House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  The vineyard could wait.

  9

  Maya had gotten his private number somehow—and not the direct line to his office. No, she had gotten his home number, and Ramsey Lomax would have paid a fair sum to know how she had managed it. After all, the evening might have developed unpleasantly had Lomax not picked up the telephone himself.

  As chance would have it, however, he did. And he’d known it was her from the first—from the unhurried self-possession of the silence on the line, from the sharp sibilance of her intaken breath. He had heard them both before, and in circumstances far more pleasurable. The word which had followed was the same as well. Only the emotional weight had changed. In the past it had sometimes presaged her imminent climax. Now it presaged … what, exactly?

  That was the funny thing: Lomax couldn’t really say. It didn’t forebode the hysterical tirade he might have expected from another woman. It hinted of nothing tearful or recriminating. It was just that one syllable, direct and businesslike after two weeks of silence that he had begun to believe augured a painless break. It was his name, or more accurately, her abbreviated version of it.

  “Ram,” she’d said—which reminded him of the perverse humor Maya had found in the phallic overtones of the word. In the context, he supposed, it had seemed pretty goddamn hilarious.

  It didn’t seem so funny anymore, did it?

  Lomax snatched a glance at the door to affirm that Sara was still upstairs, dressing for the Foundation Ball they sponsored annually. Not that it would have mattered, exactly. He supposed Sara must have known he was more or less a serial adulterer and had made her peace with it. She wasn’t naive, after all, and the tenor of their emotional lives—the endless compromises, large and small, of a marriage conducted largely as an exercise in public relations—had long since become clear to both of them. Still, such an invasion of his home offended Lomax’s sense of decorum. And more important than that, his sense of control. So he had acted to reassert both.

  “I don’t know how you got this number,” he had said calmly, enunciating every word, “but if you use it again I will see to it that you lose your job.”

  Then, without waiting to hear her reply, he cradled the phone. The truth was, however, he had already decided on another, less drastic course of action: a tidy promotion that would send her packing to a facility in another state—Arizona, maybe, the climate wasn’t bad there. And then, when the sting had faded, he’d drop her a check in the mail, something generous, a little salve to the wound. He’d done it often enough before, and the moment he’d heard her speak his name he had decided to do it again.

  Lomax wasn’t even sure why he had ever begun the affair. It wasn’t his style. He didn’t customarily mess his own nest, for one thing. For another, Maya Underwood hadn’t been his type—even before Sara, in the days when his shaven skull and sharply hooked features had been a gossip-column mainstay, he’d tended to gravitate toward statuesque blondes. He hadn’t judged celebrity a bad thing, either, at least back then, and if in these later days he’d been forced to sacrifice a public conquest in favor of privacy, there were still plenty of good-looking blondes around, most of them more than receptive to his advances. Lomax didn’t flatter himself: he wasn’t a particularly handsome man. But power and wealth possessed a certain allure, and when he wanted to turn it on he had charisma to spare.

  So when his eye fell upon Maya—an assistant of an assistant, sitting anonymously behind some junior executive during the course of an interminable meeting—Lomax couldn’t say what had attracted him. She was small and lean, high-breasted, and perhaps it was only the lure of physical novelty that drew his attention. But he thought it might be the same subtly subversive brand of humor that had led her to highlight the ironic dimensions of his own name. He’d noticed it even that first time, in the occasional glance of wry amusement she shot from beneath a wing of dark hair as the meeting dragged on. Later, pursuing, he’d found her to be self-contained, independent, keenly observant—she’d been more than adequate in bed, confident in fulfilling her needs while plenty attentive to his own, but even there she seemed always to hold some fragment of herself aloof, as if she found even her own human frailty amusing in some sad, all too self-aware way.

  Nor had she seemed to harbor any illusions about the nature of their relationship. With Maya, there had been no talk of love, no weighted inquiries about the state of his marriage, no expectation of lavish gifts. As far as he could tell, the whole thing might have been little more than a pleasant carnal arrangement among friends—and not even particularly close ones—and a time came when he wondered if perhaps she was using him instead of the other way around. It was that more than anything else, he supposed, which finally persuaded him to end the thing—a sense that it was slipping beyond his control, that he needed Maya more than she needed him, that maybe he always had.

  Which was why the phone call both startled and reassured him. He would not have expected it from her, but it comforted him all the same: perhaps he’d misjudged the shifting tides in their relationship. Perhaps she needed him more than he had thought. It didn’t occur to him until much later that night—after he’d gotten back from the Foundation Ball and, in a rare fit of remorse, had made a perfunctory kind of love with Sara—that perhaps what he had misjudged was the nature of the phone call itself. Perhaps it had been little more than a courtesy—but if so, what kind of courtesy? The question startled him momentarily awake, and it was still resonating when he finally drifted off to sleep.

  The next morning, Lomax almost picked up the telephone and called her. In the end, however, he contacted John Harris in Human Resources and arranged for her promotion instead—and if Harris was at all curious about why the founder and CEO of Eyecom Industries was suddenly taking a personal interest in such mundane matters of lower management, he was wise enough to keep his suspicions to himself. Lomax had nearly forgotten the matter of the phone call by the time Maya Underwood finished unpacking her belongings in the high desert of Arizona two months later.

  And when he finally got around to mailing the check—quite a sizable one, too—he was far too involved in the pursuit of yet another blonde to notice that no one ever bothered to cash it.

  10

  As an adult, Abel would remember almost nothing of the episode with the watch, or how it ended—not the storm and not that geyser of whispering voices in his benighted bedroom, not the give of the mattress as the cold revenant of his father leaned over him to whisper its secrets into his waiting ear. In the end, he would forget even the process of forgetting, the long years of denial during which his innermost self, secret even from his waking daylight mind, labored like an oyster to encase the terrifying memory of those days in layer after layer of oblivion, until at last only the smooth outer surface remained, lovely and impervious as a pearl.

  It must have begun that very night, for even then there were things he could not remember. He knew only that he woke, or seemed to wake, from a terrible dream of which he could recall nothing but darkness and whispering voices. And in that strange half-waking state, a bleak urgency possessed him, a black and dreamlike certainty that drove him from his warm nest of sheets into a chill February dark that pimpled his skin into goose bumps.

  The watch.

  It loomed inside his head as he stole bare-chested through the sleeping house, this too passing as in a dream: his mother’s bedroom door and the stairs steep-angled in the gloom and the floor below where everything waited in readiness for the movers, a few last sticks of furniture his mother couldn’t bear to part with, the silvery and unblinking eye of the television, the bulging ranks of liquor-store cartons looming over him in the shadows. The watch lured him and led him on, through the kitchen and into the mud-room; it hung before him as he fumbled open the door, leaving it to swing upon its hinges as he stepped into the darkness beyond.

  The night unrolled itself to greet him, silent and windy in the aftermath of the storm. The company houses stood tall and close, the ri
dges looming behind them, more sensed than seen, like the vanguard of an encircling army. Still the watch drew Abel on, through the gated yard and into the alley. His breath frosted the air before his face. His bare feet left prints in the snow. But the cold, if he felt it at all, made no impression upon him. He moved forward steadily, his gaze fixed on the far side of the alley, where garbage bags had been heaped in wild profusion, the cast-off detritus of more than twelve years in the decaying old house at his back.

  An observer, watching him, would have thought it strange, the confidence with which he strode forward—a small boy with brown hair, barefoot in the snow, clad only in ragged pajama bottoms—to burrow into that pile of identical garbage bags and surface a moment later, dragging behind him a single bulging green sack. But there was no one to see, only the night and the blank windows of the surrounding houses and the distant points of a thousand stars. Perhaps, far down in his mind, a remote fragment of Abel’s waking self remembered the source of the black intelligence which had driven him out into the frozen night; perhaps it lifted its voice in protest—maybe that explained the tears crystallizing on his cheeks, or the pounding of his heart inside its cage of bones. Whatever the case, Abel never hesitated—the fell knowledge which had mastered him won out. Moving like an automaton, he lugged the bag to the center of the alley, where the streetlight cast a jaundiced circle of radiance over the disconsolate stalks of brown grass angling through the snow.

  And there, dropping to his knees, Abel tore it open.

  Normally, he would have shrunk from the meaty stench rising from the ruptured plastic. Now, seeming to mind the smell no more than he minded the snow soaking through the knees of his pajamas or the cold that pinched his fingers into blue hooks, Abel lunged forward, clawing through the refuse, through the discarded sympathy notes which his mother could not bear to read and the congealed remnants of the lasagna which a sympathetic neighbor had dropped off three nights ago, past a clump of tissue clotted with snot and tears, beyond the deliquescing stalks of the funeral home lilies which his mother had kept on the kitchen table until finally they had drooped and begun to rot and Abel had been forced to dump them himself, draining the foul greenish water into the sink and tossing the disintegrating blossoms into this very bag. He shoved aside a newspaper turned oily and translucent by some nauseating alchemy, dug through a handful of shattered egg shells, and there—just beyond the leathery rind of an orange, curled up on a bed of damp coffee grounds—there, with a glint of cool starlight in the grinning fracture of the face and the hands still frozen thirteen minutes short of noon, as if time itself had stopped in the lost instant of that initial accident, granting Abel’s father the right to walk the earth forever, rendering all that had passed in these last days the phantoms of a vile dream—there, lay the watch. With a cry Abel lunged forward, dragged it to his breast, and curled fetal in the snow.

  That was how his mother found him thirty minutes later. The noise of the door had startled her awake, and when she came down to shut it, she saw him there, his upturned face already turning pale and blue. Dead, she thought. He has to be dead. The magnitude of the idea, the sheer horror of it, froze her in the doorway, her hand curled before her open mouth. She cried out, a strangled sob, and lurched forward, through the yard and into the alley. Sinking to her knees, she cradled her son, sobbing in relief as she felt his breath warm her cheek. And then she noticed the watch she had denied him, clutched immovably in one frozen claw. Her first thought, rising up through the guilt-choked well of her awareness, was that this was her fault—that her rage and grief might have betrayed her into yet a greater loss. Her second thought was one of wonder and fear. Her gaze flickered upward to take in the mound of trash bags, a wall of them, a mountain of them, twenty of them at least, and maybe half again as many more, who knew you could accumulate so much junk in the course of a life—

  Yet Abel had chosen the right bag with his very first attempt, unerringly, as if drawn to it, as if he already knew where he would find the watch. How? Perhaps she whispered the word aloud, for Abel’s eyes flickered and opened, his gaze unfixed and staring.

  “Abel,” she whispered. “Abel, baby, how did you know where to look?”

  She caught only a fragment of his mumbled response—

  “… told me …”

  “Who,” she asked, leaning closer. “Who told you?”

  For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer. He seemed stunned, lethargic. Then his eyes locked upon her face, and she found herself gazing down into the glare of a bleak and terrible knowing that offered no refuge, no place to hide. He seemed a hundred years old—a thousand—and suddenly she didn’t want to hear his answer. She didn’t want to hear it at all.

  But it was too late. His lips were already moving, forming the words.

  “Daddy,” he whispered. “My daddy told me.”

  His eyes fluttered and closed. He slept. Cradling him against her breast, she turned and staggered back through the darkness toward the house, toward the warmth and light emanating from inside. She slammed the door against the night and stripped off their sodden clothes and took her son, still clutching the watch, into the warmth of her own bed, and there they slept until the morning sun broke over the ridges to the east and the movers woke them, hammering on the front door.

  If Abel recalled what he had said to her—if he had even known what it was in the first place—he never mentioned it. And though she watched her son in fear and doubt for months, there came a time during the long decade that followed when even she forgot—or could no longer bear to let herself remember—that odd night when she had found him half frozen in the snow.

  Yet perhaps the memory wasn’t utterly lost.

  Years later, when Abel was grown, some watchful unforgetting self hidden deep in the cellars of his mother’s mind wondered if perhaps there wasn’t some odd echo of those words—

  —daddy my daddy told me—

  —in the strange and public life her son had chosen—a life as distant from Copperhead, West Virginia, as Abel had ever dared to dream in those long nights of staring into the shadowy net of branches over his bed. Abel’s mother was a practical woman, a realist. She had no sympathy for psychics or palm readers or anything of the kind. She called such people frauds. She called her son a fraud, too—and she called him worse, a vulture preying upon sorrow and grief, and one who should know better, having had such a bitter draught of both in his own life. She was ashamed.

  But that deeper, hidden self remembered—and wondered.

  11

  Through all that long winter and into the years that followed, Dreamland drowsed, waiting with a patience only concrete and stone can know.

  Strange vapors breathed from its open drains, wafted up from the sewers buried far beneath the streets, and even on the hottest days, a thin viscid fluid, almost organic, wept from the dank blocks of its interior. It stank of mildew and urine, of fly-swarmed trash stewing in damp corridors, of spent gunshots. It stank of blood. At night, when darkness clamped down upon the city like the lid of a pressure cooker, packs of young men roved its corridors and courtyards, driven by hungers they could neither name nor sate.

  And there was worse: rumors that deserted apartments were not always empty. That some cold intelligence drowsed in the empty places of Dreamland, in the moldering trash-heaped dark of the subbasements and the black vacuum of the empty elevator shafts. That occasionally it heaved itself into wakefulness, and unlidded its terrible eyes. Many who lived inside Dreamland’s walls discounted such tales—too mired in the mundane tragedies of hunger and drugs and lost children to countenance such horrors. Others fled the place, avoiding the sidewalks outside its gates, unwilling to endure even its shadow falling across them.

  There are places on the earth so scarred and mutilated, so drenched in the blood of human suffering, so saturated with misery and pain, that the very stones cry out. Even years later you can sense it in the air. The stench of the ovens lingers in Auschwitz. At sunset, th
e killing fields of Cambodia still run with blood. There are such places here as well. We have our Shilohs, our Oklahoma Cities. A sleeper in the shadow of the Alamo may still suffer unsettled dreams, and on a quiet morning in New Orleans, a pedestrian on Canal Street may yet hear the bark of the auctioneer’s gavel from the slave market that once thrived just blocks to the west.

  No one can say for sure when such a place stirs to consciousness, or why. Perhaps there are spots where the very fabric of reality grows thin, where the endless void without presses too hard against the fraying margins of space and time, and those rare few who have ears to hear them can detect the sound of titanic intelligences at work in the outer dark, drawing their plans against the sunlit regions of the world. Or it could be that a house, a street, even a sprawling hive of towers like Dreamland, takes on the inner hue of the people who inhabit it, that too much misery and hatred and bloodshed can awaken a furtive darkness in even the brightest place. Or it could be that haunted places arise through some fraught intersection of human misery and geographic chance. Maybe the darkness in our hearts and in our acts calls out through the thin margins of the world to the greater darkness that presses ever upon them, misery to misery, hatred to hatred. Maybe such places and their inhabitants become doorways for whatever powers and dominions reign in the fathomless vacuum without.

  In any case, Dreamland stirred slowly toward full awareness, reaching out now and again to probe and to test its powers. Once already, in the years before that difficult winter, it had roused itself from slumber and the eyes of the world had turned upon it, transfixed by the sound of snipers’ gunshots. But the public eye is fickle. Soon the bright television glare turned elsewhere, distracted by the prospect of fresher carnage. Dreamland sank once again into the realm of fitful rumor, largely forgotten by the world. Now and again stories appeared in the papers or on local television, but not many of them—violence was too common there, death routine.