Bones: Chapter One Extract

Catherine’s Note: This is straight out of the first draft, so it definitely is not polished – it has been checked for typos and spelling errors though. This is mostly just a taster for everyone who has been asking about this project and is excited about Bones.

 

Dinah had fallen in love with the house the moment her father, Ethan, had shown her the picture. She didn’t mind that it was old – in fact, that made her love it more. She had always thought old homes had character and history, but when she looked upon it now all she could see was a history filled with death. So many other owners of the house had passed on since it was built, and soon she would be following in their wake.

“This is where I am going to die,” she announced softly as she sat in the back of their car, parked in the driveway.

Her mother, Ingrid, glanced at her in the rear view mirror and sighed. “Don’t be so morbid, Dinah. Please.”

Dinah folded her arms and looked out the window. “But I am dying, and I think I’m allowed to be morbid in that situation.” Her mouth was set in a petulant line as she gazed upon the house she had started to consider her tomb, much to her parents’ frustration.

They knew it had to be hard for her – it was hard for them, too, discovering their only child had cancer and then watching her die – and they tried to be accommodating, but there was so much they could do. Once, when Dinah was even more bitter than she was now, her father had snapped at her, leaving Dinah in tears. The ensuing argument between husband and wife, in low tones out in the corridor, only upset her more. Curled up in the hospital bed, crisp white sheet pulled up over her head, Dinah had just wanted to close her eyes and die right then. In her eyes would be better than the constant waiting for the end, waiting for it to worsen and worsen, and her parents would be free from the waiting, free from the watching, and they would be able to start the grieving process now rather than feel guilty about starting it while their daughter still lived.

None of the three spoke – they’d fallen into the repeated trap of too many awkward silences these days. Ethan or Ingrid would say the wrong thing, or Dinah would make a dark remark and then there would be nothing. Silence. Awkward, uncomfortable silences, filled with refusals to look at each other until…

“I’m going inside.” There was a click as Dinah opened the car door, followed by a bang as she shut it after exiting. There was silence briefly as Dinah walked up the drive before the familiar sound of her parents arguing assailed her ears.

“Mrow?” A ginger cat trotted over with its tail in the air before twining its way around Dinah’s legs. Its purring was audible even over the arguing adults.

“Hello, Alice.” Dinah scooped up the cat with familiar ease. “I’m back,” she added, the smile on her face her first of the day. “I take it you missed me?” The purring increased in volume. “I’m gonna take that as a yes. Don’t worry, I’m not going away just yet. I’ve still got a couple more months yet.”

Dinah glanced back and bit her lip. Her parents were no longer arguing but rather sitting still inside the car. They were like small children caught fighting, Dinah decided. Children who had been told off and were finally realizing what they had done wrong.

“You’d think they were the ones dying,” Dinah said to nobody at all, not even the cat, as she fished in the bag her parents had brought her, in search for the key to the front door. And like the car door just moments earlier, Dinah slammed the door shut between her and the parents who didn’t know what to do.

 
The attic door handle jiggled and jumped but the door itself remained shut. “Dinah, can you please unlock the door? I want to talk to you.” The longer no reply came the more desperate her voice became. “Dinah, please, just open the door!”

The door swung open just as she brought her fist down to knock. “What?” Dinah asked, one hand casually on hip while she used the other to lean against the door.

“I was worried.” Ingrid’s voice was flat and void of any emotion. “You came straight up here and locked the door. Your father said I should give you some space but…” She left the sentence unfinished.

You’re a nosy and hovering worrywart? Dinah said to herself, the mental voice which filled in the sentence carried more than just a hint of bitterness. When it came time to speak out loud however, Dinah thought she did a pretty good job at hiding that bitterness. “I just wanted some peace and quiet. Some time to think.” This was half a lie: Dinah had had plenty of time to think when she was lying in her hospital bed, thoughts turning over and over in her head late into the night. But she wanted to be able to think without the visible reminders of what was happening to her.

That was one of the reasons she had refused the treatment that might give her an extra month or two. Dinah was willing to admit that vanity had made her reluctant to trade her hair – her pride and joy, strawberry-blonde locks that hung to the middle of her back – for a fragment of extra time, but would it be worth it?

Would it be worth it to spend that extra time looking and feeling like a total stranger?

The one thing scarier than the doctor sitting down beside her bed and breaking the news was Dinah’s first visit to the children’s oncology ward. She agreed with the overheard comment made by one nurse to another: pediatric oncology really was the saddest place in the hospital. The little children there, with their bald heads and deathly pale skin, made Dinah’s whole situation far more real than any words said by the doctor.

It was a horrible thought but Dinah knew that she didn’t want to go out like that. A laughing, smiling, crying, hairless, skinny and pale corpse. A living dead girl. Dinah wanted to be Dinah when she died.

There had been a big fight with her parents about it, about why Dinah couldn’t just try and take that extra time, and no one had really won. Now her parents tip-toed around Dinah, not even willing to raise their voice to her no matter what she did, unwilling to upset her again. Dinah, on the other hand, wished they would just talk to her, rather than bottle it up until they had another one of their fights when they thought Dinah wasn’t able to hear.

“Well,” Ingrid began, but if she had an idea for the rest of that sentence she didn’t say it aloud.

Dinah made a huffing sound deep in her throat and stepped aside. “You can come in, Mom.”

Ingrid hesitated, as if she were being invited into a stranger’s home, not the attic room her daughter had claimed as a place to call her ’studio’. “It really is nice up here,” she offered finally as she entered the room.

“Yeah,” Dinah returned, her tone and posture just as awkward and stiff as her mother’s, just the way things always were these days. “It’s nice to have a place to keep and do all my art stuff. My room back in Chicago was just tiny.”

A smile appeared on Ingrid’s face. It was a smile of fondness, one that caused the lines around her eyes to crinkle slightly. Overall it softened her face but was unable to counter the bags and dark under her eyes. “I remember. You took over half the garage – your father had to park the station wagon out in the drive.

“Yeah.”

The light of the setting sun filtered through the open window, bringing out the red in both their hair; sadly for Ingrid it also highlighted the new gray hairs around the edges. In Dinah’s eyes her mother was far too young to show such signs of aging and stress – even if she was raising a teenager. That was hard enough without the added difficulty of trying to raise a teenager who would never reach twenty.

“I hate this,” Dinah said finally. This could have been anything, from the cancer and the knowledge that her end was coming far sooner than it was supposed to, to the awkward silences between parent and child and the overheard arguments between husband and wife.

“I know, I know,” Ingrid said. Dinah’s eyebrows furrowed in a frown, but she said nothing. “No, you’re right,” Ingrid continued. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is like to be seventeen and dying. But I do know what it is like to be your mother, and as your mother… oh God.” Ingrid mirrored her daughter’s frown and looked for someplace to sit. She found the place in a stool by the easel and collapsed into it. “As your mother I’m supposed to keep you safe. You’re…”
“I’m what?”

“Well, you’re supposed to bury your father and me for starters,” Ingrid replied. She winced at the tartness in her voice, but it didn’t bother Dinah.

“Yeah, well. You know me. I don’t do things the way I’m supposed to.”

Ingrid couldn’t believe it, but she laughed. It twisted her heart up inside her chest – after all, the subject matter deep at the center of the joke was her only child’s death – but still she laughed even as it hurt.

Then the tears came, hot and heavy, spilling out but doing nothing to counter the pain and sorrow overflowing in the well inside of her.

“Hey, Mom. Hey.” And then Dinah was there, wrapping her arms around her mother. The position was awkward but that didn’t matter: comfort was comfort, even when it came from dying daughter to living mother, and not the other way around.

“It’s hard for all of us. Your father, too.”

“Yeah, that’s why he’s working all those extra hours.” The bitterness in her voice was more than a little bit evident. “He doesn’t want to have to stay at home and watch his daughter fade away and die.”

“Dinah!” Ingrid gasped. She blanched, face tightening in a way that made her look years older in an instant. “That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, well, you wanna know what else is not fair?” Dinah spat back. She knew she was being mean and, yes, unfair with what she was going to say next, but she was past caring. “Cancer.”

For a brief moment it looked like Ingrid was going to rise to Dinah’s bait, but then she sighed. That sigh was her default response to Dinah these days – she had never made that sound before, not once in the seventeen years in between Dinah’s birth and her diagnosis. “All right then,” she said finally, rising from the stool. “Your father is going to be working late tonight, so dinner will be at seven, not six.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Dinah muttered. She didn’t bother to look up until the sound of the door clicking shut reached her ears. Ingrid had had enough, and left Dinah to be alone with her misery once more.

Dinah said or did nothing for a short while, and the time was measured by heartbeats – the only sound in the old wooden attic. Dinah waited. So did the attic. Dinah waited some more, until she could wait no more.

Then she exploded.

A kick sent the stool flying, knocking over a pile of books. A few dozen strands of hair shone red-gold against the corpse-pale skin of the hands that had ripped them out by the root. Small moments of chaos echoed out from Dinah like ripples on an otherwise still lake, destroying the order of the room. She had this need to rage, to strike out, to do something. Just what she didn’t know – all she did know was that it had to go outward.

Her choice for her weapon was merely the first thing her hand came across: a stick of charcoal straight from the box she had brought with her from their old house. A large pad of A1 art paper was her target, and like the charcoal it was another thing brought from a happier time – before the move, before the cancer.

She swung in a wide slashing movement and a thick charcoal line bled out from the formerly untouched crisp white paper. For the space of one heartbeat she stared at the wound she had inflicted before striking again. And again. And again. But while her first stroke of the charcoal was full of rage, these latter strokes were much more precise, like a surgeon’s cuts compared to a butcher’s perhaps. Her opponent was dead and now she could take her time.

It was not long before the lines began to form a shape, and soon after that Dinah’s face started out at her from the page.

But there was something off about the self-portrait. The face was definitely Dinah’s, with the same pointed chin and slightly too wide-set eyes obvious even in the simplicity of the detailing. It was the expression that did it. The dreamy quality that her eyes normally had was gone, and in its place was fear, sorrow. Charcoal Dinah was trapped inside the page, palm pressed against the invisible barrier keeping in her two-dimensional world. The real Dinah, on the other hand, was trapped by things even more intangible: medical terms she had trouble pronouncing, let alone remembering how to spell; scans and tests that only doctors could read and understand; and something deep inside of her, growing and twisting out of control until one day it would win. Maybe when it did she would pop, and all of the things inside her would burst out, leaving her an empty and dead host.

While she had yet to pop, and the true enemy was still buried deep inside of her, growing larger and stronger even though it had already won, she did feel emptied of something. Art was cathartic, as she already knew, and now all that anger and frustration had been poured out of her and onto the paper. So what was left? A general sense of sorrow shaped like a Dinah glass, and empty of everything else.

Dinah moved as if she were in a dream, slowly making her way across the room to pick up the stool and set it back to rights. She sat, chin resting on hand and elbow on thigh. She did not realize she was crying until she blinked once and her world became all blurred around the edges; it was then that she recognized the feeling of dampness around her lashes. Another blink and the tears fell, tracing lines down her cheeks like raindrops on a window.
And that was when she heard the voice.

“Don’t cry,” it pleaded, quiet and unsure of itself. “Please stop crying.” The voice was male, young and had a hollow ring to it, as if it was a recording that was not of very good quality and played back one too many times. “Please, miss, don’t cry. I know you can’t hear me but please…”

Dinah raised her head slowly and looked at the speaker through lowered lashes. In response his eyes widened, mouth open slightly in a look of surprise.

“You… you can see me?” he asked, the disbelief obvious in his voice and expression. He still had that flaw to his voice, a not quite real factor to it, like he was something projected on a movie screen via a low quality projector with poor speakers. “You can see me?”

Dinah’s response was to open her mouth and scream. The shriek would have made a horror movie scream queen proud, envious or even both.

The young man simply blinked out of existence, a fraction of a second before Ingrid burst through the door. “What’s the matter?” she gasped. “I heard you screaming.”

Dinah was still staring at the space the stranger had occupied. Only he hadn’t, really. It was like he made space for even the air itself, he was that absent from everything. Existence included. I must be going crazy. I think I just saw a…

“Dinah?”

“I just saw a-” ghost “-spider. It’s gone now.”

“Oh, Dinah, it’s okay.” Ingrid breathed a sigh of relief. It was just a spider, nothing to be really worried about, even if Dinah did have a deathly fear of them. She moved from her position in the doorway to stand by her daughter and place a comforting arm around her shoulder. “You’re probably sick of hearing your father and me say this, but it’s still true. There’s nothing to be afraid of when it comes to spiders.”

“They’re more afraid of me than I am of them,” Dinah said, beating her mother to the punch. “Yeah, I know. They still freak me the hell out, though.”

“I know, I know,” Ingrid said soothingly. The argument of earlier was forgotten, and hopefully the peace would last longer than the last one. “Come on. Your father will be home in about ten minutes. Help me get the table ready.”

Dinah was more than willing to let her mother lead her out of the room. Anything was better than thinking about how her new – and last – home might be haunted.