by John Everson
“Just look around you,” she said and gestured at the intricately laid floor. “Those kids never left this room. Their bones are here, laid into the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Those kids built this room.”
Tricia’s eyes had now widened so large that the whites of her eyes were circled in red.
“Yep,” the old woman sighed. “You’re standing on them.”
The girl screamed.
“Just bones,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I wanted you to see, to understand. This house has a bad reputation, and rightly so. I’m sure those voices I hear coming from this room are from all those innocent orphans who had their fingers cropped off, and their bones ground down to shards of decorative tile.”
“It’s this house,” she said and shook her head, pulling Tricia closer. The girl didn’t fight her embrace. All she could think of was that she was standing on the chopped-up bones of dead people.
“Everyone who’s ever lived here has felt the need to add to the house,” Mrs. Tanser said, and pulled the girl towards the back of the long room.
“The White House was large by the standards of the 1800s when Mr. White built it, but there have been many rooms added since. I showed you the draughty room last time you were here. And this room—which I think was probably a gymnasium for the orphans—was built over a long period. There are others. In the basement is a small closet that I believe was painted in the paste of a child…its colors are faded and dulled now, but it looks to be a mad swirl of mud and blood and bone if you stare closely. There’s a shed on the back of the property that has window frames that are rounded and made of what looks to be rib bones. And the lock on that shed is a primitive thing, but it seems to be made of an arm or a leg bone that drops into place and holds the door fast.”
“There’s no way the Realtor could have warned me,” Mrs. Tanser said. “There’s no way she could ever really have known—she wouldn’t walk inside much past the front door. I wish she could have told me what I was in for. But the house…once you’re here…”
They walked across the long bone mosaic room, and the chatter of Tricia’s teeth began to reverberate through the silence.
“It’s okay, child,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I just want to show you one more room.”
At the back of the long white room she stopped, and reached out to turn the latch on a door that only announced itself as thin seams set in the wall. It opened outward at her touch, and a cool breeze hit them as it did.
“I think that some of the rooms people added to the house were afraid to show their real colors,” Mrs. Tanser said. “The people knew what they were doing, on some level, and they bleached the bones and carved the bones and crushed the bones into paste and mortar and paint.”
“But when the house told me…when I realized what I would have to do, I made a pledge to myself to be true to the children who came here. The people who grew this house. They shouldn’t be hidden in pieces, I said to myself, but celebrated. After all, everything has its place. And every place, its thing. The things that build this house, have their place. They had life, and in death…they grow the White House in rooms of bone.
“And this house…must have its thing. These days…that’s me.”
Mrs. Tanser picked up a hammer and raised it above Tricia’s head. She breathed deep as the girl squealed and tried desperately to run. Her screams rang out like bullets scraping metal. But Mrs. Tanser’s other hand held the small girl fast. A trapped animal.
“You’ll live here forever,” she promised. “And I promise you’ll hardly feel a thing. I can’t believe the torture some of these kids must have gone through. I could never be so cruel.”
Tricia screamed again. A horrible, larnyx-shredding sound. But she couldn’t break free of the old woman’s grip. Mrs. Tanser lived only for the house now, and Tricia had never felt such desperate strength before. The veins of the woman’s hands stood out blue and serious above the small girl’s reddening fingers. “I came to this town because I loved children. Genna and Jillie didn’t want to stay here either,” she whispered. “Look at them up there.” She nodded at two tiny skulls shrieking in silence on the wall. “But what could I do? I adore children. The house… This house…it never relents…
“Hold still,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I want your face to stay this beautiful, always.”
Tricia twisted and turned, staring at the bone-white eye sockets and jaws of the handful of splintered skulls that lined the half-constructed wall of the small room like fractured masks. Those perfect, unblemished bone faces screamed silently in chorus with her, as Mrs. Tanser turned to make her kill.
“It’s going to take a long time to finish this room,” the old woman lamented. “But I will finish my room. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing. This room is mine.”
She brought the hammer down.
Star on the Beach
“No, don’t!”
He caught my hand in mid-throw before I could let go and cast the shell back to the ocean. It had an odd shape, apricot and cream in spirals, I’d noticed, but it was not so strange as to make me want to keep it. Still, when the wiry little Cuban boy gripped my arm and yelled no, I listened.
“What?” I barked, and released my grip on the shell. He scooped it from the sand excitedly and said, “Star, star!”
I shrugged and went back to shoveling sand with my whole arm into the shape of a wall.
We’d met on South Beach.
Miami.
Home of skates and tons of sand…and…T&A. I could literally taste the sex in the air. Or was that just the ocean?
After a long walk down the beach from my hotel, where I’d left my wedding ring in a drawer under a stack of underwear, I’d finally convinced myself to turn my attention to the earth, instead of the well-displayed (and endowed) but unachievable women. Like countless men before me, I’d taken to architecture to release my creative urges, building phallic representations of my unsated lusts from the earth.
Sand castles.
I was building sand castles instead of scoring some choice 36-24-36 when the teenage brown-skinned boy joined me.
“You build?” he asked.
He took my nod as an invitation and soon both of us were shoring up sand walls to protect an unimpressive, tentative squat tower from the crush of the ocean.
Story of my life.
’Til I dug out the shell.
Then he freaked.
“It’s just a shell,” I said, but he kept on.
“Star, star.”
He forced it out of my hand, chocolate eyes serious with concentration.
“Keep.” He nodded.
I stuffed it in my pocket and went back to shoring up a beleaguered moat wall. We worked in silence until sunset, he pointing to areas gone weak and smiling with teeth as white as the moon when I filled the gaps with sand.
When the sun set and the conga music began filtering over the berm from Mango’s on Ocean View, I announced that I had to leave.
He looked alarmed.
“Some time?” he asked.
English came hard to him and he struggled with each word.
“Some,” I admitted. “But I need to meet some friends from work for dinner.”
I don’t know how much he understood, but he motioned for me to follow.
He took me farther down the beach than I had gone before—past the rows of hotels to the very end of the island.
“How far?” I asked and he only nodded his head quickly and said, “Yes.”
Finally, he turned and grinned at me and nodded again.
“Now, now,” he said and ran up, away from the water and in between an old boarded up shell of a building. Maybe it had been a small motel, I thought, though they didn’t seem to have anything else around here. He pointed to a mound of sand and then to my pocket.
“Star,” h
e said and without question, I gave it to him. But he refused, instead motioning for me to place the shell at the top of the pile. Or the bottom. Who could tell? Once placed, he clapped his hands and began shoveling sand off the center of the mound with cupped hands. After a moment, I took the hint and joined him. The sand slipped through my hands like water, but still I scooped, armful after armful, some sliding back as soon as I’d removed it. But little by little, we made progress towards his undescribed goal.
Her belly was bronze.
Beautiful.
And more than a bit frightening when I realized what it was we were digging up.
Again, the kid egged me on.
“Okay, Okay.” He nodded and proceeded to uncover more of her perfect, nude body.
She was like every celluloid queen I’d seen strutting up and down the beach, playing volleyball in bikini suits too small to cover all of their privates at any one moment.
Her nipples jutted round and proud from out of the sand-like copper ice cream cones, her thighs looked taut and strong and her oil-gloss pubes shed sand like liquid gold.
I was in awe. And scared to death.
The kid was uncovering a dead body. A beautiful dead body, but dead, nonetheless. We hadn’t yet seen a face and there was no way she’d been breathing under all that sand.
And then he did the worst thing.
Pointing at me, he began to rock his hips back and forth. Then he’d stop, motion at my crotch and grind in her direction again. It looked silly, coming from a boy. What could he know?
“No way!” I said and he smiled again, pointing to himself.
“Me?” he asked.
I shrugged and he dropped his shorts to reveal his finger-sized erection. It may have been small, but he knew what to do. In an instant, his twelve-year-old hips were slapping with doglike speed against the half-buried body.
I couldn’t look at him, not really, and walked away in the middle, but he caught up to me a few minutes later, slapping the shell back to my hand.
“Star,” he said.
I looked closer at the shell this time. It wasn’t a starfish…wasn’t like any shell I’d ever seen before, really. I shoved it in my pocket, wondering what I should do. I didn’t want to report a body. That was local stuff…and I didn’t want to be involved. I was just passing through. Have a few drinks, build a couple sandcastles, slip my ring back on, and head home. No entanglements.
That night, I sat on the beach outside of my hotel and watched waves drag sand in and out of the ocean. In the sky, the Big Dipper pointed the way to infinity, while the moon lit the blanketed couples scattered along the shadowed length of the sand in a romantic nightlight. The pull of their sighs was lost in the rhythmic sway of the surf.
I wanted to join them.
I wanted to plunge into the ocean.
I wanted to plunge into her.
Night birds scattered like ghost crabs across the sand as I restlessly walked the midnight coastline, the occasional rotted coconut washing in from the deep like a dark skull, tangled vines like veins trailing from its shattered brainpan. Sea foam sucked the sand from beneath my toes and shoveled shells and secrets home and gone again. The full moon reflected off the receding waters in a shining beacon.
There were eyes on me.
Silent eyes. Nervous and lustful.
The eyes of nocturnal birds and stone-white crabs and furtive humans coupling nervously in the shadows, their lovemaking open to any, yet seen only by the stars. I could feel them all, watching me, secret yet bright in the night.
In my mind, I wondered about her. Had she been one of these hidden women? Brashly naked and stealing sex on the beach in the midnight hour. Had her lover taken her hard, with liquid cries and writhing need and then, at the end, throttled and buried her, far from the surf and the crabs and the pounding feet of screaming kids and jogging businessmen?
How had the kid known about her? Had he buried her? Had it really happened at all?
The ocean breeze was warm and humid but goose bumps covered my neck and spine and I shivered. Without looking back, I strode through the mostly empty beach chairs and made my way back to my room. On the way in, I stopped at the bar and ordered a drink.
Bombay gin martini. Evaporate-on-your-tongue dry. Extra olives.
A fuzz of alcoholic evergreen filled my eyes and nostrils and eventually, moon shadows kissing at my bed, I slept.
The next day was a maze of hotel room meetings and endless, pointless committee discussion. I cinched at my tie often, and desperately wished that I could be one of those carefree patrons who I saw during breaks in the hallway, sandals slapping the tile as they headed, shorts-decked and chest bare, towards the sun-haloed doors leading to the pool and the beach. The day seemed endless. And then, it was 6 p.m., and a reception was playing itself out near the pool, and I…slipped away after five handshakes and a Chardonnay.
Free.
Back in my room, I thought of heading down the crowded pavement of Ocean View towards the clubs and restaurants, and then decided not to. I could eat anytime. The ocean, however, was not an option near my home. Without a second thought, I pulled on my still slightly damp swimsuit, slipped on an unbuttoned paisley shirt, and slipped my key into a pocket. I was leaving suit-ville for swimsuit-ville.
I made a wide circuit around Chardonnay and Cheap Beer city (the stuffy reception by the pool) and quickly found my feet in the sand and my face kissing the salt breeze. The sun was slipping low on the horizon, but not setting, and I started south once more, the same direction I’d gone the night before. In moments, I’d settled into a sand-kicking rhythm, sometimes bending to examine an interesting shell, but mostly heading straight south along the surf, reveling in the feeling of escape and adventure. I didn’t stop until I’d reached the curve of the bottom of the island.
Now the sun was setting, and the beach was draining of patrons. I could see the line for the crab shack not far off, and hear the slight jingle of steel drums somewhere along the line of eateries and greeteries.
The ocean would soon be empty as sun worshippers turned their bodies to bait. Why else had they bronzed their skin, if not to attract prey?
I was alone on the end of the island.
I was yards from the buried woman in the sand.
It struck me that this was the moment I’d been waiting for all day.
I started up the beach, away from the ocean and towards the space between the buildings where the boy had taken me the day before.
I started towards her.
Sometimes it’s funny how we fool ourselves. How we focus on other distractions while moving towards a goal.
I’d been moving towards her since my first sip of gin the previous night. I’d been putting it off, and steeling myself for it at the same time. And now, hands in the sand near a slight hill in the otherwise level beach, I began to dig.
Slowly at first, then faster, suddenly tasting the desire I’d denied the day before. Would she smell when I uncovered those tawny thighs today? Of fish or carrion? Would I take her anyway? I wasn’t sure what I intended—or at least, wouldn’t admit it to myself—as I continued to scoop armful after armful of sand away.
And then…
“No, no!” came the voice.
“Star, star!”
A hand pulled me back from the mound, shoved me over and I saw the Cuban boy, eyes bulging and flashing with excitement.
He pushed me again, hard, and I fell back from the dig, not expecting such passion.
“Star,” he said and pointed at my hip.
Now I wished I had stayed at the reception. I could have drowned my lusts in liquor, like usual, and avoided such a scene.
Hands felt me up as the boy ignored my resistance and felt along my thighs, ferreting out my pockets to see if I still had the shell from the day before.
Sinc
e I’d been thoroughly drunk and exhausted when I’d returned to my room the night before and hadn’t emptied my pockets before stripping and falling into bed, the boy found a reason to smile. Reaching past my slapping hand, he extracted the orange--and-cream shell he’d given me with such ceremony during yesterday’s sandcastle excavation.
“Star!” he proclaimed, and placed it on the portion of the beach where I imagined her head would be rotting.
I could almost see the crabs feasting on her eyes beneath the sand.
I no longer felt like continuing the excavation…in fact, I wondered why I’d come here at all. She may have looked pretty yesterday, the bits that I saw, but after all, she’d been dead.
The boy didn’t waste time, however. After dragging the shell from my pocket, he proceeded to drag me to the mound, pushing aside more and more sand and grinning flashes of white teeth in the slowly creeping twilight.
“Much fun,” he proclaimed at one point, and pointing at my swimsuit, made his own crotch push forward and back.
Then he dove back into digging in the sand, and, I regret to say, I followed suit. I’m not sure if I wanted “much fun”, but I did thirst to see her golden thighs and belly one more time before I flew home.
I was not disappointed.
My hand suddenly scooped against a layer that did not give, and I found myself moving sand away from succulently bronzed flesh.
A buried woman’s thigh.
The boy laughed and dug into the work with renewed vigor.
At one point he chuckled at me and pushed his swimsuit forward and back three times.
“Much fun,” he said again.
This time, I insisted on unburying her face. Call it morals or curiosity. I knew by now that I was going to do what the boy had wanted me to yesterday.
She was too beautiful to waste.
And, damn me to hell, but she certainly was in no position to complain.
We left the shell above where I imagined her hair trailed beneath the sand, but uncovered the slight jut of her jaw and the thin line of her nose. Her eyes were closed, but seemed wide with promise, and her lips, despite the scrub of sand, still looked ruby red as if slathered with raspberry lipstick.
