The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  I looked handsome, however, in the portrait that Mother had put up for the edification of the stone heads: rather like a poet of the gloomy and self-indulgent sort with my pale skin, long black hair and the somber clothing I favored. Mother looked downright beautiful, and at least forty years younger; she might have been my little sister. The dual portrait had obviously been painted from earlier pictures; but with sardonic anachronism, she wore one of the antique necklaces I had stolen from a neighboring tomb. For all eternity, or until the painting rotted, my grandparents would be forced to gaze on evidence of my misconduct.

  I was chuckling over this when I hoisted the panel that concealed Grandfather’s sarcophagus and rolled out the shelf that held it. Corpses that had met with violent ends intrigued me, and none more than his, a victim of the massacre in my own home. It wasn’t my intention to steal his skull, merely to have a look at it. Perhaps I meant to compare it with my own, to see if I was less handsome than I hoped.

  When I had at last succeeded in pushing the ponderous lid aside, I stared for a minute into the black void, then went and got the lamp to confirm what I knew. I still couldn’t believe my eyes, and I reached inside for some evidence that the coffin wasn’t completely empty, but I found none. He was gone.

  I’m sure this tomb had never heard such laughter, and I was grateful the walls were thick and solid, for I couldn’t restrain it. My laughter was often inappropriate by others’ lights, and now it had nothing to do with mirth. Another would have wept or roared with fury, but this was my only available response to the ironic perfection of the outrage. If I could have put my hands on him at that moment, I’m sure I would have kept laughing while I tore the malefactor limb from limb.

  Poor, silly Mother, from reverence for her beloved parents, and perhaps from uneasiness at the good progress she herself was making toward the afterlife, had spent a few days out of every week making this little home comfortable for a tenant who was long gone and would never return. She didn’t know, certainly; she would never have committed the sacrilege of having the stone lid removed for a peek at the old corpse.

  I knew whom to blame: henchmen of the hated Anatomical Institute, as a way of spitting on our family. Her father’s bones now decorated a classroom, if they hadn’t been jumbled into a bin or thrown out with the garbage. Perhaps the learned men still got a snigger out of their secret insult when Mother came to complain about the noises, sights and smells their students inflicted on us.

  I put back the empty coffin with more reverence than I’d taken it out and opened the panel that held Grandmother. Here I made a stranger discovery. The lid appeared to have been undisturbed, it fit seamlessly; the sarcophagus had been carved from a single block of stone without fissures: yet Grandmother’s incomplete skeleton was disordered, the remaining bones had been gnawed and broken. No matter how badly her killer had used her, her remains wouldn’t have been dumped into the coffin any old way. Rats may be smart, but they don’t take the lid off a sarcophagus, eat the corpse, and replace the lid.

  After resealing Grandmother’s remains, I collapsed into a sandalwood chair and stared at the busts. Were the people of the previous age more stern and righteous than we are, or did their artists merely make them look that way? This pair would never have laughed at the atrocity. They wouldn’t have found my own activities amusing, either. Grandfather looked like the sort of dutiful tyrant who would have held me down, however regretfully, while the executioner performed his long task.

  My eyes kept straying to the panels behind which Mother and I would lie. I had always been impatient with superstition. If I ever met a god I would apologize for disbelieving in him, but not until then. For all I cared some use could be made of tainted meat by feeding me to the dogs when I died.

  Or so I had always believed that I believed. However irrationally, I shuddered to think that some larval physician would one day rummage through my corpse and try to match my liver and spleen against a diagram; and I wept for my poor, stern fool of a grandfather, who had already suffered that indignity.

  I felt that some ringing declaration was in order, but all I could do was mutter, “Vengeance,” with my eyes averted from Grandfather’s fixed stare. Vengeance, indeed! If I took revenge, if I made an accusation, even if I asked a few clever questions with the utmost tact, people would talk, Mother would hear, and the truth would destroy her.

  * * * *

  Odd, how fresh air and open space can clear the mind in an instant. Once I was strolling downhill beneath the stars, I had the answer to the puzzle, hardly a puzzle at all. A pair of oafs had been dispatched from the Institute to collect my grandparents. The two of them had carried Grandfather off, imprudently leaving the door ajar and the second sarcophagus uncovered. After delivering the first body, lingering for a good laugh with their fellow students and perhaps a few toasts to the corpse, they had staggered back up the hill to find that some animal had beaten them to Grandmother’s remains. Having routed the dogs, the panther, whatever, they had found that Grandmother no longer met their standards of anatomical coherence, so they had resealed her coffin and the tomb behind them and gone home. No supernatural agency was needed to read the riddle, and certainly no ghouls.

  It was about then that I tripped over the ghoul’s jaw.

  I didn’t know what it was, of course, only an inconvenient object that had tangled my foot and sent me tumbling with a horrifyingly loud clatter of tools. I lay absolutely still for a time, my ear pressed to the ground for any hint of hurrying footsteps, before I dared rise on hands and knees to find what had tripped me.

  There was no moon, but I could have counted the hairs on my hand by the radiance of Filloweela in her guise as morning star, and I instantly spotted the white bone jutting from the earth. It was half a jaw, with most of the teeth attached, and one of these was a curved lower canine as big as my thumb. It was exactly like the tusk I had taken to the Institute a few years earlier. The jaw was more massive and elongated, the huge molars looked fit for grinding stones, and there was still that bizarre fang to be accounted for: but the jaw and its dentition were like those of a man. No scientist could have mistaken it for a wild boar.

  Forgetting the watchmen and the impending dawn, I took my pick from my bag and swung it with a will against the hard soil. I broke up the chunks and sifted them through my fingers, I dug to the depth of my knees in a circle wide as I was tall, but I found not so much as another tooth or sliver of bone.

  Although it was by then fully light, I recklessly walked up the hill for anyone to see, for this was an open field of raised sarcophagi below the more fashionable streets of mausoleums. I gave this no thought at all as I searched for a likely spot where the jaw might originally have lain. I was poking my shovel around the base of a stone coffin when a voice said at my ear, “Have you lost something, sir?”

  I didn’t mark until later the heavy sarcasm. I forgot that he was a watchman and I was a grave-robber whose conviction could mean public dismemberment. In my single-minded excitement I acted guiltless, even with a bag of questionable tools slung over my shoulder and a shovel in my hand, and my manner disarmed him completely.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I demanded, thrusting the jawbone under his nose.

  “Cludd!” he cried, backing away. “That’s a ghoul. Leave it, sir, put it down! To touch one of them—you don’t know what it might do.”

  I laughed. “There are no ghouls,” I said, mocking the wisdom of the Anatomical Institute.

  He shook his head violently. He was a big, red-faced brute, but he looked as if he might weep or faint. “You don’t know, sir, you don’t know!” Still backing away, he waved a weighty arm in the direction of my grandparents’ tomb. “I heard one of them laughing just last night.”

  * * * *

  Last night I had briefly seen myself taking a battle-ax down from the wall and giving the Anatomical Institute the housecleaning it deserved. As judges are more apt to be lords than scholars, I probably would have
suffered nothing worse than banishment from the city for a few years, and would have returned to enjoy a piquant notoriety. In my absence the students would have thought twice about puking on our steps.

  Such roaring deeds were alien to my nature, however, and my strange discovery jolted me back to my true self. Next day, instead of going to the Institute to bathe in the blood of scholars, I trotted up the steps to consult them politely about the jawbone wrapped under my arm.

  I paused before my great-grandfather’s statue, letting the scholarly swarm find paths around me while I studied it attentively for the first time. I had remembered it as being odd beyond its depiction of a wise old head with the body of a young athlete, for that was a convention of public sculpture. My memory suggested that he sat on a bench, but now I saw that his seat was a coffin with the lid suggestively shoved aside. He examined a skull in his hand, surely a fit occupation for the patron of the Institute, but his expression was queerly unscientific. With great subtlety the artist had hinted that he was not so much meditating on the skull as leering at it. If the statue had come to life, he might in the next instant have kissed it, or gnawed it.

  I dismissed these fancies and began my search for Dr. Porfat’s office. The other scholar’s contempt had raised him in my esteem; and if derision were a good gauge, he rose higher each time I asked the way. I wondered if the name were not some comic catchword, not only from the smirks or giggles, but also from the imaginative directions it evoked. After climbing marble stairs, then wooden ones, then a metal ladder or two, and at one point creeping across a precipitously sloped roof of loose slates, I found my way to a door under the cobwebbed eaves of the remotest tower, where the hieroglyph for Porfat had been burned into the wood many years ago. The door was locked, and no amount of knocking produced a response, so I opened it.

  Except for more dust than any tomb, and for towers of books and bones and papers, some of them seeming to support the high ceiling and others wavering ominously to my steps on the uneven floor, the room was empty. One of the windows was not entirely blocked by heaped manuscripts, and one grimy pane commanded a misguided toymaker’s view of the necropolis. I lingered there a long time, picking out likely tombs I had not entered and marking concealed pockets and byways of the rumpled terrain whose existence not even I had suspected. I took some notes on the back of a handy paper.

  “Dr. Por—oh!”

  I kept writing as I glanced up with feigned annoyance. It grew harder to feign as I noted eyes the odd, dark blue of plums, slack and sensuous lips, breasts that were rather small but rose at a presumptuous angle. Although she wore the egalitarian motley of a student, the shadowy, tiger-stripe tattooing of her neck and cheeks proclaimed her the grandest sort of Vendren.

  “He’s not here,” I said. “I was leaving a note.”

  Her initial fright gone, she stared suspiciously. “May I help you?”

  A thief or scholarly spy wouldn’t have carried a ghoul’s jaw, and I unwrapped it to show her. “I wanted his opinion of this.”

  From the watchmen’s reaction and hers, I was almost ready to grant the bone magical properties, for she cast down her burden of books and papers to snatch it from me. She turned it hurriedly this way and that, staring more avidly than my great-grandfather at his skull. It gave me the chance to stare at her in similar style.

  “Sleithreethra,” she whispered with appalling reverence, and I made the appropriate protective sign against that Goddess. I regretted this superstitious lapse, for it earned me a glance of disdain.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Her tone said that I had shrunk from menacing intruder to halfwit errand-boy. “In the refectory, where else?” I said, but I gestured out the window.

  My joke earned me only a grimace of impatience. “Will you show me?”

  “If you like. It’s a ghoul, isn’t it?”

  She turned to search among the papers she had dropped, some of them probably lost forever among Dr. Porfat’s rubbish, and she returned with some scrolls that she gave me to unwind. When I made no move to roll them out, she came close beside me, as I had hoped she would, to do it herself.

  When I tore my eyes from a close study of her curly, auburn hair, I saw that they were pen and ink sketches, and they were ludicrous: not from lack of skill, for she was an accomplished draftsman, but from her preposterous notion of ghouls. Those creatures, gorging on carrion, burrowing through graves, haunting the night and fleeing the sun in dank tunnels, were lower vermin than their closest associates, the rats and worms; for if the legends had any truth, they were humans who had rejected their humanity.

  In her vision, the lank and distorted limbs were graceful, the brutish heads with their fanged muzzles noble as those of fine dogs. I never would have imagined that a female with tusks jutting up to her nostril-pits could have enticed me, but one nude freak draped languidly on a tomb hardened me even further than the artist had. Most of the images were less sexual than absurdly romantic, of ghouls as outsized elves who spent the enchanted midnight gazing at the moon with bright globes of eyes that echoed its beauty.

  “Have you seen them?” I asked.

  “As a child, I thought.... Well, I heard them, I’m sure of that, and I’ve never forgotten it. It was Dr. Porfat who described them for me when I brought him my first drawings, and I wanted to see if these were more accurate.”

  I studied the jaw without comment. Comparing it with her artwork was like comparing tales of chivalry with the iron weight of a spike-headed flail.

  She surprised me by saying, “I’d like to draw you.”

  “Why? Do I look like a ghoul?”

  She gave that question more thought than I believed it warranted before she said, “No, not really, but you do look unusual. It’s mostly your body that interests me.” She shocked me, but didn’t displease me, by squeezing my arms with her tiny hands and tracing the contours of my chest. She batted my hands aside when I tried to reciprocate.

  “You’re better than most of the models we get.”

  “I play dwelth.”

  “That’s the sort we get, and you’re not like that at all. It takes hard, repetitious labor to develop your sort of muscles. Are you a soldier? I know! You’re a gravedigger, aren’t you? That’s how you found the jaw.”

  You may imagine how little I cared for this deduction. “I am called Lord Glyphtard,” I said, as I very seldom did. “I amuse myself by gardening.”

  “How amusing that must be!” It was clear she believed me not at all. “When will you show me where you found the jaw?”

  “Now?”

  “Don’t be silly. You don’t look for ghouls by daylight. Tonight?”

  As I closed the door behind us, I’m sure she heard the firm click of the lock. She said, “You forgot to leave your note for Dr. Porfat.”

  “I’ll wait until I see him.”

  Umbra Vendren was too observant, she was too smart, and she was even more eccentric than Mother. “Eccentric” might be less than apt. Her ancient Tribe was notorious for cruelty, depravity and madness, even if they all weren’t, as so many believed, witches. I saw no harm in guiding her through the cemetery, though, and perhaps distracting her from ghouls long enough to satisfy my taste for her.

  If nothing else, my way of stumbling into my career as a grave-robber should have taught me that one thing always leads to another.

  * * * *

  She wore black, but Vendrens always do, a garment that fit her like a shadow under her silk cape, and her hair was hidden by a slouch hat with a raven’s feather. You would have spotted her immediately as a grave-robber if she had walked onto a stage; or into a cemetery.

  “Planning on a bit of gardening?” she asked.

  We were a matched pair: I had brought my pick and shovel and crowbar only from force of habit, but I explained, “I thought you wanted to dig up ghoul-bones.”

  “He wasn’t buried. They eat their own dead, too, and the bone you found must have rolled away unnoticed. But I want
to see where you found it.”

  Walking through my damp garden into the cemetery, she said, “Porfat thinks ghouls are sick people, that they have a disease you can get from breathing graveyard air. Or,” she added maliciously, “from contact with ghouls, such as playing with their bones.”

  That was nonsense. If graveyard air made you a ghoul, I would have been ten of them. “You handled it.”

  “Do you have it?”

  My find had so delighted me that I carried it like a child’s favorite toy of the moment, and I pulled it from my cloak. She held it up and licked it along its length, and I thought then that sensuous was less the word to describe her mouth than depraved. She eyed me slyly as she tongued the place where its lips might have been.

  “I want to be a ghoul,” she said. “Don’t you?

  She could make me feel less sophisticated than our oldest and silliest servant, and I had to struggle against making the sort of sign that had earned her contempt. “Not really.”

  “Oh, but it would be fun! All these pigs, these fools with their absurd pretensions, their preposterous vanity, their cowardly wish to spin out their empty, stupid, greedy lives forever—” she paused to spit on a handy sarcophagus “—it would show them what they’re good for, living or dead, to eat them!” She kicked another moss-grown coffin hard enough to hurt herself, but she was a typical Vendren, I feared, and pain was beneath her notice. “What do you expect from pigs? Pork, that’s all, pork, and if I were a ghoul I wouldn’t care that it was rancid. I want to tear them up and strew them around, and then I want some great, beautiful monster to drag me down among the mud and the worms and the rot and fuck me!”