Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) (8 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

The darkness was comforting, even with the freezing wind whipping at me, and I approached the floodlit stone building with caution. I still hadn’t completely settled in. At the threshold of its centerpiece, a domed rotunda faced in split layers of blue-gray rock, I hesitated. I’d rather have watched my breath rise in the frigid air curling up the structure's grand Victorian lines than enter. Numb felt good, the cold reminding me of my flesh. But I really had to sleep, if I could.

Even well past midnight, light burned brightly from the lobby. Peeking through the glass into the entrance hall he was there, in the corner, headphones on, rather lumpy and overweight, waxing the floor. I pulled back. I’d learned by now. I waited and watched from the shadows.

Then remembering, I dug into my coat pocket and smoothing out the clipping as best I could in the wind, I held it to the light and re-read it:

England’s Daily Mail

“Superhumans could become a reality in 30 years

thanks to advances in gene science

A generation of genetically modified 'X-Men' superhumans could be among us by 2045, a Ministry of Defence think tank has said.

Advancements in gene technology could help humans gain mutant powers such as the likes of Wolverine, Cyclops and Storm in the popular comic book and movie series, it has been reported.

The MoD's Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre warn however that 'genetic inequality' could result from advancements in biology being unequally shared across society.”

Marginally fortified, I slipped the clipping back into my pocket. The concierge retreated to a back room.

I stole across the grand lobby and scurried the last few yards into the elevator. All sound was sealed away as I rose through space to the thirteenth floor, as if ascending from the ocean bottom. The smoked-glass panels flickered by. “I’m still gathering,”
I muttered. The empty elevator continued upward, reflecting fragments of me, circling me. I dropped my head but I reminded myself, despite my fatigue, that I was doing just fine. Quite well, really, considering Harold and his parents and the questioning.

***

I went around the back of the gray cinderblock building. I wanted to see Harold’s face one last time. Maybe it would put an end to the questions, mine as well as the others. A young man, probably no older than fifteen and wearing a raggedy brown Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt and a dust mask, sorted through some ashes in a small rectangular tub. He waved a large magnet over them and tossing whatever came up in a small pile on the table top, next to chunks of white coals, similar to what you’d find after a barbeque. I watched him for a few minutes, sensing the ungodly dryness of his sifting, before he noticed me and startled, then pulled off his mask and composed himself.

“Can I help you?” He wore latex gloves and dusted them off. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“There was no one up front.”

“Come back when my uncle’s in the office.”

“I was hoping to see my husband before he’s cremated.”

“That’s not my responsibility.”

“Do you know when it will be?”

“You can come with the rest of the family. Talk to my uncle.”

“His name was Harold, Harold Cloonis.”

His face took on the color of the powder.

“I know I’m not supposed to ask, but you see, my father-in-law won’t let me  . . . Well, anyway, do you know when it will be?”

He examined the pile of ash and picked up one of the white coals. Now I saw that it wasn’t coal; it was a piece of bone.

And then later that week, the cop. “Please tell me again where you were that afternoon?” He was middle-aged, part Asian, abnormally laconic. Not as aggressive as the last time. With a name like Sullivan and a largemouth bass mounted on his wall.

Truth was, I couldn’t remember. I knew it was damning, not knowing where I was when my new husband coiled a rope around his neck and broke it . . . “I think I was at the apartment studying, but I just don’t know.”

“Between two and six, six-thirty?” The detective was emotionless. Not like Columbo or Sonya Cross; more like someone pulled his spark plugs and he was waiting for his pension.

I shrugged.

“No enemies?”

“I told you, I don’t know any of his friends. Ask his folks.”

He pursed his thin lips. It could have been worse; he could have considered me a suspect.

“It’s odd.” The way he said it and turned his focus to an open file in his hands, especially with his show-nothing face, felt
accusatory
for the first time.

“Isn’t suicide that way?”
Odd
. I was being brave. Like Freyja.

“No, I meant his fractured vertebrae. His neck. It’s unusual except when the body drops. But you must know that because of your studies. It’s the collapsed carotid artery blocking blood to the brain that usually kills people.” A rush of nausea swept over me. He looked up. “You ever fight? You were newlyweds.”

“Yes.
Ever
fight, of course.”

“Physical?”

“No.”

“You’d think he’d be happy.”

“He was never a dance-in-the street kind of guy.”

“Well, I suppose you’ll need to find a silver lining. I understand this opens some opportunities for you. I’m glad to see you’ve adjusted, Mrs. Cloonis.”

“I don’t think I’ve adjusted, Detective.”

***

I watched the elevator numbers climb.
Please let tonight settle more easily than the last
. I was missing something. Harold. I closed my eyes. “You . . . How could you?
You
who was so sure about
me
, and then . . .”

I saw him swinging by the neck, watching me. My eyes bolted open. I hung onto the elevator’s brass railing.

“It seemed right at the time. Do whatever it takes. You said so.”

I’d been so sure that genetics were the answer, that I could help being in a lab while I learned and prepared for the next stage of my research, that the New York lab was the place. The next grand experiment. The pursuit of ideal beauty was exciting and exhausting.

The elevator whirred upward.

I could be loved. Logically, Harold had ended that debate,
hadn’t he?
Once would be enough, on to more important things. Things I promised Nemo, things I promised myself.

I snuck a peek at my face and was repelled as always. Beyond my albinism, more evident than ever as I’d aged, lay my flattened nose, bulging to the sides like sewer culverts; broad volcanic stone-chiseled lips —
natural on Easter Island
; a humped brow; straight ghost-white hair. The years had been no kinder to my birthmark, dog-poop brown and sinister, creeping across my left cheek and down my neck like some horror film mutation.

Love? Who could love a face like that? Who could take on the peril? I ran my finger above my right eye, along my snowbound eyebrow, Harold’s fetish. White-white. The only color I possess.
I will please him,
that’s what I thought
.
But maybe I was pleasing myself, maybe because he was something I could control.

The elevator pinged. The doors slid open with a whisper. No one would be in the hallway. I investigated anyway, in both directions.

The corridor, less chrome than the elevator, still existed as an abstract; not at all Victorian like the building’s façade. I could have been anywhere, maybe even Minneapolis, but not likely Bemidji. Not a scent of balsam or cedar anywhere. Still. It was Harold’s gift, apartment 13-F, part of what they called The Penthouse, my lease-to-buy the benefit of his modest estate.

In his odd accountant’s way, Harold had given me freedom to expand yet be invisible, to come to New York and try again at the top of the world, or close to it. Yes, his death was opportune; it kept my dream alive, his sacrifice. I thanked him. But I wished he would go away, that all of the coroner’s and detective’s questions would go away, though no one could reasonably expect relief so soon after a death.
A suicide
.

I listened, even for the murmur of a TV set, but by then I should have known that The Octagon condominiums were built for discretionary income and privacy. Nothing escaped. Privacy at least tranquilized.

My key slipped fluently into the tumbler. It snapped with authority. I was in.

In the darkness I moved effortlessly, keys to the table.

It was just as I’d wanted and as the brochure had promised: “Floor-to-ceiling windows, where the East Side skyline hangs in your living room like a colossal urban fresco . . . Easy to reach, yet possessing a secluded character all its own.”

I readjusted to the welcoming shadows. No need for light; I knew the studio confines edge by edge. Airtight. All atoms in place.

Even in the shadows it had the sheen of a model apartment. No extra fuss. It had none of the flaws that those older apartments bore, none of the snoopy, small building managers or superintendents.

Here, organized entirely by me, the walls were barren but for my college diploma, which reminded me I could do anything. All reflective surfaces, except for the windows, I’d covered or removed. Little stood on the counters — a few unlit candles, my small TV, my laptop, a textbook, the next stage of my education:
Data Mining for Genomics and Proteomics: Analysis of Gene and Protein Expression Data;
and
a celebrity magazine or two, part of the ongoing steam-driven sector of my research, a habit I knew I’d inherited from Momma
.

Even the magazines were neatly fanned. And the simple triangular table by the high-backed chair on which my diary sat. All hygienic. Except. That damned box, the large cardboard box, still unopened. It sat to the left of the two kitchen stools.
Harold’s box
.

And then there it was again, barely audible. The apartment bristled with high frequency white noise, a deep kinetic turbulence that seldom went away. No reason to be anxious. A radio tower? The city?
Never mind
.

Except for my tower apartment, I’d been judicious. I’d stayed under the radar in every way. My overcoat: secondhand. A muted pickup intended to reflect cosmopolitan New York but not bring attention, bought Day One, then aged a month or had it been six weeks?

It slipped from my shoulders to the bamboo floor, which was as tightly woven as my chest. The buttons scratched the silence. I quickly retrieved the coat and hung it up. Everything in its place.

Too late. Particles began to move, and all the spaces between them too. As if I was slipping under water, numinescence enveloping me, my ears feeling it first, just as they always had, then those vibrations around my heart. Knowing there was a rational explanation, and rather than resist, I slid past the unopened box of Harold’s books, almost as heavy as Harold himself, and settled into the wing chair.

I followed my breath. I focused on the diffused gemstone light radiating from my floor-to-ceiling cityscape. I ran my left palm across the chair’s scarred high back, reminding myself of my persistent intention to correct its imperfection.

A chill in the dark apartment distracted me though every window was hermetically sealed; nothing stirred on The Octagon’s 13
th
floor,
did it?
At best I was a motionless nebulous reflection surrounded by New York’s skyline. What moved?
A vardøger!

“Ridiculous,” I said aloud. “Momma and the old witch and Sarah Pooley telling their damn spook stories. And I think of myself as a scientist!” I cracked my jaw, trying to clear my ears. Mist played around my eyes.

But then a whirring hollow sound, possibly a man’s measured voice.
Composed but taut, and garbled as if underwater:
Come with me. Build the watchtower. Protect our independence.
That’s what it sounded like. Blood pumping faster.

This was not the first time I thought I’d heard or felt something in the apartment. I covered my ears. I didn’t want to breathe. But the pumping, I felt it too. Hands off ears.

“Harold?”

I knew it wasn’t Harold. Sounded nothing like Harold.

That set off groaning from where my small kitchen met the living area. I waited. A cold dampness seemed to rise off the floor. I directed an ear to the pipes under the kitchen sink. The cool filtered moonlight blanketed the angles. The spaces inside the atoms appeared to rest.

I caught my breath. I waited.

I thought:
someone needs help.

Then,
stop trying to make sense of nothing.

I turned my head left and right. My ears began to unclog. When nothing more was spoken and nothing more converged on me, I stood and paused for a moment, waiting for my breath to fully stabilize.

A logical explanation would reveal itself when I least expected it. Or my cursed ‘gift’ had returned.
Never mind
.