The Thread that Binds the Bones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Had she killed Alexander? She must have. No one in the Family could die in such a stupid way; it must be her fault, even though she hadn’t been present when he slipped down the cliffside and broke himself open. He was an earth power! How could a cliff hurt him?

  Fayella hadn’t been present, but she had been thinking curses at Gwenda ever since the wedding—wishing that the worst possible thing would happen to her, and earthing the curses in a mudball she had made with earth Gwenda had stepped on, mixed with Fayella’s own spit and a few strands of Gwenda’s hair. She had even put a splinter of crystal from one of the old hoard of Family snow crystals in the center of the ball, to add the stored power of the past to her curses.

  It hadn’t occurred to Fayella until too late that maybe the worst thing that could happen to Gwenda was Alexander’s death.

  Gwenda and Alexander had gone on their Together Quest into the wilderness, seeking conversation with spirits who could tell them a map of their lives. Gwenda returned weeping and alone, and some of the air sign people flew out to retrieve Alexander’s remains so the Family could perform the proper blessings, praise, and unbindings on them, releasing his spirit so it could travel on or earth itself unhindered.

  Uncle Matthew, sign earth, did the earth-shifting out in the forest to open a grave for Alexander, and asked the trees for feathery branches to lay him on.

  Fayella stood beside the grave as Grampa Samuel summoned Presences to guide Alexander, and told the air everyone would miss him and had been blessed by his presence. Everyone joined in the closing song, thanks and grief and letting go.

  Fayella’s mouth made the words, but she did not listen to them. She smelled the raw, open earth, the blood-sap of fresh branches, the start of decay in Alexander. She stared at his beautiful face. It wore serenity like a mask. He must know something now she had no notion of, something calm. As the others sang a song to release him, she sang a binding song, silently, but putting all her power into it, tying a knot in his still-present soul so it could not escape.

  That night, long after the affirmation meal, when all the house was asleep, she crept back out to the forest and shifted aside the earth under which Uncle Matthew had buried Alexander.

  Dead, his body, too, was earth, and responded to her gifts, rising from its resting place in a semblance of life. She stared at it. She touched it. She hugged it, and made it hug her back. She ignored what it smelled like, summoning instead her memories of Alexander, his touch, his movements, his warmth. And she tugged on the knot she had tied to his soul, inviting it to return to its vessel.

  It fought her.

  At first it was gentle, consoling; it whispered love to her, and comfort.

  She slapped it. “No,” she said. “You betrayed me. You chose her.”

  It pleaded with her, tried to reason with her, to tell her that defying the decisions of the Presences and Powers would have led to a miserable life for both of them.

  She pulled it down and locked it back in its body. “Dead love to dead love,” she whispered, pressing herself against the length of his flesh, thinking warmth into it, though it did not warm as much as it had alive. “You’re mine now,” she whispered.

  She kept it caged for almost two years, hidden out in the forest. It fought and struggled, but she always bested it. She only let it go when the last of its flesh was gone; bones did not anchor it strongly enough.

  When he had been successfully spirit-blind for so long that he had come to believe it would be forever, Tom found the boy in the janitor’s closet at Arthur High. It was the end of a long day for Tom; the cafeteria basement had flooded, and he had spent several hours trying to fix it and finally resorting to a plumber, who came two hours after the time he said he’d come.

  And still there were floors to mop, rest rooms to clean, wastebaskets to empty, windows to wash, walls to scrub.

  When he had finished with that night’s circuit, he kicked open the door into the janitor’s closet on the third floor, and there was the boy, sitting in the enormous sink, shivering. Tom had turned down the thermostats in the buildings, leaving just enough heat in the chill, early winter night to keep the pipes from freezing again, After a shiver when he switched on the lights and realized his personal preserve had been invaded, Tom pushed the wheeled mop bucket ahead of him into the closet, annoyed at having to evict the boy from the sink before he could dump filthy mop water; how long would this take? He and Althea, his next-door neighbor, had planned an evening around take-out Chinese and the umpteenth run of Casablanca on television. He had already called her once to warn her he would be late. Now this.

  “Who are you, and what do you want?” Tom asked.

  The boy stared at him, eyes wide and unfocused. His dark hair was wet; strings of it twisted over his pale forehead and draggled down into his eyes. Tom took two steps closer. The boy wore a white shirt, so wet it was translucent, slicked against his thin arms and chest. Must be some kind of bully’s victim, Tom decided.

  “You must be freezing. Let me help you out of there.” Tom advanced on the sink. The boy cowered.

  “No, come on. You can’t stay here. You might need to go to the hospital. How long have you been here?” He looked at his watch. It was approaching ten o’clock. Tom reached out, and his hands closed on empty air where the boy’s arms should have been.

  “Oh, God,” Tom said, staring at the boy who was not there. “Oh, God.” He had shut his eyes so carefully after that time at Mother Denver’s, when he was fifteen and he realized the world was layered with ghosts, ages on ages of them, an atmosphere: when he had opened his eyes and seen them, clustered so thickly everywhere, clutching their fragments of personal history, he could not breathe for fear of inhaling them. To survive, he had closed his eyes again and prayed, breathing (was that an ancient hand slipping down his throat? did the hair of a long-dead woman brush against his nose? that musty smell—) and whispering, “Don’t let me see, don’t let me see, don’t let me see.” He had drummed it into his head.

  When he opened his eyes again, the ghosts had vanished, leaving Mother Denver’s living room the same haven of plastic-covered furniture and plastic runners protecting the rug it had always been. He had hoped the ghosts were gone forever.

  It had taken three more years of constant work to drum them out, though, and his school work had suffered, but he had gotten rid of them.

  Until now, ten years later.

  The boy’s teeth chattered like the muffled click of chess pieces shaken in a locked box.

  “Can you tell me what you need?” Tom said to the boy in the sink.

  The boy’s wide eyes stared through him.

  “If you can’t tell me—” Tom said, and waited, hearing the rattle of teeth.

  “If you can’t tell me—” Tom lifted the mop bucket, a heavy galvanized steel receptacle with a lever-operated wringer on top and wheels underneath. One of the wheels swung on its caster, a frictiony metal-on-metal squeak. “—I’m going to dump this and go home.” He felt dizzy. These fragments of dead people always seemed to want something, and he had never been able to find out what and give it to them. His survival had depended on his ability to figure out what live people wanted, though he had never been very good at that, either.

  The boy did nothing but shiver and stare. Tom closed his eyes and dumped the mop water into the sink. He imagined he heard a long, agonized scream. He opened his eyes. The boy had vanished.

  Surfing on this tide of melting memories, Tom tried to slow down. He reached for anything, searching for anchors.

  —Ring calls to ring.

  He had thought he might never feel anything physical again, that the pain of burning from the unbinding had overloaded his receptors so they would never unblock—no future he could imagine had him lasting long enough for his nerves to heal, if nerves ever did heal. But in his left hand, shielded from the unbinding because he held it in the small of Fayella’s back, he felt a fire that did not burn. The heat of a heart, necessary to life. He f
ocused what rags of consciousness remained on that heat, leaving the memories behind.

  Laura was there. Gold and blue, a lifeline, cool strength reaching out to link with him. An anchor. A stronghold.

  —Spin.

  He no longer knew who whispered to him, but he thought about spiders, twisting thread into beautiful symmetry, taming chaos with ordered nets that greeted the dawn, hung with globes of dew that caught and held cores of sunlight, and tiny images of the world. He spun, inviting Laura to spin with him. They cast threads out to each other, silver and gold, green and blue, twining together like the souls of mother and child. We bridge the gap. We are the bridge, and there is no gap.

  Before his face, he sensed a slowing in what whirled in air.

  —More.

  From Laura’s end he felt another color of thread coming, lavender and green, riding the back of one of Laura’s golden weavings. Maggie. And then a vivid red-yellow presence cast silky lines to him. Carroll. Strong, fiery flickers of gray and yellow. Agatha. Tom took the ends and wove with them, a tapestry like the one he had fashioned earlier, but this time much stronger, augmented by the wills of others. From within him Peregrine offered threads of indigo and powder blue. More colored threads came to him and he meshed them in, Bert’s deep grass green, Trixie’s orange and pink, Michael’s thick strong red, Alyssa’s sky blue, others; colors he connected to people and others he did not recognize, some cast to him from living presences and some from dead ones, some from creatures of other species living in the nooks and crannies of the kitchen, some from the tanganar, but no time to stop for greetings. Time only to weave. He sensed the unbinding slowing in its manic counterclockwise spin, foiled by this tapestry of ties.

  In the end even the rock of the kitchen walls, ordered from years of being shaped by minds, added its lava-orange strength to their work. The unbinding slowed, stopped, died within the compass of their binding-together.

  He could hear his own ragged breathing, and Fayella’s. His eyes seemed fused shut; either that, or they were already wide open and he could see nothing anyway. He thought perhaps he could let Fayella go now, but his arms did not respond to him. He remembered the air pockets in the lava that had covered Pompeii, shaped like the people molten rock had covered before heat turned them to ash. He and Fayella were frozen statues of disaster victims, and their breathing was just an illusion.

  Hands reached into his nightmare and touched him, familiar hands. He felt cool healing spread across his back.

  After the work of trying to hold everything together, he decided it was time for him to fall apart. He let go of everything.

  Chapter 22

  —Maggie? May I come in?

  Maggie lay on her back and looked up at another new ceiling, this one with a skylight somewhere way up through rock. Daylight came down the shaft, scrubbing a square of blanket white down near her feet. Beside her she heard sleeping breathing. Her cheeks were still sticky with dried tears she had been too tired last night to wash away, and she could smell her own sweat. Rank. The scent of smoke and fire was strong too. Suddenly a great choking flood of sadness swamped her, and she felt new tears form and head out for her ears. She turned her head enough to look toward the other person in the bed, and saw the back of someone’s head, bristly with smudged, burned hair. After a moment she decided that it must be Laura’s head.

  —Maggie? May I come in?

  —What? Who—Ianthe! Huh? How can you talk to me unless you’re already in?

  —I know I have trespassed, but it was the only way I could speak with you. May I stay?

  Maggie rubbed her eyes with her fists.—As long as it’s safe for me, she thought. Then she thought, Must be the first time I’ve ever said that to someone who wants to use me.

  —Thank you. You are generous. Maggie, just now you are our only conduit to those living, and we must speak to them. Will you be our voice?

  —Me?

  —Without Tom and Peregrine, you are the only one experienced enough.

  Maggie lay back and laughed at being a voice for a whole tribe in a place where she had been voiceless.

  —When you are ready, my question still begs an answer. Ianthe’s thought was tinged with dry humor.

  Beside Maggie, Laura groaned and sat up.

  —Okay, Maggie thought.—What do we do first?

  She felt strange strokings inside her, as if a feather brushed along her bones.—Food, my poor child! Do you know how few reserves remain here?

  —I don’t feel hungry.

  —You are too far past hunger to feel it. I cannot remain in you when you are this depleted; you have no protection. Go, fetch food and force yourself to eat it. I will stay beside you.

  Maggie sat up. Her clothes were scorched and flaking, some of the material burnt into her skin. It was the death of Pearl’s graduation dress. Moaning, she pried fibers away. Whole patches of her skin burned and throbbed. When she couldn’t stand the task anymore she got up on shaky legs and headed into the bathroom, pulling off everything she could, and went to stand under the shower’s warm rain until she was pretty sure she was wearing her skin and nothing else. Most of her hair was burnt down to bristle. Her head itched and so did the places where her eyebrows used to be, and her skin hurt, even though the rain was gentle. She opened her mouth to the rain and swallowed water, which soothed her throat as it went down.

  Laura was waiting when Maggie finally stepped out of the shower. She had brushed the ash off her head; she actually looked good with the equivalent of a crew cut. She held out her hands. “I’ve still got a little healing in me,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you last night.”

  “Had other things on our minds.” Maggie walked to her and closed her eyes, feeling the cool strength coming from Laura’s hands, warming as it spread through her, taking away the burning. “Thanks,” she said. “Gotta eat. Get strong.”

  “Yes,” said Laura. “I’ll be right down. There are clothes in my wardrobe. Help yourself to any of them.” She stepped into the shower.

  The kitchen floor had sunk down about two feet, and its surface was pitted, ridged, cratered, and pooled, a picture of what the top of boiling water would look like if you could freeze it. The food preparation area was devastated, wood cupboards singed, metals smoke-darkened, all the hanging herbs crisped to shadows.

  Maggie stood on the kitchen threshold, wearing a ceremonial white robe that must have fitted Laura when she was a head shorter, and now fitted Maggie. All Laura’s shoes had been an inch too long for her. She didn’t know if she wanted to chance bare feet on the ruptured floor, even though her feet were tough and calloused. The entry to the pantry looked relatively untouched; maybe there was still food there, but it was across the frozen cauldron of stone.

  “Wish I could fly,” she muttered. A hand touched her shoulder and she jumped as if shot.

  “Sorry,” said Carroll, looking down at her with his head tilted. He had all his hair. “Here.” He held his arms out.

  She bit her lip, remembering her first vision of him, just like this, holding out his arms, asking her if he could take her away, a light of appreciation in his green eyes. She had stepped into his arms unspeaking, and he had lifted her up into the air, a flight toward a new life, away from the old one, and for a moment she had believed dreams could come true.

  She went to him and he picked her up. They drifted a couple feet above the floor across to the pantry’s entrance. He set her down there and snapped glows and they looked around.

  She went to the smoker and opened it, found jerked beef on the top rack, nibbled an edge of a piece and decided it was done. With the first salty vinegar taste, she discovered her hunger and sat down and ate, gnawing meat and swallowing without chewing much.

  Carroll poked through containers, lifting lids and sniffing. “Apples,” he said. “Want one?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  He fished a couple out of a barrel and came to sit down beside her. She handed him some jerky. Af
ter they had taken the edge off their hunger, Maggie said, “I’m on a mission from a ghost.”

  “What?” he said, and laughed.

  “Laugh now,” she said, “before she comes inside me and bosses you around. Ha!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see.” She grinned at him and went to the bread box. She pulled a heel off a loaf and dipped it into the butter crock, smearing it against the butter’s surface, then went to one of the water barrels and scooped up a pitcher full of water. She rejoined Carroll on the floor, broke the bread, and handed him half. “Salt between us,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Boot heels slapped on the floor outside, and then Laura came in. She was dressed in a white blouse, jeans, and cowboy boots. “Where’s the licorice, Maggie, do you know?”

  “In a box on the top shelf,” Maggie said, pointing into the upper reaches of the room.

  Laura held up her hands and the box came down to her. “Can’t explain it, but I have this craving—”

  “My ma used to say the body always knows what it wants when you’re expecting, and that’s when you learn to listen.” Maggie ate about half her bread, sipped water, and felt she had had enough.

  Laura lifted the top off the box and grabbed a handful of black licorice twists, then sent the box back. Carroll stared at her with narrowed eyes as she came over and perched on a barrel near them, pulling her legs up and sitting cross-legged.

  “Expecting?” he said.

  “Has it occurred to you yet that Fayella may have been twisting a lot more than our minds?” Laura asked him before she savagely bit the ends off six licorice twists at once.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Earth and water, Carroll. Know how many body systems that covers? Powers of generation, and…” She demolished licorice, then looked up, and sudden tears streaked down her cheeks. “The babies,” she said. “The dead babies. Thank Powers Mom warded us all when we were little.”

  She jumped down. “I’m going to check on Tom.”