The Bones of You

by Gary McMahon

  “Roku.”

  The cat made no sound. The children kept chanting, but the rhyme was fading, moving away from me.

  “Shichi.”

  The closer I got to the house, the more my stomach tightened. The skin on my arms felt like it was crawling, trying to escape. Despite this physical reaction, I felt confident enough to keep on going. I wanted to get inside that house, even if it meant that I was risking my life by doing so.

  “Hachi.”

  Jess might be in there. But even if she wasn’t, something was. I could sense it waiting for me, shifting expectantly behind the walls, pacing the wooden floor with oversized, clawed feet.

  “Kyu.”

  Whatever was in there, it wanted me to come. It was expecting me.

  “Ju.”

  And I was up for the fight.

  Before long, I was standing at the side wall of the house. The joints between the bricks were dusty, the mortar falling away. I reached out and brushed at it with my fingers, exposing whatever was hidden beneath. The whole front section of a brick came loose, flaking off like a cataract. It fell to the ground. Underneath, instead of the interior of a house brick, I saw rows of human teeth; tiny teeth; children’s teeth. I touched them and they were hard. They were real.

  I turned away and walked along the wall, still following the cat, which was waiting for me at the end of the building. I went around the return of the wall and saw that the door was standing half-open. The cat slipped inside, black swallowed by blackness. I approached the door. The open door looked strange, as if it wasn’t quite real: a facsimile of a door. I had no idea where this thought had come from, but it seemed right. The darkness beyond the door looked solid, like black matter. I thought that if I reached out to touch it, it would feel like ice: cold and hard and unwelcoming.

  I kicked the door and it swung all the way open. The movement was a lot slower than it should have been considering the force of the blow. It seemed as if the movement was hindered by something, perhaps that horrible darkness beyond. I watched until it stopped moving, coming to a gradual halt before it hit the wall on the other side. The manner of the motion suggested that someone was standing there, and that they’d halted its progress with their hand.

  Something moved in the blackness. I told myself it was the cat, but the nature of the movement had been all wrong. Instead of the quick, agile motion of a feline, I was certain that what I’d seen was the slow, deliberate slithering of a reptile.

  Nothing here could be relied upon; even reality was untrustworthy. Once I went inside, I was entering another world. I needed to act accordingly, and just accept whatever the damned place threw at me.

  I took a few deep breaths, clenched my hands into fists.

  And then, without giving myself any time to change my mind, I stepped across the threshold and entered the house.

  TWENTY-TWO

  We Belong Dead

  It was dark in there. Because of the boards across the windows, very little ambient light was able to enter the house. As I moved slowly along the hallway, with my arms held out on either side, brushing against the walls, I could smell the tangy scent of decay. My fingertips brushed against rough edges of wallpaper that felt as if it had been shredded from the walls. The sound inside the house was strange, like the distant thrumming echo of an indoor swimming pool: my ears felt pressurized, my skin was damp.

  As I made my way toward the vague outline of a door up ahead, I glanced to the side. The walls had been covered with what looked like pages from books. I stopped, leaned closer, and inspected the wall to my left. The pages were torn and hanging loose, but they were indeed pages from books. One book in particular: Little Miss Moffat and the Radiant Children.

  The pages were not blank, like the copies I’d found in my basement, but were covered in text. I moved closer, until my face was inches from the wall. The text on the pages was the same line repeated, over and over again:

  “Getting busy.” From what I remembered Carole telling me, it was Benjamin Kyle’s catchphrase.

  There was just that single sentence, printed hundreds, thousands, of times on those flapping remnants of pages. I stepped back, glanced up, and saw that the ceiling was covered with them, too. They hung down like strips of flypaper, shifting slightly as the air was disturbed by my movements.

  Getting busy. Getting busy. Getting busy. Getting busy.

  I started walking again, trying to reach that door at the end of the hallway. My eyes were becoming more accustomed to the gloom, and what little light was able to push its way inside helped me as I stumbled forward over the bare boards. It was odd, but I couldn’t hear my footsteps. I was walking on bare, untreated timbers, but I moved without a sound.

  I walked through the doorway and into a small, wrecked kitchen. Again, the walls and ceiling were decorated with pages from Shingley’s book. But here there were also book covers scattered on the floor and across the table and work surfaces.

  (Getting busy.)

  I heard a scurrying sound and looked in the direction from which I thought it had come. In the darkness of the kitchen, I could just make out the shape of the cat.

  “Magic…come here, boy.”

  As I watched, the animal seemed to stretch and elongate, becoming twice its size. It no longer seemed to be covered in fur, and its smooth, hairless body rippled as if maggots writhed beneath the skin.

  The cat walked in a slow circle, then moved across the room in a strange, jerking manner, as if its bones were breaking as it walked. The legs bent in too many places; the body looked segmented, like that of an insect. Its eyes were much too big for its head.

  I followed it with my gaze, and caught sight of another doorway. This one was ajar; the cat slinked through the gap. Pale light bled around the door frame. I walked over, took hold of the handle, and opened the door wider. Behind it there was a flight of wooden stairs leading down into the cellar. I caught sight of the cat’s tail—long, hairless, as fat as my forearm, and smooth as a snake—flickering downward into an odd, light-limned gloom. The darkness glowed down there; it wasn’t true darkness. It was a bright darkness, but that phrase made little sense, even as I thought the words.

  Bright darkness…

  Or bright-dark, as Jess had called it when I’d heard her talking to nobody in her room.

  The concept was too strange for me to grasp.

  This was where she’d killed them—in this bright darkness. She’d taken them down there and tortured those children, getting off on their screams, their blood, the way their lives came to such an undignified end.

  I felt a vast presence behind me, then, as if someone tall and heavy were standing at my back, just about to touch me. I knew it was simply my mind conjuring something, using my fear as fuel, so I resisted the desire to turn around. There was nobody there. I was alone here, all alone. There was no hand reaching out, moving toward my shoulder. A grinning skull-like face was not leering at me, opening its mouth in a rictus grin, with a bloated foot-long tongue hanging by its root from the cavity.

  I waited until the sensation passed, then I stepped onto the first stair.

  Again, there was no sound as my foot fell upon the tread. The stairs didn’t creak; the old timber barely moved at all. It was as if the sound had been turned down; I was walking around in mute mode, staggering through a flicker-frame silent-film version of my life.

  Walking down those stairs, I was filled with a similar feeling to the one I’d experienced that first time I entered the subway tunnel not far from my house—a place I now realized Katherine Moffat must have enjoyed going to. My stomach was cramping, waves of nausea rolling through me, and I started to sweat. My legs ached as I took the stairs one at a time, as if I were battling against some great physical odds.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned and entered the main part of the cellar. The concrete floor was dirty and stained, and the brick walls looked as if they’d been scrubbed hundreds of times but whoever had done the work could
not get them clean. There was a string of lights on the ceiling; bare bulbs hung down like shrunken heads, their light weak and flickering. The faint glow—that bright darkness—I’d seen was not a result of these lights. That was something else; something I couldn’t afford to focus on right now.

  The cellar was a single large space, not unlike the one in my house, only unfinished. There were workbenches set up along one wall, and they were littered with boxes and tools. Along the other wall there were several medical gurneys, like the ones in a hospital. I could only imagine what those might have been used for, and I tried not to think too hard about it.

  At the far end of the space, Magic had made a discovery. He looked ragged again, and his stomach was trailing orangey innards and a line of pumpkin seeds. He was sitting beside Carole. She was lying on the floor, bound up in what looked like an old, frayed washing line. Her hands and feet were taped together. Her mouth had been taped over but her nose was clear, so that she could breathe. Her eyes were swollen shut and there were cuts and bruises on her face. I didn’t think she was conscious, but she looked like she might still be alive. I hoped she was.

  Somebody laughed softly. The cat bolted into a corner, where it sat down and began to lick at its open wound. I wasn’t sure where the laughter had come from, but it had sounded cold and sarcastic.

  “Come out. Come out where I can see you.”

  Whoever it was laughed again.

  “I know it’s you, Kyle. I know who you are and what you’ve been doing.” I stayed where I was, unwilling to approach Carole’s body. It was a trap, I knew it was. I wasn’t stupid enough to think otherwise.

  “Where’s my daughter?” My voice broke only at the end of the question. I’d tried to keep it steady, but was unable to keep the emotion out of my words.

  He laughed again.

  Then, to my surprise, Pru stepped out of the shadows at the far side of the room, walking slowly until she was standing level with Carole.

  “You?” It was a stupid question, but it came out of my mouth anyway.

  She nodded. Smiled. The bulbs on the ceiling flickered. The darkness pressed in on me like a physical presence.

  I didn’t feel the blow. All I knew was that my legs were buckling and I was going down. Then, like a light going on in a dark room, there was a sharp, intense region of pain at the back of my head. I sank to my knees, putting out my hands to halt the fall. I struggled to keep my eyes open, but bolts of lightning lanced through my vision, startling me.

  A figure moved around me, sliding across my left field of vision. He was shirtless and wearing a pair of faded blue jeans. I recognized the tattoos on his torso and arms. The bird of prey on his back. I tried to say his name, but I couldn’t spit it out. My breathing was ragged and my throat was tightening.

  Benjamin Kyle.

  He laughed again, and this time I could pinpoint its origin, because now he was standing right in front of me.

  “Time to get busy,” he said.

  He kicked out at me, catching me in the side as I instinctively shifted my body to dodge and stuck out an arm to deflect the blow. It didn’t hit the target he’d intended, but it was enough to send me back down. I stayed there, trying to catch my breath and pretending that it had hurt me more than it did. I needed to buy some time. I had to gather my thoughts, work out what was happening, and come up with a way out of this.

  The lights flickered again, as if the effect were deliberate.

  Kyle walked away from me, going to stand over beside Pru. He was a good couple of feet taller than her. In the unstable light, the tattoos seemed to crawl and writhe across his abdomen, never staying still, constantly on the lookout for a new place to rest. The head of the bird of prey seemed to be peeking over his right shoulder.

  He leaned down to kiss Pru, and she arched her neck, shutting her eyes and opening her mouth. They tongued like love-struck teenagers for a few seconds, as if I wasn’t even there. Then they broke apart, and they both turned and smiled at me. My head was buzzing, the pain reducing to a gentle but insistent throb. The taste of copper was strong in my mouth. I continued to pretend that he’d felled me. I didn’t want him to know I was capable of standing. Not yet. I smiled back, through a mouthful of blood.

  “You found us,” said Pru. It wasn’t a question, just a needling little comment.

  “You’re not a ghost, then?” My voice sounded calm and even, despite how I felt. I spat out blood onto the floor and stood up straight, holding my side where the bastard had kicked me. It felt worse than it had done when I was on the floor. I suspected he’d fractured a rib.

  “I’m not even dead. Not even her. The real Pru is dead. I’m not.” She grinned. Her face looked huge, looming toward me through the gloomy, filthy cellar. I got the impression that she hated me, but not for any specific reason. It was just an abstract form of hatred, and I was a convenient target. She’d spent time getting me to trust her, and now this was where she reaped the benefits by demonstrating the extent of her betrayal.

  I shook my head. They probably thought it was simple confusion, but I was just trying to focus my thoughts.

  “I believe you know my mother.” Pru moved her hand to indicate Carole, who was still on the floor, still motionless. “But let me introduce you to my aunt.”

  She stepped to the side, moving toward the cellar wall; Kyle did the same on the other side of the cellar. It seemed like such a dramatic gesture, like a parting of human curtains.

  The couple had been blocking it from view, but now they’d moved, I could see a high-backed wooden chair set about a foot away from the rear wall, with something sitting in it. I realized quickly that it was a cadaver, but it took me longer to understand what was wrong with it. At first, I didn’t register that it was naked, and wrapped up tightly in long strips of cellophane, like a shiny mummy. The skin beneath the wrappings was dark, slick, and bulging in places. I got the impression that the transparent material was all that was holding the corpse together.

  The body was tall and unnaturally thin, as if it had been stretched and had most of the meat flayed from its bones. But the weirdest thing, the most disturbing thing, was the head. The body lacked its real head, and in its place was a massive hollowed-out pumpkin. The features that had been carved upon it were rudimentary, but this only made them more terrifying. There was a huge gouge of a mouth and triangular holes for eyes. As I strained to take it all in, I saw that the bony nub of the neck, where the head had been severed, was pushed up hard into the body of the vegetable, forming a tight, puckered joint.

  “It took Ben ages to dig her up and get her back here without anyone noticing.” Pru’s voice was horrible; it held a note of what I could only describe as glee. She loved this. She was in her element.

  The reality of the situation hit me, and I almost went down again. These two psychos had dug up the body of a dead serial killer, brought it back here, and cut off its head and replaced it with a Halloween pumpkin. Delirious laughter built up inside me, but I knew if I let it out, it would transform into a scream.

  I’d been taken in by Pru—her act had fooled me, I’d thought she was a poor little lost soul just looking to connect with someone. But all the time, she’d been reeling me in, grooming me for…for what? Kyle had even beaten her up to convince me of her vulnerability. Had they done all of this simply to get their hands on Jess?

  “My daughter…” I took a long step forward. “I want my daughter.” At last the rage started to come. I opened myself up to it, letting it grow inside me like a terrible dark flower. “Tell me where she is or I’ll kill you.”

  “Oh, really,” said Benjamin Kyle. He slipped a hand behind his back, reached into the waistband of his jeans, and brought out a small handgun. He didn’t even point it at me. Sight of the weapon alone was enough for him to win the standoff. “That’s a trick I’d like to see.” Again, he spoke to me in that mocking tone: he didn’t just want to hurt me; he wanted to humiliate me first.

  “This is a very s
pecial night for us. For all of us.” Pru’s voice had become high-pitched. She no longer sounded in control. “Katherine was born on Halloween, you see. She died on Halloween. So it’s only fitting that the transference takes place on Halloween.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but I had no choice. “Transference…what does that mean?”

  Neither of them said anything for a few seconds, which seemed to stretch into minutes. The lights had stopped flickering, but they’d dimmed: the room seemed filled with too many shadows, none of them natural. They moved across the floor and the walls like huge spectral snakes.

  “It’s simple. Katherine’s soul needs a new vessel.” This was Kyle. He said it as if he were talking about his laundry list: his voice was calm, assured, and perfectly normal.

  “So this was all planned? You’ve been planning this since she died?”

  “Sort of,” said Pru. “Not every detail was in place yet, but your arrival made it easy for us.”

  Kyle sniggered, like a child. “You just stumbled onto the scene when the plans were still being made. You became the plan…or rather, your daughter did.” He sniggered again. It was a horrible sound. “There’s a darkness in you, man. A darkness that likes getting busy. I can sense it. My own busy darkness responds to it, reaches out toward it. You’ve passed that darkness on to your kid. She’ll make the perfect vessel for Katherine’s big return. She is such a…radiant child.” He smiled, and it made him look hungry. It made him seem ravenous.

  It was at this point that I understood just how insane they really were. These two freaks actually believed that they could somehow force the soul of Katherine Moffat into the body of my daughter, and that she could carry on her work. I glanced at the cellophane-wrapped body, the oversized pumpkin head. I knew it was my mind creating the illusion, but I could have sworn that the body was in a slightly different position from the last time I checked. The arms had moved. Before, they had been hanging straight down by her side; now they were folded neatly in her lap.