Reginald Bones: Part One Read online

  REGINALD BONES

  PART 1

  BY LUCIAN BANE

  © 2016 by Lucian Bane

  All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Lucian Bane or his legal representative.

  To all the readers, fans, and or Reader’s clubs. Thank you for supporting my work. I’d also like to ask nicely that you please not Pirate my work. That basically means don’t give it away just because you bought it. If you know of anybody that can’t afford a copy, give me a holler. I’m a nice guy.

  Also, if you need a different format, please contact me, the Author.

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my beautiful, amazing, gorgeous wife. I love you forever. Thank you so much for putting up with me, for believing in me, and for loving me.

  SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE JAN WADE

  THE TAMMY BURCH

  THE CATHY KNUTH

  THE JULIET TAI

  YOU LADIES HAVE DONE PHENOMONALLY FOR ME THESE PAST FEW MONTHS! I AM SO DEEPLY GRATEFUL TO HAVE YOU IN MY BACK POCKET!

  SHOUT OUT TO MY PATREON PATRONS

  WITHOUT YOU, WHERE WOULD I BE?

  WORKING ANOTHER JOB BESIDES WRITING! THANK YOU!

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  Lisa Nicholl — Lisa Crowe— Maria Alexander—Susan Bromberg—Claressa Hands—Nanette Lindsey – Jan Wade— Angela Drogsvold—Yvette Grimes—Nina Stevenson—Cassy Kubehl—

  Melissa Johnson—Wendy Wignall—Joanie Coker—Lora Ann Russell—Nichole Watson—Kelli Wills—Rin Barcal—Jenny Shepherd—Helena Hoorn—Katherine DiLauro—Kimberly Billings— Amber Hartford—Sherry Bruyette— Shauna M Leonhardt—Stella Martin—Kathleen A Gass—Shawna Williams—Juliette Tai—Joann Gauthier—Laurie Johnson—Shelli Fuller—Mason Sabre—Alexis Thompson—Tammy Jackson—Lauren Stryker—Lynette Karasiuk—Barb Wolfe—

  WINNER FROM DARK GROUP GAMES

  Cemetary game: Joan Marie Buttigieg PA, ALARM CLOCK GAME: Christy W. French, BONES’ TRUCK Treena Ross PA CHURCH Cathedral: Basilica of the Immaculate Conception BY SHANNON SCHILLER, Cinnamon Wrolls FIRST & MIDDLE Winter Rose Joann Ouimette Gauthier Cinnamon Wrolls LAST NAME BROWN Una Denihan Doctors Name DR. WOLFBANE CHASON Nan Lindsay Bone’s Alias DRAGON” BONES BY LINDA KIDWELL! FATHER FATHER BURNS BY SHAWNA WILLIAMS Gravestone Kate McDonough hospital Our Lady of Mercy Shelli Rae IMAGE of Winter Natasha Weir Reginald’s last name Alias KNIGHT Katherine DiLauro MEET UP PLACE Kirsty Adams! MIDDLE NAME Gideon KATHLEEN GASS, NAME for a motel starlight, OUTFIT WORN TO GRAVEYARD Shawna Williams, Winters PIMP THE PROFESSOR, MARTHA RODRIGUEZ, Reginald Bones is the caretaker of a graveyard. T-SHIRT JEANS AND 2 SETS OF GLOVES. ONE FOR EACH OF THEM.Tammy Singleton Burch Reginald Bones lives PORTLAND OREGON BY LINDA KIDWELL! safe word Sebastian Melissa Thomas WINNER OF THE SECOND OUTFIT Linda Kidwell

  CHAPTER ONE

  Reginald and Bones didn’t come into the blessing of owning a graveyard right away. That doesn’t happen quickly or easily, Reginald imagined. Not when it’s a family business. Everybody has death looming over their lives, but when it does so in the form of a business, it’s exceptionally morbid. Reginald recalled Bones saying, “As a child, the notion of inheriting a graveyard had been a strange one.” And when Reginald came to be with Bones in early adulthood, that notion had morphed into irony.

  Then that fateful day happened, sooner rather than later. The death business knocked on life’s door and handed them the papers to five hundred, and counting, graves. Goodbye irony, hello terror. At least to Reginald. To Bones, you’d think they’d won the lottery. “What better place to spend the rest of our dead life?” Bones had reasoned.

  Right. If you were content to have that, Reginald supposed.

  It only took them five months to get adjusted. Reginald attributed the speedy success to Bones’condition. His brain naturally gravitated to morbidity of various sorts, but Reginald respectfully never pried into those details, no matter how curious he got. And he did get very curious at times since Bones brought him there specifically to help him. With something Bones was yet to divulge. Without specifics, Reginald had one main directive. Protect the world from Bones. Make him look normal. Hide him. It was like being called to an emergency without being told what the emergency was.

  At first, it was strange being consciously aware that he was part of Bones’ psyche. And then they shared a body like twins joined at the hip, only they were joined from inside the mind. Reginald tried to keep the body sharing fair, but Bones was as boring as his name was creepy. He seemed to have zero hobbies and zero need to do anything but keep the graves. And he did that with ten kinds of gusto.

  “If you must know,” Bones finally said one day when Reginald pried. “I absolutely dig digging.” Bones laughed and laughed at that. If Reginald wanted him to crack a joke, he just needed to ask him to be serious about something. Anything. Was damn annoying at times.

  But on the flip side, Reginald learned real quick that while Bones had little desire to do, he had plenty of desire to not do specific things. Like anything remotely connected to the opposite sex. It was Reginald’s first real clue to Bones’ problems.

  “Are you telling me you don’t like women?” Reginald had asked.

  “Exactly correct.”

  “As in you don’t like the way they look?”

  “Right.”

  “But you’ll talk to them?”

  “No.”

  “Do you like anything at all about them?”

  “Not a single thing.”

  “You sound like you hate them,” Reginald said in disbelief.

  “Yep.”

  “You hate all women.”

  “Every one of them.”

  Reginald couldn’t believe that. “Even your mother?”

  “Absolutely and especially,” he’d sung lightly. “Okay, maybe not as much.” Hope sparked inside of Reginald, only to be crushed with Bones’ cold, “Now that her dirty ass is at the bottom of this grave yard. And if you ever… bring me near a woman? I’ll fucking burn you.”

  “You’ll burn me?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in… literally?” Reginald found this kind of funny.

  “Yep.”

  Reginald attempted it only once and learned Bones had most definitely meant it. They shared the same body for crying out loud, it made sense to assume he was bluffing. It turned out Bones did in fact have other hobbies besides digging graves; enduring pain and agony. A heady pleasure saturated his every word as he burned their body with a cigarette. “Oh, you think this is bad, Reggie?” he whispered as he casually sucked in a long drag then pressed the red tip into his inner thigh. “This is nothing little brother. Nothing at all compared to what could have happened.”

  Reginald had no idea he’d meant what could’ve happened to the woman.

  Needless to say, any contact with the opposite sex was officially off of Reginald’s list of extracurricular activities. For a while at least.

  And then that day came. It would forever be known as the scorching hot summer of a record, fifty-five burials. Reginald was ready to escape the boring Bones prison or die trying. “Why am I even here?” was Reginald’s opening challenge. He’d planned it all out, question his existence and fight Bones for his freedom. He wasn’t sure how, or if it was even possible, but he was ready to do something besides nothing all the damn day.

  “Don’t do this,” Bones huffed as he spread the dirt around the plot.

  Bones tried to push Reginald out of the driver seat and for the first time, he didn’t oblige him.

 
“Move, Reggie,” Bones muttered.

  “No.”

  “Reggie,” he whispered, closing his eyes and shaking his head.

  Reginald felt the rage coming. “I don’t care what you do to me. I’m not living like this another day.”

  “Like what!” Bones thundered.

  “Like a prisoner!” Reginald yelled back, yanking the shovel from him and throwing it down. “I’m supposed to help you, this isn’t helping you.”

  “You’re supposed to do what you’re doing,” Bones said. “That’s all you’re here to do. Keep everything normal.”

  “This isn’t normal! Did you make me like this?” Reginald asked, his own anger coming. “Did you put it in me to want to help you? Because that’s all I got, Bonesy. I got this burning need to help, and leaving you like a freak isn’t right, it’s not helping in the right way, and I won’t do it. I won’t, I promise you that.”

  They stood in the silence, chest to chest, eye to eye, heaving in desperation.

  And Bones did it, with one desperate whisper, he put a collar of irrefutable loyalty around Reginald’s heart. “I need you.”

  The sheer terror in his words was not from the man standing before him. He didn’t know who it belonged to, but he knew no matter how long it would take he’d unravel what hid inside of Bones.

  “Okay, Bonesy,” Reginald whispered back to him. “I’m here, I’m not leaving. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”

  “Don’t leave, Reginald. Don’t leave.”

  His words trembled and Reginald fought to calm him. “I promise, I won’t leave.”

  “I don’t want to do bad things, Reggie. I don’t want to.”

  “Okay, hey, hey,” Reginald hurried, wishing Bones would just tell him everything. It would make it so much easier if he knew what he was dealing with. “I’m not going anywhere, you’re stuck with me. Burn me all day and night, I don’t care, chop my hands off, whatever, you’re stuck.”

  “I won’t hurt you Reggie,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, I won’t hurt you again.”

  Fear gripped their body and nearly overcame Reginald. “Bones, stop it,” he hissed when it threatened to take him too. “Stop it now,” he ordered. “You listen to me. I’m here to help you and I will. You need to be careful, I get that now. I do. I swear, I’ll protect you from what’s inside, okay? I see it now, I do.”

  “You see it?” The anguish that Reginald saw what was inside him, brought the giant man to his knees with shame. “Don’t look, Reginald. I’m sorry. I’m not good like you. You’re good, Reggie. I need you.”

  “You got me.” Reginald held an arm around his shoulder, tight. “We can do this, me and you. That’s why I’m here, remember?”

  “I don’t need a life. I’m okay with nothing.”

  The pleading in his tone to not make him live gripped Reginald until the urge to free him became suffocating. “Alright Bones. We’ll leave it. We’ll leave it alone.”

  “Just leave it alone,” he begged in a strained gasp, rocking back and forth on his knees. “Leave it alone.”

  ****

  Reginald did leave it alone. For five years he left it alone. For five years he let time do its healing thing. For five years they buried people week after blissful week. For five years they never left the cemetery because every damn thing could be ordered online. For five years they lived in agonizing peace, day and night.

  The only time Reginald interacted with humans was on the phone, and that was with the one male person who they hired to take care of all human interacting things. This freed Bones to be a prisoner at the graveyard without bother; which left Reginald praying to whatever god might hear to please intervene. Intervene in a way that didn’t require Reginald to directly challenge Bones. Reginald was getting an itch. An itch that needed scratching by another human. And it was while cleaning a grave that Reginald’s daily prayers for change were interrupted.

  “Why do you do that?”

  Reginald spun at the sound of a female human voice, even as Bones scurried into the shadows of their mind.

  “Hello,” Reginald stammered, looking around at the empty cemetery then back at the girl. What was she doing there at this time? He remembered her question and realized there had been an angry tone with it. “I was just doing final chores for the evening.”

  “I put those there for a reason,” she said, regarding the pile of rose petals Reginald had gathered.

  He looked down at them, confused with how to handle that and the entire female presence in close proximity problem. It wasn’t his fault. Neither of them had heard her. “Uh. Well, I didn’t realize.” Despite the dire predicament, he quickly captured all the close-up details he never got to see when she visited her brother’s grave. She’d done that daily for the past month. Only about five minutes, and then she’d leave. He’d kept proper distance for Bones’ sake but now, there she stood, and his mind hurried to collect up all the answers he’d wondered about her. Green eyes, a cute, pudgy nose, a mole half an inch to the left of her chin. Small chin. He watched as she pushed hair behind her ear and he recorded its size, also small. He was staring too long.

  He stooped down and scooped up the petals. “Tell me what to do and I’ll see to it.”

  He gazed up as she lowered and knelt before him. “I have to do it,” she whispered. Reginald remained still as she began grabbing the petals right from his hands and tossing them back onto the grave, one handful at a time. The soft sent of vanilla hit his blood stream and his gaze found the white skin at her neck. “You’re supposed to throw it on the grave every day at the same time, exactly twenty-four petals. I hope this doesn’t mess it up. It’s supposed to make sure the dead rest in peace.”

  Reginald felt Bones fighting to hide deeper inside, desperate to get away from her as the urge to reach out and touch her itched in Reginald’s fingers. His instincts to protect Bones and explore the humanity before him, held him immobile. “I’m sorry,” was all his mouth produced. Sorry to her and to Bones, as he knelt there stuck.

  She finally looked up at him and their gazes locked. “I see you around here,” she said. “Are you the owner?” She cocked her head a little. “I heard he was a crazy old man. But you don’t look old at all.”

  A smile took over his lips. He liked her honesty. And bravery. He liked the way she looked at him without fear. Liked the way she smelled, the way she angled her head and peered harder into his eyes as though challenging him to… engage.

  Panic hit him and he stood, taking a few steps back. She stood too, looking confused. “Just don’t mess with the petals,” she said, wiping her hands on her skirt. Pink skirt. “I thought they were getting blown away or something.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking around for his reason to leave, hoping he’d not find it.

  “So, are you the owner?”

  He looked at her. “I am.”

  She nodded, still eyeing him with an open curiosity. “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” he wondered, studying the severe arch in her left brow.

  “Are you crazy?”

  The unexpected question threw him a moment. “I guess… if I was, I might not know it. And if I did know… I might not want to say.”

  She turned her gaze to the grave. “They said he was crazy. But he wasn’t. Just misunderstood.”

  God, he loved her accent. Reginald’s heart hammered in his chest when tears fell down her face and she did like he’d seen her do many times. Swipe them away angrily. He wasn’t sure what to do or say now, his muscles were tense with the need to act. He was supposed to be the voice of reason and normalcy, and all he could manage was stupefied.

  “Well, you don’t look crazy,” she muttered, crossing her arms under her breasts. Small breasts, he thought. Cute like the rest of her. “In case you were wondering.”

  “Thank you,” Reginald said, realizing his answer didn’t match her words. He wondered why she still stood there bouncing lightly on her hip while she looked around. Maybe she wanted to
leave but wasn’t sure how. He was in the same predicament and couldn’t help her on that front.

  “How long you owned this place?” she asked, peering at him with an angled look again.

  “Around six years.”

  “Why would you want to own a graveyard?” She licked her lips and Reginald stared at them, glistening in the evening light. “Are you married? Have a girlfriend?”

  At the bold questions, Bones literally punched him in the stomach, stealing his breath. “No,” he finally managed. “And… I inherited the graveyard from my family.” He eyed her and forced the words off his tongue. “And you?”

  “Me what?”

  Incompetence hit Reginald and he shoved his hands in his large overall pockets. “Sorry, nothing.”

  “Well, I better go,” she said, sounding like she may not want to.

  “I’m sure you’re ready to get out of this creepy place too.”

  “It’s not creepy,” Reginald hurried, wishing he’d said he wasn’t ready to go anywhere. “Not to me.”

  She eyed him again, that curiosity back in her angled gaze. “So you like working here?”

  There was no derision in her tone so, “Yes,” felt safe to say.

  She nodded slowly at him. “My brother would’ve liked you.”

  “He liked grave yards?”

  “No, he was just weird to most people. Different.” Her gaze lowered over him, then rose to lock on his face, making his pulse race again. “I’m glad you’re watching over him.”

  Words rushed onto Reginald’s tongue and tied it in knots as she turned and walked off. Reginald watched her. Watched the way her body moved, the brisk rhythm of her purposed gait. She stopped and turned, stealing his breath. “I don’t have a husband. Or a boyfriend,” she called.

  Reginald could only stare, sparks of excitement flying through his veins with the way she eyed him. Did she like him? Is that what he was seeing?

  She tossed a small wave to him and turned again, walking off. Reginald stood, frozen to the spot with Bones pacing furiously in the background, waiting to speak to him about what just happened. About how it couldn’t happen again. About how he needed to be more careful. More watchful. More blah blah blah.