The Bones of You (20 page)

I opened my eyes and wished away the image.

I’d checked on Jess before dealing with Magic’s corpse, and she’d been sleeping peacefully. For some reason, I felt the need to look in on her again, to double-check that she was okay.

At the front of the house, headlights shone in the road, the illumination creeping along the side of the house. I heard a car pulling up at the curb. I waited. The engine kept running for a few moments, and then it was turned off. A car door opened and then slammed shut. Footsteps—high heels; it was a woman—sounded hard and fast against the pavement. The car—it was a taxi—drove away.

“Adam…”

I turned to face Carole. She was standing, breathing heavily, at the edge of the patch of ground that ran along the side of my house. It looked like she’d been running, but I knew she’d been in a car. Her hair was in disarray. Her face was flushed—I could see it by the streetlights.

“Are you okay?” I took a step forward; she took two steps back.

“I’m…I don’t know.” She glanced at the ground, then back up again, at me. That was when I noticed the marks on her face. Dark patches on her cheek and forehead.

“When I didn’t hear from you…couldn’t contact you…shit, I didn’t know what to think. You haven’t been to work. People have been worried.”

“Evans?”

I nodded.

“He’s a nice man. He’s always been good to me.” Her smile was pained.

“Come in. It’s dark. I’ll make some tea.”

She shook her head, walked forward into the light that was coming through my side window. Her face was battered. Someone had given her a good going-over, and it didn’t take a genius to guess who. That guy I’d seen at her place, the one with the brutal tattoos.

“What’s he done to you?”

She inhaled deeply, clutched her hands in front of her stomach. “He gets busy with his hands. That’s what he calls it: getting busy. He doesn’t do it all the time, just when he loses control. He’s always sorry afterward…”

“Oh, Carole…”

“I know, I know. Don’t you think I know? I’m stupid. I should kick him to the curb, get rid of him. I tried that, but he came back. He came back and he got busy again, just like before.” She was fighting tears, but the tears were winning. Her bottom lip quivered. She opened her mouth and bared her teeth, like a silent snarl.

“Let me talk to him. I’ll make sure he goes away and never bothers you again. I can do that. I promise you. Stuff like that, it’s nothing to me.” I moved closer to her but didn’t reach out; I was afraid that if I tried to touch her, she might run away.

“No, that isn’t why I came here.”

“Then why are you here?” I made no further moves toward her.

“I have to tell you something. I need to be honest with you. I owe you that, at least.”

Dark motion behind me: the slow turning of windmill sails.

“What’s this all about, Carole? I’m starting to get worried.
Very
worried.” I clenched my fists. I could feel the violence boiling up inside me, ready to explode.

“Maybe I should come in after all, just for a little while. We can’t talk about this out here. And afterward…afterward, you’ll get to kick me out.”

I stepped to the side and watched as she walked past me, kneading her hands together. She went inside and I followed her, thinking bad thoughts, feeling dark emotions.

“Can I sit down?”

I shut the door behind me. “Of course you can. Can I get you anything—a drink, something to eat?”

She shook her head. In the bright lights of the kitchen, the damage to her face looked even worse. Bruises were starting to form under her right eye. There was a small cut above her eyebrow. Her forehead was scratched—he’d used his fingernails.

I sat down opposite her at the table, rested my hands on the tabletop, and waited.

“This is going to sound…fuck, I don’t even know how it’ll sound. I’ll just say it. I’ll tell you, and then you can decide what you think.”

I waited. This was her moment; she was the major player in this scene. I was just an extra.

“My name—my real name—isn’t Carole. It’s Colleen. My real name is Colleen Moffat.”

At first I failed to register the connection, but she waited for the information to sink in.

“What are you telling me? I’m not quite sure that I understand…why did you change your name? What—” Then, suddenly, it clicked. “Katherine Moffat? You were related to her?” My fingers twitched on the table. I wasn’t even aware of moving them.

“She was my sister.”

“Hang on a minute…your sister killed those children? She lived in the house next door to mine, and she did all those things?”

Carole nodded. Carole…I couldn’t bring myself to think of her as Colleen.

“That’s right. It was my sister.” She paused, licked her lips, and then continued. “We were adopted by different sets of parents when we were babies. Nobody knows what happened to our real parents; we were dumped in a doctor’s waiting room when we were kids, with name tags pinned to our clothes. Katherine was two years old, and I was still a baby.

“We were sent to an orphanage, but we didn’t stay there for long. I was taken first—by a lovely young couple who couldn’t have kids of their own. Katherine was adopted a month later by an abusive couple. I only found all of this out a few years ago, and we met only once. We didn’t get on. Even then, I could sense that she wasn’t right—something was wrong with her.”

I could barely believe what I was hearing. It was too much; everything was rushing in on me much too fast. I felt attacked from all sides.

“Why are you telling me this?”

She reached up a hand and touched her face. Her eyes shone unkindly beneath the harsh kitchen lights. “The man who did this to me—the ex-boyfriend I told you about. He’s Benjamin Kyle, my sister’s lover. He’s back in town, and he’s trying to start up something. I’m not sure what, but he’s been messing around, visiting the old places he and Katherine used to hang out, reliving old memories.”

“Do the police know? They ought to be told.”

Carole laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “He’s been squatting in the house next door.” She tilted her head in the direction of the Moffat place. “He’s been sleeping rough, living under the same roof where…where she killed those kids. He thinks he can speak to them, the Radiant Children. He tells me he’s been asking for their forgiveness.”

I stood and walked across to the window, stared out through the gaps in the blinds. The house over there was in darkness; there was nobody home, had been nobody home for a long time. I spun around to face Carole. “Are you fucking serious?”

She nodded. She looked down, at her hands, unable to maintain eye contact.

“We have to tell the police. If he’s been poking around in there, they need to know. The guy sounds unhinged…talking to ghosts, beating you up. Come on, Carole. This is crazy.” I thought about Pru’s bruises the last time I’d seen her, and wondered if they’d been caused by the same man.

Finally Carole glanced upward. Her eyes were huge, moist, and empty. “He says he wants to fill the house with the sound of children screaming. He said that…those were his exact words.”

I crossed the room and went round to the other side of the table, where I grabbed her by the shoulder. She winced; I felt bad, but I held on anyway, tightening my grip. “The police. We need to call them.”

She writhed in my grip, turning around, her face tilting upward. “Please,” she said. “Don’t call the police. Not yet. He knows I’ve come here. He’ll be gone when they get there, anyway. Just…just get the hell out of here, Adam. Pack up your stuff and leave. And, please, please, don’t let your daughter come here again.”

I let go of her shoulder and stepped backward. My elbow made contact with the edge of the workbench but I barely even felt the pain. “She’s here now. Her mother—Holly—she had an overdose. She’s in the hospital, in a coma. Jess is staying with me now. She’s been here all evening.” I looked up, at the ceiling, and pictured her asleep in her bed. Then I remembered the cat, leaking those awful seeds all over the floor, his belly split open, with his mouth wide open and frozen into a horrible half-snarl.

Carole stood up, pushing the chair back across the floor. “I have to go,” she said, moving past me, toward the door. “I have to get out of here…”

By the time I moved, she was at the front gate; when I got there, she was already at the corner. I stood in the middle of the road and watched her go.

That was when I remembered where I’d first heard about this house being available to rent. It was Carole. She had brought it to my attention in a subtle way. I had a vague mental image of her handing me a newspaper property listing with this address circled in red.

* * *

The older I get, and the supposedly wiser I become, the more I come to realize that the people we love are a major part of what helps keep the darkness of the world at bay. There are dark movements everywhere; they are all around us. Some of them are huge and ugly, but others are subtle and elegant. We either succumb to the seductive pull of their currents or we build a fortress against them. Those we love are the bricks of that fortress; the love itself is the mortar that seals the joints.

When I went back inside the house, I knew immediately that something was wrong. My fortress had been breached.

The ambience inside the house felt different; it felt wrong. Something had been disturbed.

I shut the door and walked quickly into the lounge. Just as I entered the room, I saw a small form disappear around the edge of the door frame.

“Jess?” Even then, I knew it wasn’t her. The way the figure had moved, the motion it created—the ripples in the air—was not that of my daughter. I hurried over and peered around the door and into the hallway beyond. The figure was gone, but I knew it had been there. I had not been mistaken.

There was a small child in the house, and it wasn’t my daughter. It wasn’t anyone I knew.

I started up the stairs, grabbing the handrail and pushing myself forward. No more messing around: I needed to check on Jess, to make sure she was still sleeping. Part of me knew that something was wrong; even then, I was bracing myself, physically and emotionally.

When I got to her room, I paused and held on to the door handle. Something inside me was holding back, too afraid to enter. I closed my eyes, pictured her small, pretty face, and opened the door.

She wasn’t sleeping. The bed was empty. She wasn’t there.

As I stood there, taking in this vital piece of information, my stomach lurched, flipped, and then felt like it was falling out of my abdomen onto the floor. I forced my legs forward, carrying me to the bed. I felt around on top of the crumpled duvet, just to make sure. To reassure myself that she hadn’t just shrunk and was hidden in a fold. It was crazy. I kept batting at the bedclothes, expecting to find her, to discover that I’d made a mistake and she was there after all, sleeping peacefully.

But she wasn’t. She was gone.

I glanced at the window. The curtains were still closed. They were unmoving. Nobody had opened the window. I got down on my hands and knees and checked under the bed, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the wardrobe, either, or inside the dressing table drawers (which I insisted upon opening, just to be sure).

It took me minutes to search the entire house. I looked everywhere: in cupboards, under cabinets, in the bath, even in the fridge. I was searching in places where she could never be, spaces that were much too small to hold her.

Then I went downstairs to the cellar.

There was nowhere else to look, and it was obvious that she wasn’t down there, but I walked around and around the small, uncluttered space, hoping to find her there, hiding from me.

On my fifth or sixth circuit I found the cardboard box. It was in the middle of the underground room, in a spot I’d already walked over many times before. I kicked the box over and what was inside fell out onto the concrete floor. It was a single faded photograph; a photo of Jess, walking away from this house. On either side of her were vague shapes, glowing faintly. If I allowed myself, I could believe that those shapes represented children. And that they weren’t glowing, not exactly: they were radiant.

I ran back upstairs, checked Jess’s room again. Magic was sitting on her bed. He was alive, licking his paws, cleaning himself. Then he doubled over and started to lick his furred, unscarred belly and his balls. When he saw me, he jumped off the bed, ran toward me and then through my legs. I heard his little paws on the stairs as he escaped.

I sank to my knees, completely unprepared for the strength of the emotional onslaught that overcame me. I clutched at my face, my neck, and then my belly. I clutched the empty space in front of me, wishing that I could somehow grab hold of her hand. I started to dry-heave.

When I threw up, pumpkin seeds moved along my throat and emerged from between my lips. I felt violated.

When it passed, I went downstairs and called the police.

NINETEEN

Stranger