The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  Through the glass jars, Pulsa diNura looked warped, like something out of the sideshows that sometimes came through Gallows.

  Sitting up, Atticus whispered, “I don’t see anything.”

  Herbert’s calm demeanor was gone. With the thing’s arrival, he’d grown frantic and scared—feelings Atticus figured the Membrane wouldn’t allow.

  It gives just enough of yourself to keep you out of the Abyss, Atticus realized. The kind of torture you don’t realize is torture; the kind that almost seems charitable.

  “I haven’t seen them enough to figure out what they are,” Herbert said, lowering his voice. The footsteps grew louder. “They only seem to—”

  A figure lumbered into view and dropped the body of the boy it’d been dragging. Dark blond hair spilled out from under the ragged hat it wore, obscuring the figure’s face. A leather coat covered in stains and cracks ran down to its knees, stopping at its boots, which were all buckles and straps. Its right hand had disappeared somewhere up its sleeve, while its left held a shepherd’s crook.

  Atticus gritted his teeth and gripped his chest. It burned, like he’d swallowed a piece of the sun.

  Herbert mouthed, “Are you okay?” and Atticus gave a weak nod when the heat died down.

  The shepherd took a step, draping the ends of its coat over the boy. Thump, thump, thump. It banged the crook on the platform, but the boy didn’t stir. Out of curiosity or impatience, it leaned forward and continued to crack the crook against the ground.

  “What’s it doing?” Atticus whispered.

  Herbert shook his head. “I think, maybe, this is how we got here.”

  Atticus raised an eyebrow. “No, I don’t think that’s right. I remember—”

  The shepherd reared up. Its right hand, wrapped tightly with pink bandages, lowered out of its sleeve. One by one, the strips of gauze unraveled. Together, they fell into a pile on the platform. The shepherd stretched its hand, picked at the green paint splattered across its nails.

  “Oh, fuck!” Atticus fell back and gripped his chest. Between his ribs, metal ground, scraped his bones. He put his arm to his mouth and screamed into it.

  “Atticus. Atticus, stop.”

  Herbert took him in his arms and held him there, deafening his cries and putting an end to his rocking.

  “We can’t interrupt it.” He patted Atticus’ back as he came to again. “You okay? You’re okay. Let’s go, let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry, Herb. I’m not sure what’s happening to me.” He straightened up and then, looking over the pile of wire and glass, said, “What the fuck?”

  The pink bandages shot into the air. With a will of their own, they twisted and extended, until they made themselves into a rudimentary human form. The shepherd dug into the jacket’s linings and came back with a vial of orange liquid. It threw the vial hard at the ground.

  When it shattered, a cloud of sparking smoke engulfed the bandages. Scratches like suicide attempts rose out of the gauze, forming runes.

  Atticus fell forward, crashing into the wires and glass, giving them away for good.

  “I’m sorry,” he started. “Oh fuck!”

  The Echoes of his death pummeled him to the platform. He felt the kunai in his chest, the hairs of its rope sticking in his skin.

  “Make it stop!”

  The shepherd stared at Atticus with indifference and went back to the bandages. With both hands, it clutched the crook and held it over its head. The sparking strips shuddered, retracted, and exploded, full and whole, into the form of an ephemeral corpse. Colored like bloody milk, the soul, the boy’s spitting image, immediately went to the ground, crawled atop the child, and sank into him.

  When the boy’s eyes opened, the shepherd suddenly took interest in Atticus’ presence. Like a dog protecting its property, it went down on its haunches and bayed behind its blond hair.

  “Scoot back. It’ll tear you apart,” he heard Herbert say. “The things it can do to you… On your ass, god damn it!”

  Out of nowhere, a sinewy streak of light bore down on Atticus and broke through the top of his skull. Scolding tendrils of suffering spread like roots through his body.

  Herbert North was saying something now, but there were too many voices in his head for him to hear.

  Atticus’ throat closed shut as the shepherd’s crook looped around his neck. But before it could jerk him back, the sinewy streak threw him into the air, toward the clouds like tumors in the flesh sky.

  The voices multiplied in his head as he hurtled toward the vortex of skin. They were hurried, desperate. He recognized Gary’s and Mr. Haemo’s among them. But the one that stood out the most was the one that wasn’t in his head at all.

  Clementine’s.

  Fighting against the streak, which he moved along like a bead upon a chain, Atticus turned his gaze toward the ground. He had to squint to see her, but in the shrinking outskirts of Pulsa diNura, Clementine stood. She was naked, and she was alone, and once again, no matter how hard he fought, no matter how hard he screamed, he was leaving her behind.

  CHAPTER VII

  It happened fast, but not fast enough for Atticus to forget what he’d seen. There was a place beyond the flesh sky, where the Membrane ended in a colossal knot of open arteries. The streak shoved him into one near the heart of the nest. The blood there did the rest.

  Inside the artery, he was surprised to find its sides covered in pale green tiles. Back in Gallows, some fifteen odd years ago, there had been an Old World swimming pool colored and checkered the same; it had sat in the marsh Mr. Haemo now inhabited. Until he moved in, all the kids had flocked there. The pool had been a good place to catch a date or a bad case of diarrhea—which one you ended up with just depended on how much you opened your mouth.

  “Who’s that?” Atticus remembered asking his friend one lonely day. In the deep end, a girl sat at the bottom of the pool, her hair like a halo of fire around her head.

  The blood was pushing him harder now. The farther he went up the artery, the more tiled it became. He tried to grab onto the walls, like he had in the Membrane, but he was moving too fast. There was no stopping the momentum.

  “Nmw’gla fhtha xu… ek’mwn uh’fh’xu ma’ta.”

  The words rippled through the blood, each syllable a blinding smack across his brow. Going upward, he went backward through time.

  He saw Will in waves, birth to last night’s late-night beating. He felt the weight of his boy, and then on his neck, like a sigh from spring, Will’s warm breath. He traveled back some years, to when Will had come home crying. He hugged Atticus, and told him how much he hated the first girl he had ever loved.

  “Nmw’gla fhta xu … ek’mwn uh’fh’xu ma’ta.”

  Now, Atticus’ father rose out of the blood, eyes shining something fierce. He got the closest he’d ever been to his father. In the man’s reptilian eyes, he saw his mother. Her knuckles were chewed up from all the teeth they’d cracked, because she gave what she got twice over. The fear between them was palpable, a force of its own. It pulled them together, and kept them apart.

  “Nmw’gla fhta xu … ek’mwn uh’fh’xu ma’ta.”

  Atticus bucked in the blood, tried to get himself caught in a bend. One of the sanitarium-green tiles was missing. Through the small square, he saw Clementine standing in the dark, her hair the only light there.

  No, no, no! I can’t do this anymore.

  Clementine’s fashion changed with her furor. Her scowl evened out into a smile, while her dirty pants loosened into a skirt. Her stomach swelled and flattened and swelled again.

  Please, stop, he begged, but no one was listening. I can’t see that again.

  But again he saw it, Ronny down the road coming up it, mighty and triumphant.

  “Nmw’gla fhta xu… ek’mwn uh’fh’xu ma’ta.”

  Ahead, oily shadows danced on rims of light. Atticus pulled back and made for them. Whether it brought him to the Membrane or the Abyss, he didn’t care. Either he
had his wife and son, or nothing at all. The torture he deserved, yes, but fuck it, he didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it.

  “Nmw’gla fhta xu… ek’mwn uh’fh’xu ma’ta.”

  Atticus gasped and touched the darkness. Fresh air, wet grass; the sour smell of rot. He shot out of the artery and collapsed. Pale and ephemeral, every part of him in pain, he looked like the soul that had settled into the boy moments ago.

  “Nmw’gla fhta—”

  It was after the chanting stopped that Atticus realized where he’d emerged. The sky curved over him, the stars like white eyes looking down from black heavens. Beneath him, the ground thrummed, spitting out red smoke and shrouding him in it. He could taste the air, that swirling mire of iron and ichor, and listening closely, heard whispers.

  I can’t be here. This can’t be right. He sat up, cried out. At the edge of the artery, he found his nude corpse lying in the grass. Like the cruelest truth, the sight tore through his mind and left it naked and raw. With its rigid limbs and sickly sheen, Atticus’ body looked like an insect that’d crawled out to die in the light. All that he was and all that he’d done, that body didn’t hold. To know him would be to know those he knew, and they were most likely no better off.

  “Atticus?”

  The question was a confirmation, the voice, a trigger. A ravenous urge overcame him, but this ghostly form of his had no interest in earthly pleasures. He wanted life, wanted to swallow it whole. He needed to push it down his gullet, feel it thrashing in his stomach. Atticus looked at his corpse and, like an animal turned on its master, went for it.

  He scurried across the grass and mounted his body. He had to be in it, inside it. He had to have what it did and he didn’t. The carcass pulled him closer, its skin like hooks piercing his translucent tissue. He relented, the envy too heavy to hold, and sank into his rotten shell.

  “Hey… hey, is he okay?”

  Atticus shot up, digging his heels into the dirt, his fingers into his palms. As the last of his soul went back where it belonged, strands of excruciating pain threaded throughout his body. Like needlework, they pierced his bones and his organs, creating a patchwork of anguish. The sensation was suffocating, but it was real; by it, kicking and screaming, he was made new.

  “W-where… where are they… t-they…” Atticus addressed Gary, who was standing in the grainy dark. “What… what happened? Why am I… Why are we at Haemo’s?”

  The ghoul gestured for him to calm down. With a bum leg and bad cough, he closed the gap and helped Atticus up.

  Gary’s rugged flesh scraped against Atticus’ hand, but he didn’t mind much. What gave him pause, however, was the way he wavered, the way the dead thing looked deader. He remembered Gary falling that night. That night Clementine and Will…

  “Where are they?” In his lust for life, he’d forgotten their deaths. The memories boiled in his brain and spilt out as tears down his face. “Gary, tell me!”

  “They’re gone, Atticus. Killed,” he whispered, mouth quivering. He cupped Atticus’ head with his half-bone hand and held him. “I tried to stop those sons of bitches, I did. I promise you.”

  “I know you did,” Atticus whimpered.

  “They had a weapon. Caught me catching them. A Death weapon. One nick was enough to send me down. I’m so sorry. Look at me.” The ghoul wrapped both hands around Atticus’ head and managed a glint of sympathy in his glassy eyes. “We brought you back. We can make this better.” He paused, trembled. Ants fell out of his mouth. “We can make this better.”

  “Brought me back?” Again, a surge of images overtook him. The kitchen, his dying; the Membrane, his afterlife; the artery, his rebirth. “What did you do to me?”

  “He didn’t do much but provide some of the ingredients,” Mr. Haemo buzzed behind Atticus, his jagged shadow growing across the grass. “Give credit where credit is due.”

  Atticus turned, his nudity once again giving him some qualms in the presence of the blood lord. Behind him, the mosquito stood, wrapped tightly in his cloak of flesh, the hood of it resting atop his proboscis. In one claw, he gripped a ball of Atticus’ bloodstained clothes. In the other, a rolled portrait of him and his family.

  “You were dead. This one here begged me to bring you back.”

  Red smoke coughed out of the well. A fine mist of blood washed across the isle, speckling what it touched.

  Atticus glanced down at himself. He looked like a harlequin with all that splotchy, stiff skin of his. “How did—?”

  “Blood, of course,” the mosquito continued, voice shrill with glee, “and bits of you, for the delving.”

  Atticus shook his head. He didn’t know what he was; dead, undead, on borrowed time. But he did know this: he’d seen Clementine in the Membrane.

  “We have to get her back! I saw her there, before you pulled me out. Gary,” he said, turning to appeal to his friend, “we’re going to, right?”

  “Atticus,” Gary said, cringing as something inside him tore through his composure, “we already tried.”

  “What?”

  Atticus went back and forth between the ghoul and the mosquito. He could feel Mr. Haemo’s children sucking on him, to replenish lost stock.

  “What the fuck are you saying? You choose them over me, every time! That’s what we say, what you promised, god damn it! You promised me.”

  Mr. Haemo plodded forward, hints of his wings emerging from his cloak. “Don’t give him a hard time, you ungrateful prick.” He shoved the ball of clothes and portrait into Atticus’ chest. “You need something dead to get in, and blood to track the soul. Memories to coax it out, and a body to hold it. And words, hungry ones, to keep it all together.”

  “It took us days to bring you out of the Membrane,” Gary said. “And we had more than enough blood to do it. Mr. Haemo’s children have been feeding on you for decades. And the well is the other half of the old swimming pool… for the memory.”

  Atticus raised an eyebrow, his once-dead muscles struggling with the gesture. “What went—?”

  “A soul without a body is a cruel thing. For you, it was only a moment, but you remember the feeling, don’t you?” Mr. Haemo sounded as though he were enjoying himself.

  Atticus understood what he meant. In that brief, bodiless moment, he had wanted nothing more than to consume life, to hoard and covet it, if only so that nothing else could have it.

  “Give him a moment,” Gary pleaded with the monstrosity. “Let him catch his breath.”

  Mr. Haemo threw back his hood and trained his bulbous eyes on the ghoul. Mosquitoes phased in and out around them. A low rumbling bounded across the island.

  “What went wrong?” Atticus started to unravel the portrait and then stopped. Dead, undead, or on borrowed time, he still felt a dreadful loss.

  “You and yours are a stubborn kind.”

  Mr. Haemo shouldered past Atticus and dipped his hands in the well. Blood pooled in his yellow-streaked palms. He carried the offering to the ghoul, who lapped it up.

  “I’ve always liked your family. You treat us creeps with kindness. And I didn’t much care for what the soldiers did to you all. Gary said you would never accept the Abyss. After we did some delving, we saw that to be true.”

  “Clementine was in the Membrane.”

  Gary’s eyes rolled back in his head. It made Atticus’ stomach turn.

  What the hell is wrong with him? He said, “Is Will down there, too?”

  Mr. Haemo nodded. “Stubborn sons of bitches. Always putting up a fight, even when it’s Death you’re fighting. We tried for—” he and the ghoul exchanged nods, “—awhile to bring them back, but the ritual wouldn’t take. We could get their souls right now, but that wouldn’t do. You wouldn’t want them like that.”

  Eyes readjusting in his mossy skull, Gary said, “Wouldn’t do.”

  Atticus cocked his head. “You have the blood… the memories… everything. What else do you need? I’ll get it, just tell me.” Atticus stopped speaking, finally catching
the mosquito’s meaning. “Their bodies.” He spun in place. “Where are their bodies? They’re not here?”

  “No, they’re not,” Gary said, finally coming to. “Because the soldiers took them.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Atticus tore westward through marshland, Gary behind him and Mr. Haemo above. They warned him as he left the isle that something had gone wrong with the summoning, that the wrong words had been spoken, that too much ghoul flesh had been used. They told him to take it slow, because if he went any faster, he’d be right back where he started.

  So he told them to get the fuck out of his way and headed home.

  He didn’t recognize the farmhouse when he found it. Trauma will do that to a thing. He started up the porch, stopped to catch his breath. Not that he needed to. Was the haunt still here? In its late-night tinkering, had it seen something that could be of some use?

  By the time his friend and enemy had caught up with him, he pushed through the front door and was heading toward the kitchen.

  They’d made an effort—that much was true. Pieces of the floor, wall, and table had been torn up, ripped away, to get at the blood that stained them. Atticus grabbed the chair he’d sat in when it happened, and took a seat. He put his elbows to the table, hands to his temples, and lost it.

  “We have to get them back,” he said, spit and tears running off his face. Atticus pushed his hands through his hair. He dug into his scalp and thought about ripping it out. He needed something to fix, something to destroy.

  “Bedlam.”

  No one was listening, but he kept talking all the same.

  “Bedlam,” he repeated, plunging the word like a shovel into his mind. He dug at it until he recollected what’d been buried, and who’d been buried long before it.

  “James.”

  Atticus let go and looked up. He had said the soldiers were going to Bedlam, to deliver another corpse, and that he was going to the town, too. It’d been a week, but Blythe and Bon had left the boy in a bad way. He might still be there, at the tavern, collecting coin and pity. He’d used Atticus for years; it seemed only fitting Atticus should finally do the same in return.