K is for Knucklebones part 6
Continued from 07/22/2026
Hers.
The room disappeared.
She was eight years old and under the table, knees hugged to her chest, trying not to breathe too loud. Jonah crouched beside her, his face streaked with dirt, his eyes enormous in the dark. Above them, Elsie’s footsteps moved across the kitchen floor. Slow. Searching.
“Ask it,” Jonah whispered.
In his cupped hands, the bones clicked though he was holding them still.
“Ask what?” young Destiny said.
Jonah smiled with too many shadows on his face, in his mouth, leaking from his thin lips.
“Where to put me.”
Destiny came back choking on a sound she had not made. She was on the dining room floor, one hand pressed against the underside of the table, the other clawing at her throat. The wet print had vanished. Her palm remained dry.
Above her, the bones moved again with a muted click.
She pulled herself upright, knocking her shoulder against the table edge. The seven pieces were rearranged into a shape she recognized from Elsie’s drawing.
The open mouth.
Elsie’s rule came back to her with terrifying clarity. Each answer permits one question from the dead.
The bones did not spell their question.
It opened it inside her.
Where did you leave him?
Destiny bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. Elsie’s warning shouted through her. Speak plainly. Lie to the dead and you owe a chamber.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The instant the words left her mouth, every door in the house closed with a soft click.
Not slammed. Not blown by the wind. Locked, one after another, from the front hall to the pantry to the bedrooms above, a measured procession of latches turned by invisible hands. The final click came from somewhere much closer.
Inside her left ear.
Destiny clapped a hand to the side of her head. The room tilted. For a moment she could not remember the word for table. She saw it in front of her, brown and rectangular and waiting, but the name had been taken from her.
A chamber may be a memory.
Upstairs, in Jonah’s voice, something laughed softly.
Destiny did not remember standing.
One moment she was on the floor with the word table missing from her mind and the laugh sinking through the ceiling. The next, she was at the kitchen sink with both hands under running water, scrubbing hard enough to redden the knuckles. The faucet shrieked in the pipes. Dawn pressed gray and thin against the window.
Hours had passed.
Her phone lay on the counter beside the sink, dark except for the time. 5:43 a.m. Destiny stared at the numbers until they made sense, then looked down at her hands.
Black dirt was packed beneath every fingernail.
Not dust from the house. Nor grime from the old boxes. Wet, dark earth, the kind that clung to roots. It streaked her wrists and collected in the lines of her palms. The water in the sink was running nearly black.
She turned off the faucet. In the silence that followed, she heard humming.
It took several seconds to realize the sound was coming from her. A nursery rhyme, tuneless and slow, each note dragged out thin as a thread.
One for the floorboards.
Two for the key.
Three for the dark place.
Four if it’s me.
To be continued.
Richard Schiver 
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