The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  “My mother? Yes. I never knew my father well, but by all accounts, he was a mean man.”

  Dario searched Oblita’s body for non-verbal cues; for those often-uncontrollable hints of the thoughts and feelings going off like overloaded lights in one’s mind. He glanced at her face and the vein-like scars that started at the corner of her mouth. They looked fresh, but maybe they weren’t. Or maybe they were, and there were others beneath her blouse—ones from her childhood, when her father was still around.

  “Was she a gardener? Your mother?”

  Oblita’s eyes lit-up, got smaller. Coyly, she said, “For a time.”

  “Anyone else that you are or were really close with?”

  “I don’t know. My uncle, I suppose.” Hate locked Oblita’s jaw into place. “That’s the bad thing about getting older, Mr. Onai. People will eventually disappoint you, and those that don’t, die.”

  “I appreciate your honesty,” Dario said.

  Oblita took the bait. “Thank you.”

  “Do you find people disappointing?”

  “Absolutely. All of them.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’ll think less of me.”

  “I’m your therapist. Anything you say to me is confidential. Again, I can only break that rule if you tell me you want to hurt yourself, someone else, or if you know a child is being hurt. And even then, it’s a judgment call on my part.

  “But for everything else?” Dario leaned over the kitchen table. “I’m not here to judge you. I’m just here to help you make sense of things, and to help you find the path that you want to take. At this point, I’ve heard just about everything.”

  “I wonder if you really have,” Oblita said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. This is the first time we’ve met. I don’t expect you to tell me everything right away. I have to earn your trust.”

  “I’m sure that you will.”

  Dario thought about redirecting the conversation back to Oblita’s reported disappointment with others, but on that topic, she was guarded. He checked his watch—twenty minutes left—and decided to move onto something else. He didn’t have to get her life story right here and now. That’s what next week was for, and the week after that, and the week after that, and so on, and so on, until all the goals were met, or the insurance coverage ran out.

  “Your apartment is amazing,” Dario said.

  Oblita laughed and gestured for him to drink his bottled water, which he hadn’t touched.

  Dario twisted off the cap, had a sip, and then, temptation taking over, guzzled almost all of it.

  “It’s taken a long time to get things the way I’ve needed them to be,” Oblita said.

  “Even in the hallway, it’s… not what I expected. Did you have something to do with that?”

  Now, Oblita was beaming.

  “Are you the landlord?”

  “No, of course not. Well, maybe, in a way. I take care of a lot of people here.”

  “I thought you said people disappointed you.”

  “They do, but I try to make them be better.”

  “How do you do that?”

  A scratching sound came from the walls, and disappeared somewhere behind the ceiling’s sharp, unsmoothed plaster.

  “Everyone knows everyone in the Manor very well,” she said. “Everyone is good for something, even if they do not realize it.”

  “Is there something special about the third floor, though?”

  Snidely, she quipped, “Other than the fact that I live on it?”

  “Other than that,” Dario said, faking a laugh.

  “Well, yes, actually.” Oblita straightened up in her chair. Her long, dark, almost tail-like trunk of hair fell over her gaunt shoulders. “Did you run into any of my neighbors?”

  Dario said he did.

  “Notice anything about them?”

  “The few I saw had a physical disability in some way.”

  “They all do.”

  “Do you take care of them?”

  “I try to. They’ve given a lot.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work.”

  “More than most realize.”

  “Do you help them outside of the Manor?”

  Oblita’s brows furrowed. “No, they never leave. They do not need to.”

  “Food? Activities?”

  “Everything they could ever need is up here, with me.”

  Dario pressed his pen hard against the diagnostic assessment form and started unconsciously drawing a circle. “Do you take care of the others on the floors below?”

  “When they’ve earned it,” Oblita said. “I know it is strange to hear all of this—”

  “No—” he stopped drawing, “they are very fortunate to have someone so dedicated to them.”

  “It goes both ways,” Oblita said, with a clear, British accent. “Doesn’t it?”

  “It does.” Dario agreed just to agree. “We don’t have a lot of time left, but you said you wanted to begin therapy because you feel guilty for things you’ve done.”

  “Yes.”

  “Things in the past? Or things you’ve done recently?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “But it sounds as if you do a lot of good here.”

  “I am trying.”

  “This guilt… how does it make you feel?”

  “Sad,” Oblita said. “Angry.”

  Dario made a note of each affectation on the assessment and asked, “Anxiety?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Used to?”

  “When I didn’t know myself so well.”

  “Do you feel comfortable in your own skin?”

  At this, Oblita leaned back in her chair and let out a loud laugh that might as well have been a bark. “I’ve become accustomed to this skin, I suppose.”

  “Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy doing?”

  “It’s routine.”

  “Okay,” Dario said. “Do you have as much energy as you are used to?”

  “I’m sixty-five. I wake up early, and go to bed early.”

  “Fair enough. Have you ever been a violent confrontation with someone?”

  “Yes,” Oblita said.

  “Bad enough to have the police called?”

  “I suppose, if the police ever came out this way.”

  “What happened?”

  Oblita shrugged.

  “That’s fine,” Dario said. “You don’t have to tell me. But do you feel safe here?”

  “Oh yes.” She looked at Dario as if the question was the most absurd thing she had ever heard.

  “This sadness… this guilt… has it ever made you want to harm yourself?”

  Oblita chewed on the question like a piece of meat. Surprisingly, most clients would answer any questions about harming themselves or one another with very little hesitation. Dario had always thought it would be the opposite when it came to those topics unprotected by confidentiality, but it wasn’t. Once the doors of the mind were unlocked, all manner of things came crawling out.

  “When I was younger,” Oblita admitted, touching the vein-like scars beside her mouth. “Not anymore.”

  Dario checked the time—eight minutes—and went into wrap-up mode. “I’m really happy to hear that. But if you do ever feel that way, you can tell me.”

  Oblita hummed in agreement.

  “Somehow, we’re almost out of time.”

  “Already?”

  “Unfortunately. But before I go, I want you to think about one or two things you would like for us to work on in therapy together.”

  Oblita played with her bottled water. She still hadn’t opened it. She was thinking about something, the same way a child might think of a wish before blowing out their birthday candles on a cake.

  Packing up the papers and folder and placing them back into the bag, Dario said, “Do you mind if I use your bathroom before I leave?”

  Oblita cocked her head. Again, there was a light i
n her eyes. A red prick of light that could’ve been some refraction from the walls. At first, she looked as if she was going to say no, and Dario prepared himself to tell her not to worry about it. But instead, she scooted her chair back loudly, came to her feet, and with a very obvious British accent, said, “Ignore the mess, if you can.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.” Dario stood and placed his bag on the chair he’d been sitting in. “Thank you. I’ll be right out.”

  Dario went left, across the apartment, where three doors formed the ends of the small hall there. Oblita, her voice distant, told him to go to the right. And without looking back to see why she sounded so far away, he opened the door on his right.

  The bathroom was the very definition of cramped. It was nice—the sink was marble, the toilet white porcelain with a red flower around the base—and like everywhere else, impeccably clean. The bathtub was white as well, but the shower curtain was pulled over it, so beyond the vague shapes he could see through the covering, there wasn’t much to note there.

  Dario tried to lock the door behind him, but there was no lock. He didn’t really have to go, but he wanted to see Oblita Vesper’s bathroom, and maybe even what was in the garbage cans. Except there weren’t any garbage cans. Nor was there any toilet paper, hand soap, or towels. Unbuttoning his pants, he lifted the toilet seat and lid and started to piss. Curious, he leaned over the sink, reached for the medicine cabinet, and pulled it open. The shelves were empty, except for a few dried-up roots that appeared to have come through the drywall behind the cabinet.

  He shut the cabinet, gave himself a few good shakes, buttoned his pants, and turned on the faucet. The water sputtered out brown, and then, after a few seconds, it was clear. He didn’t have any soap to work with, but he figured he may as well make the effort. On another day, he might ask Oblita about her lack of supplies in the bathroom, or if she had some, why she had decided to hide them for when guests came over.

  Thinking about his new client, as well as the group he had to run tomorrow (families in Bedlam whose children had gone missing), his eyes wandered over to the base of the toilet and the floral decoration he had more or less dismissed.

  Because now the red flower didn’t look so much like a red flower. It was dripping down the toilet in chunky streams to the floor, where the tiles were dotted with wet, faintly red splatters.

  He stared at the bathtub, and at the shower curtain, and what might lay behind it. His first thought was of himself, and then of his family. He took out his cell phone in the event he needed to dial 911. Oblita Vesper was an old woman who clearly had something to hide. She spoke of guilt regularly; maybe her guilt was all over the tub. She had to have known he would find this.

  Footsteps outside the door. Dario’s heart let out a thunderous beat. He grabbed the side of the sink, steadied himself. It wasn’t a body. This woman needed help. She was reaching out for help. This wasn’t an accident. He was here, in this bathroom, for a reason.

  More footsteps. Something brushed against the doorknob from outside. Dario summoned the coping skills he never used and preached to his clients as gospel. He looked at the toilet again, and the blood dripping off it. He remembered the stains on Oblita’s cuffs, and how she had been acting strangely. Had she been bleeding out the whole intake?

  Dario shook his head and grabbed the shower curtain. She didn’t have a body her bathtub, he told himself. And telling himself this, he flung the curtain back.

  Oblita Vesper had a body in her bathtub.

  Dario gasped and choked on his words: “Oh fuck!”

  He spun around to make sure he was still alone.

  He was.

  Forgetting about the phone in his hand, Dario, cringing, leaned forward.

  Inside the bathtub was the body of an old man who looked to be in his eighties. He was covered in a heavy blanket from the waist down, as if Oblita had been wrapping him up the moment Dario rapped upon her door. The old man’s neck was cut open, deeply; straight down to the bone, the ravaged gulch was the cause of death, and the source of the blood that coated the bottom of the tub.

  Dario thought of his wife and daughter. For a moment, he saw himself in the tub. He moved the phone around in his sweaty palm, thumbed the number pad on the screen…

  “Isn’t that something?” Oblita said behind him.

  Before Dario could react, she cracked the back of his elbow with a hammer, sending the cell phone flying into the tub of blood.

  He screamed, spun around, and slammed against the bathroom wall.

  “Please,” Dario cried, holding his throbbing elbow, his blood-mushed skin there making his stomach sick. “Please, I can… I can help.”

  Oblita lowered the hammer to her side and bounced the head of it against her thigh, over and over. “I do feel guilty about killing Herbert North, but I feel worse about what I’ve been doing in the basement. Come, Mr. Dario Onai, let me show you. I still want to unburden my soul.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not… I’m not the right person. Police… a priest… if you want to confess.”

  “A priest?” Oblita chuckled. “No, no. If I told a priest about what I’ve been doing—a real priest, mind you, who worships the true God—they’d only encourage me to keep going. I’m not confessing. I just want your opinion.”

  She held the hammer outward and bared her teeth.

  “Your professional opinion. Can you do that for me? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Dario pressed himself harder into the wall, like a rat trying to dig away from a threat. It took a lot out of him, but he managed a nod and a pathetic, “Mm.”

  “Excellent use of active listening, Mr. Onai,” Oblita said. She went sideways and gestured for him to pass in front of her. “Go ahead. Attack me if you’d like on your way out, but it will not do you any good. A man’s hands have never been enough to stop me.”

  Dario swallowed the bile of hate and terror clogging up his throat. Slowly, he slid across the wall, closer and closer to Oblita. He thought about attacking her, or running, and yet neither seemed possible. She was psychotic, or, at the very least, decompensating. No amount of pain he inflicted upon her, unless it led to a coma or her death, would be enough to stop what she had in store for him.

  In a flash, Oblita swung the hammer and bashed the side of his face. Screaming, he grabbed his face, where his left eye was already beginning to swell from the bludgeoning.

  “God, stop!”

  “You had a look in your eye like you were about to do something stupid.” Oblita grabbed his hand and pulled it away from his face. She surveyed the bleeding bulge. “It’s gone now.”

  Dario told himself to be calm, but that only made him all the more terrified. Going past Oblita into the hall, he tried to think of something to say or do to take control of the situation. He’d had classes on this sort of thing, and training, both online and in-person. He had even signed a fucking form stating that he felt qualified to de-escalate situations where a life was in danger. But he couldn’t think of anything. Not a goddamn thing. All he had to work with was the sick feeling in his stomach, and the stupid things it might drive him to do or not do in the name of self-preservation.

  Back at the table, Oblita Vesper practically nipping at his heels, Dario grabbed a kitchen chair, spun around, and smashed it into her face. She went down hard; a geyser of bright red, black-speckled blood spurt out of her head, across the carpet.

  “Good thing you weren’t next to the couch, Freud!” Oblita said, laughing.

  He didn’t look back. Cradling his busted arm, fighting against his failing vision, he hurried to the front door. As he reached for the knob…

  The door pushed open and something his mind couldn’t reconcile came through. The nearly naked thing had the frame of a drug addict—hard limbs and thin skin on a body caving in as if there was a black hole inside it. It stood on two legs, and it had two arms, but it might as well have been a reject from god’s petri dish. It wore a leather apron and leather gl
oves, and there was a massive butcher’s knife fixed to its leather belt. Wrapped around its head was the last of the creature’s clothing: a cobweb-colored scarf that left only its eyes exposed. From those diamond-shaped cavities, vermillion veins poured, like calcified tears, down its face, obscuring most of its mouth.

  Dario took two steps backwards before he bumped into Oblita and her hammer.

  “His name is E.A.973,” she whispered, her lips wet against his ear. “The Manor can be unstable during this time. He will guide us to the place.”

  Staring at E.A.973 robbed Dario of any courage he had left in him. He was shivering out a monsoon of sweat. His mind was full of prayers; not his prayers, but his grandmother’s prayers—those feverish exultations that left her pallid and everyone around her speechless. And then there were his wife and daughter; the shapes of them; the hate of them; the disappointment, the dinner, and the emptiness between them. Why wasn’t death worse than missing tonight’s date?

  “I don’t know what drove you to this,” Dario said, as Oblita came around him and stood beside E.A.973. “But… I know it must have been… awful for you.”

  Oblita arched an eyebrow. “You hit me with a chair—”

  He had, and all she had to show for it was a patch of skin on her face bubbling, like foam, until it didn’t.

  “—and now you want to reason with me?”

  His eyes darted back and forth between Oblita’s hammer and E.A.973’s butcher knife.

  “I prefer violence, Mr. Onai,” she said. “It is the only truly reliable way to survive. We are all survivors at the Manor. What have you survived?”

  Dario’s thoughts were fragmented, held together only by the threads of fight and flight. He had told himself that he wasn’t like some of the other health care providers he’d met—damaged and deranged, and desperate for vicarious validation. But something was breaking apart inside him. A dormant memory had metastasized; a traumatic tumor he’d thought he’d removed with time itself. The hammer and the pain it caused him hadn’t been the trigger. No, it was the way Oblita Vesper was standing before him, lording over him; the way she might one of the creeping things that came crawling out of the shed. It was the disgust, and it was the delight, and the deadly combination the two of them created. She was going to do terrible things to him, and she knew as well as he did there was nothing he could do it about it. He was powerless. Again.