Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  At the inquiry afterward, the ghost of the man he had killed followed him wherever he went. It watched when he was interviewed by the local chief of police, when he sat with a lawyer, when his fellow cops turned away reporters and family. The officer was terrified that he would have to answer the unanswerable—Why did you chase him? Why did you shoot?—but no one asked him this. None of them was confused about why he found the man threatening.

  The ghost went everywhere with him. Riding in his car. Lying next to him in bed. Sitting on his desk at work. Furious that it would have no justice, it believed in the same things as the officer. It wanted to punish, to pass judgment, to make the officer pay for his wrongs. So it climbed inside him one night and forced blood up through his pores, making him hurt for all that he had done.

  The pain broke his skin and twisted through him like screws. It taught him to hate himself, to understand that he was wrong and deserved to hurt. His knowing was what kept his ghost welded so tightly to him. He needed punishment, and he would have it.

  The brutal story of his haunting washed over Jane in an instant. The bleeding man gestured to the bag on the table. “Here are your brother’s remains,” he said.

  Ashes, Jane realized.

  “That’s what you came for, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Trigger’s ghost lay along her back like a cloak. If the bleeding man couldn’t see him, surely he must feel the chill, the stormy friction in the small room, the way the meager light from the cook stove and the fading sun outside the window had suddenly grown weaker.

  Take the ashes and leave, her ghost said. He’s too afraid to hurt you for now. Go before he changes his mind.

  She didn’t want to be here with the man who had killed her brother. She could leave the station and find some alley where Trigger could fall on her in the dark. It would be the easiest thing to just surrender.

  “Do you remember the first time we met?” Jane asked him.

  The bleeding man didn’t answer her. He picked up his gun again, rolling the chamber open with his thumb and spinning it. He could feel the ghost in the room, was afraid it was Henry. His stomach clenched with fear. He thought about killing her.

  Her ghost wanted her to run. It made her remember how the boys had killed Dennis, how her brother had been brutalized and mocked and then switched off like a light. It pulled every fearful thing out of her, slinging them against the walls of her mind. She held the desk to steady herself.

  The circling spirits knit together, wrapping them in dark. They jumped in and out of one another and hummed, locusts hungry and ready to fall.

  Jane swallowed and steadied her voice. “You told me that somebody has to pay when things go wrong,” she said. “Do you still believe that?”

  “I do.” He didn’t just say it. He felt it, deep in his gut. He felt it so hard that it had made him lift his gun and kill a sixteen-year-old kid. There was so much wrong in the world, and he had been born to come down on it like a wide, flat hand. He thrashed in bed at night, his ghost tearing him apart, and knew that his suffering was just.

  He had no pity for anyone, not even himself.

  Trigger’s ghost stepped into the room, gathering heaviness and ethereal flesh. The bleeding man’s need to punish called to Trigger like his own name. He had come to haunt someone, to take on skin and blood, and he wouldn’t leave until he had it.

  The bleeding man rested his palm on his gun, wondering who this new ghost was, wondering if he should fire a bullet through Jane or himself. The flickering shadows of spirits covered his hand, waiting to see what he would do.

  Trigger turned from the bleeding man and stepped behind Jane, taking her in his arms like they were dancing again. Her ghost fled, and Trigger pushed into her mind.

  You want me to hurt the bleeding man because of what he’s done. You understand that some people need pain.

  He tried to push into her body. Jane remembered the ghost of the old man that had haunted her brother, how it just walked into him as if through an open door. She had to close herself or Trigger would take her and have her forever.

  “I am angry at you,” she said. “I’m angry at both of you so much. I hate you. But I don’t want to see you tortured. I don’t want to see you anymore at all.”

  What about all the ways you failed your family?

  She felt like he was stretching her lungs, shouldering his way inside.

  “I did fail them. But I loved them too. They wouldn’t want me to suffer.” Jane felt the weight of responsibility that she’d been carrying, and she set it down. “I forgive myself.”

  The bleeding man raised his gun toward Jane and pulled the trigger. The quick motes of the people he had killed gathered in the gun like iron filings drawn to a magnet. They held the hammer in place, welded the bullet to its chamber, locked the gun down like a prisoner in a cell.

  It didn’t fire.

  Trigger threw Jane against the wall, pulling himself away from her. She didn’t have what he needed. His last lingering thought when he’d been entwined with her was disappointment and fear. He surged across the room toward the bleeding man.

  The officer put down his gun, heavy with phantoms who had willed that it would never fire again. A high, sad cry rose from his mouth as Trigger crashed into him.

  Jane’s ghost returned to her, and she felt Trigger spiral into the officer’s body like a parasite. The pain was so intense that she held herself. The bleeding man looked at her for help, weeping blood that spread over his cheeks like wings.

  Echoes of ghosts jumped from the walls and floors, piling on top of him, gnawing their way into him too, responding to his fear with their own. The bleeding man fell and writhed on the floor, his eyes sun bright. Jane couldn’t feel the cop or Trigger as distinct things anymore. The bleeding man was suddenly honeycombed with ghosts, an entire city of the dead. The spirits built a hell inside his heart.

  Jane left Henry’s ashes on the desk. That wasn’t her brother any more than his ghost was. She fled the police station on her aching legs, letting her ghost guide her as it grew dark.

  Do you feel bad for abandoning him like that? After everyone else left Trigger, now you left him too.

  “He wanted to hurt me. And Trigger’s dead. That was only a ghost.”

  That’s a lie. He was more than an it to you.You need to believe that Trigger and Henry aren’t people. Otherwise, you’d hate yourself. Even when he was alive, Trigger had that same anger and obsession. That ghost was the boy you loved, and you left him.

  Her ghost was right. It was necessary for Jane to believe that the spirits were something else, that they weren’t the people she had lost. Otherwise, she never would have been able to walk away from them. How much of a person was left in a ghost? It didn’t matter. If she was going to survive this place, she needed to let Henry and Trigger go.

  The spirit within her quieted, but Jane could feel its grief. Knowing that she would soon leave it behind, the ghost brought to mind fragments of all the sad songs it loved.

  In the quiet room of Jane’s chest, it sang and mourned itself.

  It was fully dark when Jane left the police station. Once she got far enough from downtown, Jane could feel Bethany again. Somewhere beyond their world, all around her and nowhere at all, Bethany rose up from the nothing that swallowed lost ghosts. They watched her climb, astonished. Spirits never came back from that place. It was real death, the forever kind. Bethany seemed to be only inches away from their world, but she was tired. She was close to letting go and falling into the abyss. Jane and her ghost waited, wondering if Bethany would make it.

  She walked toward Hogboss’s house, but she could smell smoke and see the glow of flames far before she reached his street. Jane didn’t need her ghost to tell her that the hollow men had burned the pig neighborhood to the ground. She wondered if the pigs had been dragged from their homes and killed in the streets, butchered the same as Dennis. She wondered if her mother had been caught or if she had escaped. Would she be spared,
or would they treat her the same as the pigs?

  The heart box throbbed against her leg. Jane pulled it from her pocket and held it out in front of her like a lamp, the pulse and flex of its beat straining against her fingers. Her sullen ghost warned her of spirits roaming the neighborhood. Jane stepped into empty houses, circled behind buildings, stayed clear of the road. The fragmented ghosts still coiled hard as shells in her arms and legs. Every step was pain.

  Your brother is close. He’s planning some new machine.

  Her ghost wanted her to look for Henry, to try to stop him or help him move on. It made the suggestion, more in images than words, that she could find her brother’s ghost a person to haunt and then she would have him back. Or they could figure out a way to help Bethany before it was too late. Anything would do, so long as Jane stayed in Swine Hill, tangled in its problems and wrestling with its spirits a little longer.

  She left the tomblike closeness of downtown and came into the open, crossing a field of high grass that rose into dense brush and trees. The light of the moon fell on her like a spotlight. From the dark windows of nearby buildings, men called out to her.

  Pinpricks of light turned to face her from the windows. The hollow men threw themselves down to the street, no concern for pain or injury, and rushed toward her. There were dozens of them.

  Jane pushed on into the forest, following the racing heart. Her father was close. Her ghost sank deep within her, so quiet and still that Jane could hardly feel that it was there. It hadn’t warned her about the hollow men. Had it not heard them? Or would it rather see Jane die than abandon it?

  A slash of paint marked the trees ahead of her. The bark was stained with overlapping red Xs. She followed them, a long band of trees that seemed to wrap the town. She remembered something Henry had told her, how he had seen their father marking houses with dangerous ghosts. After the town flooded with spirits, her dad must have decided that all of Swine Hill was dangerous. He was doing his best to ring the town with warnings, to tell anyone who might stumble upon it to stay away.

  Branches broke behind her. The hollow men were still coming. She tried to make herself go faster, her legs burning, unable to shake free the spirits that wrapped her muscles like barbed wire.

  The heart box flared warm in her hand. At her feet, a gaunt figure lay wrapped in a torn coat, sleeping in the hollow of a tree. Jane was too exhausted and in pain to go any farther. The haunted would find her soon. She could feel them gathering around.

  She lay next to her father, and his arms reflexively tightened around her, wrapping her in his coat. He smelled of sour sweat, rain, and earth. His face and chest were a thick map of scars: her mother’s hands, lips, teeth, even her breath cutting riverlike channels across him.

  The hollow men came under the tree and looked down at her. But they were so full of ghosts, the life within them so crushed under the weight of the dead, that they couldn’t see her father in front of them. Held by him, the ghosts couldn’t see Jane, either. And so they passed, shaking branches and trying to flush her out, but eventually they gave up and headed back into the town.

  Her father awoke next to her and looked around, fumbling for his paint can.

  Jane didn’t know if her mother was alive. She and her father might be the last members of their family, the only ones the town hadn’t yet killed. She had his heart, kicking like a trapped bird in its case. But he still wasn’t himself, and he probably never would be. She had no way of getting the heart back into his body. She didn’t know how she would take care of him. Maybe she had been a fool for thinking she could. Despair bloomed inside her, and Jane hung her head, holding tightly to her father’s arm.

  Bethany is drowning, her ghost said.

  Through her ghost, Jane saw the girl struggle. Alien light coated Bethany’s body and swept down her throat. She couldn’t breathe or move. She dug in her fingers until they bled, trying not to fall. Bethany grew calm, and Jane waited for her to finally give up. Wasn’t that all that was left to do?

  Bethany tensed her muscles and screamed until the alien light dissolved in her throat. She forced the alien glow back down into her cells. She made her brutal climb up the cliff face, scraping her hands and feet raw. Bethany would never be rid of the alien. It haunted her like her storm of ghosts. But it would learn what those spirits had learned. She was not the alien’s prisoner. It was hers.

  A blade of light rent the ground at Jane’s feet. Her father started to stand, but Jane held on to his coat, keeping him from disappearing into the night. Bethany shoved her arms up into the world from some other place and, straining, lifted herself back into their reality.

  Jane wondered for a moment if Bethany was dead and just didn’t know it yet. But she seemed more solid and real than Jane herself. Her skin was shot through with the alien light. Her nails were broken and her arms and shoulders bruised. She gasped, taking in deep breaths, her arms spread like wings. She looked like someone who had forced her way through a wall of rock with her bare hands.

  All of her spirits are still with her, Jane’s ghost said.

  Jane could see them, sitting inside Bethany’s curved ribs like a stadium. They cheered for her, this girl who had beaten everyone, beaten the alien, even beaten death just as they’d known she would.

  “Give me the heart,” Bethany said.

  Jane put it in her hands, Bethany’s skin searing hot and as hard as metal. Bethany reached inside Jane’s father like he was a pool of water. She pulled out something, a fist-sized lump of metal and rubber, and dropped it on the ground. Jane’s father staggered, holding his chest, but Bethany held him up, then took the heart from its box and nestled it inside him, pinching the arteries back together afterward.

  Somehow, Henry had trapped their father’s wants and needs and hurt, most of who he was, inside this small lump of flesh. When Bethany gave it back to him, his mind came blazing back with it. He remembered who he was. Her ghost spooled his every raw thought across Jane’s mind, letting her know how cold and afraid and guilty he was.

  He didn’t recognize his daughter at first, squinting and touching her face. His voice was coarse and paper-soft. “Jane? Did you already grow up?” He put his hands over his chest, the heart’s rhythms unfamiliar and overwhelming, raw emotion pumping through his body. “Oh. I hadn’t meant to be gone so long.”

  Jane held him. She had so much to say, didn’t know where to start. Henry had given her exactly what she’d needed. Bethany had saved her.

  No matter what else happened, she had her father back.

  Jane spoke into her father’s shoulder. “Henry’s dead. The town is almost gone. I’m leaving as soon as I can.”

  Her father stiffened in her arms, struggling to process this new world he’d come home to, a world without his son.

  “I’ve been watching Henry,” Bethany said. “I can’t stay long or I’ll wear a hole in the world. But I’ll take care of him before I go.”

  Jane didn’t know what that meant, and her ghost didn’t want to tell her. It was terrified of Bethany. She was untethered from the world, fading out of the universe like the dead.

  Bethany left Jane and her father to get to know each other again. She walked through the woods back into town, searching for Henry’s ghost. Her body burned with light, and Jane could see her even through the branches and trees between them. The world seemed more fragile, less solid and real, than Bethany Ortiz.

  Her father sat on the ground and started to cry. He held his hands over his ears and drew his knees up to his chest. Jane hung on to him, telling him that everything would be okay. She didn’t know if that was true. She didn’t know what would happen next.

  He hasn’t felt anything in years. The wind is too cold. The trees are too loud. He has sores on his feet, pain in his mouth. He doesn’t know how to be a person anymore.

  The moon was a silver plate behind the grasping fingers of tree branches. There was a sweet smell on the wind, a rush of overripe fruit. Jane’s stomach hurt. It had bee
n so long since she had eaten anything. Her head burned with how tired she was, but she was happy, overflowing with gratitude. Even if her father struggled with the shock of consciousness and all its pain, at least she had him. Whatever came next, she wouldn’t be alone.

  There are people out here, her ghost said. Or maybe pigs. I could never tell the difference.

  There was smoke in the wind. Through the trees, a tongue of fire lapped along a broken branch. A rough chorus moved through the woods. When her father had caught his breath, Jane pulled him to his feet and guided him toward the sound and light, one hand out to shield her face from branches in the dark.

  The density of the forest fell away. Suddenly they were in a grove of low, bushy trees. Pig people had come here in the hundreds, sitting around small fires and stretching tarps over frames of rough wood. Jane could feel her mother somewhere among them. The hollow men hadn’t hurt them after all. Her mother had been right about Hogboss keeping her safe.

  But the orchard was haunted. Ghosts of those who had lived and worked here filled the trunks and spreading arms of the trees, making peaches swell and fall from their heavy branches. Spirits flew through the grass and chased one another invisibly through the grove, coiling and kissing in the dark. They circled the bonfires of the pigs, remembering night fires of their own. The ghosts barely noticed the pig people, so caught up in their own decades’ long love of each other and this place. Swine Hill had forgotten that the orchard had ever existed, but for the spirits who haunted it, this place was the entire world.

  Ahead, Hogboss spoke in his cavernous voice. Jane’s mother stood next to him, her dress billowing in the wind. They were arm in arm with the other pigs, all of them gathered in a circle. Jane strained to hear, catching only a few words. “Here are the things I’m thankful to Henry for,” one of them began.

  Her father shied away from the mass of people, but Jane kept her arm around him, leading him closer. He seemed too small to her. But what had she expected? Had she thought that when he remembered himself, she would become a little girl again?