House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  They were still unsnarling themselves when Fletcher Keel, dragging Lomax behind him, stumbled into the corridor and cut off their escape route to the stairwell.

  25

  Lomax saved them.

  Somehow, despite the burning agony in his back and the blood that filled his mouth with every throb of his racing heart, he managed to hang on for the few steps it took Keel to reach the corridor—managed even, in the end, to drag himself closer still and sink his teeth deep into the thick-bunched muscle of the other man’s calf.

  In the heaving instant that it took Keel to stop and lift the hammer to batter him to the floor, Ben managed to get Lara to her feet. Lomax saw it: they were already moving toward the distant beacon of the north stairwell when the first blow fell, like a bomb going off against the side of his skull. And still he clung. He clung with every ounce of strength he had as the hammer came down again, a bright sheet like lightning flaring up before his eyes, and then another blow and then another, the whole world erupting with an incandescence so bright it was almost painful. He felt as from a distance his fingers losing purchase, felt Keel kick him contemptuously away as a man might kick a dog that had been nipping at his ankles.

  And then he came to rest.

  Through a flickering haze, he saw Keel kneel over him, his arm uplifted for yet another blow.

  Ramsey Lomax closed his eyes, and down it came.

  It didn’t hurt at all.

  He felt like he was floating.

  26

  They might have made it, too—might have made it the length of the hallway and into the stairwell at the other end, might have made it all the way down to the lobby and into the freezing night without—but even as they ran past the elevator bay, the thing that had been Abel Williams shrugged off the final strap and rolled off the gurney. Its legs buckled, but it locked its knees, forced itself erect, and staggered into the hallway to meet them.

  27

  “Shit,” Ben said when he saw Abel Williams looming in the hallway before them. He hung there for a heartbeat, despairing and indecisive, trapped between the Scylla at one end of the corridor and the Charybdis at the other. Then Lara shook him, her fingers tight around his forearm.

  “The elevator,” she said at his ear.

  The elevator. Ben pivoted to follow her, the corridor revolving around him, granting him a final fleeting glimpse of Abel staggering toward them like a human pinball, banging from one side of the hallway to the other on unsteady legs. A blurred swath of innocuous wall flashed past, pierced through with the double-hung door into the kitchen, where all this horror had begun, and then—oh, God, then, then the corridor down which they had lately fled rose up before him. Framed in the milky cone of a wall-mounted sconce, Fletcher Keel hunched like a Neanderthal wielding a club of bone, smashing and smashing and smashing the convulsing figure at his feet, three heavy blows and the arm flung back for yet another one in the single flying second before Ben finished pivoting back toward the elevator. Three blows, like a man pulping a half-rotten melon with a crowbar, each one launching into the crimson air a garish spray of blood and brains and bone.

  Then—though he seemed to see it yet, though he thought he would see it the rest of his life, burned like the ghostly image of the afternoon sun not into his retinas but into the gelatinous medium of his brain—then, it was gone. Then he was in the elevator bay. Colored sketches of hydrangeas on the wall and the velvet-padded bench beneath. A decorative urn in the corner with a spray of pastel flowers. He was in the elevator bay, his gorge rising in his throat, the horror behind him for the moment, but coming. Oh, coming.

  Lara punched the call button.

  Ben wheeled back to face their pursuers, still searching for something—anything—he could use to fend them off. He was reaching for the urn when he heard a circumspect ding and the polite clatter of the doors retracting.

  “Let’s go,” Lara hissed, tugging him empty-handed into the car behind her. His heel caught on the metal lip, and he might have gone down but for the brushed-steel railing that ran waist-high around the interior of the car.

  Lara stabbed at the control panel.

  A light flickered dimly, illuminating the “L.”

  “L” is for lobby, he thought incoherently, the phrase rolling around inside his head like a child’s ABC mnemonic, and then the doors shuddered once again into motion. Through the slowly narrowing aperture, Ben saw Keel turn the corner into the elevator bay. He looked like a vision of death itself; he looked like Thor fresh from the fields of Armageddon, swinging the gore-streaked hammer at the end of one thick arm, his enormous frame splashed in the blood and grime of battle, his face bruised and swelling behind a veil of greasy hair.

  “Come on, come on,” Ben urged the doors, uttering the words in an earnest whisper, and he realized that Lara, too, was speaking, the same words, almost sobbing them, “Come on, come on,” their voices rising up in unison, a chant, a prayer, a propitiation offered up to whatever gods were listening.

  Keel—the thing that had been Keel—hurled the hammer after them. Spinning like a thrown hatchet, it rang harmlessly off the metal wall at Ben’s back, spattering him with bits of blood and matter—spattering them both, he could see the crimson flecks in Lara’s hair. The doors kissed in rubber-bumpered silence, and then they were alone, the hammer on the floor like a token of the horror past, or a calling card, a promise, of others yet to come.

  I’m coming, it said. I’m coming.

  A moment later, as if in confirmation, they heard the impact of Keel’s weight upon the door. A wordless scream of anguish and rage followed, echoing inside the car.

  A gear clunked overhead. The elevator lurched into motion, and Ben felt a terrible joy well up within him and die away in the realization that followed:

  The elevator was going up.

  28

  Ben launched himself across the car. He punched the buttons methodically, their lights flaring one by one. When the elevator kept rising, ticking without stopping by each illuminated floor, he began hammering the unresponsive control panel, first with one fist and then, his frustration rising, with both fists in tandem. At last, the pressure mounting inside him toward some terrible crisis point, he wheeled on Lara.

  “What the fuck?” he screamed. “I saw you, I saw you push the button for the lobby, so what the fuck is going on here?”

  He gasped, swallowing, his jaw rigid.

  In the silence, the elevator slammed suddenly to a halt.

  They hung suspended, just short of the eighteenth floor. The numbers glowed down upon him, the eight steady, the one flickering and half-extinguished.

  Lara clutched the rail with both hands. She returned his gaze in silence, her face pale as fine bone china, her eyes wide, deep-sunken in their orbits, and smudged with bruised-looking shadows of exhaustion.

  “What’s going on?” he whispered.

  She laughed, a grim despairing sound like the rattle of knives inside a drawer.

  “Don’t you see?” she said, her voice tremulous and small. “It’s like the phone. It’s not going to let us get away.”

  29

  The moment the elevator doors slid shut, Abel Williams felt the dark presence inside him weaken. He was, for a time anyway, himself; not that that was necessarily a good thing. His nose felt as thick and fibrous as a cauliflower, making every breath screaming agony, his teeth ached, and his thigh throbbed like—well, like someone had driven a knife into it. He took rueful stock of himself: he was barefoot and shivering, probably feverish, and he wore only a tee shirt and what was left of a pair of blue jeans, Lara apparently having decided to split the seam of his jeans in order to stitch him up rather than bothering to undress him. In short, he was a mess.

  On the other hand, considering the options …

  Abel surveyed the elevator bay, apparently unmarred by the violence just past, his gaze settling at last on Fletcher Keel. The other man stood preternaturally still before the elevator, his bruised, bloodstaine
d face tilted to track the numbers over the door. Abel found himself watching them as well, flashing in numerical sequence, until finally, somewhere far above him, something must have gone awry. The seventeen flickered and dimmed, and the eighteen flared momentarily to life; then it, too, died back into a strange shivery half-life, as though the elevator had gotten jammed—or had been jammed—somewhere in between floors.

  And it had been.

  He knew it had been. It wasn’t conjecture, it wasn’t guesswork, and it wasn’t logic: it was knowledge, and there was only one way he could have come by it. What the thing inside him knew, he too knew—and so Abel concluded that the cold intelligence hadn’t departed, not entirely, anyway. It had turned its attention elsewhere, but it had left something of itself behind, like an explorer planting a flag in virgin territory. Or, better, like a vacationer who’d left a lamp burning to light the house for his return.

  And where did he fit into this little metaphor? Abel wondered. He wasn’t the homeowner, not anymore—that had become abundantly evident. No, he was more like … he was more like a mouse, probing with quivering whiskers into a pantry or nosing for crumbs atop a counter, every sense alert for the master who might any moment return, driving him back to the safety of the tunneled wainscoting, the hidden ways inside the walls of—

  Abel Williams swallowed.

  Inside the walls of his own body. That pretty much summed it up, this nightmarish little analogy: when the owner was in residence, his movements were sharply restricted. When the owner was … otherwise engaged—running the elevator say, or running the elevator and running Fletcher Keel—then he had more latitude.

  Which had its encouraging side. It meant, for one thing, that the owner, whoever it was, whatever it was, was not all-powerful. No, Abel sensed that it was more like a newly awakened child, prone to fits of temper and caprice, still testing its limits and powers. He even had an idea—and this was conjecture, though somehow it felt right—of how such a thing might have happened: how all the hatred and resentment in this place might have grown over long years, like a charging battery, until at last it had achieved some critical mass, spilled over into a kind of dull half-waking consciousness, stirred now and again to mischief, to sustain itself, then lapsing back into torpor. And in the moments of torpor, or inattention, he was free.

  The word rang in Abel’s head like a summons: free.

  He’d better make the most of it.

  Stealing one last glance at Fletcher Keel—he still hadn’t moved, he was like an automaton in standby mode—Abel turned away. The corridor outside the elevator bay was a shambles. Gore streaked the walls and it smelled like an abattoir, a nauseating reek of blood and raw meat. Halfway up the corridor, just by the door into the lounge, Lomax sprawled on the sodden carpet, his arms outflung. Abel checked the impulse to go to him: you didn’t have to be a doctor—or even a psychic, for that matter—to tell that Ramsey Lomax was clearly beyond help.

  He, on the other hand, wasn’t—and, as his mother used to say, the Lord helps those who help themselves. So Abel turned in the other direction instead, hobbling off toward the infirmary. His first order of business was locating some painkillers. His second was finding his shoes. As for what came next—well, he’d figure that out when he came to it. He thought he had enough to start with.

  30

  A few moments later the thing that had been Fletcher Keel roused itself. Ignoring the occasional sounds coming from the infirmary, it headed toward the kitchen. It could deal with Abel Williams at its leisure. For now, it wanted to replace the hammer.

  This time, it wanted something sharp.

  31

  “Who’s Katie Wright?” Ben asked.

  Lara didn’t answer. She was aware only in the most cursory way that the question had even been addressed to her. She felt numb, exhausted, and her brain seemed to have slipped into some lower gear, processing information at glacial speeds. From a clinical perspective, she knew, this could suggest shock, but this insight, too, seemed to have little immediate significance. Right now she was mainly focused on the question of what Ben was doing to the elevator’s control panel.

  Actually, what he was doing wasn’t much of a mystery. He had used the hammer, cautiously at first, and with evident reluctance, to pry off the cover. Now he was moving methodically down the rows of buttons, ripping out the wiring. The more interesting question—and it seemed to fill her up at the moment, that question—was why he was doing it. Even so, it took her a few seconds to actually formulate the query into words.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  He didn’t look at her. “Say you’re right. Say the building can control the elevator, the phone.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So it’s got us trapped here. It’s only a matter of time before it decides to move us somewhere more convenient, right? Someplace where Keel’s waiting outside the damn doors with a machete.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. “You think that’ll stop it?”

  He looked at his handiwork, bemused. “Shit,” he said. “I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.”

  He gave her a tight little smile, and then he turned, examining the ceiling. After a moment, he clambered up on the waist-high metal railing that encircled the elevator—or tried to anyway. The railing—it was segmented and loose in places—stood out maybe three inches from the wall, making balance difficult; after a few seconds Ben half-leapt and half-fell back to the floor, rocking the entire car.

  Something groaned far above them.

  Ben winced when he straightened, and she saw that blood had started to seep through his shirt on the left side. The wound hadn’t been deep—she’d used butterfly bandages to close it; it hadn’t even needed stitches. But even in her—altered? was that the right word?—even in her altered state, she recognized that it had to hurt.

  Actual words came to her on a ten-second delay, working their way up through the frozen corridors of her brain: “You okay?”

  “What?”

  She nodded at his side.

  He touched the stain gingerly and lifted his fingers to examine them. “At this point,” he said, “I figure I’ll be lucky to bleed to death.”

  Wiping the blood on his jeans, he turned his attention back to the ceiling. “So, listen, Lara,” he said. “I’m going to have to ask you to help support me on the railing. Can you do that? Hold my legs or something?”

  “I guess. Why?”

  He pointed at the ceiling, and she saw a trapdoor set high in the back corner, to the right of the flickering fluorescent bulbs mounted over the center of the car.

  “I think it’s time to get us out of here,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Lara, still drifting in that numbed and dreamy state, didn’t have a strong opinion on the issue. The truth was, she didn’t want to think about it just now; the truth was, she didn’t want to think about much of anything. But she was willing to help.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He smiled again. “Good,” he said, and this time when he clambered up on the railing—it creaked ominously under his weight—she moved in behind him, bracing him with her hands set high on his legs, midway above his knees. He fumbled around up there. Her angle of vision, close against the wall and just under him, gave him a looming foreshortened appearance that made it hard to see anything else.

  “So seriously,” he said. “Who’s Katie Wright?”

  This time the question penetrated the frozen tundra of her thoughts. Lara blinked, surprised to find tears sliding down her face.

  “Katie died,” she said.

  32

  She hadn’t died, though. She’d been killed.

  Here was the cold truth of the matter, the cold truth that came back to Lara McGovern in that moment, stranded high in the narrow elevator shaft that cored Dreamland like a spine; the cold truth that came back to her every day, silent companion to every waking thought, and every night as well, an unwelcome visitor in her dreams:

  Kat
ie Wright had not died. She’d been killed.

  And Lara had killed her.

  It had been a simple case, too, a simple case that came into the ER during the thirty-second hour of a thirty-six-hour shift during which Lara had been able to snatch little more than a couple of hours of restless sleep, and even that spread out across a span of hours in tossing increments of ten and fifteen minutes, until finally her eyes felt like someone had worked them over with a fine-grit grade of sandpaper and the hospital assumed a hallucinatory, overlit reality, like an overexposed snippet of film or a place seen in a dream: her third such shift in five days, her body humming like a plucked string with caffeine and adrenaline and vending-machine doughnuts.

  And then this child, this girl, this delicate blond nine-year-old who could have been her sister, this Katie Wright: not a complex case at all—she presented with nausea, vomiting, and lethargy. It could have been the flu—but everything is complicated when you have slept maybe twelve hours in the last one hundred twenty, you’ve been working for more than twenty-four hours straight, and you’re juggling a ten-patient backup in chairs, a stabbing, two might-be-acid-reflux-might-be-heart-attacks, and a multiple-injury car crash in transit. She’d ordered an IV for hydration and the standard blood work, and when the blood work came back with low magnesium, she’d scrawled an order for an IV push of magnesium sulfate, a holding action while she dealt with the car crash victims even then pouring through the doors.