Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  The altar of bones … dear God, it was real. He’d seen it with his own eyes. He’d drunk from it. Already he could feel its incredible power coursing through his blood, changing him. He felt like a god.

  No, not like a god.

  He threw back his head, and his shout echoed over the raw, frozen land.

  “I am God!”

  5

  Galveston, Texas

  Eighteen months before the present

  FATHER DOM hated that horrible hiss as oxygen was forced into the failing lungs, but he leaned closer to his father’s mouth. The old man was dying and he wanted to confess.

  Confess. That was the word he’d used, even though Dom didn’t really believe it. Not from his devoutly atheist father, who’d once called religion the greatest con game ever perpetrated on the human race. But “I’m dying and I want to confess,” his father had said, then he gave this wild laugh that nearly killed him right there.

  “Aw, quit acting like you’ve been hit with the proverbial thunderbolt,” the old man said now. “I’m not gonna start shouting hallelujahs and I haven’t gone stupid on you either, if those two afflictions aren’t already redundant. I just have something that needs saying and I obviously don’t got all livelong day.”

  “I’m here for you, Dad. But so, too, is the loving and forgiving presence of our Lord.”

  Dom winced inside at how trite that sounded, but then his father had always been able to make him feel and behave like some ridiculous caricature of a priest. Most days Dom loved being what he was, and he was good at it, but sometimes he thought he’d put on the white bands of the Holy Roman Catholic Church just to spite Michael O’Malley, because he’d known it would piss off the old man for all eternity.

  Only now his father was dying, so Father Dominic O’Malley laid his hand on the graying head as he began the last rites. “Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit—”

  The old man shook his head so hard he nearly tore the oxygen tube out of his nostrils. “Shut up with that ridiculous nonsense. I said confess, not die with the dirge of medieval hocus-pocus assaulting my ears.”

  “But I thought you …” Dom swallowed something that felt halfway between a laugh and a sob, then looked quickly away before his father could rag on him for his weakness. He wished just once the old man could have … what? Respected him? Accepted him? Loved him?

  “Okay, you win. No more medieval hocus-pocus. Only you know what? You can deny Him all the way up to your last breath, but Christ has never denied you. He’s always loved you, and so have I.”

  The old man blew out a ragged sigh. “You’ve always been so full of pompous and sentimental certainties. Not only is it tedious, but when paired with your naïveté, it can be downright dangerous. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

  “Then tell me. Confess. And we’ll even leave the Lord out of the conversation, because a godless confession can still be the first step to forgiveness and salvation.”

  “What baloney. No God worth his salt is going to let puling sinners worm their way back into his good graces just by kissing his ass. Dom”—he felt his father’s hand clutch his arm—“quit mouthing religious platitudes for once and focus here.”

  Such strength still in those fingers, Dom thought. But the old man had always been tough. Texas tough, he liked to brag, like a boot full of barbed wire. Dom stared down now at his father’s mouth, bloodless from lack of oxygen, at his watery blue eyes that looked clouded with what?

  Fear?

  No, Dom thought, that simply wasn’t possible. The father he knew had never shown a lick of fear in his life. It was part of the code Michael O’Malley lived by. When things turned bad on you, you sucked it up. You didn’t bawl, or whine, or make excuses.

  His father released the grip he had on Dom’s arm and gave it a surprisingly gentle pat. “Hey, it’s okay, son. It’ll be okay. It’s snuck up on me, this death business. I need you to call your brother, call Ry, and tell him to get down here now. He’ll know what to do—” A vicious cough racked the old man, and he let his head fall back on the pillow, closed his eyes. “Call Ry …”

  “I already did, Dad. He’s on his way.”

  Forgive me, dear Lord for that big honking lie.

  They’d often called their father “the old man” even when they were kids, but he really wasn’t all that old. Only seventy-five, and when you looked at him, you saw a big, strapping man, still full of vigor and a lust for life, or at least until yesterday.

  Yesterday morning Michael O’Malley got up with the dawn, went for his daily power walk on the beach, and ate a breakfast of granola and yogurt. Then he stood up to put the dirty dishes in the sink and was struck by a massive coronary. On his way to the hospital, Dom had called and left a message on his brother’s cell, then he’d called again after the doctors had given their prognosis—their dad’s heart had been damaged beyond any hope. It would go on pumping for a little while yet, but soon it would stop. Just stop.

  As the hours passed, and the old man grew steadily weaker, Dom kept trying to get hold of his brother, kept getting that damn voice mail. Ry not only wasn’t on his way to Galveston, God alone knew when they would even hear back from him. He’d been known to drop off the face of the earth for weeks, even months, at a time.

  Dom touched his father’s hand where it lay, looking waxy and already dead, on the white hospital sheet. “In the meantime, why don’t you try to get some sleep. We can all talk later, after Ry gets here.” Or doesn’t.

  He saw his father’s lips twist with a sudden spasm of pain. “Dad? Are you all right?”

  He reached for the morphine drip, but the old man stopped him. “No, don’t. That stuff makes it hard for me to think, and we’re running out of time. I know I said I had a confession to make, but that was a poor choice of words. I don’t have any use for a priest, and if that hurts your tender feelings—tough.”

  That did hurt, actually, but Dom managed to keep it off his face.

  “Talk to me as your son, then. Or better yet, as an equal, a fellow human being. Now that would make a nice change.”

  The old man gave him a ghastly smile. “You live with this thing you call a God, Dom. You preach goodness, turning the other cheek, doing unto others, all that bull, so you think you know all about bad. Only you got no idea. Not the kind of bad I’m talking about. The pure, down and dirty kind of bad that knows no rules and has no stopping point—”

  The old man broke off, looked away. His eyes darkened, turned inward, and Dom wondered what they saw. Michael O’Malley had married late, at the age of forty-one, and much of his earlier life had always been a blank slate to his wife and sons. But what he’d just implied—Dom didn’t want to believe it. You’re talking about evil, Dad, and you could never do evil.

  Could you?

  He saw an odd look come over his father’s face. Not dreamy or nostalgic. No, it was too intense for that.

  “Katya was her name. Katya Orlova, and from the beginning there was something special about her. In those days Hollywood had more pretty blondes than palm trees, but Katya … She had this luminescence about her, this glow, as if the sun was inside her, shining through the pores of her skin. And did I tell you she had the damnedest eyes? Dark gray, like storm clouds.”

  The old man’s mind seemed to be wandering, but Dom got the gist of it: another woman. He might have known. Since he couldn’t shut his ears, he shut his eyes and saw his mother’s face. The sprinkling of freckles like cinnamon flakes across her cheekbones and nose, those dimples every time she smiled and she’d smiled a lot, even at the very end when the breast cancer finally beat her.

  “Aw, Christ, Dom. Quit looking like I’m breaking your heart. Katya Orlova was just a means to an end. I never loved her, not like I did your mother.”

  Dom blinked away tears, angrier with himself than his father. Why do I always let him get to me like this? “So who was she then?”

 
But his father said nothing more. The watery blue eyes seemed lost now, staring across the foot of his bed at the mint green wall that was empty except for a black-enamel, plain-faced clock.

  “Dad?”

  “I’ve been watching that clock,” the old man finally said. “Every time another minute goes by, the long hand does this little jump from one hash mark to the next. Sometimes it trembles before it moves, like it’s not really sure it wants to go there, but it does it anyway. And it makes this little click noise, like it’s checking off another minute of eternity, and I’ve been thinking how one of these times soon that clock is going to do its little tremble-jump-and-click routine, but me … I’m going to be too damn dead to see it.”

  He took his gaze off the clock and looked at his son. “All those rituals and sacraments of yours—what do you really think they’re for? In the end we’re all the same. We’re all afraid of that long dark night, and so we hold sacred the one thing we think can save us.”

  Dom shook his head. “What are you telling me? That you thought this Katya Orlova woman could somehow have saved your soul?”

  The thin mouth opened on a sigh. “Could have given me more time …”

  Dom leaned closer. “Time to do what?”

  The old man shook with another bout of violent coughing that sapped his strength, and the room fell back into silence again except for the hiss and beeps of the machines.

  Dom thought his father was done talking, but then he said, “No, not my soul, and it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it never mattered, because a heart attack from out of the blue or a shot behind the ear from a .22 and either way, bang! You’re deader than a doornail.”

  A shot behind the ear from a .22? That kind of talk was so unlike the man he knew, Dom thought it had to be the painkillers messing with his head.

  He was sure of it an instant later when his father tried to grab at the handrails to pull himself out of bed, his eyes wild. “Time … we’re running out of time, Dom. They’ll be coming for you boys once I’m dead, because they’ll figure they’re safe then. You’ll be loose threads to them, just for being my sons. And loose threads get snipped.”

  He lay back gasping. “They probably already got a man inside the hospital here, waiting for me to croak. Or a woman. Some female doctor I’ve never seen before showed up to poke and prod at me while you were down in the cafeteria getting coffee. Red hair and that angels-weep kind of beautiful, but I don’t like her smile. She’s got a killer’s smile.”

  What was he trying to say? That a female assassin was lurking here in the hospital, waiting for Michael O’Malley to die so she could then bump off the man’s sons? Dom tried to stop himself from jerking around to check out the open doorway, did it anyway, and felt like a fool. No one was there.

  “Who’s coming for us? The Mafia? The Columbia drug cartel? Who really does stuff like that?”

  A hideous laugh tore out of the old man’s throat. “My partners in crime.”

  Something suddenly seemed stuck in Dom’s throat; he had to swallow twice before he could get a word out. “Are you telling me you were some kind of gangster in a past life? I won’t believe it.”

  “Hunh. So says the man who’s got no trouble wrapping his head around the idea of a virgin giving birth.”

  The old man’s eyelids fluttered, but then he pulled himself back through sheer will. “You boys’ve got to find her,” he said, his voice faint, raspy. “Find Katya and get it back.”

  “Get what back, Dad? I’m sorry, but this is just crazy talk—”

  “The film. The film Katya made of my last kill. Them thinking I had the film is the only thing that’s kept us alive all these years.”

  “What film? What last kill, for God’s sakes. I know you. You couldn’t—”

  “Dammit, Dom, get your head around the idea that I’m not who you think I am. I never was….” He drew in a strangled breath and closed his eyes.

  Dom shot a look at the monitors. His father’s blood pressure was up to 180 over 95, his breathing now so torturous he could barely speak. His hands opened and closed, as if he were trying to grab his strength back out of the air.

  “Dad, maybe you should—”

  “Shut up and listen to me, boy. I was ordered to do the kill, so I did it. It wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter, I was already in too deep. But I knew right from the get-go that once a hit that big went down, they were going to have to kill the killer, if you know what I mean.” He grimaced, baring his teeth. “So she got it all in living color, Katya did. It was supposed to be my insurance, the thing that would keep me alive. But a couple of days later, she disappeared on me. And she took the film with her.”

  Dom looked into his father’s eyes and he saw fear, but he also saw sanity. And deep inside where darkness and truth burrowed deep, Dom knew: Mike O’Malley, who’d run a little charter fishing boat off the Gulf Coast, a man who wouldn’t even use a pellet gun to chase the jackrabbits out of his vegetable garden, had once been ordered to murder someone and he’d done it. And somewhere there was a film of the crime.

  The old man grabbed Dom’s arm, but little strength was left in him anymore. “After Katya took off with the film, Dom, I let them go on thinking I still had it. But it was all one big, bad-assed bluff, and now—”

  The word ended on another strangled cough. The oxygen hissed, his chest gurgled. “You better pray to that God of yours Katya Orlova isn’t long dead, because only she knows where the film really is. You and Ry, you’ve got to find her and get it back, and you’ve got to do it fast. Prove to them you have that film and it’ll be your life insurance, like it was mine.”

  Who did you murder, Dad? It was the obvious question, but for some crazy reason the words were all balled up in Dom’s mouth, he couldn’t get them out. If he said them aloud, they’d be real, and he couldn’t do that yet.

  “You keep saying them,” he said instead. “Who are they, these guys who made you …?”

  Kill.

  The old man shook his head, almost dislodging the oxygen tube again. “The details are for when Ry gets here, because it’s a long, ugly story and I’ve barely got enough life left in me to tell it once. And Ry will understand, he’ll know what to do. Call him again, Dom.”

  “Why can’t you for once trust me, rely on me? I don’t live in a damn bubble, I know how to do things—” Dom drew in a deep breath, let it out, made his voice calm, soothing. “I’ll call him again, Dad, I promise, only I don’t think he’s going to make it here in time.”

  The old man gave Dom a smile that froze his soul and nodded slowly, accepting the truth. “All right then,” he whispered, phlegm thick in his throat. “It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones, but it ended with the kill.”

  He laughed again, that hideous noise that shouldn’t come from a human mouth. “And not just any kill, but the kill. The big kill.”

  Dom started to take his rosary out of his pocket, then left it there. He picked up his father’s hand instead, and this time the dying man let him keep it.

  “What big kill?” he asked.

  And his father told him.

  6

  SOMETHING CLATTERED out in the hallway, and Father Dom whipped around. But it was only an orderly, pushing a cart stacked with lunch trays, broccoli and chicken by the smell. He fought down the urge to gag.

  He turned back to the bed. His father slept now, so utterly still Dom wondered if he’d slipped into a coma.

  He looked at his father’s hands, lying flaccid at his sides, at the age spots, the protruding veins, the knuckles only a little crooked and swollen from arthritis. He saw those hands raise the rifle, his father’s eyes line up the sights. He heard the shot and saw the bullet smash through flesh and bone, and the blood. So much blood—

  “No, you couldn’t have done that,” he said out loud, but the old man didn’t answer. And if he had, Dom thought, it would only have been to sneer at him for not being man enough to accept the truth.

 
That his father was a monster.

  He stared down at the lax face for a moment longer, then he put his priest’s sacramental stole around his neck, made the sign of the cross in holy oil on his father’s forehead and performed the rite of final absolution. Forgiving Michael O’Malley for his sins, even if he hadn’t wanted to be forgiven.

  The act, the words, Dom knew, were really for himself.

  When he was done, he hesitated a moment, then leaned over and kissed his father’s sunken cheek and asked that soulless face, “Who are you?”

  Out in the hall an intercom crackled, calling for a Dr. Elder to report to radiology. Dom sat down in the chair next to his father’s bed, rested his elbows on his spread knees. He fingered his rosary, but no prayers were in him. He had a sudden, horrible fear he would never be able to pray again.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there like that, but suddenly he was aware the room felt different. The machines still beeped, the oxygen hissed, but it was quieter somehow. Emptier.

  His head snapped up. “Dad?” he said, and knew even before he looked that his father was gone. A split instant later the machines caught up to reality and the steady beeps turned into a screeching alarm.

  For maybe five seconds more, Dom stared at the shell of what had once been Michael O’Malley. Then he pushed to his feet and ran from the room.

  HE STOOD IN the middle of the hall while doctors and nurses rushed past and the intercom blared, “Code blue! Code blue!” His heart pounded, but already he was feeling foolish. Running from phantoms.

  Within moments the hallway emptied, leaving him alone. He rubbed his hands over his face. His eyes burned, but he couldn’t cry.

  The elevator opened and an orderly with an empty gurney came out, followed by a woman. She wore green scrubs with a stethoscope dangling half out of one pocket, and she had …

  Red hair and that angels-weep kind of beautiful.