House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Except the only darky in the room is me, Ben thought, and the old sense of being somehow an interloper loomed up inside him, the all-too-familiar awareness that his was the only black face among all the white ones staring back at him—that no matter how much he liked to pretend otherwise, he remained after all these years an envoy from a different and a darker nation. The shadow nation. You’re invited to the party, but don’t expect to dance.

  It was like living your life behind a pane of glass.

  He felt the knot draw tighter, the resentment shading into anger.

  By the time the doctor pulled her little disappearing act on twelve, it had drawn so tight that it took an active effort of will even to breathe. And by the time Abel retrieved her, the anger had gotten the upper hand. Ben cleared his throat, determined suddenly not to play along with Lomax’s charade. Both of them knew why he had come here—hell, for all Ben knew, maybe everyone was in on his little secret. That didn’t mean he had any obligation to pose as Exhibit A.

  “You really intend to inspect every floor?” he said, uncertain what exactly he expected to accomplish by this statement. He supposed that some small part of him, that terrified inner self who held the secrets of his past, had hoped to engineer some kind of last-minute reprieve. If so, he’d miscalculated badly.

  Lomax smiled coldly. “We can do it any way you want, Mr. Prather.” He lifted his finger to the control panel and punched a button. “We can go straight up to eighteen,” he said. He held Ben’s gaze as the doors slid shut and the elevator lurched into gear, steadied, and began pulling itself laboriously higher. And then he turned away. “Eighteen saw the worst of it,” he said to the others. “I’m a little rusty on the dates, though. That was—when, Mr. Prather?”—flinging this last over his shoulder, as he might have flung a table scrap to a dog.

  But Ben never got a chance to answer.

  “Eighty,” Keel said. “Nineteen-eighty.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Keel. Nineteen-eighty. Practically a lifetime ago.”

  That phrase—

  —practically a lifetime ago—

  —ricocheted around inside Ben’s head like shrapnel. Now that the elevator was climbing, moving inexorably toward a rendezvous with the past, he could hardly breathe, much less think. He leaned back, clutching the cool metal railing that ran waist-high around the elevator’s interior. Decades-old newspaper headlines swarmed the air before him, blurry newsprint photos of faces he’d seen a thousand times in his dreams.

  “It started with a sniper,” Lomax was saying. “Picking people off in the plaza. He wounded one man, and shot another one dead, a seventeen-year—”

  “They,” Ben said, dredging the word up the dry funnel of his throat.

  He felt the cumulative attention in the car shift, its weight on his skin. His voice seemed unnaturally loud, the air dense with the heat of their bodies. And still they rose upward—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, each number flaring momentarily orange above the doors. Blood sang at his temples. He dragged in a long breath, and lowered his gaze. Lomax was staring at him the way a man might stare at some chance oddity he’d discovered in the grass. An insect, or maybe a spider. Something loathsome anyway, and possibly deadly.

  “There were two of them,” Ben said.

  Above the doors, another number flared. Sixteen.

  “That’s right,” Lomax said. “No one knew that at the time, of course. Otherwise things might have turned out differently.”

  Seventeen.

  “What happened?” Abel asked.

  Lomax lifted his eyebrows. “Perhaps you’d like to tell it, Mr. Prather,” he said, but Ben said nothing.

  The elevator dinged. The eighteen—what was left of it, anyway—lit up. The eight glowed evenly, but the upper half of the one had gone dark. Its base flickered intermittently, a washed-out, sickly orange. Staring at it, Ben felt a wave of dizziness swamp him. The elevator doors drew back, disclosing the tee of another decaying foyer, the corridor receding in shadow to either side. A heap of damp carpet remnants mildewed in one corner, and a moist organic stench hung like a curtain in the chill air. Water dripped somewhere faraway.

  “Jesus,” Abel whispered, kicking at a discarded beer bottle, and Ben, fuming, felt the knot draw tighter.

  “You tell it,” he told Lomax. “You seem to have all the answers.”

  “All right, then,” Lomax said. “It turned out to be a home invasion. Apartment 1824. A woman and her family, three kids. The woman managed to make a 911 call before one of the snipers yanked the phone out of the wall. That was it for a while. The police got their own marksmen into position on the neighboring buildings, shut down the elevators, put SWAT teams in the stairwells.”

  They were moving toward the far end of the corridor now, where it hooked toward the south wing. The wind had picked up again. Ben could hear it sobbing through a broken window somewhere. He tried to focus on that—the wind and the graffiti scrawled on the cinder block walls, the occasional bare lightbulb casting down its jaundiced circle of radiance. Anything but the sound of Lomax’s smug little monologue. Anything but the weathered numbers painted beside each apartment door—1810, 1811, 1812—as they drew inexorably nearer and slipped by him, into the shadows.

  “The SWAT teams moved in when the shooting started again. They took down the first shooter—the only shooter so far as they knew—right away.”

  They turned the corner then, into the south wing, the corridor stretching out before them. Ben glanced at the first door on his right—1818—and then let his gaze slip ahead, farther down the narrowing perspective of the hallway, counting doorways. Twenty, twenty-two … twenty-four. 1824. So Lomax had said, but he needn’t have bothered, not for Ben’s sake, anyway. Ben had been knowing that number for years—all his life, it seemed—knowing it, longing for it, dreading it, even dreaming of it, and here it was at last, scant yards away—twenty feet, thirty at the most—the door standing open, a rectangle of ashen light in the deepening gloom, like a gateway into the past.

  “And then?” Lara asked.

  “And then the second one came through a bedroom door. In the shooting that followed, six people died.”

  “Christ,” she whispered.

  “Cops killed five of them,” Ben said.

  The words slipped out without his volition, his voice low and tense. He felt their attention shift to him once again, the entire group—Keel and Lara and Abel Williams, Ramsey Lomax, too—slowing to gaze back at him, mere shadows, silhouetted against the gray aperture of that doorway, 1824, their faces unreadable.

  How had he fallen so far behind?

  “What?” Lara said.

  “The cops. Six people died, seven if you count the one the sniper shot on the plaza. The cops killed five of them.”

  “He’s right, I’m afraid,” Lomax said. “When the second sniper burst in—”

  “The snipers, sure,” Ben said. He drew closer to them, ten feet, five, closer still, until he could see them, summoning their pale features out of the shadows. “They killed the snipers, all right. Not to mention one of the two little girls inside the apartment—the eleven-year-old. Also the girl’s mother—”

  “Wait a minute—” Keel said.

  “She was thirty-seven. Their mother,” Ben said, shooting a glance at Keel. “Not their grandmother. They even shot a couple of other cops. One of them died, too.”

  “Don’t blame the cops,” Keel said. “Listen to the man’s story, why don’t you. Your two gangbangers there started—”

  “My gangbangers?” Ben said quietly.

  Fletcher Keel fell abruptly silent. No one said anything. They just stood there, listening to the wind slowly die away, leaving only the regular cadence of their respiration to fill the silence, and that drip of water, close now, and steady, like something else in the darkness with them. Breathing.

  “I’m curious,” Ben said. “I want to know: how do you figure they’re my gangbangers? Because of the color of my skin, is that what you had in mi
nd?”

  Keel shifted on his feet. “That’s not fair. That’s not what I meant at—”

  “What did you mean, then? Explain it, why don’t you? I’m all ears.”

  “Listen,” Abel said. “Everybody just calm down. Nobody wants to—”

  “I do,” Ben said. “I want to.”

  The silence spun itself out in the agonizing intervals between each plink of water. Ben stepped closer to Keel and stood there, staring up at the bigger man, his shape bulking large in that strange swimming light. Blood hammered at his temples. The knot in his chest pulled tighter and tighter still.

  Keel, looking down at him, laughed softly. “Shit,” he said, and turned away. He took a step, and then another, moving swiftly, and then his foot came down with a splash in the center of a puddle, the water dripping from a pipe that had burst overhead—Ben saw it now—dripping steady and cold to pool there in a shallow depression in the concrete.

  “Shit,” Keel said again, louder this time, and turning back to them, he kicked savagely at something. Water arced up in a glittering spray, and an oblong brown shape skidded across the concrete to stop at Ben’s feet. A football—that was his first incoherent thought, and then looking down at the thing, he saw it for what it really was: a sodden rat the size of a dinner plate, its vacant eye upturned, black and staring. Water clung in silvery droplets to its matted fur. Blood clotted its whiskers. Its tail curled out behind it, prehensile, naked, somehow obscene.

  Ben prodded it with his toe. He looked up.

  “People lived like fucking animals,” Keel said.

  “You ought to listen to yourself,” Ben said. “All of you, you ought to listen to yourselves, touring this place like it’s some kind of zoo, like the people who lived here weren’t even people at all, like they were animals in some kind of cage, and you never even bothered to think about who put them there.”

  “I think Mr. Williams was right,” Lomax said. “I think we all need to calm down.”

  “Calm down? What does that mean? Have you even been listening to the words coming out of your mouth? You’re the worst of the bunch, marching around here like a tin-plated God, passing judgment on everything you see. These people, most of them, they never had a chance—”

  “That’s bullshit,” Keel said. “They had as much chance as anyone else,”

  “Did they? You grow up in this kind of environment, Fletcher? What color is your skin?” Ben looked around in disbelief, from face to startled face, settling at last on Lomax. He laughed humorlessly. “You know who you remind me of? That mayor, Jane Byrne. Moved right into Cabrini-Green, said she’d had enough of the killing. People said she was brave, but there was nothing brave about what she did. How much courage does it take to live in a place like this when you got a whole entourage of cops and bodyguards to take care of you? Especially when you know you can leave any time you take a notion to. You know how long she stayed, Fletcher? How about you, Abel, you got any idea how long she stayed?”

  “Three weeks,” Lomax said. “She stayed three weeks.”

  “Seems to me that’s about how long you were planning to stay,” Ben said. “And in the meantime, you’ve done exactly what she did, down there on the fifth floor. You brought a little piece of white America with you.”

  He hesitated, wanting to say more, knowing that there was nothing more to say. And even if there had been, he couldn’t say it, could he? Couldn’t find the air to give it voice, couldn’t squeeze the words past the obstruction in his chest, that Gordian tangle of fury and resentment and—

  And what?

  Fear, of course.

  Ben saw it now, felt it in the hollows of his bones. Fear of apartment 1824 and fear of a past he could not remember. Fear of the terrified child who still lived inside his flesh, drowning in words. That most of all, maybe. He glanced around at them, at Keel and Ramsey Lomax, at Abel Williams, at Lara, her hand outstretched as if she wanted to comfort him—

  He glanced down at the rat which lay dead at his feet.

  Blood glistened on its snout, in its whiskers, on the curving yellow blades of its teeth. It stared up at him from the dizzy abyss of one glossy black eye, empty of everything but the dumb enormity of its own death.

  Suddenly he wanted to cry.

  “Screw this,” he said. “I’m going downstairs.”

  “Wait, Ben—” Lara said, but Ramsey Lomax interrupted.

  “Mr. Prather,” he said. “I’m serious about this: it’s unwise to be alone here.”

  Ben, already moving in the direction of the elevator, didn’t bother looking back. “I think I’ll risk it,” he said.

  3

  Ben came unglued in the elevator.

  An observer might not have noticed, but that was the word for it all the same: unglued. His hands shook. His eyes watered. And as the elevator carried him down, unspooling the floors until at last the doors swept open, delivering him into the womblike comfort of the renovated corridor, he thought he might be sick. He stood in the foyer, waiting for the nausea to retreat; then, calmer, he made his way down the hall to his suite.

  Inside, the door secured at his back, Ben stood in front of his laptop, still anxious for the comfort of words after all these years. What would Paul Cook make of him now, he wondered: thirty years old and still unattached, with nothing but his words to console him? What would Paul say about this, his decision to come—

  —home—

  —here, to Dreamland, to try piecing together a single moment in time, twenty-seven years lost? And wouldn’t it be nice to ask—to have just an hour with the man, a chance to talk things over? Maybe he could talk to Abel Williams about it, see if he could arrange a person-to-person call with the dead.

  Ben laughed, imagining the scene—How am I doing, old friend? Inquiring minds want to know—and then he turned on the computer. While it booted up, he slipped a Chet Baker disc into the CD player. He’d always identified with Chet, Chet Baker and Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, all those white men stranded in the black, black world of jazz, like photo negatives of his own life.

  Back at the desk, the spare trumpet line snaking through his thoughts, he opened the previous night’s work and began scrolling through it, ten pages or so: impressions of his companions mostly, descriptions of their first evening in Dreamland.

  Halfway down page six, his eye snagged.

  Ben felt something sodden and inert settle in his guts, and unbidden his mind served up an appropriate image: the dead rat, its black and staring eye.

  It was a typo, he told himself. It had to be a typo. Yet he knew even then that it was no typo. It appeared near the bottom of the page, two words centered on an empty line, square in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable sentence—a sentence that resumed uninterrupted on the very next line. He read through it again:

  I wasn’t prepared for the remarkable level of

  do you

  destruction. I should have been, I know; yet the physical reality of the place surpassed

  The words—

  —do you—

  —jumped out at him. Ben stared at them, his breath suspended, then scrolled further down. The phrase recurred at the top of the very next page—

  do you

  —and again two-thirds of the way down, each time breaking the flow of another sentence. Ben’s interior chill deepened, dipping into the glacial abyss on the far side of zero.

  His fingers jockeyed with the track ball, faster now. Page seven, four broken sentences, the same phrase repeated four times. Page eight, five times—no, six, for there toward the bottom of the page, just before it broke, he saw the phrase once again, this time with an expansion of the formula—

  do you believe

  —the sentence once again continuing despite the interruption. Ben scanned it without real comprehension. Something about Fletcher Keel, something familiar about his eyes as he had stepped into the lobby elevator—

  Screw it, though.

  A buzzsaw of static cut through his thou
ghts. It was all he could do to make sense of the words. He wanted to shut down the computer and make his way to the elevator, to walk out the front doors of Dreamland and never look back. He sat still instead, numb, his fingers working, summoning page nine into view. A pixilated column of repetition—

  do you believe

  do you believe

  do you believe

  —marched down the center of his screen. The column broadened toward the base, the sentence—a question actually, his stunned brain surmised—expanding once again to echo the first phrase he had ever heard Ramsey Lomax speak—

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  And even that was not what really terrified him. What terrified him, what set his pulse racing and sent raw panic clawing up the knuckles of his spine was not this mindless pattern of repetition and expansion, but the other lines on the page, the three or four lines of conventional prose, each separated by as many as ten or twelve iterations of that same rote phrase. Each time, the broken sentence recovered its rhythm with nary a stumble, hauling itself forward with the familiar cadence of his own voice. As if nothing at all had intervened, not a single line. As if the personality that had written and rewritten and rewritten yet again that same rote line had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

  Do you believe in ghosts? read the final line on the page. Against his will, Ben’s finger slipped once more over the track ball, summoning up the final page. A single sentence glimmered mockingly at the center of an otherwise empty screen:

  You should.

  He was still staring at it when someone knocked on his door.

  4

  It was the doctor. Lara.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Shaken—more shaken than he wanted to admit—Ben stood in the doorway before her. The CD came to an end, Baker’s last plangent notes falling away into silence. In the stillness, the phrase he’d seen on his computer screen—