House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  And besides, the victims were black.

  It wasn’t until years later, when Abel Williams stood on the verge of achieving his dubious fame and the sole survivor of that first catastrophe had grown into a troubled maturity, that the TV cameras returned. Ironically enough, it was another boy, this one a mere five years old, who caught the world’s attention. Hurled from the cold heights of Dreamland, Dante Morris had plunged eighteen stories to the crumbling plaza below. And even that would not have been enough—such falls were common, after all—had not the perpetrators been so young, nine and ten years old, mere children themselves, though the police who interviewed them afterward said that their eyes were as weary as the eyes of old men. If you had inquired further, if you had earned the trust of the grizzled uniformed officers who arrived first on the scene, who saw the child’s shattered body and his killers staring down from the roofline high above, you might have learned something that the reporters and the TV cameras never learned, something that even the people of Dreamland spoke of only in whispers; you might have learned that there in the immediate aftermath, the eyes of the killers looked barely human at all—that staring into them was like staring through ragged holes into the hot glare of eternity itself. And had you wormed your way into the innermost thoughts of those men, where they held secrets even from themselves, you might have learned what they had never said even to each other: that they had glimpsed something else far down in the incandescent pits of those eyes, some cold intelligence peering back at them.

  But no one ever learned that.

  The nation’s attention held. From plush offices and marble porticoes half a continent away, politicians railed against the inhumanity. Men of God wept in their pulpits and passed the collection plate. Deep in the bowels of the Housing Authority, plans for Dreamland’s destruction were drawn up. Then the public’s attention swerved, distracted by some new calamity. The cameras went away. For a time, the plans were forgotten.

  Dreamland subsided once again into sleep, or what passed for sleep. It abided anyway, and if occasionally it stirred from its long stone thoughts to some small act of malice—like the time Robert Johnson poured boiling water in the face of his screaming baby, or the day Letitia Rayfield pushed her little sister down the north stairwell, breaking her arm—no one could say for sure that these weren’t acts of merely human cruelty, and even those who suspected otherwise said nothing, or only whispered it among themselves. For its part, Dreamland stood patient and unchanged, a circle of featureless slabs, as mute and inexpressive as a ring of stone megaliths erected in supplication to some bloodthirsty Neolithic god.

  Invitation to Dreamland

  THE PRESENT

  1

  But for the happenstance of a Ouija board and half a case of Budweiser, Abel might never have stumbled across Dreamland at all. The Ouija board belonged to Greg, his sophomore roommate at WVU; the Budweiser belonged to the roommate’s tearful ex-girlfriend, Susie—and had Greg been present when she arrived, Abel’s life might have taken an utterly different path. As it happened, though, Greg, exhausted by Susie’s near-daily assaults on his apartment, had fled home to Parkersburg, leaving Abel to fend for himself. So it was that Abel, who should have been studying for a psych midterm, spent that Saturday night knocking back pilsner with Susie instead—and when Susie’s eyes happened to light on the Ouija board jammed under the television stand, he was three beers too far gone not to play along.

  Ten minutes later, Abel found himself hunched on the threadbare carpet, staring blearily at the lettered board by the flickering light of a single candle. Several things quickly became evident, among them the fact that Susie was a breathtakingly ordinary girl. Neither her questions nor the responses she sought from the “presiding spirits” (her phrase) showed the faintest sign of imagination. But the answers themselves—answers which Abel dutifully manufactured, picking them out letter by solitary letter (“u will find luv”) through the nearly invisible exertions of his fingertips atop the planchette—seemed to gain authority through the agency of the Ouija board. It was a lesson in human nature far more useful than anything he could have learned poring over his psych book, and by the end of the night—when Susie fell enthusiastically into his bed, her avowed passion for his absent roommate temporarily forgotten—Abel had taken it thoroughly to heart. What people said they wanted and what they really wanted were two entirely different matters—and someone willing to exploit that division could occasionally accomplish something of merit. In this case, for example, Greg no longer had to dodge his ex-girlfriend’s kamikaze assaults upon his apartment, while Susie, who thought she had come in search of reconciliation, departed instead with a measure of the revenge she had truly been seeking. From Abel’s perspective it was nearly a perfect resolution—and he got laid to boot.

  It was a classic case of doing well by doing good, and one he would not soon forget. By the time he graduated, the paranormal had become a lucrative hobby for Abel. A few parlor tricks and an increasingly sharp eye for what people really wanted garnered him a pretty fair campus reputation; that, in turn, gleaned him invitations to the best parties and, even better, an occasional tryst with a girl who would otherwise be out of his league. They were usually on the rebound from one disastrous affair or another, true, but as far as Abel was concerned the temporary nature of these liaisons merely contributed to their appeal. Variety, after all, was the spice of life.

  Three years later, jobless and adrift in the Midwest, Abel decided to try parlaying the same set of skills into a living. In a culture defined by sitcoms and office cubicles, he reasoned, the secret to success might well be to demystify the paranormal, to work it into the fabric of mundane existence. So he placed an ad in the Yellow Pages, scraped up the cash to lease a strip-mall storefront, and jettisoned all the hoary supernatural clichés—the crystal balls, the Tarot cards, even his precious Ouija board—opting instead for the bland professional decor of a psychotherapist: a sofa, a couple of comfortable chairs, fresh flowers on the table. Six months later he had a thriving clientele. A year after that people were flying in for consultations from around the country—a heady brew of grief, redemption, and cash, well spiced by an occasional squeeze from the odd good-looking widow.

  Abel might have been content, but for a call from a television producer named Gale Parker. As Parker talked, he found himself staring once again into that net of branches printed on the ceiling of his boyhood bedroom. The old dream of glamour stirred within him. He knew he would say yes ten minutes before she finished her pitch.

  The program, Messages from Beyond, proved to be another landmark on the long road to Dreamland. Over Parker’s objections, Abel vetoed spooky mood music, atmospheric camera angles, and horror movie sound effects. He kept the show as familiar and nonthreatening as that strip-mall storefront: a studio audience of the bereaved, an occasional celebrity guest, and of course Abel himself, strolling back and forth across the stage, his brow furrowing as he plucked messages out of the ether. The show’s real drama, he argued, ought to come from within—from the interaction between Abel and the audience, from the tears of relief and reconciliation, from the heartfelt testaments to Abel’s accuracy that would close every show. His sole concession to Parker’s sensibilities was the opening montage of photos, a gallery of the dear departed as submitted every week by members of the studio audience. Just watching it sent a strangely disquieting shiver up Abel’s spine.

  A year later Messages had become a morning staple, sandwiched somewhere between Regis and Oprah in just about every television market in the nation. In the two years following that, he landed a book deal and a contract for a sequence of self-help tapes. Abel’s agent opened negotiations for a prime-time slot on FOX, and for the space of a single glorious summer Abel’s face seemed to peer out of every magazine cover in America.

  Then, almost as quickly as it had risen, Abel’s star faded. The book tanked. The tapes sat on the shelves unsold. The promise of prime time waned. The syndicated show limped o
n for another season, but ratings slipped. Cancellation loomed.

  And then came the murder of a south-side volunteer named Theresa Matheson. The details of the crime alone—a six-hour ordeal of gang-rape and torture conducted in the abandoned lobby of Dreamland’s Tower Number Three—guaranteed a modicum of coverage. Matheson’s personal profile—she had been eighteen, attractive, socially committed and, most important of all, white—sent the national media into paroxysms of indignation.

  When Abel got to the studio the next Monday, he found a message from Hard Copy waiting. A week later, he accompanied a reporter, a camera crew, and a handful of Theresa Matheson’s friends on an expedition into the decaying lobby where she had died. Abel would have preferred family—family were easier to read, and they could always be counted on for a sympathetic tear—but Matheson was fresh out of blood relations. Her mom had died of breast cancer a year previously; her dad had died in a car crash two years before that. In a week of frenzied research, Abel hadn’t been able to locate so much as a single distant cousin.

  Nor did he have any great love of Dreamland itself. The whole complex gave him a genuine case of the willies. The sketchy history provided by Hard Copy’s producer was part of it. She filled him in on the drive over, describing both the rooftop plunge of Dante Morris and the twenty-six-year-old police raid in which six people had died—seven if you counted the first victim, gunned down at random from an upper-story window. “Kind of creepy, all that happening in one tower, isn’t it?” she said, with a gusto that seemed tasteless given the wide-eyed presence of Theresa Matheson’s friends. The perverse brilliance of the move—she’d been laying the groundwork for the emotional reactions she hoped to catch on film—hadn’t struck Abel until later, and even then it was shot through with a spasm of self-loathing. Were they really that different, after all?

  He knew what his mother would say.

  But that was only the start of it. For one thing, the cratered moonscape of the projects—a desolation of abandoned cars and crumbling streets—reminded him oddly of his boyhood, the polluted industrial wreckage of the coal fields. For another, the place itself, Dreamland, projected a sense of disturbingly sentient awareness. Abel felt it the moment he climbed out of the van and looked up at Tower Three, lifting its cold facade eighteen stories into the sky. Even on that sunlit July day, it seemed shrouded in darkness, a sensation produced not so much by any literal gloom—the morning sun fell in a golden wash against the bleached concrete surface of the upper stories—as by … well, what, exactly? And that was it: he couldn’t really say. All Abel knew was that the place simply felt dark. Every time he caught a glimpse of it, jutting unexpectedly into his angle of vision, he felt a cold knot of tension in his guts.

  Leaving Matheson’s friends huddled nervously around the van—it wouldn’t do to be seen cozying up with them—Abel trailed the producer and her team into Tower Three. His uneasiness only grew inside. The glass entrance doors had been shattered, and beyond the bright space of the vestibule the lobby receded into shadowy dimness, unrelieved except for the distant red glow of an exit sign. Two elevator banks stood on the far side of the room, one set of doors sensibly closed, the other yawning open upon a well of darkness. A stench of urine and rotting trash shimmered palpably in the heat.

  “So this is where it happened,” the producer said, almost reverentially. And then, looking up at the cameraman: “I want to shoot Abel’s reading here.”

  The cameraman surveyed the room with narrowed eyes. “Gonna have some trouble with lighting.”

  “Screw the lighting. This is where she died.”

  The cameraman snorted. “Let me get a meter,” he said. He kicked an empty liquor bottle toward the black mouth of the elevator shaft as he turned away. Abel watched in a kind of fascination as it skidded across the metal lip and into the void beyond. A numb instant of silence followed, and then the sound of shattering glass came rolling up at them, doubling and redoubling in the echo chamber of the empty elevator shaft.

  “Asshole,” the producer muttered, but Abel barely heard her. He was listening to the odd reverberations even now dying away into stillness. They had almost sounded like voices, a swirling chorus of whispering voices rising up out of the darkness—

  His bowels cramped. For the space of a single heartbeat, a ghost of memory hovered at the edge of his awareness. The next instant, it was gone.

  Abel turned away, suddenly anxious for the touch of the July sun against his skin, realizing too late that one of Theresa Matheson’s girlfriends—a lanky brunette with an oval face—had followed them inside. That was the instant, he would later think, that killed his career. It was not merely that the girl had overheard the exchange between the producer and her half-witted cameraman—though God knew that was bad enough. It was that she had seen that flicker of unease in Abel’s eyes. Her face closed like a fist. Watching her, Abel was struck by a sudden further insight: people knew he was a fake, they wanted him to be. If they truly believed he could speak with the dead—believed the way they believed in Toyotas or telephone bills—they would be terrified of him. Three hundred years ago they might have burned him at the stake. That thought triggered another ghostly flutter of memory. His mother’s face loomed momentarily in his mind—

  —who told you how did you know—

  —and then it flickered and disappeared, driven out by the clatter of heels against the concrete floor as Theresa Matheson’s friend turned away.

  “Wait—” Abel said, but the door swung shut behind her.

  Which was just as well, he supposed. What would he have told her, after all—Don’t worry. I really am a con artist?

  Besides, the reading had already been spoiled.

  It worked out pretty much as Abel had feared. The producer took her time dressing the scene, arranging and rearranging several massive displays of bouquets and candles around dramatically enlarged photos of Theresa Matheson’s face. Another hour passed while the camera crew worked out the lights. By the time everything was set, the oval-faced girl’s tension and resentment had communicated themselves to her friends. The whole crew of them sat rigidly before Abel while the cameras rolled inexorably, catching every minute of the disaster on tape.

  There had been only one incident that was the least bit memorable—and even that could hardly be counted a success. Abel had been doing his standard shtick—pacing, wrinkling his brow, studying his audience for even the tiniest reaction as he worked to refine a mix of generic patter and careful guesswork into something they hoped to hear. Given the amount he already knew about Theresa Matheson’s death, it should have been easy. But Matheson’s friends merely sat there, mute and uncooperative. The reading was already going badly when, turning, Abel happened to catch a glimpse of Matheson’s candlelit photo. The temperature seemed to dip, and he paused, transfixed, as a chorus of whispers swirled around him. A panicked phrase—

  —please no please—

  —rose up out of the babble, and suddenly the air before him shifted and parted, like stage curtains sweeping back to reveal the scene beyond. For a single terrifying moment, he saw, or imagined he saw, the whole thing: the shadowy lobby and the ring of jeering black men and Theresa Matheson herself, flung at an angle across a rickety table, her battered face twisted in agony and her skirt bunched around her thighs as a thickly muscled kid in a battered Cubs cap worked himself steadily between her outflung legs.

  “Jesus,” Abel gasped.

  Even as the word slipped unbidden from his lips, the scene faded. He snatched a final desperate whisper—

  —no help me please—

  —from the whirl of sound, and then that too was gone. The world was the same world it had always been.

  He caught his breath and turned away. “I’m getting a strong sense of peace,” he said, but it was already too late.

  The reading was a disaster. Hard Copy never used the footage—which was a blessing in disguise, he supposed—and his star continued to fall. Abel chalked up the rest of
it—the chorus of voices, the glimpse of Theresa Matheson’s rape—to stress and an overstimulated imagination.

  Messages from Beyond got canceled six months later.

  Abel drifted for a year or so. He didn’t go hungry—he had a reputation, after all, and he could subsist on private readings for years to come. But he missed the glare of the spotlight, the glamorous life he’d always longed for.

  He had almost reconciled himself to the fact that it was over when Ramsey Lomax called. Though Abel knew the name—he’d had plenty of money to invest over the last couple of years and telecom stocks had been good to him—he wasn’t particularly impressed. He’d grown accustomed to celebrity readings by then. But Lomax didn’t want a reading.

  “What do you want, then?” Abel asked.

  “I want you to spend two weeks with me,” Lomax responded. “I want you to come to Dreamland.”

  2

  Lomax would make several such communications over the weeks that followed. Lara McGovern’s came indirectly, in a meeting with Dan Sutherland, the Chief Resident of Mercy General Hospital. Sutherland was tall and lean, with rheumy blue eyes and a thatch of unruly red hair that receded sharply to either side of a narrow widow’s peak. Despite the red hair, however, Sutherland seemed to have no temper; what he possessed instead was an apparently endless reservoir of melancholy. His charges, Lara among them, feared error less out of self-interest than from a desire to avoid further burdening their boss. Indeed, when Sutherland had suspended her privileges two months ago, Lara had found herself in the strange position of wanting to comfort him. Now, looking at him slumped on the other side of his desk, she had to choke back the same maternal impulse.