House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  And now, to have it flung up in his face like this, that word.

  He stood, pacing, and snatched a crumpled wad of paper off the desk: the splotched barroom napkin Klavan had given him. Pausing by the window—the snow had stopped at last, and a faint luminescent moon, three-quarters full, peered down between wispy fingers of cloud—he unfolded it, thinking now of Susan Avery. He had given it up, the life he might have made with her, and for what? Nothing. An ink-smeared napkin, a Rorschach blotch, unreadable. He let it drop from abruptly nerveless fingers.

  But Susan Avery, once summoned, would not be so easily dismissed. She seemed to hover in the air around him, her scent of coffee and soap, the touch of her chapped lips against his own, her voice in his head, echoing that tired AA platitude about owning up to the exact nature of your wrongs, echoing that and more, saying, We’ve got the rest of our lives. It’s not too late.

  The phrase echoed inside his head.

  And why not? Who said it was too late?

  Why not step into the hall and bang on Benjamin Prather’s door?

  Keel hesitated a moment longer, and then he turned from the window. The doorknob gave beneath his hand. The hallway beyond was desolate. He did not give himself time to reconsider. He lifted his fist and rapped sharply on the neighboring door, once, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, again.

  No answer came.

  He sagged, weariness washing through him in a hazy reverie of nightmarish plunges and distortions, last night’s uneasy dreams. He almost turned away, but Susan Avery’s voice—

  —we’ve got the rest of our lives—

  —turned him down the hall instead. He swung through the lounge doorway unseen—and pulled to an abrupt stop. Prather and the doctor were hunched over a pile of papers like a couple of high school kids on a study date. Even a blind man could have read their easy intimacy.

  His guts heaved.

  Abel’s voice cut through his thoughts—

  —ask the nigger, he’ll tell you, you don’t mind a nigger’s sloppy seconds, do you—

  —unleashing a tidal swell of jealousy and resentment, and he lurched away instead, not toward his suite, toward the south stairwell.

  8

  In the same moment, in the infirmary, the sedatives in Abel Williams’ bloodstream dropped past some critical threshold and he came suddenly awake, stretched taut on a rack of agony—his thigh burning, his face throbbing—as the events of the past hours poured back to him in a stream of nightmare images. Panic clawed at him—

  —what had happened to him—

  —and then the malevolent presence lying dormant inside him uncoiled itself, banished him to that deep internal pit, and once again assumed its cold dominion.

  9

  The first drink tasted great.

  Deep in the bowels of Dreamland, seated comfortably at Dennis Eakin’s desk in the gentle radiance of the gooseneck lamp, almost without memory of the dark sojourn just past, the unlit stairwell and the cavernous antechamber of the central basement, Keel held it in his mouth, that drink, savoring the subtle flavors of charcoal and smoked wood, the sweet evanescence of prime Tennessee sipping whiskey on his tongue. At last, he swallowed. The liquor warmed him all the way down. Igniting a comfortable glow in his belly, it set about the serious business of dispatching calming emissaries to every frontier of jangled nerve ends.

  The voices in his head were silent.

  Keel leaned back, the chair squeaking underneath him.

  It might have been made for him, that chair, its arms tooled to fit his arms, the dimpled surface of its seat designed especially to receive him. The whole place felt that way to him—comfortably shabby, lived-in, homey. The sleep that had evaded him upstairs in the impersonal luxury of his suite hung waiting here, high in the crepuscular corners, like a silken net suspended in the shadows to enmesh him.

  He hardly needed the drink, the place itself so soothed him. He let this fantasy spin itself out for a minute or two—he’d have one drink, that’s all, hardly a major offense, more like a gentle step off the wagon than a genuine fall, and what was to prevent him from stepping right back on, none the worse for wear? Then—hardly aware that he was doing it—Keel lifted the pint of Jack once again to his lips, tilted another slug of whiskey into his mouth, and swallowed it.

  A boundless sense of well-being suffused him.

  He reached out and dragged one of the magazines closer: Gallery, “Home of the Girl Next Door.” He studied the cover—a bubble-breasted blonde, her tongue extended in teasing invitation to the giant, rainbow-swirled lollipop she held in one hand—and then he flipped it open, idly thumbing pages as he followed out the line of his thoughts.

  The thing was—and when you got right down to it, he really did believe this, he believed it to the very bottom of his soul—everything was going to be okay. He was comfortable here, that’s all. In fact, it was probably better this way—better for all of them. He could sleep undisturbed, stretched out on the sofa as he had slept the other night. He’d have another drink or two—not too much, just enough to dull the edge of anxiety that the whole encounter with Abel, fucking Abel Williams, had honed to razor sharpness—and then he’d sleep. He’d sleep like a baby—remember how well he’d slept here the other night?—and in the morning he’d be fine. He’d be in better shape than if he had slept upstairs, and that would be good for everybody. It would only increase his odds of success in doing just what he’d agreed to do: wading through all the damn snow to fetch back help for fucking Abel Williams.

  Right?

  Keel eyed the level of whiskey in the pint carefully, comforted by the presence of the two bottles of Crow, like attendants in waiting.

  He had another sip, turned a page.

  He was well launched into the “Girls Next Door” section by this point, and he felt pleasantly aroused. He’d always been partial to the whole girl-next-door concept: their imperfect bodies, immortalized in cheap snapshots, held an erotic appeal, an accessibility, that the airbrushed models who deigned to spread their empyrean perfection elsewhere in the magazine could not match.

  He licked a finger and turned the page.

  Take this one here, for example, the dishwater blonde at the bottom of the page, the skinny one with the snub nose and the high tits. Sarah, from Lubbock, Texas. Not bad, not by any stretch of the imagination. She wasn’t a surgically enhanced goddess, true, but what she lacked in the looks department you can bet she more than made up for in enthusiasm, else she never would have let—Keel squinted at the text under the photo—she never would have let her boyfriend Jess take the damn picture in the first place, much less submit it for publication. Right? In fact, come to think of it …

  Keel leaned closer, studying the picture.

  … she looked a little like Lara, didn’t she?

  More than a little, actually—and Keel’s whiskey-flushed imagination, unbidden, treated him to a private little blue movie of the doctor in action, of Benjamin Prather mounting up in the saddle of her narrow hips, black on white, right there in the goddamn lounge.

  You don’t mind a nigger’s sloppy seconds do you, John?

  Keel’s lazy sense of well-being dissipated in the cool subterranean air. He separated the page from the stapled binding of the magazine with a single angry jerk, quartered it and quartered it again, and let the scraps flutter down to the untidy mass of paper already on the floor.

  It didn’t prove so easy to erase the image from his mind, however. Grimacing, Keel reached for the pint—it was almost empty now—and took another drink.

  10

  “Here,” Lara said, pointing to the page.

  “What?”

  Ben stopped pacing to look over her shoulder. She’d been reading a printout of his notes on Abel’s reading—the one session at the keyboard he’d managed without the staccato sequence of interruptions. He’d told her about his nagging sense that there was something of importance there, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

/>   “I had forgotten this,” she said. “The reading in the lobby—it was Lomax’s idea.”

  “No, it was Abel’s, remember? We were playing gin.”

  She looked up at him. “The reading was Abel’s idea. The lobby was Lomax’s.”

  “You sure?”

  “You wrote it.”

  He reread the passage in question. “Huh. Well, so what?”

  “This afternoon at the table,” she said. “Just before everything went to hell—Lomax suggested we move to the lobby again. Remember? He was kind of insistent about it.”

  “So what’s the connection?” He turned to look at her. “Or here’s a better question: Why did he get interested in Dreamland in the first place?”

  He resumed pacing, running through the events in his mind. In both cases, Lomax had insisted on a reading in the lobby, where Theresa Matheson had been killed. That had happened two years ago—two and a half now, actually, not long before Lomax had sold off his interest in Eyecom Industries and gone into seclusion—

  He looked up, met Lara’s eyes.

  “Theresa Matheson,” they said at the same time.

  “What about her?” Ben said.

  “She was my daughter,” Lomax said from the doorway.

  11

  Fletcher Keel was drunk.

  The booze, after three months off, had hit him harder than he expected. What had started as a swelling sense of well-being had mutated, following that little mind movie of Lara and Benjamin Prather, into sullen resentment. With each subsequent sip of whiskey, the resentment had deepened into something else—self-loathing and a looming sense of depression, finally a formless and foreboding apprehension.

  Dennis Eakin’s office abruptly seemed neither cozy nor comfortable. It seemed … threatening. He suddenly longed for the comfort of his fifth-floor suite.

  A long walk, that. A long climb up hundreds of damp concrete stairs. In the dark. With some misguided notion of self-protection, Keel yanked open the drawer containing the tools and fished out the hammer. He heaved himself to his feet and glanced at the desktop, a little surprised to discover that he’d finished off the entire pint and made a respectable dent in one of the liters of Crow.

  He reached for it instinctively, checking the gesture just before his fingers closed around the bottle neck. A complex storm of emotions swirled through him—defiance and rancor both, and wrapped up inside of that, like the eye of a tornado, a deep and unyielding pocket of shame. He wondered what Susan Avery would think of him now—and the fact that he knew what she would think of him, that she would pity him without judging him, that she would seek to lend him even in this moment of reeling weakness a fragment of her own strength and dignity, somehow made it all worse.

  And it wasn’t his fault.

  He’d been led astray, hadn’t he? He’d been coaxed and lured, he’d been manipulated, and now, drunk in Dennis Eakin’s office, drunk on Dennis Eakin’s whiskey, he felt dark wings once again beating invisibly around his shoulders.

  He lashed at the bottle, slapping it unbroken to the floor, where it leaked aromatic bourbon into the stew of spilled paper and shredded magazines. He hated himself for wanting to snatch it up before it emptied. He hated himself even more for not doing it. If he’d had a match in that instant, he might have snapped it burning into the whole mess, and been glad to do it—maybe he’d get lucky, burn this fucking place to the earth and burn himself up inside it, yielding himself to the bright and purifying flame. Lacking one, he turned toward the door instead, staggering a little. He reached for the lamp to steady himself, and sent it crashing to the floor. Its bulb popped with a soft whump of displaced vacuum, plunging the office into darkness.

  “Shit,” Keel muttered.

  He fumbled at the doorknob and let himself out into the central basement, still clutching the hammer in his left hand. Alas, that preternatural knowledge of the building’s layout, of every stick of discarded furniture and shattered bottle, seemed to have evaporated. He tried to summon up the blueprint inside his head. Nothing came.

  So turn on the lights.

  The thought, logical as it was, seemed to come from nowhere, and for a moment Keel wasn’t sure whose voice it was—his or someone—

  —something—

  —else’s—but in the end he didn’t bother trying to hash it out. The darkness weighed upon him, impenetrable. If he tried to make it across the basement in this condition, he’d probably break his neck. So he reached out with blind, grasping fingers, located the switch, and did just what the voice had told him to do:

  He turned on the lights.

  12

  “I fear that I have been a very poor father indeed,” Lomax said, sitting heavily across from them.

  “I thought—I thought you didn’t have any children,” Ben said. “There’s no record of them.”

  “No, there wouldn’t be, would there?” he said.

  He hesitated, looking at the ceiling, the light gilding his shaven skull. He looked suddenly like an old man, his flesh sagging, his mouth tremulous—as if he had sustained his vitality all this time through sheer force of will, and that failing, he was left with nothing. He sighed. “How to tell it? Lord, how to tell it?”

  His hands shaking, he reached into his sport coat for an envelope. He struggled with it momentarily, his fingers prying ineffectually at the flap, and then he gave it up and handed it across to Ben.

  Inside it, made out to a woman named Maya Underwood, Ben found a check for a hundred fifty thousand dollars.

  13

  The lights suspended high in the ceiling came on in staggered clusters, like stadium lights, a line of bright explosions marching down the arched aisle from the super’s office to the distant stairwell, and with each fresh burst of radiance, Fletcher Keel cried aloud in horror and dismay.

  Bones.

  The basement was full of bones, human bones, skeletons limned in interleaving arcs of shadow and of light, still wreathed in the decaying rags they’d worn in life, or in their leathery envelopes of mummified flesh—there must have been twenty of them, thirty, more, who could count, who would want to? Bones, scattered more or less at random the length of the colonnade before him, and the breadth of the basement, too, as wide and long as the nightmare height that towered far above it. Bones, in every conceivable attitude of death, bones supine with arms outflung to the frowning canopy above them and bones facedown in puddles or marooned piecemeal on islands of cracked and drying stone. Bones curled fetal or sprawled in wanton eagerness, ravished now by death. Bones slumped against walls and columns, still cradling the half-full bottles of whiskey and gin and Wild Irish Rose they had died with. It was an abattoir of bones, of curving ribs like the spars of sunken galleons, of shattered femurs and scoliated spines, of fleshless fingers clutching and blank skulls with empty eye sockets staring, jaws agape, and tangled shreds of disintegrating hair still clinging to their yellow-ivory domes.

  Keel sank moaning to his knees, struck down by memory, the kindling snap of something fragile underfoot and the sound of Ramsey Lomax’s voice inside his head, reminding him how Theresa Matheson’s grim assailants had come to that abandoned lobby.

  It summoned them, he’d said. I think it summoned them.

  14

  She had shown up at his office three years ago, and he had turned her away—a stranger, what was she to him? His assistant had demurred, and finally, to appease her, he had surrendered. “Very well,” he’d said, “send her in,” and in she came, eighteen years old, a tiny thing, but possessed of a fierce directness that was somehow tantalizingly familiar. “So whatever do you want?” he’d asked her, and her reply had shocked him as nothing else had shocked him in forty long years behind that desk.

  “I want to know if you’re my father,” she’d said.

  15

  Summoned them, Keel thought.

  And surely it could do such a thing.

  It had summoned him here, had it not, to this dank well? And when, once before,
he had lifted his hand to turn on these very lights, it had forbidden him. Everything in its own time, and in this place, in this hellish place, Dreamland set the time: teasing and cajoling and luring them along, trading on their dreams and fears until at last it had them, weakened now, and ripe for plucking, and the moment came to spring its trap upon them.

  Dreamland.

  It was conscious. It was aware.

  He thought of the cold intelligence that had assailed him in the south stairwell all those years ago. He thought of that reed-thin voice—

  —it could be any voice—

  —and those dark wings beating at his shoulders.

  He thought of the photo in the lounge, Dreamland, her eight towers like standing stones, erected all inadvertently, to the service of some dark and hungry god. Who could say what awful intelligence it might have summoned from the void, to batten on the weakness, on the misery and resentment, on the hatred and despair of the uncounted thousands imprisoned in these walls? And when they fled at last, unwilling to countenance such horror any longer, what did it do, what else could it do?

  It had turned its power outward, extending questing fingers into the city, seeking in its seething masses the helpless and adrift, the forgotten and unnumbered, rendered vulnerable by drink or drug or madness. And when such a one chanced to stray into its purview, it lured him home, it summoned him to its bosom with the siren song of his own unacknowledged dreams.

  But why? he wondered. Why?

  And the answer, when it came, struck him numb and cold:

  It had to feed, that’s why. Everything had to eat.

  16

  He had very badly wanted to win her, this girl, this child, with her mother’s fierce courage. He was old already then. His wife was dead, he had tired of work, and now there was no one left, maybe there never had been anyone, but a time comes when a man longs for the touch of a hand he hasn’t bought and paid for. So he took her to dinner—everyone had to eat, right? He thought it would be a way to win her—tuxedoed waiters, a hundred-dollar bottle of wine.