The Bones of You

by Gary McMahon

  “Hey, baby. Who were you talking to just then? Was it Magic? Were you talking to the cat, sweetheart?” I took a few steps closer to the bed.

  “No, Daddy. I was talking to the little girl.” She pointed into the corner of the room, to the right of the dresser. As I looked that way, my eyes skimming past the mirror, I could have sworn that I saw movement reflected in the glass. But when I looked again at the mirror, there was nothing to be seen: just the room, the bed, the few items of tatty bedroom furniture that had been left behind.

  I looked into the corner where Jess had indicated. As expected, there was nobody there. But there was a strange tinge to the air, a kind of hovering dim light, like a reflection from somewhere.

  “It was just a dream, sweetheart…a dream, that’s all. Was the girl scary?”

  The light faded, was gone.

  She shook her head. “No, she was nice. She said she likes us being here. She isn’t lonely anymore.”

  When I reached her, I scooped her up and kissed her forehead, then laid her gently down on the bed. I tucked her in, taking the opportunity to hug her as I did so. She wriggled a bit, giggling, and then quickly settled down.

  “You get some sleep, okay?”

  She nodded. “I’m tired. Tell me a story?”

  I sat down on the bed next to her, ran my hand across her brow. She didn’t feel too hot or too cold. Nor did she look ill. I was probably right about her having a dream. The new surroundings, the upheaval of coming to stay…it had brought on a nightmare. If she was getting into fights at school, she was having issues anyway. This could be an extension of whatever was already going on with her.

  “Once upon a time, in a land far away, there lived a little girl.”

  Jess giggled again. She closed her eyes.

  “This girl was a princess, but it was a secret. She lived with her mummy, and her daddy was a knight who fought dragons, so she didn’t get to see him that often.”

  She was breathing heavily, on the verge of sleep. I ruffled the hair across her forehead with my fingertips. Her skin was so soft, so delicate. Precious.

  “One day the princess sat beside a magical lake, and she saw her entire future reflected in the water. Her daddy would kill all the dragons, her mummy would never be poorly again, and everyone would live happily ever after. All the princess had to do was go to sleep…go to sleep…and when she woke up, everything would be fixed. She’d never be lonely again.”

  I became aware of someone else in the room. No, that isn’t quite right. I knew there was nobody there, but I could feel them. Someone was standing in the corner listening to the story, taking in my words and cherishing them. I didn’t want to look because the sensation wasn’t at all unpleasant, and I didn’t want to ruin it.

  “And they all lived happily ever after…”

  I stood and moved away from the bed, keeping my eyes on Jess. She was fast asleep; her face was partially obscured by her pillow, but she looked calm, relaxed.

  I sensed rather than heard movement in the corner. I couldn’t take it any longer, so I looked over there. A shadow moved; it was quick, light, barely there at all. Then there was nothing, just the empty air and the suggestion of a disturbance. It was becoming familiar to me, this feeling. It was enough to make a man paranoid, or to make him believe in ghosts.

  I left the room and closed the door. Then I opened it again, just an inch or two. I told myself it was to allow the cat to get back in, but deep down a little voice asserted that if the door was open, it would be easier to hear Jess if she called out to me in the night.

  When I went downstairs, I finally remembered the book: Robert Shingley’s study of the Katherine Moffat case. I’d been trying not to dwell on any of this. It made me uncomfortable to think of a child killer next door when I had my daughter in the house. But I could keep my curiosity at bay no longer; I had to at least take a look at the book.

  I had a hard time finding it because I had no idea where I’d put it down when I’d brought it back up from the cellar. I checked all the obvious places: bookshelf, kitchen table, under the sofa, on the stairs…then I eventually found it stuffed down the back of the armchair in the living room.

  I sat down in the chair and looked again at the cover. It was very banal: just a shot of the house next door, but taken years ago, before it had been boarded over like a dirty secret. I opened the book at a random page and was surprised to find it blank. Possibly it was a publishing error or a page that had been inserted by mistake during the printing process. I opened the book at another place, and got the same thing. When I examined the book closer, I discovered that every single page was blank. No text, no pictures, not even a page number. I had no recollection of it being this way before, when I’d taken a quick glance at the book.

  Blank white pages: a bunch of pages of nothing.

  I shut the book and threw it on the floor. I pushed it away from me with my foot, feeling as if it were dirty. Then I leaned over and picked it up, stood, and walked through to the kitchen. I put the book in the kitchen bin, took it out again, went to the door and chucked it in the outside bin. When I came back inside the house, I made sure the door was locked.

  Those blank pages had unsettled me. They felt like a message.

  * * *

  Much later—I’m not sure what time it was—I woke up in the dark. I knew I was in my room, but everything felt different. The shape and texture of the darkness was unfamiliar, and it took me a few minutes to take it all in, to assimilate the information my senses were giving me.

  Ichi, ni, san, shi, go…

  I only needed half of the mantra to calm my nerves. I blinked into the darkness. I’m not sure when exactly I became aware of it, but there was someone else in the room. I could hear light, raspy breathing. Then the smell reached my nostrils: it was like backed-up drains, or rotten eggs. I wrinkled my nose; the smell was faint, but it was unpleasant. I waited, expecting to hear a sound, but none came.

  I wanted to sit up, reach out, and switch on the bedside lamp. But I wasn’t sure of the precise location of the lamp, or of the cabinet. My memory kept pulling up images of the old room where I used to stay, the room in my friend’s house. This new room, with its different kind of darkness, would not resolve into a solid image in my mind.

  I clenched my fists, prepared to start the counting mantra again.

  Something moved across the floor. I could hear the sound of claws as they gripped the pile of the carpet.

  Magic. It was the cat.

  I felt my entire body relax. Suddenly there was no danger; everything was okay, normal, familiar. The cat had made its way into my room—that was all: there was nothing to be afraid of. It must have brought in that foul smell from outside.

  But the door to my room was shut. So how had the cat got inside with me?

  My fists clenched again.

  Slowly, I began to lift myself up on the pillows. I moved as slowly as I could, making as little noise as possible.

  The claws scrabbled on the carpet again.

  The smell grew stronger: rotten eggs; weeks-old garbage left to decay in a warm room.

  Slowly, I shifted the duvet down off my chest, giving myself space to maneuver. If I had to fight, I wanted to make sure I could get at whatever the hell was in there with me.

  Then the damned cat meowed.

  “Fuck,” I said. Angry, I threw off the duvet and reached out, groping blindly at my side. My fingers grabbed the lamp cord and I followed it down until I felt the little switch, and then turned on the light. In the instant before the darkness was banished, I had a mental image of something large and foul with its face hanging in the air before me, its mouth pulled wide open; noxious vapors roiling from within the thing’s deep throat. The teeth were like those of a lion. There were no eyes in its head, just big carved holes, deep spaces that held only blackness. It was screaming, but no sound came out of its straining, motionless rictus.

  Then the room was no longer dark, and I was in familiar terr
itory once more.

  I couldn’t see the cat anywhere. “Magic? Come here, you stupid cat…”

  Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. I made a quick circuit of the room but couldn’t find a thing. I even checked under the bed, feeling like a frightened kid looking for monsters in the dust and the shadows.

  Magic wasn’t in there with me.

  I lay back down on top of the duvet, and left the light on.

  PART TWO

  “It’s the thing that every parent fears most; the thing you’ve been rehearsing in your head for years without even knowing it. That single dreaded moment when all your imaginary terrors become real.”

  —Robert Shingley, Little Miss Moffatt and the Radiant Children

  TWELVE

  All These Images

  Saturday was over before I could even savor the time I had with Jess. It was always the same. We rushed around doing things, having fun, and by the time we stopped to catch a breath, it was time for her to go home.

  We went into town, visited the library and the museum, ate street food from a vendor, and did some window shopping. Jess liked to pick clothes out for me that I’d never buy. It amused her. We liked to argue over which color suited me and which one didn’t. Bickering like that, it made me feel as if we were a normal family; it made me feel real.

  Late in the afternoon, as the shadows shifted across the roads and the shopping plazas, we stopped for a rest at a little island in the center of a pedestrianized zone. The town center wasn’t much, but it did have a few pockets of urban beauty: a couple of Victorian shopping arcades, old stone bank buildings that had been turned into chain pubs, narrow back alleys leading to odd little shops selling retro fashions and trinkets.

  I watched the weekend shoppers milling back and forth, their slow, easy steps, the way they talked or peered at mobile phones as they moved casually and carelessly through the streets. Normal people. Real people. I could, I really could be one of them, if I tried hard enough.

  An old man caught my eye. He was small and stooped, but still looked strong. He had the sleeves of his jacket rolled up to show his hard, muscled forearms. They were decorated with cheap, ugly prison tattoos. He caught my eye as he passed us, nodded at me, winked at Jess.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Why do old people have to die?”

  We’d covered this ground before. She was at an age where death was becoming a confusing reality rather than some abstract notion she didn’t have to worry about.

  “It isn’t just old people. Young people die, too. They die all the time.”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark. There was chocolate smeared at one corner of her mouth. “Why? Why do people have to die?”

  I wanted to put this off, but I couldn’t. It would have been wrong of me to brush off her question and change the subject. Also, she would have seen right through any ploy to do so. When she was in the mood for answers, Jess was not easily put off.

  I took a deep breath. “Everybody dies, baby. We all die. Someday I’ll die. Mummy will, too. Then, hopefully when you’re very old and very frail and after you’ve lived a great life, you’ll die. But we leave part of ourselves behind in the family we have: our children, our grandchildren. They keep small pieces of us in their hearts, and they pass those pieces on to their own children and their children’s children. That’s how life works. It’s how we’re remembered when we’re gone.”

  She took a moment to digest all that, and then she licked her lips. “I don’t want you and Mummy to die. I want you to live forever.”

  “Nobody lives forever.” The anger I felt as I made that statement shocked me. I wasn’t angry at Jess; I was angry at the world, the universe. Because the rules of the universe dictated that someday my beautiful daughter would die. She’d be put in the ground to rot, or incinerated in a narrow coffin.

  “Do we go to heaven when we die?”

  This was the question I hated most. “Some people believe that. They think we have a soul, and the soul is eternal—that means it never dies, it lives forever, in some other form.”

  “But…but you don’t believe that?” She was clever, sometimes too clever for her own good.

  “That’s right, sweetheart. Daddy doesn’t believe in that stuff. I think it’s just a story. As stories go, it’s a good one—one that can give a lot of people comfort. But not me…I believe that once we’re dead, we’re gone. Apart from those small bits and pieces I mentioned, the ones we leave behind with the people who loved us most.”

  She stared into the middle distance, thinking about my words. I hoped they were good enough. They were the only ones I had. The last thing I wanted to do was infect my daughter with the kind of fatalism that had dogged me my entire life, but I didn’t want to fill her with bullshit, either. I wanted her to make up her own mind about things. It was my duty to give her the tools to do that—my duty as a father.

  “Okay,” she said, her focus snapping back to me. “That is a good story…but I’ll have to think about it a bit more. I bet there are better stories. Like the one about the little girl in my room last night. She’s dead, but she’s still here.” She smiled. My heart shivered.

  We walked slowly back to where I’d parked the car, in a space outside a Pizza Express at the north end of town. The traffic was always quiet there, and I was usually able to get a space. I didn’t mention what I’d seen last night, how I’d interrupted her conversation with what she claimed was a dead girl. I didn’t have the energy to take the subject any further.

  I stopped outside the pizza restaurant. “Are you hungry?”

  She nodded.

  I glanced at the diners through the big picture window. “Pizza?”

  “Yay!”

  I’d messed up on my promise to feed her healthily this weekend, but for the moment I didn’t care about that. She jumped up and threw her arms around me, and when I hauled her up into a tight embrace, she covered my face in sweet, chocolate-smelling kisses.

  We went inside and got a table by the window. It was still early, so we’d just beaten the dinner crowd. The place started to fill up as we ordered our meal—I had an American Hot with extra peppers; Jess went for a plain Margarita on a thin base, her favorite. We ate slowly; there was no reason to rush. Jess chatted to me about anything and everything under the sun, and I simply sat there enjoying the sound of her voice as the sun tilted down over the horizon. She didn’t give anything away about those bruises, and I managed not to pursue the issue. She seemed fine to me; there was nothing different about her attitude or in the way she carried herself. Despite the constant shit-storm around her, she was a well-adjusted little girl.

  She fell asleep in the passenger seat as I drove home through the early evening traffic. I played a Radiohead CD—one of the later, moodier ones—and allowed my mind to drift. The streetlights were coming on; their illumination smeared the night like oil paint. Early revellers were taking to the streets, jumping out of taxis, making their way toward the center of town, where the noisier pubs were located. I didn’t feel any kind of bond with them. They were not my people; I didn’t understand how they operated. I’d worked on a lot of pub doors in my time, stopping drunken fights in some rough places. I didn’t miss that life, those characters. The memories made me feel dirty.

  These days I was trying to be a better man.

  Jess was still sleeping when we arrived home. I parked the car and carried her into the house, setting her down on the sofa. When still she failed to stir, I took her upstairs and put her into bed fully clothed. She’d had an exciting day. She needed her rest. Part of me—the selfish side—wanted to wake her up so that I could spend more time with her. The rest of me was content to bring a close to a near-perfect day.

  Downstairs, I poured myself a large whiskey. It tasted good, like I’d earned it. I no longer used alcohol as a crutch, and could now take simple pleasure from drinking it. I love the taste of whiskey, the burn of it on my lips, in my mout
h, along my throat.

  I thought about calling Carole, but then thought better of it. Our last meeting had ended abruptly, and things had felt strained. I didn’t want to push too hard in case I scared her away. I still wasn’t certain what I wanted from the relationship, or even if I was keen on it being a relationship. Take things slowly, see how they develop. These were probably the thoughts of an emotional coward, but they seemed sensible at the time.

  I found myself wandering through the house, feeling ill at ease. Nervous energy buzzed through me. I thought about practicing kata, or going through some basic drills, but I was too tired for karate. I intended to take a class at the dojo the following evening, if only to fill the gap Jess left behind when she went back to her mother.

  Just then, thinking about my plans for the immediate future, I heard a sound from behind the cellar door. I stopped, listened, but the sound failed to repeat. I walked slowly over to the door, placed the fingertips of one steepled hand against it, and waited.

  Still the sound didn’t come again, but there was a sense of someone standing directly on the other side, waiting, just like me. I resisted the urge to speak, to say, “Hello,” or ask what it was this person wanted. Because I knew that, in reality, there was nobody there. Jess and I were the only two people inside the house, and she was asleep upstairs, hopefully lost in her dreams.

  Impatient with myself, I opened the cellar door. I reached around and switched on the light. I walked down into the space and immediately my gaze fell upon the cardboard box in which I’d found the copy of Little Miss Moffat and the Radiant Children—the book with blank pages; the volume that had unnerved me so much I had to get it out of the house.

  Without hesitating, I walked over and crouched down beside the box. The flaps were closed but not sealed. I looked around me, into the corners of the cellar, just to confirm that the cat wasn’t down there. I’m not sure why that should have been an issue, but at least it felt like I was being proactive and not just going along with whatever was thrown at me.