Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  Words were exchanged—Gaelic again, forever keeping her on the outside—but Sean Reardon’s were few, brief, and ragged, and soon extinguished as the eyelids drifted shut and the breath Kathleen gave was spent, sputtering through flesh that was now truly dead.

  Judging by the somber faces all around, the news they had gotten was as bad as they’d evidently feared. Together, Kathleen and the other woman returned the head to the table, to reunite it with its body.

  The skinny old man who’d done the carving cursed. “So much for hopes ‘twas some escaped nutter, who we’d find dead of his own wound soon enough.”

  “And that,” Pandora said, “would be the good word and aim of Gerry Fallon?”

  Fergus nodded. “The same.”

  “So, even though from the way it sounded earlier, that it was just a temporary solution, who’s he supposed to have shot?”

  “Have you not suspected already? If you were to go back to the yew, it’s a dreadful surprise you’d be getting from who you wouldn’t find there.”

  She must have shaken her head, something. It’s what you did when you reached your threshold of the impossible. Ethan…? Okay, work with it. The second point, maybe, from the tale of Oran and from Columba’s dismissal, accurate or not, of the message his friend had relayed: It’s not Oran anymore, but something that’s usurped the rightful place of maggots so it might take up its own residence inside.

  “In Ethan…there’s a demon?”

  “That depends on your perspective.”

  For the first time, the woman who’d washed and cradled Sean Reardon’s head spoke. She stepped closer, away from the tables and the pair of slaughtered men, and now, no longer distracted by the carnage, Pandora noticed the face inside the hooded cloak.

  “The way it sees things, I’m the demon,” she said. “Even though we’re both creations of the same god.”

  I’ve never seen you, not even in my most hopeful dream, Pandora thought, but now that I have, I would know you anywhere…

  “We’ll leave her to you,” said Fergus, and Pandora almost answered him, until she realized the obvious: He wasn’t talking to me.

  VII

  Her name was Maia, and she should have been dust. Before the first blocks were laid for the Acropolis and the Tower of Babylon, she should have been dust.

  Online, Pandora had encountered much rumor, much speculation about her—much bullshit, as she understood now. Know-nothings had credited Maia and her two Sisters with everything from plagues and miracles to the rise and fall of empires.

  What Pandora thought most likely to be true were the relatively few details contained in the brief autohagiography of Saint Patrick the Fallen: that Maia and her Sisters had been born ordinary women in Assyria, where they had become concubines of King Sennacherib; that they had been betrayed and abandoned to the Hebrew King Hezekiah after the Assyrian army’s failed siege of Jerusalem; that the god of Israel had ravaged them with a triune fate, beyond death but with an eternal hunger for the bodies and essences of mortal men…

  Lilah, their flesh.

  Maia, their blood.

  Salíce, their seed.

  Pandora sought her face for some sign of origins in the Middle East, and in her dark hair and eyes it was there to be found…but over more than two and a half millennia her countenance had assumed a translucent luster that seemed to transcend race. She could live anywhere, belong anywhere, and be revered.

  Yet her splendor had been shaped by sorrows above all. She was as beautiful now as she must’ve been during the siege of Jerusalem, when her babies had been fed to appease a demon unleashed by her king’s sorcerers, after it had turned on them. She was as beautiful tonight as she would’ve been the day in Belfast when, after seven-year-old Patrick Kieran Malone had nearly been killed by an IRA bomb, she kissed the blood from his knee and tasted his destiny. She was as beautiful now as she had been during the years she’d watched Patrick grow; as the day she took him as her lover; as the evening she’d drunk his tainted stigmatic’s blood to steal secrets from heaven; as the night she and her Sisters consumed him.

  And Maia would be beautiful, Pandora knew, long after she herself had turned to dust.

  The surprise, after encountering Maia in the first place, was that the cottage and the stable where the dead man had spoken were hers. For one who’d slept in palaces, it seemed so…prosaic. After Fergus and Kathleen and the others had left, she had taken Pandora in, away from the sight of butchery, and made a pot of herbal tea for her. Tea, for gods’ sakes.

  “The stone, the carving,” Pandora said, and thought of it sitting on the dresser in her room. She wished she’d thought to bring it, a talisman to touch in the night. “You left it for me, didn’t you?”

  “You seemed to need it,” Maia said.

  “You watched me…? The way you watched Patrick?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Did it matter? Pandora almost laughed. Did this woman not know there were people out there who longed for such a thing to happen, who prayed for it…present company included? Did it matter? It was only the most flattering thing she’d ever heard.

  Only moments later did she look at it from the other side, sensing what an awful life it would be to spend it forever out of reach of the maternity that Maia had briefly known, then had ripped away. Lifetimes of letting herself be drawn to surrogates, who often never knew she existed, and watching them grow, flourish, mature, wither, die.

  Because of the sustenance Maia was forced to rely on, she was a monster—or so said traditions all over the world—yet Pandora could not see it. The only monstrosity she could recognize was whatever had turned its wrath upon the people of Glenmullen. Why—because Maia lived as one of them?

  “You didn’t stay in Dublin,” Pandora said, thinking of the estate Patrick had told of, where the Sisters of the Trinity had lived in privilege and privacy it would’ve taken an army to breach.

  “How could we, if we were going to release what Patrick had written? We could’ve been seen for who and what we were then. We would’ve been too easy to find.” She smiled, an enigma. “We had been there long enough.”

  Now she lived in the same simplicity as a villager whose family had been bound to the same land for generations, surrounded by roughly plastered walls, unvarnished timbers, heavy crockery. The obvious carryover were two of the mastiffs Patrick had mentioned patrolling the grounds in Dublin, of a lineage that extended back to the war dogs of ancient Rome. Bulky masses of muscle and black and brown fur, they had padded agitatedly about for the first few minutes after Maia had brought her inside, and now watched her from the floor with their great heads settled upon their paws.

  “We distributed his bones within the first month,” Maia said, “and within the year had made all the arrangements we needed to disappear. We decided against remaining together, because Patrick had described us well, and we were determined not to change a word of what he wrote…even if it meant the three of us might be easier to recognize for those who knew what to look for.”

  Years apart, even decades—what would it matter for those unbound to time? They could reunite a generation later and it would be as a vacation to the rest of the world.

  While there was no reason to think that all three Sisters had remained in Ireland, Pandora suspected they had. Even before Maia confirmed it, the pattern implied by the shrines became clear: one shrine in Dublin, near the home they’d abandoned; one Sister and a shrine she kept in the south, another in the west, and Maia with the fourth shrine here in the north. Had no one else discovered this, or even suspected it? Online, would-be acolytes had described so many futile searches in Dublin—or claimed success in what were obvious lies—that she’d thought it pointless to try looking for them.

  “You risked everything,” Pandora said, and almost asked why. She didn’t have to ask. She knew why. If she hadn’t already known why, she never would have made this journey in the first place.

  Patrick himself had written all the ex
planation anyone needed: As for me, I'll not mind leaving bones, and I hope they keep them around, gnawed and clean, true relics for the inspiration of disciples yet to come. In this plaintive statement of faith, he seemed to have foreseen his own future in the quiet but ongoing and perhaps even doomed struggle against their common enemy, described by Maia in sadly lyrical terms:

  “Imagine an arrogant and greedy and demented child on a beach, building castles in the sand…only to kick them over out of boredom, leaving what's left for the waves. Which of course begs one more question:

  "Where did the sand come from?"

  Pandora had memorized that years ago, even if she thought it too gentle. Call such a god what it was: a monster that had taken credit for a world it had never created, and grew bloated on the suffering and misplaced faith of the innocents mired in its deserts and mud.

  “You’re too generous,” Maia said. “Patrick risked everything. The people of Glenmullen, they risked. You’ve risked, because you believed enough to bring yourself this far.” She looked to one side—at the rough white wall? “My Sisters and I…? We’re better at inspiring risk than assuming it ourselves.”

  No, not the wall. At the stable beyond the wall, and the carcasses inside.

  “But let’s forget that for now,” said Maia. “You came here for something you’ve left undone. You never visited the northern shrine, you only thought you did.” She stood. “Come. I’ll take you.”

  Pandora thought of the wounds she’d seen, of Ethan resurrected, of the violence that she had unwittingly instigated. “It’s not safe out there.”

  Softly, Maia uttered some word that brought the mastiffs snapping to their feet.

  “Why would you think it’s any safer in here?” she said.

  VIII

  With the moon ducking in and out from behind low clouds, the path they walked was barely visible, little more than a furrow in tall grasses that led through bowers smelling of autumn and farmland nearing the end of its season. Now and again they would cross a clearing, still close enough to the heart of town that she could see it, a small scattering of dwellings and other shelters huddled together against the dark. Periodically the crack of a gunshot would pierce the gloom, or a shout; less often a scream, lingering like a wound in the chilled air.

  “I don’t understand. Ethan would never do this.” Pandora blinked at the tears burning their way through. A wonder they’d waited this long. Until now she wouldn’t have believed it possible for the same long night to be both the best and worst of her life. “Isn’t there anything of Ethan left inside?”

  “A little, maybe. The souls of those who have taken their own lives, or died violently…they sometimes linger.”

  “Does he feel anything?” Thinking of the claim that he’d been shot. “Does he feel pain? Or remorse?”

  “Remorse, I most surely doubt. Pain, perhaps, but I imagine only to the point that it drives him away from what could destroy his body. They say he was wounded earlier. He would’ve had to retreat for a time. To heal. To learn. To formulate a new plan.” Could Maia read her questioning face in the dark? Perhaps she could. “What moves him is no longer his own will—that’s gone. What moves him is a fragment of God that was broken loose and dropped here a very long time ago. An avenging angel, you might call it—that’s close enough. But without a body, it’s just intent and wrath. Without a body, it has no sense of time. Until tonight, it understood blades best…so that’s what it resorted to.”

  Pandora’s imagination began to fill in the gaps: Ethan rousing; slithering backwards, upwards, until he was free of the yew’s hollow core. Ethan stalking through fields, barns, stables, until he had found…what? Sickles, axes, knives kept sharp enough to slit the throats of lambs? Ethan, who could only ever hurt himself, turning these blades on others.

  “They move frightfully quick,” Maia said. “But against guns…?” She pointed toward town, where a flickering orange glow backlit the silhouette of one of the taller buildings. “So you can see…he’s come back with fire.”

  Please, not The Mouth of Oran. Not Kathleen and Fergus, she mouthed, painfully aware of the absurdity of it, with no idea who might hear such a prayer, much less grant it. She lowered her lips to her tea; had taken along another large serving in a glazed earthenware mug—for warmth mainly, and something to hold onto.

  “You’ve seen this one before,” Pandora said. “Haven’t you?”

  “It’s why I came here after Dublin. Glenmullen is very old. Very. It’s owed my Sisters and me a debt for much of its history. They’ve never forgotten that here. All the generations that have lived and died, and they’ve never forgotten. They know what I am, too, and they accept that. Maybe because I don’t need to kill to feed—only Lilah has to kill. Or maybe after all this time, they still regard the debt as that binding. If we had time, I could show you a story in stained glass that hasn’t been seen by anyone who wasn’t born here almost since Christopher Columbus was alive…

  “In this valley,” she went on, “there was an ancient tradition of worship. Much stronger once than it is now, but even today it survives.”

  Pandora thought again of the matriarchal figure Maia had left for her, wondering anew how old it truly was.

  “It predated the Druids, although it’s said that they never interfered with it. It survived the rise of the Celtic Church—which may have tolerated it too, if they were aware of it. Later it survived the Council of Whitby, when the Roman Church declared itself the only true church…only now their survival depended on the people here taking care to guard their secrecy.

  “Then, many generations back, a slip of someone’s tongue betrayed them to a pair of missionaries who’d come to the valley. If it was ever known what aroused their suspicion to begin with, it’s been forgotten…but not the depth of their condemnation. And you must remember, this was an age when heretics could be burned by the dozens.

  “So the people of Glenmullen killed one of them. The other escaped long enough to pray for the wrath of God. He was heard…and answered. Maybe he was expecting fire from Heaven. He certainly couldn’t have been expecting his own body to be used as the sword of judgment.”

  A fragment of God, Maia had said, broken loose and dropped here. Pandora had, of course, heard plenty about demonic possession, even if she’d had a hard time believing in it. She’d never once heard of its opposite.

  “My Sisters and I had already lived in the valley for many years. It suited us. The people knew there was something different about us, even if they didn’t know what it was…but unlike the Christians of that age, they didn’t equate different with evil. Some suspected we might be survivors of one of the earlier races lost to myth…the Tuatha Dé Danaan, or the Daoine Sidhe…and we were happy to encourage that.

  “So on the day the slaughter began, they sent a runner to us, begging for help. It wasn’t our fight, yet the source of their massacre was the same god who’d designed our own fate. How could we have said no? By the time we got there it had killed more than thirty of them, with no discrimination.”

  For several paces, Maia said nothing; then: “My Sisters and I, and all the others that Patrick wrote of…we’ve never known why we were made what we are, not with any certainty. We only know that the centuries have given us power, and cunning. And so, together, the three of us were a match for it, barely—Lilah especially. She knows intimately how to take a body apart, and quickly. Even so, we were all badly wounded before it was done.

  “The people of the valley took the pieces and buried them beneath the yew, amid the roots—the tree was intact in those days—and then they consecrated it, in their own way, in the hope of holding the spirit there. I think they knew, without us telling them, that even though it may have been beaten, it wasn’t destroyed. Can you even destroy a piece of God? I don’t know.”

  “It couldn’t move to another body?” Pandora asked. “Or wouldn’t God just send another one?”

  “What your parents may have raised you to believe
in as God…we’ve always suspected it’s not omnipotent, nor all-seeing. It sends something like this, but then in its arrogance it trusts that the job can’t fail to be completed. And so it forgets…

  “As for moving to another body, no, I don’t think it would be as simple as that. When it was loose the first time, it used the missionary, and he hated the place already. They seem to need that—a meshing of intent. They work in harmony with what they find. It could never have worked with those who loved their home. You tell me Ethan could never have done this? Perhaps not. But in the time he was here, he must have developed a terribly deep resentment toward Glenmullen.”

  Yeah, I guess he did, and Pandora felt her heart sink. Because this is where he thought he’d lost me to a dead man.

  “So that fragment of God…it lay waiting all these years,” Maia said. “If it recognized time, maybe its hatred might have dissipated. If it could’ve felt the passing of centuries, maybe it might have forgotten the need to destroy.”

  Years ago, we used to guard that yew, same as those before us, Kathleen had said. But at some point they’d grown complacent. And so Pandora had to wonder if there wasn’t more behind the mistake in locale that she and Ethan had made than she’d first thought. If the disinformation online that she had so gullibly swallowed had been deliberate—someone, something, hoping to steer unstable visitors toward the yew.

  She turned her face to the heart of the village again. Although trees blocked the view, through their thinning branches she saw that the flames had grown bolder.

  “If your Sisters were here, could you…?”

  “They’re coming. But it may not be soon enough.”

  “Then shouldn’t you be doing something anyway?” she said. “Or…we?”

  At her side, Maia’s hand found its way around hers for a moment, gave a small squeeze. “We are.”

  And her hand was as warm as any woman’s, no more, no less. Another myth dispelled. Pandora thought it likely it was her own hand that felt cold as death. She wrapped both hands around the thick earthenware mug to leech the last of its heat.