“Well, some of us get to go home sooner than others, I guess. Which is why I’ve come to fetch you, actually. I’d like your help with the catafalque.”
“The cata-what?”
“The lowering.”
“Oh, sure,” I say, still having no idea what he means.
“Good,” he says. “And please don’t call me sir. Or His Lordship. Or any of that fancy poppycock. I get enough of that from Riley. Just call me Finn, and we’ll get along fine. Now, you said your name was Aubrey?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, then quickly adding: “I mean, Finn.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Aubrey,” he says, bowing slightly. “And what’s your name, young man?”
“Jimmy.”
“Aubrey and Jimmy. Good solid names. I’ll cheer for you in the games. Very well, then. Shall we go and do our duty?”
We follow him across the great hall, through a large pair of double doors and into a chamber room where a corpse lies in waiting, its body wrapped in a thin, white sheet and its head resting on a pillow. It’s an old woman, her thin skin gray and sagging, but I can see the resemblance in her bone structure. She must be Finn’s mother. The old man we saw tending the garden through the breakfast window earlier kneels beside the corpse, securing the sheet corners with pins.
“I brought some strong hands to help, Angus,” Finn says.
Angus looks up without expression, nods to us, and turns back to his work.
“I promise he’s not being rude,” Finn says to us. “It’s just that Angus doesn’t speak. However, he hears just fine. Don’t you, Angus?” Angus nods. “Be a couple of champs there, you two, and grab the head,” Finn continues. “I’ll take the other end, and perhaps Angus here can get the door.”
Jimmy and I hesitate, making nervous starts toward the corpse, but not committing. Then I see that she’s resting on a moveable board. Relieved that I don’t have to actually touch the body, I grab a side of the board near her head, and Jimmy grabs the other. Then Finn snatches up the board at her feet, and we lift her from the platform and walk toward the door. She’s surprisingly light.
As we exit the chamber and cross the great hall, Finn walks backwards, always keeping her feet pointed in the direction that we’re heading. As he faces us over the corpse, he talks as if it were just another day and just another chore.
“I was sorry to see the snow,” he says. “It’s early this year. Might delay the games by a few days, but don’t worry, it’ll melt. Have you any interest in joining the hunt tomorrow morning?”
“The hunt?” I ask.
“The men won’t mind, I promise. We always celebrate a passing with a feast, and since you’re here and helping today, I see no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy the hunt tomorrow.”
When we arrive at end of the hall, Angus opens the same door Jimmy and I knocked on last night, and we carry the body outside. The castle exterior looks different in the light of day. Less frightening. The path has been cleared of snow, the steps sanded for traction. I can imagine in the summertime it’s a gorgeous seaside spectacle of green lawns and flowers.
Several rough-looking men stand by the seawall, assembling a wooden crane-like contraption, wheeled out from a nearby stone shed. The water beyond the seawall is calm and dappled with dull silver as the sun tries to burn through high clouds in gray skies. Somewhere out there is the submarine, hovering beneath the gentle waves. I look to the edges of the seawall as our landmarks and try to triangulate where I think it should be. It’s not as far out as I thought, but still an awfully long swim in the freezing black of night.
When we reach the last terrace, Finn steers us to the crane and lies the board in front of it. With all that timber scaffolding surrounding the corpse, it almost looks like the funeral pyre that I built in the cove, except the machine is connected with iron joints and iron hinges and the wear marks on the wood give it the appearance of something well used.
Finn thanks us and heads back into the castle, leaving us to watch as the men finish erecting the crane. I can’t discern its purpose, though. With a long, weighted crossbeam hinged in the middle, it almost looks like photos of catapults I’ve seen, except I can’t imagine hurling a dead body from a catapult.
The men eye us as they work, seemingly annoyed by our presence there. When their work on the crane is done, they return to the shed and wheel out a cast-stone firebox with an iron kettle suspended above it. While they load the box with wood and light a fire, one of them carries the kettle down the steps and scoops it full of seawater. With the kettle of sea water warming over the fire, the men drift off toward the shed and pass around a pouch, dipping something out and stuffing it into their lips and proceeding to spit on the ground while they visit.
People begin arriving in ones and twos. They drift down from the castle, carrying little pine wreaths woven with bright fabric bows. Each new visitor gazes a moment at the deceased and lays their wreath at the base of the machine. Then they mingle, discussing mundane things, mostly the weather.
“Is this how they go?”
“How what goes?” Jimmy asks.
“Funerals?”
“Pretty much so,” he says. “But we usually had a day of silence. Then we’d tell stories about whoever died ’round the fire. What’d ya’ll do?”
“We never had funerals.”
“You didn’t?”
“We just gathered at the platform and said goodbye when people left to retire.”
After the last stragglers arrive, Finn comes out from the castle wearing a crown of pine branches on his head and an elaborately stitched cape. He carries an iron helmet attached to the end of a thick chain. Riley follows him, ringing a bell. The guests fall quiet as Finn descends the steps and approaches the machine. As I watch Finn move through the small crowd, it becomes clear to me that these must be his relatives. They have the same high cheek bones and wide-set eyes.
Finn bends over his mother’s corpse, at least I assume it must be his mother, and caresses her gray and wrinkled cheek. Then he lifts the iron helmet on its chain and unclasps the sides and opens it like a clam shell on hinges. He slides the helmet over her head and closes and latches it again. Then he lifts the chain and hooks it to a rope running through a pulley on one end of the crane’s main beam.
The corpse lying there wearing an iron helmet attached to the crane by a chain is an unsettling image, but the spectators seem bothered not at all, as if it were a common occurrence. I’m busy watching their faces when a ratcheting sound turns me back to the Finn at the contraption.
Finn is pulling on a rope fed through pulleys and raising the corpse off the ground by her head. It looks like a strange resurrection. The chain brings her to a seated position with her arms still crossed at her chest, either pinned by the loose sheet or locked that way in some kind of death rigor. Then the chain continues pulling her up, until she stands, hanging woodenly from the crane like some medieval puppet dancer as she twists on her tiptoes. When she’s completely suspended, Finn ties off the rope and produces a knife from his tunic and bends down and slashes open her heels. No blood flows, but the flesh is flayed open to the yellow bone. I see Jimmy wince beside me. And he’s no stranger to gore.
Several of the workers join Finn and help him push the crane toward the seawall. The crowd moves with it, following the dangling corpse like a prize and scooping up their wreaths as they go. Jimmy and I stay put and watch from the elevated steps. They stop the crane just short of the seawall edge and one of the workers chalks the wheels with wooden wedges. Then they swing the armature out over the water.
The second the dangling corpse’s shadow hits the water, the sharks arrive. They rise to the surface in a boil of blue fins, their shadows gliding back and forth beneath the hanging body as if summoned by a dinner bell.
Jimmy and I turn to look at one another, our shared horror reflected in the other’s eyes.
“You think?”
“I’ll bet it was,” Jimmy says.
&nb
sp; I look at my scabbed-over calf.
“But it wasn’t a bite.”
“No,” Jimmy says. “But their skin is rough as sandpaper.”
The thought of swimming past those sharks in the black of night makes me sick to my stomach. Almost as sick as watching what I know is about to happen.
Finn unties the rope and lowers the corpse slowly on its chain. The body turns left, then right, as if taking a moment to acknowledge each of the visitors through the iron eyeholes in the mask. Then her filleted heels hit the water and she sinks slowly from view until even the mask is submerged.
The sharks seem to hit the line at all once.
The chain pulls the rope taught, jerking back and forth in a froth of thrashing tails and white water. The crane strains, the timbers creak, the wheels slide a few inches against the chocks. A light breeze carries a spray of saltwater mist to my nose. I can’t decide whether they’re honoring the dead by returning her to the sea, or simply feeding their pet sharks.
It’s horrific, but not so much so when I think about what I saw done to my father in Eden, or to Jimmy’s family in the cove. This woman was old, and she obviously died of natural causes with her son at her bedside. And if this is their way of disposing of the corpse, then who am I to judge? There are many questions I’d like to ask, however, but I won’t risk giving away the fact that we’re not from around here, since nobody seems to suspect yet that we came from off the island.
The strain on the chain softens and the thrashing withers to an occasional tail breaking the water. Finn returns to the pulley and wrenches the chain up from the depths. Nothing remains except the head inside the iron helmet and a stump of vertebral column protruding where her neck had been. Finn undoes the clasps, opens the helmet, and removes his mother’s head and holds it cradled in his hands. He seems to be smiling and crying at the same time.
The people walk up to him one by one and gaze into the lifeless eyes of the severed head, before tossing their wreaths into the water. When all the wreaths are tossed and floating, Finn carries the head to the firebox, kisses it once on the lips, and drops it into the boiling kettle of water.
Then he turns to address the crowd:
“Thank you all very much indeed for coming. The feast shall be tomorrow evening, here as usual. And, of course, you’re each invited. Anyone who wishes to join the hunt should meet us at the stables half an hour prior to sunrise.”
Finn strides off into the castle with his cape billowing out behind him. The crowd drifts away. And we’re left alone with the boiling head and a few workers tending to the fire. I step closer and look into the pot. Hair swirls in the steaming water, and the severed head slowly turns to face me, an air bubble escaping her gaping mouth and rising to the surface like a silent cry for help. Then the head turns, and the face is gone.
The castle is deserted when we return. No sign of Finn, Riley, or Angus anywhere. We find Junior slumbering in front of the fireplace with the deerhounds, as if he’d always been among them. I slump down on the sofa to think.
“I’m glad now that the professor threw him out,” Jimmy says, kneeling in front of the fire and scratching Junior’s ears.
“You don’t think he did that on purpose?” I ask.
“I know he sure didn’t wanna be scoopin’ his poop.”
“Still,” I say, “Junior could’ve drowned.”
“That’s pro’ly what he was hopin’ for.”
“You never did like the professor, did you?”
“I dun’ like nobody who has anythin’ to do with the Park Service. And I never will.”
“Then let’s remember why we’re here,” I say. “We need to find that encryption key and stop the drones. Let’s go take a closer look at the David.”
Later, after our search yields nothing new, I lie in bed and wonder where the encryption key could be. The only thing I can think is that it must somehow be hidden inside the marble in the David’s right hand—perhaps in some kind of memory chip, or etched on a piece of inserted metal. But Jimmy and I didn’t discover any obvious patch marks in the marble.
It’s late and I can’t sleep again. I’m tempted to creep down the passageway to Jimmy’s room, but I can’t think of anything to say if he’s awake. Instead, I think about Hannah back at the Foundation. I wonder how she’s getting along with Red. I wonder if she worries about me. Then my thoughts turn to the island and these strange people. How long have they been here? How is Radcliffe connected to them? I wonder about this hunt tomorrow and these games that Lord Finn thinks we’ve come for. There must be a decent size population spread around the island since he didn’t seem to question where we came from.
I lie in bed and think about all kinds of things, which is fine with me as long as I’m not thinking about sharks.
CHAPTER 13
The Hunt
Just a hint of blue dawn rims the eastern horizon.
Wearing borrowed wool coats, our bellies filled with eggs and hot tea, and our ears filled with wishes of good luck from Riley, Jimmy and I join the men at the stables.
The horses stand in a row stomping the cold ground and snorting smoke from their black muzzles while the men work at cinching saddles and looping metal bits into their mouths. I’ve never seen a horse in the flesh before, and I stand a safe distance away and smell the manure and leather and hay.
Finn comes down from the castle, leading the deerhounds on a leash. Junior takes up the rear, trotting along untethered. Finn smiles at us as he passes, apparently pleased that we took him up on his invitation. He hands the hounds off to one of the men and walks the row of horses, inspecting them. Then he takes the leash back and mounts the lead horse and ties the leash to its saddle horn. The men wait for his nod, then mount their horses and sit atop them, looking down on Jimmy and me.
Two horses remain unseated.
Jimmy steps forward, places his foot in the stirrup, and swings into the saddle as if he’d done it a hundred times before. I approach my horse more cautiously. Just as I get my foot in the stirrup, the horse sidesteps away, and I have to hop along to keep from falling. The men laugh. It takes me three tries to get up. When I finally do, Jimmy has to reach over a hand to keep me from sliding off the other side.
“Grip with yer knees,” he whispers.
“You’ve done this before?”
He shakes his head no.
Is there anything he can’t do, I wonder.
Finn sets his horse moving down the snow-covered road with the deerhounds prancing along at his side. The other men fall in behind him. Jimmy and I take up the rear, our horses fortunately needing little direction from us. Junior runs back and forth along the line, visibly excited to be on an adventure.
We leave the castle road where it turns east, cutting due north instead and slugging across a snowy field toward the hills rising in the distance. The snow has frozen over in the night, and the horses’ hooves crunch through it with high steps that kick up little showers of crystal powder. The deerhounds lope through the deep snow with their long legs, and Junior is smart enough to trail behind in the path already trampled.
As we climb to higher ground, the snow thins, and soon we enter a narrow gorge surrounded by rocky ridges and follow a stream upward. I try to do what Jimmy told me and grip with my knees. But when Finn holds his hand up, the procession comes to a halt, and I fall forward and nearly slide off my horse. I regain my balance in the saddle and follow everyone’s gaze up to where the ridgeline is backlit by the rising sun. There stands the silhouette of a stag, its horns reaching like branches into the pink morning sky. We hold our ground and watch for a while. I smell the wet grass beneath the melting snow. The only sound is clinking tack, the horses’ deep breathing, and the soft trickle of water running down the stream.
Then I blink and the stag is gone.
When we reach the ridge where the stag had stood, a world of highland beauty opens up before us. Hills of heather, their summits blown free of snow. Gorgeous outcroppings of rock standi
ng like sentinels in the treeless land. Glens and valleys, shaded purple with deep drifts of snow. Pink light hovers over it all, making the scene appear like something from a dream that might slip away any moment. But there’s no sign anywhere of the stag.
The sky fades from pink to orange and then to blue as we ride the morning into afternoon. We cross numerous valleys and crest countless hills, each time scanning the horizon for any sight of the stag. The deerhounds are surprisingly quiet. Never once do I hear them bark. The men are quiet, too. They mostly communicate with hand gestures and nods, leaving Jimmy and me to silently puzzle out what they mean, not daring to even talk amongst ourselves as we ride along behind them.
Then we crest a high hill, and Finn holds up his hand to stop us again, easing his horse backwards and pushing us down off the top of the hill. He dismounts and signals for us to do the same, and we creep to the summit on foot, keeping low and quiet. Sure enough, the stag stands just on the other side, in a wide glen, browsing among the exposed plants.
“Lord, I tell ya,” one of the men whispers, “he’s got ten points if he’s got a single one.”
Finn disappears downhill and returns a few moments later, leading the deerhounds. He sits them where only their heads crest the summit and faces them toward the stag. Their black eyes burn with hunger for the chase, flashing red as coals when their swollen tongues slide out to lick their chops. Their tails wag, their wiry coats bristle, their taut muscles shiver with fever. Still, they make no sound. Finn releases the buckle and slides the leash free from their collars, but the deerhounds sit quivering on their haunches, showing remarkable breeding for restraint. Junior, on the other hand, crouches beside them with his head on his paws, looking quite bored with it all.
The stag ceases its browsing and lifts its nose into the air, appearing to smell the breeze. Then it turns its head toward our hill and stands perfectly still, watching.
“Kill!”
Before the echo of Finn’s call can return, the deerhounds take off like arrows shot from a bow. They bound down the hill with long strides, heading straight for the startled stag. Junior scrambles after them. The stag jumps three feet off the ground, changes direction in midair, and lands running and leaping away across the snowy glen in a streak of brown fur and antlers.
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