It came again. That shuf-shuf-shuffle of ragged fabric on bare stone. That tapping; that endless tapping. Blackened bone on cold cement.
Not his bare stone, no. Not his cold cement.
Not here in his twenty-third-floor condo with the private access elevator and the floor-to-ceiling windows. All white leather and polished chrome.
No, it came, again, from the mausoleum. The one so many blocks from here, in Toronto’s necropolis, shaded by oak trees so thick that grass wouldn’t grow, leaving the ground around it nothing but hard-packed dirt.
In that mausoleum, where his personal raven endlessly croaked ‘nevermore.’ Where his telltale heart never stopped pounding. Where the bones he’d laid wouldn’t sleep.
Daniel Deluca didn’t sleep either. Not anymore.
Daniel put his pillow over his face to block out the dim glow that crept around the edges of his blackout curtains. As ever-unsleeping as the bones he’d put in the mausoleum.
It wasn’t fair. He’d worked for this life, this condo, this whole damn city. He deserved it. He’d fought for it, kept his head above water when the waves kept coming. He’d even made it all the way to shore.
This was his reward. He’d made it.
Joey hadn’t made it. But it was his own damned fault. Joey Armstrong had clung to Daniel from childhood, trailing after him like a lost puppy. That arrangement had worked for Daniel, most of the time. You couldn’t be charismatic, you couldn’t blaze like the sun, unless you had a willing audience. So he’d dragged Joey along with him, pulling him into his schemes and his successes, even when it meant Daniel couldn’t reach the surface quite as soon.
Poverty and riches, and they’d do it all together. Or Daniel would do it all, and Joey would follow. That’s all Joey needed to do. Follow. Stay on track, stay with Daniel, stay loyal.
Only when it came time for Joey to truly show his loyalty, he hadn’t. Years upon years together, and that last big score evidently pushed him over the limit. As if any of their fraud had really been worse than others. This was how they would make it.
But Joey wasn’t going to keep their secrets.
Daniel had been heartbroken, of course. Joey was more to him than any lover had ever been. But he’d done what he had to do to keep everything quiet. Joey must have known what would happen.
And yet, and yet.
Now came the next part. The next movement to Daniel’s nightly symphony. A hint of charnel stench wafted from the hall to fill his nostrils, familiar only to those who’d spent too much time in hospitals or warzones, or had done wicked deeds.
Despite what Daniel had done, he didn’t see himself as the latter. No, for Daniel, every day was a warzone.
His conviction didn’t stop the smell, though. That sick scent of rot oozed from under his door, thick as a miasma, familiar as his late mother’s perfume. Had it been a year of this already? A year since Joey was dead?
Daniel didn’t have time to think it through as it was on to the minuet of his symphony of stench, as the smell of rot danced and coupled with the fetid reek of scorched flesh, making Daniel gag in his bed, dry heaves scratching his already dry throat.
That one sin, just that one among so many evil deeds, but it never let him loose. Joey never let him loose.
Sweat beaded on Daniel’s forehead in anticipation of the grand finale. He couldn’t shift even a millimetre as he awaited what came next. What always came next.
The scratch-scratch-scratch of a fingerbone on his bedroom door was an almost orgasmic release. Daniel unfroze and sprang from bed, pyjama pants clinging to the jutting hip bones bracketing his spare frame.
This time, he rushed for the door and flung it open.
To nothing, of course. No sounds, no smells. No bones.
In his mind’s eye, he could see Joey’s bones right where he’d left them, blackened and charred and nestled against someone else’s anonymous, hundred-year-old remains in their now-shared coffin. All the way eastward and southward in that mausoleum. So anonymous and meaningless was the original recipient that Daniel couldn’t even think of the name carved on the front of that granite box.
The bones—Joey’s or others—weren’t outside his bedroom door. They weren’t dragging themselves along the hall and between the artistic concrete pillars of the condo. They weren’t haunting him every night.
Yet Daniel still didn’t sleep. Instead, he paced through his unit and pulled on a ragged fleece jacket sitting beside the door. Then he left.
He nodded to the doorman on the way out of the building. The man frowned slightly under his tidy moustache. Daniel would have castigated him for the frown, once. Who was a doorman to look at him like that? But his reflection in the glass of the doors caught his eye.
Scraggly dark hair fell limp around his chin, around uneven stubble; his eyes were hollowed to dark pits. Gone were the Burberry sweaters and Harry Rosen suits, and in their place were a pilled fleece jacket and worn plaid pyjama pants. His dull brain vaguely registered that he would have once been embarrassed to be seen like this. Not anymore. He shrugged off the doorman’s subtle criticism and walked outside.
It was still dark. Daniel stood, rocking ever so slightly as his exhausted body wobbled against the crispness of the breeze. It was still mild in the city, even though the calendar in the lobby had said October.
October. It had been a full year since Joey had died. Possibly to the day.
He stood and watched and bided time as the darkness greyed to dawn, yet again. The pale autumn sun rose over the gleaming skyscrapers. How long could a person live without sleeping?
His feet started moving without his express permission.
Eastward, eastward.
Dan sighed, but didn’t stop. Weakly, he considered fighting the pull toward the mausoleum that he’d felt every day since he’d murdered his best friend and burned what was left of the body. But now he was too tired. Now it was inevitable.
One year. That’s how long a person could live without sleeping, or at least in this insomniac half-sleep he’d lived since Joey’s death. Since the haunting.
So Daniel walked. He walked as the city awoke, the human traffic around him thickening as his feet led him magnetically eastward, the pull of the mausoleum and the bones inside them beyond irresistible.
Then Daniel saw a familiar figure, about his height, about his hair colour, also in his early forties. Bespoke suit like the ones that filled his own closet. For an instant, he thought he was seeing his reflection in one of the many mirrored buildings. Then he remembered what his own reflection had actually looked like. He wasn’t this man anymore.
The context settled in his brain. A colleague from a previous company. The man’s name was on the tip of his tongue.
But as Daniel puzzled him out, the other man looked back at him, his eyebrows drawn together. There was a puppy-like kindness in his eyes that reminded Daniel of Joey, rare among investment bankers like them. A kindness that Daniel hadn’t seen in his own reflection. Not now, not ever.
He and the other man slowed as they reached each other, insensible of the crowds surging around them. Daniel also insensible to everything else but that lodestone in his heart that was the mausoleum and the bones within it.
“Dan? Daniel?” the other man said, blinking. “I barely recognized you.”
“Yes, yes. I’m on vacation!” Vacation. Plausible. “Didn’t sleep much last night, so decided to take a stroll.” The words were right, but the tone was all wrong. Something between flat and garbled. And the outfit. . .
The man tilted his head like a confused cocker spaniel, and Daniel accidentally laughed aloud at the visual, further cementing what he must look like. Further cementing that something was wrong, wrong, so very wrong.
“My man,” the other guy said. “Do you need help?”
David—it was David, Daniel was sure of it. He was so pleased about remembering the other man’s name, that the man’s actual words filtered right out. Only one dim part in the very back of his mind whispered that this was, again, exactly what he would have been embarrassed about. Once upon a time.
He tried to whisper advice to himself: act charming, be your old self.
It didn’t work.
Instead, he mumbled, far too late. “No, no, I’m fine.”
David—he was sure it was David—shook his head. “Okay, man.” Then he pressed a business card into Daniel’s limp palm. “But seriously, you can call me. If you need help.”
Daniel blinked in bemusement for a moment, and the instant passed, David left him to continue down Bloor Street, leaving Daniel alone. A rock that the waves of humanity on the sidewalks crashed onto, many with passive-aggressive stares, but a few with patently un-Canadian sneers.
Soon, Daniel’s feet began moving again, and it was right. This was what he was supposed to do. Forget the life, the condo, the city. Forget all the rest.
It was just him and the mausoleum. And the bones, of course. Always the bones.
He didn’t know how long he walked, but then he was suddenly there. Daniel couldn’t remember seeing the entrance to the necropolis before. All Victorian and neo-Gothic, with peaked spires on the chapel and gingerbread trim on the arched entryway. The necropolis welcomed him with arms open, the beating heart of the mausoleum whispering his name.
This wasn’t a haunting, it was a homecoming.
He picked up his pace, he jogged, he ran. He ignored the paths and stumbled through the tombstones so he could make it there quicker. The desperation reminded him of the need that had once driven his constant push for more money and more power. The drive that had dissipated on the wind like so much dust.
Daniel came up on the mausoleum, his mausoleum. He laid his head and hands against the cold granite of the back wall. His exhausted body turning it into a vigil, a requiem, for the one thing that still motivated him.
He didn’t move again until the sun was straight above, burning a bright hole in the white sky.
Then he let his feet take him once more, crunching dry oak leaves as he made his way to the front.
The two glorious pillars out front of the small mausoleum reminded him of the perfect cement pillars in his condo unit. The grand door like the door to his building. It echoed his own home in so many ways that for a split second, he couldn’t tell the difference.
This time, Daniel forced himself to look upwards at the name engraved above the door.
Armstrong.
He stumbled back from the mausoleum, his hands connecting with the hard-packed earth under the massive oaks as he caught himself. Joey’s last name.
But as Daniel looked again, the name had shifted in front of his eyes. Not Armstrong, but Anderson. A trick of his exhaustion. A trick of his guilt.
Crouched on all fours outside the mausoleum, as the world spun and the October sun beat down on the pilled navy-blue fleece covering his bare frame, Daniel let the guilt in. He had destroyed the one good thing in his life, and for what? For the life, and the condo, and the city. He was the one who wasn’t loyal, not Joey.
As Daniel looked up at the granite rectangle that had so haunted his days and nights, a slight wrongness filtered into his consciousness. Not the mausoleum itself, no.
The lock.
He’d added a brand-new padlock to the century-old door after he’d interred Joey with the original occupant. The lock was still hanging there, but it had snapped. It hung open, and the door was open inwards, an infinitesimal crack. Almost undetectable to the naked eye, but Daniel had seen this building in his waking dreams day after day after day after day.
“No, no, no, no,” he said aloud as if it could change anything. Did they know? The authorities, anyone who mattered? But there was no police tape, no signs of anyone else.
He stumbled through the crack into the small, dark room, shoving the door as far open as it could get to shed more light than the tiny slivers of windows could bring.
It took him a minute of blinking back the after-images of the thin October sun to see it, but then he did.
The old casket was propped open against the wall. The dusty remains of the original occupant were intact, but the burnt bones of Daniel’s best friend were gone. As if they’d never really been there at all.
Daniel fell to his knees on the cold cement, the ragged fabric of his clothes rasping against the bare stone in a shuf-shuf-shuffling as he sobbed on the floor of the mausoleum, parched body only able to expel the barest of tears.
The dusty scent of the closed room faded, and the smell of death rose, clinging to Daniel’s nostrils. That familiar sick scent of rot, again, here. Daniel lifted his head in a panicked look around, but there was nothing but the four granite walls.
The smell of freshly burning flesh filled the tiny room until Daniel was gagging, his eyes still wet with sparse tears.
And then, finally, it came. The scratch-scratch-scratch of a fingerbone on the heavy door. Joey was coming home.
