House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Seven floors above him, Ramsey Lomax sat in his art deco chair and stared down at the envelope in the drawer, stark white and tidy on its mat of velvet green.

  When he reached for it, his hand was trembling.

  The Next Day

  1

  Waking was like coming out of a fog.

  He had been dreaming—he was still dreaming, he knew that—but most of the dream was lost back there in the mist, blurred shadows, more sensed than seen: an outstretched hand, the echo of a voice—

  —we’re here, Abel, we’ve always been here—

  —the shape of a stunted apple tree lifting winter-barren arms against the sky.

  The tree gave him pause.

  He knew that tree, he could taste its apples sour on his tongue, strong enough to clear out the mists, to root him if only for a breath in space and time: here, in the house in Copperhead, in his boyhood bedroom high up under the eaves, the window frosted with his breath.

  It was like he had never left, like he had not so much dreamed it as summoned it back out of time: the room dimly aglow, lit only by the bedside lamp over his shoulder; the uncarpeted hardwood chill beneath his feet; the window itself, mullioned in dark wood, a crack bisecting his reflection where an errant ball had struck the pane. His room, intact, unchanged. Out there, the streetlight; in here, the cage of shadows on the ceiling. Downstairs in the cozy oven-smelling kitchen, a late dinner warming on the stove as the second-shift whistle flared and died away into the darkness, the whole house hushed in expectation of his father’s boot upon the stair.

  Abel only stood there, looking out, letting the shadowy figures in the fog recede. Maybe this was the place where dreaming left off and reality began. Maybe his whole life up to now—Susie Whatshername and Messages from Beyond and Dreamland itself—had been a dream.

  Maybe his father had never died.

  He leaned his head against the glass and sighed. His breath fogged the glass, and when he lifted his boy’s hand to clear it, there lay upon the glossy surface underneath a single flickering blur of color, an impressionist dab of white, like a lily, or a rose.

  A foreboding stone plummeted through his breast as he looked at it.

  He did not want to turn and face it, that mysterious white blur. More than anything else in the world, he did not want to turn and face it—yet with a kind of dread inevitability he found himself doing exactly that, pivoting on his heels, helpless in the way of dreams to stop himself, the room suddenly brimming with strangeness, like an overfull cup. His bed was gone—his bed, the nightstand, the WVU pennant on the far wall, all the familiar landmarks of his childhood, gone, gone, gone.

  In their place, refulgent in the gleam of a hidden ceiling spot, stood a casket, its lid closed. Ornate candelabra burned at either end—that was what he’d seen in the glass, the guttering reflection of a candle flame, neither a lily nor a rose—flanking the bizarre centerpiece on the glossy lid of the casket: a framed snapshot of his father and an old-fashioned rotary telephone, squat and venomous as a toad.

  Abel swallowed.

  His father gazed back at him, mute and frozen, his face under the mining cap gaunt and smudged with glittering streaks of coal. He stood in the cage of the mine elevator, the earth laid open like a wound at his back. Abel stepped closer, lifting one tentative hand, his eyes fixed on the photograph.

  “Dad,” Abel said. “Oh, Dad …”

  And then the telephone started to ring.

  2

  Keel opened his eyes. He did not immediately know where he was, and he did not much care. He had slept as small children sleep, trusting and deep, without stirring, and for a moment he was content simply to lie still, suffused with a drowsy sense of well-being. He had the fleeting thought that if he lay very still he might find that he hadn’t woken up after all, that he had only dreamed of waking and might at any moment slip once again beneath the surface of consciousness into the forgetful depths underneath.

  It was dark enough, anyway.

  In other respects, however, his environment seemed disinclined to cooperate. The air was a touch too cold for one thing—he was naked, he realized—and the silence too all-pervasive. A spring was digging into the small of his back. He shifted slightly, hoping to relieve the pressure, and memory flared inside him, strobic flashes punctuated with darkness. The summons in the air and the blind descent of the stairwell. Most of all the woman—

  —Lara could it have been Lara—

  —kneeling in the darkness before him, to take him in her mouth.

  It all seemed fuzzy now. Remote and unthreatening. Like a dream, he thought. Like he’d been sleepwalking or something.

  He sat up. A subterranean chill gripped him. The air tasted stale and cool, like the air in a soda bottle after the soda has gone flat, and the taste of it in his mouth brought it all back home to him: the reality of Dreamland. Not Albuquerque or Santa Fe or San Antonio or any of the other sun-blistered cities where he’d momentarily washed up in the last two decades. No, he was waking up in Dreamland, and not in his comfortably anonymous upstairs suite, either, but down here in the building’s hidden heart.

  Don’t go back, Susan Avery had told him.

  But he had come back, and what harm had come to him? None. Nothing at all had happened. A handful of unpleasant dreams and a few episodes of almost-memory, disturbing on the face of them perhaps, but so distant that you could almost pretend they didn’t matter at all. They might have happened to some other man. You might have imagined him. Maybe you did. And now this: the best sleep you could remember having in years.

  “See, Suze,” he said aloud. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Bracing one hand against the back of the sofa, Keel stood. He moved with confidence despite the darkness. He could not see exactly, but he had a clear sense of the room’s layout—the filing cabinets on the wall to his right, the desk just across from them—and if some fragmentary component of his personality—

  —Susan, maybe, or dear old Dad—

  —wondered just how that could be, Keel wasn’t inclined to indulge them. He felt good. For the first time in years, he’d slept like a baby and he felt just fine, thank you. He wasn’t going to let any sniping from the peanut gallery ruin it. As if to prove it, he reached out and switched on the reading lamp—he knew somehow that it was an adjustable gooseneck lamp hinged halfway up the five-foot post; he had a picture of it in his head, and he didn’t bother worrying about that either. Yet there was something gratifying all the same—a kind of vindication—in reaching out and finding it just where he expected it to be, and driving home the switch.

  The room looked just as he had imagined it: the black-and-white checkerboard tile, his footprints faintly visible in the dust, the spavined sofa, the row of metal filing cabinets. The desk stood just where he thought it would, a standard government-issue desk, dented and gunmetal gray. Everything about the place projected a sense of abandonment—from the avalanche of yellowing memos and coffee-stained invoices on the desk to the freebie wall calendar (ERIC’S AUTO PARTS—WE’RE THERE WHEN YOU NEED US!), nine years out of date—but there was something comfortable about it, too. It was neither as rundown as the apartments upstairs, nor as impersonal as Lomax’s renovations. It was just … well, homey.

  Keel stooped to gather up his clothes and dressed without haste. Warmer then, he lowered himself into the creaking wooden chair before the desk. He surveyed the office as he reclined, studying the wall calendar (girls in bikinis posed against an array of shiny street rods) with some leisure and chuckling at the framed novelty sign hanging over the desk (IF I WANT TO HEAR YOUR SHIT, it announced, I’LL SQUEEZE YOUR HEAD). He picked up the name plate on the desk—DENNIS EAKIN, it read—and then, idly curious, pulled open the desk’s middle drawer. It contained the usual office debris—a stack of business cards, a cache of paper clips and ballpoints, a crumpled pack of Winstons. Another drawer held hanging files—old Dennis appeared to have been truant the day they discussed alphabetical order�
�and still another, a variety of hand tools: a hammer, a couple of box-cutters, a pair of broken pliers.

  Yawn, yawn, and yawn again, Keel thought.

  He opened the final drawer, bottom right, twice as deep as the others. More memos, a box of pencils, and … something else: a bright corner of slick cover stock, just peeking out from underneath a box of letterhead.

  Keel snorted. “Dennis, you old horndog,” he said, shoving aside the letterhead, and yes, he was right, it was exactly what he thought it was, a magazine—a stack of magazines, actually—much thumbed and swollen with dampness. He gathered them up and fanned them out atop the drift of memos in front of him, a poker hand of convenience-store pornography: Juggs, Hustler, two issues of Gallery (“Home of the Girl Next Door”), and a tattered digest-size copy of Penthouse Forum. Gazing down at the garish parade of airbrushed flesh, Keel couldn’t help feeling a faint stir of last night’s excitement at the base of his belly.

  He felt something else, too, a dawning suspicion (though it was really more than a suspicion, wasn’t it?) that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t exhausted the contents of Denny’s stash. Part of him—the part he associated with Susan Avery, the part he associated with his father—suggested in no uncertain terms that this might be a good time to suspend the search and vacate the premises. The other part of him—the Fletcher Keel part—reached down and pulled the drawer out to its limit.

  He knew what he was going to see there before he saw it. He knew it the same way he had known that the lamp was one of those old-fashioned gooseneck lamps. He knew it the way he had sensed even before he opened the office door last night that there would be a sagging, mildew-smelling sofa to receive him. He did not know how he knew it. But he knew it all the same. Dennis, that old horndog, was also a secret tippler, the kind of man who likes a nip in the morning to get his motor running and another one before lunch to prime his appetite and three or four more during the afternoon just to keep things running smoothly. And he knew that bourbon—cheap bourbon, Ten High toward the end of the month, Old Crow if he was feeling flush—was Denny’s poison of choice.

  There were three bottles at the back of the drawer: two liters of Crow, their plastic seals unbroken, and—surprise, surprise, Denny was busting the budget, he must have scratched off a lottery winner right there on the counter—a pint of Jack, green label, the good stuff, maybe a quarter gone.

  Keel grunted, a plosive little huh of exclamation. Setting the magazines aside, he cleared the desk, dumping the invoices and memos in disorderly heaps on the floor. Then, without making any conscious decision to do so—

  —no, Fletcher, Susan Avery said inside his head—

  —he reached into the drawer and let his fingers close around the cool neck of a bottle of Old Crow. It might have been made to fit his hand, it felt so natural. He held it up to the light, turning it as a jeweler turns a gem, amber radiance swimming in its depths, and then he set it down on the desk. Its companions soon joined it, the two liters of Crow escorting the squat pint of Jack, one on either side, like a couple of sentries marching a POW off for interrogation: Private Daniels, sir, serial number Old Number 7. He laughed, rocking back in his chair to study them. How easy it would be to reach out, spin loose the cap on a bottle—say the Jack, for starters—and lift it to his mouth. He could almost see himself do it. It was like watching a snippet of film leap its sprockets, a stuttering glimpse of things to come, licorice and wood smoke blooming on his tongue—

  He laughed again, a strangled, despairing sound.

  The bottles stood at attention before him.

  He stared at them for a while. He didn’t know how long he stared at them.

  3

  The phone rang again, like an air raid siren going off inside his head.

  Abel reached out and picked it up. “Hello?” he said. “Dad?”

  In answer came a flood of voices, snaking their way up the coils of black telephone line to hiss mockingly in the speaker at his ear, a dozen voices, a hundred, a thousand voices from the world beyond the fence, all of them saying his name at once, Abel, Abel, Abel AbelAbelabelabelabel—

  Then, abruptly, he was awake—really awake, this time, sitting bolt upright in a nest of tangled sheets, his name still riding the air.

  “Abel? You in there? Hey—” Knocking, a persistent knocking at precise intervals, like the ringing of a phone. “Come on, Abel, you’re starting to scare me.”

  The doctor. Lara.

  He took a breath. It was midmorning, after eleven by the clock on his nightstand. Out the window, the sky was gray and heavy. “I hear you,” he called. “I was asleep. Give me a second, okay?”

  “Okay.” The relief in the voice was palpable.

  Sighing, Abel stood. The room was silent, so silent that he might have dreamed the whole thing—the nightmare moments in the lobby and the exam that followed, culminating in that moment of surpassing strangeness when he’d happened to let his gaze fall upon the photograph of Lara’s sister and it had all come clear to him, a premonition that bordered on certainty, on knowledge, her little girl’s voice ringing in his ears. That was me. We were twins, identical twins—

  Just recalling it, he felt a wave of strangeness wash over him.

  Enough.

  No more voices, not now, anyway. Maybe you did dream it. And the doctor is waiting.

  He splashed water on his face and pulled on a pair of faded cords. The outer room was silent. See, he thought, nothing to worry about. But as he reached out and swung open the door he heard a silvery rill of amusement from the far corner of the room. A child’s laugh, bright and delicate as the tingling of struck glass.

  “What?” Lara said, when she saw his face.

  Abel swallowed. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  4

  “So yesterday,” Ben said in the kitchen. “The thing with Abel.”

  Lomax looked at him over the rim of his coffee cup. “What about it?”

  “Fainting like that. It was weird, that’s all.”

  Lomax shrugged almost imperceptibly. “It was cold down there. We’re all under pressure. The doctor said he hadn’t eaten.”

  “True. But I can’t help wondering …”

  “What?”

  Ben took a bite of his sandwich, turkey on rye. He studied Lomax as he chewed, the curving prow of his nose, the cold, cold eyes. Lomax sipped his coffee and returned the scrutiny, unblinking.

  “Look,” Ben said. “You’re no fool. You know what Abel is. You know what he was doing down there.”

  “Cold reading,” Lomax said. “Not even a particularly artful example of the technique, I’m afraid.”

  “So why did you bring him?”

  “I also saw him faint—we both saw that—and I don’t think he was faking that.”

  “What do you think, then?”

  “I’m not sure. As I told you at the start, Mr. Prather, I’m interested in this place, in what may or may not be here, and I have the time and the money to pursue that interest. Mr. Williams had an experience here—you heard him describe it—so I invited him to join us.” He nodded. “As I invited you.”

  “Keel, too? And Lara? They have some connection to this place?”

  “You’d have to ask them.”

  “Oh, come on—”

  “No, Mr. Prather, you come on. You have a history here yourself, do you not?”

  “So?”

  “Yet you’ve chosen not to share that information with the others, and I’ve respected—”

  “I haven’t sought to hide it. Lara knows.”

  “Does she? And how does she know?”

  “She asked me.”

  Lomax lifted his hands, palms up. “Exactly,” he said. “And you decided whether or not to tell her. As I was saying, I’ve respected your autonomy in this matter and I intend—”

  “What about the first day, huh? Your little tour? Do you call that respect?”

  “I wouldn’t call it disrespect. We visited every site o
f significance in the building that day. We could hardly leave out your family’s apartment. I’m sorry if it upset you, but I don’t think it has a thing to do with me. Do you?”

  Ben pushed his plate away.

  What he remembered about the incident, what had irritated him about it, was not the tour itself but the subtle consensus of the men in the group—exclusively white men, too—that in similar circumstances they would have chosen different lives than the gangbangers and the dealers and the welfare mothers. What bothered him was the assumption—unspoken, but clearly present—that the people of Dreamland, black people, had somehow brought the horror of their lives upon themselves. That they were responsible—morally and otherwise—for their own misery.

  Yet some dissenting component of himself couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an element of truth in Lomax’s words—if maybe, just maybe, he had manufactured a fit of self-righteous indignation in order to avoid facing whatever awaited him in apartment 1824. His meltdown last night—his panic attack, to borrow the doctor’s terminology—cast things in a different light, didn’t it?

  Lomax leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table. His eyes bored into Ben’s. “Look, Mr. Prather, I haven’t lied to you. I don’t deny that my choices have been self-serving. I asked you to join us because of your past—but I had other reasons, as well, not least among them because I thought it might be useful to have someone with your particular set of skills, your”—he flapped a hand—“your journalistic habit of mind, I suppose. It’s the same with the others. I engaged the doctor because I have no desire to see anyone get hurt. And if someone does get hurt, I want to be able to treat them. I asked Mr. Williams along because of his … sensitivity, if you choose to believe in that sort of thing, to these phenomena. Mr. Keel joined us because it seemed prudent to have someone present with his experience—”