Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  She pushed open the door.

  A bell above the lintel jangled loudly and she paused, but the shop was deserted and no one came out of any back room to help her.

  She looked around. The place was like something out of a Dickens novel. Floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with what could only be described as “stuff.” Clocks—lots and lots of clocks—but also paintings, busts, flowerpots, lamps, candlesticks … In one corner was a ship’s figurehead, a bare-breasted floozy with a trident in her hand and a lascivious grin on her face.

  “Bonjour,” Zoe called out. But the shop remained quiet, except for the tick of the clocks.

  She looked for something that might take her key, but the trouble was there were too many somethings: chests and jewelry boxes by the dozens, several bureaus, and even a couple of armoires.

  Just then a blue velvet curtain half-hidden behind an ornate floor mirror flared open so dramatically Zoe expected nothing less than a vampire to step out from behind it.

  Instead, an old man came into the shop. Only a few wisps of white hair dusted his pink scalp, and the teeth behind his smile probably spent the night in a glass on his bedside table. He’d been whittled down by time, yet he had quite the dapper air about him with his argyle sweater vest, polka-dot bow tie, and rimless bifocal glasses.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” Zoe said.

  “Bonsoir, madame,” he said, neither rude nor friendly, but he couldn’t help correcting her French.

  Faced now with having to explain what she wanted in that language, Zoe’s head had emptied of almost every word she knew, and there hadn’t been all that many in there to begin with. “Parlez-vous anglais?”

  The man blew out a “No” between his lips, lifted his shoulders, spread his hands.

  On impulse, Zoe asked him if he spoke Russian.

  The man beamed, said in beautiful Russian, “How ever did you know? I’ve lived here so many years I might as well be French…. Well, Parisian—there is a distinction. But I was born ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution.” He turned his head aside and spat. “In a reindeer herder’s hut on the frozen tundra near what they now call Norilsk. You will not have heard of the place, and for that you should count your blessings.”

  Zoe kept her voice light, but her gaze didn’t leave the old man’s face. He had the darkest eyes she’d ever seen. More than black, they were opaque.

  “Actually, I have heard of it, monsieur. My great-grandmother was … well, maybe she wasn’t born there like yourself. I really know so little about her. Just that she escaped from a Siberian prison camp called Norilsk, back in the 1930s. Her name was Lena Orlova and she had a daughter called Katya. Maybe you know the family?”

  The old man’s smile stayed in place, but Zoe thought the tiniest spark of a light had come on deep in those dark eyes. “Truly what a small and intimate planet it is we dwell on. I have a nephew who works in a bank in Chicago.”

  Zoe laughed. “I’m from San Francisco, but I get your point.” She waved at a particularly cluttered stack of shelves that seemed to have a Russian theme going on. “I was wondering, though…. Ever since I first heard my great-grandmother’s story I’ve wanted to go to Norilsk. To trace my roots, as we Americans like to say. Do you have some artifacts, antiques, or whatever, native to the region I could look at? Maybe buy.”

  “You do not want to go to Norilsk, trust me on this. She is the frozen armpit of the universe, never mind the season. Or, if you want to save that epithet for Mother Russia herself, then Norilsk is a puss-filled pimple on the frozen armpit of the universe.

  “So,” he went on before Zoe could get another word in. “Sadly, I’ve nothing from Siberia at the moment. Not even a necklace made of wolf’s teeth, which is more common than you might think. Can I show you other things? A clock, perhaps? I have many clocks. Cuckoo, grandfather, turret, water, repeater, pendulum, marine—and every one keeps perfect time.” He pulled out a pocket watch, flipped open the lid. “If you care to wait for twenty-one minutes and sixteen seconds, you will hear them all strike the hour simultaneously. It is a symphony, trust me. Stay, listen, your ears will thank you.”

  “Your clocks are beautiful.” Zoe pulled the silver chain out from underneath her turtleneck and over her head. “But I was wondering if you have something in your shop that might be opened with this key.”

  The old man went very still. He started to reach up to touch the key, then let his hand fall back down at his side. He said, his voice barely above a whisper, “If you have that, then Katya Orlova is dead.”

  “So you did know my grandmother.”

  “I knew them both, Lena Orlova and her daughter, Katya. Her death, was it a kind one?”

  Zoe’s throat got tight, so that she ended up blurting it out more harshly than she’d meant to. “She was murdered.”

  “Ah.” He bowed his head, shut his eyes. “It never ends.”

  “Were you very close friends?”

  “Katya and I? No, not in that way. But I have been waiting many years for her to walk through my door again. Or for the one who comes after her.”

  Zoe had so many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. “I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. I’m Zoe. Zoe Dmitroff.”

  She held out her hand, and the old man bent over it in an old-fashioned bow. “And I am Boris. A good Russian name, no?”

  He kept her hand while he stepped closer, to peer up into her face. “Yes, it is still as it should be. One Keeper passes, but another is there to take her place. I saw it was so the minute you walked through the door. I only thought I should wait for you to produce the key. But I saw it.”

  He stared at her, but with faraway eyes, as if he were lost in another time. “But then I am of the toapotror. The magic people.”

  “The magic people?”

  He sighed, letting go of her hand. “Do you not know? Well, the years pass by, and with them goes the knowledge of the old ways. We toapotror are a tribe of native Siberian families whose duty it is to help the Keeper preserve the altar of bones from the corruption of the world. Sadly, we are mostly all gone now, either dead or strewn to the four corners of the world.”

  His flat black eyes glimmered with his sudden smile. “But then the real magic has always resided within the altar, not in us.”

  “Yet it was the green light you put in your window that brought me here. I would never have found you otherwise. That was magic of sort, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes…. Yes, perhaps it was.” He smiled again. “And I suppose it was magic of another sort at work that day I spotted Lena Orlova in a Hong Kong noodle shop. That two war-weary exiles from so far a place as Norilsk should both happen to take hungry at the same time, to walk into the same noodle shop in a city full of noodle shops—coincidence or magic, who indeed is to say? And I knew her the moment I laid eyes on her. How could I not? For although we were both only children when last I saw her, she had grown up to be the very image of the Lady. As you are.”

  Zoe’s blood quickened. Look to the Lady … “What do you mean I’m her image?”

  He held up a finger. “You will see in a moment, but first …”

  He went to the front door, poked his head out, and looked up and down the street. He shut the door, hung out a FERME sign, and turned the lock bolt.

  He turned back to her, his voice barely above a whisper. “Were you followed?”

  “I don’t know,” Zoe said, feeling stupid now that the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her.

  The old man turned off the green-shaded lamp, peered out the window, then pulled down the shade. “We toapotror have served the Keeper for generations, since ever there was a Keeper, and we do so with loyal hearts. But sometimes it is dangerous. We learn to take precautions, even when we look like old fools for doing so.”

  He went back to the blue velvet curtain behind the mirror and pulled it open. “Come.”

  Zoe followed him through a narrow door into a small room. It looked, she thought, like a stage set
for a séance. A round, cloth-draped table was surrounded by five hard-backed chairs. A tin-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling. The plaster walls were bare of paintings, the old peg wooden floor of any rugs.

  The old man pulled out a chair. “Please …”

  Zoe sat.

  “It will be a moment,” he said, then left to go back into the front of the shop.

  Zoe heard the scrape of wood against wood, the creak of a hinge, followed by a sneeze and “Merde!”

  The curtain swirled open, and he came back into the room. “I’m afraid I’ve allowed things to get a bit dusty.”

  Zoe felt a jolt of pure excitement when she saw the wooden casket he carried so reverently in his outstretched hands. It was an exact replica of the casket in the tapestry. The one the unicorn lady had used to keep her jewels.

  This one was large enough, though, to hold a good-size loaf of bread. It was banded with studded iron strips and had a domed lid. It also had two locks, one at each end.

  The old man set the chest on the table in front of her. He whipped a cloth from his coat pocket and wiped away the dust. “We toapotror like to tell a story of how many, many years ago, so long ago the truth has been lost in the mists of time, there lived a people who practiced the ancient arts of sorcery, and whose shaman was possessed of a magic so powerful he could bring the dead back to life. One day this shaman took himself a wife, who was as fair as the first snowfall of winter. Alas, she could bear him only daughters, although each daughter she bore him was as beautiful as their mother.”

  “Did he care?” Zoe asked, her feminist hackles on the rise. “That she gave him only daughters?”

  The old man laughed softly and shrugged. “If he did, it is one of those truths now lost in the mists. But to go on with the story … On another day some evil men, who were jealous of the shaman’s powers, set upon him in a snowy field. They stabbed a spear into his side so that they might drink his blood. But the taste of it drove them mad. They fell into fighting amongst themselves, killing each other until none was left alive.”

  The old man gave the casket a final buff, then took a step back to admire his handiwork. “It was nearly nightfall when the shaman’s wife and daughters came upon him there in the field, his red blood staining the snow. They wailed and tore at their hair, and their hearts broke into pieces. Then they gathered up his shattered body and bore it away to a secret cave behind a waterfall of ice, where they guard it to this day and will for all eternity…. But, my dear, why are you crying? It is only a story. One story among many that are told around the fire during the long and cold Siberian nights.”

  “Sorry,” Zoe said, feeling a little silly as she wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I honestly don’t know where that came from. It must be the jet lag.” She also thought, though, that there was something more to this particular story than what the old man was letting on, but she let it go. “So tell me what happened after you met up with Lena in the noodle shop.”

  “Why, I offered her my services, of course. As was my duty.”

  The old man’s eyes had lit up with a look of wistful memory, and Zoe wondered if he and Lena had been lovers for a time. It was hard to imagine, looking at him now, but he would have been a young man after the war.

  After Lena died,” he went on, “I kept in touch with her daughter, Katya, over the years, and in the fall of 1962 Katya came to me here and asked for my help in safeguarding the altar’s secrets for the Keeper who would come after her. She never told me the nature of the danger she was in, out of fear perhaps that with too much knowledge the danger could rub off onto me.”

  The old man stuffed the cloth back in his coat, then removed a pocket watch from his vest, and Zoe saw that instead of a fob on the end of the chain, there was a key. With a griffin on the end of it.

  “It takes two keys to open the casket,” he said. “Mine and the Keeper’s. Your grandmother Katya designed it. Clever, is it not? But then over the centuries you Keepers have always been clever at devising riddles to keep the altar safe from the world.”

  “It’s like a safe-deposit box in a bank,” Zoe said, feeling more than a little intimidated. She couldn’t even solve the old riddles. God help them all if she ever had to come up with any new ones.

  The old man pushed his key into the lock on the left end of the casket, then motioned for Zoe to do the same with her key to the lock on the right.

  He met her eyes and actually winked at her. “Now we must both turn our keys simultaneously for the mechanism to work.”

  “Okay,” Zoe said, feeling both a little silly and so curious she was about to burst.

  The old man said, “One, two … now,” and they turned their keys. There was a soft click and the casket lid sprang open a quarter inch.

  Zoe reached for it, but the old man stopped her. “Not yet. For this I must not be present. There is only one Keeper, and she is always a she. But then you knew that, of course.”

  Zoe nodded, thinking of those names in her grandmother’s letter, Lena, Inna, Svetlana, Larina … And then she remembered something Anna Larina had told her only yesterday in San Francisco. How Lena Orlova liked to sing to her daughter when she was little, about being a blessed girl child from a proud, long line who wouldn’t be the last.

  “Thank you, Boris.”

  He crossed one arm over his waist and bowed slightly. “I wish you God speed. I fear that you will need it.”

  He turned and pulled aside a smaller velvet curtain—purple this time—to reveal a plain oak door. “When you are ready to leave, it is best if you do so through here. You will find yourself in a small courtyard. To your right will be a wine bar, and if you go through it, you will emerge onto the Boulevard St.-Michel. If you’re of a mind to pause for a little libation and without making your wallet squeal too loudly, I can recommend the house Bordeaux.”

  Zoe smiled. “May I buy you a glass after I’m done?”

  He bowed again. “Thank you for the offer, but, sadly, I find that at my age the grape gives me the heartburn.”

  He opened the blue curtain, said, “Good-bye, Katya Orlova’s granddaughter,” and disappeared behind it.

  ZOE WAS SO excited now she was humming with it as she pushed open the casket’s domed lid and looked inside.

  She saw something square, about the size and thickness of a hardback novel, wrapped tightly in a sealskin pouch. She lifted it out slowly, unwinding the thick, oily skin, and she gasped.

  Inside the pouch was a Russian icon, and although her knowledge didn’t run nearly as deep as her mother’s, even she knew this one was exquisite and rare. And very old.

  It was painted on a thick piece of wood, the image unlike anything she’d ever before seen. It filled her with both wonder and a supernatural fear. The Virgin Mary sat on a gilded throne with her hands folded around a silver cup fashioned in the shape of a human skull. But the Virgin’s face … Zoe couldn’t stop staring at her face. It had been painted centuries ago, but it was the same face Zoe saw looking back at her in the mirror every day of her life.

  She could see now how the old man knew Lena Orlova was a Keeper the moment he saw her in that noodle shop. She was the very image of the Lady. As are you. The thought gave Zoe chills.

  Could this icon be the altar of bones? Certainly in centuries past, from superstitious peasants to the powerful czars, it was believed some icons could heal and work miracles. But surely no one would buy into such a thing today—at least not enough to kill for it. The icon was priceless, though, like a buried treasure, and if a clerk in a convenience store could be shot over twenty bucks, Zoe supposed an old lady could die trying to protect the secret of an icon worth millions.

  Suddenly the shop seemed quiet, too quiet. Except for the ticking of the clocks. Zoe opened her mouth to call out to the old man, then shut it. She felt alone.

  And she didn’t like it.

  She looked at the icon again. It was starting to creep her out now, how the Virgin had her face. The sk
ull cup was creepy, too. The Virgin and her throne seemed to be floating on a lake. On one side of her was a waterfall, on the other something that looked like a jumble of rocks. And the painting had been studded with jewels, but it was odd the way they were laid out, as if the artist had stuck them on with no plan of either symmetry or logic. Except for the ruby, which he’d put right in the middle of the skull’s forehead.

  Ruby, sapphire, aquamarine, diamond, fire opal, iolite, onyx. Seven jewels, and no two of them the same. She didn’t know enough to assess their quality, but the ruby was as big as her pinkie. The other stones were smaller, though.

  She stared at the Virgin’s face a moment longer, then wrapped the icon back up into its waterproof sealskin pouch and slipped it in her satchel. She was about to close the casket’s lid when she saw something else inside. It must have been lying underneath the icon.

  Not until she took it out, though, did she make sense of what it was—a round, gray tin can of the type that was used for storing reels of 8 mm film. And sure enough, that’s what was inside it.

  She unspooled the film a little and held it up to the light. She thought she could make out a little girl blowing out the candles of a birthday cake. She would need a projector to be sure, but she thought the little girl was her mother.

  Zoe closed her eyes against the burn of sudden tears. To think this could be all Katya Orlova had left of the daughter she’d been forced to abandon when she’d gone on the run for her life. Why hadn’t she just given up the icon? Zoe wondered. Surely no material thing, no matter how old and rare and valuable, was worth such a sacrifice.

  Zoe put the reel of film in her satchel and stood up to go. Then she sat back down to check the casket one more time, to be sure it was empty. She ran her fingers over the bottom and sides and was only a little surprised when she exposed the corner of a photograph peeking out from a slit in the black satin lining.

  She pulled the photograph out carefully, for it felt brittle to the touch. Oddly enough, though, it wasn’t all that old.

  It was of a man and two women, both blondes, sitting in the booth of a restaurant somewhere. Zoe recognized the woman on the left as her grandmother, and it looked as if it had been taken a year or so after the one in front of the studio gate, for in this one her hair was longer, worn in a soft bob just past her shoulders. Zoe was also sure she knew the woman sitting next to her grandmother, but she couldn’t place her. The man in the photograph was extraordinarily handsome, with dark hair and a charming, bad-boy grin. He, too, looked familiar to Zoe, although much less so than the second blonde.