The Singing Bone (12 page)

“Or where there is no reality,” Lee added.

“You can use it to help people,” Allegra explained. She was sitting next to Stover, and as she said this, she crawled down and began to undo the laces of his boots. “Say your friend is in trouble, and as you have sex, you keep your friend in mind, and you visualize protective white light around her, or when she exhales, you see a gray fog leaving her body, and when she inhales—” She pulled Stover's boots off, and then they all watched as she crawled onto his lap and began to kiss him. “When she inhales, you see clean, white light moving into her body. And when you see her again—” She laughed. “And when you see her again, and she says something like, ‘Oh I feel just terrific. I don't even know what I was worried about,' you just smile because you know it worked.”

Alice looked at Mr. Wyck, but he was staring into the fire and didn't seem to care. “We raised so much energy here tonight,” he said. “The dancing. The friendship. The love—” Still without looking at them, he lifted a hand towards Allegra and Stover. “They're beautiful.”

Allegra took Stover's hands and led him into the downstairs bedroom. Trina's mouth hung open at the sound of Allegra's moans. They all watched the fire, not knowing what to do or say, and then Lee leaned over and kissed Molly on the mouth.

Stuart's at work, staring at an image of a stranger's ventromedial prefrontal cortex. His specialty is the relationship between the amygdala and the frontal lobe: emotion and execution. Kate calls Stuart the brain detective. They joke about it. For his birthday once, she gave him a Sherlock Holmes hat. She left the hat on the dining room table for him to find, and when he lifted it up, smiling, he found a scientific model brain beneath. “Clever!” he called out, because she was upstairs, and when she came down, laughing, she said, “That's the real Rubik's Cube. That's the ultimate puzzle.”

Kate's good with gifts. She has a knack for it, and when Stuart asked her once how she did it, she said that she imagined the recipients holding the presents. “And then I know. It's really just about paying attention.”

That morning, when Kate woke him and said, “Call your mother today,” Stuart buried his face in his pillow. “Why?” he asked. What was Kate talking about? But of course. It's Molly's birthday. His mother will have gotten up early to get everything done. He makes a note to call her that evening. He wonders what story he'll tell her. Remember when Molly—but then he knows. Once, when they were playing hide-and-seek, Molly simply put a blanket over her head and stood in the center of the living room. When he pulled the blanket off her head, her hair sprang up from the static electricity. Now
that
was funny.

  •  •  •  

Every year, Stuart picks out a present for Molly. He settles on the gifts slowly, by doing what Kate said, holding them in his hands and picturing his sister holding them. What would she like? Last year, he got her a handsome book of John Singer Sargent's paintings. He thought Molly would appreciate the direct gaze of some of Sargent's society women—the way they looked as if they had a good joke to tell—maybe something slightly off-color, even. He stopped on the page that showed
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
—the girl to the left, in the white pinafore and red dress. He squinted, bringing the book closer. She looked so like Molly! “There you are,” he said aloud. He left the store with a smile on his face, the book under his arm, as if someone had given him a gift. He doubted he could top that this year.

Stuart looks at the computer screen. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is part of a study on mood and anxiety disorders. The control group is random. The test subjects are given a snack and made cozy beneath a white blanket. Fitted with headphones and electrodes, they are rolled into the white tunnel of the MRI. Once inside, a story begins to play over the headphones. Since it has no beginning or end, it's not really a story. It's a sequence of events.
You're walking down the street when you see a stranger fall. No one stops to help the stranger. The stranger doesn't get up. Still no one helps. You decide to help the stranger.
The brain reacts to the sequence of events, and it's Stuart's job to interpret the brain's reaction.

Stuart always sees a woman walking down a busy street. She falls like a tree, in one straight line. Her face hits the sidewalk, and strands of her long dark hair snake across the concrete. Once she's down it's as if she's lost all mobility. Around her, people pass. Sometimes, he dreams about her falling, and when he does, there is a second, intervening dream, almost like a commercial break, but he doesn't know what that dream is.

Stuart is often called to interpret brain scans of criminals. A lawyer wants to see deep space, the black hole. He or she doesn't want a brain that lights up—lighting up means cognizance, emotion, blame—it means
just like you and me
to a jury. No, a lawyer wants a half-human, devoid of empathy; a lawyer wants the knife and the blank stare. Stuart has mixed feelings about this work, but it's usually done to get the death penalty off the table, and since he opposes the death penalty—since he, more precisely, opposes
cruelty
—he does the work. The lawyers take the scans and put them up on a board in front of the court. They point to the black areas in the brain and tell the jury that the person who houses the brain does not know right from wrong

The images on his computer screen change with each patient: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lights up—or doesn't—during the sequence. Later, he'll go over all of the findings. He thinks of Kate, how her brain would glow during this test—like the crimson glow of multihot star formation. Brains that don't light up—that always takes him by surprise—it's a world he knows about as a scientist, but it's also a world he can't fathom. Deep space. Black holes. No stars, no glow.

It's the same every year—
but especially this year
, he thinks. Twenty years. He hopes his mother hasn't heard about the film that Hans Loomis is making, that she doesn't know about the Wyckians—

How they dance on his sister's grave.

Every year, he calls the police station the day before Halloween, and he calls on the night she died, too, to ask them to go out and make sure no one bothers Molly. That's what he says: “Please make sure no one bothers my sister tonight.” Every year, he calls Detective Simon. He was the one who came out to the house twenty years ago. Stuart knows that John Simon won't forget his sister.

Brains that don't light up are rare—thankfully. He closes his work and stands, stretching, still wondering what he'd get Molly for her birthday. He'll go to the bookstore and choose something. Molly wasn't a big reader, but it doesn't mean she wouldn't have one day become one. She liked stories. She liked something scary. He'll buy a nice copy of
Dracula
. Or
Frankenstein
, but for some reason, he's sure she'd prefer
Dracula.
Now. Wouldn't that be interesting? A scan of Dracula's brain. He smiles. He'll have to tell Kate. Dracula: Empathy or no? And Molly's book—yes, he's got it—
Interview with a Vampire
. That's what she'd like. She would have read the whole series. He's sure. It doesn't matter that Molly's gifts stay in the attic. It doesn't matter that no one sees them. At home, Kate will look at what he's chosen. She'll say, “She would have loved this, I'm sure,” and maybe Stuart will read a little. It's been so long, anyway. He hardly remembers the story.

He takes his coat from the hanger on the back of his office door. By definition, monsters must lack empathy. He puts his coat on, playing with the idea. Frankenstein's monster might possess a glowing red brain, but Victor may not.

When he passes the woman with curly red hair in the parking lot, he thinks she looks vaguely familiar, but decides he doesn't know her. He's wondering about Jekyll and Hyde. Yes, they share a body, but they have completely different brains. Whatever the potion was that changed Jekyll would have induced a kind of temporary brain damage, he muses. When he reaches his car, he realizes he's left his keys in the office. “Oh!” he exclaims, feeling his pockets. He looks up. The woman he passed has stopped and is staring at him. She takes one step forward. “Stuart Malloy?” she says.

He pauses before answering. “No,” he says simply, walking quickly away from her. “No.” He shakes his head. “No,” he says again, and darts past her, jogging back to the office, where he finds his keys on his desk. He sits and waits, wondering if she's gone. He thinks of
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,
the girls in the background lost in shadow. His breathing is loud in the small room from the sudden exertion—or from something else: from the shock of being discovered.

Past the cemetery's black iron gates, the well-spaced headstones rise neatly from the ground. The cemetery is bordered by old shade trees, and the fallen leaves are swept from the graves every morning. At this time of year, though, it's impossible to keep the leaves away and by midafternoon, a crew must come again to rake and bag. The men do their work quickly. It's Halloween. There is candy to pick up, a child to dress. And it doesn't matter if one is superstitious—this is no place to be on Halloween. But they take care with their work, just in case, and when they leave, they lock the gate behind them.

Beyond the hills that border the town, the sun hangs low. The grave markers cast long shadows. A boy in a black hooded sweatshirt climbs the wall of the cemetery—one leg over, then the other. He drops easily to the other side, landing with bent knees. For a moment he stays still, crouching, looking to make sure he's alone, and when he is sure he is, he runs to a side entrance and opens the gate for the others.

The Wyckians arrive in groups no larger than five. They do not want to attract attention—especially from the police. Heads down, in sober jackets and sweaters, they could be mourners, but underneath the drab coats they're wearing colorful outfits—embroidered shirts, striped pants, tall boots. They have boas stuffed in bags, wigs, makeup. All for later, when they arrive at the Wyck house for a party. When there are too many Wyckians to count, the boy leaves the gate to catch up with his friends.

The first grave is a ten-minute walk in. That's where they'll convene.

Hans Loomis follows the boy in the black hooded sweatshirt. He wonders if it's Doug Ramsey. He's a lead in the Wyckian players, the one who talks to the man himself, to the source. Jack Wyck mentioned him in one of his letters to Hans.
There might be something deeper than kin, than blood and bones. I had been praying (which I am likely to do at times like this—though to what or whose god I could not say) and I had a dream about a boy. The boy was in the forest. He was lying on his side with his arms wrapped around him and looking up at the sky through the leaves. The next day, I got a letter from Doug asking for an introduction. Well, you know I answered right away.

Hans might be the oldest person there, but that doesn't bother him. He looks around. Just a few of these people could be from Jack Wyck's generation, from Hans's. Certainly. “Ariel,” Hans says. “Do you recognize anyone?” In the car on the way, Ariel looked at the photos of the original Wyckians: Alice, Trina, Molly, Stover. Big John. Schizz. Allegra. Lady Mary. Lee. Ariel looks around. “Nope,” she says. “Or wait—” She sees the man in the army jacket. “Could be Big John.”

“Go on ahead,” he tells her. “Set up at the graves. We want to see everyone coming towards the camera as they arrive.” Ariel leaves him. On the way over, she told him about Stuart, how he refused to talk to her. Hans can't blame him. Stuart would have no idea who Ariel was, or why she'd approach him in a parking lot. Hans will try calling himself, but right now he wants to observe, to walk slowly, to let the followers move around him, to listen in on their conversations. He wants to be invisible. And to them, in any other situation, he would be. A man in his fifties, a quizzical, slightly bemused expression on his face. But tonight he's the same age as Jack Wyck—and they're the same age as first-time true believers always are: late teens, twenties. The revelers surge around him, coming in waves. He thinks of Jack Wyck's drawings—the sleek rats running at the base of the page, their black tails giving the drawing motion and direction, their eyes white and empty.

He's surprised at the number of people who've shown up. It's the Internet, he thinks. Newcomers might only be curiosity seekers—Wyck's ideas and theories could seem outdated, fantastic, somewhat foolish, even. They've come for the spectacle, the debauchery. Their pretend reverence is a free pass to the night's saturnalia. And this is the twentieth anniversary, they say to one another. It's going to be
crazy
. Should we go? Is it wrong? Of course we'll go. There's nothing wrong in seeing it. We won't
do
anything.

“See that woman with the camera up ahead?” he hears a girl say as she passes. “Hans Loomis is filming tonight.”

“Who?” asks the boy walking next to her.

“Hans Loomis.” She has her head down. “You know—the guy who made
Death Christ
?”

“Um. No.”

“Anyway. Yeah. He's totally into Jack Wyck.”

Hans smiles to himself.
Totally into Jack Wyck.
Hardly. Completely curious about Jack Wyck and his followers? Definitely.

At the first grave, the Wyckians migrate and mingle freely, handing out directions to Jack Wyck's house. They take out candles and pass them around, lighting them as they go. When everyone has a candle, they begin to sing. As they sing, they place their candles on the ground in front of them. The stragglers come towards them. It's clear who belongs and who doesn't. The poseurs don't know the words to “Dark Eyes,” though it would have been easy enough for them to learn.