Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  The downstairs was trashed from Bethany’s battle with the plant workers. Picture frames had fallen to the floor, their faces spiderwebbed with cracks. The couch was upside down, spilling foam and splintered wood. Holes were constellated across the drywall, and the hardwood floor was sagging and cracked from whatever Bethany had done when she’d hurled people out of the universe.

  He went through the house looking for something, but he didn’t know what he needed. It was like he’d lost his keys or his wallet, some small and essential thing that he couldn’t go on without. What he wanted, he realized, was to find something that reminded him of himself.

  At the base of the stairwell, one of his father’s metal toolboxes was hinged open. Henry had left it out weeks ago when he’d needed to tighten a loose leg on the kitchen table. The toolbox was softly dimpled, its latch broken, and the red paint was scuffed through in places, showing its gray metal skin. He kneeled on the floor and stared at the tools for a while. The scrambled socket set looked like a series of tunnels. He imagined himself walking through them, pressing his hands against their smooth sides. The pile of wrenches, pliers, and screwdrivers looked like a city folded in on itself. For a moment, he felt vertigo, like he might fall inside and become lost.

  With effort, Henry pulled himself away from the toolbox and went upstairs.

  He found Jane lying in his bed. She had one of his old shirts balled up in her hands, and the skin under her eyes was swollen. She looked more tired than he’d ever seen her. When he stepped into the doorway, Jane covered her mouth with her hands, suppressing a scream.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Where’s Mom?”

  He went to his desk where a clutter of old school papers was mixed with the notes he had taken on Bethany. He winced to see his thinking written out, how shallow and simple it all was. None of this could have helped her. He glanced over the stack of papers, finding Neilson’s pain engine notes. He knew as soon as he touched them that they weren’t what he needed.

  Jane pulled her knees to her chest, staring wide-eyed at Henry. She still hadn’t spoken. Her clothes were dirty and wrinkled, her hands scraped and shoes muddy. She looked shattered.

  “Did Mom get hurt? Did something happen?” he asked.

  Jane swallowed and spoke very softly. “What do you want?”

  At one time, that might have been a hard question for him to answer. He had wanted to invent or discover something amazing, to be respected and remembered. But he had never really known what that something might be. He had wanted to go to a good college because he was supposed to and he thought he might like it. He had wanted to leave Swine Hill because it was such a small and suffocating place. But those were vague wants, undefined, more a wanting not to fail than a want for anything in particular.

  But now he knew exactly what he wanted. It was the only thing he wanted, and it was clear and sharp and drove his every thought. He had no plans beyond satisfying this desire. It was all of him.

  “I’m going to fix my mistakes,” he said.

  Jane started to cry. Henry sat on the bed, thinking, for some reason, of the dancing girl who had spent her last night next to him. Did she get pulled into the darkness beyond the world? When he thought of it, he could see Bethany’s bright star again.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Jane struggled to catch her breath. “They butchered Dennis, and I felt every bit of it. Bethany is gone. Trigger was murdered, and his brother’s ghost almost killed me, too. They tried to kill all of us. Our own neighbors. People we grew up with. Everything is wrong, but I kept hoping you were alive. God, Henry. I’m so sorry.”

  For the first time since his ghost had returned, he felt a dissonance in himself. It bothered him that she thought he had died. Why would she say that?

  He could see something familiar on her face. Jane had regrets. Everything was so broken, and she wanted to make it right. Maybe his sister was what he had been looking for. They could rebuild the world together. He started to sit down on the bed, his arms out to pull her close. He had the same feeling as when he stared into the toolbox, a feeling that he was growing small.

  Jane backed away from him.

  “I didn’t know about Trigger,” he said. “He was a good guy. I might have died in the school bathroom if he hadn’t found me. I’m sorry, Jane. As soon as I make things better here, we’re going to leave, just like you always wanted.”

  It felt odd to say that he was going to leave. For some reason, he couldn’t imagine what lay beyond Swine Hill. He tried to think of somewhere else—a city or country or university—but couldn’t name a single place. He didn’t dwell on it, though. He had too much to worry about here.

  Jane shook her head, looking at Henry like she didn’t recognize him. “I don’t know where Dad is. My car is dead with ghosts. I don’t have anyone left. I’m going to die here just like everyone else.”

  These were problems he could solve. It was all he wanted to do, to make right the things he had left undone. Waiting was unbearable. He got up and went to his desk, gesturing to the slowly beating heart in its box.

  “Take this,” he said. “It will help you find Dad.”

  Jane waited until Henry backed away before she would approach the desk. She picked up the box and opened it, grimacing in disgust. She cried silently, her voice soft. “You made this? A heart?”

  “I didn’t make it,” Henry said. “I took it years ago. It’s Dad’s heart. Can you find him and give it back for me?”

  Jane watched the heart’s slow beat. “You took it?”

  “My ghost must have thought it was helping. I did a lot of things I didn’t mean to. But everything is different now. I have control. Just wait. I’ll fix your car. I’ll put our family back together. I’ll even fix Swine Hill.”

  “What about the pigs you made?” Jane asked.

  “What’s wrong with the pigs?” He tried to remember if there was some flaw with the pig people, but he couldn’t think of any. He’d built them to work at the plant, and they did it beautifully. He thought of Hogboss—his skill in managing the plant, his strength, his honesty and kindness. The pig man and his kin were maybe the only good thing Henry had ever done.

  “Pig City owns them,” Jane said. “They’re being shipped all over the country to train the next generation of pig people. You made slaves, Henry. And when they start working and more people get laid off, everywhere will be just like Swine Hill.”

  Had he made them for that, to be owned heart and hoof by the Pig City Corporation? Was this Neilson’s pain engine, the pig people made to overturn the world? Henry couldn’t remember. He didn’t like it, though. They did their work, but they also loved and hurt and learned. They had already changed so much about Swine Hill. People were asking questions they had never asked before: what it meant to be a person, what the world owed them, if they could escape the past. Henry thought of the philosophy and ethics questions in his binder, the hard problems he had never liked to think about. The pigs forced those questions. They would change how humans saw the world. Dennis believed that Henry had made the pigs for more. He must have.

  “You’re right. I need to fix that too. I’ll get it done.”

  He could tell by her face that she didn’t believe him. She was afraid. He didn’t blame her. He had been making everything worse for a long time, the ghost in him wrecking whatever it touched. But everything was different now. She would see.

  “Pack your things,” Henry told her. “We’re leaving.”

  Henry found himself in Hogboss’s house. His ghost must have brought him. His mother’s things were scattered everywhere. He found her sleeping in Hogboss’s bed, though the pig man wasn’t with her. Henry turned on the light.

  “Henry?” His mother sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Your nose is back! Are you okay? Where have you been?”

  He could see the ghost seething inside her. It rose out of her like a bonfire, a shapeless and burning cloud of need. Finally, after years of watching her suffe
r, he could help.

  “Come with me, Mom. I have to show you something.”

  He tried to pull her up from the bed, but his mother drew away. He put a hand on her shoulder. The contact didn’t burn him.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “My ghost can protect me.”

  Her face fell. She wrapped her arms around him, sobbing into his shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said. “Not you, too.”

  His mother’s ghost ballooned up huge, seeming to fill the room. It wanted love and touch. It wanted to know it wouldn’t be abandoned. Henry had nothing it needed.

  “Let’s go home, Mom.”

  “I don’t have a home,” she cried. “I had one, but I killed it. Jane is the only one I have left, and she’ll never forgive me. My baby. I’m so sorry, my poor baby boy.”

  “Come on, Mom,” Henry said. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I need you to follow me.”

  He led her into the morning light, telling her that everything would soon be okay.

  Henry was careful to steer her around those streets and houses where powerful ghosts prowled for someone to haunt or hurt. Swine Hill had become a labyrinth of spirits. Henry could see them now, the layers of brick and wood thin to his eyes, the lurking ghosts bright as fire behind them.

  His mother blamed herself. Said that it was her fault she’d lost her family. She wondered where Hogboss had gone, if he had left her too. Henry urged her along faster. He should have dealt with her ghost a long time ago.

  It took an hour to walk across town back to their house. When they finally arrived, his mother was drenched in sweat. She trembled with fever and gasped, mouth dry with heat. From the window upstairs, Jane looked down at them.

  Henry took his mother down the walk to stand over the robot. It was rusted dark, the gleam gone from its metal body. It looked skeletal in his father’s baggy clothes.

  His mother’s ghost looked down on the dying machine and saw something that spoke to it more than any sad song ever could. The robot had never been in love with Henry’s mother. It had always been in love with her ghost, had loved the spirit with a pathetic and hungry want that mirrored the ghost’s own. They were made for each other, but the robot had never been broken and full of need enough for the ghost to notice it before. Lying shattered and abandoned on the grass, the machine was everything his mother’s ghost feared it would become.

  His mother clutched her chest as the ghost forced itself out of her, unwinding its limbs from her own and stepping free. It was a woman-shaped shadow with long-fingered hands and hair that dragged the ground, the air shimmering hot around it. For ten years it had made his mother fear being abandoned. Now it cast her aside without looking back.

  The burning spirit fell down on the robot and sent soaring blue light shooting through its chassis and pouring from its eyes. The spirit haunted its battery and motherboard, moving like a storm through its programming. Machine and ghost became one. They held each other, wanting never to let go.

  The robot’s new ghost forced out the fragments of spirits fouling up its servos and wiring. It stood, a haunted machine, powered by its own want. It wrapped its arms around itself and spoke for the first time. Its voice was hollow and sharp, a warping of metal.

  “I am love,” the robot said.

  Jane came outside and ran to her mother, hugging her tight for the first time since she’d been a girl. The robot smiled down at them, completely content with itself. Something was still wrong, though. His mother didn’t say anything. Jane wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “See,” Henry said. “I got rid of Mom’s ghost. Why aren’t you happy?”

  Jane’s face was tight with grief. “I should have protected you. I should have gotten you out of Swine Hill sooner. If I hadn’t been such a coward, we could have left.”

  “We will leave,” Henry said.

  “No,” Jane said. “You can’t. You’ll be stuck in Swine Hill until you do whatever it is you need to do, but you won’t ever be able to come with us.”

  The world felt thinner suddenly, the void closer, the sun somehow less bright.

  “But I want to go with you,” he said.

  “I want you to come with me too,” Jane said. “But you can’t. You’re dead, Henry.”

  “No, I’m not.” Henry looked at his hands, his shoes, the sidewalk under his feet. “I’m right here.”

  “Your ghost didn’t come back.” Jane bit her lip and closed her eyes, fighting to keep her voice steady. “You are the ghost. I’m going to miss you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how much you meant to me when you were alive.”

  “Get in Mom’s car,” Henry said. “The robot can push you back to Hogboss’s house. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Don’t go looking for someone to haunt,” Jane said. “Don’t use someone like your ghost used you.”

  Henry almost screamed. He didn’t want to hear that they thought he was dead. He didn’t want to think that he might be a ghost. He had work to do. He was going to make things better. Why couldn’t she see that? His body dissolved into smoke. He ran from them like a gust of wind.

  * * *

  Henry was downtown, walking between the old brick buildings a few blocks away from the school. He didn’t have time to argue with Jane. He had to help the pigs. Certain that nothing could hurt him, he plunged into the dark of a haunted warehouse.

  The ghosts inside shrank from him. It was the middle of the day, sunlight cutting in through the broken windows to expose everything for what it was: dead insects and trash, scattered bricks, fallen boards. Whatever this place had meant to the spirits before, it wasn’t the same now. They just barely clung to it, desperate to remember the lives they had lost.

  Henry found a dog in the corner, shivering with fever. It was covered in sores, its ears in tatters from fighting. This was a different dog, but the violent ghost inside it was the same, the feral and hungry thing that had wanted to haunt him when he was at his weakest.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Henry said.

  “Of course you’re not,” the haunted animal said. “Why would you be?”

  It was mocking him, but he didn’t understand why.

  “You’re going to come with me,” Henry said.

  “I can’t haunt you,” it said. “You missed your chance.”

  “I have something else for you to haunt. Something hungry and swift as light. Something with a million tiny teeth.”

  The dog staggered to its feet, panting past curling fangs. “I’ll go and see what you have. But just because I can’t haunt you doesn’t mean I can’t hurt you, little boy. Night will be here eventually. You might remember fear then.”

  The dog came with him, limping its way down the sinking stairs. Henry seemed to fly over the road, the dog running along behind him. What had the spirit meant, that he had missed his chance? His mind felt strange, too singular. He couldn’t puzzle it out right now, couldn’t be bothered to think about it. He had to help the pigs. He had to help his family. He had to save the town from its toxic haunting. Nothing else was worth a thought.

  * * *

  He was back in his room, waiting for the robot to return. He needed to use his computer. He knew what he wanted to do, but for some reason he couldn’t do it himself. He needed another set of hands. Henry stared out the window, frustrated, while the haunted dog grinned from his bed.

  Finally the robot came walking back down the street. The burning ghost rolled through its limbs and body. To Henry, now able to see ghosts as easily as he could see anything else, the robot looked like it was on fire. It came upstairs, and Henry motioned for it to sit in front of his computer.

  He leaned close to the machine, explaining what he wanted it to do. The robot’s blunt fingertips battered the keyboard, making keystrokes as quickly as Henry could bring them to mind. After a while, he realized he was inside the robot’s head, looking down at his monitor through its staring yellow eyes. He could feel the burning ghost curled in its gut, jealous and wanting Henry
to leave the robot alone. The laughing dog watched and grew larger as the day waned.

  At some point, Henry found himself drifting through a maze. Walls of metal and silicone surrounded him. He wandered for a long time, the sound of the robot’s fingers booming on the keyboard somewhere far away, like thunderheads or falling bombs. He caught chains of electricity and flashed through the labyrinth. Where was his body? In a wave of panic, he realized that he was somehow inside one of the robot’s microchips. He wrenched himself free.

  Like waking from a dream, he found himself standing over the robot again, directing its work. This wasn’t anything unusual, he told himself. When his ghost had taken control of him before, he always lost time. Still, he tried not to think about the tiny architecture inside of the machine.

  Using the robot’s hands, Henry built a computer virus, something ravenous and multiplying. It would sweep through Pig City’s corporate systems and destroy every bit of data about the self-slaughtering pigs. There would be no record of Hogboss, of Dennis, of any of the pig people. The genetic information, surgical enhancements, and hormone regimens Henry had invented would be consumed.

  He needed to be sure that his virus could slip easily through any firewall, could lie unseen on hard drives and snap up the data Pig City’s scientists and managers thought most safe. He gestured for the haunted dog to come closer. “Look. See how hungry this is? Does it remind you of anyone?”

  The dog sniffed the computer, ghost-light blazing in its nose and mouth. “It does have a million tiny teeth,” it said. “It is hungry. It understands what I am.”

  The ghost crawled out of the mouth of the dog and poured itself into the computer, nestling into the ragged lines of code Henry had written. The monitor darkened to gray, the colors draining out of it. The animal, unhaunted and afraid, ran downstairs and back into the sun.