House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  What it meant, that glitter, was trouble.

  Keel felt a tug of memory—a subterranean ripple that fell a hair short of genuine recollection—but he shunted it aside, and watched the whole thing play out. A reading? Sure, and in the lobby, too—despite the shadow he’d imagined stirring in the empty stairwell.

  Why not?

  Trouble didn’t scare him, it never had. Besides, he thought, staring down at his cards, he was already a hundred points in the hole.

  What else did he have to lose?

  4

  No one spoke in the elevator.

  They stood there, huddled like children as the lurching, paint-scarred car descended, busy with their own thoughts: shadows in stairwells and the falsetto laughter of a child. The unblinking gaze of a dead and sodden rat.

  Lara felt a gout of hysterical laughter lodge in her throat. It might have been a scream.

  Then the doors slid open before them.

  5

  It was a lobby, that’s all, Abel told himself.

  A lobby: two elevator slots, a wall of mailboxes with apartment numbers stenciled on their windows, and a curving counter where a doorman might have whiled away the hours. Just a lobby, and never mind that the retracting metal doors of one of the elevators had been cannibalized for God knows what purpose and the empty shaft beyond plummeted unimpeded into the black depths of the basements and subbasements below. Never mind that the rows of mailboxes had long since been defaced, locks broken, glass spiderwebbed with cracks, doors ripped utterly away to reveal naked slots in which no letter had fallen for years. Never mind that no doorman had ever stood behind that curving counter, or that sometime in the long decades before the Housing Authority threw up its hands in frustration and walked away it had been crudely boxed in by a scarred shield of bulletproof glass, complete with a pass-through tray, like the counter of a late night Gas and Go. Never mind any of that.

  It was a lobby—a chilly, unheated lobby, true—but a lobby all the same. And every apartment building on earth had a lobby.

  Never mind that a lobby, by definition, was a point of transition, a threshold between the building and the world beyond, and that there was nothing to prevent him from turning on his heels and walking out those doors into the declining January day beyond. Never mind that he could walk out of Dreamland forever.

  He’d come here for a reason. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t giving up. It was a lobby, that’s all. He could handle a lobby.

  And besides, there were no whispers. The voices had fallen still. There had never been any voices, just tension, just tension and anticipation and an overactive imagination, and all it took was work—

  Abel glanced at Ramsey Lomax.

  —to silence them. Purpose. Something to do.

  Keep busy—that’s the secret of being happy, his father had told him once—and why should it disturb him, here in this place, at this moment, to think of his father?

  Unbidden Abel’s fingers sought the watch, like a shackle at his wrist.

  The elevator doors rumbled closed.

  No voices. Nothing to fear.

  Abel turned to the others.

  “So,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

  6

  Everything depended on the pitch.

  Ideally, someone else delivered it—on Messages, Abel had employed a veritable strike force of pitchers, assistant producers mostly, polished and comfortingly bland, who worked the studio audience for an hour or more, moving through the rows and chatting people up, before Abel so much as stepped on stage. To the unschooled eye, they might have been undertakers, sincere, attentive, above all concerned: You okay, ma’am? You comfortable? Can we get you something—some water, a tissue maybe? We understand how hard this is.

  In actuality, however, something else was going on—and nothing so insidious as the deliberate intelligence-gathering Abel’s skeptics sometimes accused him of (not that anyone was averse to picking up the useful tidbit here and there). No, the real purposes of the pitch were more subtle: to put the audience at ease, to sharpen their nervous anticipation and their already hair-trigger emotions. And most of all, to lower expectations. Because the less they expected, the more they would grasp to find some connection, any connection, to the words coming out of Abel’s mouth.

  That was the closer’s job.

  The best closer Abel had ever known was Gale Parker, the woman who’d sold him on Messages to start with. By the time she stepped on stage and introduced herself, the audience was primed. And by the time she wrapped it up—by the time Abel bounded out from the wings and the cameras started rolling—the audience was practically humming with anxiety. It was primal, palpable. You could actually feel it, like the charged air that augurs a storm: a needling sense of static expectation, of pent-up energies about to be released.

  Ideally, anyway.

  Unfortunately, this was in no way an ideal situation: unlike Abel’s usual audience of fifty or sixty people, self-selected and inclined to credulity, this was a group of four, at least two of them actively skeptical. And this time he had to play all the roles—he had to make the pitch, he had to close the deal, he had to do the reading. Just like the old days. Yet it was Gale’s speech—or an appropriately modified version of it—that he fell back on, and these were the first words: “No promises.”

  Abel let them hang there, just as Gale always had, while he took stock of the others, arrayed in a ragged crescent on a clutch of rust-eaten folding chairs they’d found stacked against the security counter. Then, leaning forward in his own chair—it creaked ominously, exuding a faintly ferric odor—he clasped his hands between his knees, and repeated the phrase: “No promises. You have to understand the way this works. Imagine the worst cell phone conversation you ever had—random static, the signal cutting out, all those weird beeps or clangs. Then imagine that the person you’re talking to is speaking a language you don’t know, so you can’t rely on anything but tone to deduce his meaning. Now multiply those difficulties by a factor of ten or twenty. That’s what I’m trying to do.” He looked up. “It’s a false analogy, of course. In reality, it’s not a conversation. There are no words—”

  —no voices—

  “—only …” He shrugged. “… vague impressions. You with me so far?”

  Lara and Ben exchanged glances.

  Keel nodded skeptically.

  Lomax was impassive, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “So it’s a bad analogy, but let’s carry it a step further: you’re on the phone, but you don’t have the faintest clue who’s on the other end of the line.”

  He sat there, contemplating them, trying to find that zone of concentration, that inner intuitive space that he usually summoned in the comfort of his dressing room. There was little comfort here. It was cold, and outside the wind gusted intermittently, rattling the plywood panels affixed over the doors. Yet he sat there all the same, trying to relinquish the pressure, the sense that this was the most important reading he’d ever done, that he’d acted hastily in running out of his room like that—

  —why had he run out of his room like that—

  —that he should have thought things through. Trying to live in the moment, deep in his nerve ends.

  “It could be anyone,” he said. “Sometimes—usually—there’s a connection with someone in the room, someone at the sitting. But the only way we can figure that out is if we work together, okay?”

  Ben’s eyes flickered with something that might have been cynicism. Abel let it pass. He didn’t have to convince Ben. Not Ben, not Lara, not Fletcher Keel. The only person in the room he had to convince was Ramsey Lomax.

  “So that’s all I have: tone, the color of an emotion, an intimation. That’s what’s going to happen here. I’m going to be tossing out impressions—whatever comes to me, whatever I sense in the room’s”—he hesitated, making air quotes with his fingers—“‘energy.’ I’m just going to throw it out there. Your job is to let me know if anything rin
gs a bell. Okay?”

  Lomax, his arms still crossed over his chest, cleared his throat. “Never fear, Mr. Williams, we’ll all be suitably cooperative. Now—assuming you’re done with the disclaimers—perhaps we can get the show on the road.”

  And that was the thing: Abel didn’t want to get the show on the road.

  Something in him resisted, some deep component self.

  And yet, maybe, just maybe, that core reluctance was a gift. The thought triggered an intuitive humming in his bones, something akin to the one he’d felt fourteen years ago, hunched drunkenly over a Ouija board as he plotted his assault on Susie Whatshername’s virtue. Yes. He could use his discomfort. He could exploit his reluctance.

  The reluctance authenticated him: Fakers had nothing to fear.

  Leveling his gaze at Lomax—no one else mattered, how liberating a thought that was turning out to be—Abel said, “No. As a matter of fact I’m not done. There’s something else. I did a reading here once before. In Dreamland. In this room. Hard Copy hired me, back when the story of that girl—Matheson—was hot. We came down here, we did it right here.” He paused. He took a deep breath, uncertain suddenly how much of this was a put-up job. He said, “I didn’t want to come back. I wouldn’t have, if my show hadn’t tanked.”

  Silence greeted this confession.

  “Why is that?” Lomax lifted his chin.

  “Something happened.”

  Abel licked his lips. He didn’t want to say what had really happened—didn’t want to mention the whispers stirring in the dry mouth of the empty elevator shaft, didn’t even want to think about that searing glimpse of Theresa Matheson’s final agonizing moments on earth—but he had to say something. Here, as in all things, vagueness was his watchword: what went unsaid possessed infinitely more power than any words.

  “I don’t know what it was, I don’t understand it exactly, but there was something here. Something I’ve never felt before.”

  “What was that?” Lomax said softly, leaning forward almost imperceptibly, and Abel felt something open up inside him: a renewed confidence, a certainty. He’d set the hook; now all he had to do was reel it in.

  He swallowed. “There was a single moment there—just a few seconds—when—when—” And if his voice caught for an instant, if for a single pulse of his heart his brain resurrected that image of Theresa Matheson, and his core reluctance—

  —terror it was terror—

  —reasserted itself, no one else seemed to notice. Taking a breath, he pushed on: “—when I had a connection that was deeper than anything I’ve ever felt, so deep it … frightened me, actually.” He forced a laugh. “Other than that, the reading went badly. Very badly, to be honest. Hard Copy never used it.”

  “What was so bad about it?” Ben asked.

  “Except for that one moment, I couldn’t get anything. The room was full of Theresa Matheson’s friends. She died here. There should have been some connections, and now, the weird thing is …”

  Abel let his voice trail off. He stood, scraping his chair across the chill concrete, utterly in command of their attention. The lobby, silent—

  —voiceless—

  —suddenly belonged to him in a way that no other place on the planet had ever belonged to him, no place but the stage. He owned it now. He owned them. He paced, letting his face relax into a semblance of empty concentration, the expression of a man trying to hear the voice on the far end of a static-ridden line—

  —a party line, something whispered deep inside him—

  —the expression of a man distracted beyond mere distraction, a man barely present at all except in the most prosaic and physical of ways. It was all practiced illusion. In reality, Abel was never more present, never more aware, than when on stage. He paced before them, vigilant for the slightest stir of interest: a rustle of clothing, an involuntary sigh.

  He turned, watching them without seeming to watch them. He spoke slowly, his voice a monotone. “What’s weird is, I’m sensing more connections now than I did then. I’m sensing connections with people in this room …”

  He drifted into silence once again. How powerful silence was. How discomfiting. People couldn’t help wanting to fill it.

  Lara took the bait, her voice puzzled. “With us?”

  “More than one of you,” he said. “Loss. An incredible sense of loss.”

  He cautioned himself to avoid the temptation, to avoid the obvious. Avoid Theresa Matheson.

  Slowly, then, his voice soothing, coaxing: “Someone here, among us. I’m getting a sense of … kinship?”

  “Here?” Lara said, puzzled.

  Abel gestured vaguely, as if groping for words. “Everywhere. They’re drawn to us, the ones they’ve left behind. They’re always with us.”

  He paced, his face blank, inwardly exultant. He had forgotten—off stage, he always forgot—just how easy it was, how simple to summon it up, how close to the surface it ran, this river of grief flowing just under every human skin. Name it, and it was there. How naked their faces were, how clear the ripple of emotion.

  Abel could see it in Keel’s face, in Ben’s—he could see them fighting it. The obdurate set of Keel’s mouth, the furrowed ridges of Ben’s brow. Lomax sat straight, his arms uncrossed, receptive, his fingers curled loosely at the edges of his seat. Lara leaned forward, her lips moist, slightly parted. Her hands balled in fists in the narrow valley of her lap.

  He had her. Fixed and fascinated. More than any of them, she belonged to him.

  In silence, pacing, Abel followed his intuition. Go with her, it said. She’s ripe for it. Snare her, you snare them all, sooner or later. And why had he ever worried? After all, there was time yet. There was plenty of time.

  Abel dropped his voice an octave. “Kinship,” he said thoughtfully. “A close friend …” He scrutinized her, dragging the word out while he waited for a light of recognition to come into her face, but there was nothing there, no spark. Projecting a note of certainty into his voice, a note of revelation, he said, “No. A family member, a loss that wounded you deeply …”

  Yes. There it was, the light in her eyes: he’d touched something, a tender spot. A wound.

  He moved away from her. He didn’t want to crowd her.

  But for the damp echo of his feet upon the concrete, the lobby was utterly silent: a blessing, a benediction of silence. All it took was work—

  —keep busy that’s the secret of silencing the voices, he thought giddily—

  —and now, with his back to her, Abel said, “I’m sensing … there was a heaviness …” Turning, watching her slant-wise, he laid his hand against his breast. “There was something in the chest area.”

  “Pneumonia …”

  The old folks’ friend. “Your mother.”

  A shot in the dark. Abel saw it go wide. He saw the light flicker in her eyes, and quickly, even as her lips shaped the denial, he shook his head, hastening to fill the silence: “No, that’s wrong, it’s something else. I’m sensing that she was younger. Your sister. It was your sister, wasn’t it?”

  Lara’s face lit up. It was like pulling the lever on a one-armed bandit, and watching black bars, one two three, spin to a stop the length of the dial: jackpot, a rain of coins overflowing the tray. He turned, fixing her with his eye. Sister, she had a sister …

  Young people didn’t die of pneumonia. Young people beat pneumonia. The respiratory stuff was a red herring, symptomatic of some larger affliction, AIDS or cancer, which one was it? And he looked at her, at Lara, thin to the point of gauntness, eaten up with something, punishing herself like some medieval flagellant. He looked at her—thin, white, highly educated—the whole profile wrong for AIDS, dead wrong, ha ha, no pun intended, it was cancer, it had to be. He felt the certainty in his bones.

  “It was the chemo, wasn’t it? It weakened her immune system, she got pneumonia, but it was the cancer that killed her.”

  A single tear trembled at the lip of Lara McGovern’s left eye. Then it spilled
over, drawing a glistening line down the hollow of her cheek.

  The money shot.

  It was all Abel could do not to pump his fist. Triumph flooded through him, an intoxicating rush. He turned away lest someone see it in his eyes, and just then—just for an instant—his concentration faltered. Just for an instant, he let himself slip into that sunlit July day almost two years gone, Dreamland stark against the pristine sky—yet shrouded in a darkness that fell just short of visible, a darkness he could feel inside his bones. He sensed Theresa Matheson’s friends encamped around him, silent and resentful, the Hard Copy producer fretting just out of camera range.

  Now it came back to him: that sense of anxiety as the reading went bad. He turned as he remembered turning and there it was again, in the eye of memory, the Hard Copy producer’s absurd shrine of candles and roses and photo enlargements, Theresa Matheson staring back at him from half a dozen burnished frames.

  The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees, his breath vapor in the air.

  No, he thought, wrenching himself back into the moment. No—

  Too late.

  Came the whirlwind, came the thunder, the clamor stirring to crescendo in the dry throat of the abandoned elevator shaft—

  —voices my god so many voices—

  —and gushing out at him, an invisible wave. Abel staggered like a man leaning into raging wind or water, and still it came on, a sound that was not sound, that he heard not with his ears but in his bones, in his sinews and in his cells, vibrating like the struck surface of an enormous bell, a gale of voices, a geyser spewing up from some black and unimagined depth a few half-familiar phrases—