by Laura Bickle
Owen sighed, sifting through his memory for a story that didn’t involve sex, drugs, or rock ’n’ roll. Or violence. There was always that. He reached forward to relight the cigarette.
“How about Sal?” Anna asked. “Tell me a story about Sal.”
Hell. There were no good bedtime stories about Sal. “I don’t think—”
“Tell me about the worst thing you did for him.”
Owen made a face and took a drag on his cigarette. Anna had been tagging along behind him for years. She’d seen much, but not everything. He’d sent his men to do much of the cleanup after Sal. He didn’t want to get directly involved and get his hands dirty. It was the coward’s way out, he knew. It kept him in his office, with a veneer of plausible deniability. But underneath . . . underneath was ugly.
He took a deep breath. “I guess there’s no point in being squeamish around the dead.”
Anna made a snickering noise.
“No offense. Back when I first became sheriff, I was still figuring things out. I had maybe read too many comic books when I was a kid, and I was determined to be one of the good guys. You know, the ones with the capes who could stand in the daylight with their hands on their hips and block bullets and shit.
“About a month after I took office, Sal called me in the middle of the night. It was summer, hot and sticky as hell, and my air-conditioning was out.
“Sal told me to come to the ranch. That he had a ‘problem.’ I probably shoulda just rolled over and gone back to sleep, or kicked him over to Dispatch. But I was eager to prove that I was now Superman with a badge, that I could handle anything. I wanted to stand in front of Sal in uniform and have him know that I finally was in charge. That I had the power. Or something like that. Anyway, I expected that the trappings of the office would finally grant me some grudging respect from him.
“I rolled up to Sal’s house about two a.m. He was sitting on his front porch, in a rocking chair, drinking a beer in the dark.
“I asked him what the hell was the matter that he had to get me out of bed.
“He was being weird. All the lights were out in the house. He said that someone had broken in, that someone was still in his house. He said that the guy was in the basement and that he was armed. I’d puffed up like a fish. Sal was asking for my help. He saw my authority, damn it! Our relationship was going to change after I swooped in and took care of this situation. And it sure did.
“I entered the house, announced that law enforcement was here. I yelled for the guy to come out with his hands up. I didn’t get a response, just some banging from the basement.
“I shoulda called for backup, but I was convinced that I had control of the situation. I opened the door of the basement and saw the silhouette of a guy down there with a gun. I fired and hit him.
“Then I turned on the lights. I realized immediately that I’d been set up. There was a guy down there, all right, but he was all tied up, hanging like a puppet from one of the ceiling joists. He had a gun duct-taped to his hand. And I’d shot him dead.
“I was horrified. Just fucking horrified. Sal was laughing at the top of the stairs. Turned out, this guy had a real estate deal with Sal that went bad. Sal had asked him over for a truce over drinks, but whacked him upside the head with a golf club. I never did figure out how he got him all strung up in the basement—he had to have help.” Owen lapsed into silence, staring into the blinding white before him.
“What did you do?” Anna prodded.
“I yelled at Sal. I went to call the squad, but he stopped me. Told me that no one would believe me. And he was pretty much right. If I called for help, the best case scenario was that I was gonna throw my career away. The worst would be cooling my heels in prison for thirty to life.
“So . . . I helped Sal bury the body. And I was pretty much under his thumb from then on.” Owen rubbed his nose. “I’m not proud of that. Not at all. And I wondered why in hell that man’s ghost never rose up to haunt me.”
He gazed at Anna through blurry eyes. He felt woozy, and he wanted to stretch out on the ground to take a nap. Just a short one. But first, he had to know: “Why did you pick me to haunt?”
Anna chewed the hem of her hoodie sleeve, and it was a long time before she answered: “I picked you because I thought you were a good man.”
Owen closed his eyes.
Chapter 13
Beneath the Fire
It had been decades since there had been a fire burning here.
Petra knelt on the broken hearthstone to scrape ice from the fireplace with her knife, trying to clear a spot to start a fire with her steel flint. Most of the carbon black had been worn away, and the sandstone chunks that the firebox was built of were cracked with the incursion of ice. Abandoned bird nests crowded the flue, and she’d pushed as much of them away as she could with a broom handle. Wind howled down the broken chimney and through the chinks between the logs of the walls. Sig sniffed at the chinking, and Petra saw that there was animal fur in the mud, like the horsehair that often appeared in plaster in old houses. She shuddered, thinking of the wolves.
Behind her, Gabe was destroying a table for firewood. Maybe they could get the tent set up before the fireplace. It would be survivable, not terribly comfortable, but . . .
Her knife clanged against something metal. She frowned and shone her flashlight into the box. The large piece of sandstone at the bottom had something jammed under it—it looked like a file or a tool of some kind. She worked at it, mostly out of curiosity, but the sandstone floor of the firebox shifted. A draft of cool air came up . . . up from the ground.
“Gabe.” She sat back on her heels, and he came immediately to her side.
“What is it?”
She gestured at the fireplace stone with her knife. “I think there’s something under there.”
“Let’s move the stone.”
Gabe levered the broom handle under the stone and pushed. It slid up and away, and bits of grit and carbon rattled down into the darkness. Petra peered into the firebox, seeing a hole yawning into the earth. It was about two feet by three feet.
“I wonder if it’s some kind of root cellar under there.” She shone her light down into the darkness, seeing nothing but dirt.
“Underground is always a good spot to hide things.” Gabe swung his legs down into the hole.
Petra supposed he was accustomed to mysterious underworld structures, but she still said, “Be careful.”
He swung into the pitch-black and she heard his boots connect with earth. His flashlight shone around below her.
“What’s down there?” she called.
“Something . . . odd,” he said, sounding distracted. It would have to be something strange indeed for him to be at a loss for words. Given the macabre decor of the cabin’s great room, she couldn’t imagine what things Skinflint Jack would have deemed worthy of hiding.
Petra tied a nylon rope to the iron front door handle. She cast the rope down into the hole, squeezing around Sig’s backside as he peered in.
“Sig. Do you want to be the guard dog or do you want to explore?”
Asking a canine to make a decision was always dangerous. Sig, at least, seemed more decisive than a domestic dog. He glanced at the hole and then at the closed door. He trotted across to the door to sit down, his ears perked up.
“Good boy.” She felt much better, knowing that at least someone was on watch for threats.
She grasped the rope and tested her knots. They would hold her weight. She pocketed her light and climbed down into the darkness.
It was a hand-hewn earthen cellar, shallow. Illuminated by her light, the floor was pounded dirt, shiny and smooth as stone. She could barely stand upright, and Gabe had to stoop. Along the walls were tool marks from the edges of shovels and timber beams jammed up at odd angles. Small bones, likely from the wolves, were set into the walls: spines undulated, ribs sinking deep into the earth. Dismembered bits of thigh bones and delicate toes were interspersed in a bizarre m
osaic.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s what happened to the wolves’ bones, I guess.”
“An ossuary.” Gabe seemed unrattled by his surroundings, tracing a shin bone in the wall with a finger. “I saw something like it, before I came here. It was an ossuary in the Austrian Empire. That had been built over centuries, but with human bones.”
Her brow wrinkled. “This was back when you were investigating paranormal cases for the Pinkertons? I had no idea that they’d sent you to Europe.”
“I went wherever a client with deep pockets would send me. That place was more elaborate than this . . . chandeliers of skulls and every inch full of bones.”
“I think I might have seen some pictures on the Internet . . . it was very, uh, metal.”
There were beds on the floor, two of them, covered in moth-eaten and filthy quilts. Beside them sat night tables with burned-down candles and wash basins with evaporated water, like an ordinary bedroom of the time. Except the tables were made of stacked skulls and jawbones. Peeking out beneath the blankets were legs of larger animals, perhaps cattle or moose.
Inside the beds were lumps. Petra approached cautiously, shining her light over her head.
She pulled back the corner of the disintegrating quilt on the first bed. A human figure wrapped in calico fabric lay in it like a caterpillar in a dead chrysalis, hands crossed over its chest. Skin as thin as a mica lampshade had sunken deeply over the skull, with tendrils of light brown hair clinging to flesh.
“How could a body last this long?” Gabe murmured. “Maybe tanned?”
“It’s been mummified . . . this environment, closed away from air and water. It looks like most of it just . . . desiccated.”
Gabe crossed over to the other bed. He drew back the blanket covering two children, lying faceup in dressing gowns. One was larger than the other, and it looked as if they’d been posed that way.
“I’m betting they didn’t die here,” Petra said. “They must have been brought here, after . . .” After what, she wasn’t entirely certain.
Gabe had none of her squeamishness. He pulled back the sleeves on the bodies and was inspecting them in a businesslike fashion.
“If this is Skinflint Jack’s family, perhaps he put them here after they were killed by the wolves.”
She was struck by the terrible effort and sentimentality of it. Maybe Jack had truly loved his family, in his fashion. She was reminded of a giant white cross that had been built on a hill near where she grew up. The story that went with it was that a man who had been terrible to his wife during his marriage had lost her to an illness. In his grief, he erected a giant stone cross in her memory that was visible from the freeway. Maybe this was like that, just . . . just more morbid.
She glanced back at Gabe, who had turned one of the children over and was inspecting the corpse with the keenness of a raven with something shiny in its talons. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m not certain,” he said. “The legend of Skinflint Jack said that the wolves carried away the bones of his family and left the skins. This doesn’t look like that at all.”
“And that still doesn’t sound like wolves. If anything, they’d take the flesh and leave the bones behind.” Petra frowned. She felt squeamish in the pit of her stomach, watching Gabe manhandle these bodies. He had no fear of death, while it seemed to well up sharp and acidic in the back of her throat, like bile. She turned away, to the wall, trying to make rhyme or reason of the patterns of the bones, stuck to the wall with mud.
She paused before a section facing the foot of the beds. This spot seemed more deliberate than some of the other areas. Bones—they looked like scapulae—formed sconces in the wall, crusted with years upon years of tallow from candles. The skull of what she guessed was some kind of ungulate was set just above eye level . . . a stag, she realized. Antlers spread out from the skull, like a frieze. But the resemblance to a stag ended there. Rib bones were set around a spine in an upright posture. Arms and legs extended from the torso, the arms apart and uplifted to the sky. The legs were closed, but the tiny metatarsals didn’t brush the rough floor. She scanned her light over the hands. The finger bones seemed delicate and small . . . tiny. And they were uneven sizes. The clavicles appeared diminutive, as did the overall stature of the creature. The pelvis seemed the wrong shape to belong to a wolf, and she guessed that many of the bones were human.
She chewed her lip, looking up at this . . . art? Were these truly human bones, or were they animal bones cobbled together in the shape of a man? She dredged her memory for her college anthropology classes, counting vertebrae and the number of ribs. And what did this mean? Was this a self-portrait of Skinflint Jack?
Behind her, Gabe grunted.
“You found something?” She was afraid to ask.
“It’s more what I didn’t find. Come see.”
Steeling herself, she stepped back to the beds. Gabe had pulled off the covers and peeled the disintegrating clothes back like onion skins. The bodies were facedown. Gabe had taken off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and was wrist-deep in a gaping tear in the woman’s back.
“Gah,” she said, stepping back. Her flashlight shook.
“There aren’t any bones here,” Gabe said. He pulled his hand back from the parchment-translucent skin and came away with a handful of sticks and dried grass. “They’ve been stuffed, like the wolves.”
Petra focused on her shallow breathing, allowing her vision to get out of focus. Thank God it was cold in here—she was sweating beneath her coat. “I think the bones are over there.” She gestured to the wall with her light.
“He had a lot of time.”
“What does it mean, though?”
Gabe glanced down at the bodies. “Well, these people weren’t killed by wolves. All the skin is pretty much intact—I don’t see any tears or rends, like you’d expect with animals. There’s just this . . .” He gestured at the zipper-like cut where the woman’s shoulder blades should have been, following a tree branch that stood in place of her spine.
“Do you think that Skinflint Jack did this himself? That he killed his family?” She stood on her heels and turned around, taking in the ossuary. “He sure felt guilty about it, then.”
“Looks that way. There’s no trace of even muscle or fat in here . . .” He poked around in the corpse’s shell.
“Oh, hell. You don’t think he . . . ate them? Like the Donner party?” Bile burned the back of her throat.
“Even if he did . . . it would have been one hell of a feat to get all the bones out without breaking them.” Gabe glanced back down at the body and began to fish around some more. “This bothers me.”
Petra lifted an eyebrow. “Just one thing bothers you?”
“It’s just impossible that . . . hmmm.” He paused and shone his light into the cavity. It passed through the transparent skin and bits of straw.
She inched closer to him. “What?”
Gabe reached in, with a look of concentration on his face. He pulled out his fist, fingers closed around something. He opened his hand, and there was a mineral specimen, an opaque, shiny silver cluster.
Curiosity overcame her squeamishness. She plucked it immediately from his hand and turned it over.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s antimony. Very, very pure antimony . . . I haven’t seen anything this perfect outside of a lab. When purified, it forms a starlike structure . . .” She traced the spines with her finger.
“The Star of Antimony,” Gabe murmured as she handed it to him. “In alchemy, it’s known as the Grey Wolf. There’s a series of illustrations of this in the old alchemical texts that show a king devoured by a wolf. When the wolf is burned, the king is resurrected from the ashes.”
“Lascaris had something to do with this?”
“He must have. I know that he gathered his materials for his experiments from unusual sources.” Gabe’s brow was in shadow. “Perhaps Jack sold his family to him.”
Petra
shook her head, uncomprehending.
“We know that Jack lied about what happened.” Gabe was clearly in his element here, wrist-deep in a mystery.
“I just can’t . . .” The air was getting close here, stifling, as she tried to wrap her mind around this horrible act. “Let’s go up.”
“Are you all right?” Gabe was looking at her now, the star and his autopsy forgotten.
“I just want to get topside before I barf.” She was embarrassed that he was looking at her this way, like she was more fragile than hundred-year-old corpses.
He laced his fingers together for her boot as she grasped the rope. He lifted as she climbed. She clung to the edge of the blackened fireplace and hauled herself up on the hearth, where Sig waited to slather her with kisses.
Where underground had been black and stifling, the wind howled whitely through the seams of the windows, spitting snow through the cracked panes of glass.
She wrapped her arms around Sig’s ruff, promising herself that she wasn’t going to cry. She wanted nothing more than to flee this place. It felt too still, like death and suppressed rage. She had the sense of wandering into a sacred place and desecrating it. No good could come of that.
Petra climbed to her feet and peered through the warped glass. Snow rattled against it like gravel.
She sank down to the floor.
They were trapped here, in this shrine to Skinflint Jack’s family.
She hoped that he wouldn’t return anytime soon.
Blinded by the whiteness of the storm, the wolves were lost in a colorless expanse.
Nine knew they had climbed a wind-whipped hill and descended into a new valley. The Stag had chased them there, and they’d slid downhill, the edges of the valley blotting out the grey orb of the sun before the storm swept in. The storm likely had little effect on the Stag, but it was deadly to the wolves. The nine-month-old pups were flagging, and they could no longer depend on their speed to deliver them from the Stag. They had to find shelter soon, had to, or they would die.