Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Page 13

  “That was my mom’s,” he said. “It’s broken. Why do you have it?”

  Jane wound the key and set the music box in his hand. Inside, a tiny brass drum turned. Teeth struck keys. Soft music rose from his palm.

  Memories—whether from Trigger, his ghost, or both of them—washed through him like floodwaters. They swept away all sense of where he was, bringing him back years and years ago to when his family had been whole. He sank to his knees, cupping the box in both hands. His chest glowed with blue light.

  Slowly, the ghostly face of his brother leaned out of Trigger’s skin. Its eyes were wide and afraid, staring into the box. The ghost stretched its small arms out of Trigger and reached down. Serpent-like, it poured its body out of him and coiled into the porcelain.

  Trigger dropped the box on the ground. It pulsed with cold, making the ground beneath it tighten and crack. A warm wind blew out of the trees and through the clearing, dispersing the chill air. Jane touched Trigger’s shoulder, feeling heat in his skin.

  “He left me,” Trigger said.

  “Wind the key. Keep it playing.”

  She used the heavy metal end of his flashlight to gouge out a hole in the spot where moments before the ground had been soaked with blood. Tiny roots crisscrossed like netting, making it slow and hard. She dug the hole as deep as she could. Beside her, Trigger unloaded his mind to her ghost, full of hope and fear.

  Jane picked up the music box, wound its key one last time, and set it inside the hole. It was freezing to the touch, shocking her arm up to the shoulder. She kicked dirt back over the box and pressed the ground flat with her shoe.

  “Come on.” She pulled Trigger away through the trees, following the flashlight’s tunnel of light. “In case it changes its mind.”

  Trigger was in pieces. Sweat bled out on his neck and under his arms, wetting his back. He wasn’t used to heat. He was amped up, excited and free, but he was also angry. He didn’t like that she could keep secrets while knowing everything about him. He didn’t like that this choice had been hers instead of his.

  The truck appeared ahead of them, and Jane walked Trigger around to the passenger side.

  “The metal.” He passed his hand over the lip of the truck bed. “It’s so hot. I forgot what that felt like.”

  Jane got in the driver’s side and moved the seat up. There wasn’t room to turn around on the narrow track, so she backed out, watching the road behind her in the red glow of the truck’s taillights.

  Trigger rolled down the window, letting the air rush over his arm. “You should have told me what you were going to do.”

  Jane sighed. “You never would have said yes. Your ghost wouldn’t have let you.”

  “I don’t know how I’ll tell my dad. He’s going to feel like we abandoned my brother.”

  “It has your mother’s memory to haunt. Maybe it needed to get away from you so that it could move on.”

  “What if it can’t move on? What if it’s just stuck there, alone with that memory?” And in his mind, What if I can’t move on either?

  Jane backed onto the main road and started for home. She squeezed his hand. “Things are going to be better now.”

  Her ghost circled behind her eyes, full of pity for Jane and Trigger both. Do you believe that? Do you really think things are so easy?

  Henry stayed up late with Bethany reading articles on his computer and sketching out ideas on a whiteboard. He swabbed the lip of her water bottle and magnified the saliva and stray cheek cells under his microscope. The cells looked like ragged eggs, a yolky nucleus lying at their center. And there, suspended in the nucleus, Henry saw a faint shimmer of light. The alien light Bethany had caught was still inside her, buried in every cell of her body.

  Finally, he sent her home with a list of tests for the doctor to run tomorrow. She couldn’t actually leave town to go to the hospital, but there was a walk-in clinic in Swine Hill. He wanted brain scans and radiation measurements, but he doubted they would be able to do much more than draw blood and send it off for testing. Still, it was better than nothing.

  He tried to get a few hours of sleep, but his mind kept stumbling through the ruins of half-remembered equations. He watched the red numbers on the face of his clock count down the night. Finally, Henry sat up in bed and fumbled for his glasses—his ghost’s glasses, worn by the spirit when it was alive. They were old with delicate metal frames, sitting loose on his face. He needed, more than anything, to find his ghost.

  He went to the stairwell, grabbed the hanging string, and pulled down the attic stairs. He switched on the light and went to the farthest corner, where a pile of boxes from the house’s old occupants sagged apart, spilling tongues of yellowed cloth and dingy photos. There was an old TV and VCR, a stack of family videos, their ribbons of tape too snarled to play. This was the first place he had seen the ghost, back when he was only a child.

  He went through the boxes as he had many times before. There was a young girl in ballet tights. An older woman giving the camera a sad smile. In only a few did he see the man wearing his silver glasses, always looking down or away, his hands busy with some broken thing in his lap. Why had this strange man haunted him in the first place? And why had he left?

  He fell asleep on the floor of the attic for a while. A soft thump against his cheek, quiet and regular, woke him. Something moved under the boards. He pressed his hand to the wood, feeling it rise to bump against his palm. At first he thought it might be an animal, a rat or squirrel lost inside the house. But it was too even, too regular. It sounded like a machine.

  He went to the garage and dug around in his father’s toolbox for a hammer. Henry had been the only one to use those tools for years, but he still thought of them as his father’s. Through them, he could know something of the man who had left when he was so young. Henry went back up to the attic and pried up the wooden floor, finding a stack of papers hidden between the ceiling joists. He brushed them aside and uncovered the source of the vibration. It was a wooden box slightly bigger than a fist.

  He pulled it out, the lid straining against its latch, and opened it. On a bed of green felt lay a human heart. It was brown and dry to the touch. The heart was covered in electrodes, their wires snaking off into the secret workings inside the box. The organ should have been long dead, but the small genius of the box had kept it alive. The heart beat slow but steady. Had Henry made the box? And who did the heart belong to?

  He gathered up the heart box and as many of the papers as he could carry, taking them down to his room. Spreading them on the floor, he tried to make sense of it. The manuscript was typed, the ink half faded, and it was heavily annotated in pencil. The technical was mixed with the personal. The author’s name—his ghost—was Neilson. Anecdotes about Neilson’s two unhappy daughters were woven in with facts about pain tolerance, nerve signals, the relationship between psychological and physical pain. Exploded diagrams of machines covered page after page, factory-sized behemoths with thousands of numbered parts, most of it crossed out in frustration. Neilson had been trying to build something.

  Long letters to himself, like diary entries, covered the back of Neilson’s notes. He logged the times he had been asked to leave restaurants and hardware stores for causing a disturbance. The times his car broke down and police had stopped him walking to work. How the plant only employed him part-time, the hours chaotic, his pay always late. His inability to protect his daughters from illness, hunger, and violence. Neilson wrote about a helpless anger that smoldered for decades. He tried to turn it into numbers and degrees, to quantify his hate.

  Henry skimmed the pages, a repeated phrase jumping out at him: pain engine. It didn’t surprise him that Neilson had wanted to make a machine that ran off pain. Suffering had been more plentiful for the man than sunlight, could animate the world in ways that electricity never could. Still, the thought was chilling. Maybe it was best that the ghost wasn’t lurking inside him anymore.

  There was no mention of the strange heart i
n any of the notes. His alarm went off and he sighed. What was the point of going to school? His teachers hadn’t taken him seriously even when he’d been haunted by the genius ghost. Now that he’d lost it, they might even be pleased, happy to see him sink to the low bar they’d set for him. No one there was going to do a thing to help him.

  He got dressed and zipped up his backpack anyway. He might not want to be there, but he couldn’t leave Dennis alone. Until he convinced the pig boy that the school wasn’t safe, Henry would have to look out for him.

  On his way out the door, Henry saw the robot slumped over in its wheelchair, like it was sleeping. He turned on the lamp and snapped his fingers in its face. It lifted one arm and moved one leg, trying to straighten itself. A spark of light flashed from the joints of its chest cavity. Most likely there was a short in its wiring, or some part of it was finally too haunted to work anymore. In his pocket, the heart thumped in its box. He wished he could put it inside the robot, let it feel the kind of pain that would make it enough for his mother. He wished he could do anything at all to help his shattered family.

  “As soon as I get home, I’ll fix you. I’ll figure something out.”

  The robot grabbed one of its wheels with its working arm and turned itself around, facing away from him. Henry went out to wait for the bus, wondering how something he had made could hate him so much.

  * * *

  Henry climbed on the bus and saw Dennis sitting alone in the back. As usual, they were the oldest. As poor as the town was, most teenagers had a busted old car or access to a Pig City work truck. They’d rather pack themselves three and four deep across a truck cab than ride the bus like children. They drove without licenses or insurance, their vehicles worthless anyway, the police too understaffed and buried in their ghosts to care much about traffic violations.

  The younger kids leered at Dennis over their seatbacks and pushed up the tips of their noses with grubby fingers, giving themselves snouts. The pig boy looked straight to the front like he didn’t notice.

  Henry started to sit next to the pig boy when he noticed Dennis wearing heavy eye shadow in ragged bands, his long ears drooping with piercings. He wasn’t wearing a baggy shirt and jeans like usual. A dancer’s leotard looped over his shoulders and stretched down his torso and legs, as tight as skin.

  “Don’t you know anything about high school?” Henry asked. “You stand out enough as it is. Are you trying to get killed?”

  “Krystal—the ghost girl—she says I could be a dancer. She’s going to teach me.”

  “That ghost is going to get you murdered.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  Henry sighed and pushed the sagging glasses up his nose. “There’s nothing wrong with being scared. There’s a lot to be afraid of.”

  Last week, the coach complained that Dennis’s hands weren’t the right shape for a basketball, so Dennis had been moved to the laughing room for first period. Henry didn’t say so, but he thought it was probably for the best.

  They entered the shrieking classroom and pulled headphones out of their bags to block out the ghostly laughter. Dennis stood in the back, stretching and doing dance exercises. The other students watched him all period, ghosts burning in their eyes.

  When the girl who was always late floated into the room—Henry thought her name was Erica—she froze at the sight of Dennis doing toe touches in the back of the room. She stared at the pig boy, her eyes wide and bright. Something about the sharpness of her face, the thinness of her limbs, made Henry think of origami. She left, letting the door pull itself shut behind her.

  Henry took his binder of Gifted problems from the teacher and sat down. He switched on the CD of music Jane had left for him, this one full of sad songs, regrets and apologies, her way of emphasizing how sorry she was.

  He lost himself in the math for a while, pages thorny with dense differential equations, variables nested within variables. In the flat world of numbers and graphs, the answers were clear and he was in control. It was nice to remember that he was good at something, haunted or not.

  He had no time for the English and philosophy questions, paragraphs asking him to reflect on power and responsibility. Why was it that people without power were always blamed for what was wrong? Thinking about it only made him feel helpless and tired.

  He turned the pages over to their clean backs and started writing down everything he understood about Bethany and the alien. It came from a corner of space dark and swept clean of stars. It was made of heat and light, held together by a powerful magnetic force. It might be technology, or it might be a living thing. Whatever it was, it was inside her at a cellular level, so integrated with her body that it couldn’t be surgically removed. At best, it was changing her. At worst, it was killing her. He had no idea why it had come, what it wanted, or how to make it leave. All he knew was that it was here because of him.

  In his pocket, the heart throbbed against his thigh. The rhythm was two beats and a pause, over and over, like it was saying, Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

  * * *

  Between classes, Henry shadowed Dennis, watching the long hallways for any sign that someone might be following them. People got bored, and there weren’t enough teachers to keep an eye on everyone. If the wrong person noticed Dennis at the wrong time, he might get destroyed, shoved into a bathroom stall and beaten until he was numb, all of it too quick for him to even know who had done it. Henry was surprised someone hadn’t jumped him already.

  The pig boy was supposed to be in Algebra II, but Henry followed him to the old drama room, where the ghost girl was waiting for him on the stage. When Henry saw her, he remembered the girl in the attic photo. This was the ghost of Neilson’s daughter. How unhappy their family must have been for so many of them to rise as ghosts, desperate to find someone to live out their unfulfilled dreams. Would the same happen to his family if they stayed in Swine Hill?

  When she saw Dennis, the ghost girl smiled. Music played from the wreckage of the piano, bright and fast. Dennis stepped on stage and took her hand.

  Henry watched the ghost lead the pig boy through the steps. There was a strange grace to Dennis, a lightness that he never would have expected. When Dennis first started coming to this room, Henry thought he had them both figured out. The pig boy, he imagined, must have a hopeless crush on the dead girl. And she must want him for his body, to haunt him, live through him, and accomplish whatever terrible purpose obsessed her. He wasn’t sure now. They danced, rocking their shoulders with the music, laughing when Dennis mixed up a step. Maybe they were just lonely. What if all they wanted was this, to dance with each other? He wished Jane was here to read their minds and tell him.

  Dennis came over and sat beside Henry, draining a bottle of water. The ghost girl came closer too. Henry drew away from her in spite of himself.

  “There’s no dance team or anything like that here, so we’ll just dance together at prom,” Dennis said. “That’s about the best we’ll be able to do.”

  Henry didn’t go to things like prom. He didn’t dance, didn’t have money for nice clothes, and didn’t want to spend any more time with his classmates than he had to. But if Dennis was going, then he would need to go too. Maybe he could invite Bethany, just as friends. It wasn’t her kind of thing either, but maybe for just a night it would take her mind off the alien slowly killing her, the heavy chain of ghosts that tied her to the dying town, all the danger and frustration in Swine Hill that both of them had been living with for years.

  “All you want is a dance?” Henry asked. “How long have you been practicing this routine? Years?”

  “Decades,” the ghost girl said.

  Henry turned to Dennis. “Some ghosts are insatiable. They need something, but they can never get enough of it. My sister’s ghost needs to know everyone’s business. It could have every secret in the world and it would still want more. But other ghosts”—like mine, he thought—“they have one thing left to do, and once it’s done, they’re gone
. They vanish.”

  Dennis looked up at the ghost girl, and she looked away.

  “I just want you to know,” Henry said. “Ghosts need things from you. They aren’t here to be your friend. And sometimes when they get what they want, they leave.”

  Dennis shrugged. “That’s okay. She’s been a better friend to me than anyone.”

  “You remind me of him so much,” the ghost girl said to Henry. “I can see why he haunted you. He was so frustrated with everything he couldn’t change about himself, so he tried to fix other people. And like you, he only seemed to make things worse.”

  “What did Neilson do to you?” Henry asked. “Did he use you and your sister in his experiments?”

  The ghost girl laughed. “See, Dennis? He says that he’s looking out for you, that ghosts only care about themselves. But he’s only here to find out why his ghost left.”

  Dennis gave a sad snort and kicked at the carpet. “I was wondering why you were hanging out with me so much.”

  “It’s not like that,” Henry said. “I need my ghost to help you. I need it to help all of the pig people, and now Bethany, too. This isn’t about me.”

  The ghost girl stabbed him in the forehead with her index finger, giving him a jolt of hurt. Her ghostly fingertip slid a centimeter into his skull, teasing at his brain. Spasms of light broke across his eyes.

  “Do you miss my father riding around in there?” the ghost asked. “You sad that he’s gone? You’d be the first person to ever miss him.”

  Dennis stepped in between them.

  The ghost girl backed away, looking rebuked, not meeting the pig boy’s eyes. “My father thought pain was the most plentiful thing in the world,” she said. “He wanted to build machines that ran off of it. Making me and my sister unhappy was a research project for him.”

  Henry felt sick. Maybe there was a reason all of his inventions caused pain. But it was more than just his ghost, wasn’t it? The machines had also come from Henry, and he only wanted to help people. There was still so much good they could have done together.