Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  "Terrance," I said. "Since there are other skulls, do they do the same thing?"

  A pause. Then, cautiously, "So I've been told."

  "Do they have any explanations for it?"

  I could hear him laughing softly, almost derisively. All the answer he'd give.

  "Well over a century's worth of skulls," I tried next. "Have they done this all along? Or is this something new?"

  "I really can't speak on behalf of them all, and because Miskatonic's finds aren't as centrally stored as they once were…"

  "Just yours, then," I said. "Ours. When did it start?"

  "Two years ago, perhaps a little less."

  "Why? What happened then? Why would it suddenly start up then?"

  "You must understand, Miskatonic often shares information on a need-to-know basis. They've learned the wisdom of that the hard way, and, well, thus far…"

  "Do you know that its rhythms perfectly sync with frequency emissions from Sirius, when they're converted into audio range?"

  "Good god," said Terrance. "However did you discover a thing like that?"

  And I stood there holding the phone, shaking my head. Having to tell him that I didn't know, because I couldn't really say where those ideas had come from, or what had guided my hands toward the Sirius data.

  "The Dogon tribe," I said. "They have to know about that, don't they?"

  "Quite extensively."

  "Terrance, whose…" I faltered, because I found that it required a surprising amount of courage to ask what I wanted to know. "Giving me that skull. Me, someone completely unconnected with Miskatonic. You made it seem like this soulful gesture. But whose idea was it for you to do that? Was it yours?"

  Silence. Then: "No. Theirs."

  "Toward what ends?"

  "I really don't follow…"

  "You must've thought it was strange. You had to. Because you don't just take an artifact like that and treat it like a family heirloom. So what was giving it to me supposed to accomplish?"

  "It was discussed among the committee that oversees the business to do with homo sapiens primoris, and what I understood is that there was interest in seeing what someone of your background in sonics would make of the phenomenon. Your work isn't unknown to them. Surely you're aware that your solo work has been used for group rituals, for trance inducement and other consciousness altering."

  Judging by some of the fan mail I've received from such people, I wasn't sure how much importance could be placed on their conduct.

  "Why not just be upfront about it?" I said. "Why the charade?"

  "I suppose," he mused, "for the same reason that wildlife filmmakers tend not to interfere in what they're documenting. They prefer to let nature take its intended course."

  Maybe it was cruel, but I had to ask: "Terrance, are you even dying?"

  "An understandable question," he said. "Much to my chagrin, let me answer it this way: If there's a black suit hanging in your closet, don't get rid of it any time soon."

  *

  It was something I'd been taking for granted: that when I first heard from Sonja after she left, it would be with a phone call. Which was why I'd been taking the cordless into the studio, something I ordinarily never did. Or she would just reappear, having gotten over the worst of her frustration with my hyperfocused work habits, and I would hear her car, or the door, or the sound of her voice calling to announce her return. I was ready for any of these, hoping for one, so we could at least start to negotiate some compromise between what I was and how I worked, and whatever needs of hers had evidently begun to conflict with that.

  What I didn't expect was a postcard. Or from where she'd mailed it. Or what she'd written on it.

  The front of the card showed a simple, boring shot of the capitol building of Vermont, in Montpelier. The postmark had been stamped in a small village to the southeast, in the farm country where…

  Well, you know.

  I suspect there are things about your father's death that you've never come to terms with, Sonja had written. Maybe the time has come for you to do that.

  Except for signing her first name, this was all she'd written. Evasive, concise, cryptic…and indescribably cruel. I'd never known her to play games before. It was one of the reasons I'd been so drawn to her. After some of the psychobitch mindfucks endured during my more tumultuous years, Sonja had seemed refreshingly free of pretense and artifice. So what was I supposed to blame for this shift: the cultural kinks of the country she lived in now…or just a life spent with me?

  Because you really couldn't expect me to wonder if it had been there in her all along, and I'd been too blind to notice, would you?

  *

  Within thirty minutes I had a ticket for a cross-country flight the next day, plus a rental car waiting at the other end. After all this had been taken care of, it was only a matter of how to spend the oppressive hours between. For the first time ever, the idea of going into the studio repelled me, because I imagined the skull waiting for me down there, and the sound of it sliding into my soul the way slivered bamboo slides beneath fingernails.

  When you look upon a skull, any skull, especially a monstrosity like this one, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that this was once an individual. Who was born, who grew, who died. And this one? Its eyes had seen creatures no longer alive today, known only by their bones, if they're known at all. Its ears had listened for them; its tongue had tasted their flesh. And I wondered if, when he raised his eyes to the night sky, he stared in awe at its vastness, or with instinctive collusion at the glimmer of far stars, or if he roared in defiance of it all. I wondered what he had built and left behind, how he had adorned it to mark it as his own, if he knew pride. And most of all, I guess, I wondered what had become of the offspring he'd almost certainly sired, and theirs as well, and all the others down through the ages, with their savage teeth and their long, long stride.

  To these ancient fathers, I fear we would today seem like such a puny race.

  Thinking along these lines had put me in the mood to call Terrance. I'd already thought I should tell him that I would be away for a day or two, or however long it would be. He assumed I was flying south, something pertaining to the film, and I let him go on assuming it.

  He sounded worse, his voice noticeably weaker. The cancer? Yes. And no.

  It was everything.

  "I feel as if awhile back I started reading the most absorbing mystery in the world," said my uncle. "But now I'll never have time to finish the book."

  Only everything.

  "You wondered what happened two years ago, when the skulls started to sing?" he said. "I pressed my old colleague from here in Chicago, Sam Charlton…and think I may have learned of something that's at least linked to the phenomenon. The report was initially submitted to a professor of genetics at Miskatonic, by an ally in Reykjavik. Can you guess why Iceland has become a living genetics laboratory in recent years?"

  "I give up," I said, weary of the way Terrance always seemed to think he was in a classroom.

  "Two reasons. First, it's been settled for roughly a thousand years, and the influx came almost exclusively from one place: Norway. Where, you remember, we found the skull. Even today, because of its remoteness, Iceland's population remains remarkably pure. They're pretty well all descended from those original settlers. And second, from the very beginning they were obsessed with genealogies. They have unbroken records going all the way back to the Viking Age. The flow chart of its population has literally been mapped out in its entirety.

  "So these factors combine to make the place a haven for genetics research, unlike anyplace else on Earth. If you have, say, the same disease or congenital defect afflicting widely dispersed members of the present-day population, it's possible to comb the genealogies and see if there's a common ancestral link between them, even if it goes back dozens of generations. It's invaluable for helping to identify and isolate the specific genes and mutations that cause various conditions."

  "And now that
I know that, why should I care?" Playing hard to reach, but then, losing your wife will do that to you.

  "Because, quite unexpectedly, it isolated something else. Another of those anomalies that get the official silent treatment because there's little or no basis for understanding them. Apparently there's one lineage on the island that exhibits something in the genetic structure that isn't strictly, as we recognize it…human. But almost without fail, the people it was found in are characterized, either anecdotally or by photographs, as being of quite large stature. Dental peculiarities too, sometimes. As if a diluted but still viable strain of DNA had survived from that race of primoris we know was in Norway."

  The sons and daughters of giants, I thought, and flashed on the old European legends of such unsavory folk as ogres.

  "Two year ago, soon after this was noticed and the tests were run and re-run again to confirm that the results weren't contaminated, the test subjects themselves disappeared. All of them."

  "What do you mean 'disappeared'? You mean, poof, you blink once and they're gone?"

  "I mean homes abandoned, jobs vacated, money left in bank accounts and untouched ever since. I mean a mass exodus of hundreds of men, women, and children occurring within a week's time, with no trace of them since."

  "Exodus still implies a destination," I said. "So where to?"

  "Since there were no indications of flights booked, or any other kind of travel arrangements…? Presumably the Icelandic interior. It's populated only around the coast—a lot like Australia, just different extremes of temperature, and an even emptier middle. The place is a cold waste that was deforested by the original settlers. Most of Iceland's uninhabited. Uninhabitable, by almost anyone's standards. Geologically the place is quite young, spit up by volcanoes when the rest of the earth was already old. Not much in the interior but calderas, crags and flows of black lava, barren land, and glaciers."

  "Sounds like a time capsule," I said. "The prehistoric world condensed down to…how big is it?"

  "Forty thousand square miles," he said. "And you're not the first to make that observation."

  "So these latter-day giants disappeared, and then…"

  "And then the skulls began to sing. Or chant."

  "So what happened there?" I asked. "Your Miskateers must have all sorts of ideas about that, don't they?"

  "What occurred implies a kind of group consciousness. Whether or not its members were aware of it before, in their everyday lives, they must've possessed it. So if they encountered one another on the streets, maybe there was an innate recognition in passing, even if it left them puzzled. At night, perhaps they dreamed of one another. So, just speculating, it's possible the threat of discovery, of further examination, awoke something deeper. A flight response. A homesickness predicated more on time than geography."

  "So they retreated to…"

  "The replication of their ancestors' world. They went home."

  5

  If I've given the impression that I'm completely callous about my original family, really, that's not the case. There isn't much I have pertaining to the first five years of my life, but what there is I've kept in a lidded wooden box, except for my father's record albums, which won't fit. Most of my family photos aren't originals, but are on the glossy inner sleeve of his final album. You know how bands used to do with their packaging—take a scrapbook's worth of candid photos and reprint them scattered on top of one another to show the world how much fun they had every day. Here's the lifestyle you fans are paying for.

  So I've always known what the place looked like where my father died. The band had rented the same Vermont farmhouse before, as a songwriting retreat, and there was a shot of it in that final album. In my early teens, I'd done enough digging to know how to find the place, always intending to go there, but by the time I had a car of my own, my interest in making such a pointless trip had already begun to wane.

  Besides, it was possible that I'd been there before, maybe even was there that mid-October night he'd died. If I had, though, I'd blocked it from memory. Terrance and Genevieve had always been vague on the subject, claiming that by the time I was old enough to seek answers, they were no longer sure what these were.

  So if I was expecting a flood of memories to be unleashed as soon as I stepped from the car and onto the grounds, it didn't happen. A hazy familiarity, nothing more, which may have been as attributable to the old picture as genuine memory. Or suggestibility, because here it was October again, October in Vermont, and the leaves of the maples were a searing red, and the oaks a merry orange and yellow.

  The place was deserted, and had been for a long time, so it was easy to imagine that everything had been left just as it'd been back then, the austere charms of this white two-story farmhouse allowed to rot day by day. The windows, knocked out perhaps by stones flung by boys from neighboring farms, never replaced. The boards of the porch, sagging underfoot, never repaired. Thirty years of dust, never swept aside. Graffiti, never scoured away.

  It was strange to see them, these sentiments of strangers wrought in paint that had been sprayed and slopped by long-ago fans of my father. In the years following his overdose, this place had drawn them: the fanatics who couldn't let go of the dead, the delusional who'd dissected his dippy lyrics and concluded he was speaking just to them, the losers who'd decided to make their own lives a eulogy for the life he had squandered. I assumed this was why the place had gone to seed—his death had doomed it to become a morbid roadside attraction for just the kinds of tourists you wouldn't want, who traded in a currency of broken dreams instead of cash.

  Most of what they'd left behind was still legible, although waterstains down walls had rippled away parts of it. Some of the mourners pledged eternal devotion, which I wondered if they remembered now. Others promised to see him again one day in Middle Earth or Narnia, fantasy lands that he'd lyrically appropriated from richer imaginations than his own. Still others, more ambitious, had reproduced album artwork on a wall-size scale.

  Pathetic, just pathetic. All of it. Whatever Sonja could have possibly thought I needed to come to terms with, I couldn't see how she'd gotten the notion it would happen here.

  As I walked through the derelict house, its musty damp chill heavy in my nose and the gritty crunch of my footsteps unnaturally loud, I realized that I didn't know specifically where he'd died. Down here on the first floor, or upstairs, or…? I'd always imagined it happening in whichever bedroom he and my mother had been sleeping in, but for all I knew, it could've happened on the flagstone path out back, or the hayloft in the barn, or the bank of the brook that was supposed to flow past the treeline.

  Would I know it when I stood on the spot? Would they have known, these pilgrim losers from another age who'd been left unmoored by his unceremonious junkie's death?

  It appeared that they had, or believed they had, once I'd climbed the stairway to the moldering second floor. All graffiti led to a room at the end of a hallway whose floor was a hazard zone of warped boards. A corner room with windows on two sides, where nothing remained of the furnishings, only what the grieving and the curious had brought with them and left behind: bottles and candle stubs, empty packages of rolling papers and used condoms as dry and brittle as cicada shells. Plus more faded paint, expressing more of the same…except for one inexplicable sentiment that brought on a momentary frown:

  NO ACCIDENT, it read, in block letters that were strangely ornate. HE KNEW WHAT SHE WAS.

  A few inches below that, a sloppier, hurried attempt to establish some sort of dialogue:

  OH YEAH & WHAT WAS SHE???

  It had, after all these years, gone unanswered.

  You can waste a lot of time after seeing something like this, hunting in vain for anything else that can illuminate it—it has to be there, you've only missed it. Every square inch becomes important. But eventually I surrendered. There was no more, just the watercolor residue of old dried tears.

  She…my mother? I couldn't think of anyone else it might be
referring to. He wasn't faithful, and they weren't even married, but still I sensed that this had to mean my mother, if only because by all accounts she'd been the main woman in his life. The mother of his child. They can draw a lot of flak, the mates of coveted men, so maybe this was no more than the aching bitterness of some lovelorn schoolgirl who by now had short, practical hair and teenagers of her own.

  He knew what she was.

  But I didn't want to know, because wanting to know would mean I cared. All I cared about now was this strange and lonely turn my life had taken, the void in our bed left by the woman I had married.

  Sonja had been here. Certainly in the state, but closer still. Here. This house, this room. Why refer to it otherwise, alluding to it with a veiled invitation?

  I stayed in the house for hours, until nightfall, then gave up for the day and drove off to find a motel, where I slept so little it seemed a waste of money. But at least I was showered and fresh the next morning before going back to the farmhouse to wait again, certain that whatever was to happen next, it was meant to happen here.

  The day was altogether more dismal than the sunny day before—the darker side of October was showing now, the October of spirits and Samhain, the October that blusters gray skies above your head and drags at your bones with a misty rain. I roamed the house and listened to it creak, and tried without success to recall the place from another time, to remember running happily through its well-kept halls.

  I was sitting halfway up the stairs to the second floor when she came that afternoon—first the sound of a car stopping on the weed-choked gravel drive out front, and then footsteps, too light to be those of some deputy arrived to run off a squatter. Her hollow tread on the porch, the rasp of the front door hinges.

  And then, for the first time in nearly two weeks, we were looking at each other, here on the other side of the country.

  The normal instinct you should have at such a moment is to run and hold the other person. That the impulse was suddenly squashed within me is the best testament to how unsettling the moment truly was. It was Sonja and then again it wasn't. It was someone wearing Sonja's face. It was Sonja after she'd removed a mask I'd never noticed. And it might've even still been love with which she looked at me, but no kind of love I would ever knowingly seek.