A House With Good Bones

Chapter 26

Green roselight filled the garden, casting hundreds of shadows through the dirt. It reflected from the walls of the house and I saw Mom and Phil holding Gail between them, while the underground children gathered just below their perch.

I turned my head and saw the child holding my foot in its dirty-nailed hands. The blue bruises of its eyes contracted as I watched. My blood stained its mouth where it had bitten into my flesh, looking black in the glow of the roses.

I knew nothing of magic. I barely believed in it. But I felt something well up in the center of my chest, a pressure that mixed with the shooting pain in my hand and my heel, and I pushed with it, as hard as I could, at the white horror that clung to my ankle.

It was as if the roses were a battery and by gripping the stems my body had closed the circuit. Roselight twined up my arms and the pressure in my chest grew so strong that I thought my heart would explode out of my chest, smashing my ribs outward as it went. Power arced through me, green and terrible, a power of stem and root and thorn, a power made of my grandmother’s life and my great-grandfather’s obsession. I could taste the freesia skin powder she wore and feel her bird-claw hands gripping mine, and I heard her voice as if she was standing at my shoulder.

Little piggy.

No one can tell you anything, can they?

Father says…

You could be so beautiful.

Little piggy.

Nice and normal.

The underground children will get you…

The words flicked by, hundreds of them, thousands of them, the words that had built our life together, but there was one particular set of words that I needed. I sorted for them with all the intensity that I had once used to sort pictures of insects, looking for the words that would save us.

The roses say, stay away…

I found them and seized them and curled my hands more tightly around the rose stems, driving the thorns even deeper, and pushed those words out toward the underground children.

The pressure on my ankle was ripped away. I saw the grublike body go tumbling backward, arms flailing. It landed on the earth a dozen feet away and lay still.

The arcing power slowed and the pressure in my chest began to ease. My heart suddenly remembered that it was supposed to be beating and began hammering wildly against my ribs. I took a deep breath and then another.

“Sam?” Mom yelled from the roof. “Sam, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I croaked. There was no way that she could hear that, so I tried again. “Yeah. I think. Yeah.” That was a little better.

“What happened?”

Gail’s voice was weak, but it carried across the yard. “She used the roses, Edie.”

“I don’t know what that means!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, me neither.”

I pried one hand loose from the roses and sat up, keeping my left hand wrapped around the stems. Blood was pouring down my fingers. I shoved my hand under my armpit to slow the bleeding and looked around the yard.

The underground children had been pushed back, away from the roses, but none of the others had been killed. Three were already converging on the dead one. I could see more white heads popping out of the soil, reflecting ghostly green in the roselight.

Christ, there were a lot of them.

It was clear already that whatever the roses were doing, it wasn’t enough. The clear space around the roses was barely six feet wide, and Mom and Gail and Phil were still trapped on the roof. What had worked when the roses were a circle around the house was useless now that the circle had been breached. The underground children couldn’t get to me, but unless I could get the others to the safety of the rosebushes, it wasn’t going to help.

Phil might be able to run the distance to me. Mom couldn’t, not with her ankle, and Gail’s pallor, in the green light, was so ghastly that I was amazed she was still upright. I had to do something else. Otherwise I was going to lie here, bleeding, and eventually the underground children would come over the roof and I would watch my mom and friends die.

What else could I do? No, that was the wrong question. What else could the roses do?

The roses say… say your prayers…

Not helpful.

They’d brought me ladybugs, but it had taken time. Could insects even find us down here, wherever this was? And even if I convinced the roses to bring me a swarm of hornets or something, how did I get them to go after the underground children and not me? Hornets are not exactly a precision weapon. Neither are wasps.

Gran Mae had built a puppet for herself out of rose stems and leaves. Could I build something like that as a decoy?

“Meeuuuu…?” came a thin cry from high up on the roof. Phil and Mom jerked around. Gail’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything from this distance.

I didn’t have enough time for anything fancy. I didn’t have enough time for much of anything.

A small white hand came over the top of the roof, feeling delicately across the shingles. Three more underground children waited in the dirt under the eaves, ready to latch onto Phil or Mom if they tried to run.

“Sam?” called Mom. “Sam, are you still okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Give me just a minute.”

And then, knowing that I was about to do something supremely foolish and probably fatal, I buried my left arm to my shoulder in the roses and opened myself up to the power.

Gran Mae’s presence filled my ears and my throat and my lungs, wrapping around my rib cage, sinking into my bones. I could hear her spitting words at me, at my brother, at Mom, at the world. It no longer felt as if she was standing at my shoulder or holding my hand. This felt like being possessed.

I don’t believe in demons,I thought, and then I laughed at myself because I didn’t believe in ghosts either. That was the last coherent thought I had as my grandmother’s power poured through me. Malice and the scent of freesia powder. Rage that had festered for so long that it had turned to poison.

And under that, pain.

And under that, loneliness.

Say there was a bright girl who grew up unloved, with a strange, erratic father who saw her as nothing more than someone to cook and clean and get out of his way. Say that that daughter taught herself bits of his magic to try to win his love. Say that it didn’t work.

Say that she turned instead to families she saw on TV, to smiling black-and-white patriarchs who dispensed wisdom and loving discipline and tousled their children’s hair, to women who vacuumed the house while wearing pearls. Normal families. Nice and normal.

Say that she lived her life trying to match that, and when real people failed (as of course they failed) the old rage and loneliness welled up and came out as cruelty.

I understood Gran Mae then, I think. I could not pity the adult she had become, but I could pity the girl she had been.

In the end, she had turned to the roses. She had poured everything she was into them, and they had wrapped around her and kept her alive, a ghost of root and stem, flower and thorn.

And here I was now, gripping the rose stems with blood-slicked hands, and the roselight was all around me, vivid green. I stood at the heart of the roses and my grandmother’s power filled me, and all I had to do was utter a command.

I gave them the only order that I could think of.

The roses say… BURN…

“Sam!” Mom shouted in my ear. “Sam, that’s enough! Sam!”

The smell of smoke and burnt fat filled my nostrils. I wondered if it was me. There’s a thing that happens sometimes where you catch fire, but your clothes aren’t as flammable as you are, so they act as a wick for your own fat and you burn almost completely. Supposedly that’s what happens with spontaneous human combustion, at least in theory.

What little I knew about spontaneous human combustion did not involve Mom yelling in my ear. Maybe I had just overslept. Maybe it was a school day and Mom had made bacon and that’s what I was smelling.

I opened one eye blearily. My head throbbed. My fingers throbbed even worse.

“Jesus Christ, Sam,” said Mom, “what have you done to your hands?”

What had I done? I lifted my hands in front of my face. They were covered in blisters and black ash. Blood flowed sluggishly from dozens of punctures. I could see the snapped-off ovals of rose thorns embedded in my palms.

The world snapped immediately into focus. The underground children. Shit.

I tried to scramble to my feet but my knees buckled. “Where are they? Are they gone?”

“Yeah,” said Phil. His laugh was more incredulous than amused. “Oh yeah. Whatever the hell the roses did, they took care of it.”

I prodded my memory like a sore tooth. I had given an order, and then the roselight had erupted and my hands had burned and my grandmother had been screaming in my head and the roses had screamed too and green whips had lashed out everywhere, blackening with heat even as they struck. And the underground children…

I couldn’t lift the flashlight anymore, but Phil swung a beam of light over the dirt for me, and I saw charred shapes wrapped in brittle, ashy stems.

It finally occurred to me what I was smelling. I would have been sick, but it seemed like far too much effort, so I settled for swallowing a few times and feeling queasy, on top of everything else.

When I shifted, more stems fell to ash around me. The leaves had been reduced to charcoal ghosts that shattered at a touch.

“You did it,” said Gail. She was sitting down too. She gave me a wan smile. “You used the roses.”

Had I? It was what I had meant to do, but it had felt like Gran Mae as much as the roses. It was her voice and her loneliness that had echoed in my head and twisted around my bones.

She was gone now, burned away as thoroughly as the roses. I felt hollowed out, cored, as if a shell of ash was all that remained, and I might fall apart at a touch.

“But how do we get out?” asked Phil. “We’re still here. Wherever here is.” He swung the flashlight around, the beam vanishing into the darkness that still nevertheless felt like walls.

I shook my head. The roses had burned. There was nothing left of their power, or Gran Mae’s. There was barely anything left of me. I couldn’t fix this.

“It’s all right,” said Gail. “I think, now that the roses are gone, it will be easier.” She held her hand out to Phil. “Help an old lady up.”

He helped her to her feet and she leaned against him, her eyes closed. For a moment, I thought I felt something coming from her, but as I said, I’ve never been good at feeling things. Probably it was just an aftereffect of the roses.

“Sam,” said Mom, wiping her sleeve across my forehead, “Sam, what did you do?”

I shook my head again.

“Almost…” murmured Gail. “Almost… there!”

Light bloomed in the darkness overhead. Mom gasped. Phil swore, as heartfelt as a prayer. I tilted my head back, trying to push away the darkness that clung to the edges of my vision, and saw a distant shape overhead.

It burned, but with a kinder fire than the roses. Golden as a blaze of sunlight, as the wind off a wheat field, as the stripes on a bumblebee. If I had ever pictured the light at the end of the tunnel, it would have looked something like this.

The fire descended toward us and I wondered if I was dying. Gail reached her hands up toward it, swaying on her feet.

It was Hermes.

Light haloed the vulture like an angel. One outstretched wing was made entirely of golden flame. He turned his head and the discs of skin on either side of his face gleamed like burnished copper, and his beak opened.

The noise that came out sounded like a pigeon cooing with a sore throat. It was completely absurd, for an animal that was currently doing a pretty good imitation of an archangel. As hollowed out as I felt, I laughed, and the laugh filled a little of the empty place in my chest.

“Good boy,” said Gail. “Oh, good boy, Hermes! You found me! I wish I had a mouse for you. Now go and open the way.”

The glowing vulture tilted his wings and rose on invisible thermals, circling upward. The fire began narrowing to a finer and finer point as he rose into a sky that didn’t quite exist. When we could no longer make out individual feathers, only a small, brilliant shape, the light seemed to gather itself, and then it flashed outward, bright and sharp as an explosion.

Afterimages seared across my retinas. I blinked them away, trying to find an undamaged bit of skin on my hands to wipe my eyes.

When I could see again, the world was lighter. I could see gray, gritty light coming from somewhere near the roof. It outlined Gail, who had collapsed against Phil, and lit the tear tracks on Mom’s face.

“Are we somewhere now?” Mom asked. I had no idea how to answer her.

A voice came from the patch of gritty light. A familiar voice. Not the voice that I had expected to hear at the end of the world.

“What the hell happened to your house?” shouted Mr. Pressley. “Was it the government?”