House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “—what would he think of you, down there diddling yourself in the basement—”

  Keel sank his other hand into the thing’s hair—

  —it’s Abel, Abel’s hair—

  —and yanked its head back. “Shut up, I’m not listening to you—”

  But the thing did not shut up. It laughed. It laughed and glared up at him from one moist, rolling eye, an eye that seemed to penetrate right down to the black river muck at the bottom of his soul, and it kept talking, talking, talking, its neck corded with strain, its jaw clacking, its voice boring through his skull like a bone saw. “What would Daddy think of what you’ve become, John?” it said, twisting the name into a skewer. “You’re a killer, you’re a coward, you’re a drunk—”

  “You shut up,” he spat. “You shut up—”

  “—you’re weak. You’re weak, and we’ll have you, too, before we’re done. You can rest assured of that, John. If you’re good, if you do just what we require, we might let you have a crack at the woman—”

  “—shut up—”

  “—she’s good, ask the nigger, he’ll tell you, you don’t mind a nigger’s sloppy seconds, do you, John—”

  “Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut up—”

  He smashed the thing’s face into the tile, rage lighting him up like a candle, like a constellation, like the sun itself, the whole world burning with incandescence as he wrenched the thing’s arm higher up its back and drove its face once again into the tile, and still it was talking, goading him, goading him, and he yanked back its head for yet another blow, he would smash its brains out, he—

  “Stop it, stop it. You’re going to kill him—”

  Keel hesitated, the voice razoring apart that swarm of molten light. He was trembling, all over he was trembling. He took a breath. He looked up into Lara’s staring face.

  They stood over him in a ragged circle—Ben and Lara, Lomax, too—their expressions blank with horror, and not at Abel, either. No, at him, at what he’d done, alone and of his own accord. His fingers spasmed in the Abel-thing’s hair. He lifted its head and stared down into the devastated face. “What would your Daddy think of what you’ve done now?” it rasped, its voice clotted with mucus, breath rattling in its shattered nostrils. It began to laugh, softly at first, the sound growing louder and louder until it seemed to fill the room, echoing back to Keel in wave after derisive wave, and he might have finished the job, might have snatched back the thing’s head and slammed its face once again into the tile, might have done it over and over again until he had smashed that laughter into silence, but Lara McGovern reached out and touched his shoulder.

  “Enough, Fletcher,” she said, and there was something kind in her eyes, something that reminded him of Susan Avery.

  A dam broke inside him, he felt it giving way.

  He pried open his fingers and lowered Abel’s face to the blood-smeared tile. When he spoke, his voice was thick with disdain. “He would have killed you both.”

  “I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I let him up, he might yet.”

  “I know. I’m not asking you to let him up. I just—Don’t hurt him anymore, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The thing writhed underneath him, trying to buck him off. “Oh, Daddy would be proud,” it whispered, and mocking laughter swirled in the air around him, fanning the ember of rage that still smoldered in his breast.

  “Shut up,” he hissed. And, then, to Lara, “You do it then. You find a way to shut him up. Or I’ll do it myself.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  She held his gaze for the space of a heartbeat, and then she turned away. A moment later she was gone.

  16

  Lara came apart in the infirmary.

  The pulse in her temple throbbed like a bass line, fragmenting her thoughts, and her endless panicky flight down the corridor had a jaundiced pall, like things seen through the fevered lens of dream. In the examination room, she fumbled her keys jangling to the counter. She realized she was cursing, low and monotonously—

  “—damn it, damn it, damn it—”

  —on every heave of breath.

  She brushed a strand of sweat-darkened hair from her forehead and plucked at the keys. Her hands trembling, she fitted one—she thought it was the right one—to the lock. It skidded off to the side, barking her knuckles.

  “Damn it!”

  The drug cabinet stood impervious, mocking.

  A vision seized her: the pressure boiling in Fletcher Keel’s agonized features, his fingers clutching at Abel’s hair. And Abel’s face. My God, his face.

  She dragged in a breath, calming herself. This time she managed to lodge the key at the mouth of the keyhole. She shoved it in, twisting. The lock surrendered with oiled precision.

  The cabinet swung open.

  She stared into it, overwhelmed by the thronged shelves. Ranks of pills and amber-tinted fluids, cartons of IV bags, sheaves of sample packs, boxes of ampoules and sealed vials, a crazy profusion of drugs. After Lomax’s litany of little horror stories, she’d spent a morning organizing and reorganizing them, memorizing everything’s location, knowing nothing was going to happen, it was like a vacation, two weeks and she’d be able to reclaim her job, her life, everything she’d lost, but committing herself to the project of organizing the damn drug cabinet anyway, just in case—and what a bitter taste those words had now, now that all that knowledge seemed to have evaporated right out of her mind. Suddenly, she didn’t even know what she was looking for, much less where to find it.

  She pounded a fist on the counter.

  This wasn’t her. This wasn’t like her. She was at her best in a crisis, this was her life’s work, it was what she was, damn it. She had vowed never to lose her head when someone else needed her, she had made a promise to herself, she had made a promise to Lana—

  Like opening a floodgate, that name. Suddenly everything came pouring through, Fletcher Keel’s twisted physiognomy and the knife, the knife driving straight down into Abel’s thigh, the knife laying open the wound in Ben’s side, most of all that mocking catalog of her own failures, Abel’s—

  —but it wasn’t Abel. It was something else reading out that—

  —taunting register of her sins: Lana and Katie Wright, too, dead, both of them dead. The word tolled in her thoughts. Did she want to fail someone else, did she want to hear those words again—

  —it should have been you, Lars—

  —did she?

  No.

  That one syllable stopped her cold, dammed up the frantic cataract of her thoughts.

  No.

  Not Lana’s voice, either. It was her own voice. Lara’s voice. She wasn’t sure she’d ever really heard it before.

  No, it said, calming her, and suddenly it was all right there inside her head, her careful inventory of the drug cabinet, what she needed—what Abel needed—Haldol, of course it was Haldol, even its location: on the lowest shelf, far back in the left corner.

  She reached for it, fishing in a drawer for a hypodermic with the other hand, that vision of Fletcher Keel’s face—

  —you shut him up then—or I’ll do it myself—

  —unreeling in her mind. She shoved aside a row of pill bottles, spilling several of them to the counter below. A handful of sample packs—allergy tablets—followed, then a glass jar that tumbled shattering to the floor.

  There it was.

  Lara dragged it out, her heart still racing, swept aside the mess on the counter, prized the box open. Neat rows of five-milligram vials nested inside. She stripped cellophane from the hypodermic, popped the needle through the taut rubber cap of an ampoule, and drew the drug up into the reservoir. She hesitated then, debating dosage. Five milligrams was standard, five milligrams ought to do it. But images of Abel haunted her thoughts—Abel driving the knife hilt-deep in his thigh, his crazed strength, the way he had kept goading Keel through a mouthful of bloody, broken teeth. And t
hat laugh. Dear God, that laugh.

  She snatched up another vial and plunged the needle through the cap, doubling the dosage. Capped the needle and set it aside. Dug under the counter for a medical kit, bandages, disinfectant, gloves.

  Christ, this was taking forever—

  There. Done.

  She stole a glance at her watch, saw that she’d been gone three or four minutes, five tops. Okay, good. She gathered her supplies and turned away, and that’s when her gaze happened to fall on the telephone.

  A fleeting memory seized her. Two nights ago, was it? Three? She didn’t know—didn’t even know for sure how long they’d been in this nightmare, and there was something more than a little disturbing about that, wasn’t there?—but the memory was utterly clear, tactile: the receiver smooth in her hand, her forehead tilted to the wall, drawing from it cool comfort to salve her blistered thoughts. And the voice on the other end of the line, faceless and remote, radiating the cool competence of an airline pilot saying he’d turned on the seatbelt signs, things were liable to get a little bumpy, the tone saying more than the words: nothing to worry about, folks, you’re in good hands.

  You folks have a problem, there?

  You bet your ass we do. Problem doesn’t really begin to describe it.

  She imagined herself picking up that phone and saying exactly that, trying to ignore the selfish dissenting voice that piped up inside her, the one arguing that if she didn’t stick out the full two-week term, if she dragged somebody else into this mess, doctors and paramedics and, inevitably, cops, because, let’s face it, what we have here is at least one case of attempted murder and maybe two—if she did all that, well, Ramsey Lomax might just renege on their deal. And where would that leave her? High and dry, that’s where.

  But somehow all that didn’t diminish the lure of the phone. How easy it would be to pick it up. And why not?

  It wouldn’t take but a minute.

  And they’d had a deal, too, she and Abel. They’d all agreed to that deal.

  She stared at the phone.

  Help was close at hand, seventeen minutes away, probably more in this weather—she glanced at the window, all darkness and whirling snow—but that was even more reason not to delay. She rolled her lower lip under her teeth, considering, while precious seconds ticked away.

  Finally, she set aside her medical kit and reached for the phone. “Hello?” she said. “Is anybody there?” And she held the receiver to her ear for two full minutes, forcing herself to wait while the second hand on her watch made two complete circuits, round and round and round it goes, but no reply ever came.

  No reply at all.

  Dreamland

  1

  “The snow must have knocked it out,” Ben said.

  Prickly tension reigned in the lounge.

  Lara paced. The others watched her—the weight of their scrutiny almost palpable—Lomax from his post by the window, one foot propped against the wall, Keel from the pool table, where he had stationed himself in silence the minute he’d finished helping strap Abel to a gurney in the infirmary. For his part, Ben eyed her mildly from across the room. He had propped himself upright against the back of a sofa, his arms crossed gingerly over his bandaged ribs. She glared at him, annoyed by his insistence on mundane explanations. “So what do you think happened to Abel?” he’d asked her as she cleaned up his side. “Some kind of psychotic break?”

  She had bitten back the impulse to tell him what she really thought, unwilling to utter the words aloud—not quite sure she was ready to give the idea any credence. Now, despite her exasperation, she settled yet again for dithering uncertainty: “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s not unreasonable, is it?” Ben said. “Storms like this take the phones out all the time.”

  “We still have power,” Lomax pointed out.

  “Maybe we ought to check it again.”

  “How many times are we going to check it?” Lara snapped.

  Ben shrugged, wincing slightly.

  “What do you think caused it, Doctor?” Lomax asked.

  Lara stalked away, unspeaking.

  “Well?” Ben prompted.

  “You of all people saw what happened to Abel, didn’t you?” she said, wheeling to face him. “You heard the things he was saying.”

  The tension ratcheted another notch tighter. None of them had yet gathered the resolve to address the issue of the things Abel had said—what they might mean, or how he might have known them.

  Secrets, Lara thought. So many secrets.

  Ben bit his lower lip.

  “Well, didn’t you?” she snapped.

  Ben looked away. “Yeah, I saw.”

  “Okay, then,” she said, unwilling to push it any further. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what caused it—any of it. The point is, what are we going to do about it?” She paused in her pacing, fixing first Ben and then Lomax with her gaze. “The point is, he can’t stay here. None of us can stay here. Agreed?”

  Lomax dropped his foot to the floor and straightened his shoulders. “I don’t think anyone disagrees with you, Doctor. Unfortunately there’s at least three feet of snow on the ground and more coming down. It’s dark. And the temperature is well below zero. What do you have in mind?”

  “There must be …” She waved vaguely. “There must be someone close by. With a phone, I mean.”

  “I trust you remember the drive in?”

  Lara said nothing.

  “Even if there is someone around, I doubt they would have a phone. I doubt even more they’d be inclined to let a stranger in to use it.”

  “We could ask them to call the cops. We wouldn’t have to go inside.”

  “People around here are wary of the police, to say the least,” Lomax said. “Where would you suggest we go if they don’t invite us in? And who would stay here with Abel? He’s hardly capable of travel.”

  Lara threw up her hands. “Do you have a better idea?”

  Lomax mulled that over quietly. “I propose we put off acting until morning,” he said at last. “We’ll send someone out at first light. Perhaps the phone will be working by then. If not, the snow may have stopped. At least, no one will be stumbling around in the dark.”

  “Right,” Lara said. “And who’s going to go?”

  “I’ll go,” Keel said from the pool table.

  The sound of his voice startled her after his prolonged silence. He stood on the far side of the pool table, not looking at them, toying with the eight ball, rotating it slowly on the velvet with long fingers—the same fingers he had used to smash Abel’s face into the tile, Lara couldn’t help thinking. If they hadn’t been there to stop him—

  Lara choked off the thought, and the one that came after it, too, Lana’s always pragmatic answer. And if he hadn’t been there to stop Abel, what then, Lars? Huh?

  Keel looked up, squaring his shoulders. “It’s the least I can do, after …” He shrugged. “You know.”

  Lara had an image of broken teeth and blood-smeared tile.

  “Very well, then,” Lomax said. “Mr. Keel has volunteered. Do we have a consensus?”

  He looked pointedly at Lara.

  She turned away, studying the photo affixed to the wall: Dreamland, all eight towers intact, in the bright moment of its inception, drowsing underneath a summer sun. And now? she thought. The answer came unbidden: Now it’s winter. Now it’s awake.

  “So we’re in agreement, then,” Lomax said.

  Lara turned to face the others.

  “All right,” Keel said.

  He spun the ball in place, like a top, reminding Lara suddenly of the prophetic novelty she’d had as a child, the magic eight ball her father had fetched home from the toy store one day. How long had it been since she had thought of that, she and Lana hunkered together on the floor of their bedroom back home in Wilmington, posing questions about who their teachers would be in the coming year or what presents they might find under the Christmas tree? An endless stream of optimistic answe
rs had floated up in response—you may rely on it and outlook good and signs say yes.

  What would it say now, that magic eight ball? What would it say about their odds of getting out of Dreamland alive? Did they have any chance at all?

  And she imagined herself a child again, in her girlhood bedroom, kneeling over the eight ball with bated breath, knowing already what answer would come swimming up through the green murk inside—

  Signs say no.

  Keel closed his fingers, abruptly checking the ball’s rotation. He snapped it toward the nearest pocket with an effortless flick of his wrist, accurate and unthinking. Lara listened to it clatter down through the guts of the table and into the return tray at the other end.

  “I guess I’d better get some sleep, then,” he said.

  2

  Prather caught up with him in the hall.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” he said.

  Keel turned back to face the other man, standing stiffly there five feet away. Tell him, a voice whispered inside his head, and another one of the AA bromides swirled through his thoughts, the one about admitting to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs. Keel shook his head. “Things got out of hand,” he said.

  “Well, things would have been far worse if you hadn’t intervened, right?”

  Would they? He wasn’t so sure, suddenly. Wasn’t so sure about anything. “I guess.”

  “Yeah, well, anyway. I wanted to say thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Keel turned away and continued down the hall, all too aware that Prather was still watching him. He spoke just as Keel was fitting the key into the lock.

  “Keel.”

  Keel pocketed the key and opened the door. Darkness waited on the other side. “Yeah,” he said, without looking up.

  “He called you John.”

  The statement hung in the silence of the corridor like an accusation. Keel stared into his empty suite, the dark swarming with nightmarish images: a blood-smeared swath of tile, the bright circle of the flashlight, like a bull’s-eye on Patrick Mitchell’s back.