Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Read online

  They emerged into sunlight. The girl took her to an upstairs bedroom overlooking the fields behind the house. There was a pair of binoculars on the floor by the window, one of the lenses cracked. The girl put them over Jane’s eyes and directed her gaze toward the window of a house across the way. “Watch.”

  The other house wasn’t abandoned. Curtains fluttered clean and pink at the edges of the window. Lawn chairs stood in the backyard. A woman passed in front of the window. A man took her by the shoulders and pushed her down onto the bed.

  Jane watched him shed his shirt and kick off his pants. The woman dropped her clothes over the side of the bed. Jane adjusted the focus of the binoculars when the man bent over the bed, grabbed the woman by her heels, and dragged her to him. Jane was young enough that she only half understood what she saw, both repulsed and fascinated.

  “They do it a lot,” the girl said. “Almost every day.”

  The rest of the week, Jane waited until her mother wasn’t paying attention to go meet the girl. Sometimes they watched the couple through the window. Other times, the girl dressed her in the stained clothes littering the floor of the abandoned house, or found pens for them to write on the walls.

  At some point, Jane realized she was playing in the house alone. She looked out the window by herself. She wrote vicious things on the walls and picked through the cast-off clothes and toys for what she wanted. The girl was still with her, but inside. When the sky darkened and Jane went home to avoid the thickening ghosts, the girl came too.

  At home, the ghost brought her mother’s burning loneliness right into Jane’s head. Her father spoke his fear and pain without saying a word. Her parents circled each other, afraid to touch but unable to stay apart. Henry sat in front of the television, eating stale cereal, feeling forgotten.

  Jane went into the living room and brought down an old game box, setting it between them. “Let’s play something.”

  Henry picked up a deck of cards and spilled them across the floor. “How do you play?”

  “I don’t know.” She put paper and pencils in front of him, found some dice, an abandoned game board. “Why don’t you make something up?”

  Something kindled in his mind, and her baby brother went through the parts in front of him. Her ghost told her everything he was thinking, helping her follow the convoluted rules of the board game he was inventing. While Henry flipped through the cards and made notes, Jane decided she would have to take better care of him. Her ghost settled into her ear. It spoke and spoke and spoke.

  * * *

  Trigger got up to open the door and window, to let out some of the cold.

  “That must have been scary,” he said. “To have a complete stranger get inside you like that. With my brother haunting me, at least I know who he is.”

  “We know each other better than anyone.” Jane wasn’t sure if the defensiveness in her voice was her ghost’s or her own.

  Trigger stepped into the hallway. “You know each other now. But you didn’t at first.”

  “I don’t think that matters. I know exactly what my mom is thinking, but that doesn’t mean I understand her. Half the time she feels like a stranger to me.”

  He shrugged. “I guess you can’t really know anyone.”

  “I know my ghost. Why are you smiling? What are you thinking?” She got off the bed and went to him.

  Her ghost refused to tell Jane, withholding his thoughts for the pleasure of it.

  “I’m hungry,” Trigger said. “Let’s go eat something.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.” Jane wasn’t used to not knowing, didn’t like feeling unsure of herself.

  This is why you need me, her ghost said. I’m the only one who will be honest with you.

  “I think that you wish you could haunt me. You want to be my ghost. Then you’d know everything.”

  Jane smiled and said nothing, unused to someone so clearly seeing into her mind.

  Henry lay across the peak of the roof, the shingles rough under his cheek. It was night. His clothes were damp, and mucus plugged his nose and coated his throat. He shivered in his thin shirt. When he sat up, his head spun. He felt weak and hungry. His old gnawing headache was still with him, a clenching squeeze like his head was gripped in the jaws of a dog.

  A few feet away, a box was nailed to the roof. A bundle of wires ran from the attic to feed the machine’s guts: a circuit board, a set of motors, and an array of metal cylinders thicker than his arm. It fired a spray of red laser pulses into the sky. Henry looked up and saw fingers of red light braiding through the clouds, a spear of information fired into space as far and fast as light could go. Still, given the vastness of what lay over his head, he’d be dead long before the light reached anywhere interesting. If his ghost was trying to help Bethany leave Earth, this seemed like a poor way to do it.

  He ran his hands over the box. The laser array was small. His ghost probably hadn’t taken control of him for more than a day. Jane would worry that it might be dangerous. It would be easy to destroy it. Henry could bury the head of a hammer in it, or he could rip out the wires trailing from its side. But nothing about it seemed dangerous. Maybe he’d leave it for a while and see what happened.

  His bedroom’s dormer window had been left open to the rain. Henry lowered himself inside, his carpet and school papers soaked. His clock read three in the morning.

  He trudged down to the kitchen and poured himself a bowl of cereal. The robot was spreading soapy water over the tile with a ratty mop. The washing machine and dishwasher were both running. His mother must be home. The robot only cleaned when she was asleep, staying close by her side when she was awake in case she might need something.

  “Your corrosion is getting bad,” Henry said. “And I’ve seen you dragging your left leg. Is that why you’re wearing clothes? To hide the damage? You should come to me when you need repairs.”

  The robot swiveled its head and narrowed the shutters on its headlamp eyes, slicing him with a thin sliver of murky orange light. Its stance seemed to say, You made me wrong. Fix something that matters.

  Henry put his bowl in the sink. “You do her a lot of good. It’s just hard to see it.”

  He pulled on his shoes and walked outside, his head aching and a sweet film coating his mouth. Over his head, the laser array made its red scar across the galaxy’s edge. He dug his cell phone out of the pocket of his jeans, the battery almost dead. Hogboss answered on the third ring.

  “I was worried about you, Henry. You never answered my texts.”

  “Are you working tonight? Want to show me the plant?”

  “Nights are best.” His voice was harsh and well-deep, like iron warping. “The workers get concerned if they see me too often during the day. They worry that something bad is going to happen.”

  “Is something bad going to happen?” At the edges of Henry’s vision, a blue shimmer moved in the house across the street. Some ghost still gnawing away at whatever had obsessed it in life. He kept his eye on it.

  “I don’t know why people ask me questions like that,” Hogboss said. “I’ve only been a man for a few months. I just learned how to turn on the news. Give me fifteen minutes, Henry. I’ll be right there.”

  Henry had fallen asleep sitting on the porch by the time Hogboss pulled up, his head resting on his knees. Careless of him. Ghosts didn’t always make noise. One could have slipped up and walked right inside him, like he was an unlocked room. Henry stood and climbed into the passenger side of the Pig City truck.

  It was too dark for him to get a good look at the pig man. He was an immense shape, featureless and huge, a mountain. Hogboss’s breath made the cab hot, and there was a bloody, almost sterile smell, like the meat counter of a supermarket. Even without being able to see him, only feeling the vibrations of his throat rumble through the truck, Henry was crushed by his size and inhumanity. He remembered seeing a lion at the zoo as a child, how when it yawned he could have lain inside its jaws.

  “You want
to find out why you made me,” Hogboss said.

  “People are nervous. If I knew why I did it, I could tell them that there’s no reason to worry.” Henry was glad Jane wasn’t there—her ghost was always eager to unearth his secret fears. There were things it was best not to think about. “Why do you think I made you?”

  “To butcher pigs. And you should know, Henry, I take a lot of pride in my work.”

  In the road, wisps of fog coalesced into the shapes of men and women and children, the barest shadows of ghosts. They drove through, Hogboss turning his windshield wipers on as if the spirits were rain. The pig man adjusted his mirror, catching sight of the lights battering the sky behind them.

  “What’s that on top of your house?” Hogboss asked.

  “My ghost made it. Just like he made the robot. And you.”

  “Do you know why he made it?”

  “I can’t talk to my ghost. It’s not like Jane’s.”

  “How did you get haunted?”

  They were still several minutes away from the pork-processing plant, shining with light on the plateau over the town. There was time, and as strange as it was, no one had ever asked Henry before. The pig man had caught him off-guard with simple kindness.

  “It was my sister’s fault,” Henry said. “She was supposed to be watching me.”

  * * *

  Henry was ten when he first saw the stranger in the house.

  His father had left years before, and his mother was at work that day. Jane mostly raised him, making sure he had dinner and was woken up for school, but her ghost was getting tired of Henry. It craved something messy and complicated. There was an older boy who lived a few streets over, and it coaxed Jane out of the house to meet him.

  “You’ll be fine by yourself for a few hours,” she had said. “Just stay inside and don’t open the door.”

  Henry got bored watching TV alone and started to pace. He found the attic stairs had been left folded down, wondered if his mother had been putting things away. He wasn’t allowed up there. The people who had lived in the house decades ago had left behind furniture, photos, tools that even his father hadn’t known what to do with. His parents worried some of it might be possessed by spirits, though Jane said she couldn’t hear any. There was an entire lost life in the attic, and they had been sorting through it and throwing it out, piece by piece, for years.

  The attic steps were steep and narrow, swaying when Henry put his foot on them. He climbed up with hands and feet, going slow to listen for his mother coming home, and stuck his head through the hole in the ceiling. The air was hot. He waited for his eyes to adjust.

  There was a man sitting on the floor at the other end of the attic. He had a lean face and small, round glasses with thin frames. He was dark-skinned and lanky, his shirt and pants baggy around his bony limbs. The man held an old cassette and was winding the ribbon of film back into it, carefully untangling its shining snarls.

  “Who are you?” Henry asked.

  The man looked up at him, frowned, and was gone.

  Henry stayed on the steps for a long time, staring at the spot where the man had been. It was a ghost. Their house was haunted.

  By the time Jane came home, he was in tears. She went up to the attic to look herself, then went through every room. “There’s no one, Henry. My ghost would hear if there was.”

  She took him into the attic and made him look with her. The cassette was still there, lying beside an old box of books, VCR tapes, and photos. Jane pulled one of the photos out, a badly faded picture of a family eating together. The daughter wore a ballet dress and tights. The man Henry had seen sat in the middle of them, ignoring his family to probe a wristwatch with a jeweler’s screwdriver.

  “You probably just imagined it,” Jane said.

  She could read the bright flame of anger in his mind, his frustration that she’d left. Sometimes he didn’t even speak, just projected his raw feelings at her without words.

  “I watch you all the time,” Jane said. “And I deserve to have friends. You better not say anything to Mom about me leaving.”

  In the weeks after, Henry saw the stranger again. In the garage, he found the man staring into the engine of his father’s old truck, there and gone as soon as Henry laid eyes on him. After a power surge knocked out one of the electrical sockets, Henry found the stranger bent over, removing the socket cover.

  One afternoon, Jane brought him a broken handheld game she’d found in an old house. The screen was cracked and it wouldn’t turn on, not even with new batteries. While Jane went to make dinner, Henry got some of his father’s tools from the garage and began taking the game apart. He arranged the pieces beside him on the floor, uncovering the green of the circuit board. He didn’t know what he was doing or what to look for, but he was curious. How could something made of metal and plastic just die? Could he make it live again?

  In his periphery, the stranger went through the screws and plastic debris at his elbow. Henry was careful not to look at him.

  The long fingers pointed and guided. Henry cleaned the battery terminals, glued back a broken piece, spliced together a frayed wire, shook dirt out of the case. When he had it all back together, he flipped the game over in his hands and snapped on the power button. The screen lit up green and music came out of the speakers. What a miracle, resurrecting this broken machine. Watching the sprites make their pixelated crawl between his hands, Henry felt that there was nothing he couldn’t do.

  “Henry? Did you get it to work?”

  As Jane walked into the room, the stranger grabbed Henry by the arms and stepped inside him. He felt something heavy and cold push through his chest. The weight pressed against his lungs and knocked the air out of him, leaving him sprawled on the floor. It moved deeper, into his bones. When he got his wind back and sat up, he felt heavy, off balance.

  His sister leaned over him, shouting. “Henry! Are you okay?”

  He blinked. Shapes blurred together, out of focus. His sister’s face was a smear of color, featureless. The carpet and ceiling bled together in a pale field.

  “I can’t see.”

  He groped around on the floor, and his hands brushed metal. A pair of old glasses—the stranger’s glasses—lay beside him. He put them on, and the world grew sharp and clear again. “The ghost is inside me,” he said. “What does it want?”

  “I don’t know.” Jane angled her head toward him, like she was listening. “My ghost can’t hear anything. Is it talking to you? What’s it saying?”

  As shocked as he was, afraid of the spirit that had stepped into him like he was a closet, Henry had one secret thrill: Jane, who knew his every thought, didn’t know this.

  “It’s not saying anything,” Henry said. “It’s just waiting.”

  * * *

  Hogboss’s truck climbed the steep and winding road up to the gates of the plant compound. There were streetlights here, their white glare spearing through the ghostly fog.

  “Does that mean the stranger made me?” Hogboss asked.

  Henry wasn’t sure if the pig man was angry or grateful. “You can’t separate us. It’s a part of me.”

  “It must be hard to share yourself,” Hogboss said. “Your ghost could use you to do anything.”

  Henry wanted to say that the ghost only helped with what he wanted to do. His mind and his hands animated it. But part of him would always worry about what it did when he was sleeping. He didn’t know who actually had control. He tried not to think about it.

  They drove through the gate, the guard catching sight of Hogboss and waving him through without checking his ID. The forest was dense around them, trees climbing the sides of the plateau and falling away into deep valleys of green. Rounding a corner, they arrived.

  The white tin buildings looked like they were on fire. A roiling, cloudy haze swept over the walls and reached up from the roof, poured from the door seams, and made tidal gasps along the ground. It swallowed up the few people coming and going in their blue jumpsuits
and headlamps. Huge plumes of white floated over the high-ceilinged pig houses. Smoky and indistinct shapes, flailing like men, fell from the windows of the concrete butchery. Little puffs of what seemed to be steam twirled from cracks in the asphalt. Henry covered his mouth, held his breath involuntarily.

  But there was no fire. The heavy haze was only the dead; Pig City drowning in spirits like the river Styx.

  Hogboss came around and opened Henry’s door. “They won’t hurt you. Pig City’s ghosts are here to work. They’re quite content.”

  As they walked to the door of the closest building, though, Henry saw faces rise out of the fog and stare. Insubstantial mouths opened and wispy hands reached out to point. The ghosts understood that a pig was working at the plant and they didn’t like it.

  Decades before, those hands belonged to the living. They pointed not at the pig man but at the few black workers brave enough to fight for jobs here. Afraid of losing some future they couldn’t quite see, resentful that anyone different would have something they were so assured was theirs, the men closed ranks to keep the plant jobs for their kith and kin. They started fights in the parking lot, spread rumors to bosses, insisted people be fired, and got their black coworkers sidelined to the most dangerous and worst-paying jobs until finally there were only a few black faces in the whole sprawling body of the plant.

  Still, black ghosts did wander the factory. For those who had spent years seeing the lights of the plant shining on the hill over the town, a star cold and unreachable, it was no surprise their desperate ghosts would at last find their way here.

  Hogboss gave him a tour, taking Henry past the time clock and into a dressing room where workers put on vinyl smocks, plastic gloves, and elastic boot covers. The floors and walls were tiled over in green squares that had been bleached almost gray. There were few people at the plant this late at night. Mostly janitors and repairmen. The workers were thin-haired, their faces acid-scarred or chapped red from cleaning agents. They moved slowly and stiffly, carrying weariness in their backs. They seemed like old trees, wind-stripped and thunder-struck, half toppled over and barely clinging to the earth. When they finally died, would their ghosts even know? Or would they show up to work, punch their phantom time cards, tongue their old sores, and continue to dread the day cancer or a heart attack would finally knock them down?