House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “Well, then,” Lomax said. “Shall we?”

  Ben fumbled with the latch and stepped out, the air sharp against his face. He glanced back toward the fence line three hundred yards away, and then he turned to survey his companions. They stood gazing at the building as one, breath frosting the air before their faces.

  The driver popped the trunk and lined their bags up along the edge of the crumbling plaza. “Anything else, sir?” he asked Lomax.

  “No. You can go, Tyler.”

  The driver nodded, and slid back into the car. It swung around and accelerated smoothly back toward the fence, its brake lights flaring through thin, hard snow as it approached the gate. It paused there, pouring gray exhaust into the air, and then it was gone, slipping silently into the devastated streets beyond. The gate rolled closed with a metallic clank that echoed in the stillness, reminding Ben suddenly of a story he’d done on death row inmates at San Quentin, the fatal clash of all those electric gates sliding irrevocably home behind you, one by one by one.

  Abel Williams’ thoughts must have been running along the same lines. “What if somebody gets sick or something?”

  “That’s why we have the doctor,” Lomax said.

  They stood there a moment longer, staring at the poured-concrete facade of Tower Three, monumental and aggressively utilitarian, its shattered doors—they must have been glass once—patched with splintering, graffiti-smirched panels of plywood.

  Lomax shivered. “It’s cold out here,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  2

  Fletcher Keel slung his battered duffel bag over one shoulder and followed the others toward the doors with a confidence he didn’t really feel. He’d had a bad moment on the plane that morning, somewhere back there in the thin air 37,000 feet above the frozen cornfields of Iowa. One minute everything had been normal. He’d been dozing even, lulled by the white roar of the jet engines and the subdued chatter of the flight attendants as they trundled the service cart up the aisle behind him. The next instant the plane had taken a sickening lurch, and Keel had jerked awake to find himself gripping the armrests so tightly that his knuckles blanched. A dream voice was still echoing inside his head.

  And not just any voice. No indeed.

  It was his father’s voice—and how long had it been since he’d heard his father’s voice? How long since he’d managed to pour enough booze and pills down his throat to drown that voice for good? Fifteen years at least. When he’d sobered up, it had been the return of that voice that Keel had feared most of all. But until that moment on the plane, he’d managed to dodge that particular blast from the past. Until that moment on the plane he’d had nothing but blessed silence.

  Honor, his father had said inside his head. Honor and integrity, and look at you, look at what you’ve become, you think you’re good enough—

  And those words, that phrase—

  —you think you’re good enough—

  —triggered a flash of memory so visceral that the narrow fuselage of the plane seemed to sheer away before him. For a moment he had been there, there in the humid gloom of a past twenty-seven years lost, there in Dreamland—

  “No,” Keel had whispered.

  That’s when he’d realized that the service cart had rolled to a halt beside him. The flight attendant leaned over him in a floral-scented cloud, the tantalizing swell of her breast at his cheek.

  “Something to drink?”

  The plane bounced again, rattling a handful of shot-sized liquor bottles in one metal drawer. For the space of a single heartbeat the memory of bourbon bloomed in Keel’s mouth: the ashen taste of the stuff, its heat in his throat. His hand was halfway to his wallet before he managed to check the impulse.

  “No,” he said again. And then, more strongly: “No thanks.”

  She gave him an empty smile and moved on, her ass swinging as she leaned over the seat in front of him. Keel leaned back and closed his eyes, trying not to think of the glint of those little whiskey bottles just visible beyond the tempting curve of her hip. Trying not to think of anything at all.

  But his father’s voice had lingered in his mind.

  He could hear it even now, all these hours later, as he stepped over the threshold—

  —last chance, John—

  —and as the doors of Dreamland swung shut behind him, iron bands seemed to close around his chest.

  Ramsey Lomax flipped a switch and maybe a third of the fluorescent tubes overhead flickered to life. As soon as Keel saw the place—really saw it, with his eyes instead of his mind and memory—he felt a weight slip off his shoulders.

  What was there to fear?

  Dreamland was nothing but a derelict shell: unheated and uninhabited. Despite islands of cast-off furniture—a handful of rusty folding chairs, a broken wooden school desk, a spavined sofa that stank of urine even from here—it projected a sense of cavernous abandonment. It was empty: empty of human habitation, of voice or personality, empty even of memory. Definitively, irredeemably, and irrefutably empty.

  Keel studied the ornate scroll of graffiti festooning the dank cinder block walls, the gloom lurking in the empty stairwells—

  —not the stairwell—

  —the paired elevators, one set of doors sensibly shut, the other gaping on a black pit. A wall of blank mailboxes turned their copper faces to him; his own cloudy reflection gazed back at him from the pitted glass box of a reception area. Otherwise nothing. Nothing, nothing, and nothing, he thought, and the bands at his chest loosened. He drew a deep breath, laden with the stench of mildew, damp concrete, and sodden acoustical ceiling tile. He nearly laughed aloud.

  He would have if the black guy—Prather—hadn’t started speaking first. “So this is where the girl died?” He turned slowly, surveying the room, his bag draped over one shoulder.

  “What girl?” Lara McGovern said.

  Prather looked at her. “The social worker—”

  “Theresa Matheson,” Lomax said. “Her name was Theresa Matheson. And to say she died is something of an understatement, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” Lara asked.

  “She was tortured,” Lomax said. “Gang-raped and tortured for something like six hours right here in the lobby.”

  “And nobody stopped it?” Lara said, a faint disbelieving edge in her voice. “Nobody reported it?”

  “No,” Lomax said. “Nobody did anything at all.”

  In the stiff, uncomfortable silence that followed, Abel Williams drifted away, a faraway look on his face. Keel, looking on, caught another glimpse of the south stairwell. He felt his guts twist—

  —something there—

  —a disconcerting twinge of not-quite-memory, there and gone again in the space of a breath. But it was nothing, nothing at all, and if he felt as green as Abel Williams looked—standing twenty feet away, his expression distant—well, that was purely a matter of chance. Not his father’s warnings and not the paralyzing shame which had driven him to drink, most of all not the humiliating knot of dread rising into his throat—

  He shut off the tumbling freshet of his thoughts. Took a deep breath. Turned away from the shadowy reaches beyond the doorway.

  There was nothing there. Period.

  “You okay, man?” he said to Abel.

  Abel Williams looked up, startled. “What?”

  “You seem … distracted.” Keel shrugged. “I thought you might be having a vision or something.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Ben said. And then, when no one responded, “Does it, Abel?”

  “No,” Abel said. He looked around at them, surveying their faces as if surprised to find them there. As if surprised to find himself there, actually, and a little uncertain how it had come to happen. To Keel, he looked like a man waking abruptly from a deep and unpleasant dream. “No,” Abel said once again, his voice hesitant, uncertain. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How does it work?” Lara asked, lifting her eyebrows.

  “It’s …
energy, that’s all. It’s a matter of sensing energy.” Glancing around once again, he turned to join them, his voice gaining strength and confidence. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “I’ll bet,” Ben said.

  “Well,” Lomax said, “putting aside the issue of how you do it, why don’t you tell us if you’re doing it?”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Like I said, it doesn’t work like that.” He hesitated again. He looked around at the shattered lobby, that faraway expression stealing across his face. “I mean, I’m getting some vague impressions …”

  “Such as?”

  “There’s clearly been a great deal of misery here, a great deal of pain and unhappiness.”

  “You don’t have to be psychic to see that, do you?” Ben said, and that was a sentiment Fletcher Keel could heartily assent to, yes indeed. The misery the place had seen was palpable—in the empty bottles of MD 20/20 and Wild Irish Rose and Colt. 45 scattered among the debris, in the sagging piss-stained cushions of the sofa and the overstuffed garbage bags rotting in one corner, in the sour reek of an abandoned refrigerator propped doorless against one wall, a flat, faintly organic stench, like garbage that had been broiling inside a metal trash barrel the length of an August afternoon.

  Or like the air inside a freshly opened grave.

  He glanced at Lomax. “The whole place this bad?”

  “Never fear, Mr. Keel. You’ll find your accommodations acceptable.”

  Grunting, Keel gave the room a last once-over. “We’ll see, I guess,” he said. Hiking the strap of his duffel bag higher on his shoulder, he started toward the elevator. It wasn’t until he was inside the car with the rest of them, clutching the waist-high hand rail as the metal doors rolled closed before him, that he let his gaze slide once again toward the black mouth of the south stairwell. He thought he saw something stir inside the open doorway, a deeper shadow coalescing from the gloom. In the same instant, he sensed something staring back at him, something diffuse and cold and infinitely patient. You shouldn’t have come back, his father said inside his head, so clearly that Keel thought the words must have been spoken aloud. He felt a choking wave of shame and resentment. You would have, he thought. You weren’t afraid of anything, were you, Dad?

  I wouldn’t have had to, the voice said.

  And there was no answer to that, was there?

  There never had been.

  Sighing, Keel stared resolutely into the dark interior of the south stairwell. He was still looking at it when the doors slid shut before him.

  3

  The elevator jerked into motion.

  They rose slowly through the heart of the building, alone in the brittle silence of their thoughts. There would come a time when Abel, Lara, and even Keel himself would wonder if that had been the moment when it began, if as the doors slid shut and the elevator’s gears engaged with a clunk, something buried deep and sleeping in the twisted entrails of Dreamland had not stirred itself to waking and, in waking, speech. For Keel, it was what he perceived taking shape in the formless dark of the abandoned stairwell—the memory of a past that would not die, the disembodied contours of his own worst fears. For the others, for Abel and Lara, it was what they heard or thought they heard or anyway imagined that they heard—the merest stir of whispers, the falsetto laughter of a child.

  Keel, bracing his feet as the battered elevator rocked beneath him, shook his head as a horse will shake at the flies clustering around his nostrils and eyes. Nerves, he told himself. Imagination, nothing more.

  Lara McGovern, trained to the skepticism of a scientist, arrived at much the same conclusion.

  None of them believed.

  Not Ben, and not Abel Williams, despite the faint minatory rumble of memory—

  —father, father—

  —triggered by that chorus of competing whispers, like the rustle of dried leaves swept up in a whirl of autumn wind. An image of his childhood bedroom—the quilt his grandmother had made, the streetlight outside and that Rorschach cage of shadow on his ceiling—sprang into Abel’s mind with such vivid clarity that he almost gasped. He hovered at the edge of revelation, his right hand stealing unbidden toward the watch he wore on his left wrist; then his outraged mind beat the memory back.

  None of them believed.

  Not even Ramsey Lomax.

  He stood alone at the back of the elevator, his face upturned like a penitent’s as the numbers over the doors flared one by one, his shaven skull gleaming in the flickering and fly-specked light.

  4

  “The original floor plans called for twenty-four units on every level,” Lomax said as the elevator came to a stop on the fifth floor. “My intention was to leave things as I found them on the principle that the force or forces that inhabit Dreamland—if there are such forces—would be more likely to manifest themselves in familiar circumstances.” He smiled. “As you’ll see, however, my dedication to the spirit of scientific enterprise extends only so far.”

  The doors rumbled aside.

  Stepping out of the elevator was a little bit like stepping into another world, Ben thought. The twelve-by-twelve square of the elevator alcove was furnished as a sitting area. The broad corridor beyond had the bland luxury of a Hilton. Wall-mounted sconces printed tastefully alternating parabolas of light and shadow on the plush carpet. An almost subliminal hum of climate control filled the air, wafting to him the faint odors of new construction—fresh paint and carpet, the woodsy scent of sawdust.

  “Our suites—bedroom, sitting room, private baths—are located at either end of the hall,” Lomax said, leading them out into the corridor. “I’ve closed off the wings on this level—it’s not like we need the space—and gutted the central corridor. Mr. Williams and I will occupy apartments at the south end. The other three units are at the north end.” He turned back toward the elevators, pointing. “Common areas are in the center, radiating outward from the elevators. A basic gym—a couple of treadmills, a weight machine—to the left of the elevator, kitchen and dining room on the right. And then there’s the lounge.”

  He crossed the hallway, stepped through an arched entryway, and flipped a switch. Overhead lights flickered on, revealing a long space furnished with sleek art deco furniture—all chromed metal and supple leather. A pool table stood at one end of the room. Books had been shelved along the facing wall.

  “No television?” Keel said.

  “Alas, no, Mr. Keel. No television, no Internet, no telephones. As you all agreed, of course.” Lomax surveyed them as a group. “My hope is to confront whatever might exist here directly, face-to-face and on its own merits, without mediation. Have you any idea how rare unmediated experience is in today’s world?”

  Lomax snapped off the light and ushered them back into the hall without waiting for an answer. “We’ll need to figure out a rotation for the cooking and other chores,” he said, leading them through a double-hung door, “but I think you’ll find the kitchen facilities more than adequate.”

  Ben, following, took an involuntary step backward as the lights came up, dazzled by the radiance glaring back at him from every polished surface: the gleaming expanses of tile and stainless-steel countertops, the glossy mirror of the stove, the massive chromed shield of the refrigerator. “Wow,” he said.

  “I believe in comfort, Mr. Prather,” Lomax said crisply. “I can afford it.” He pointed. “That’s the utility room to the left, including breakers for the renovated floor space and the one functioning elevator, plus a master switch that shuts down the entire building. The dining area is to the right. The walk-in freezer contains substantial stocks of meat and seafood. Canned and boxed goods are in the pantry. We also have two weeks’ worth of fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy supplies, deli meats, and bread. Starving is the least of our worries.” He turned to face them. “Booze might have been. That’s why there isn’t any. After you’ve spent a few days here, I think you’ll understand why it’s in our best interests to stay sober.�
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  He snapped off the light and led them across the hall to another room—a standard doorway, this time, with a lock in the doorknob.

  “Last but not least, the infirmary, outfitted as you requested, Doctor.”

  Lomax switched on the light, and Ben saw that this room too was sterile and cold. It looked pretty much like a standard examination room, minimally furnished: a reclining table, a sink and a few feet of counterspace, a computer workstation. Locking cabinets lined either wall. Lomax pointed to a wall-mounted telephone, naked without its keypad. “This is a dedicated line to the Mercy General Emergency Room, a seventeen-minute trip by ambulance. It’s also the only functioning telephone line in the building.”

  “Kind of an elaborate setup for a two-week stay,” Ben said.

  “True. But given our experiences during the renovation, Mr. Prather, it seemed only prudent.”

  “Why is that, exactly?”

  “People have a penchant for injuring themselves at Dreamland, often badly,” Lomax said, shutting off the light. “And a lot can happen in seventeen minutes.”

  5

  Alone in her suite, Lara lowered her overnight bag to the floor. She stood in the gloom, letting the stress of the day—the ravaged lobby, the fault lines among her companions, Ramsey Lomax’s penchant for ominous little pronouncements most of all—settle over her. Then, without being entirely certain why she was doing it, she turned and slid the tongue of the deadbolt home behind her.

  Feeling better, she turned on the lights.

  The suite wasn’t bad at all—considerably better, actually, than the rundown walk-up she’d leased for her residency. At the time, the place hadn’t seemed like a bad idea: a chance to save a little money—God knew she needed it—without undue hardship. After all, she’d reasoned, how much time would she actually be spending there? She hadn’t been naive about the hours a residency required—shifts that routinely ran thirty-six hours, work weeks that sometimes totaled more than a hundred and twenty. She thought she had been prepared.