A House With Good Bones

Gail enters the room “like an avenging angel” (199). Her shadow has a curved beak and wings, and Sam accepts that Gail casts the shadow of a vulture. Gail orders Gran Mae to leave. Gran Mae says it is her house and she can do what she likes, but Gail points out that it is Edith’s house. If Edith tells her to leave, Gail can enforce it. Edith gathers her courage and asks her mother to leave. Gran Mae laughs and agrees to leave, but warns that she has been keeping them safe from the underground children. Now that she is leaving, they will have to deal with the children by themselves. Sam insists the underground children are not real, but Gran Mae assures her they are. Elgar made them and they are angry and hungry. Gran Mae grew roses and buried jars of teeth to keep them away, but when Sam dug up one of the jars, she left a gap they could crawl through. Gran Mae adds that they already had Elgar’s blood, but it was not enough. Gail orders her to leave one last time, and Gran Mae relents. The rose puppet falls apart, scattering dead leaves and browned stems on the floor. Gail comforts Edith, and Phil asks what is going on. Before anyone can answer, the floor collapses beneath them and everything goes black.

The epigraph reads, “[T]here are no flowers in this place only the roots of roses and the things that move between them / only roots and runners / only thorns” (203).

Gail and Sam help Edith, who is pinned by the dining table, while Phil finds flashlights. Phil suggests an earthquake hit, but Gail refutes this. The glass doors leading to the back yard are intact but covered in dirt, as if the house were buried. Sam wonders if a sinkhole opened. Phil and Sam go upstairs to look for an escape. Everything is dark outside Sam’s bedroom windows, as if it is night rather than late afternoon. With her flashlight Sam can see the roof of the porch and, below that, “churned earth” like the “wreckage that follows a bulldozer, everything ripped up and mixed together” (208). In the dirt past the first floor, Sam sees buried rose bushes. Sam and Phil decide they should climb out a window onto the porch roof and jump down from there. They return downstairs to get Gail and Edith. Sam tells Gail that everything outside is unnaturally dark, and Gail says this situation is beyond her skill as a witch. Sam freezes, looking at the glass doors, on the other side of which something white moves in the dirt.

Sam sees a small white hand sliding easily through the dirt and knows it belongs to one of the underground children. She locks the door just before the hand reaches it. The others ask what is wrong, and she tells them that something outside wants in. More hands join the first, and the door shifts a little. Sam holds it closed while the others check and lock the windows. More arms come into view, and Sam sees one of the underground children. It presses its face against the glass with a head “shaped like a monstrous fetus” (212). Edith sees one at the kitchen window and rushes to lock it. Edith asks what they are and Sam answers that they are “Elgar’s other kids. [...] Mom, they’re our aunts and uncles” (212). They realize the front door is wide open, dirt pouring in. Too late, Phil tries to close it. White hands push through. As Gail tries to banish the children, one leaps out and bites her arm, taking out a chunk of flesh all the way to the bone. Phil kicks it and it hits the wall, dead. The other underground children swarm and start eating it. Horrified, Sam and the others run upstairs. A moment later, the swarm slowly follows.

They barricade themselves in Sam’s bedroom, where Edith wraps Gail’s bleeding arm. The underground children start chewing on the wood on the other side of the door. Sam explains the underground children to Phil. Gail realizes that Gran Mae kept them out with a “circle of protection” (217) built of roses and teeth. She reflects that Gran Mae “poured everything she had into the roses,” but Gail never knew (217). Sam asks if Gail can stop them, but Gail says they do not have enough time.

The group starts climbing out of the window and onto the roof. It is dark outside the house, as if they are in a cave. As they continue climbing, the underground children get through the barricaded door. They push at the window, which Phil holds closed with his feet. Gail says they need the roses. She suggests that Sam might be able to make them work again, reminding her that “some things run in families” (220). Sam recalls Gran Mae’s statement that Sam, with her blood, had caused the roses to send the horde of ladybugs. The underground children smash through the window, and Gail, Edith, and Phil scramble farther up the roof.

Meanwhile, Sam jumps from the roof and runs for the roses. She thinks she might be able to do something if she touches them. One of the underground children grabs Sam’s ankle, and she falls into the dirt. Sam shoves her hands into the dirt and touches rose thorns. She speaks to them directly: “Get them away [...]. Get these monsters away from us” (224). At first, nothing happens, but then the roses begin to glow.

The roses glow and Sam feels magic collecting inside her, but does not consider it strong enough yet. She thinks about what Gran Mae said and clutches rose thorns tightly, thinking, “the roses say, stay away” (227). The creature holding her ankle lets go and tumbles backward. The rest of the underground children fall back as well, but continue climbing the roof toward Edith and the others. Sam buries her left arm up to the shoulder in the rose bushes and Gran Mae’s presence overwhelms her. She imagines her grandmother’s childhood, lonely and unloved by her father, filling with rage when her attempts to live an ordinary life continually fail. She realizes Gran Mae bound herself and her power to the roses, which “kept her alive, a ghost of root and stem, flower and thorn” (230). Sam calls on that power. When it fills her, she orders, “the roses say … BURN” (230).

The roses and underground children start to burn. Edith, Gail, and Phil climb down from the roof to get Sam, burned and bleeding in the dirt. Gail calls out, Hermes the vulture flies down, wreathed in flames, with one real wing and one wing of fire. At Gail’s command, the vulture cuts through the unnatural darkness that surrounds the house to the real sky above. The group hears Mr. Pressley’s voice, and they realize they are free.

The epigraph reads: “Coragyps atratus: Black vultures are […] highly social scavenger birds that form strong family bonds and will share food with other members of their family flock. In the evening, they will usually gather together at a communal roost to feed the young and reinforce social bonds” (235).

The official story is that the house fell into a sinkhole. Mr. Pressley calls the police and fire department, who at first do not believe him. Instead, he finds a ladder and helps Sam, Edith, Gail, and Phil climb out. They hail Mr. Pressley as a hero. After their release from the hospital, Sam and Edith stay with Gail while they assess the damage. Little from the house is salvageable and Edith agrees to move in with Brad and his wife in Arizona. As they prepare to leave, Phil gives Sam his phone number.

The day before she leaves, Sam asks Gail about the underground children, and Gail suggests they were hybrids—a mix of Elgar’s genetic material and dark magic. She does not know if they attacked out of hatred or hunger. Gran Mae spent years keeping them away, and Sam suspects Gran Mae meant her to continue the tradition. Sam reflects that though family was important to Gran Mae, she was willing to let the underground children eat them when they defied her. Sam asks if the underground children are gone. Gail hopes so, but she fears they may have survived. It will be better, she says, to keep Elgar’s relatives away from the land where the house stood, just in case. Because they moved so slowly, Sam guesses it would take any survivors centuries to reach Arizona.