Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Read online

  Henry sat on Jane’s bed listening to the CD in her stereo, the volume cranked up loud enough to rattle the windows and send sonic booms of bass slapping the walls.

  “I’m sorry!” Jane shouted over the sound. “You weren’t supposed to listen to it.”

  He ignored her, focusing on the music. There had to be some moment, some change in the melody or dizzying pile-up of instrumental patterns, some seam his ghost had fallen into. If he could find that moment in one of the songs, maybe he could get it back. He’d listened to the CD four times through already.

  The last track ended. His ears throbbed. What was he missing? He picked up a guitar in the corner of Jane’s room and tried to play, his fingers tripping over the strings. If only he could play something that would draw the ghost back into him. The strings made stuttering, self-conscious ripples of noise. He threw the guitar down.

  “You listen to it,” Henry said. “Find out what song he’s stuck in.”

  Jane looked afraid, no doubt thinking of her own ghost, imagining what it would be like to lose it. “I have listened to it. I can’t hear a ghost in there.”

  Henry paced back and forth, squeezing his head in his hands. “Why did you make this CD? Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I was trying to get rid of Trigger’s ghost. I didn’t think it would work for anyone but him.”

  The ghost had been a piece of Henry. Everything he saw, touched, or thought about, the spirit had been there, ready to help him remake the world. The school counselor had made it clear that no matter how smart Henry was, no one in Swine Hill would ever see anything good in him. Only the ghost would help him escape the town and find the life he wanted. Losing it was like having the sky taken away, the world folding flat and suffocating around him. He sank to the floor.

  Jane sat down beside him and gave him a hug. He held himself rigid, looking out the window. Where was it? How could he get it back?

  “I don’t think your ghost is inside the disc,” Jane said. “I should be able to hear it.”

  “You couldn’t hear it when we were kids. It was right inside the house, and you never knew.”

  “What if it’s gone because it made the pig people? What if it did everything it had left to do, and now it’s at rest?”

  Henry shrugged her off and stood. “What did it do? Mom was lonely, so it made a shitty robot that breaks the dishes. Bethany wanted to get away, so it made a light show. Everyone in town is miserable, so it made pig people to be miserable with them. How the hell could it have done everything it meant to do? What has it even done?”

  “Things are different now. The pigs are changing everything. I’m worried.”

  “Worry about getting my ghost back. Worry about fixing what you screwed up.”

  He left Jane’s room and went down the hall. The path leading to his room was narrowed by heaps of broken appliances and bins of spare parts. A busted AC unit, its fins dark with grime, sat dead on the floor. The skeleton of a vacuum cleaner twisted beside it. Even without his ghost, he might be able to fix them. Pour enough money, time, pain into something, and he might see power flash through it again, hear the compressor groan to life.

  But with his ghost, he could have made them sit up and speak, could have taken trash and transformed it into living machines. Never again would he take ruin and bend it into the impossible, effortlessly making things that had never been before. He shoved one of the bins over, sending a rain of nuts and bolts sloshing down the stairs.

  In his bedroom, the robot sat on Henry’s bed, its weight almost folding the mattress in half. Deep in its motors and circuits, the robot was eaten through with ghosts, too many and too small for even Jane to hear them. Wanting nothing to do with spirits, the robot couldn’t shed them. Wanting only to be possessed, Henry couldn’t make his one shy ghost stay.

  “Not a good time,” Henry told it.

  His computer scrolled with information, some program he’d forgotten that he was running. It looked like a data feed for the laser array on the roof. There were columns for distance, for wavelength, for pulse frequency. He hadn’t even known it was collecting information. The dataset might contain the secrets of free energy or faster than light travel. He might never know, might never be able to interpret what was right in front of him.

  The robot made a crackle of static from the bed. Henry turned and took a closer look at it, his heart sinking.

  The machine looked like it had been hit by a car. Its chest was dented in, the front panel bent and swinging open. Sparks flashed inside its body. One of its thin legs was crushed. The floor was scraped where it had dragged itself into the room. It held out its long-fingered hands, the palms caked with dirt. Please help me, it seemed to say.

  “My ghost left,” Henry said. “I’m not sure I can repair you now. I’d probably just make things worse.”

  The robot struggled to climb up from the sagging bed, Henry’s blanket getting tangled around it like a shroud. It dropped to the floor and crawled away, fans and drives moaning within its hull.

  * * *

  The robot had retreated to a corner of the living room downstairs, hiding like a spider behind the recliner. It glared at anyone who came into the room. Henry made himself breakfast before school. He kept getting distracted thinking of all the things he would never be able to do, burning his eggs hard to the bottom of the pan. He scraped the mess onto a plate.

  His mother poured coffee into a thermos, her makeup already blurring in her own heat. She breathed through her mouth, looking like a woman dying of thirst, and wrung her hands.

  “You should be grateful,” she said. “Jane tried to get rid of my ghost for years, but it wouldn’t budge. Now you can be yourself without the dead weighing you down.”

  He didn’t want to be himself. He was nothing—a kid smarter than most, but not special enough to impress anyone who mattered. He had thought he would leave the town in a couple of years, attend a robotics program in a major city, build fantastic machines that would change the lives of everyone in the world.

  But without his ghost, he might never go anywhere at all. He was a prodigy by Swine Hill standards, but he’d done enough research to know what he was up against: a lifetime of money, personal tutors, private schools, summer camps, everything he’d never had. He would stay here, pinned by the town’s awful gravity, his only friends the strange pig people he had made.

  His mother gave him a quick, tight hug, kissing him on the temple. It hurt, like he’d touched his forehead to a hot skillet. Even through his shirt, her touch spread like a sunburn. He tried not to flinch, but couldn’t help it.

  She dropped her arms and stepped back, ashamed to have hurt him. It must be hard for her, Henry thought, to watch things fall apart and only be able to make it worse.

  “Where’s your sister?” she asked. “Isn’t she taking you to school?”

  “I’m riding the bus.”

  After his mom left, Henry sat on his front steps. It was cool out, and he rubbed the chill from his arms. Pale shapes moved in the house across the street. He wished his ghost would come walking out of that house and step back inside him. Hadn’t he been important to it? Didn’t it need his hands as much as he needed it?

  His phone buzzed, a message from a number he didn’t know.

  Hey, Henry. Jane gave me your number. I’m really sorry about giving you the CD. I didn’t know this would happen.

  He was about to text Trigger back, say thanks and tell him that it would be okay, even though it would never be okay, when Trigger texted again.

  You probably don’t want to hear this, but you’re lucky. I don’t think my ghost will ever leave. This is the best thing that could have happened to you.

  He slammed the face of his phone against the steps. No, he wasn’t lucky. He was lost. Worse than losing a friend or relative, he had lost a piece of himself. He was less than he’d been before. Why couldn’t everyone understand that?

  The bus pulled up and sighed to a stop. Henry climbed on,
walking between seats ripped open and vomiting foam. Whorls of graffiti covered every surface, even the windows. Only a scattering of kids rode it, most of them young. There was no driver. The haunted old thing kept dragging itself along the same route it always had, propelled by spirits alone.

  A few days ago, he might have wondered how a machine could draw power from the grief of the dead. His ghost might have taken control of him, and days or weeks later he would have woken up and beheld some ghostly engine that burned spirits like coal. Now he could only imagine such a thing. Henry went to the back without looking at anyone.

  “Henry? Hey, it’s you. Come sit by me.” The pig boy from the plant lounged across a seat in the back. He had pierced the edges of his thin ears, and heavy rings weighed them down against his cheek. He wore a T-shirt two sizes too big, the logo of some band Henry had never heard of splashed across it. Dark eye shadow masked his eyes in wide bands.

  Henry sat in the adjacent seat. “You shouldn’t be here, Dennis. People aren’t going to like it.”

  “Dad said that you’d look out for me.”

  Henry stared into the pig boy’s face and started running through the variables. Hundreds of students and faculty, almost none of them comfortable with pigs being in town. Quiet nooks, dark rooms, dead ends, and narrow corridors in a place without enough adults to keep track of everyone. Angry kids who felt like the world was unfair and getting worse all the time, no outlet for their anger. People who saw any difference as a criticism or a threat. A pig boy, alone. Even with his ghost, this wasn’t solvable. Henry’s heart raced with all the terrible things that could happen.

  “Go home, Dennis.”

  “I’m good at making friends,” the pig boy said. “Just wait and see.”

  * * *

  Henry skipped first period to follow Dennis. The pig boy unfolded a schedule and pointed to his first class: physical education in the gym. Henry pulled Dennis’s hood over his ears and motioned for him to follow. “Let’s go around the long way.”

  Twenty minutes later, Dennis was dressed out in basketball shorts and a tank-top, struggling to dribble the ball in his clumsy hands. Henry sat in the bleachers, his skin prickling, waiting for something bad to happen. Even if he had still been haunted, this wasn’t the kind of problem his ghost had been good at dealing with. People didn’t act rationally. They would do things against their own interest, out of boredom or spite. Better to get them out of the equation all together.

  On the court, Dennis smiled and said something to one of the girls next to him. She laughed, though whether it was from what he said or from the novelty of having a conversation with a pig, Henry couldn’t tell. The girl’s boyfriend pulled her away. The floor of the court was slightly off-level, as the soft earth under the school had sunk and turned slowly over the past few decades, the very ground rising up to bury the town. Whenever Dennis fumbled the ball, it went rolling away. Henry watched him drop and chase it for an hour.

  After gym, Dennis didn’t come out of the locker room for a long time. The other boys walked out and grinned at Henry, their smiles knife-sharp, wanting him to know that something had happened.

  Henry plunged in. The room was steamy from the showers and had a wet and fungal smell. The walls were textured with mold, the lights half burned out. In the close, dark space, old ghosts sat on the floor and muttered to one another, reliving some horrible thing that had happened years ago. If the ground did swallow up the school one day, Henry wondered if they would still be down here, whispering in each other’s dead ears, not knowing that the earth had closed over their heads.

  Dennis sat in the corner, staring at his jeans. He held them up so Henry could see: someone had cut a hole in the back. The pig boy stuck his finger through.

  “Get dressed,” Henry said. If the boys came back, they’d both be trapped here. Anything could happen.

  “My tail will hang out. Everyone will see.”

  “People already know you’re a pig. You might as well be comfortable. Maybe this is a good thing.”

  He sounded like his mother or like Trigger, telling Dennis what was good for him, how best to be himself, that his pain didn’t matter. Henry bounced his fist against the wall, impatient, wanting to get back to looking for his ghost.

  “When we were playing basketball, that girl was missing all her shots too. I told her that we had something in common.” Dennis gave Henry a sad smile. “I guess they wanted to remind me that we’re not the same.”

  Henry sighed, annoyed at how raw the pig boy was, how little Dennis understood. Once after school, a group of upperclassmen had caught Henry walking alone and thrown bricks at him in the parking lot. Once, he smiled at the wrong time, and the principal thought he was laughing at her. Someone’s wallet went missing and Henry was blamed. He was chewed out by teachers for talking too much or not talking enough. Whatever he did, it was wrong. He was different, so people thought anything they did to him was okay. When he came home after, the rage and unfairness of it sitting heavy in his mind, Jane would hug him and nod and say that she knew.

  “You aren’t the same,” Henry told the pig boy. “Try to remember.”

  * * *

  Henry shadowed Dennis all morning. No one asked what he was doing out of class. They were used to his ghost taking over and making him do odd things, and honestly, Henry knew they didn’t think he was worth their trouble. He stared blankly ahead, not speaking to anyone, staying close to Dennis like he was monitoring an experiment. Every time he thought of his ghost, wondering where it might be and how to find it, he would catch someone staring at Dennis and it would break his concentration.

  He pulled out his phone and texted Hogboss. I don’t think it’s safe for Dennis to be at school. He’s drawing too much attention.

  Hogboss’s response was slow in coming. Henry imagined him punching in the letters with his big, blunt fingers. People will get used to us eventually. I can’t keep Dennis home. He asks me upsetting questions.

  Dennis’s tail stuck out from the back of his jeans, twitching while he listened to the teacher.

  At lunch, Henry pulled Dennis to the back of the cafeteria, a broken table with few seats. Dennis had a plate full of green peas, the only vegetable they were serving today. The cafeteria steamed with the sweet, salty smell of barbecued pork.

  “They’re afraid that pigs will take their jobs,” Dennis said.

  Henry shushed him, hoping no one heard.

  “But I don’t even want to work at Pig City. I’m going to college. I’m going to travel. I think you made me for more than this.”

  “I wish you’d go home. You’d learn more on the Internet than you would here anyway.”

  “You did make us for more, didn’t you? You can tell me. What’s your plan?”

  At the best of times, Henry didn’t know what his ghost was trying to do, and that was when it had been right inside his head. It was highly likely that Dennis had been created to be a plant worker, to be torn up and underpaid, to worry over an underwater mortgage and fight with his kids so that the people of the town wouldn’t have to. And after his sad and brutal work was done, he would be fed into the meat grinders and processed into sausage like any other pig.

  “My ghost left me. Whatever plan it had is done now. Tell your dad that I can’t help you.”

  A group of senior boys came over and sat on the edge of Henry’s table, their long legs touching the floor. They all had the tired eyes and scraped, ropey arms of evening plant workers. One of them wore his Pig City uniform, the cartoon pig logo giving a toothy smile.

  “We’re done,” Henry said. “You guys can have the table.”

  “You look familiar,” one of the boys said to Dennis.

  Dennis tossed his head from side to side, nervous. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

  “No, I know you,” the boy said. He reached out and grabbed Dennis through his jeans, squeezing his hip. “That’s ham.”

  Another boy grabbed the base of Dennis’s neck. “P
ork shoulder.” He dug in his fingers, shaking the pig boy’s flesh. “Lot of good meat there.”

  They surrounded Dennis, grabbing his body while he asked them to stop. “Spareribs. Loin. Chop. Hock.” One of them punched him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of the pig boy and folding him over the table. “Pork belly.”

  Henry watched, paralyzed. He wanted to stop them. He wanted to say something, to do something. He felt so small, so weak without his ghost. The boys were huge and dangerous, and there were so many of them. The teacher on duty was Ms. Miller, the yearbook crone. She watched the boys put their hands on Dennis, pretending nothing was wrong.

  Dennis pulled away from them, knocking over his plate of peas. He fled the cafeteria. Henry kept eating, head down and silent, until the boys drifted away. Then he followed, feeling ashamed but also relieved. Maybe now Dennis would go home.

  Henry looked all over campus for the pig boy. He saw the silhouette of someone walking on the abandoned third floor of the classroom building and slipped up the stairs, finding Dennis in the old drama room. Dennis stood on stage, dancing slowly with the ghost girl. She led him through the steps, spinning him in her strong, airy hands. His eyes were swollen from crying.

  “What are you doing?” Henry asked. “You didn’t get killed by the living, so now you’re trying your luck with the dead? Can’t you feel how dangerous that ghost is?”

  Dennis sniffed, his flat snout glistening. “She played music so I would find her. She wants to be my friend.”

  “She is a ghost. An it. And it doesn’t care who you are, so long as you give it what it wants.”

  The ghost girl laughed, grabbing Dennis by both hands and twirling him in circles while the piano played faster. “Henry was half ghost himself once,” she said. “Now he’s not even half. What kind of friend has he been to you?”