by Tim McGregor
Gantry eyed the lad with suspicion. “The wha?”
The boy blinked, astonished at the stranger’s ignorance. “The severed hand. Chopped off in a duel back in the old days, like a couple hundred years ago.”
Gantry dragged on his cigarette but the drizzle was dousing it. “Who lopped it off?”
“The other man in the duel, of course.”
“That’s just the story they’re telling you, son.” Gantry flung the cigarette away. “A quid says it was really his wife done it. Hacked off her husband’s mitt when he tried to sneak it up the milkmaid’s skirt.”
The boy simply blinked at him, his expression blank.
Behind the glass of the front doors, a woman in a grey jumper appeared and began to unlock the door. She smiled at the boy waiting outside.
“You should see it,” the boy said, watching the door like a hawk, eager to get in first. “It’s under glass, like. All brown and mummified, it is.”
Gantry fumed as the woman slowly turned the locks. Like a sprinter at the starting blocks, he’d be damned if this little twerp would be the first inside. He didn’t have a problem pushing little kids out of the way. Time for a bit of fun.
“You know what I heard about that mummified hand?”
Another lock turned. The woman moved like a tortoise.
“What?”
“You stare at that hand long enough,” Gantry said, one eye on the twisting lock, “it’ll start twitching. The fingers scratching at the glass to get at you.”
The door swung open. Finally. Gantry, ready to elbow the kid away.
“You’re fucking barmy, you are,” said the boy.
Drop-jawed, Gantry was taken aback for a tiny moment. Long enough. The little bastard scooted through first, past the woman holding the door open.
“Come in out of the rain,” said the woman, waving him inside. “Dreadful out there today, isn’t it?”
“Tah.” He stepped through, shook the rain from his coat.
“Is that your son?” she asked, nodding in the direction the boy scampered. “He seems quite eager, doesn’t he?”
About to sneer, Gantry suddenly grinned instead. An evil, spiteful grin. “Listen, the lad’s a bit trouble, you know. Shoplifts all the time. Watch him in the gift shop, yeah? And have him turn out his pockets before he leaves.”
Alongside shoving kids around, Gantry had absolutely no qualms about being petty.
Down on the lower level where the storage area was garrisoned behind a chipped counter, he found an older gent to answer his query.
“It was a stone box, about two feet wide, with glyphs scribed into it,” Gantry said. “It was dug up about three years ago. Brought here to be identified.”
The older man’s mouth popped open. “Wait a second. Was this the one they found during the road repair? Buried at the crossroads over on Tennyson?”
“That’s the one,” Gantry said. “It was an ossuary box, bones rattling inside.”
“Caused a bit of a stir, I remember.” The man adjusted his thick glasses, turning to the computer screen before him. “The staff didn’t much care for having it here.”
“What do you mean?”
“People started whispering that the bloody thing was haunted, didn’t they? Said they felt sick around it, or chilled or weak, what have you.”
“You too?” Gantry asked.
“Not my experience,” he said, tilting his head to look at the visitor over his glasses. “But then I don’t go in for that kind of thing. Ah, here it is.”
Gantry watched the man’s eyes move horizontally as he read. He wondered what the boy was doing now.
“Bad news, I’m afraid,” the man said. “The bloody thing was nicked from the premises.”
“Nicked? Who the hell would steal a tangle of old bones?”
The man shrugged. “God knows. People get up to all sorts of daft things, don’t they?”
“The police have anything to go on?”
“If they did, they didn’t let us know. I doubt it was top-drawer priority for them.”
Gantry’s mouth soured. He had hoped that the damn thing had simply been misplaced somewhere, or shipped off to some other facility. With the box stolen, his plan was screwed. He gave the gent a wave and turned toward the exit. “Thanks for the help.”
“My pleasure. What did you want it for anyway?”
“I was gonna steal it meself,” Gantry called back. “But someone beat me to it.”
~
The idea came from Tom. After showering and getting dressed, Billie still hadn’t come up with any plan for how to spend her birthday. Everyone else was working, because they had normal business hours, unlike herself. So the idea of spending it with Mockler or Kaitlin or Jen was out. Tammy had yet to return her call but that wasn’t unusual. She rarely did if she was busy with a shoot.
Outside the window, the wind was blowing hard, piling snow in sheets across the sidewalks. Not the best day for a walk but she needed to get out of the house. But where?
A thud against the floorboards. She turned around.
Tom had returned. He had knocked a book to the floor and sat hunched over it, turning the pages with a spindly finger.
She crossed to his side to see what he was looking at. “What do you have there?”
He glanced up at her as she knelt beside him before turning his attention back to the book. An old photography guide she had found at a church sale a year ago. Back when she was interested in photography. The book was mostly a beginner’s how-to manual, but the pages were filled with beautiful photographs of flowers and animals and foreign landscapes.
“I haven’t looked at this in a while,” she said.
She watched him as he turned the pages, noting what pictures he lingered over. He favoured outdoor shots of forests and mountains. Animals, too. Photographs of individual people or urban city scenes, held no interest for him. As he studied a picture of horses in a field, she couldn’t help wonder what he thought of each subject. She touched his hand, chilled and thin as it was, hoping for some connection to his thoughts. Psychic to psychic, as it were, but his thoughts remained closed to her.
Poor Tom stopped at another picture, a tiny exhale escaping his lips. A full page shot of a monarch butterfly, all vibrant orange and moist black. He seemed entranced by it, and that’s what gave her the idea.
“Do you like butterflies?” she asked. His focus remained on the picture, as if he hadn’t heard her.
Billie smiled at him, the idea growing warmer the more it fluttered around her brain pan. “Wanna see some real ones?”
An hour later, they were cruising down the Queen Elizabeth Highway in another car borrowed from Bruce’s garage. Her neighbour had grumbled about asking again so soon after the last time and Billie had to promise to make an extra grocery run for him this week. He relented, letting her drive off in a grey Cutlass that was almost white with splattered road salt.
Convincing Tom to get in the big car was a whole other matter. The boy sat hunched on the snow-swept steps, eyeing the vehicle warily as Billie held the passenger door open.
“We have to drive to where we’re going,” she said, mindful of how crazy she would appear to any passerby, talking to no one. “Well, I have to drive. You can probably fly or just teleport or whatever you do, but I need wheels. You can keep me company.”
The boy scratched at his armpit, looked down the street and then back to the big Oldsmobile.
“It’s totally worth it,” Billie said. “I promise.”
The half-boy hobbled forward on his hands in his peculiar trot and leaped into the passenger bucket.
They were there in less than an hour, off the highway and onto a curving road that bisected fields of white and snow capped trees. The border just a stone’s throw away, Niagara Falls a few minute’s drive south. The conservatory parking lot was empty save for three other cars. Perfect, Billie thought, tromping through the slush to the greenhouse-like atrium rising up from a cobblestone w
all. They’d have the place to themselves.
Admission was paid with the birthday money Maggie had sent, the boy following behind her through the entryway, eyes wary and unsure in this foreign place. Pushing through the heavy door to the conservatory proper, Billie watched his face to see his reaction.
She wasn’t disappointed.
The air inside was heavy and humid, like stepping out of frigid southern Ontario into the tropics. Verdant vegetation ran riot over walls and rocks, the gurgling shush of a waterfall reflecting off the glass panes of the greenhouse ceiling. Tropical flowers bloomed in the treacly warmth of a man-made rainforest and flitting through everything were the butterflies.
Thousands of fluttering insects filled the air, alighting from leaf to branch, dozens of different species. One couldn’t turn around without brushing against an orange monarch or feel a blue morpho dust a cheek with gossamer wings. Others flitted about with vibrant zebra patterns or yellow orbs that resembled the eyes of an owl. Magic lived and breathed in this glass dome of tropic air, the butterflies like the artificial snow in a shaken snowglobe.
Billie watched the boy closely and the expression on his face took her breath away. Flickers of awestruck wonder and sheer delight played over his features, alongside what Billie took to be a profound reverence. A holy moment of joy and astonishment. For the first time since she had encountered this small ghost-child, Billie stood testament to an almost alien happiness gracing his small, dark eyes.
Poor Tom ran after the butterflies, climbing trees and rocks with an almost simian grace, his phantom blood trailing behind him. He grasped at the insects but they fluttered away from his cold reach.
“Be still,” she whispered to him, craning her neck up to see him in the folds of a dwarf palm. “Stay totally still. Let them come to you.”
The boy nodded at her and became a statue in the trees. So still that he became another twisted branch. The butterflies winged close but flapped away, perhaps sensing the cold seeping from his limbs.
Billie frowned. He needed to experience the fragile grace of a butterfly on his hand, the odd bond and protective zeal that swole one’s breast in that moment. She looked around her but the two other visitors inside the conservatory with them were nowhere in sight. Stretching over a rock, she plucked a few petals from a brightly coloured flower.
“Tom, come here.”
He clambered down with ease, as if the jungle trees were a natural habitat, and dangled from a branch above her. She tucked petals behind his ear and a few more in his teeth, under his cap. “They like bright colours. And the smell of the flower. Be still. They’ll come to you.”
Poor Tom swung back up and became still, the flower petals limping from his ear and teeth. A dark-winged insect, known as the Small Postman, alighted onto his nose, its forelegs testing the petal in his mouth. More of them came, settling onto his cheeks and hands, slowly wafting their wings open and closed.
The boy swivelled his head slowly until his gaze locked onto the woman looking up at him. The tears flash-froze on his pale cheeks before they could fall.
After a time, the chill of his flesh drove them off. He clambered back down to the paved path between the hanging boughs of moss. Billie settled onto a bench under a hibiscus bush and the boy joined her, huddling close. She put her arm around his narrow shoulders and then she whispered into the deformed cauliflower of his left ear.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
Chapter 18
LATE AFTERNOON SAW a break in the clouds and the low winter sun blasted through the tall windows with crisp, almost sterilizing light. The loft apartment overlooking the city seemed empty and deserted until something on the sofa stirred, roused by the antiseptic sunlight.
Pushing up into a sitting position, Christina doubled over and put her head between her knees until the throbbing in her brain eased off. The appearance of a bright sun on a winter day should have pushed back the gloom but when she looked around, it only illuminated the chaos. Paper was everywhere, scattered across the floor, the table, every chair. Oversized pages of fine cotton fibre paper ripped loose from their sketchbooks. More of it spilt across her work table, on the cushions of the sofa next to her. Her feet stepped onto it as she rose and moved into the rays of sunlight. Squinting, she turned around and almost gasped at what she saw on the south wall.
Her face, reflected back to her a hundred times over. The sketch paper was pinned to the wall, covering every inch like some madman’s wallpaper. Each page a self-portrait, done rapidly, almost maniacally, over the last two weeks. A new direction for her work, a new phase. Equal parts expression and documentation, what she wanted to record was the deterioration of her own mind as it displayed on her face. The darkness, the ever-present depression, settling in like snowfall in winter. Heavy and cold, and here for a good, long spell.
Her breath made a sharp intake at the ghastliness on display, at the regression of it. Each portrait, rendered in graphite and acrylic, a few in oil, revealed a slow breakdown, the eyes growing more manic while the lines under them grew darker. Her mouth, neutral and plain at first, dipped further into a scowl, into deeply etched lines. The muscles sagged, the crow’s feet deepening. A stop-motion Dorian Gray.
What was she doing? This was madness, writ large and illustrated like cells in an animation reel.
Christina turned away from the wall but everywhere she looked she could not escape her own face. The portraits lay strewn over the floor and taped to every wall. She could not escape her own face, reflected back to her like a funhouse mirror.
She dropped to her knees, jostling the coffee table as she went down. The wine glass fell over, spilling stale red over the table and dripping from the edge. It stained the paper of another sketch on the rug, shading it in purple. Standing the glass upright, she noted there was still vino in the bottle. Not much, but enough to wash down the pills.
~
The image rippling in the water of the scrying pool revealed a serpent. Crudely rendered, with heavy line work like that of a medieval woodcut, the snake coiled around a stick or maybe a sword. Gantry studied the watery image, trying to make sense of it before it vanished.
Scrying pools were like that, temperamental and short lived. The blood, drawn from a small slice into the heel of his hand, dripped into the water and roiled around in curling spires, forming an image in thin red lines. The serpent.
“Come on,” he growled. “Show me more.”
The blood diffused into the water completely, the serpent vanishing. Gantry scratched the back of his head, trying to place the image of the snake coiled round a stick. He’d seen it before somewhere but he was buggered if he could recall where. A book? Some poisoned grimoire of verboten knowledge?
“Crap,” he said, almost snapping his fingers. “It’s a pub.”
Flinging the water into the ditch, he climbed into the ruined Fiesta and drove back into the village proper. Five minutes later, he parked in a cobbled laneway and stood before the yellow-lit windows of a public house. The sign over the door was a shield carved in wood, showing a serpent coiled around a broadsword. Below this whittled wooden image was the name of the pub, The Brass Whistle, which, as far as Gantry could tell, had nothing to do with the snake imagery.
No matter. The scrying had provided a clue to the whereabouts of the witch’s bones, stolen from the repository in the museum. She was here, old Margaret, somewhere inside the pub.
Pushing through the heavy door and into the dimly lit room, he could almost smell her among the reek of stale beer and bargain counter perfume. The patrons huddled over their drinks seemed ordinary enough; a few older men, three yobs watching the telly and a table of women chatting over gin and tonics. Gantry tilted his head up to the tarred beams of the ceiling. She was up there somewhere, hidden away on the floor above.
Crossing to the back where the toilets were, he found the stairwell and went up. A narrow hallway with four closed doors. His gut pushed him toward the last one at the end. Locked,
but the lock was old and it twisted under his grip with the sound of metal snapping. Inside, he found three young men comatose around an ornate glass bong. Hypnotic trance music played from a cheap sound system, the room bathed crimson from an overhead red bulb. The party was well underway, apparently.
He stepped over the splayed legs of the sleeping men, scanning the cluttered and filthy room. Then he went still.
“Oh, Margaret,” he wheezed. “What have they done to you?”
The dusty bones of the witch were wired into some half-arsed shrine and bedecked in tinsel and poncy crystals. Amateurish wish-knots and twee dreamcatchers. It was godawful, like a school art project created by a deranged child. Gantry looked back at the three napping stooges and wondered which one of them was the brain-damaged artist behind this tacky altar.
He set to work on it, unwinding the wires that held the bones in place. “All right, luv. Let’s get you out of there.”
“Oy!”
One of the clowns had woken up, looking up at the intruder with heavy-lidded eyes. “Who the fuck’re you, then?”
“I’m from the Cultural Ministry, son,” Gantry said, pulling another bone free from its rigging. “Your masterpiece here has been officially declared ugly-as-dog-shit.”
“Don’t fucking touch that!” The droopy-eyed man lurched up from his beanbag chair. “It’s dangerous, like!”
Gantry hit fast, kicking the man down. The bong fell over, spilling foul, blackish water on the soiled carpet. The man struggled to get up but Gantry stomped his head and he stayed down. The other two gents slept on, snoring obliviously.
Unfastening the rest of the bones took another minute. Setting the remains aside, he flung the hideous shrine to the floor in a crash of glass and scattered beads.
He turned back to the man moaning and rolling on the floor. “Where’s the ossuary?”
“Wha?”
“The box she was in,” Gantry barked. “Big stone thing. Where’d you put it?”