A House With Good Bones

by T. Kingfisher

We stared at each other, my great-grandfather’s other child and I, and my mind was empty of everything but horror.

“Elgar’s other kids. The underground children.” I could feel a high, hysterical laugh in my throat. “Oh god, Mom, they’re our aunts and uncles.”

Gail held out her arm. I leveled the flashlight on it so that Mom could see what she was doing, caught a sickening glimpse of bone, and had to look away.

Oh god.... that's deep

“The roses and the teeth. It was to keep them out. The roses said, stay away. And she poured everything she had into the roses.” Her laugh was barely more than a gasp. “So much power that it kept going long after she was dead. And I’d watched her do it for years, and had no idea.” “Was that why she was haunting the place?” Mom asked. “To protect us?”

How? I wasn’t a witch. I didn’t know the first thing about ritual magic. I was … … the granddaughter of a sorcerer, and the great-granddaughter of the Mad Wizard of Boone. Some things run in families.

I guess this is it, I thought, as I lost my balance and the ground came at me. I’m gonna die now. Well, shit. It struck me as funny, as I lay full length on the ground, how casual everything seemed suddenly, as if death were one more minor catastrophe, like dropping a coffee mug and having the handle break off.

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.

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?”

If I had to guess, he found something elemental in the earth and bred it with his … ah … essence.” I held up a hand. “Are you suggesting that he … err … with a…?” “Ritual magicians can get weird,” said Gail.

Um.. ewww

She might have planned to teach me, but she hadn’t felt any qualms about letting us all get devoured when Mom and Gail had banished her. Family, like roses, were something she had planted and something she’d yank out again when it didn’t do what she wanted.

“Do you think they’re gone?” I asked. “The underground children?” Gail set down her lemonade and took a deep breath. “I think,” she said, very carefully, “that it’s a good thing your mother is going back to Arizona with you.”

“Is Hermes your familiar?” Gail looked at him fondly. “He’s my friend.”

Strange, the powers you find sometimes, in a garden at the end of the road.

I stared into my glass and thought about the underground children slowly crawling westward, inch by inch, burrowing through stone and earth, blindly following the scent of our shared blood.

Lord let's hope not...