Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

“If you insist you’ve never made an enemy,” he went on, “or that you’ve never been sufficiently wronged to plant the seed of a grudge worthy of Wrath in you, then I take you at your word. But there are no free passes.”

  Her heart sank. She was hoping that Hannigan and the other Deacons might be persuaded to reconsider her role in Jarvis’s passing.

  “And there’s nothing wrong with that. Your contributions in the service of Greed are exemplary. You can remain there as long as you wish.”

  “No! Don’t you dare suggest that!” she cried. “That was never my plan.”

  He managed to shrug, for Hannigan a flamboyant gesture. “Plans change.”

  “Not this one. Not for me.”

  Did he not see that she was meant for higher service? Could he not tell that she had reserved her body for it? That, in this one area, she had denied herself as strictly as a nun? The only things ever to have been inside her were fingers and tampons, and food and drink all that passed her lips. Since her teens, her supreme ambition had never wavered: deliver her purity intact to the seventh floor, and sanctify its loss out of love for the world.

  “If you can’t indulge an act of Wrath on your own initiative, there’s another way,” Hannigan said. “I can let you know when it’s arranged. A day, two at the most.”

  Lynette held to his words like a lifeline. “What is it?”

  He shook his head, the picture of regrets. “All we are, all we do…you wouldn’t think we could have a problem with heresy within our ranks. But we do.”

  This again—echoes from her father’s memorial.

  “We’re flexible on so many things…but we were founded on certain ideologies, and if we bend on those, then we become something else. We become unworthy of our aims. So, if heresy comes up, what else can we do but deal with it. Harshly. Before it spreads. Would you be up to that?”

  It was always easy to say yes before you knew what was involved. But she got the general idea.

  “Good,” he said. “Go home and wait, prepare. I’ll have someone handle your portfolio in the meantime.”

  She dropped a hand to the backrest of his chair. “Would you answer a question about something? About my dad, now that he’s gone?”

  “If I can.”

  “What was his act of Wrath? He’d always change the subject when I brought it up. I quit asking.”

  Hannigan gave her one of those smiles he saved for occasions when he seemed to prefer leaving you wondering whether or not he was telling the truth. “How do you think I ended up in this chair?”

  *

  Waiting was always the hardest part of anything, and she vacillated between preparation and distraction. The call couldn’t come soon enough. Lynette dreaded the thought of answering it. She wanted the act over and done with. She had no idea if she possessed the resolve to go through with it. Whenever she looked into a mirror, she didn’t see a cruel person staring back.

  But it helped to remind herself that Les Hédonistes had been founded in an era of epic cruelty.

  Its origins, she’d been taught, lay in the latter days of the Crusades, when Christians and Muslims had lived in close enough proximity, and for enough time, to develop ties of trade and tolerance, sometimes even respect…at least in the periods between hostilities.

  It was said that during one lull, a faction of Norman nobles learned from the Saracens about the existence of seven towers of blackest iniquity. Called zariahs, they pierced the sky in a 300-mile swath from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Caucasus Mountains in the east. Each was a site of unrelenting blasphemy, ritual, and sacrifice conducted for the sole purpose of seeding the world with darkness and fear. Just as the Crusaders sought an earthly kingdom in honor of their God, those who dwelled in the zariahs sought a world in the image of theirs.

  One by one, from west to east, Christians and Muslims fought alongside one another to bring the towers down, a page found in no history book that Lynette had ever read in school. But she cherished the idea of it: the improbable set in motion in service of the ineffable. It was the way God so often chose to work.

  And nothing was ever truly lost or wasted. It was inevitable that hidden histories and concealed truths should meld in stranger ways.

  Among the Norman clerics in their force, the story said, was a Cistercian monk, a mystic second only to Bernard of Clairvaux. He had spent years of his life lain prostrate by visions of a strange mechanism in Heaven, and despite the deluge of sin he saw all around him, he was convinced that its hands did not turn quickly enough. How much wretchedness might the world be spared, he wrote, if the gears could but be impelled to turn with greater swiftness, and bring our Lord’s deliverance that much sooner?

  In the rubble of the zariahs, the nobles he’d convinced of God’s most secret truths found their answer. How could anyone deny that they’d been led here to do something more than destroy? It was judged no less a sign than the cross of light that Constantine saw in the sky by before his victory at Saxa Rubra, a miracle that convinced him to turn from paganism to the one true God. For all their evil, the zariahs still contained wisdom. They weren’t wrong, merely misguided.

  It wouldn’t be the first time that the tactics of one’s enemy were adopted in service to one’s God. It wouldn’t be the last.

  *

  When the call came she was ready, and drove to the tower in calm confidence that tonight would bring about all the transitions her life had been leading to.

  Hannigan escorted her to an elevator she’d never ridden before, had never even seen, although she knew it had to exist. As with the seventh floor, the sixth was accessible only to believers who had business there: the Deacons, and those who’d won the right by merit. The sixth had always inspired speculation among those who’d never been there; those who had seemed to never talk about it.

  When the elevator doors opened, the sight wasn’t what Lynette expected. The place had an unfinished look, as though abandoned in the middle of construction. The floor was raw concrete, stained here and there with dark, irregular blotches, and the few walls were no more than naked frameworks and random slabs of plasterboard, conduit and bundled wiring exposed like nerves. It was a place where you wouldn’t expect to spend much time. It was a place in which you might fear being forgotten forever.

  Hannigan led her down corridors that weren’t quite hallways, to something that almost resembled a room. He spun his chair around, reversing it in the direction they’d come.

  “His name is Gareth. Gareth Vaughan. And it would be good if you can get his reasons out of him,” Hannigan said. “How and why he came by these deviant beliefs. However you do it, that’s up to you. But you shouldn’t lose sight of why you’re really here.”

  Hannigan trundled away and left her to enter on her own. No door, only an empty doorway. She slid a hand along the plasterboard until she found a switch. It lit a bare bulb dangling from the overhead network of struts and joists. At its flare, ten paces ahead of her, a man twisted his head downward with a grimace and a squint.

  He’d been strapped into an iron chair the likes of which she’d never seen, a relic from some other century. It held his arms out to the either side, his legs out before him. She thought the chair was merely for restraint until she comprehended the purpose of the round rims on either side of the chair’s framework, with handles like a ship’s wheel. A shaft ran between them, not an axle but a fulcrum. Behind the chair waited an oblong barrel of water, with a notch to accommodate the chair’s headrest.

  Nearby, a stand on rollers held a tray of tools, from dull mallets to honed blades, and all grades of sharpness in between. Did his crime really merit all this? They said he’d been discovered trying to lure converts by telling them that a life of flagrant and unrelenting sin was forgivable in the end, as long as the sins were committed with the intent of hastening the Return.

  She stepped closer and wondered if whatever was to happen here would ruin her clothes.

  “’We drink damnation unto ourselv
es so the Kingdom might come to others that much sooner,’“ she said. “Don’t you believe that anymore? Did you ever?”

  Gareth Vaughan lifted his head, eyes grown accustomed to the light. She tried to place him and found him familiar only in a passing sense: an attractive man several years older than she was, approaching his middle years if not there already. He was fit, he was confident, he was in his prime. He obviously breathed the rarified air of the seventh floor. He wore nothing but briefs and seemed unconcerned about it, as easy in his skin as any Fornicant would be.

  He had squandered every privilege he’d earned, and for that Lynette found it easy to despise him.

  He was the only thing that stood between her and any future worth living.

  She grabbed a hard rubber mallet from the tray and, before she knew what she was doing, twice smashed it down onto the end of his upraised foot to dislocate his toes. His bellow was so loud she took a step backward, instantly realizing she’d lost his respect forever, no matter what else she might try, because even in his agony he looked at her and managed to laugh.

  “What in hell did you expect me to do?” he said.

  For one thing, she hadn’t expected an accent—Scottish, Welsh, or perhaps from a strange corner of England. Someplace where they cooked up deviations and dissent, then exported them overseas. It figured.

  She glanced from the snapped-twig tangle of his toes to his unshaven face, the strain of his gritted teeth. He had the most amazing eyes, though, so knowing and blue that the right look from him, under other circumstances, might have seduced her if she’d been another kind of woman. Was that what happened up there? Did they all look like this in time? But no—her father had never had eyes like this.

  At last, recovery: “I expected you to answer my question.”

  He grunted. “I thought it was rhetorical.” He stared at his crooked toes as though studying a work of art whose meaning was lost on him. “Don’t I believe, did I ever—why’s it matter?”

  “Because it does. Because it has to. You joined us. Why would you want to join us if you needed to rewrite the most basic beliefs?”

  “Don’t tell me it doesn’t appeal to you. That you could still get your pass in spite of everything you’ve done, everything you’re gonna. Trying to have it both ways…it’s a long, honorable tradition in the Hédonistes. Has anyone told you of the Schism yet?”

  It was surely obvious by her blank expression that no one had.

  “During the Renaissance. New ways of thinking? You’d expect trouble,” Gareth said. “You had the sturdy old orthodox beliefs: damnation, cast into the lake of fire…no eternal torments, just snuffed out of existence is how they read that. The would-be reformists took another look at all this. They decided that, though damned, they’d ultimately be rejected by Satan for their role in the Coming and restored to a state of grace. Back to the Lord’s bosom. They’d still get to Heaven, they’d just be taking the long way.”

  Could this be true—the history, if not the doctrine?

  “You can guess which side got wiped out, and which side lived to sin another day. But make no mistake: Someone’s always been looking for the escape clause.”

  She’d heard enough. “They warned me you’d lie.”

  He grinned at her, the disdainful and pitying grin of someone convinced he understood you better than you understood yourself.

  “They’ve done such a number on your head,” Gareth told her.

  For a moment she froze—where had she heard that before? Then she had it: this past weekend, in Glendale. He’d spoken in an almost perfect imitation of her sister, words and inflection alike, and he knew it.

  Lynette dropped the mallet to the tray and moved to one of the chair’s side rims. She gripped two of its handles and found the release catch and cranked the wheel, surprised by how balanced the chair was, how easily it tipped backward and down, Gareth’s legs keeling upward while his head plunged into the water barrel. She let him gush bubbles for a moment, then righted him; let him sputter and did it again, longer this time.

  Upright once more, his hair lay plastered to his skull as he coughed and snorted water from his nose.

  “How did you know?” Lynette asked. “My sister. What she said. How she said it. How did you know?”

  His smile dribbled water and mucous. “You can see anything you want if you know where to look for it.”

  She asked what that was supposed to mean, but when he didn’t answer, she dunked him again, and again, and again, throwing her body into each flex of leverage. Water sprayed and spattered her like chilly sweat, and she hoped that slamming down and up and down again was hurting him, like whiplash, as his arms and legs and chest strained vein and sinew against the leather straps.

  With each dunking she left his head submerged longer, and in these moments of calm it grew obvious why Wrath was the hierarchy’s only level you were meant to pass in a single day: You could grow to like it too much, and if you looked hard enough, there would always be something more to fuel it.

  She saw her sisters in the chair, both of them, the one who judged her and the one who ran away. Her mother, too, for all she couldn’t be, and her father, for everything he hadn’t been. Hannigan, for his absolute control of her future. And they were just the beginning.

  A fleeting thought: Maybe that’s what this floor is waiting for…the right person to come along and occupy it. It can’t be finished until then.

  The surface of the water was still. How long had she left him under?

  She stepped around the chair and looked into the barrel, dreading the prospect of bulging eyes and a slack mouth and hair wavering as calm as seaweed.

  But no. Those eyes were anything but dead. He peered up through the water, his gaze fixed on her as he held his breath with tranquility. His eyes didn’t blink. They didn’t rove or betray panic. They saw her with such unnerving clarity she stood rooted to the spot a few moments longer, before thinking again to wheel him upright.

  His spent breath let go in a wet whoosh, and he sagged his head while gulping for air, and the hardest thing she’d ever done was stop herself from telling him that she was sorry.

  “You’re giving them exactly what they want, you know,” he said, which she thought was so obvious it hardly warranted saying at all…until she wondered:

  Suppose he hadn’t meant the Deacons?

  “Have you never asked yourself what’s wrong with you?” he went on. “With all of you? That you’d dedicate your lives to ushering in a Paradise that won’t even want you…that would rather see every last trace of you obliterated?” He shook his head in disbelief. “How you must loathe yourselves, underneath all that Pride. How you must detest the idea of your own existence.”

  She looked at the mallet, and worse things, tempted to hit him again, fearing that it would make her sick.

  “What makes you any different?” she said. More a demand than a question. “You joined us, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, there’s with you, and then there’s one of you. That’s the difference. You do the work of God, or think you do? All right. But I’m up on you. I do the bidding of angels.”

  She steadied herself, still drawn in by his face, wet and fouled, so fragile and human…and luminous with the sense that it was graced by something so much more.

  “I want to give you a gift, if you’ll accept it. You have so much of your life ahead of you, so at least make an informed decision,” he said. “Bend down lower. Go on—don’t you think if I could break loose I would’ve done it before now? Just look into my eyes and tell me what you see.”

  She hesitated. She squirmed. She complied. Could there be any other choice?

  Lynette met them on their own terms: eyes that could have seduced her, and at first she saw nothing but black pupil and blue iris and sclera of purest white…until, feeling freshly unmoored, she was pulled beyond. There was gravity here, deep in the center of the black, each pupil a portal that widened to admit her, and though his arms were
strapped he still as good as held her. A turbid swim through vitreous aqua, past membrane and nerve, then the airless void of a vacuum and a swirling opaque cloud burned away by a flash of light, and then shadows again, all the deeper for the light that never reached them, where she felt the scrutiny of a billion eyes, until at last Lynette confronted what she knew she was meant to see: an ancient clock the size of a moon, its uncountable hands as still as dusty bones, eaten by eons and rust.

  Gareth blinked. It was the first time she’d seen him blink.

  And she was back in something not quite a room again, unfinished and ugly in every way.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The clock ran out…I don’t know when. The angels kept it to themselves. Because they like to watch. It’s what they do. I think they find it all more interesting in a fallen state than it would ever be if it were redeemed. As for our fine towers—now, how could they bear to look away?“

  She understood then why Gareth lied, telling converts what they wanted to hear. How better to lure them into a life of transgression than by promising that Heaven would never hold it against them? Yet would he do this on his own? She couldn’t imagine why. Not when he’d already said he did the bidding of angels.

  “They want more of us?” she said. “Is that it?”

  “Now you’re thinking.”

  Yet what did the rules of this place matter now that she had seen that all they worked for, and all they were, amounted to nothing, and counted for even less? Her life. The entirety of her life. For this sin of omission.

  “One more gift,” he said. “Take them.”

  She didn’t know what he meant. She knew exactly what he meant.

  “Your…eyes?”

  “They’re not mine. What, you think these two were the ones that came with the head?” He laughed until he moaned. “I’ve seen enough. On their behalf. I want you to, really. Go on. It only hurts when you take the old ones out.”

  She hesitated. She squirmed. And knew she would never again be presented with such a choice.