The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  “Helena, it’s Augustus!” I had an unwelcome flash of insight: that I was watching the distillation of the nine years of their marriage, Helena never looking at Blaine, always looking for something else, Blaine pleading and coaxing, talking always to her back, to the amazing sunset river of her hair.

  “Why isn’t Ruthie here?” Helena said petulantly, as if she had not heard Blaine at all.

  Blaine stepped into the circle. I do not think he realized at that point what he was doing, for the warnings in the Mortui Liber Magistri against the caster crossing the circle were dire and uncompromising, and I know that he heard me when I explained them.

  “Blaine!” I lunged forward, but I could not catch him in time; I had drawn too far away from the circle when Helena began to manifest. My fingers brushed the back of his shirt with no more force than a butterfly’s wing, and he was beyond help. The instant Blaine was within the circle, Helena turned. She had heard him all along, had known to a nicety—as she ever had—how to get him to do what she wanted.

  Her face was ghastly. It was not simply that she was, all too clearly, still dead. It was that she was dead and yet animate. Her face was gray and stiff and bloodless, but it was filled with a monstrous vitality. Blaine had not brought Helena back to life; he had done something far, far worse.

  I suppose it is possible that the thing in the circle was not Helena Pryde Blaine at all, that it was a demon or some other sort of inhuman spirit. My own belief, however, is that it was the quintessence of Helena, the thing in her that Blaine had never been able to see, and that I had been powerless to show him: the greedy selfishness of a child who can never be satisfied with her own toys if another child has a toy, no matter how shabby, that she does not. Blaine was just another toy to her, and one that bored her.

  He saw the truth of her then, the insatiable, heartless greed, although he had never seen it before. He recoiled from her and tried, far too late, to back out of the circle.

  “Kiss me, darling Auggie,” said Helena, in her breathless, mocking way. She caught his arms and drew him toward her. Blaine stiffened and made a noise that would probably have been a scream if he could have gotten enough air into his lungs before her lips closed on his. When she let him go—five loathsome, endless seconds later—he fell down dead.

  I was pressed into the corner, the cold damp bricks prodding at my back like angry fingers. My whole desire at that moment was that Helena should ignore me as she always had.

  She looked at me. The face was livid and hard, but the eyes were still hers. “Boothie,” she said.

  I moaned, somewhere in the back of my throat. It was all the noise I could make.

  She cocked her head to one side, a hideous parody of the way she had been accustomed to flirt. “I don’t suppose I can talk you into the circle, Boothie, can I?”

  My head was shaking “no,” wobbling back and forth on my neck as if it belonged to someone else.

  “No,” she said, with a little moue of disappointment. “Auggie could have, I’ll bet. But you never liked me, did you?”

  “I hated you, Helena,” I said, the truth croaking out of me unwilled.

  She actually smiled then, and I would give anything I possess if I could stop seeing her smile in my dreams. The smile was hers, the little, gloating smirk that I had always loathed, but the dead stiffness of her face made it a rictus. “I don’t hold that against you, Boothie. I always knew you were jealous.” She tittered. “Boothie and Ruthie—Auggie and I both had our little lapdogs, didn’t we?”

  I should have held my tongue, but my hatred of her, my crawling revulsion, was greater than my fear. “Yours killed you,” I said.

  “And now Auggie’s has killed him. So I guess we’re even.”

  She was starting to fade; with the death of its caster, the ritual was losing potency. She noticed it herself. “Phooey,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes bright with all the malice of the living Helena Pryde Blaine. “Are you going to have a go at calling Auggie back, Boothie? I’m sure you could do it. He always said you were the smartest man he knew.” With that, she was gone, dissolved into the stinking smoke, leaving nothing behind her but her husband’s corpse.

  It took me until dawn to clean the cellar, washing away the blood and dirt and other materials. I had to lift Blaine to clean under him, but after that I left him where he was. His body looked sixty-two now instead of thirty-two, and there was not a mark on him: nothing to show that he had not fallen down dead of a heart attack. He was cold and stiff, and obviously had been dead much longer than five hours, although he had died only seven minutes before two o’clock.

  He had been living entirely alone, without even servants—he had dismissed them all when his interest in necromancy began to devolve into obsession—and that was my good fortune. I took away the paraphernalia of the ritual and threw all its repellant ingredients into the river on my way home.

  Then I waited.

  Blaine was found four days later. One of his sisters finally became worried enough about him to use her key to his house. No one, except apparently for me, had heard from him in over a week. His family had known nothing of his dabblings in necromancy. He had told no one of his latest purchase—save of course the book dealer—and no one at all of his decision to consult me. There were, as I myself had seen, no signs of violence on his body, and the coroner’s judgment was that his heart had simply given out: he was awfully young for such a death, but he had been under a severe strain for a very long time, and these things did happen . . . If someone had gone exploring through Blaine’s effects, they might have found evidence to suggest another possibility, but his family did not wish any further inquiry, and the Blaines are powerful. No one else asked questions, and I heard later that the book dealer who had supplied Blaine’s mania had left the city unexpectedly and precipitously.

  My culpability was not discovered, nor even suspected. Only I knew, and the things that came to find me in my dreams. They knew and I knew that Helena was right. I had killed Blaine, just as surely as Rutherford Chapin had killed her. The guilt and the loneliness were all but unbearable; I was as comfortless as Cain.

  And all the while Helena’s last question—Are you going to have a go at calling Auggie back, Boothie?—echoed meanly through my head. I could repeat the ritual. I had kept the book, and my notes, and I had watched Blaine. I could bring Blaine back.

  I wanted to. I wanted to bring Blaine back, just as Blaine had wanted to bring Helena back. I wanted to see him again, to hear his voice. More importantly, I wanted to talk to him and to know that he was finally and forever hearing me, not the version of me that lived in his head. I wanted Blaine to love me as I had always loved him.

  I sat by the fireplace in my living room, the book and my sheaf of notes in my lap. It will be different, said a voice in my head—the voice, I suppose, of Blaine’s “Boothie.” Helena was greedy and loveless. Blaine is my friend. Blaine would never want to hurt me. And I won’t make the mistakes that Blaine did.

  It said such wonderful, plausible things, that voice, and I wanted to believe it very badly. It was my hatred of Helena that saved me, my absolute, unassailable conviction that she would never have put any idea in my head that might have made me happy. I remembered her eyes, remembered her smirk, and with a sudden convulsive motion, flung the Mortui Liber Magistri and all my notes onto the fire.

  The notes went up at once. For a terrible moment I thought the book was not going to burn at all, and I grabbed the poker and shoved it deeper into the fire. It was an old book, its pages dry and brittle. Once they caught, they were quickly consumed, my last link with Blaine destroyed, transformed in seconds into a pile of ashes and a bitter, noxious reek.

  The sound of them burning was like the sound of Helena laughing.

  THE VENEBRETTI NECKLACE

  I

  There were fingers in the wall.

  I was lifting a box when I saw them, saw the gap between the bricks where the mortar had fallen away and then the
whitish-yellow gleam of bone. I lost my grip on the box; it fell and broke, sending yellowing holograph pages in all directions.

  “Really, Mr. Booth!” Mr. Lucent said crossly.

  “Bones,” I said, still staring at that crack in the bricks. “There . . . in the wall.”

  “Bones? The dust has gone to your head.”

  “No, really.” I wedged my fingers into the crack, cringing from the possibility of touching the bones; all the mortar was cracking and weak, and the upper brick came away easily.

  “Oh!” said Mr. Lucent in a sort of gasp. “There’s a person back there!”

  There, clearly visible, were the bones of a hand, clawed into the absence of mortar as if whoever they had belonged to had died trying to dig through that brick wall with his bare hands.

  “There was,” I said.

  Mr. Lucent and I were in that storeroom only because of Dr. Starkweather’s inventory, which had been eating the time and energy of the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum staff for months now. Dr. Starkweather had come in February and instituted his comprehensive reforms amid a searing barrage of contempt and invective; it was now mid-June, and there was some faint hope that we could have a preliminary, albeit woefully inadequate, catalogue ready by his six-month anniversary. We had started at the top of the museum, in its extensive attics, the ballrooms of the bats, and worked our way down with desperate, slipshod haste, aware of Dr. Starkweather smoldering in his office like an unappeasable pagan volcano god. At the end of May, we had reached the basements.

  The Parrington’s basements were an empire unto themselves, a sprawling labyrinth of storage rooms and sub-basements, steam tunnels and abandoned stretches of sewer. No one knew the full extent of them now, although there were rumors that old Mr. Chastain had had maps that he had burned in a fit of pique when the previous museum director, Dr. Evans, had forced him to retire.

  It had been discovered years earlier that watchmen and janitors could not be paid sufficient money to make them include the basements in their rounds. They complained of drafts and dampness and strange noises, and it was beyond argument that the electric lights in the basements—installed by the stubbornest of all the stubborn men who had headed the Parrington—burned out at twice the rate of the lights in other parts of the museum buildings. People going down to the basements told the docents at the information desk—perhaps half a joke, perhaps a little less—to send search parties if they had not returned within an hour.

  This particular room—long and narrow, more like a corridor than a room—was in the second level of the basements, as near as I could reckon it beneath the Entomology Department and its horrid collection of South American cockroaches. The unfortunate junior curator who had been detailed to scout the basements had observed that this room was full of books and boxes of papers, and so its more thorough investigation had fallen to Mr. Lucent and me, as the senior archivists of the Department of Rare Books. We had been down there three hours before I saw the bones, and were hot, miserable, and thickly coated in dust.

  “Wh-what should we do?” said Mr. Lucent, staring at the hole in the wall, the handkerchief he had been using to clean his glasses pressed to his mouth.

  “I, er, I don’t know. I suppose . . . we have to tell someone, don’t we?”

  “God, yes—we can’t just brick him back up and leave him there, Mr. Booth!”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said, mostly to my shoes, as I followed Mr. Lucent back up toward the daylight. We were climbing the stairs from the first basement to the ground floor before I realized I was still carrying the brick, and at that point there seemed no sense in setting it down.

  In the storeroom where the basement stairs debouched, Mr. Lucent stopped. “Who should we tell, do you think? I don’t . . . I don’t like to bother Dr. Starkweather.”

  I had no more wish than he did to disturb Dr. Starkweather with the news that we had found a skeleton in the basements. Dr. Starkweather did not like me. I said, “Major Galbraith?”

  Major Galbraith was in charge of the Museum’s custodial and security staff; he was a dour old veteran, no more in awe of Dr. Starkweather than he had been of Dr. Evans. And I was sure that even news of a body in the basement would not shock him.

  “Yes, of course,” Mr. Lucent said, beaming with relief, and we emerged from the storeroom, turned down a cross-corridor, and came to Major Galbraith’s office. Mr. Lucent knocked quickly, as if to get it done before either of us could change our minds. I was strongly reminded of the nervous sensation of guilt I had felt whenever I approached a master’s office at my prep school, regardless of the reason I was there.

  “Come in!” called Major Galbraith. Mr. Lucent, the brick, and I entered his office.

  He listened imperturbably, digging at his pipe, while Mr. Lucent explained our find. When he was in possession of what few facts we had, he sighed, put his pipe down, and said, “Suppose I’d better come have a look. Have you notified Dr. Starkweather?”

  “We, um,” said Mr. Lucent.

  “I would, if I were you,” Major Galbraith said, with a quirk in one beetling eyebrow. “You go do that, Mr. Lucent. I fancy Mr. Booth can show me what there is to see.”

  “Oh, yes, rather,” said Mr. Lucent and left distractedly. Major Galbraith shot me a look I could not decipher and said, “All right, then, Mr. Booth. Show me your skeleton.”

  We made our way back to the basement room in silence. I had nothing to say, and I felt a greater and greater fool carrying that brick. It would have made more sense to take one of the finger bones, as proof that Mr. Lucent and I had not hallucinated the entire affair. I felt that Major Galbraith did not quite believe us.

  But we came to the storeroom, and I pointed to the gap in the brickwork. Major Galbraith went across and took a look. “Hmmph,” he said. “Finger bones, sure enough.”

  After a moment, I said, “What do we do now?”

  “Wait for Dr. Starkweather,” Major Galbraith said and pulled his pipe out again.

  “Er,” I said.

  “Yes, Mr. Booth?” he said, his eyebrows shooting up alarmingly.

  “The . . . the paper,” I said apologetically.

  “Oh, yes. I’ll wait outside then, shall I?”

  He went out. Since he had not invited me to join him, I stayed where I was. After some time—I hope that it was less than a minute, but I do not know—I pulled myself together and began collecting the contents of the box I had dropped, at last putting down that ghastly brick. The papers were letters. As I picked up the fourth one, I placed the signature as that of Jephthah Strong, a particularly obscure visionary and poet of the previous century. Another time, I might have tried to deduce the identity of his correspondent, but I was having trouble merely keeping my mind on my task. I kept catching myself looking at that unpleasant gap in the bricks, as if I were expecting the hand to reach forward, or the hand’s owner to peer out at me. The latter fancy made my neck crawl, and I was relieved when Major Galbraith stuck his head in and said, “That’ll be His Nibs coming now.”

  His warning gave me just time to put the tidied stack of letters on top of the nearest box, and then Dr. Starkweather was in the room, striding across to stare at the hole in the bricks, his expression outraged, as if someone had done this to him on purpose. Mr. Lucent came in behind him, along with Major Galbraith and Dr. Starkweather’s secretary, Mr. Hornsby.

  Dr. Starkweather rounded on us, demanding, “Who is it?”

  “Er,” I said.

  “What?” said Mr. Lucent.

  “Dr. Starkweather, don’t you think—” began Mr. Hornsby.

  “Well, clearly that’s the most important question,” Dr. Starkweather said. “Who is this fellow, and how did he get bricked up in our wall?”

  Major Galbraith coughed. “I myself was wondering what we were going to do with him.”

  “I’ve sent a message to Dr. Ainsley,” Dr. Starkweather said. Dr. Ainsley was the staff archaeologist. “He’ll know what to do about extracting h
im.”

  “Should we . . . ” I said and stopped under the bombardment of Dr. Starkweather’s furiously blue eyes.

  “Yes, Mr. Booth?” said Dr. Starkweather.

  “The . . . I was only . . . that is, the police?”

  “A cogent thought,” said Major Galbraith.

  “Nonsense,” said Dr. Starkweather. “This clearly isn’t a recent crime—if it is a crime.”

  “Oh, but surely—!” Mr. Lucent protested.

  “Yes, Mr. Lucent?”

  “Well, I just—I frankly don’t see how this could be an accident.”

  “We will wait for Dr. Ainsley,” Dr. Starkweather said with a fulminating glare at all four of us.

  “Yes, Dr. Starkweather,” said Mr. Hornsby, whose particular gift was for placation. We waited in awkward silence. Mr. Lucent noticed my stack of letters and moved across to pick them up, but I could tell he was not looking at them, even though his eyes were fixed on the top page. I edged away from the hole in the wall, away from the stiff and savage figure of Dr. Starkweather, and gave myself occupation by examining the spines of a stack of books—although I was not looking at them any more than Mr. Lucent was looking at Jephthah Strong’s letters.

  In the end, it was not Dr. Ainsley who appeared. He was much occupied, and had been for weeks, by a box of Greek potsherds someone had found at the back of a broom cupboard on the second floor; he dispatched in his place his senior assistant, Miss Coburn. She was in her thirties, tanned from field-work, with curly, sandy-red hair that habitually escaped from its pins to hang in fine strands around her face. The common remark about her in the museum—apart from the usual, stupid calumnies about spinsters and bluestockings—was that she knew more about Dr. Ainsley’s work than he did.

  “Well, Dr. Starkweather?” she said. “Dr. Ainsley said he couldn’t make heads or tails of your message.”

  “I should think the situation would be clear to a child of five,” Dr. Starkweather said and pointed. “There.”