House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  He had no patience for self-deception. Besides, he could afford it.

  Yet none of it calmed him now.

  Not the chair and not the marble credenza; not the framed Haring sketch over the desk, in which he could see his own reflection, ghostly and gaunt, his strong-boned face half in shadow. He stared at himself, the sound of that stairwell door echoing in his thoughts.

  So it had begun.

  Five days in—or was it six? (this imprecision, which wasn’t like him, momentarily nagged at him)—and finally it had begun. That afternoon in the lobby, when Abel Williams had collapsed during his absurd manipulation of the doctor, Lomax had felt a seed of hope lodge inside his breast. Now that someone—

  —who?—

  —had ventured out into the night corridors of Dreamland, he felt that seed swell and burst, sinking the first questing roots into the aching loam of his heart.

  “Please,” he said aloud, his voice husky. It was as close as he could come to a prayer.

  As the word died on his lips, he drew open the desk’s central drawer.

  Inside, on a bed of green velvet, lay an envelope.

  7

  Hesitantly at first, and then with growing confidence, Keel descended into a well of night. The dark was like syrup, pouring in at his nostrils and mouth, in his ears, through the pupils of his eyes. It filled his lungs, spun tenuous threads though his arteries, rooted itself deep in the fabric of muscle and bone. Finally it blurred even the edges of his awareness, the impermeable envelope of self. He sensed the topography of the stairwell as he might have sensed his own body: with the same certainty, the same careless grace. His feet fell naturally at the edge of every riser, he lengthened his stride for every landing, he compensated without thought for every turning of the way.

  Downward, he went. Downward, his hand loose upon the iron rail.

  Ten steps, twenty, a hundred and twenty. Two landings, then four, then six and eight, until finally he lost count, until finally he had descended farther than he had ever intended, beyond the lobby, beyond all logic or reason, into the subterranean guts of the building, an alarm trilling like a telephone inside his brain.

  Keel ignored it. He knew the voice he would hear at the other end of the line. It was his father’s voice. He knew what it would say.

  Go back, John. Go back. It’s not too late.

  Part of him longed to do just that, to turn and begin the long ascent into the light. But another, stronger self had ears only for that other voice, the woman’s voice, Lisa’s voice—

  —come to me—

  —as it boomed like a siren’s song through all the chambers of his brain.

  Downward, it sang, and downward he went, his prick rigid in his trousers. And by the time he reached absolute bottom and paused in blindness before another metal door, the entire weight of the building balanced above him, that alarm bell of anxiety had faded. Only the crooning summons remained, cutting through his thoughts with an edge honed by more than a decade of pent-up need.

  Come to me, it whispered.

  Moving with absolute certainty in the dark, Fletcher Keel put out his hand and opened the door.

  8

  On the eighteenth floor, the elevator doors retracted in silence.

  Lara hesitated at the threshold, studying the elevator bay as if she might be asked to recall it for an exam—the heap of molding carpet remnants, the malodorous garbage bag of bulging black plastic, the ancient scuffs on the dull concrete floor where somebody must have dragged a piece of furniture back when Dreamland was still habitable and there were people willing to inhabit it. What she was really doing was delaying the inevitable, of course. She supposed Ben must have done the same thing.

  In fact, she was a little surprised she hadn’t run into him right here, still dithering.

  She knew where he was heading. She had known it from the moment she’d seen him turn into the elevator bay thirteen floors below. And she should have known it before that. But for her own self-involvement, Ben’s behavior during their little tour the other day would have alerted her. Then again, Lars, Lana put in, but for your own self-involvement, Katie Wright might be alive even now.

  Right.

  Which really didn’t bear thinking about, did it?

  As if in answer, a silvery tremolo, like the mocking titter of a child, chimed in the hallway around her, and Lomax’s warning—

  —it’s unwise to wander here alone—

  —ghosted through her mind. But it was nothing, she told herself—the glassy harmonic of wind in a shattered window, that’s all. Instead of punching the elevator button and riding the car back down to the warmth and comfort of the fifth floor, Lara steeled herself and turned down the corridor toward the south wing. Her imagination had gotten the best of her in the lobby yesterday. She wasn’t about to let it happen again. Besides, once she caught up with Ben she wouldn’t be alone anymore, would she?

  But the corridor, narrowing before her in diminished perspective, had a surreal, dreamlike quality. One or two lingering bulbs flickered dimly overhead, casting down sickly-pools of radiance. Elsewhere, a wan blue light held sway, brightening to ghostly incandescence in the moonlit doorways and deepening to black in the intervals between, where graffiti-scrolled planes of icy block scaled the dark like the walls of some gargantuan labyrinth. The wind kicked up, rattling a door against its frame. In the distance, she heard that tingling falsetto laughter once again.

  Almost against her will, Lara quickened her pace.

  Doorways whisked by, whispering with malign intent. The corridor lengthened inexorably before her, like a corridor in a dream. It reminded her suddenly of her dream, the one which had awakened her, and she found herself wondering if maybe she was still dreaming—if somehow she had dreamed herself awake and, waking, plunged deeper yet into a maze of sleep, where the tiled and sterile corridors of Mercy General might metamorphose as if by magic into the walls of her childhood home or the ruined passageways before her, where she might at any moment come face-to-face with the blood-stained specter of a man who was and was not Fletcher Keel, or, worse yet, the waiflike and accusing eyes of the child who was and was not Lana but some other child—

  —Katie was it Katie—

  —the lost and lingering apparition of all lost sisters in all the passages of years. Her heart pounded. Her breath grew short.

  Then, abruptly, she was there, at the dogleg turn of passage into the south wing, and as when waking from a dream, the world reverted to its old, familiar self. The corridor was just a corridor, nothing more. The wind was just the wind. And Ben—Ben was only Ben. He stood at the distant terminus of the corridor, in a nimbus of moonlit blue from the yawning doorway at his back, and gazed in silence at the shuttered face of apartment 1824.

  Ben, she thought, and she must have spoken it aloud, for as she started down the corridor, he turned to face her, his hands restless at his sides, his dark features clenched blindly, fistlike, in some cloistered agony of grief. It shamed her, that expression, as though she had intruded upon some intensely private ritual, yet she never hesitated. When it came to hurt, Lara did not, would not, hesitate, ever again; she was the maternal one—Lana had been right about that much anyway—it was her cross to bear. And so she moved toward him, repeating his name softly, like a talisman, summoning him back from that reverie of guilt and sorrow as she would have coaxed a man from the edge of a precipice. “Ben,” she said, “Ben,” and after a moment’s hesitation, he took a halting step or two to meet her. In that fraught, clockwork stumbling, she intuited all at once what she must have been piecing together at some unconscious level from the moment he had first turned in flight from apartment 1824: the shape and dimension of his sorrow, its latitude and weather.

  How could she have missed it?

  Face-to-face they paused, two feet apart.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. “The little boy in that apartment, it was you.”

  His lips worked soundlessly. He exhaled, and d
ragged in a choking breath. He turned away.

  In the silence Lara was conscious of the water dripping from the burst pipe overhead. She looked up at it, an intricate stalactite of sculpted ice suspended from the lip of the shattered pipe. A single moonstruck droplet clung precariously to its sharpened end, and then it plunged away, to shatter with a plink against the ice-skimmed puddle below. When she lowered her gaze, he was there, fully present once again, staring into her eyes.

  “I can’t,” he whispered. He drew a breath. “I can’t go in that place.”

  “You don’t have to. Listen. You don’t have to do that.”

  “I stand there, I look at the door, my heart, it’s like I seize up inside—”

  He clutched at his chest, and she saw how washed-out he was, how drawn and pale. Beads of perspiration jeweled his forehead. His breath came in shallow heaves. She did not have to touch him to know that his pulse was galloping, his heart fluttering like a trapped sparrow in its bowl of ribs. He bent double, as if he might throw up.

  “I can’t,” he whispered. “I don’t … understand … what’s happening …”

  And then she did touch him.

  She took his arm. She steadied him, and when he spoke again—when he said, “I need … some air,” she turned him back toward the apartment, toward the glimmering EXIT sign, the metal fire door, and the stairwell on the other side.

  “No,” he said. “No!” In a panic, he resisted. Then, all at once, he surrendered. Arm in arm, they lurched past the mute entryway of apartment 1824 and banged through the fire door beyond. In the darkness of the landing, a column of steep iron rungs circled invisibly toward the roof. She might have missed them altogether but for the guide of memory and the intermittent complaint of the door above, groaning in its frame with every knife-edge gust of wind.

  And in the tumult of the moment she did miss something else.

  They both missed it, though her foot had grazed it in the corridor as they passed and sent it spinning across that thin-skinned pool of ice. It fetched up against the far block wall and shattered with a sound like brittle twigs cracking underfoot: the corpse of the rat which only days ago had lain sodden there and freshly dead. How utterly skeletonized it was, and how soon: stripped of flesh to its white and grinning bones.

  9

  In darkness, disoriented, Keel thought: Imagine.

  Imagine eight stone slabs, Dreamland, Tower Three and her seven sisters, featureless and vertical, erect against a sky of humid August steel. Imagine a battalion, mazelike, of squad cars, ambulances, and fire trucks idling their poison into the choking air. Imagine the buzz and chatter of the dashboard radios, the grunted oaths, the barked commands, the distant whup-whup of a chopper circling overhead. And in the midst of all this chaos, imagine a man. He has a way of moving purposefully and quickly, this man, with a kind of unconsidered grace; he is quick-tempered, and capable of charm. He is, in other words, a man not unlike yourself.

  But—pay attention now, this is all-important—this man: he is not you.

  Imagine him—

  Peripherally aware of all this and more: of the fire team crowded at his shoulders and the sun pulsing like a white-hot coal in the sky, of the trickle of sweat oozing down the channel of his spine. He knows the weight of the weapon in his gloved hands. He senses the eyes of the civilian evacuees upon him, women and children mostly, these citizens of a darker nation pressing resentfully against the line of uniforms at his back. He’s unlearned but intelligent, this man. He has a kind of animal cunning. He knows how he and his companions must appear: more like gigantic insects than human beings, their strange white faces suspended inside exoskeletons of matte black body armor, each of them sporting the kind of semiautomatic firepower most people never see outside of action movies. More like storm troopers than saviors, the invading SS in the Warsaw ghetto.

  He knows all this, intuitively, but he does not care.

  In that moment, with the sun beating on his armored shoulders, he cares about nothing but the sheaf of age-yellowed blueprints spread across the hood of the squad car before him, anchored there by gloved hands like his own. Those blueprints may well hold the key to his survival. In fifteen minutes, twenty at the most, he’ll be inside that building. He’ll be ascending the blind well of the darkened stairs—

  —the south stairs, John—

  —that’s not my name my name is—

  —toward a confrontation with whatever awaits him in the stultifying heat of the upper stories, in that rathole warren of crack dens and cinder block corridors. A confrontation with something that can kill him. He’s confirmed that with his own eyes, the man in the matte black Kevlar—saw through the sweep of the binoculars clipped to his belt the body of a man writhing in a pool of his own blood there on the heat-softened blacktop of the central plaza. Three times in the last twenty minutes, an ambulance crew from Mercy General has tried to retrieve him. Each time, gunfire from the tower drove them back. The imaginary man in the black armor saw it with his own eyes, so he studies those blueprints like he’s never studied anything in his life up to now—not the weapon in his own hands (which he can field strip and reassemble blindfolded in three minutes flat), not the lessons of his father more than ten years gone, not the faces of his sisters or his mother or the almostwoman that he thinks he loves. He studies those blueprints because the truth of the matter is that for all his training, for his four years in the service, his months at the academy and on the street, for all his endless hours of rehearsal on the range, he’s never once come under live fire; the truth of the matter is, he wants to know exactly where he is and where to go—

  —to hide—

  —when the shit starts raining down. The truth is he’s scared. So he imprints the layout of that building in the gray matter of his brain.

  Imagine it, Keel thought. It is not memory. It’s imagination only. So imagine it.

  And he imagined it. Standing there in the dark with that summons—

  —come to me John come—

  —still beating in his ears, he saw as if projected on a screen those disintegrating blueprints fished somewhere out of a file in the bowels of the special gangs unit. Saw the squarish block of the tower cored through with the twin elevator shafts, saw the metered heights of the four stairwells, one each at the corners of the lobby and the extremities of the building’s outflung wings. Saw in particular the stairwell that had been assigned to the fire team of that other and imaginary man. With a mental flip of age-ivoried pages he could almost see himself at the base of that stairwell, deep in the labyrinthine substructure of the tower above.

  What lay before him?

  Storage, that’s what the blueprints said. An enormous storage room, twenty feet high or more, girded at intervals with titanic archways of formed and rebar-reinforced concrete, marching in colonnade away from him: the building’s lowest level, its dank and secret heart. Keel had a sense of spacious emptiness in the darkness, cool currents in the air, a scent of damp stone emanating from the glossy upturned eyes of subterranean pools. He could see it all so clearly in the blueprints. A row of doorways sketched themselves in blue ink along the far wall: tool rooms and workshops; the lair of an ancient and enormous furnace like a dragon rusting, rendered obsolete by Lomax’s renovations, its ferric odor faintly seasoning the air; a lounge and office area for the maintenance staff. He could sense it somehow—

  —how?—

  —he could see it in the imaginary blueprints in his head, but he could not really see it. He could not see it with his eyes, so to confirm it he called aloud into the darkness, “Who are you?”

  The echo came rolling back to him in waves, out of the cavernous grottoes overhead, off water and from the mouths of damp stone, down the whispering gallery of arches.

  …who are you who are you who are you who …

  Fletcher Keel grimaced. The hairs along his arms shivered themselves to attention, his scrotum shrank into the shelter of his body, the heat of his arousal retreated
. For the space of an instant the house of lies he’d spent the last two decades erecting trembled in its bones. The weight of memory lipped the surface of some internal dam, and the man he had imagined or remembered—

  —it wasn’t memory it wasn’t—

  —almost merged into the man he had become. Then, just as the last echo died, the summons renewed itself.

  I’m yours, it said. It said, I’m yours for the taking.

  It might have been an echo, except that it was a woman’s voice. It was Lisa’s voice, it was Susan Avery’s voice, it was the smoky whiskey-timbred voice of every woman he had ever known, in every bed, in every bar and brothel, in every backseat where he had bought or stolen the sweet oblivion of a momentary spasm.

  And it was coming from the building super’s office—an office with a rump-sprung sofa to accept the weight of their coupled bodies. He did not pause to question this, to wonder how he knew it or how it was he found his way surefooted through all that void of dark. Images cascaded through his mind—the rounded promise of the flight attendant’s breast at his cheek or the perfect inverted heart of her ass as she leaned toward the passenger before him, the fleeting taste of Susan Avery’s lips against his own—and in the haste of his tumescence he did not pause to wonder what it was that crackled like kindling underfoot as he hurried down that avenue of arches.

  He didn’t think of it at all on any conscious level. He hardly heard it. But even in that frenzied moment of desire a fragment of his ever-watchful being, frightened and deeply buried, registered the sensation of something brittle snapping underneath his unshod feet. At some level, even then, he knew.