House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “Hello?” the voice said.

  Lara sought to match it with a face. But no, it was a stranger, faceless: a voice, nothing more.

  “Anyone there?” it said.

  “Hi,” she said. “This is Dr. McGovern.”

  “Evening, Doctor. You folks have a problem there?”

  “No.” She tilted her forehead against the wall and closed her eyes. How could she explain? How could anyone explain? “Everything’s fine. Just checking in.”

  “Okay. Well. We’re swamped here, so unless you have—”

  “No,” she said. “We’re fine.”

  “Have a good night, then.”

  “You, too,” she said. “You have a good night.”

  Lara reached up without opening her eyes and cradled the phone. Then she just stood there, her forehead drawing from the wall its cool comfort. After a time—she couldn’t say how long—she sighed. She straightened and turned, opening her eyes.

  Ramsey Lomax stood in the doorway, his bald pate gleaming.

  “You’re free to leave, Doctor,” he said. “All you have to do is say the word.”

  But she thought of Dan Sutherland and Mercy General—she thought of all she’d left behind—and when she spoke, her voice echoed strangely in her ears. It was like she wasn’t even talking at all. It was like someone else’s voice.

  “No, no,” the voice said brightly. “I’m staying.”

  11

  No.

  She would stay, they would all stay, for—let us be honest here—what else could they do? So exquisitely constructed were the traps that contained them, so finely and so carefully wrought—the work of a lifetime—that most of them hardly knew they existed, and even those that did, that sensed (as Lara did, and Ben) in some dim benighted way the steps and missteps that had brought them to this end, were powerless to free themselves.

  So they stayed, and Dreamland, outward emblem and internal arbiter, contained them. Patient, cold, and infinitely removed, as from some lofty precipice, Dreamland observed them. Dreamland saw everything—saw them share a joyless meal of cold cuts in the kitchen (Abel, contrary to his promise, did not show), saw them snatch a few desultory moments of conversation in the lounge (they talked around everything; none of them mentioned the events in the lobby or inquired into the genesis of Lara McGovern’s tears), saw them retreat at last to the privacy of their own quarters, like mollusks deep chambered in the solitary nautilus of self.

  Dreamland—and Dreamland alone—knew them.

  And if it acted at all—if it spurred Ramsey Lomax to retrieve a videotape from a bottom drawer, slide it with nervous fingers into the mouth of a contraband VCR and television unit, and stare with bated breath at an image of Abel Williams flickering upon the screen; if it visited upon Fletcher Keel dreams of whiskey and of women or afflicted Abel with a prattle of disembodied whispers as he stared sleepless at the cage of shadows printed on his ceiling; if it mocked Ben through the dead screen of the laptop he dared not switch on—none of them could say for sure.

  Night Wanderings

  1

  Sometime in the midnight reaches before dawn of the fifth day—or was it the sixth?—Fletcher Keel opened his eyes. Sleep-fogged, only half-awake, he gazed into the darkness and pondered this question, filing through the events of the past week. It should have been easy enough, this reconstruction, yet somehow it defied him. He could call up specific moments—that sense of something staring back at him from the south stairwell or the prickly conversation with Ben in the weight room—but when he tried to piece them together, to line them up like so many beads upon a string, everything seemed to blur together, an incoherent haze of panics and renewals, all of it impossibly insulated from the world outside Dreamland’s walls.

  So how many days was it? Five? Or six?

  Sighing, he kicked at a tangle of sheets and started through it again, working methodically forward from that bad moment on the flight. That was clear enough, anyway—clearer than he would have liked, actually. So was the round of introductions, those initial disconcerting moments in the lobby, and, yes, the first night, too, waking suddenly from unquiet dreams—

  The thought derailed him, stranding him in the present.

  He’d been dreaming just now as well, hadn’t he? And something in the dream had awakened him. What was it?

  Keel rolled over to glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand, and just then something spoke out of the darkness: a voice, a woman’s voice, thick with dreamy urgency.

  John—

  “Who are you?” he whispered. “How do you know my name?”

  Nothing.

  Keel sat up, his bare flesh prickling. A gust of wind shouldered the building, rattling the window in its frame; the sound sparked an image in his mind: Lomax’s glazier running a jagged shard of glass the length of his forearm. The whole thing was strangely vivid. He could see everything: the strained intensity in the man’s long face, his knuckles white and trembling as he drove the glittering blade deeper and still deeper, the bright arterial blood welling from the wound. Wincing, Keel reached out to switch on the lamp.

  The darkness swelled—

  —John, it whispered, come to me—

  —and his fingers closed themselves into a fist. Lisa, he thought. In darkness, he pulled his hand back and reached for the battered tee shirt and frayed jeans he’d left at the foot of the bed. In darkness, he pulled them on. Barefoot, he moved into the outer room of the suite. He stood there, gazing at the line of light under the door.

  Now what?

  As if in answer, the summons came again, echoing inside his head: John, come to me, come—

  Opening the door, Keel stepped into the desolate hallway. The light burned away the final webs of sleep. It had been a dream, he thought. Some kind of freaking dream. And his name was Fletcher. His name had always been Fletcher. He glanced up and down the corridor, all plush carpet and indirect illumination, like some kind of luxury hotel, and he had to resist a sudden, almost overpowering urge to hack up a big yellow loogy and blow it all over the scalloped, eggshell finish of the walls.

  Lisa, my ass, he thought. It was a dream, that’s all. Lisa was gone, Lisa had been gone for years. That was another life, another man.

  My name is Fletcher.

  He turned back to his room, disgust clogging his throat.

  Yet just as his hand closed over the doorknob, he heard it once again: that rush of expectancy in the air, the whole building drawing breath. Something brushed invisibly past him, shivering erect the blond down at the nape of his neck, and there it was again, that voice, Lisa’s voice, urgent, crooning in his ear:

  Come to me, John.

  Images flickered on the sleep-dazed screen of his mind: a curve of hip and breast, a woman’s breath hot against his throat, the taste of whiskey on his tongue. His cock twitched, stiffening. No, he thought, no, it’s a dream—

  But it wasn’t a dream.

  It was real and it lured him, that voice. It lured him all unwilling down the long hallway, past the infirmary and the elevator bay, past the lounge, past the kitchen. Abel’s suite slipped by unnoticed on his left, Lomax’s on his right. And then he was there, hard against the fire door into the stairwell, the south stairwell, his hand curled loosely around the door handle.

  John, the voice whispered. Come to me …

  Keel swallowed.

  Memory tugged at him: that stir of presence in the darkness, and something else, deeply buried, long forgotten. Something he didn’t want to remember. Blood thundered at his temples. In some hidden antechamber of his heart, his father stepped out of the shadows.

  Don’t do it, John, he said. You’re not strong enough. Don’t step inside that door.

  And her voice—

  —whose voice?—

  —Lisa’s voice—

  —answering, drawing him close against the door, cheek to metal, cool as porcelain against his skin. His penis throbbed, rigid against the seam. John, come to me. Come, John,
come.

  Fletcher Keel whimpered, unaware that he had even made a sound.

  Don’t, his father said. Don’t do it.

  Keel sobbed, a single hoarse gasp of longing and of dread.

  “Fuck you, Dad,” he said.

  He flung open the door and stepped into the darkness on the other side.

  2

  It boomed, that door. It clamped into the frame at his back with a metallic crash loud enough to rouse whatever powers or principalities of air that might have slept inside the walls of Dreamland.

  But Dreamland wasn’t sleeping, Keel did not quite allow himself to think as he stood in darkness on the other side; oh no, it was awake, or if it did sleep still, it had long since started stirring: in the hour when they had first set foot inside the crumbling lobby—four days gone, or five, or six—or before that even, months ago, when the first of Ramsey Lomax’s contractors had braked his rattling pickup in the crumbling courtyard outside; stirred then, and had been stirring during all the long hours since toward some full and watchful awareness as yet unachieved. And that part of him—that not-quite-conscious self—shuddered to hear the sound of that door as it echoed unmuffled the length of the corridor, shattering for the space of a single startled heartbeat the predawn stillness.

  In the neighboring room, Ramsey Lomax opened his eyes. Ben, at the far end of the corridor, sat up abruptly, reaching for his bedside lamp. In the suite opposite, Lara, too, was stirring.

  Of them all, Abel alone slept on.

  And even he moaned aloud at some whispered portent in a dream—moaned and thrashed his sweat-stained sheets and fumbled with blind fingers at the broken watch cinched tight around his wrist.

  3

  Ben stood, rubbing his eyes.

  It was just after three o’clock and he could not say what had awakened him. Sleep had eluded him for hours—there had been Abel’s trouble, and Lara’s too, and, more pressing still, his own worries. His fingers ached with unreleased tension, the habit of a lifetime abruptly forsaken. How long since he had passed a day without writing? How long since first he had taken a pen in hand—a pencil, actually, one of those big, fat orange-yellow pencils especially engineered for clumsy first-grade fingers—and tapped the reservoir of poison in his heart? How long since he had begun to drain it, drop by drop, day by day, word by solitary word? Two decades and more, at least.

  He practically twitched with the need to unburden himself of words.

  He flipped on the light in the living room, sat down at his desk, and booted up the computer. It clicked and whirred, and then the welcome screen came up. Ben dragged the cursor over the word-processing icon, and paused there, his finger hovering.

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  You should.

  “Shit,” he said, and shut down the computer.

  He stood, pacing, all too aware of the blank screen at his back: like an eye, coldly observant. He turned and snapped the screen shut.

  “Now what?” he said aloud, and though he wasn’t expecting an answer, an answer came.

  Apartment 1824, Paul Cook said inside his head. Nothing can change, not until you face Apartment 1824.

  4

  On the landing, Keel swallowed.

  “Who are you?” he whispered, but no answer came.

  Shifting on his feet, he peered into the dark. He could see nothing, not the faintest glimmer of light, but the blindness seemed to have sharpened his other senses. Sound was magnified—his breath labored hoarsely in his lungs, and even the tiniest movement unleashed a symphony of rustling echoes. The concrete floor beneath his feet felt particulate and cold. And the smell—damp and cool as a root cellar—the smell had not changed. In all these years the smell had not changed, a dank sandy stench compounded of wet concrete and mold and stale urine that had seeped into the stone, of the menthol bite of discarded cigarette butts, and the ashen ghosts of expended gunshots. He drew it in with his breath, that smell, and for a moment memory threatened to crush him. For a moment it was all too close, so close he could almost touch it: the ring of boot heels on the stairs, the walls of pitted, paint-strewn block jumping in the uric intersection of the flashlight beams, the killing weight of the weapon in his hand. It had ended here, his father’s legacy of honor, and a diminished life had begun. All these wasted years …

  Keel drew in a long breath.

  Anxiety welled through him, dampening the heat of his arousal, and then that voice renewed itself, rising up the well of stairs to peal inside his head like a bell, so clear and cold:

  Come to me, John—

  Like a beckoning finger in the dark, that voice. Like ice on blistered skin. It soothed and calmed him.

  Come, it said.

  And why not? What else did he have to lose?

  Keel’s hand closed around the iron rail.

  In darkness, he descended.

  5

  Lara had already been awake for fifteen minutes when she heard the door snick closed across the hall.

  Sleep had been a long time coming, and when it finally had arrived, it had been a restless tossing kind of sleep. She had dreamed a long, confused dream about Mercy General. Abel had been there, and Ben, too, still and cold on gurneys in the glare of the abandoned ER, their dead eyes accusing. And then she’d found herself walking down an endless corridor in a place that was somehow, simultaneously, Dreamland and Mercy General and the house she’d grown up in back in Wilmington, the house which had seemed so huge when she was a girl and which now, when she returned for a visit (why don’t you visit more often? her parents always said), seemed cramped and airless and damp, as if mushrooms might any moment sprout from the humid weave of the carpet in the hallway. Only, in the dream, there was no carpet. In the dream, the hallway was tiled and sterile, cavernous. She stood in the doorway of her childhood bedroom, watching children at play: her sister and her younger self, so alike that even she couldn’t say for sure who was who. She smiled, she lifted her hand as if to summon them—and then, from behind her, came a telltale rustle of fabric. She turned, knowing that she should not turn, but powerless, in the way of dreams, to stop herself. A man who was Fletcher Keel and not Fletcher Keel, a man who was an altogether different man, stood at the nurse’s station. Blood spattered his clothes and he held a knife, one of the gleaming steel blades from Dreamland’s kitchen—but that wasn’t what frightened her. What frightened her, what sent a nauseating flood of terror through her veins, was the figure that stood beside him, frail and wizened in a gore-stained hospital gown, limpid eyes huge and staring. It should have been you, the figure said, and Lara came awake with a start.

  She lay frozen in the dim red glow of the alarm clock, waiting for the dream to recede, and then she switched on the light. Lana stared back at her from the nightstand, still seven years old after all this time.

  You were twins, Abel Williams said inside her head. Identical twins.

  Not anymore, she thought, and reaching out, she turned the picture facedown.

  It didn’t help any. There was no escaping Lana, was there? No escaping the locket that dangled like a stone between her breasts, or the nightmare images that even now flickered at the perimeter of her thoughts.

  There was no escaping what had happened in the lobby.

  He had known, she thought as she pulled on a pair of jeans. Somehow Abel Williams had known. He had known about Lana’s cancer, he had known about her scary-bad bout with pneumonia—

  —but not how you wanted me to die, he didn’t know that, did he, Lara—

  —he had known the whole sordid story. He had known they were twins.

  How? And what scared her more—this public exposure of vulnerability, her tearful humiliation in the lobby, or the way the whole episode undermined everything she’d forced herself to believe? For if it had happened—if Abel hadn’t conned her, somehow, if he really had known—then a lifetime of hard-won skepticism went right out the window.

  Dressed, Lara drifted into the outer room of the suite. On
the love seat, with her legs tucked underneath her, she chewed at her thumbnail, all too suddenly aware of how silent the building was, how isolated: a vast wind-buffeted monolith jutting above the ruined moonscape of the projects.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Lana.”

  But there was no answer. Even the voices in her head had fallen silent.

  She felt tears start up in the corners of her eyes. She swiped angrily at them and tapped one fist against her thigh.

  “Dammit,” she said. “Dammit.”

  And just then, from across the hall, came the sound of a door quietly closing. She felt so desolate in that moment, so fathomlessly cold and alone, that had it not been for the memory of Fletcher Keel—

  —his clothes his blood-spattered clothes—

  —watching her on the treadmill, she might have yanked open her own door without a second thought. Anything for a little company, right? As it was, though, she pressed a cautious eye to the peephole instead. The hallway was empty. The doors to the suites opposite—Keel’s to the left, Ben’s to the right—stood shut.

  Cracking her own door, Lara peeked out. Ben was just turning into the elevator bay.

  Without even thinking about it, she stepped into the hallway after him.

  6

  Ramsey Lomax turned on the desk lamp and sat in the sleek art deco chair. It calmed him, the glossy luxury of that chair, its understated elegance and comfort. He liked fine things and for more than four decades now, from the moment he could afford to buy them, he had surrounded himself with them—paintings and sculptures he had no feelings for, first editions he would never read, cars that purred so silently and smoothly you hardly knew you were moving at all. Deferential servants. The best wine. Women most of all.

  Before his marriage, during it, and afterward, too, during the decade since Sara had died, he’d enjoyed plenty of women—handsome, clean-limbed, enthusiastic—and none of them in all those years had meant any more to him than the cars or the wine or the Gold Coast apartment. Which is to say none of it, the women or the wealth, had any intrinsic importance. It signified, that’s all—his success, his power, most of all his need never again to feel beholden. It signified and soothed him, and so he indulged it. Why not?