Bone Read online

  Copyright © 1989 George C. Chesbro All rights reserved.

  The Mysterious Press, 129 West 56th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019 Printed in the United States of America First Printing: March 1989 10 987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chesbro, George C. Bone / George C. Chesbro.

  p. cm. I. TITLE. PS3553.H359B66 1989 813'.54—dcl9 ISBN 0-89296-292-5

  BoNE

  Sleeping with Jesus had always saved her in the past, but on this night the electric voices had penetrated even this sanctuary. Sailing on the raw winds of early April, cloaked in darkness and speaking the lisping spring language of rain, the Speakers—three of them tonight—had found her shortly after midnight. On other occasions when the Speakers had found her here Jesus had persuaded them to go away and leave her in peace, but tonight Ho Chi Minh had been very persistent in defying Jesus and persuading the others to do the same; for almost two hours the Speakers had been cursing, spitting and urinating on her from the writhing bundle of black clouds the stone Savior held above her head in his outstretched arms. The pain caused by the Speakers' voices—shimmering electric shocks that made her muscles twitch, her bones vibrate, her eyes burn and bulge—was growing worse, and she knew she would have to escape from the Speakers or she would die.

  Marilyn Monroe had told her so.

  But she was so terribly cold. The body heat trapped by the five layers of clothing and plastic garbage bags she wore had leaked away into the night hours before, and the urine that had run down her legs into her socks and ragged shoes was beginning to freeze. She had endured nights much colder than this during winter, she thought as she rested her cheek on the gelid granite that was her bed and shuddered—but on those nights Jesus had been protecting her from the Speakers. The fact that this protection had been stripped away, even as the wind had stripped from her the newspapers she had carried all day to cushion and insulate her head at night, made her feel terribly vulnerable, and even colder.

  But she had to move. Marilyn had said so.

  Mary Kellogg reached inside her thin coat and pulled out the wads of newspaper she had stuffed there for added warmth, threw them to the hungry wind. She did the same with the newspapers stuffed between her garbage-bag skirt and the baggy, filth-caked wool pants beneath. Thus unencumbered, she reached up with a frail, trembling hand to grip the great iron ring on the massive wooden door behind her. Her bare fingers wrapped around the slippery, cold metal and she managed to haul herself to her feet. This exertion, combined with the cold and the wet and the pain caused by the electric Speakers, left her short of breath; she stood gasping and shuddering, leaning for support against a cold stone foot of Jesus. Joseph Stalin cursed at her, and she finally let go of the carved toes, hobbled stiffly to the wrought-iron handrail that ran down the center of the wide stone steps beneath her bed. Gripping the rail with both hands, pausing twice to rest and slap her hands against her thighs in an effort to restore feeling to her fingers, she finally made it down to the street, where she cringed and furtively looked around her, terrified that she might be noticed and caught again by the savage young gray ones who had hurt her and tried to make her do a horrible and disgusting thing. But there was no sign of the gray ones, nor of anyone else. Only an occasional car, tires whistling on the rain-swept avenue, sped by.

  Mary turned left and shuffled toward the end of the block. The Speakers followed, screaming at her from their hiding places behind Doubleday, Garrano, Gucci and Fortunoff, across the wide avenue. She paused at the curb, again gasping for breath, feebly trying to brush back the wispy strands of hair plastered to her face with hands that had lost all feeling.

  Still standing at the curb in the rain and wind, the old woman's mind began to drift.

  There were times, usually bad times like now, when for no apparent reason Mary found herself thinking of her husband; she missed him so badly at these times that the pain in her heart became even worse than the pains caused by the Speakers. She remembered the good times they had shared when he was alive, when she was so many years younger, before the Speakers had visited her with their electric torment, before her children had placed her in a mental hospital.

  The first place hadn't been so bad, Mary thought, her mind now far away and oblivious to the taxicab that raced past only inches from her, sending up a wall of dirty water that crested and cascaded over her, drenching her from her chest to her feet. She had been almost happy there. The doctors and nurses had been kind, and pleasant volunteers had often taken her out for walks, or rides, or even an occasional picnic when the weather was warm. Most important, the doctors had given her medicine which made her invisible to the Speakers, who had eventually gone away. She'd even had her own television set.

  Then the doctors had told her that the state had changed certain rules, and she was no longer considered sick enough to be hospitalized; she was to be transferred to a much smaller, privately operated facility, and the Speakers would not find her there as long as she continued to take her medication.

  But the community house where they had sent her had been very crowded, and the small staff had been overworked, impatient and mean to her. Often, they had forgotten to give her her medication, and had shouted at her when she tried to remind them. Once a staff person had shoved her against a wall, hurting her so badly that she had been unable to get out of bed for three days. Then the Speakers had found her, and she'd had to leave in order to escape from them. The police had found her sleeping in a bus station, and had brought her back to the community house; but it had been easy to sneak past the staff, and she had left again when the Speakers ordered her to. This time no one had found her.

  So many years ago.

  She had been living on the streets ever since. She had to remain on the streets, for it was only in the open that she could escape for any length of time from the Speakers. She could never seem to make the many social workers and doctors who'd talked to her understand this; fortunately, they had never put her in a place that she hadn't eventually found a way to get out of. And on very cold nights, when she had been found and put in one of the blue vans with the smiling faces and forcibly taken to a shelter, she had been grateful for the warmth and food, and had been able to tolerate the pain from the Speakers' electric voices until morning, when she had been free to leave. She had learned where to go for food and clothing when she couldn't find what she needed in the city's garbage, and on nice days she would sit with her friend on the stone steps under Jesus and listen to Zulu, whose deep, booming voice always scared the Speakers away.

  She was grateful to kind social workers like Anne and Barry, who came in their blue van and always gave her a paper bag with a sandwich, cookie and carton of juice inside, and who never got angry when she refused to come with them in their van, or when she threw away the card inside the bag that listed their organization's address and telephone number. Even Dr. Hakim, who sometimes traveled with Anne and Barry in the van and made her come inside when it was very cold, seemed to accept that there was no place he could force her to go which she would not eventually find a way to walk away from. Dr. Hakim did seem to understand about the Speakers, and had said that he could make them go away if she would agree to let him put her in a hospital. But she no longer believed that anyone could make the Speakers go away; even Jesus had failed her this night. The only answer was to stay in the open, so that she could move away when they found her.

  Mary wondered if Dr. Hakim and the social workers had been telling the truth when they'd said she was in terrible danger now because there was someone loose in the city who was chopping off the heads of homeless people. It had sounded like a story meant to scare her into coming with them in their blue van, but even Zulu, who knew everything, had warned her about the killer and pleaded wi
th her to go to a city shelter. But Zulu did not understand about the Speakers. She was terrified of the young gray ones, but they only seemed to want to hurt, rape and steal. Aside from the Speakers, who were from another world, she could not understand why anyone would want to kill an old woman who wore plastic garbage bags for skirts and meant no one any harm.

  Mary was brought out of her reverie by the sudden and agonizing churning of her bowels. Sometimes, when she absolutely couldn't help herself, she went to the bathroom in her pants; she often wasn't even aware that she was urinating until she felt the not unpleasant warmth of the fluid running down her legs. But defecating was something else, transforming her into a vile-smelling creature she could not stand. Horrified at the thought of soiling herself, knowing that she must allow herself time to pull up three garbage-bag skirts and drop two pairs of pants, Mary desperately looked around her for a hiding place that would afford her a measure of privacy.

  In the next block a church facade was undergoing renovations, and a covered, wooden mall extended out over the sidewalk for the length of the building. One of the light bulbs beneath the mall was out, and there was a large area of darkness. Mary disliked the thought of relieving herself on the sidewalk in front of one of her stone Savior's many houses, but she did not see that she had any choice; the alternative was to risk soiling herself, and then suffer the ultimate humiliation of having to go to a shelter to beg for clean clothes and water to wash herself.

  Slowed by the wide streams of rushing water in the gutters, Mary shuffled across the street, stepped up on the curb and then went faster when a Speaker screamed at her from somewhere inside Lufthansa. She hurried down the mall to the area of darkness, pulled up her first garbage-bag skirt and desperately struggled with cold, arthritic fingers to undo the safety pin that held up her outer pair of pants. She finally managed to lift the skirts and drop the pants, quickly squatted at the base of the stone steps leading up to the church's recessed main entrance and let herself go, sighing with pleasure and pride that she had been able to exhibit such self-control.

  A car came around the near corner and started up the avenue, its lights momentarily blinding Mary. The old woman averted her gaze, looked down between her legs—and was startled to see a copious amount of blood mixing with her urine and watery stool; the blood, feces and urine mixed, pooled in slight cracks and depressions in the concrete, then broke into thin rivulets that flowed out over the sidewalk and into the gutter.

  Mary's first thought was that she was dying; she had waited too long to leave Jesus, and the Speakers had managed to penetrate her body and mortally wound her. Blood was pouring from her body along with the waste, and soon she would be dead.

  But she did not feel as if she were dying, and the pain from the electric words had begun to ease as soon as she'd left Jesus and descended the stone steps. She did not feel as if her insides were pouring out; aside from the cold and wet, she felt only pride and pleasure at having managed to relieve herself without soiling her clothes. When she finished and tentatively touched herself between the legs, her fingers came away moist with urine, but no blood. Perhaps the blood was not hers, Mary thought, and she wondered if this might not be another abominable trick of the Speakers to torment her.

  "Hello, Mary."

  This was a different Speaker, one who was hiding somewhere up in the darkness at the church entrance behind her. His tone was gentler, softer, than any she had heard a Speaker use before, and the voice reminded her of a friend.

  So it was a trick.

  Embarrassed at having been observed relieving herself, frightened by the fact that a Speaker had found her so soon after she thought she had escaped them, Mary stood up, quickly pulled up her two pairs of pants, secured the safety pins and started to shuffle away.

  "Don't go away, Mary," the gentle, soothing voice said. "You know me, so you know there's no reason to be afraid. I can see that you're soaked through to the skin, and you must be freezing. You don't want to catch pneumonia. I can help you. Come back."

  Mary stopped walking. Perhaps it really was him, she thought, and not a Speaker after all; this voice had uttered many words, yet she felt no electric pain. She slowly turned, cocked her head to one side and squinted, trying to peer up into the night shrouding the recessed entrance.

  "I was planning on coming to see you soon anyway, Mary."

  Mary shook her head in confusion. "But you see me all the time."

  "I think it's wonderful that you're here with me now, tonight. It's a good time. Come up to me, Mary. See what I have for you."

  The old woman shuffled back up the sidewalk into the darkness, felt with her foot until she found the first stone step. "What is it?"

  "I know how cold and tired you are, Mary. Wouldn't you like to rest? I mean really rest, and never be cold, hungry or in pain ever again?"

  "Oh, yes," Mary said weakly, her voice cracking as a violent shudder, triggered by bone-deep cold, suddenly passed through her body.

  "Then come to me."

  She did—or tried to. She made it up two steps, then tripped in the darkness and would have fallen if a powerful, sinewy hand sheathed in rubber had not reached down and gripped her arm, holding her steady. A car came around the corner across the way, its headlights briefly, dimly, illuminating part of the recess, and Mary smiled up into the face of the man draped in a bright, crimson-streaked orange slicker buttoned to his neck and wearing a rain hat that was only orange.

  "Oh, Lord, I'm so glad it really is—"

  She abruptly stopped speaking and gasped when a large truck, which had been following the car, came around the corner and its powerful high beams briefly flashed across the recess. Mary had forgotten all about the blood she had seen on the sidewalk, but now she saw where it had leaked from. Beside the carnage that was the fountainhead was a plastic shopping bag stuffed with still more carnage, topped with blood-matted white hair.

  "Oh, dear," Mary said in a small voice. "Oh, dear."

  "I'm sorry I didn't get to you sooner, Mary," the man said kindly, once more cloaked in darkness. "There are so many who suffer, as you well know. Please forgive me for keeping you waiting so long in your time of need."

  "But I don't want to die," Mary said just before the razor silenced the Speakers forever.

  Chapter One

  (i)

  His first sensation was of vague discomfort, a damp chilliness which almost immediately exploded into wet cold so fierce and piercing it seemed his heart would freeze and shatter; next he was aware of cold rain beating on his head, melting away his hair and scalp . . .

  ". . . me, Bone?" A woman's voice echoing somewhere in the dark depths of his stirring consciousness, a disembodied human sound balanced on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness, or one dream and another. "Bone, can you hear me?

  Then came anxiety, which quickly swelled into fear. Something was terribly wrong, but he did not know what it was. A dream? Whose dream? He could not remember anything. He was missing huge chunks of himself, but he could not recall where he had left, or lost, them. Without the pieces of himself that were inexplicably missing he felt reduced to no more than a pair of eyes trapped inside an alien, out-of-control body squatting in cold mud oozing over the tops of his shoes and soaking through the seat of his pants. He sensed that the body was gripping something in its right hand, but he did not know what it was. Fear became terror and he felt as if he were suffocating, the air being crushed from his lungs.

  Who was the stranger squatting in the mud?! Who am I?!

  Somewhere off to his right in this freezing, black ocean of rain and mud, a man's voice said, "Look at the poor son-of-a-bitch; he's shaking like a leaf. I'm going to—"

  "No, Barry!" The woman. Her tone sharp, confident, commanding. "Don't go near him yet. Just let him be for a few minutes."

  "Anne's right, Barry." Another man's voice. Authoritative tone despite a foreign accent that gave the sound a lilting, almost song-like quality. Off to his left. The two men were flanking t
he woman, who was closest to him. Very close to him. "I'd say he's trembling as much from fear as cold, and he might very well be dangerous."

  "Oh, come on, Ali," the woman said. "I just don't want him to be any more frightened than he already is. He's never given any indication that he's dangerous; quite the opposite."

  "He's never squatted in the rain and mud for two days before, either," the high-pitched, lilting voice of authority said. "Obviously, something's changed in him, and I don't think it wise to approach him until we can determine just what, and how deep, that change or those changes may be. The bone he carries is a human femur which appears to have ossified; it would make a formidable weapon. You're too close to him, Anne."

  "I'm all right."

  "I can handle him," the man on his right with the deeper voice said. "If you give the word that we can take him in, Ali, I'll get him to the van."

  "No," the woman said firmly. "If you start grabbing at him, we could lose him again. This is the biggest reaction we've ever seen in him. Whatever's happening inside his head is important, and we don't want to rush things."

  "Agreed," the lilting voice said. "Anne, come back under the umbrella."

  "I'm all right, Ali."

  "How long are we supposed to just stand around here in the rain and wait?"

  "If you're cold, Barry, go sit in the van."

  He blinked—and suddenly he could see. He was crouched in the middle of a very large field which was bordered by trees. Beyond the trees, shrouded in mist and fog, dozens of tall buildings thrust up into a lead-colored sky. Atop one building was a sign, Essex House; it meant nothing to him, except that it told him the stranger could read. The sight of the magnificent stone and glass buildings surrounding the meadow and the trees deeply touched him for reasons he could not understand. He had no idea who, what or where he was, and he could not remember ever seeing the meadow or the trees or the tall buildings beyond, but there was no doubt that they reminded him of something. Perhaps it was all a dream, a nightmare, and he would awaken at any moment and remember who he was.