House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  —there, staring slack-jawed as a helicopter wheels overhead through a vault of steel-wool sky, shedding down upon his upturned face a doppler-shifted rain of spinning rotors. There’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and he sees that they’re folding up the blueprints, the whole team jittering with eagerness, like thoroughbreds being hustled into the gates. Mitchell’s face looms before his startled eyes, leaning close, strained shouting in his ear, let’s go, let’s go, baby, it’s show time, and they’re on the move, no time to think, weaving through the labyrinth of squad cars and ambulances at a not-quite run, sweat grooving in the channel of his spine, the black Kevlar chafing with each thudding impact of his booted feet. Up ahead, Mitchell pauses for a few final words with the chief, but he hardly has the time to catch a breath before they’re moving again, his weapon swinging in his gauntleted hands, and he can’t think, he can hardly hear over the crackling chaos of police radios and shouting and sirens, the wheeling roof lights touching everything with blood, his heart pounding, each and every nervous face that turns to track his progress twisted and hateful as the faces in a dream. A couple of uniforms pull back the doors to admit them, like a wide mouth waiting, and just before it swallows him up, he snatches one last glance at the world he’s about to leave behind, but all he sees is Dreamland, steadfast and implacable against the sky.

  Then, boom, they’re inside, the doors slamming shut behind them, and quiet comes down like a curtain. Half the fluorescent bulbs overhead have burned out, and the other half have the dim, shuddery look that means they’re about to go, so the whole place has a greenish flickering cast; the air is stale, the heat so thick he can feel the sweat greasing his face. Mitchell’s directing traffic, splitting them into teams, one for each stairwell. The uniforms have shut down the elevators and sealed every stairwell on ten; no one’s going in and no one’s coming out, not until they take the shooter down. He thinks suddenly that he’s going to be sick. The room ripples and jumps around him, his gorge pushing like a hand at the back of his throat. He can’t seem to catch his breath. All he can think of is Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. It’s like a clock booming in his brain, counting down the seconds of his life—

  You okay? The voice hoarse, Mitchell’s face in his face, he can smell the coffee on his breath. You okay, man, you need to step out, I need to know now—

  Something in him leaps at the idea, and it’s like a revelation: what he’s feeling is fear, not thoroughbred nerves but stark lunatic fear, it’s like a black wind crying out inside him, it’s all he can do not to collapse whimpering right there on the floor—

  Keel turned his shoulders to the needling spray. He smacked his open hand against the wall, not wanting to recall any more, but there was nothing he could do, the tidal pull of memory took him out once again into the black, black water, Patrick Mitchell’s voice in his ear, saying—

  —you look fucking green, Martin, and I got no time for this, you need to step out, yes or no, I need to know, the words hissing low in his ear, and the only thing worse than the fear is the humiliation. He can feel the fire team’s eyes upon him, he can feel his father’s eyes, his fucking war-hero father nearly ten years dead. Every day he can feel his father’s weighing eyes upon him, and it’s not hard to imagine what he would make of this little exercise in cowardice, is it—

  He speaks before he knows he’s going to. Fuck no, he says. Let’s get it on.

  Mitchell studies him, nods almost imperceptibly, and waves them forward. They’re on the move, then, through the flickering gloom and into the stairwell, the long climb before them, two turns at the landings, the light of the lobby falling away behind them, going going gone. Darkness envelops them, utter and complete. Gangbangers don’t like the light. They bust out the bulbs in the wall cages so often nobody bothers to replace them anymore, and so the fire team switches on the flashlights mounted over their weapons and climbs on in silence, climb baby climb in a tangle of intersecting beams, up the south stairwell where twenty-seven years from now a man named Fletcher Keel, a man he cannot yet imagine, will sense a presence stirring, and feel the weight of memory shifting, something dark and unwholesome surfacing through all the lies that are his life. What he will remember is what happens to this man in the south stairwell, this man who will one day seem so distant in time and space that Fletcher Keel can hardly recall him at all, can hardly imagine him and will one day let himself believe that that’s all he ever was: imagination.

  But that’s not true.

  He’s real and what Fletcher Keel will someday remember about the stairwell is a stunning little epiphany—

  Fear is a doorway.

  Open it up and anything might come in, anything at all—

  Keel hammered the wall, remembering. The reed-thin voice with the sneer of cold command sounded once again in his mind, and he thought about fear and the south stairwell.

  Fear was a doorway.

  Open it up, anything might walk in.

  He remembered what it felt like even now, there in the darkness, the fire team climbing, when it came to him.

  It felt cold and hating.

  It felt like power.

  It felt like nothing at all. Not shame and not fear. Not love and not remorse. Just nothing. Nothing at all.

  It felt like the void.

  It was the best feeling he’d ever had.

  “No,” he whispered into the thump and drizzle of the shower, thinking of the reed-thin voice that had seized him in the basement, thinking of the long trek in darkness, Dreamland opening before him its manifold and secret ways. “No.”

  He leaned his forehead against the moisture-beaded plastic of the shower wall and let the water pour across his shoulders, trying to summon back the strength he’d felt in the program. The twelve steps. Susan. Against negation, affirmation. Against the lying voice that had lured him to the basement, the voice of truth. And against the reedy voice inside the lying one, the voice of honor.

  Twelve steps.

  Susan’s voice, his father’s voice, please God his own true voice.

  Step nine: Make amends.

  He adjusted the water to scalding and stared down at his feet, watching his own filth swirling into the drain.

  God he wanted to be clean.

  13

  They ate together that night, the first time they’d done that in days. Lomax’s notion that they would divide the cooking and set a rotation had fallen by the wayside somewhere along the way, Lara wasn’t sure when. She wasn’t sure about a lot of things suddenly—Abel’s collapse and Keel’s increasingly erratic behavior, the wordless tug of emotion she felt with Benjamin Prather, all mysteries. Of one thing she was certain, though: they were all on their own here, random particles accelerating in their own eccentric orbits, alone but for chance collisions in the kitchen, the corridor, or the lounge, and God save them any explosions.

  It seemed unwise, such isolation.

  But that night, if only for a span of hours, they were together. She made it happen: she cooked the meal, she walked the corridor and banged on every door, she drew them together at the trestle in the kitchen—conversation halting, the air clamoring with unspoken tensions, but a meal, and in the best sense of the word: food as more than sustenance, as communal experience. Supper, her mother would have called it. The last supper, Lara would later come to think of it, but of course she didn’t know that then.

  She told them about Abel’s reading over stir-fried chicken, and outlined their agreement over dessert, enlisting the others by way of holding him to terms. “Anything happens to him,” she said, “anything we don’t understand, he’s out of here, agreed?”

  A circle of solemn nods, Lomax grunting his reluctant assent.

  “Abel?” she said.

  He shook his head, bemused. “Agreed.”

  So it was decided. After dinner, they played cards in the lounge for an hour or so, and then, one by one, they drifted off to their suites, Keel first, strangely subdued, his long face scored by weariness, Lomax and
Ben soon after that. In the infirmary, Lara took a bottle from a locked cabinet, shook out a single white pill, and handed it to Abel.

  “Ambien,” she said. “Ten milligrams. You’ll sleep like a baby.”

  Like a baby, he thought.

  He did, too. He swallowed it not half an hour later, and sat on the edge of his bed gazing at his own bifurcated reflection in the crystal of his father’s watch, time forever stopped thirteen minutes short of noon, while he waited for it to take effect. He pictured it happening, the pill dissolving in his belly, surrendering itself to its constituent elements, dispatching them by the thousand, tiny ambassadors of sleep, into the stream of his own unquiet blood. The last thing he remembered was reaching out to shut off the lamp and lying back in the cool sheets, an assembly of whispers following him down into the dark.

  The others weren’t so lucky.

  Alone in their suites, they hovered at the near frontier of sleep, Lomax restless in his old man’s bed, and Lara thrashing in her sheets, dreaming of Mercy General. Keel was awake long into the night, honing the edge of needs he dared not name. In the suite next door, Ben sat gazing into the ghostly well of his monitor, rocking gently, his fingers flying, chasing down connections yet unseen.

  It was after midnight when he shut off his light.

  The wind quickened, driving the temperature down through the single digits and into the subzero, mercury contracting, five below, then ten, and colder still by any human reckoning, a killing cold. Dreamland stood, impervious to weather, holding fast its silences inside walls of block and stone, its darknesses, too, and a cold still deeper and more cold.

  At just after one o’clock it started to snow.

  The Reading

  1

  The words were waiting for Ben when he woke up, centered on a glimmering screen of white. Six of them. Six simple words, and they undermined everything he had managed to fool himself into believing yesterday afternoon—that he could work at Dreamland without slipping once again into the obsessive patterns of his youth, that he stood on the verge of unraveling the mystery of Ramsey Lomax, that Paul Cook had been right and the foreboding little interjections in his prose were nothing more than subliminal communiquès from a second self, long traumatized and deeply repressed.

  Six simple words, and they did more than challenge that conclusion. They mocked it. They mocked Paul and his belief in Paul. Now, at just after nine o’clock in the morning, Ben stood in front of the computer and read them over once again:

  Too many Cooks spoil the broth.

  He’d left the lounge early last night, eager to reread the afternoon’s work, to track down the connection he’d sensed in his narrative of Abel’s collapse. He remembered sitting down in front of the computer, skimming through the day’s prose as he had planned, and then, still frustrated, opening a new document instead. He’d intended to make some notes on his rooftop conversation with Lara. Instead—

  Instead, what?

  Instead, he woke hours later to the image of a small boy hunched and rocking over a tattered spiral notebook, squat pen snug as a gun in the crook of his finger and thumb, digging. Instead, he woke to a familiar line of tension in his shoulders, a dreamy sense of rocking like a dervish at the altar of his keyboard: body memory, in his blood and bones, the fetal roll and hunker of a man in pain or need. He woke without memory of turning out the light, without knowledge of what he had written, or how long. He woke to find that he’d slept in his clothes, like a man too drunk or too exhausted to bother folding back the counterpane.

  Like a man possessed.

  The thought had shivered Ben to the bone. He stood rumpled and grainy-eyed and gazed out the window, winter in the streets and winter in his heart. Snow spiraled endlessly from a sky of tarnished pewter, softening the wasteland of shattered concrete and twisted steel below: deep already, and deepening. Inches from the window, Ben could feel the cold against his cheeks, his glasses steaming.

  He had turned away.

  In the adjoining room, the laptop stood atop the desk. Its screen crackled to light, resurrected by the touch of a key, a line of black text—

  too many

  too many

  too many

  —marching by like a column of ants, endless pages of them, then nothing at all, just blank screen after blank screen after blank screen, tabula rasa, and what came to him was a vision of himself, that hunched atavistic rocking, spectacles sliding down his nose, hammering out the same two words over and over again, like some kind of machine, tap tap tapping until even recollecting it he could feel the ache in the delicate web of muscles that strung his fingers to the bone. And somehow in all that time he had never noticed. Somehow he had managed to turn off his brain, to negate himself, consciousness sieving through his pores like water while something else filled him up. The question was: What? God help him, what?

  As if in answer, a single word came once again into his head, a cold whisper, reedy and thin—

  Possessed.

  He didn’t believe in such things, yet it had a curious power, that word. It felt right. Last night at his keyboard Benjamin Prather had checked out, and something else, something cold and hateful, had checked in. Something else had possessed him, he thought, his finger still working the track ball, empty screens flitting by until at last that phrase floated up before him, the one that made him go cold inside: six words, like some loathsome bottom-dweller surfacing in an Arctic sea, the week-old body of a whale, shark-ravaged, turning its bloated belly to the sky:

  Too many Cooks spoil the broth.

  His guts tightened.

  With one hand Ben steadied himself against the back of the chair. With the other he worked the track ball.

  Another blank page blinked by. Then another.

  And then, neatly centered, another of those oracular little phrases—

  There are many of us here, Ben.

  —this one triggering a memory of Abel in the lobby, his eyes flying open like the eyes of a man—

  —possessed—

  —startled suddenly awake.

  So many, he’d said. So many.

  Ben thought he might be sick. He wanted to turn away, to run, to lift his face to the sky and taste the snow upon his tongue, cleansing, a benediction. Still his fingers moved at the keyboard. Half a dozen empty screens flew by, and then another column of text scrolled up before him—

  too many Cooks

  too many Cooks

  too many Cooks

  He’s wrong, Ben.

  And he has no peace.

  He’s here.

  There are many of us here.

  We hate you.

  We hate you.

  We

  hate

  hate

  hate

  hate

  hate

  —that single word running on for pages, a dozen of them, two dozen, three, culminating at last in a sequence of repetitions—

  we hate you

  we hate you

  we hate

  the Cook is here

  the broth is spoiled

  —followed by a final spate of white screens, like an iris flickering on a field of light, his finger skating so quickly over the track ball that his eye barely had time to register them, until, abruptly, the end of the file yanked him up short, breathless as a runner at the end of a marathon, three phrases strung like tape across the finish line, or the blade of a guillotine, grinning and cold:

  the broth is spoiled

  the Cook is here

  soon enough you’ll join him

  2

  In the same moment, at nine, with storm light in the window, Keel woke. He had slept badly, like a skipped stone dipping bare millimeters into a choking haze of dreams, only to rebound into the outer air of full wakefulness, hurled back by the physics of his own drowsy trajectory—a restless and uneasy business, worse somehow than not sleeping at all. Jittery and raw, he lay for a long time in a nest of sleep-thrashed sheets, watching the snow come
down, pondering the super’s office in the basement, and the price a man would pay for sleep.

  3

  “Ambien,” Abel said in the lounge, and Lara looked up from the book she had not been reading. He dropped into the chair opposite, wearing faded Levi’s, sneakers, and a tee shirt that must have been red once, washed now to a burgundy that was almost pink. He laced his fingers behind his head and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Ah, Ambien. If I’d have known the power of the prescribing pen, I might have gone to med school.”

  “The glamour wears off the first time someone pukes down your top,” she said.

  Abel slung his legs over one arm of the chair and laughed. He regarded her wryly across the coffee table. “I don’t know,” he said. “My sainted mother always wanted me to do something respectable.”

  “Trust me, it’s not worth the hassle.”

  “Hassle? Healing the sick? Saving lives?”

  “Fighting with HMOs.”

  “And there’s the money.”

  “Stick to television. Lots more money there.”

  Too late, she realized it wasn’t the best thing she could have said.

  “If you can get the work,” he said ruefully.

  “Abel, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.”

  Smiling to take the sting out of it, he stood. He surveyed the bookshelves, and then he turned away, pacing, suddenly full of nervous energy. He washed up against the window, fingers drumming on the frame. After a moment’s vacillation, Lara set aside her book and joined him.

  The snow was still coming down, and not in the lazy corkscrews she’d woken up to, either. It whipped by in gusts, buffeting the glass, and then whirled once again into the void, thousands of tiny flakes, the distant skyline invisible beyond the billowing sheets of white. And it was silent, too, a deep pervasive silence that seemed to well up from the ruined streets below, seeping into the lobby, the stairwells, the airless corridors overhead. She drew it in with every breath and there was something watchful in it, and she hesitated to speak, to profane its stark perfection, or call upon herself the weight of its regard.