House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “This is my family,” Ben said, his voice rising. “This is my fucking family, and I will not—I will not—” He took a long, slow breath. Then, his voice taut with suppressed emotion, he said, “I will not let you profane their memory with your—”

  “—she spoke to me—”

  “—manipulative charlatan’s bullsh—”

  “Ben, listen—she spoke to me, I heard her voice.”

  Ben yanked his arm free. Rubbing his wrist as though he might massage away even the memory of that clinging hand, he glared at Abel, his eyes unswerving. He shook his head, uttering a sound halfway between laughter and a sob.

  “Fuck you, Abel,” he said, and then, turning to Lomax, “And you, too. Is this what you had in mind? You think you can just play around in other people’s lives? Do you? Answer me!”

  Lomax’s lip twitched. Visibly composing himself, he said nothing.

  Ben stood. He scanned the circle of faces before him, Lara beside him, her eyes obscured by a wing of hair, and Abel, stricken, with a pleading hand outstretched. Fletcher Keel flushed and looked away.

  “Ben,” Abel said. “Please. I’m not—I’m not lying. I hear her voice. I hear it in my head.”

  Ben shook his head again.

  “You know what,” he said. “I feel sorry for you. You’re a sick man.”

  He turned away.

  He was almost to the door when Abel spoke again.

  “Ben,” he said, “she says to tell you—and I don’t understand this, I don’t know what it means. She says to tell you that the cook is here.”

  7

  The words rolled over him like a wave, one of those enormous breakers that thunder in from the deep cold waters farther out and tumble you down and down before them, the pressure pinning you breathless on a bed of muck and languid weed until your lungs burn and the water turns smoky before your terrified eyes. When at last it passed and he surfaced through all that dark water, Ben felt as such a swimmer feels, brimming with a stark exhilaration that might be terror and might be joy.

  He wanted to keep on going, to push through the big double-hung door and into the hallway beyond, to pretend he’d never heard those words in the first place. It was all he could do to turn around and face the others—face Abel—down the length of the kitchen.

  “What—” His voice caught, and he paused to clear it, working up a teaspoon of spit to lubricate the words. “What did you say?”

  “The cook—The cook is here.” Abel hesitated. “Does that mean something to you, Ben?”

  “I don’t know. Does it?”

  Still clutching the picture in one hand, he walked back to the table. He sat down by Lara. Cautiously, he said, “I don’t know what it means. It means I’m willing to listen. For a little while, anyway.”

  Abel blinked. He smiled uncertainly. “Okay. Good.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  “That’s the thing, I don’t really know.”

  He laughed, a manic edgy laugh with more hysteria than humor, and it came to Ben that he’d gotten the metaphor all wrong: The wave hadn’t passed, after all. Or if it had, it hadn’t flung him any closer to shore; it had dragged him out instead, into deep, deep water.

  “I don’t know,” Abel said. “I think—I think those photo montages used to scare me because I sensed something stirring inside me. Something stirring in response, you know?” He looked around as if in search of confirmation, but none of them said anything. Abel laughed again. “Something I didn’t want to face.”

  Ben pushed the photo across the table. “It’s a picture of a little girl, Abel. She’s been dead for twenty-seven years.”

  Abel averted his gaze. “She’s not dead to me.”

  “So what?” Keel said. “Who is?”

  “Indeed, Mr. Williams,” Lomax said. “Who is? No one is dead to you, or so you’ve claimed.”

  Abel smiled sickly. “This is … This is different. This is …”

  “Real,” Lara said quietly.

  Abel shrugged, and nodded. “This is real,” he said.

  8

  I am not afraid.

  He remembered the cage of shadows on his ceiling and he remembered the telephone on the table in the hallway, an old-fashioned rotary device in gleaming black, so heavy that he had hardly been able to lift the receiver as a child, to bring it to his ear and hear the voices of his neighbors echoing down the party line from the world beyond the high wooden fence that demarked on one side the border of his narrow child’s universe. He remembered his father’s face and the touch of his work-roughened hands. He remembered his mother’s tears. He remembered all this and more. He remembered the stunted apple tree outside his bedroom window, sculpted by the vicious winds barreling endlessly down from the mountain hollows above, and he wondered what black wind had been pouring down through the years of his life, and what it might have made of him. Even as a child he’d longed to escape the squalid necessity that had led his father to doom in the deep places of the earth. Now, for the first time, Abel wondered if the life he had chosen, the work he had chosen, wasn’t some tawdry reflection of a real gift, twisted beyond recognition by that endless stream of grief and fear.

  Unbidden, he traced the cracked crystal of the watch on his wrist.

  How had he come to wear his father’s watch anyway?

  Memory beckoned.

  A closet door in his mind swung open. The shadow of his father fell across him. He thought: there is a world, and there is a fence, and there is a world beyond the fence.

  The photograph—maybe any photo—was a telephone.

  He glanced down at it. The girl, Ben’s sister, stared up at him from a gulf of years, and he felt something gathering in the room around him, a trickle of whispers that might at any moment become a flood.

  I am not afraid, he thought.

  Yet he tore his eyes away. Looked up at the others.

  “There’s a … phenomenon, I guess you’d say, called psychometry. You’ve seen it in movies. Occasionally you read about it: some desperate cop takes an article of a murder victim’s clothing, a photo, whatever, to a psychic and the psychic ‘reads’ the object’s … resonances. Psychic impressions. Whatever’s going on, I think—” He took a breath. “I think it’s something like that.”

  He paused, thinking it through.

  “Maybe the photo isn’t even necessary. I told you the other day about something that happened in the lobby when I was filming Hard Copy. It was very sudden, very brief, but it occurred when I happened to catch a glimpse of Theresa Matheson’s photo. The producer had put this huge photo up as set dressing and I—I was doing my thing and I, I …”

  He shrugged.

  He looked at the others, expecting to see disbelief. He saw none. Lomax had leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his hands clasped, his face rapt. Keel, at the other end of the table, seemed to have disappeared into his own private universe, his face brittle and impassive. Abel glanced at Lara, and then his gaze settled on Ben.

  The whispers swirling in the corners of the room surged.

  A chill gripped him.

  I am not afraid, he thought.

  He closed his eyes. Took a breath. Opened them.

  “The other day, in the lobby, the same thing happened. There was no photo, but I happened to think about that picture of Theresa Matheson, and …” He swallowed. “So maybe photos are, I don’t know, props or something. Devices that enable me to focus, to access the level of concentration I need to … to hear.”

  “Hear what, exactly?” Ben said.

  “The … the voices—”

  “There’s more than one of them?”

  “Yeah, there are—there are lots of them. It’s not like a direct line. It’s like a … party line. There are so many of them coming through.”

  Silence, then.

  “So what I propose,” said Abel, “is nothing like the reading the other day. What I propose is … an experiment, I guess you’d call it.”

  Lomax
put his hands flat on the table. He cleared his throat, and then, crisply, with his customary mien of command, he said, “Well, the lobby seems like the logical—”

  Abel and Lara objected simultaneously.

  “I’m not ready for that—” Abel started, but Lara overrode him.

  “I don’t want to risk the lobby. Given what happened to Abel the other day, I think it’s best if we stay close to the infirmary. Besides,” she added, looking at Lomax, “if you really think the … the building’s power is weaker here, then maybe it’s best—”

  “If you’re interested in what I really think—” Lomax started.

  “No,” Abel said. “The answer is no.”

  And then: “If things go okay, maybe … maybe later, all right?”

  Lomax nodded, spreading his hands in capitulation.

  “Okay, then,” Abel said. He reached for the photo, and if his fingers trembled, none of them noticed.

  I am not afraid, he thought.

  That was how it began.

  9

  Three miles away, an elevated train screamed overhead, showering sparks into fresh drifts of snow. An observer, had anyone been there to observe, might have noted a final handful of hardy commuters fleeing homeward at last, their faces blurred by speed and glass as they gazed numbly into the storm from the heated comfort of their cars.

  But there was no one present to observe.

  The day—if you could call the muzzy three o’clock twilight day—was unfit for any but the most desperate of pedestrians. At present there were none. Along the streets of the Gold Coast, yellow lights glimmered warmly from the well-insulated houses and condominiums of the city’s more fortunate residents; in the ramshackle blocks to the south, citizens of a duskier and more desperate nation hunkered down to weather the storm in pestilent apartments where icy January air gnawed through every chink and crevice. Still farther south, where the shuttered facades of check-cashing counters, liquor stores, and pawnbrokers gave way to block after block of empty storefronts and burned-out row houses, nothing moved but the wind, drifting the streets three and four feet deep in a crusted mantle of pristine white.

  The dead lands had never been more lovely, or more lethal. In a cardboard refrigerator box at the back of an alley that the wind had lately breached, a homeless man was engaged in the serious business of freezing to death. He wouldn’t outlast the blizzard. When his blood congealed into pink froth—and it wouldn’t be long now, already he had succumbed to the fleeting warmth that precedes the fatal plunge—the dead lands truly would be dead, bereft of any human habitation but for the five troubled souls huddled around a table in Dreamland’s sole surviving tower, where it stood alone, high above the waste and wreckage, colder yet than any natural cold, and impervious to weather.

  The storm deepened.

  The snow quickened, drifting knee-deep in the floors of long-abandoned apartments. Wind banged through the mouths of shattered windows, screaming down the black throats of half a dozen deserted corridors. In the kitchen, Abel Williams’ fingers closed around the photo of a child twenty-seven years dead, and Dreamland, long drowsing, bestirred itself to full wakefulness at last.

  From its cold height it observed him, this paltry man.

  It observed them all, arrayed around him like sinners at an altar: the broken creature on his left, gripping the table and grieving honor lost; the sinewy ancient to his right, his hawkish features avid and abject, like a man in need or prayer; and the others, too, both of them halved by guilt, gazing back at him over a table still littered with the detritus of a meal now hours past.

  Five souls.

  Each of them hungry, each of them riven with sorrows they dared not express and needs they could not name.

  Dreamland saw them.

  Dreamland knew them.

  Abel Williams swallowed, uttered a final avowal of defiance—

  —I am not afraid—

  —and lowered his gaze to the photo in his hand.

  10

  This time it happened without preliminary.

  One moment Abel was gazing down at the photograph, at a girl of maybe six years old, thin and dark as Ben and with Ben’s narrow face, but utterly without his brooding intensity. The next, the room was wheeling vertiginously around him. Memory, long repressed, flared at the edge of his awareness, and he had a fleeting glimpse of his childhood bedroom, his own adult hand overlain with the hand of a child, clutching a photo not of a stranger twenty-seven years dead but of his father, his—

  —Dad Dad—

  —father emerging unscathed from the mine that had finally swallowed him whole, never to return. The overbright kitchen sheared away, and he seemed to tumble forward, downward and in, the photo—

  —the photos—

  —scrolling open to receive him, spilling him not into the rundown apartment where the girl—

  —LaKeesha, her name was LaKeesha Turner—

  —had died and not onto the blasted apron of mud and boot-trodden grass that fronted the mine elevator where his father was even now stepping down to greet him, but into another place altogether, a place that was somehow both places at the same time, and neither of them, a colder place, and darker still than any place on earth or under it, where his father and LaKeesha Turner and a jostling throng of thousands awaited him.

  So many, he thought, so many—unaware that he had moaned these words aloud, that the temperature in the room had plummeted, cold, so cold that his breath frosted the air before his blind and staring eyes, unaware that Fletcher Keel was suddenly clutching the table with such ferocity that the muscles in his forearms stood out in ropy cables or that Lara McGovern’s pale hand had crept of its own accord into Benjamin Prather’s dark one, unaware of all this, and more, of the snow ticking at the window and Ramsey Lomax’s barely suppressed moan of need or fear, unaware even that he had crumpled the photo in his hand, aware only of the dark and the cold, and the jostling throng that pressed whispering upon him, so many, my God, so many, who knew that death had undone so many—

  It was the girl’s voice that came to him first, tentative, questing—

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

  —through all that dark and cold, a mere trickle of sound, and for a moment of wild elation, he thought he could control it, could measure it out syllable by syllable, like water through a spigot with a simple turn of hand. Then the floodgate burst, the dike ruptured, the dam crumbled, and a tsunami of voices, whispering, screaming, pleading, and cajoling in a veritable Babel of languages, came spewing out around him—

  —help us you’ve got to—

  —with a knife he did it with a knife—

  —cold I’m cold—

  —it was a flower that he brought me—

  —mommy I screamed for my mommy all the way down—

  —too many, my God, too many, and still they came, a thundering deluge of the dead, restless and grasping and all unquiet, and needy, there was so much need, and still they came and came and endlessly came, hungering after his still-living warmth until finally, in a jolting panic—he was afraid, oh so very afraid—Abel shrank back, withdrawing deep and deeper into the labyrinth of self, into a warm close cell at the very center of his brain where there were no voices, only silence, an endless gulf of silence where he curled rocking in the dark.

  He pitched forward like a felled tree, convulsing.

  He did not know it.

  He was safe down there in the dark. Nothing could reach him there. Nothing could touch him.

  Not even the thing that slid down into the shuddering husk he’d left behind, a cold thing, and dark, with a voice all its own, reed-thin, and hating.

  11

  In the thrashing instant of confusion that followed, Lara’s perceptions dissolved in a montage of stark, disconnected images—of Abel’s shoulders hitching in seizure; of the clutching pressure of Ben’s startled fingers, there and gone again in the same fleeting instant; of Lomax shoving back from the t
able. A water glass shattered like a bomb, spraying glittering shards across the tile.

  “Jesus,” somebody said.

  Lara stood, pushing back the bench, everything happening too fast, like an ER trauma with no trained staff to handle it. A hot panic pulsed inside her. She ignored it, no time for it now, letting the hormonal tide sweep her past it, already dreading the adrenaline hangover that would follow, her heart racing, legs shivery and weak.

  “What the fuck?” Keel said.

  “He’s seizing.”

  “What do we do?” Ben said, his voice calm at her shoulder, and the memory of his touch sprang unbidden into her mind, his fingers squeezing her own.

  What the hell did that mean?

  Abel’s feet hammered a frantic tattoo on the tile, and she grimaced, dismissing the thought. He pitched over on his side, rattling crockery, his upturned face a moonscape, airless and uninhabited. Reaching for him, Lara upset a glass, dashing water across the table. She glanced at Keel, and realized that she was talking, snapping out orders like a drill sergeant. “Get him on the floor, try to—”

  She ducked a writhing arm.

  “Damn it,” she said, lunging forward, her fingers closing on his wrist, and, yes, she had him: his flesh clammy, his pulse thready under her thumb. “Help me get him down,” she said. “Let’s get him down, I don’t want him to—”

  Another shudder tore through Abel, twisting him up and away. The force of it wrenched his arm free and sent Lara reeling backward, unbalanced. Abel landed with a meaty smack, facedown, one flailing arm sweeping the table clean with a spectacular eruption of glassware and tinkling silver, bombs away, the salt cellar shattering, ceramic plates halving themselves along hidden fault lines. The cutting board crashed to the floor with a hollow whump. A final cataclysmic convulsion shook Abel, and then, incredibly, unbelievably, he was still.