House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  The room was icy cold, and silent, the snow still pecking at the window. Lara hung her head, winded.

  “Damn it,” she said. “Damn it.”

  When she looked up, the others were staring at her with shell-shocked expressions: earthquake survivors, dazed and mistrustful, awaiting aftershocks.

  “Is it over?” Lomax said.

  “I don’t know. I think so.” Lara shook her head and looked at Abel. He was still seated, his torso draped limply across the table, his mouth webbed with glistening strands of spit. His eyes were glazed, unseeing, devoid of personality, and Lara found herself thinking of that night in the kitchen, bantering over the dishes—

  —you wouldn’t want dishpan hands—

  Something twisted inside her. “Yeah, it’s over,” she said. And then, gently: “You hear that, Abel? I’m going to take care of you, now. It’s over.”

  It wasn’t, though.

  She had just started moving toward him when Abel snapped up like a jack-in-the-box, moving with an awkward, lurching intent, like a wind-up toy or a puppet on a stick. He lunged at her over the table, drawing back in the same jerky motion, his face twisted in a mocking rictus. Startled, Lara uttered a brief, involuntary scream.

  “It should have been you, Lars,” he hissed in a voice that was nothing like his voice. “It should have been you.”

  She stumbled back, stunned by the force of those words—

  —you Lars it should have been you—

  —and his knowledge of them, so often whispered in the sanctum of her most secret thoughts. Then the adrenaline hangover caught up to her in a nauseating rush. Her heart hammered, and the kitchen rippled with a glossy unreality, like a mirage seen through the seething haze of heat over a desert highway. She felt Ben’s hands on her shoulders, guiding her down to the bench across from Abel—

  —was it Abel, was it—

  —and she realized that it wasn’t over, after all.

  It wasn’t even close to over.

  12

  Abel—or the thing that had been Abel—swiveled its head mechanically, observing them, and tested, under the table, the edge of the blade it had snatched up during that final crashing moment of confusion. A single ruby droplet of blood welled up from the pad of Abel’s thumb, plunging unseen to the tile below, and the thing inside him laughed for the pleasure of it—the grating joyless laugh of a creature unaccustomed to laughter. Calmer then, it settled to the business of accustoming itself to this fragile body, readying itself for what was yet to come.

  13

  In dread silence and in cold they watched it, this thing that was and was not Abel. It rocked stiffly on the fulcrum of its hips, lunging now at one of them and now at another, its movements jerky and imprecise, like a marionette in the hands of a novice puppeteer.

  It was Lara who worked up the nerve to speak first, her voice tentative, trembling. “You need to be calm, we’re going to help you, we’re going to take you down to the infirmary, you’re sick and we’re going—”

  “Shut up, bitch,” the thing hissed. It chanted the words like a mantra, weaving the whole time, its eyes darting at each of them in turn, the whole stunned circle of them, drawing them in. Ben sat heavily, his gaze fixed on the thing, then Lomax, and then only Keel was standing, his big hands flexing at his sides, watching. “Shut up,” it sang softly, “shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  “No,” Lara said, “please, we just want to help you—”

  “Like you helped Katie Wright?” the thing said, jabbing its head toward her, its face intent. “Helped her right into the grave, didn’t you?”

  “No, God—”

  The voice shifted into a higher register, the mocking falsetto of a child. “It should have been you, Lars.”

  “Please, Abel—”

  The thing paused. It drew itself erect, pulling in its chin. “Abel?” it said. “Abel stepped out for a bit, I’m afraid.”

  “Who are you, then?” Lomax said quietly.

  “Oh, there are lots of us in here, old man. A legion of us.” The thing leaned toward him, smiling, and then it drew away. “I’m afraid we scared Abel off. He left us the run of the place, though. Nice, isn’t it?”

  It spread its arms, rolling them experimentally and admiring the articulation, like a man checking the fit of a new coat. They saw the knife, all of them, at the same time, shining clean and sharp. There was a hiss of intaken breath, a single crestfallen syllable of dismay—

  “Oh.”

  —the circle tensing. The thing raised its eyebrows in a pantomime of surprise. “What have we here?” it said. It rotated its wrist, catching the light along the flat of the blade. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” it said. “Pretty.” And then it drove the knife straight down into the meat of its thigh—into Abel’s thigh, Ben thought, and he felt a queasy wave roll through him.

  “Jesus,” Lara breathed.

  “He had that coming, our friend Abel,” the thing said. It clutched the hilt of the blade and yanked it out, holding it up where they could see it, a common kitchen knife, maybe eight inches of bright-edged stainless steel, sheathed now in the blood of a man, and transformed into something terrible. “You’ve all got a little of that coming, I’m afraid.” The thing smiled, a rictus stretching of the lips, mirthless and without humanity. A corpse smile.

  It resumed its weaving, its movements smoother now, fluid, like a charmed snake. There was something hypnotic in it, and when it started speaking again, a whispering, lilting kind of speaking, there was something teasing and hypnotic about that, too, as though it was weaving them up inside a web of words. “We’ve been watching you,” it said. “We’ve been listening.”

  The blade traced languorous patterns in the air.

  “What a fine lot you are, each of you hoarding your little secrets, hmmmmm?” it said, still weaving before them, lunging now at Keel—

  “Had a drink lately, John? Been playing with your cock any? What would Daddy think of that?”

  —and now at Lomax, talking, constantly talking, its voice reedy and thin and full of malice. “Get you in a lot of trouble, cocks will, hmmmmm, Ram. Written any checks lately, Ram? Have you? Hmmmmm?”

  Lomax flinched, almost imperceptibly.

  The thing drew back, carving shapes in the air, and settled its gaze on Ben.

  “And you, oh, we know you, don’t we?”

  “No. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Oh, but we do.”

  Ben watched the blade, mesmerized.

  “We do, we do. Paul Cook has told us all about you. We know you better than you know yourself. Ben, poor Ben, you don’t know a thing about yourself. What are you doing here, Ben? Why did you come back?”

  Ben’s mouth opened. Closed.

  A steady hum had started up deep inside his brain.

  The blade flashed, carving the air before him with a faint, unintelligible whispering. If he listened closely, he could almost decipher it …

  “You know what you are, Ben?”

  Ben licked his lips. His mouth was dry. His mouth was so dry. “What? What am I?”

  “You’re their pet nigger,” the thing said.

  The word shocked him. All his life it had shocked him. He’d grown up in a world almost entirely sanitized of that word, a world scrubbed so ruthlessly free of it that its utter absence announced its attendance everywhere around him, hovering unspoken on the lips and in the minds of every white face that met his dark one, his mother’s face, his father’s face.

  Paul Cook’s face.

  “You’re not white, Ben, and you’re not black, you’re nothing at all.”

  The blade crooned in the air before him, and the blade’s voice and the other voice—the one speaking aloud these truths he’d always left unspoken, this secret knowledge of his heart—were one voice, his own true voice, secret and self-hating. We hate you, it purred, and he could see the words—

  —we hate you—

  —we hate you—

  �
�we hate you—

  —rolling in a mesmerizing column up a screen inside his mind. A distant hand closed over his hand, summoning him back, but it was too far, too far to come. “Ben, Ben, Ben,” the blade sang softly, “What color is your skin?”

  And then he jerked awake to see it hurtling toward his chest, bright and glittering through the sheen of Abel Williams’ blood.

  14

  Lara, too, had been mesmerized, less by the weaving dance of the blade or the whispered blandishments of the thing across the table (not Abel, she couldn’t bring herself to think of it as Abel) than by the strange effect these things seemed to be having on Ben. A dreamy expression stole over his face as the thing wove its serpentine patterns in the air, and when he spoke in return—

  “What? What am I?”

  —Ben’s voice had a drugged, faraway reluctance, like a man on the edge of sleep, summoned back all unwilling and anxious to be off.

  What’s happening? she thought. What’s happening to him?

  A choking sense of foreboding clogged her throat, she could not swallow it down. His lips moved, shaping soundless words—

  —we hate you, we hate you—

  —and before she quite knew what she was doing, she found that her hand had crept once again into his hand. How easily it happened, how naturally, and when Lana spoke inside her head—

  —what will Daddy say when you bring him home to old Carolina, hmmmm—

  —Lara dismissed the thought as unworthy.

  Benjamin Prather’s fingers were dry and cool and not without strength. She squeezed them gently, hoping to recall him from whatever dream he had succumbed to. He didn’t respond, didn’t stir or squeeze her fingers in return, and she thought suddenly of the knife, plunging in a savage arc into the meat of Abel Williams’ thigh. She blew her breath out in a cloud—

  —it was cold it was so cold—

  —and the air in the room tensed with expectation. The dread in her throat thickened like mortar, sealing her esophagus, making it hard to breathe. Something was going to happen, something terrible was going to happen—

  Still clutching Ben’s fingers, squeezing with every ounce of strength she possessed, she turned to face the Abel-thing across the table. The knife whipped by more swiftly now, a bloody silver blur, keening as it cut the air, and Abel—the thing that had been Abel—was keening too, singing softly, “Ben, Ben, Ben, what color is your skin,” and weaving there before him, its eyes bright and hateful and utterly empty of humanity. An instant before it happened she sensed or saw the gathering intent, the muscles tensing in the thing’s arms and shoulders, like a tiger crouching low to launch itself from some hidden bower in the grass, and all the time singing, singing that mocking, hateful little rhyme, “Ben, Ben, Ben, what color is your skin—”

  The weaving blade drew back and leaped forward in a single smooth motion, like the arcing strike of a cobra—

  Lara hurled herself off the bench, pushing off from feet planted solidly on the floor, tapping the long muscles of her calves and thighs, fortified by all those endless miles along the lake. She used all of it, every bit of strength she had. Her fingers clutched, dragging Ben down with her. For a terrifying, adrenaline-slowed moment, everything seemed to freeze, her lunging body suspended over the tiled floor, the knife descending in its fatal trajectory. She glimpsed something in the air above her, a hurtling shadow, and then a balance shifted.

  The floor hurled itself up to meet her. She rolled, tucking her chin to take the blow on her upper arm and her shoulder. Still, it hurt more than she expected, a white-hot nova of pain, centered high in her back and expanding outward. Her body recoiled from the impact only to be slammed back to the floor as Ben came down on top of her, dead weight, driving the breath out of her in a plosive gasp.

  Her lungs heaved, clawing at the air for purchase, that awful phrase still screaming through her thoughts:

  Dead weight, dead weight, dead weight—

  15

  For Fletcher Keel, the events just prior to Abel’s seizure—and he thought that word might have a dual significance in this context, that Abel was not only seizing but that he’d been seized—had a hazy dreamlike cast. It was like being in two worlds at once, here in this kitchen with Abel at the table and there, too, in a moment twenty-seven years gone, still ascending that lightless stairwell toward the fatal encounter that would change so many lives, his life and Lisa’s life and, yes, Benjamin Prather’s life, change everything, and irrevocably.

  And there was worse.

  Now, as then, he’d felt that cold presence at his shoulders, beating invisibly about his head like wings, leathery wings that reeked of blood and old resentments, hungry for admission. How he longed to surrender, to relinquish his fear and doubt and give over to its strength. He almost succumbed—would have maybe but for that other voice—

  —Susan’s voice—

  —his better angel’s voice, crying out within him: Make amends, make amends.

  He had done some seizing of his own then. He’d seized the edges of the table like a drowning man latching onto a piece of drifting wreckage, and he’d held on, too, he’d held on with every fiber of strength he possessed as the waters rose around him and the black pinions thundered at his shoulders. He held on, and watched the others as through a scrim of frost upon a glass, listened to their voices like the voices in a dream. Then Abel had picked up the photo—

  —LaKeesha’s photo, LaKeesha—

  —you stand accused of—

  —and Keel had a brief vision of the girl pitching over backward as the bullet tore out her throat, her hands fluttering helplessly before her.

  And then, abruptly, the waters grew still. That dark attention swerved temporarily into another quarter, the sense of presence at his shoulders retreating. It didn’t go away—he didn’t think it would ever go away, not so long as he stood inside these walls—but it became more bearable: the wings of a moth—

  —not a dragon—

  —just brushing the edges of his awareness. He’d hardly tasted his relief, like a draught of cool, clean water after a day beneath the August sun, before all hell broke loose—before, not to put too fine a point on it, Abel pitched his fit, not to mention all the weirdness that had followed, the bizarre weaving and the business with the knife and Abel’s knowledge of things he could not possibly know—

  —been playing with your cock any—

  —what would your daddy think of that—

  —things that unleashed a festering resentment inside him. Maybe that was what inspired Keel to do what he did next: his resentment at his father’s legacy of honor, his hunger to silence that nagging voice inside his head. Maybe it was that and maybe it was the voice of Susan Avery, urging him to make amends. Maybe it was both.

  In any case, he had spent time enough in bars to recognize the symptoms of impending violence—the tightness that seemed to enter Abel Williams’ shoulders, the increasing speed and savagery of those slashing gestures with the blade. He’d seen what was going to happen an instant before it did happen, and when the blow came, when Abel—or the thing that looked like Abel—drew back its arm and lunged across the table, Keel was already moving, that voice—

  —make amends—

  —crying out within him.

  He had a moment’s fleeting impression of the scene—of Ramsey Lomax stumbling away from the table, of Lara diving toward the floor, Prather tumbling in her wake, of the blade itself arcing down in a blur of bloody silver, like a smile inverted in the air—and then all that sheared away. His field of vision narrowed to Abel, Abel Williams and the knife, a concentration so fierce, so focused, that he could see the white crescent of each articulated knuckle on the hilt and smell the blood still steaming from the blade. He struck the other man high, wrapping one arm around his torso, battering with the other at the hand that held the knife. The edge parted Benjamin Prather’s shirt, laying open the ribbed flesh underneath as Keel’s momentum carried them over the table, their
feet tangling, clearing whatever crockery remained.

  And then they were down, rolling, Abel flailing with the knife. The blade whicked by Keel’s cheek, so close he could feel the wind of its passage. It snapped on the tile, and Keel lunged away, scrambling to his feet.

  Abel came on undiscouraged. The fear Keel had all this time been holding in abeyance gripped him then, held him fast. He heard his own voice—

  “—help me, Jesus, help me—”

  —a hoarse plea for deliverance.

  He backed away, circling. The room wheeled around him—the wreckage of the table and Ben lurching to his feet, one hand clasped to his ribs—febrile glimpses, Abel Williams always in the foreground.

  Lomax loomed up at Abel’s back, swinging a chair with both hands. The blow staggered Abel, but it didn’t seem to hurt him. He uttered a coarse grating laugh, a rattle of stones in a dry creek bed. He turned, tearing the chair from the old man’s grip, momentarily distracted. Keel tensed for the leap, but the impulse froze within him, paralyzed by terror, and the advantage slipped away. The thing—it was not Abel, it could not be Abel—hurled the chair across the room. It faced Keel, brandishing the broken knife, its features twisted with fury.

  Half-forgotten skills from training decades past, desperation, his natural grace—these things saved him. Abel—the monster inside Abel—was unschooled, overeager: when it came, it came headlong. Keel feinted to the left and ducked underneath the knife. He grabbed the thing’s arm, twisting the blade free, and rode the creature’s charge all the way to the tile. He pinned it there, breath screaming in his lungs, and shoved its arm north toward the shoulder blade.

  “It’s over,” he hissed at its ear. “It’s over, let him go.”

  “It’s not over. We’ll have you, too, John, before it’s over,” the thing seethed. “You’re half the man your daddy was—”

  Keel drove his knee into the thing’s back. “Shut up—”