Bone

by George C. Chesbro

  But if he did not run, Bone thought, the innocent stranger would never be free again; he would remain locked away in two prisons, one of concrete and steel and the other of his mind, until he died. The stranger did not deserve that—and the only way to clear the stranger was to find the killer himself; He had to run, return to the streets.

  Besides, he thought, just because the killer apparently intended to stop after framing him for the murders did not mean that the killer might not start killing again at some time perhaps years—in the future; if he did not run, it could mean the future murders of innocent people. He had to find the killer, and he could not do that behind bars; imprisoned, he was certain he would never recover his memory.

  He would not even try to hide the duffel bag, Bone thought. There was no time. Trying to do so would only slow him down, and to be caught with it in his possession would only be more damning—if that were possible. Also, he realized that it was improbable that he could leave the building undetected, since by the time he got to the ground level the police would have all the exits covered.

  So he would have to leave from another building. Even the precious femur, the only solid link to his past, would have to be left behind.

  Halfway up the emergency stairs he climbed through a window onto a fire escape. He quickly climbed to the top of the building, sprinted across the roof, gathering speed and timing his approach, and then without hesitation leaped up on the brick cornice at the edge and hurled himself off into space twenty stories above the ground. He caught the parapet of the adjoining building with his hands, absorbed the shock of hitting against the stone surface with his left hip and thigh, noted with satisfaction that his gnarled fingers held their grip firmly. Exhilarated, feeling adrenaline surge through him, he flexed the muscles in his arms, back and shoulders and easily pulled himself up over the parapet and onto the tar-papered roof.

  The stranger's skills, courage and strength thrilled him and filled him with pride—but this was only a fleeting thought, one which made him feel even stronger and more confident but not something he could afford to dwell on at the moment.

  There was no time now for thinking about anything but the need to get far away.

  He continued on his journey across the roofs of the other buildings in the block, often making leaps of twenty feet or more. When he reached the building at the end of the block, he crouched behind a parapet, then raised himself slightly and looked down.

  There was a subway entrance halfway up the block, and no policeman in sight.

  He found a door on the roof, went through it and found himself on stairs. He descended, came out in an alley. He went out to the sidewalk, turned and hurried toward the subway entrance. He knew where he had to go.

  (iii)

  Anne, feeling very cold, small and foolish, sat on the floor in a corner of her bedroom with her arms wrapped around herself, shuddering as she stared in horror at the unmade bed where she and a man who cut off the heads of people had made love and slept together.

  So it had been Bone all along, she thought as a new shudder moved in a wave through her body, and she hugged herself even tighter. He was the killer, as everyone—including Bone—had suspected might be the case. Everyone except her. Finally he had been betrayed by the "stranger" he had fought so hard and bravely to clear.

  She wondered what it was Ali had said, or what they had discovered together, that had finally caused the killing person in Bone to emerge. For that matter, she wondered what it was that Bone had used to sever the psychiatrist's head; whatever the weapon, he had obviously been carrying it on his person, for they had risen late, and she had driven him directly to Ali's office.

  Perhaps, she thought, there had never been a "stranger" inside Bone at all. If he had been carrying such a deadly murder weapon with him all along, it had to mean that he had always known exactly who he was, what he had done—and what he was prepared to do. His "awakening" and pretending not to remember anything had all been a game.

  He could have killed her at any time.

  Anne wondered how she could have loved such a man. Perhaps she still loved him; she was not sure exactly how she felt at the moment, and was not sure she wanted to know. Perhaps, she thought, it would be a good idea to see an analyst herself. She had been so certain that Bone was innocent . . .

  A cold-blooded killer who had probably been laughing at her all along . . .

  Suddenly the phone rang, startling her. She let it ring seven, eight times. Finally one of the homicide detectives who had been searching her apartment answered it. He listened for a few moments, then covered the mouthpiece and looked at Anne.

  "It's somebody named Barry Prindle, ma'am," the detective said gruffly. "He says he works with you. You want to talk to him?"

  Anne thought about it, finally nodded. She rose, walked across the room and took the receiver from the detective's hand. "Hello, Barry," she said in a soft, slightly quavering voice.

  "Anne!" Barry Prindle's voice was strained, breathless. "Thank God you're all right! I was on my way home from playing tennis when I heard the news on the car radio. God, I was just about to hang up and come over . . . I was so afraid that . . . I'd heard that you'd taken him in to live with you. Are you all right?!"

  "Yes, Barry, I'm all right," she said with a small sigh. She felt foolish, embarrassed.

  "But what if he comes back?"

  "There are police detectives here now, Barry; I called them right after I heard. I think they plan to keep the apartment building under surveillance. In any case, there's good security here, and there's a doorman. But I don't think he'll try to come back. If he'd wanted to kill me, he could have done it anytime during the . . . he could have done it easily enough. I think he's gone for good now—until the police catch him."

  "Anne, the man is insane. You can never be certain what a madman is going to do."

  Anne swallowed hard. "Barry?"

  "What is it, Anne?"

  "Barry, I just want to apologize to you for . . . acting the way I did. You were right all the time; all the time, you were just trying to protect me, and I said—and did—some things I shouldn't have."

  "Forget it, Anne. I'm the one who should apologize; I acted like a bonehead—if you'll pardon the expression. Now I realize just how immaturely I behaved. I was just—well, I was just worried about you." He paused, laughed nervously. "Also, if I may say so, I've never felt the way I feel about you, so I didn't know how to handle it."

  Anne gnawed at her lower lip. There was something in the back of her mind that was bothering her, and she knew what it was: guilt. She felt as if she were now somehow betraying Bone, and she felt anger at herself for being so stupid. "I don't understand how I could have been so wrong about him," she said distantly, almost to herself.

  "He had a lot of people fooled, Anne."

  She laughed bitterly. "Not like he fooled me, Barry." She paused as tears welled in her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. Suddenly, she was no longer sure of anything. "Or maybe he really wasn't fooling anyone; maybe he was telling the truth when he claimed not to remember. Something must have happened during his session with Ali. Ali must have said something that set Bone off, something that released that other, terrible personality in him." She paused again, shuddered. "He was always referring to himself as 'the stranger.' I guess he must have finally met that stranger."

  "I guess he must have."

  "Barry," Anne said, and sighed again. "I could use some friendly company real bad right now. Would you like to come over and have some coffee with me?"

  "I'd like that very much. I'll see you in a few minutes."

  Chapter Thirteen

  (i)

  In order to remain free long enough to prove the stranger's innocence, Bone knew that first he had to disappear. He had seen enough, learned enough, to believe that he knew how to do that.

  He had headed for the Bowery.

  Finding different clothes had certainly not been a problem. Within twenty minutes of his arrival
in the lower section of Manhattan he had found a drunk about his size, bleary-eyed and searching through trash cans for cans to redeem, who had been more than happy to exchange his clothes for Bone's. The man's clothes—torn shirt, outer jacket, baggy trousers and plastic shoes—were filthy, and reeked; but Bone had known that was precisely what was needed, and so he had overcome his revulsion and donned the fetid rags. He'd known that now he had to be truly homeless, drifting deep in the bowels of the city, if he was to escape detection. In order to protect the stranger, he had to ignore the stranger's uncanny survival skills, as well as his love for cleanliness, for as long as it took to find—to remember—the real killer. Until his quest was finished, he would now have to lead the life of the most wretched of the homeless.

  For three days he remained on the streets, his features still hidden behind dark glasses and under a floppy-brimmed hat, clustered with groups of men, some of whom occasionally wandered in and out of the Men's Shelter. At night he slept huddled in doorways, arms wrapped around himself for warmth.

  And he thought of Anne.

  He knew she would, of course, have to assume that he was guilty; after all, he had been the one to repeatedly point out to her the possibility Ali Hakim had raised that his was a multiple personality, his mind host to a savage killer. He missed Anne terribly, but knew that to contact her would not only place her in jeopardy, but would also confront her with a terrible dilemma. If he contacted her, no matter what she believed, she would have to report that contact to the police, or risk charges of abetting a fugitive. Really, he had nothing to say to her—but the time he had spent with her, sharing her bed with its clean sheets, the softness and musky smell of her body, her passion, only made his present misery more acute.

  His one solace, the thought he clung to during his stench-filled days and cold nights, was the certainty that the stranger was innocent.

  What he had sensed before instinctively was now confirmed: cleanliness was an all-important factor in maintaining the stranger's morale. Clothed in filthy rags, he was a constant affront to his own senses and sensibilities. Nor was he able to eat properly; he could not risk going to any of the soup kitchens for fear of being recognized. Like the other homeless, sick men down on the Bowery, he ate from garbage bins and trash baskets.

  And he learned what it felt like to be invisible; as he had hoped, few people gave him a second glance, and those who did usually walked quickly away.

  But he was making no progress. Clearly, the stranger had never been in a situation like the one he was in now, and, aside from escaping detection, there seemed to be no value in the situation, no reference points to aid him in his search for his memory. He had to expand his range, move about the city.

  But he wondered how long he could continue to live this way before he became ill—perhaps seriously so.

  The impulse to move on from the Bowery came on the morning of the fourth day, when one of the city's blue vans pulled up to the curb next to him. Bone quickly ducked down an alleyway, then watched from the shadows as two Project Helping Hand people got out and began to talk to three drunken men sitting on the sidewalk in front of a storefront. When the van left, Bone walked out of the alley, pulled his hat down low over his forehead and began walking uptown; he would go to another place he had heard of, where he would be invisible.

  (ii)

  Bone stood across the street from the Forty-second Street entrance to Grand Central Terminal and shuddered slightly. It was in the underpass near here where he had suffered his panic attack on the morning after leaving the Men's Shelter, Bone thought. Now he knew that the terminal itself was a gathering ground, like the Bowery, for the most wretched and helpless of the city's homeless men and women. At the time it had happened, and since then, Bone had attributed his panic to the close proximity of speeding cars, suffocating fumes, darkness, and perhaps the fact that he was underground. Now he wasn't so certain it had been those things which had triggered the attack; now he wondered if it was the building itself and its hidden memories. Looking at the facade of the massive stone structure he felt no sense of familiarity, no indication that it meant anything to the stranger.

  But it might be different for him inside.

  Bone sucked in a deep breath, then, in the shuffling gait which he had adopted for walking on the streets during the day, he hobbled across the street and went through the vaulted entrance. He found himself in what appeared to be a waiting room, old, with a musty but unmistakable atmosphere of grandeur. It was close to four in the afternoon, and he found himself going against the flow of heavy pedestrian traffic: well-dressed men and women carrying portfolios or briefcases who hurried on past him with their gazes fixed straight ahead, their faces tense, not looking at each other and not looking at him, yet parting smoothly as they walked past him like rushing water around a stone, giving him a wide berth. A few made visible gestures of distaste; one woman turned her head away and held her nose.

  He stank, Bone thought. And he felt deeply ashamed.

  And he was exhausted. He could not last much longer living like this, he thought; he felt feverish, weak, profoundly depressed. He was losing his soul down the holes he was seeking to hide in. He was swimming in the sea of the wretched, but he was losing it; now he was becoming wretched, and he was drowning.

  His initial reaction as the stream of well-dressed commuters swirled past him was fear of exposure, fear that somebody would look more closely and recognize him as the man whose drawn likeness was on the front pages of all the newspapers. But nobody gave him a second glance—and soon he was standing alone, but still feeling conspicuous dressed in his rags. He looked around him, saw rows of benches like church pews on both sides of the waiting room.

  In front of him, at the opposite end of a short but wide connecting corridor, he could see part of what appeared to be a very large, brightly lit room where a large, ornate clock was suspended over an information booth. But Bone did not want to go there with his filthiness and his shame and his wretchedness; it was too open. For now, all he wanted to do was sleep.

  He thought: he was escaping, all right—disappearing right down the drain into himself. Now, for the first time since he had awakened, he actually felt like one of the homeless, the dispossessed. It was horrible.

  He shuffled to his left, past the first three rows of benches where well-dressed men and women sat reading newspapers or idly staring off into space, waiting for their trains. It was when he reached the rear pews, those close to the entrance to the men's toilet, that he saw what, where, his quarters would be for the night, and he felt a renewed sense of despair. It was the same here as on the Bowery, he thought, except here everyone was jammed together, and there was no place to walk to. At least a dozen homeless, ragged men and women were huddled on the worn wooden benches at the rear of the waiting room. Despite the fact that it was a relatively warm afternoon, all of the people appeared to be dressed in multiple layers of clothing, shirts and jackets buttoned or zipped up to the neck, scarves wrapped tightly around their necks, dirty woolen caps pulled down low over ears and foreheads. Two men and four women had shopping carts pulled up beside them, the baskets overflowing with clothing and flotsam from the street. Everyone seemed to be either sleeping or in a stupor.

  Stupor, Bone thought. That was where he was headed—to a kind of death in life where, like these people on the back benches near the toilet, all he could hope for in each day was simply to survive it.

  He had no energy left; all he wanted to do was rest.

  He found a narrow space between two men, sank down on the bench, leaned back and pulled the floppy brim of his hat down over his eyes. Almost immediately he fell into a troubled sleep of exhaustion and despair sharply punctuated by fever dreams of darkness, flickering lights, bones and a crimson streaked orange figure stalking him.

  (iii)

  Grand Central Terminal was closed from one-thirty to live-thirty in the morning; at around one-fifteen, members of the terminal's Metro North Commuter Railr
oad Police came to prod and shake Bone, and the other sleeping men and women sharing the rear benches with him. The manner of the police was firm, but not rough; the eyes of the police, when Bone looked into them, were oddly glassy, as though the men were not really seeing what they were looking at.

  He had expected to be hustled out onto the streets; instead, he and the others were herded down the wide corridor opposite the entrance and into the vast rotunda, now only dimly lit, that Bone had glimpsed earlier. They were herded across the rotunda and under an arch at the far end into another large area, with marble tunnels branching off in various directions. Here, more homeless men and women were rousted from their cold marble beds and forced to join the main group. They were herded down a tunnel to their left, down onto a wide platform sealed off at one end by a high, wide gate. The police left, and a few minutes later Bone heard another gate slam shut somewhere back in the area they had come through. They were sealed off, Bone thought, and immediately he began to experience a feeling of claustrophobia. He knew that the guards had meant to be kind in affording them this place to sleep while the terminal was closed, but Bone wished he had left the building when he'd had the chance.

  Bone stopped in the center of the platform, which was really a gently sloping ramp, and looked around. Bone estimated that there were perhaps a hundred and fifty people in the area, shuffling about, searching for a place to lay down their few belongings and their bodies so that they could return to their stupor-sleep. Bone walked down the ramp, sat down on the stone with his back resting against the gate.

  But he did not sleep.

  Grand Central Terminal was like an open psychiatric ward, he thought as he watched a half-naked man with scabs covering his body dig into his nose with a dirt-encrusted finger and pull out a large, slimy mucous clot. When the man had cleared one nostril, he started on the other, wiping his fingers on his filthy, torn trouser legs. A young, wild-eyed man with greasy black hair that hung to his waist was furiously masturbating as he rocked back and forth, singing to himself. Gradually, since it was even stronger than his own smell, Bone became aware of the cloying stench of unwashed bodies, urine, vomit, feces.