House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  —I’m here Abel I’m—

  —here we’re all—

  —here don’t leave me please don’t leave me—

  —here—

  —fragmentary, fraught, and gone again, submerged in that onrolling tidal swell.

  Stunned, Abel lifted his hands as if to ward it off, that insane babble welling up the empty throat of the elevator shaft, and then, as if an invisible curtain had parted—as if time itself had split asunder—

  —there is no time not here not in this place—

  —plummeting him into a past twice removed—once again he was there. There: in the lobby, Theresa Matheson spread-eagled on her back, her heels drumming the table as a black kid, jeans bagging around his knees, drove himself savagely into her, over and over again.

  Here, too, cacophony assaulted Abel. Music hammered out of a boom box—frantic, discordant, a thunderous back-beat overlain by the menacing taunt of gangster rap. Theresa Matheson screamed—over and over again, with a dull, relentless monotony—as she fought the hands holding her down, the hands clutching at her, the hands mauling her. Her attackers answered in kind. The room rang with their jeers, with their laughter and their mockery, their hatred, their rage. How many of them were there? Ten? Twelve? More? They seemed to multiply by the dozen, by the hundred, there in the moted furnace of a July day two years gone: a host of shadowy presences encircling the ring of men closest to the table, a throng, a legion—

  —my name is—

  —of avid faces, men, women, children, their teeth bared and white in eager grimaces, their muscles taut under dark skin. There and not-quite-there, in a thousand whispering and resentful voices, they urged it on, the horror at the center of the room.

  Worse: they sensed Abel’s presence and they hated him. Abel did not know how he knew this, but he knew it. He knew it with an iron-clad certainty that brooked no denial.

  Maybe he screamed. He thought he did, anyway, a scream even he could hear above the phantom dissonance.

  No, he thought, no—

  And then the darkness took him.

  7

  In a silence pristine and pure—in a blue-black cold they hardly noticed, they were so transfixed—they watched it happen.

  It was nothing much to see.

  One minute Abel was walking away from them, perfectly in command of his faculties. The next, he moaned, a sound a fevered child might have made.

  Keel stirred, and something changed in Ben’s face.

  Lomax leaned forward, his rusty folding chair creaking with his weight.

  Lara, still wiping at her eyes, looked up in time to see Abel fold in upon himself and collapse.

  8

  She was at her best in a crisis.

  Her personal life was a disaster, she’d managed to lose the only job she had ever aspired to, she’d failed miserably in keeping that long-ago promise over Lana’s casket—but from the wreckage of her sister’s funeral, Lara had salvaged at least one vow she could cling to: never again would she lose her head in a moment when someone needed her.

  Your personal problems came second to saving a life, it was that simple.

  So when Abel Williams crumpled to the floor, Lara was the first one to her feet. By the time the others had gathered around her, she had already started her assessment, moving down a mental checklist point by point, the ghost of Lana which Abel Williams had somehow—

  —how?—

  —summoned up temporarily forgotten. For the moment anyway, she was focused entirely on Abel himself: his breathing and the pallor in his face, his pulse, racing beneath her fingers.

  “What ha—” Lomax said, but Lara shushed him.

  Staring down at her watch, she counted. By the time the second hand completed its initial sweep and started around again, Abel’s heart rate had slowed. By the time it swung into its third circuit, his pulse was back to normal: strong and full, seventy-four beats a minute. Lara released his wrist and glanced up into a circle of anxious faces.

  “He okay?” Ben said.

  “I think so.”

  “What the hell happened?” Keel asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Sitting back on her heels, Lara looked Abel over. Color was already coming back into his face. She saw no evidence of broken bones. No bleeding.

  “Here,” she said, gesturing. “Help me roll him on his side.”

  “Are you su—” Keel said.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  The words came out more sharply than she’d intended. Shaking his head, his palms lifted in mock surrender, Keel knelt across from her. Together, he and Ben wedged their hands under Abel and shifted him, dead weight. Abel’s mouth gaped open. He shuddered, and Lara thought he was going to throw up, but no—it was his respiration settling into a deeper rhythm, steady and slow, like a man sleeping.

  “Did he hit his head when he fell?” she asked. “Did anybody see?”

  “He hit everything,” Keel said coolly.

  “But not his head,” Lomax told her. “Not badly, anyway.”

  Abel moaned. His eyelids fluttered.

  “Abel?” Lara said. “How you feeling, Abel?”

  He muttered something, she wasn’t sure what it was.

  Lomax knelt at Lara’s shoulder, crowding her, and when she glanced back at him the intensity in his face startled her. There was something frightening about it, something hungry and utterly without mercy, like the glint in a raptor’s eye when it spotted movement in the moonlit grass below. Looking at him, Lara felt her confidence weaken. Renewed doubt assailed her—doubts about Lomax and his reasons for coming to this place, doubts about her own mixed motivations for accompanying him. Doubts about her competence.

  “What did he say?” Lomax asked.

  “I don’t—”

  Abel spoke again, interrupting her. “So … many,” he said distantly. He shook his head. Swallowed.

  “So many what?” Lomax asked.

  And then Abel snatched Lara’s hand, clutching it painfully, like a drowning man. His eyes snapped open, and she found herself gazing into an abyss of paralyzed bewilderment. He reminded her of a patient she’d seen during her psych rotation, a paranoid schizophrenic so pathologically disconnected that he had retreated to a corner the first time she had walked into the room, his shoulders hunched in expectation of some cosmic blow. He’d been a mutterer, too, shifty-eyed and raving, constantly glaring at her from under lowered brows. Spare parts, he’d muttered repeatedly, his eyes glittering with emptiness, spare parts spare parts-spareparts, until finally he’d exploded, get away from me getawayGETAWAYFROMMEYOUBITCH, and Lara had retreated near tears. Later, she had learned that her lab coat had set him off, that in the peculiar architecture of his delusions, doctors were homicidal maniacs, forever in search of donor organs fresh for harvest. The whole unnerving scene had been engineered for her benefit, a tradition of sorts. Welcome to the ward: a little initiation ritual-cum-learning opportunity for new doctors on the floor. The lesson?

  Madness is utterly impersonal. Madness doesn’t care.

  Those were the words that came to Lara now, gazing down at Abel. The resemblance was so profound that she half expected him to lurch erect and seize her by the shoulders, to scream those words into her face—

  Spare parts spare parts SPARE PARTS—

  Instead, the pressure on her hand relented, the void filled up with personality, and the cold—

  —when had it gotten so cold?—

  —retreated. Instead, he was only Abel: a little dazed, but Abel all the same. “What happened?” he said, but before Lara could answer—before any of them could answer—Lomax repeated his question:

  “So many what, Abel?”

  Lara glanced sharply at him, wondering if anyone else had noticed the sudden shift into the familiar.

  Abel pushed himself into a sitting position. “What?” he said.

  “‘So many,’ you said, but you never said what.”

  Abel hesitated, repeating th
e words, drifting.

  Lara, watching, saw him stiffen with memory. He looked up, wide-eyed, and she found herself staring once again into that dizzying vacuum. Then a steely glint of self-awareness obscured it. It was like watching a privacy gate slam shut inside his eyes. And then he really was Abel again—not the true Abel she had momentarily glimpsed, frightened and confused, naked all his veils of self—but the old Abel from that first night in the kitchen, always on stage, less a person than a performance, self-assured and owner of a certain facile charm.

  “It was something you said,” Lomax said.

  Abel shook his head again. His face clouded, and now Lara found herself wondering if this too was feigned and, if so, how expertly. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. What happened?”

  “You fainted,” Ben said.

  “Try to remember,” Lomax said. “Try.”

  “Later,” Lara said, and when Lomax started to protest, she let the slightest edge creep into her voice. “I said later.”

  Lomax stood with an unrepentant glare.

  “You know where you are?” Lara asked Abel.

  “Harold P. Taylor Homes. Tower Number Three … Dreamland.” He gave her a faint, rueful smile, but if he’d been aiming for humor the effort fell short. The name hung in the emptiness like an accusation. “So what happened, Doc?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to look into that, won’t we? You think you can walk?”

  “Sure,” he said, but his optimism proved unfounded. He made it to his feet all right, but they were unsteady feet indeed. Weaving slightly, with Ben on one side and Lara on the other, their hands cupped and ready at his elbows, he made his way to the elevator.

  None of them spoke on the way up.

  9

  Upstairs in the infirmary, Abel reluctantly submitted to a more formal examination. Lara listened to his heart, checked his blood pressure, and took his temp (all normal), quizzing him as she worked: Had this sort of thing happened before? Had he felt anything unusual prior to passing out? Weakness? Dizziness? Light-headedness?

  No, no, no, and no.

  “What about smells?” she said, watching him button his shirt.

  “Smells?”

  “Oranges, maybe? Cinnamon?”

  He shook his head.

  “Flashes of light?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Voices?”

  His fingers fumbled. “I hear voices for a living, Doc.”

  “I thought you sensed energies.”

  He looked up, flashing her a faintly self-mocking smile. “Touché.”

  “I’m serious, Abel. I’m just trying to do my job.”

  He crossed his arms and propped himself against the examination table. “You’re right. I’m sorry. No, I didn’t hear voices. What’s with the inquisition?”

  “Hallucinations sometimes mark the onset of grand mal seizures. Olfactory hallucinations are especially common.”

  “Did I have a seizure?”

  “I’m not sure what happened to you, Abel.”

  “Probably, nothing,” he said. “Something I ate. Right?”

  “Did you eat today?”

  “Actually, no,” he said. “Not since breakfast. So you think that’s it?”

  Lara sensed she was being offered an out. She hesitated, and then—she couldn’t help herself—she relented. “Could be.”

  “Good. So”—he lifted his eyebrows—”if we’re done …?”

  “Well there’s a dozen other things I’d like to do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. An EEG for one thing. Maybe a heart monitor.”

  “Please tell me our benefactor’s budget didn’t stretch so far.”

  “Alas, no.”

  Abel snapped his fingers. “Darn. Well—maybe, next time, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So I’m going to get something to eat now. Feel like tagging along? You can make sure I eat all my veggies.”

  But now that the crisis was past, she wanted a few minutes to think, a little time to work through what exactly had happened downstairs—and not just the fainting episode, either. She wanted to think about Lana.

  “Another time, okay?” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “Okay, then,” he said. “See you around, then.”

  “I’ll be here.” Smiling to take the sting out of it, she turned away, gathering up her tools.

  “Listen,” Abel said. “If it’s about what happened downstairs—”

  “It was nothing, Abel. You’re right: you probably just needed something to eat.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Lara stood silently by the computer workstation, unwilling to answer him, her fingers resting lightly atop the shelf of CDs, a neat little row of medical databases containing all that was known or could be known about human frailty—more certainly than any single practitioner could ever hope to master—and yet in all those dense columns of text not a single word that explained this sudden clutching at her heart. All that knowledge about serotonin and neurotransmitters and the emotion centers in the brain, and none of it—none of it—was sufficient on the subject of grief.

  None of it.

  For a bright segment—a brief half hour or so in the bustle and pressure following Abel Williams’ collapse—it had flowed uninterrupted in its subterranean course, unseen even by her, this hateful current of misery and loss which Abel had tapped inside her heart. Now it bubbled to the surface again. Lara’s fingers twitched—anxious to busy themselves smoothing the fabric of her slacks or wiping away the line of dust along the lip of the monitor, anxious to do anything other than rest in stillness atop this utterly inadequate, this absurd compendium of all the things that could go so disastrously wrong with the human species. She commanded them to be still. She stood there, outwardly calm, a bland smile pasted on her face.

  Abel outwaited her. His silence compelled her to speak. “It’s nothing,” she said.

  He moved toward her—a half step, that’s all. He looked her in the eye for half a second, and then his gaze slid down and away, toward the computer workstation. Toward the photo of Lana she’d propped beside the keyboard.

  He blanched and seemed to rock a little, suddenly uncertain on his feet. He reached out a hand to brace himself against the wall.

  “Abel?” she said, but he interrupted, his voice a distant monotone.

  “That’s her, isn’t it?” he said, except it wasn’t a question, not really. It was a statement of fact, flat and declarative.

  “Abel—”

  “Your sister. You were twins. Identical.”

  “Abel—”

  “It was a long time ago—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this, Abel.”

  He fell silent, and in the silence Lara reined in her own galloping emotions. She focused on Abel, on her patient, on her duty here and now, in this fleeting present. Abel: clutching at the wall like a drowning sailor clutching at a drifting spar. His pallor hadn’t retreated, but he seemed steadier somehow, resigned, less like a man in the fresh aftermath of some catastrophe than a terminal patient who’d lived too long in the shadow of eternity.

  She pitied him suddenly. She pitied him and feared him, too, and maybe it was this combination that motivated her to say what she said next. She didn’t know why she said it, or what she meant by it, or even what she intended to say until she had already said it, the words dying away into the air-conditioned hush. All she knew was that she believed it. Fervently.

  “I don’t think you should stay in this place,” she told him, and Abel, looking up, gave her a faraway smile. “I think you should go home.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and then he stepped into the hallway and closed the door gently behind him.

  10

  Finally alone, Lara let herself go to hell.

  Only when the sobs retreated—fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, and even then she felt torn and bloodied inside, like she’d just glutted herself a
t a banquet of broken glass—did she manage to get past what Abel had told her to the more important question: how he had known it. It was a soul-shattering moment, a moment in which she felt all the cool scientific dams she’d spent a life constructing tremble in their foundations. A cold wind reached her from the turbulent waters on the other side.

  Shivering, she stood and walked to the window: night coming on, the ruins of Dreamland brooding under a murky shield of clouds. This place. My god, this place.

  Turning, Lara surveyed the infirmary, this little exam room so like the other rooms where she’d spent her days these last eight years: the vinyl exam table with its pristine roll of paper, the tongue depressors and cotton swabs in their rows of jars atop the counter, the ranks of stainless-steel instruments, the square box of the autoclave, all of it shining and sterile in the flat, even radiance of the bulbs set overhead, all of it bright and safe and unutterably false—all these careful hedges against the night. She saw it as if for the first time. She saw how hollow it was, how little power it possessed, this little bubble of rationality at the heart of nightmare. She perceived the weight of mystery and terror that weighed always upon it, like the pressure of ocean ten thousand fathoms down, all that black, black water.

  How had he known? And if he had known, what did it all mean and how was she supposed to deal with it?

  That’s when her gaze lit upon the telephone. She lifted it. She turned her face to the wall, she brought the receiver to her ear. Her fingers entwined themselves in intricate coils of cord. She didn’t know what she had expected—ringing? A dial tone? Whatever, she didn’t get it. What she got was silence, the empty hush of an open line. And then there was a voice, distant, calm, like the voice of a NASA flight engineer calmly noting telemetry even as the booster rockets erupted into flames on the launch pad.

  “Mercy General,” it said, and something twisted inside her at the words. Mercy General, everything she’d left behind: so close she could summon it all to life simply by picking up a phone, and yet, somehow, impossibly remote.