House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  He had miscalculated, and badly. Bound for Harvard in the fall (it had made him proud when she told him, though what had he contributed beyond a teaspoonful of seed?), she had come to the city for the summer to do mission work for her church. Why stay at home, she said, when there was nothing for her there, her father (stepfather, he silently amended) dead, and her mother lately joined him?

  “You can stay with me,” he had said, and a funny look had come into her face, as though he had suggested she take up residence in a cave. She didn’t want a relationship, she explained. She had just wanted to see his face, to confirm what the check implied.

  “You’re my daughter,” he had said.

  “That’s biology,” she told him. “My father—my real father—died in a car wreck two years ago. You can’t buy me any more than you could buy my mother.”

  Ten minutes later, she walked out.

  17

  Fletcher Keel whimpered, that phrase—

  —everything had to eat—

  —resonating inside his head.

  Terror seized him, paralyzing, and he slumped all the way to the floor, facedown, sobbing. He lay there for a long time—he didn’t know how long he lay there, plumbing his own black depths of hysteria—and then an image took shape inside his heaving mind, a nightmare picture of his own bones hunched fetal on the cold stone floor before Dennis Eakin’s office, a desiccated husk still draped in the clothes he’d died in, his eyes hollowed into empty sockets, his mouth slackly ajar, his teeth dropping one by one from his decaying jaw as the long years wore on.

  “No,” he whispered, “No—”

  Still clutching the hammer, he lunged to his feet, the basement spinning vertiginously around him, spilling him once again to the floor, face-to-face with a broken skull. Keel stared into those empty eyes for a single nightmarish moment, and then he scuttled away, crablike, fingers clawing at the stone floor until at last he clambered drunkenly erect, unbalanced, all resolve forgotten, thinking now only of the world outside these walls, the velvety night and the snow spinning down upon his shoulders, crystalline and pure. The basement reeled about him. Stone archways lurched toward him. The floor heaved. Skeletal fingers scrabbled at his feet. Keel screamed, kicking at them like a frightened child, and spun, staggering back toward the stairwell.

  He didn’t see what tripped him, whether it was some upturned spur of bone or merely his own panicked frenzy, but suddenly he was unbalanced, his fingers raking the air as the floor hove up to meet him. He hit the stone with a gasp, his arms outstretched, and plowed face-first into the moldering ribcage of a dead man. He gagged, his throat clogged with the fetor of decay, and then he was still, all the machinery inside him grinding to a halt. He took a breath, willing his heart to slow within him.

  Finally, he opened his eyes.

  Inside the shattered ribs, couched on yellow bone, glimmered a handful of filthy ribbons and tarnished service decorations. Keel swallowed and pushed out one trembling hand, sooty with the dank muck of the basement. He was bleeding, too, he saw, from the fall maybe, a single bright trickle running the length of his index finger. He lay there, watching this hand that looked nothing like his own hand close around the fistful of medals, and drag them from their cage of bones. He held them on his splayed palm, staring at them in disbelief, reading the name—

  —his father’s name—

  —inscribed on each tarnished badge.

  No, it couldn’t—

  Dear God, it couldn’t be—

  But even as this crazed prayer unreeled inside his mind, there loomed up in the eye of his imagination the seamed and grimy visage of the vagrant to whom he’d surrendered them, his father’s medals, oh God, the vagrant, and it all came back to him, the putrid blast of his breath and his yellow food-flecked teeth, his eyes rheumy and wild over the matted lather of his beard, and most of all his raving, he’d been raving about microwaves—

  —goddamn Russian microwaves—

  —and maybe even then he’d been hearing it, not microwaves, but Dreamland’s summons ringing deep down in the shuttered chambers of his soul.

  Keel’s mouth tasted coppery.

  His guts cramped, and he vomited, spewing up a bilious flood of churning acid and half-metabolized whiskey, the stench of it overwhelming even the clinging miasma of decay. He heaved again, and then again, fetching up another cupful of liquor, and then nothing at all, just the clutching spasms in his guts, his mind reeling with tangled images, his own finger pulling home the trigger and LaKeesha Turner convulsing as the bullet tore out her throat in a spray of cartilage and arterial blood, and Lisa’s face and Susan Avery’s and Lara, Ben laboring between her legs, and it was all too much, too much fear and too much horror, too much resentment and too much shame, God, the shame—

  And this was the doorway, he understood that now. Fear and shame, the black rivers flowing in the deepest channels of his soul, both of them doorways. Open them up, anything might walk in, anything at all—

  Black wings were beating at his shoulders. Keel cried aloud and clutched his father’s medals in his hand. He had a final incoherent thought—

  —forgive me God forgive me—

  —and then he surrendered at last.

  18

  “When I read about the murder,” Ramsey Lomax said, “I could barely function. It was all I could do to go on. I kept thinking about that girl across the table from me, a child really, and she was so—” He sighed. “She was so much like her mother.” He clutched his thighs with gnarled old man’s hands, straightening his back, and took a deep breath. “Six hours,” he said hoarsely. “Can you imagine what that must have been like for her?”

  He shook his head in baffled disbelief.

  “And that’s when you quit working?”

  Lara’s voice was smooth, sympathetic. Ben marveled at it, that voice. He tried to choke down his own rising emotion, to cling to some ideal of journalistic objectivity, but he was past that. For God’s sake, look at the man, wallowing there in self-pity, and look at them, look at what he’d done to them, look at what he’d done to Abel, and why, for God’s sake why?

  He stood jerkily, too fast, the pain in his side straightening him abruptly, cutting through the fog of rage.

  “No,” Lomax said. “That was later. I was using my sources to collect everything I could on the case by then, and I got word of Abel’s Hard Copy reading in the lobby. It had never aired, but I managed to get my hands on a production tape. It was remarkable, that tape—”

  He shook his head.

  “Abel is a fraud, Doctor. I knew that, I knew the techniques he used to elicit his audience reactions, and yet, when I watched that tape, I saw something else. There’s a moment when, when—something happened, I didn’t know what it was, but Abel’s polished facade seemed to crack. He seemed disoriented, afraid; there’s a look of real uneasiness in his eyes—it’s remarkable.”

  Ben propped himself by the window, his arms crossed.

  “That’s when I decided,” Lomax said. “I’d heard the rumors about this place, of course, and the tape seemed to confirm them, at least somewhat. And I was tired, tired of working, tired of everything.” He shrugged. “So I sold out my shares and dedicated myself to this, this … project. It took two years to negotiate the contracts, to track you all down. And there were others, some who wouldn’t come back, and some who couldn’t, because they were dead or because they were in prison.”

  “But it had to be more than curiosity,” Lara said.

  “Oh, yes, definitely more than curiosity.” He laughed ruefully. “At dinner that night, my daughter, Theresa, said she was glad we’d met. She’d learned a lot. ‘What did you learn?’ I asked. ‘How I don’t want to live my life,’ she said.”

  Lomax hesitated, staring up into the lights. Finally, he shrugged. “I wanted her forgiveness, I suppose. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry for a selfish life. I wanted another chance.”

  At this Ben felt his anger tip over into something d
eeper, something he could no longer contain. “Well, I guess you screwed that up, didn’t you?” he said.

  Lomax was unperturbed. “You sound angry, Mr. Prather.”

  “I am angry. You lied to us, you lied to all of us—”

  “Did I, Mr. Prather?”

  “Lies of omission,” Ben said, waving a hand. “The point is, you did it again, exactly what your own daughter despised about you. You used us. You manipulated all of us to serve your own ends, and you never spared a thought for the consequences. You, you—”

  He bit the words off. He pushed himself away from the wall. Back at the sofa, he knelt and began to scrape up the documents spread out across the coffee table, the clippings and the trial transcript and the smudged photocopies with their imperfectly reproduced faces, the mother and sisters he had no memory of, the cops and lawyers, even a photo of a four-year-old version of himself, a solemn-faced child in an ill-fitting suit, hand in hand with some expressionless court-appointed guardian, the headline announcing in a line of sober black type, SHOOTING SURVIVOR TO FACE ADOPTION, RECORDS SEALED—

  Ben felt something break inside him; it was the story of his life, his whole goddamn life, the records sealed, the secrets hidden even from himself, and no one willing to accept responsibility, not even to tell him the truth. He snatched up the documents by handfuls, shoving them at random into the accordion file, and when Ramsey Lomax leaned over to help him, he could not countenance, could not countenance this gesture of—was it pity?—from the old man who had dragged him back here. He shoved the hand away—

  “Leave me alone.”

  —sending a spray of papers high into the air, swirling as the heat caught them up, and drifting slowly back to the floor around him. He slumped against the sofa, exhaustion sweeping over him like a woolen tide, his side aching; he was tired, he was so tired—

  “Mr. Prather—”

  “No,” he said. “Look around you, why don’t you, look at how it’s ended. You disgust me.”

  He shut his eyes, trying to block it all out, but Lara’s hand closed over his shoulder, summoning him back.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  She didn’t answer, not aloud anyway. Her hand clutched tighter and, wearily, Ben pried open his eyes. Fletcher Keel stood in the doorway, staring back at him from eyes like extinguished cinders. His hair was tangled and matted, his face smeared with dirt and maybe blood. He stank of whiskey and vomit even from across the room. But none of that, disturbing as it was, really alarmed Ben. What did—what shook Ben to the core, what sent bright electric currents of adrenaline jolting through his veins to wake him up—was the object Fletcher Keel clutched in one grime-streaked hand.

  A hammer.

  19

  In the infirmary, the thing that had been Abel Williams paused for a moment in its efforts to wriggle free of the leather straps binding it to the table. The sounds of voices came to it from down the hall—voices raised in anger, or in fear. A smile spread across its face in the darkness, and then it turned once again to the straps, redoubling its efforts.

  20

  “You thought you could get away, but you couldn’t get away,” Keel said, only it wasn’t Keel’s voice that came to Ben, it was the same dead voice that had lately issued from the lungs of Abel Williams, stroking now the deeper timbres of Fletcher Keel’s vocal cords but unmistakable all the same, like the voice of stones or serpents had they tongues to speak with.

  It was thin and hateful, that voice. It was cold, and utterly empty of pity. It was Dreamland’s voice. Ben had no doubt of that now, no temporizing, no rationalization, nothing, just a stark certainty that momentarily froze him there, slumped against the sofa.

  Lara pulled her feet onto the sofa and clambered backward across the arm, putting it between her and the figure in the doorway. Lomax, too, scrambled to his feet, backing away until he passed beyond the limits of Ben’s peripheral vision.

  And still Ben only sat there, fixed and fascinated.

  Keel stepped into the room, his fingers white-knuckled on the shaft of the hammer, a battered, grime-encrusted tool, the black iron head balanced with a curving double-pronged claw, two inches long and maybe longer.

  “Fletcher—” Lara’s voice, coming from somewhere over Ben’s left shoulder.

  “Shut up, Doc,” the thing said, and its dead eyes didn’t deviate from Ben. “Shut up,” it said. “Your turn’s coming.”

  “No,” Ben said.

  “You got away once.”

  “I didn’t, I never got away,” Ben said, and sitting there on the floor of Dreamland with the fat accordion folder on his lap, adrift in all that history, it struck him suddenly how true this was: he was thirty years old, and he had never gotten away. “Not here,” he said, touching his chest. “Not in my heart.”

  The thing paused at the other end of the coffee table. “Here?” it said, and it tapped the hammer to its breast in mockery. “Here?” it said calmly. And then a third time, its voice petulant and shrill, like the voice of a child in a fit of angry pique: “Here? We’re here forever!” it screamed. “Forever!”

  Still shrieking, the word hanging in the air like some hideous accusation, it lunged at him, bringing the hammer down before it.

  21

  In the infirmary, the thing that had been Abel had managed to wriggle a hand free at last. As the voices down the hall escalated past anger and into downright hysteria, it started to work on the remaining straps.

  22

  Ben heard the hammer smash into the table behind him as he scrambled away, and then he was on his feet. He turned, backing now, to see the Keel-thing looming up behind him, its face twisted in fury, its voice echoing in his ears—

  “Forever. We hate you. We hate you.”

  It tangled its feet momentarily in the wreckage of the table, and then it shook free, kicking jagged shards of wood aside. It advanced toward him, raging, the hammer cutting the air. Ben dodged backward, and the blow whistled by an inch short, overbalancing the creature. It stumbled, and Ben took the opportunity to put more distance between them, scanning the room in panic, looking for Lara, looking for something he could use to defend himself—

  There was a blur of movement at his shoulder. He cringed, half-expecting an attack from another quarter, but it was only Lomax, his hawkish face combative, his fingers clutching a pool cue. He brought it whistling through the air as the thing straightened. The blow caught Keel just under the jaw, staggering him backward, arms flailing. Lomax pressed the advantage. He whipped the cue around like a slugger swinging for the fences, and this time there was the hollow pop of breaking cartilage. Keel’s head snapped back in a spray of mucus and blood.

  “Go,” Lomax hissed. “Get the doctor, get out of here!”

  Instead Ben wheeled around desperately, looking for something—anything—he could use as a weapon. He heard another whistling impact at his back, this time accompanied by the crack of shattered wood. Then Lomax was shoving him toward the door. “Go,” he screamed. “Go! I’m right behind you!”

  In the same moment, Ben caught a glimpse of Lara moving toward the door from the sofa opposite.

  “Go—” Lomax screamed.

  He went.

  23

  When Ramsey Lomax felt the fist close around his ankle, he spun, lashing at Keel’s face with his other foot, hoping to drive him back. Instead Keel managed to trip him up completely, bringing him crashing to the carpeted floor with a jolt that nearly took his breath. Still kicking, Lomax flipped onto his stomach, and hurled himself after Ben, trying to reclaim his feet. For a single exhilarating moment, he was free, his legs unencumbered. He pulled himself to his knees, hope blossoming in his breast, and then a stunning blow drove him to the carpet.

  24

  Lara, not ten feet away, saw it happen—saw Keel rear up over the fallen man, his arm flung back in rage, saw the hammer descend in a twisting blow that buried the claw two inches deep in Ramsey Lomax’s back. Lomax toppled forward, arms
outstretched, dragging Keel down on top of him.

  Keel scrambled to his knees, yanking at the hammer, struggling to free it, and in a moment of nauseating comprehension she understood that the claw had lodged like a hook under the bony ridge of a rib. Then, with a bone-rending crack that set Ramsey Lomax screaming, Keel wrenched the gore-stained claw loose. A terrible wheezing filled the air. Lara moaned and cupped one hand before her mouth, her gaze fixed on the hole in Ramsey Lomax’s back, a ragged gouge of blood and gristle from which a jagged shard of rib extended like a broken tree branch. The ravaged fabric of his shirt fluttered with every whooping respiration, and though Lara had seen such things and worse a hundred times in the ER, it was different somehow, seeing a man you had known savaged right before your eyes—

  She stood frozen and she might have died there had Ramsey Lomax not lunged up, locking both hands around Fletcher Keel’s leg, slowing him down, and even so, for a single terrifying moment, she found herself staring right into Fletcher Keel’s eyes, bright and empty and mad all the way to the bottom—

  Lomax screamed, his face a writhing mask of agony, his mouth a bloody hole. She couldn’t hear anything but the hoarse agony in the voice, the bubbling wheeze as his lungs filled up, drowning him in his own blood. He screamed again, his imperative cutting through the fog of horror, her mind plucking at the sound for meaning—

  Go! Go!

  And then Ben was at her shoulders, forcibly wrenching her toward the corridor. He gave her a hard shove to get her moving and still she hesitated, her mind filling up with some crazy impulse to go back, to help, to somehow help, and then it was too late, her feet tangled up with Ben’s in the doorway, spilling them both into the hall, and a screaming incoherent thought loomed up inside her, filling her brain: she’d doomed them, she’d doomed them both—