by Andrew Nance
Matt cringed. “Word for word?”
“You wrote it and know it well. Tell it as you would a story around a campfire.”
“Hold on.” I retrieved the Book of Daemon Hall and held it out to Matt. He reluctantly took it. I reached past him and flipped it open to the page headed “A Promise for Bones.”
“It wrote out Millie’s story, remember?” I tapped the page with a finger. “Start yours and see what happens.”
He hesitated, and Lucinda urged, “Go on, Scungilli. Nothing will happen. It’ll prove we’re right.”
He stood and cradled the book like an altar boy holding a prayer book for a priest. Matt gathered his thoughts and began. “My name is Dante, and when I was twelve, I quit—” He gazed intently at the book and groaned.
“No way,” Lucinda said.
He whispered, “It’s writing it a little quicker than I’m speaking. It’s a few words ahead of me.”
Lucinda grabbed the book and read aloud, “‘My name is Dante, and when I was twelve, I quit my job at Quisling’s Spirit—’ it ends there.” She looked at Matt. “Is that right? Is that how your story goes?”
He numbly took the book from her and nodded.
“Proof we’re right.”
“Shut up, Demarius.” She turned to Matt. “Well, I guess you better read it.”
A PROMISE FOR BONES
My name is Dante, and when I was twelve, I quit my job at Quisling’s Spirit Emporium—well, ran away is more like it. I didn’t get paid for my work. Instead ol’ Quisling fed me and provided a floor to sleep on. The spirits came out of a bottle, but when the customers drank too much, they’d swear they saw the ghostly kind. Smelly, dirty, and dark, Quisling’s sat in a narrow alley that snaked through the French Quarter.
My father sold me to Quisling. It wasn’t exactly legal, but what could a kid do? Mr. Quisling, a grim man in a stained apron, paid my father six bottles of rum and twenty dollars, good money in 1929. Every night I sat on a wooden crate at the end of the bar and Quisling would put me to work when the need arose. I fetched liquor from the storeroom, cleaned up after fights or when someone got sick; after the customers peed in buckets in a back room, I dumped them in the alley. I did most everything except tend bar.
Quisling’s had lots of regulars, and some of them were downright scary. One white man was captain of a tramp steamer that docked in New Orleans. His face was narrow and stubbled. He wore a soot-blackened captain’s hat and rarely spoke. His eyes were faded brown surrounded by yellow, and they always seemed to be directed at me.
One old fellow told me, “Don’t you ever find yourself alone with that man. He got a taste for things that ain’t right.”
Two people were scarier than the captain. Bones Man, they said, was over a hundred years old. Toothless, he dressed in raggedy clothes and had so many lines in his face that he looked like a prune. But no one sassed him—he was strong and had powers. Bonaparte, always in his company, was the blackest man I ever saw, and one of the tallest. Bonaparte had to take off his crooked stovepipe hat and bend his head when he came in. He wore an old black tuxedo, even on the hottest nights.
Bones Man had an intuition that told him when someone was facing troubles. He’d come in, gaze about the room until that intuition pointed out the person he was looking for.
He’d walk up to that person and say, “Bonaparte, my bones.”
Bonaparte would fetch a cloth bag from a jacket pocket. Bones Man would shake the bag and dump its contents, all twenty-seven bones from a human hand. He’d read those bones and whisper in that person’s ear. Their eyes might widen, or their face turn gray, and they’d nod as if accepting some terrible fate. We all hated when Bonaparte and Bones Man came in, but truth be told, they saved people from sorrow.
Once I overheard Bones Man tell a man that his wife was cheating on him; he could see it in the bones. He told that man that if he agreed to do a favor for him, well then he’d throw the bones again to see how he might fix his marital woes. It wasn’t just love—he might see coming financial problems, a betrayal, even a person’s death. And the worse the fate, the harder the favor; I learned that firsthand.
Things changed the night the captain paid Quisling for more than just drinks. As usual the captain sat in his corner staring at me and licking his lips with his gray slug of a tongue. At one point he went up to Quisling, ordered a drink, then leaned in close and whispered to him. I felt a shiver when they looked my way. Quisling rubbed his chin, then nodded. They shook hands, and the captain slid a pile of paper money to Quisling.
An hour later Bones Man and Bonaparte came in. The room went silent as the old man looked from person to person. His eyes locked on mine, and he strode right up to where I sat on my box. Bonaparte passed the bag to Bones Man, who knelt, shook it, and rolled the bones at my feet. He looked from them to my face, and I knew it was bad.
“What?” I managed.
Bones Man whispered in my ear. “That one bought you from Quisling.” He looked over at the captain. “Tonight he’s gonna take you to his ship and do hurtful things to you. When he’s done, he’s gonna toss your bloody corpse over the side.”
I didn’t even hesitate. “I’ll do what you want.”
Bones Man smiled. “Of course you will.” He scooped the bones into his bag, shook, and dumped them again. After a few moments, he told me, “When you leave here, go left instead of right. Walk, don’t run, down the alley until the problem is gone.”
Not much later, Quisling told me to go home early. Home was where I slept under the kitchen table in Quisling’s small apartment. I walked through the bar, past the captain, and out the door. Normally I’d go right, but Bones Man said to go left, so I did. A few seconds later, the captain came out. There ain’t no lights in the alley, and each time we passed through a particularly dark patch I’d glance back and see that the captain had crept closer. I wanted to run so bad, but Bones Man told me to walk. When the captain got close, I could tell by his smile that he enjoyed this slow chase, that it whetted his appetite for things to come. He was no more than three paces behind when I passed a dark intersecting alley. A second later, I heard a grunt and turned to see Bonaparte drag the captain into it. I waited until the sounds of struggling stopped and Bones Man and Bonaparte stepped out of the shadows.
“Your problem has been remedied.” Bones Man smiled. “Now, here’s what you will do for me.”
* * *
A year later, I was a thousand miles away working for a rich man. Now that we were into the warmer months, I enjoyed the work, though I near froze when I got there in the middle of winter. I’d never experienced cold like that in New Orleans. It wasn’t like I had any choice, though. In that dark alley Bones Man told me what I had to do.
“Boy, my bones lose a little power each time I use them. For saving your young life, you have to get me a new hand from a graveyard. Collect those bones at midnight, when their powers are greatest.”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I’ll go into St. Peter’s or Lafayette and get your bones.”
He shook his head and said, “Not a New Orleans boneyard. There’s a special one far away, a new one on ancient ground that will provide the most potent bones.”
That’s how I came to work for Mr. Rudolph Daemon in the year 1930. He was building a house for himself and his family, bigger than any I’d ever seen. Mr. Daemon had a crew of over a hundred men. I was hired as a general laborer, not skilled in any one particular thing. I might help the carpenters one day, the stonemasons the next, or the plumbers. My favorite was helping Mr. McGarrity, an electrician, run wires.
“This is the kind of house a king lives in,” I said one day as we took a break.
Mr. McGarrity puffed on his pipe and said, “Mr. Daemon is a king of business.”
I took in the skeletal form of the massive structure. “The man must have thousands and thousands of dollars.”
Mr. McGarrity chuckled. “He’s worth quite a bit more. He has millions.”
; “Millions,” I repeated, trying to get my mind around a number so big.
There was a bad feeling to that land. Most of the workers thought the site was jinxed, though Mr. McGarrity said that was just superstition. Still, they’d started building a year before the Depression, and men got injured in all kinds of accidents. Two, three, four a day were getting hurt.
“We had a lull for several weeks,” Mr. McGarrity told me, “and everyone thought the run of bad luck was over. But no, that was when men started dying.”
Several fell from scaffolding, two were crushed by stone brought in for the walls, and one died when his saw slipped and sliced clean through his leg.
“The man exsanguinated before the wound could be cauterized.” Mr. McGarrity saw me puzzle over those words. “Exsanguinate means to completely bleed out. To cauterize is to use extreme heat to seal an open wound, even when it’s a limb that’s been severed.”
Those were big words, words used by educated men. I’d remember them.
Mr. McGarrity paused to put a match to his pipe. “The most men died when they brought down the—
* * *
Matt stared at the book, his lips moving though he made no sound.
“S’up, Scungilli? Ghost got your tongue?” Lucinda asked.
Mouth open, he slowly moved his head from side to side. Demarius stood and checked out the page Matt had been reading, then looked at us and shrugged.
“Mr. Matthews,” Ian Tremblin said, “is there a problem?”
“A problem?” Lucinda said. “I can give you a whole list.”
“Shhh!” Millie directed at her.
Ian Tremblin prompted, “Matt, what is wrong?”
“The—the story. So far this has been my story. I mean, I don’t know if it’s been word for word, but”—he looked up at us—“now it’s changed.”
“How?” Millie asked.
We found ourselves shoulder to shoulder, circling the Book of Daemon Hall.
“There,” Matt said, pointing to a sentence. “Remember, I took the tree out of my story? But there it is, in that sentence. See? It got back in.”
Ian Tremblin adjusted his glasses. “Your work has been”—he cleared his throat—“edited.”
“Who edited it?” Demarius gave voice to the question bouncing around my head.
Ian Tremblin looked into the surrounding darkness and said, “Who, indeed?”
“Well? What should I do?”
Ian Tremblin smiled uncomfortably. “Keep reading.”
“Keep reading. Of course.” Matt took a deep breath and continued.
* * *
“The most men died when they brought down the black tree.”
One of the carpenters had a photograph of it. The tree was as black as coal, and the bark looked like scales you’d find on a snake. The trunk was as wide as a truck and twisted, and so were the branches, as if it wrestled with itself while it grew. The limbs were long, starting out thick and continuing up sixty or seventy feet, ending in sharp points. The wood had knots all over that looked like bone joints.
“Mr. Daemon wanted the entrance hall right where that tree grew. The wood was so hard it took a full day to bring it down.” Mr. McGarrity dropped his voice. “Tree sap the color of clotted blood flowed where we sawed on it. That tree groaned as it fell, and that blood-clot sap sprayed everyone there.”
The foreman shouted that our break was over, and as we strolled back to our work site, Mr. McGarrity continued, “A couple of weeks later, the men who had been present fell ill. At first they got achy and ran a fever. That’d last a day or two, then the fever would rage, and they’d slip into a coma.”
“Coma?”
“A deep sleep no one can wake you from,” he explained. “Funny thing was, the comas lasted only three days, no less, not longer. Mr. Daemon brought out doctors and nurses and set up a hospital tent. They didn’t have a clue as to the affliction that struck the workmen. At first they thought things would be okay, because the sick woke up after the third day, but that was when the illness took its most dreadful turn: Their backbones went rigid and the bowing started. That’s what they called it, bowing. Their rigid spine would bend backward and you could hear their bones crack. Even the toughest cried because of the pain. The fever boiled their brains at about the time their spines snapped. It was a horrible death.” Mr. McGarrity shook his head at the memory.
I was nervous that it was contagious, but Mr. McGarrity said, “It only affected the men who’d been sprayed by the sap. Forty-eight out of the forty-nine men who were present died in that fashion.”
“Bet that forty-ninth man feels blessed,” I said.
“I do, Dante,” Mr. McGarrity said, relighting his pipe. “I surely do.”
“You were there, too?” Stunned, I shut up and concentrated on work until I had to ask, “What happened to the wood from that tree?”
“When everyone started getting sick, we collected it all. Well, not all of it. Mr. Daemon took some—said he wanted to make something out of it—but we burned the rest. That wood was hard to ignite, but it burned hot and made greasy black smoke.”
Mr. McGarrity explained that some of the men who died had been homeless because of the Depression, and others came from away. Mr. Daemon had a small graveyard put in about a mile from the building site. Sixty-three bodies had been laid to rest before I arrived. The sixty-fourth in the ground was my friend Mr. McGarrity.
* * *
The tent hospital was long gone by the time he took sick. A doctor came out from Maplewood and looked him over. When he was done, he just shook his head.
“I thought I’d gotten a reprieve,” Mr. McGarrity said, his voice weak and raspy. “I don’t want to die alone. You’ll sit with me, won’t you, Dante?”
“I promise, Mr. McGarrity.”
“I want you to have this, Dante.” He put a gold pocket watch in my hands. “My father gave it to me, and his father gave it to him. I’ll never be a father now, so I want to pass it on to you, from one friend to another.”
For the next few days I rarely left his side. I stayed when he slipped into a coma for three days. He woke, and when the bowing was at its worst, as if he were trying to touch the ceiling with his belly, he grabbed my hand. He was so fevered it was like holding charcoal. When he died, I had to pry his fingers loose. My hand was numb all that day.
Everyone came to the funeral because Mr. McGarrity had been such a kind man. The cemetery was in a small valley, and Mr. McGarrity was laid close to the road, his grave marked with a flat-topped headstone. During the service, I decided I’d leave that very night after performing my job for Bones Man.
When most everybody was in the dining tent, I went to the toolshed, grabbed a shovel, and started for the graveyard. I stopped and went back to fetch a machete since I’d have cutting to do. It was a strange night. Even though there was a yellow full moon, it didn’t provide a lick of light to see by, so it was slow going down that road to the graveyard. When I was halfway there, fog rolled in. Thick and low-lying, it chilled me from the knees down. I had a few hours to wait until midnight, so I collected wood and started a fire.
As I warmed myself, my thoughts turned to the long trip here from New Orleans. I had figured that jumping trains would be quickest, but Bones Man said not to hurry. He said I could accept rides that were offered, be it automobile or wagon, but mainly I had to get here by my own two feet. I figured that’s how I’d get back once I had the bones.
“If you get the bones.” The voice came from the direction of the graveyard.
Pinpricks of fear ran up my spine. I peered into the darkness. “Who’s out there plucking thoughts from my head?”
“You know me, Dante.”
And I did. I forced myself to leave the protective circle of firelight and walked over to Mr. McGarrity. He sat on his headstone, legs crossed.
“Can’t you rest, Mr. McGarrity?”
“No one rests in this graveyard.” He spoke calmly, tamping on his pipe.
“Maybe when I’ve paid my debt to Bones Man I can move you to better ground.”
Mr. McGarrity’s ghost looked at me as he lit his pipe. “You’re a good friend, Dante. Thank you.” He exhaled phantom smoke and said, “I think it’s time.”
I pulled out the pocket watch he’d given me. It was closing in on midnight.
“Those buried here have no good feelings for you. They become more corrupt the longer they’re in this ground. As you try to fetch a hand, they’ll try to fetch you. The lonely ones are whispering that they’ll drag you into their holes for company.”
I shivered. “I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I promised Bones Man.”
“Then you’re welcome to my hand. I won’t harm you.”
“I couldn’t do that. You’re my friend. You understand, don’t you?”
There was no reply. He’d gone. I spoke to the still night air. “Good-bye, Mr. McGarrity.”
I returned to the fire for the tools, then tromped into the middle of the graveyard and chose a grave marked by a stone cross. This is wicked work, I thought, and moved dirt by the spadeful. It would have been easier in New Orleans, since bodies weren’t buried deep there. Because of the high water table, bodies were buried in shallow graves or placed in aboveground graves, mausoleums. But Bones Man wanted his hand from here, and I knew I’d have to dig down a full six feet. I worked steadily until I reached the coffin. After clearing dirt from the lid, I took stock of my situation. I was in a grave, and my head was belowground. I would have to climb out for the machete I’d left leaning against a headstone.
It was then I heard something move in the casket, thumping within that burial box. I jumped up and grabbed the ground above my head. I heard a squeak and looked down as the coffin lid swung open. Hanging on the side of the grave wall, I kicked my legs furiously, trying to find purchase in the crumbling dirt. The coffin’s occupant sat up. Black sockets gazed up at me, and skeletal hands took hold of my ankles. It gave one tug and I fell into the coffin.
I’d seen some horrible things in my short life, but the worst by far was lying on top of that cadaver and watching the coffin lid come down. I struggled in the pitch-black box as that thing touched me all over. I screamed while it grabbed and caressed me. I fought until I heard the worst possible thing: dirt falling on the coffin lid. I gave up and lay still as the corpse stroked my face. I prayed death would be quick, and then remembered it would be a restless death in that ground. I renewed my fight, snagging something from my pocket: the chain holding Mr. McGarrity’s watch. I yanked it out and the watch threw a golden glow throughout the casket. That corpse cowered under me trying to hide from it. I dropped the watch over my shoulder onto its bony face, and the cadaver crumpled into dust.