Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  Jane found herself driving to Trigger’s house. It was down a rough gravel road on the outskirts of town, a place the flood of ghosts probably wouldn’t reach. He would let her spend the night there. As angry as she was with him, she needed to tell someone that Henry had been taken, that he might be dead. Whatever else had gone wrong between them, she knew that Trigger would listen.

  It was storming again when she reached Trigger’s house, the rain coming down in sheets and battering the top of her car. The work truck Trigger and his father used was in the driveway, but no lights were on. Her stereo clock read 4:00 a.m. With the plant closing, there would be no reason for them to be awake.

  Jane texted Trigger that she was outside, hoping his phone wasn’t on silent. I don’t have anywhere else to go, she wrote. Please, can I stay here tonight?

  Driving among the surge of angry spirits had left her mind coated in the hot, stinging anger of the town. She felt bruised from contact with them. It reminded her of when Dennis had died, how she relived his death through the guilty memories of everyone involved. Or of the mob who had descended on their house, their need to retaliate against Henry for taking something from them. Even her mother had been too much, the woman a black hole of emotion. Jane wanted space, somewhere quiet to figure out what she would do. Inside her mind, her ghost was like a full moon, bright-shining and full. She wanted away from it too.

  Tired of waiting, Jane got out of the car. The rain drenched her instantly, but it was midsummer, and the damp wasn’t cold. The pure physical shock of the downpour was good, took her out of her head for a moment. But then she thought of the police lights again, her brother disappearing into the dark.

  Trigger might be angry if you just show up and pound on the door. You know his father doesn’t like you.

  It was true. He might be angry. But something evil had happened to her family, and Jane needed a friend. Surely he would understand.

  There was no porch, just a shallow ledge over the door. She leaned against the wood, knocking hard, her back and legs getting soaked. No one answered. There was no sound from inside. She tried the door handle, and it was unlocked.

  It will be morning soon, her ghost said. Just sleep in your car and then go back to Hogboss’s house.

  Jane froze with her hand on the door. “You know something. What is it?”

  The ghost twisted and flinched within her, not wanting to say. Please, Jane. I love you. Don’t go in that house.

  Jane opened the door and stepped inside. Immediately, she felt the heavy anger of ghosts. She didn’t understand. The wave of spirits from the plant couldn’t have spread this far. Stepping forward, she found herself in the woods on a dark winter morning. Then she understood.

  Trigger’s ghost, that hateful winter child, had found its way home.

  Jane turned, looking for the door, but there was no door or house or walls. She was in a clearing. The rain was gone, and sharp wind cut across the grass, prickling her arms. The ground was darker in the gloom at her feet, and she reached down, finding it bloody.

  “Trigger!” she yelled. “Riley! Where are you?”

  Go back. Find the door.

  Jane walked into the woods and pressed her hands against the tree trunks. They were solid and rough. She closed her eyes and felt around her: dead leaves, icy branches, hard ground. The dense forest pressed in. “How did I get here?”

  Don’t let the ghost confuse you.

  Her ghost flooded her with images caught from the spirit that enveloped them. She saw Mason cupping the dirt-covered music box in his maimed hands, whistling to it. The porcelain iced over. A hissing tongue of fog rose out of it and took up all the space in the house. They were inside the ghost, its haunting on their skin and in their lungs.

  “My poor son,” Mason had said, full of gratitude. “Where did you go?”

  She saw Trigger and his father lost in the house, pacing in the endless trees and cold, trying to understand what had happened. The ghost put a name in Mason, like dropping a coin into a well. Jane.

  Mason had left in a fury, Jane’s face rolling through his mind. When the house saw him return hours later, back into its frozen mouth, he was eaten up with ghosts, their lights burning deep in his eyes like the torches of explorers lost in the dark.

  The man took an old hunting rifle out of its cabinet, the gun that had killed his youngest child and hadn’t been fired since. Years of spiderwebs wrapped the barrel like gauze. Mason sat at their table cleaning it, his eyes pale and gleaming. He spoke with a child’s voice, listing all the things that had been taken from him. Long, copper-wrapped shells rolled across the table.

  Trigger pleaded with his brother’s ghost inside his father. He said that everything was his fault and he was sorry for forgetting. He apologized for bringing Jane to the house. He said that he would send her away and never talk to her again. “Please,” he said. “Put the gun down. Come back where you belong.”

  Mason stood and leveled the gun at him. He spoke in the voice of the dead. “I’m not coming to you. You’re coming to me.”

  The rifle shot cut through her like a lance. Jane could feel it, the memory so strong and sharp that she collapsed, holding her stomach. The afterimage of Trigger fell to the ground beside her. Jane rolled toward him, shouting his name, and found only a pile of leaves under her.

  “Oh, God.” Jane lurched up and ran from the past. “Trigger’s dead.”

  The presence of the winter ghost was all around her, its rasp of wind and bone-aching cold, the sharp drops of ice that fell like knives from the trees above. Branches dragged across her face, and frozen weeds tangled around her legs. The forest made her feel small. She was in pieces, her body reduced to gasping breath, two pounding feet, the heavy punch of her heart.

  Where are you going?

  “I have to find the logging road. I have to get out of the woods.”

  You’re not in the woods, Jane. You’re in a house.

  It was raining just outside the windows, she reminded herself. It was summer. There were four walls around her, old furniture, stained carpet under her feet. But the wind and cold felt so real. The branches clattered in the wind like chimes, and ice fell and broke on the hard ground.

  Animal shapes rose from the loam and leaf rot. Deer and rabbits and squirrels, soot black and staring, trapped here the same as her. Out of the dark and cold, a shape pushed through the leaves and came to her, a child in an orange hunting vest.

  “This is your fault,” said the boy.

  “You took him away,” Jane said. “You tortured him for years, and now you killed him.”

  “I was alone,” the boy said. “He was all I had. You tricked me and buried me in the ground.”

  Jane, no. Be careful.

  “You’re dead!” she shouted. “You’re supposed to be in the ground.”

  The boy grabbed her arm, his touch so cold that it burned and left ashen streaks on her skin. “You have a ghost too,” he said. “Are you going to bury it?”

  “Trigger was sorry for what happened. Why did you kill him? He was a good person.”

  “You didn’t want him,” the ghost said. “But I did. He was my family. He should be here with me. Why should he be alive if I’m not?”

  Jane held her aching arm and cried, the tears icing down her cheek. The tune from the music box began to play, sweeping through the forest with the wind and growing louder until it sounded like the trees were hung with chimes. The ghost boy dropped a shovel on the dirt in front of her.

  “You want to be with my brother?” he asked. “Then dig. Make a hole and get inside.”

  Her mouth was dry from fear. Her ghost sank deep within her, heavy and distant, like a stone falling through water. It couldn’t save her, and it was afraid that it would fade too, losing the one thing that tethered it to the world.

  Jane stood and picked up the shovel, not knowing what else to do but dig. She couldn’t find her way out of the haunted house. She was in the dead boy’s winter kingdom, and
he would do what he wanted with her.

  She pushed the tip of the shovel into the frozen ground. Her hands were chapped with cold, sticking to the handle and scraped raw. The earth was stony and hard, tiny roots spiraling through the dirt, bright with ice. The boy watched her, and she dug. If this was all only a haunting, if the shovel and the frozen earth and the dark woods weren’t real, why did everything hurt so much?

  A white shape stepped between the trees in front of her. A man, tall and wide-shouldered, standing in a bulky hazmat suit. He had a tank of cleaning solution on his back, a metal pump and hose in his hand. Through his facemask, he looked at Jane with Trigger’s broad, young face, his eyes full of longing. Trigger had come back as a ghost. He too was lost in his brother’s sad dream.

  Her ghost rose in her again. Don’t talk to him. You don’t know what he wants.

  Jane dropped the shovel, her hands numb with cold. The ghost boy had disappeared when his brother had come, but her ghost could still feel him watching.

  “Trigger? Do you remember me? Can you help me get out?”

  Trigger’s face was empty of expression behind the mask. He didn’t speak. But he came and put his arm around her, the barrier of the suit making the embrace feel strange, and led her into the trees.

  “I’m so sorry for what happened to you,” Jane said. “I wanted you to be happy. I was trying to help.”

  He isn’t the same, her ghost said. Be careful. He wants to show you something.

  Ahead of her, Jane heard rain. She felt heat. She was almost free. The ghost flit through her mind, afraid but not saying why, its presence as light as insect wings.

  The front door and living room came back into focus through the trees. Trigger’s ghost brought her to the couch where Mason lay shaking with fever. A whir of gnashing thoughts swarmed over him, his ghosts a hive. He held the music box, dirty and split in half. He muttered to himself, quick and clipped sounds, no meaning to them apart from accusation, blame, anger. His eyes blazed, motes of light dancing like arcs of lightning.

  A dozen ghosts pressed their lips to his ears and spoke to him. Their dead hands fought for control of his body, and they poured their grief and hate through his blood. More spirits, fragments small and sharp like fiberglass, itched in his muscles and bones, making him flinch and kick.

  He obsessed over the last few days. The gates of Pig City shut for the first time that he’d been alive. A funeral for a pig. The rumor that the plant would never open again. He knew who was responsible, who had encouraged the pigs, who had come into his home and taken something private away from him. A warped, ugly version of Jane and her family crawled through his mind. It was their fault, he had decided.

  Mason had gone into the ruins of downtown with a few others from the plant. They had found vicious ghosts and let the spirits fill them up. Loaded full, the ghosts packed into them like bullets in a gun, Mason and the others had driven to Jane’s house in the dark. He’d come to wreak violence on her family, not because he thought it would make anything better for him, but because he wanted to take whatever he could from her.

  Mason shouldn’t be alone, Jane knew. Trigger wouldn’t want his father abandoned in that haunted house, shivering with the poison inside of him. She had gotten ghosts out of people before. There was every chance she could save him. But she wasn’t going to try. Whatever was inside of him he had invited in. Let it burrow down until it filled even his bones.

  The door was in front of her. With a crash of sound and damp, Jane was back in the rain. Behind her sat the house, its door swinging open. Inside, the forest stretched deep and covered in ice. Warmth moved through her limbs. Trigger’s ghost still held her arm, still looked at her with his flat dead eyes. He was solid and real, as if he were alive. But he was wrong, too, less than he’d been before.

  “What can I do?” Jane asked. “What do you need?”

  He spoke, his voice expanding in her mind like a cloud of smoke. To be with you, Trigger said. To haunt you.

  She backed toward her car. Trigger’s ghost watched her go, the early-morning light blurring his edges. Jane locked her doors, knowing it wouldn’t keep him out if he tried to follow, and spun her tires pulling out of the driveway. His pale shape grew smaller in her mirror.

  “Is he following me?” Jane asked.

  Not yet.

  She should be ashamed to have left him there, to have abandoned him like everyone else had. But Jane didn’t want his ghost living inside her, filling her up with his old pain. Emptied of all feeling, she drove back to her house.

  Through her windshield, the sun swelled over the town of the dead.

  Henry woke from a heavy, dreamless sleep. He sat up and found himself on the haunted school bus. It groaned and lurched forward, dragging itself through the ruins of Swine Hill.

  The seats and aisles were crowded with jostling ghosts, mostly children screaming that they wanted to go home. But they had no home left to go to. Something was missing or different. Their parents were gone. New families had moved into their old houses. The smallest change—a missing stop sign, a porch torn down after storm damage, an overgrown lawn, an empty house—might keep them on the bus, not seeing a place where they belonged outside the rows of ripped seats and rubber floor.

  How had he gotten here? The last thing Henry remembered was rain. The pale ghost-light in the eyes of the men who chased him, their teeth clenched so hard that blood ran from their gums. His sister shouting from their mom’s car, backing out of the driveway. Over them all, the ridge above the town burning with light again, like Hogboss had decided to reopen the plant and spare Swine Hill.

  He remembered the cop car, its handle crusted with something like rust, and how he had thrown open the door and fallen inside. It was the bleeding man’s cruiser. In the dark, the man’s face was drowned in shadow and the red glow from his console. His sparse hair was matted and streaked, his hands dark. Henry never would have run to him for help, not if he’d had anywhere else to go. His best friend was gone, fallen out of reality. Violent men were coming for him. He needed the safety of a locked door. Henry shouted wordlessly, hands out and pleading.

  I’ve got you. The cop’s raised arm, like he might shield Henry. And then the dark mouth of the gun, its blue-black shine, and a world-shattering sound in the close space of the car.

  What happened after? Henry looked up and saw his reflection in the bus driver’s wide mirror.

  He had his nose again. Henry reached up and felt its soft bulge, the scars and bandages gone. Had his ghost come back? Had it saved him, rebuilt his nose, and left him here? It was the only thing that made sense.

  There were gaps in his memory again. He couldn’t remember how his ghost had returned or what it had done with him when it came back. He couldn’t remember how it fixed his nose or rescued him from the mob.

  It was early morning. Henry looked out the window, trying to understand how much time had passed, and saw that Swine Hill had changed. Power was out at every gas station, house, and convenience store. People sat on their front steps or lay in their yards muttering to themselves, shivering from the cold things that had slithered inside them. They twitched and trembled, their eyes blazing with light. Henry didn’t need Jane to tell him that they were haunted.

  He wasn’t the same either. His haunting felt different. Whatever ghost power was in him, it was closer to the surface. He had a certainty about things that he’d never had before. His mind burned electric. On the window, he traced equations with his fingertip, inventing formulae as he needed, translating everything around him into a language of numbers and functions. He could almost reach out and grab the world, spin it like a globe in his hands. He’d never felt so brilliant, so in control.

  After the alien light merged with Bethany, she’d said that the world seemed thinner, like she might pass right through it. Henry could see that now. Beyond the foam seats and metal hull of the bus, past the overgrown yards and falling houses, the world was paper-thin. He could see through its
glassy edges into some other place beyond.

  Beyond the horizon and outside of reality, Henry saw a great, yawning nothing. It pulled at him like wind on his back and water rushing over his feet. If he didn’t find some way to anchor himself, he knew that he would be dragged away.

  Far out in that dark place, there was a single point of brightness. It was the unmistakable glow of the alien, the strange light that had become a part of Bethany. Henry tried to look away from it, but the geometry of the void curled through and around Swine Hill. No matter which way he turned, he could see Bethany’s light burning in the deep.

  He had thought that when his ghost came back, he would know how to save her. But looking into that sea of emptiness, he felt small and cold. Even with his ghost, he wouldn’t be able to help. It should have devastated him, but he didn’t feel guilty about the past anymore. His mind only had room for the present. Everything seemed possible again. He was going to right as many of his wrongs as he could. He was going to mend his broken family.

  The bus let him off in front of his house. The other homes on their street, long empty of people, boiled with ghosts cut loose from the plant. Henry could hear them in the groan of boards swaying in the wind, could see their bright eyes moving through the dark windows. Even during the day, they paced and raved, ready to make someone hurt for all that they had lost.

  Their yard was churned up from the heavy boots of the mob. The robot lay blighted across the driveway, its body crushed and battery dead. The head tilted toward him, the lenses of its eyes cracked and one of its arms stretched out, palm open. Its lanky frame wore the tatters of his father’s old clothes, rippling in the wind.

  Before, Henry had always wanted to fix it. But now, with his mind leaping electric again, Henry understood. There was use in broken things. The robot, lying dead across the front walk, was exactly what he needed to help his mother. He felt like a fool for not understanding before. So many things were perfectly clear now. He stepped over the machine and went inside the house.