Bone

by George C. Chesbro

  "And where might that be, Mr. Bone?" Ali Hakim asked in an even, matter-of-fact tone. "Do you recall?"

  Tears continued to spill out of him as he picked at the stranger's mind, found nothing but silence and emptiness. He swallowed hard, shook his head, whispered, "Where will you take me?"

  "First, to a hospital," Anne said with a heavy sigh of relief. She squeezed his left hand hard, smiled up into his face. She, too, had begun crying again. "We'll get you fed, washed up and into some dry clothes. Then the doctors will examine you. Who knows? Maybe they'll even be able to figure out why you've lost your memory, and then help you get it back. Okay?"

  He nodded.

  "Thank you for letting us help you, Bone," Anne said, and suddenly began to sob. "I've been trying for so long . . ."

  Barry abruptly took off his windbreaker and started to drape it over Bone's shoulders.

  "Don't patronize me!" Bone snapped, pushing the jacket away. "If I've been sitting in the rain for two days, I really can't get much wetter, can I?! Put your damn jacket back on!"

  But when his knees began to buckle, he allowed the two men to support him under the arms.

  "Proud, even defiant," Ali Hakim said to no one in particular. "Good vocabulary, intelligent. Cognitive processes seemingly intact, for the most part, but apparent total loss of memory. Most interesting."

  (ii)

  With Anne leading the way, frequently and anxiously glancing back at him, he was half escorted, half carried across the meadow, along a sidewalk, then up a flight of wide stone steps to the sidewalk next to a street filled with slow-moving cars and trucks. He was led to a bright blue van that had a bright yellow and black smiling face painted on its side, next to the city's official seal. Anne, who looked increasingly concerned, slid open the door on the side, and he was helped up and into a seat. Anne sat down beside him and gripped his left hand tightly as the two men got in the front. Barry drove, while Bone—sweating profusely now, and with his vision going in and out of focus—gazed in bewilderment out the window at the throngs of people and vehicles slogging through the rain, the enormous buildings—great stone, steel and glass monoliths built side by side on both sides of the street and extending in all directions as far as he could see. Suddenly, for no reason at all that he could understand, he had the unmistakable sense that this world of stone canyons that were city streets was at once totally alien to the stranger and totally familiar, an impossible paradox that was nonetheless true in the unknown universe of the stranger's heart.

  Barry maneuvered the van with confidence and skill through the traffic as Bone, now drenched in sweat, drifted in and out of consciousness. Once, in a moment of consciousness and clear vision, he found himself looking out the window at a magnificent stone church, with an intricately carved facade. There were two sets of stone steps leading to two entrances. The wide steps leading to the main entrance were bisected by a steel guardrail. At the top of the steps, beneath a stone overhang, close to two dozen people, in all manner of dress, were huddled together as they sought protection from the rain. At the front of this group was the bizarre figure of a very tall black man dressed in a brightly colored, flowing robe that billowed in the wind. The man stood very erect, both hands grasping a stout wooden pole of polished wood which he had placed in front of him, and which was almost as long as he was tall.

  Again, Bone experienced the effects of the paradoxical emotional laws at work in the universe of the stranger's heart: he was at once native and alien, at home and very far from home.

  He dozed, had fever dreams of dark, cold, wet places, graveyards, the rotting smell of dying things and things long dead, drowning in darkness, falling, blood, a forest of bones, flashes of bright orange and red and purple, flickering lights of giant candles . . .

  He awoke as the van slowed and made a turn. He glanced out the window and saw a sign that read Bellevue Hospital Center. Then the fever in him took complete control and he passed out.

  Chapter Two

  (i)

  He was not aware of time passing, consciousness or unconsciousness, in the usual sense; he felt like a large body of water controlled by powerful psychic tidal forces that waxed and waned in totally unpredictable patterns. In passing moments of dim, blurred consciousness he was vaguely aware of lying in bed in a small room with pale pink walls and a white plaster ceiling spiderwebbed with cracks. People—white-coated doctors and nurses, the two men and a woman who had brought him here—came and went, and were occasionally joined by a well-dressed, powerfully built black man who would simply stand by the bed, unmoving, for long periods of time and stare down at him. He heard snatches of conversation about the danger of dying from exposure, double pneumonia, serial killings, murder and horrible mutilation.

  Or he imagined he heard these conversations.

  Once, he awoke to find himself shivering violently on an inflatable plastic mattress that seemed to be filled with ice, simultaneously burning with fever and chilled to the core, another paradox in the stranger's universe. It reminded him of how cold he had been when he had "awakened" in the meadow. And before that . . .

  There was nothing before that. Attempts to probe beyond that barrier in his stranger's mind only exhausted him, and he would lapse back into unconsciousness.

  And he would dream. His stranger's crippled mind would torment him with flickering, candlelit images of being trapped underground, buried alive, sinking in quicksand, of a great stone chamber where bones protruded from the walls, floor and ceiling like stalagmites and stalactites erupting from hell. Tunnels. Orange streaked with crimson. Purple. And there was something waiting for him in the chamber, stalking him through the tunnels, something unspeakably horrible. He had found the thing's treasure, and he must die for it . . .

  He dreamed of falling through space . . .

  Peel off!

  (ii)

  When he awoke it was morning, and he knew his fever had broken. His white cotton hospital gown was wet and clammy with his night sweat, but aside from this discomfort he felt better, if very weak.

  He sat up on the edge of the bed, then had to brace himself with both hands as a wave of nausea and dizziness passed through him. The spell passed, and he looked around.

  The room was not the one he had been in before. The walls and ceiling of this room were painted a dark brown, and the two windows in the wall, as well as the small one set at eye level in the door, were covered with thick wire mesh. A small television camera was mounted in a corner, near the ceiling, and it was pointed at him. Without knowing how he knew it, he realized he was in the hospital's secure ward.

  What had his stranger done to be considered dangerous?

  His heart began to beat rapidly, and he closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths to calm himself. Then, once more, he slowly began to probe the stranger's mind to see what else besides the recognition of a secure ward he might know, or could remember. He remembered Anne Winchell, Barry Prindle and Dr. Hakim bringing him to the hospital after he had awakened in the park. He remembered the first words he had heard there; the clinging, gelid touch of mud in his shoes, and on his seat; the sudden pangs of hunger, and the incredible pleasure eating the two sandwiches had given him. He remembered the frightening thrill he had felt, along with the numbing blow of loneliness, at the touch of Anne Winchell's hand, the feel of her breasts. He remembered everything that had happened—from the time he had awakened. And nothing before that. He did not know what he knew.

  He did not even know what he looked like.

  The woman with the hazel eyes had told him he'd been wandering the streets of New York City for at least a year. That year was completely lost to him. Where had he come from? What had he done before? How many more years had he lost? How old was this stranger whose body he inhabited?

  He stood up, walked to the foot of the bed and picked up the chart that hung from a cord there. He was listed as John Doe. He walked into the small bathroom, bent down over the sink and peered into the small square o
f polished steel that was anchored to the wall to serve as a mirror. What he saw was the reflection of a man in his early to mid-thirties. His eyes were a deep blue, and there was a thin, jagged scar that bisected his left eyebrow and tracked up his forehead to his hairline. He had a full head of light brown hair—matted and stringy now with dried perspiration—which he remembered as falling around his shoulders when he had been in the park, but which had been cut, and not badly, during the time when he was unconscious. He was fair-skinned, with a smallish nose that looked as if it might have been broken once. Strong chin and mouth. When he examined his teeth, he found them reasonably clean and white, with none missing. All in all, he thought with a thin smile, this stranger wasn't all that bad-looking, and some people might even consider him handsome. He estimated his height at around six feet.

  He was turning away from the polished steel when something on the right side of his head, an inch or two above his ear, caught his attention. He put his hand there, pulled back the hair and was surprised to find a depression the size of a half dollar covered with puckered scar tissue.

  He stepped back from the sink, untied the laces of his baggy hospital gown and let it drop off his shoulders to the floor. Examining his body, he found that he had a flat, hard belly, heavily muscled legs with thick thighs. After a year living on the streets, he thought, not to mention an unknown length of time in a hospital in a coma, the stranger still looked remarkably fit, if a bit on the thin side in the stomach and around the ribs and gaunt in the face. He even had good teeth and gums, and he wondered how that could be possible. It had to mean that the stranger had well-honed survival skills. He knew how to take care of himself in the most adverse circumstances, and he found that reassuring.

  He certainly was in adverse circumstances.

  When he looked down at the palms of his hands he was startled to see that they were covered with large calluses—not just on the palms, but from his fingertips to the heels of his hands. They were softer now, surely, than they had been a year before, but large and thick nonetheless. It was, of course, possible that he'd done some kind of very rough work with his hands during the year he'd been on the streets, but he doubted that calluses such as his could build up in only a year; they had come from the time before his year on the streets, from the other—the first—life lost from his memory.

  When he turned his hands over and examined the backs, he found the same evidence of incredibly hard use—in this case a network of scars, indentations, gnarled fingers. Two nails on the fingers of his left hand, and three on the fingers of his right, had somehow been torn off, and the tips were overgrown with flesh and scar tissue.

  Construction worker? he thought. What kind of work could he have been doing that could possibly cause such kind of damage? And why wouldn't he have worn heavy gloves to protect himself? An accident? No; accidents don't leave calluses. Whatever he had been doing to wreak such damage to these large, obviously powerful hands, he had been doing by choice.

  Except for the absence of memory, he thought, the stranger's mind seemed to work fairly well. It allowed him to speak, to read, to think and even—apparently—to reason. There was an emotional toughness to the stranger; he no longer felt the anxiety approaching panic he had experienced in the first moments in the park when he had awakened and found he did not know who or where he was. The situation was presently as bad—or worse, since he still could not remember anything before awakening to find himself squatting in the rain and mud in the middle of the Sheep Meadow—but he seemed to be dealing with it. His stranger was apparently cool, level-headed.

  He hoped he stayed that way.

  He felt lonely, but not overwhelmingly so. Was there no one who loved him, who would have reported him missing?

  Whatever had happened to cause him to lose all memory of that first life and end up on the city streets, it was nonetheless true that he had apparently been taking care of business, so to speak—meandering around Manhattan, obtaining food and clothing and finding a place to sleep. What had happened to cause the stranger to suddenly stop taking care of business and squat down in a field, in the pouring rain, for two days?

  Had he wanted to die?

  Why had he been placed in a secure ward? The woman had said he'd never been considered dangerous before, despite the bizarre trophy he'd carried around with him. Why, suddenly, was he considered dangerous now? What had he done?

  There was a small shower stall in the bathroom. He washed, dried himself off with a ragged towel hanging on a rack next to the toilet, then put on a clean cotton gown he found in a white metal cabinet on the wall next to the sink. Directly above the cabinet was another television camera, pointing directly at him. He looked up at the camera and patted his stomach; suddenly he was very hungry.

  Was he insane?!

  Without warning the thought with fangs had leaped out at him from the dark depths of the stranger's mind, attacking, making him short of breath and knotting the muscles in his stomach.

  Leave it alone, he thought as he leaned on the sink and took deep breaths to ease his fear. There was no sense in worrying now about what he might find out about himself. His job now was to try as hard as he could to retrieve the mental records of both lives he had lost, regardless of what those records might show.

  Even if the monster chasing him through the caves of his dreams turned out to be himself.

  He had not been comfortable with the physical appearance of the stranger's body, had been pleased with his thought processes; now he had no choice but to trust the stranger himself.

  When he came out of the bathroom he was startled to see the well-dressed black man—the same one whose presence he had been aware of at times during his brief periods of con-sciousness—leaning against the wall near the foot of the bed; he had not heard the door open or close, had not heard footsteps.

  The man had strong features—high forehead, gray shadows on the sides of his head where he had shaved the hair. Bone judged him to be in his mid-forties. There was a milky spot in his left eye, suspended in the black iris like a thick cobweb. There was no humor in the man's thin smile, but rather mild curiosity and a great deal of suspicion. He wore a well-tailored, three-piece, gray pinstripe suit, pale blue shirt, maroon tie. His black shoes, when he stepped around from behind the bed, were highly polished, and looked expensive. He was, Bone thought, obviously a man who cared about his appearance and was probably more than a little vain. He was a man who was very sure of himself.

  "Good morning," the man said simply.

  Bone sat down on the edge of the bed, met the man's gaze. "Good morning."

  The door to the room opened to the sound of a buzzer, which Bone had not heard when the black man had entered. A young, frowning doctor with a stethoscope draped around his neck hurried in, followed by a husky orderly carrying a tray containing juice, cereal and milk, a carafe of coffee, a covered dish and a small paper cup with two blue pills in it. The orderly set the tray down on an adjustable table next to the bed, then turned and hurried out; the door closed behind him with a loud click—another sound Bone had not heard previously. The black man in the three-piece suit, who obviously knew something about clicks and buzzers, retreated to the wall at the opposite end of the room, where he continued to stare at Bone with the same mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

  "I'm Dr. Graham," the young man announced perfunctorily as he stopped in front of Bone, crossed his arms over his chest and gazed down into Bone's face. This man's pale brown eyes also revealed curiosity and suspicion, and perhaps disgust. Bone wondered why. "How are you feeling?"

  "I'm not sure," Bone said carefully, watching the other man's face. "I seem to have lost my memory."

  "Do you know where you are now?"

  "A place called Bellevue Hospital Center, in New York City."

  "How do you know that?"

  "The people who brought me here told me the name of the city, and I saw your sign when we drove in. I remember waking up in a field in the rain, but nothing
before that."

  The man leaning against the wall put a hand over his mouth and coughed lightly. The doctor grunted, then abruptly put the plugs of the stethoscope in his ears and listened to Bone's heart and lungs. After a few moments he straightened up and took the plugs out of his ears.

  "You still have some fluid in your lungs," the doctor said curtly, "but the antibiotics we're giving you should clear that up in a day or two."

  "You don't seem very interested in my loss of memory."

  "I'm an internist, not a psychiatrist or neurologist," the doctor replied in the same abrupt tone. "Amnesia isn't my field. What you describe is interesting, but unfortunately my schedule here doesn't permit me to indulge curiosity."

  "What about you?" Bone said to the man standing against the wall. "Are you a psychiatrist?"

  The man shook his head—a slow, deliberate motion.

  "What's the day and month?" Bone asked the doctor.

  "April seventeenth—a Saturday."

  "How long have I been here?"

  "Seven days. You had a severe case of double pneumonia complicated by other factors associated with exposure. For a time, we thought we were going to lose you." Graham paused, blinked slowly, continued, "You seem to remember the meaning of months and days; obviously, you haven't lost the concepts of time and date."

  "Is that unusual?"

  The man against the wall coughed again.

  "I told you amnesia isn't my field," Graham replied as he cast a quick, annoyed glance at the other man.