A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  Now the floor was buckling, the sheet tiles warping and melting to be replaced by flagstones, until finally no trace of the hospital remained—yet it did, because he could still see it if he concentrated, but it was hard to keep it fixed in place, and so it faded in and out like a wavering in his consciousness—and Godwin and his drowsing daughter were enclosed by the confines of a narrow chapel, illuminated by a light that seemed to come from within the walls themselves. He both felt and heard movement all around as tendrils of ivy emerged from the cracks between the blocks, interweaving to create faces from the greenery until the original stones were barely visible through it.

  From the open mouth of one of the faces appeared a green tuber thick as a wine bottle, like a great tongue lolling. Farther and farther it extended, moving toward his daughter, bifurcating as it drew closer. When at last it reached her, one half moved over the chair to probe at her mouth while the other wound its way around her right leg, ascending over calf, knee, and thigh before vanishing beneath the folds of her skirt.

  “Alyce,” said Godwin again, louder this time.

  His daughter brushed at her mouth with her left hand, even as her lips parted, her jaws unlocked, and the Green Man entered her body from above and below. The chapel walls receded, the space increasing, and before Godwin a great stained-glass window arose, and its lower regions were filled with living creatures.

  “ ‘On the other side is Hell,’ ” Godwin rasped from memory, those hours spent with the works of Neale and Bigland, poring over their descriptions of medieval glass, and of one window in particular, “ ‘in which is the great Devill…’ ”

  This was not just any church, Marcus knew: this was St. Mary’s in Fairford. He tried to get up, and all motion ceased. Suddenly he was conscious of a vastness above him, as of one who wakes to find himself on an isolated plain, surrounded by night. He looked up to see red veins opening amid the living blackness, as though some massive entity were pressing itself against the very fabric of the universe, seeking to force its way through. Marcus glimpsed teeth, and many eyes, and jointed limbs like the legs of a giant insect, before the entity appeared to coalesce and re-form, and the room was filled with the sound of great wings beating, until a countenance became visible, its lineaments almost human, its longing inexpressibly so, and its hatred beyond all understanding.

  It was almost beautiful.

  Marcus Godwin thought: If this is God, I do not wish to die; and if I must die, do not cause me to wake again in His presence.

  He felt a fierce pain in his chest, and with it came a final understanding—No, this is not God—even as a second face appeared alongside the first.

  Not God.

  Not-Gods.

  Marcus closed his eyes. He heard his daughter cry out as the alien noises of machines and monitors took the place of the beating of wings. Hands were on him now, and a beam of light shone into his eyes, but it was all in vain because he was leaving; he had done no harm in his life, and thus had no fear of judgment, only of the Not-Gods.

  “ ‘On the other side is Hell…’ ”

  “Dad!”

  “ ‘… in which is the Great Devill.’ ”

  “You have to step back, miss. We’re—”

  “They’re in the windows.”

  “Please, Daddy, don’t go.”

  “Tell them…”

  “Miss!”

  Marcus smelled the sea, and heard his dead wife speak his name.

  “Tell them they’re in the windows.”

  Gone.

  All gone.

  * * *

  IN HIS LONDON ROOMS, Quayle was privy to visions similar to those being witnessed by the dying Marcus Godwin, although he had no knowledge of the old man or the manner of his passing.

  Because universes were in tumult.

  Quayle felt oppressed by the weight of his own failure. It should have been for the Atlas to finish the reordering of the world, but the Atlas remained deficient, and so this world was deficient also. But what waited beyond its boundaries would wait no longer; blood spilled in foregone places might bridge the final gap, yet how many lives would it take? The discovery of the Moon girl’s remains on the Hexhamshire Moors so soon after Wylie’s death at Canterbury would establish a pattern, and the proximity of the body to the former site of the Familist chapel was also deeply unfortunate. Two dead, and already an error had been made. Mors would see what could be done about it.

  But Quayle had not given up hope of finally restoring the Atlas, and had resumed his search for what appeared to be at least one missing page. He had returned to his primary sources, both the books on his shelves and those that resided in other libraries, and had engaged a trusted contact in similar work. Something must have been overlooked: a line mistranslated, a reference misinterpreted. They would locate the error, and proceed from there.

  Yet Parker was coming.

  Parker: Quayle wondered if the detective’s relentlessness might also have communicated itself to others. In worlds beyond worlds, did the Not-Gods sense Parker’s approach?

  He shook off the notion. No, he would not countenance this. Parker was a man, and only that. He had been lucky so far, but all men ran out of luck in the end, because all men died.

  As Quayle prepared to close the door behind the shelves, he saw the threads at Soter’s mouth contort for a moment before tightening once more. Had he not known better, Quayle might almost have believed Soter had smiled.

  CHAPTER LI

  Despite Parker’s reservations, it had been decided that Bob Johnston should travel ahead to London, if only by a few days, while Parker accompanied Angel and Louis to Amsterdam. In the past, Parker would have been happy to entrust the inquiries in the Netherlands to Angel and Louis alone, but—as Angel had pointed out to him—illness and injury, respectively, had left both men weaker than before. Nevertheless, he continued to worry about Johnston as well.

  “I’ve spent my life working with old books,” said Johnston, when Parker broached the subject of his security. “You’ll only get under my feet.”

  Parker had to admit there was some truth to this, and besides, he had no burning desire to sit around the great libraries of London while the book dealer lost himself in dusty volumes. On the other hand, Johnston would be asking questions about the Fractured Atlas, and doing so on Quayle’s territory. Unless he was very careful, word of his efforts might get back to the lawyer.

  “I’d feel happier if we had someone watching your back,” said Parker.

  “But I’d feel unhappier,” said Johnston, “and I have to tell you, I’m usually pretty unhappy at the best of times.”

  Which put an end to the discussion.

  * * *

  PARKER CALLED ROSS. AS usual, the FBI man didn’t sound pleased to hear from him, but Parker considered this to be Ross’s default position on everyone, and so wasn’t inclined to take it personally.

  “We’re about to get moving,” said Parker. “You need to find some extra cash under the floorboards.”

  “How much?”

  Parker named a figure that, even allowing for business-class flights, and hotel rooms in which a man could stretch upon waking without banging his hands against the walls, was clearly considerably higher than Ross had been anticipating.

  “That’s not going to fly,” said Ross.

  “Then neither are we.”

  “Let’s be serious. You want Quayle at least as much as I do.”

  “And you want Louis to call in favors. In his world, favors come with a price attached.”

  “Mors shot him. I would have thought that might be sufficient motivation to economize.”

  “He’s prepared to pay for his own bullets.”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “Plus, as he and Angel get older, they prefer to travel in serious comfort. They’re not big Red Roof Inn guys.”

  “Yeah, about that fucking champagne delivery. I know that was your—”

&n
bsp; Parker continued talking over him. It seemed the safest option.

  “Unless, of course, you’d like us to knock on the door of the U.S. embassy in London, give them your name, and tell them you said it was okay if we slept in the basement.”

  On reflection, Ross decided this would not be okay.

  “Give me a couple of hours,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  ROSS MET CONRAD HOLT, deputy director of the FBI, in one of the comfortably upholstered booths of the White Horse Tavern on Bridge Street in Lower Manhattan. Holt had ordered the lunch special: $10 for a cheeseburger deluxe with a draft beer, which, as anyone familiar with prices in the Financial District would confirm, was tantamount to giving the food and booze away for nothing.

  “I think you should have ordered something stronger,” said Ross, as he took a seat.

  “Are you ever the bearer of good news?”

  “Rarely. If it was good news, we could have spoken in your office, and sent out a memo after.”

  “They serve Paddy whiskey here for five bucks a shot”—Holt took a bite of cheeseburger—“but I only drink it when I have a cold. Otherwise, I steer clear. You eating?”

  “No.”

  “Then talk, and I can eat while I listen.”

  “It’s about Parker,” said Ross. “And Quayle.”

  “Forgive me for not looking more startled.”

  “I’d have struggled to forgive you if you were startled at all.”

  Ross was engaged in a delicate balancing act when it came to his superior. Holt was one of only a few individuals familiar with Ross’s arrangement with Parker, and probably the only one who didn’t believe that Ross himself was crazy. This was because, years earlier, it was Holt who had detailed Ross to investigate the activities of the killer known as the Traveling Man, and clean up the shambles left behind.

  But the more Ross had learned about Parker, the more apparent the private detective’s strangeness became, while Parker’s own investigations increasingly began to dovetail with matters that concerned Ross and Holt, in particular the activities of the Backers. Unlike Ross, Holt was not prepared to countenance any non-rational explanation for the Backers’ efforts; he saw them only as a group of wealthy, corrupt individuals who were engaged in a criminal conspiracy to perpetuate their own power, a conspiracy that had infected any number of financial, political, and corporate entities. What they chose to believe in the privacy of their own homes was of no concern to Holt. He just wanted them stopped.

  Now there was this whole Quayle business with which to contend, and a series of killings linked to a missing book. (Holt was mildly impressed to be encountering murders with a literary origin. It made a pleasantly cultured change to the norm, although he kept this opinion to himself.) If Ross was correct, Quayle was linked to the Backers through the death of Garrison Pryor, which appeared to have been carried out by Quayle’s associate Mors, possibly in return for assistance received while she and her mentor were in the United States.

  “Where are we on Quayle?” said Holt.

  The FBI had no jurisdiction to make arrests on foreign soil, except where extraterritorial permission was granted by Congress, and then only with the consent of the host country. But the Bureau retained agents and other personnel—known as “legats”—in legal attaché offices situated in embassies and consulates, administered by the FBI’s International Operations Division in Washington, D.C.

  “The legats in London and The Hague have been in contact with national law enforcement and Interpol, but the consensus appears to be that the Quayle and Mors identities are entirely manufactured. Pallida Mors is a reference to ‘pale death’ in Horace’s Carmina, while the Quayle legal firm ceased to exist in the forties, and was followed soon after by the demise of Atol Quayle, seemingly the last of the line. Because of the Dutch passports used to enter and leave the Americas, the legats are continuing to focus on the Netherlands, but so far to no avail.”

  “And you still think Parker can do better?”

  “I believe so, with the help of his associates.”

  Holt finished his burger and pushed away the plate of fries.

  “Now you really are putting me off the rest of my food,” said Holt. “At least I got to enjoy my burger before you mentioned those two. Is that fucking Angel still wasting FBI time?”

  Ross’s office continued to be the recipient of anonymous missives concerning the supposed location of a network of secret FBI restrooms across the United States. The latest communication, received the previous month, had pinpointed the Barbed Wire Museum in La Crosse, Kansas; the Sasquatch Museum in Cherry Log, Georgia; and the Umbrella Cover Museum on Peaks Island, Maine, as likely locations for these facilities. On this occasion, fifty key blanks of various designs had also been included, with a printed note advising that the sender did not wish to inconvenience the taxpayer, and expressing the hope that some of the blanks might be appropriate for the manufacture of the relevant restroom keys. The typed return address was A Friend, c/o The Great Lost Bear, 540 Forest Avenue, Portland, ME 04101. Holt had to be dissuaded from sending the blanks to be dusted for fingerprints.

  “They’ll require funds.” Ross named the figure given to him by Parker.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Holt, “we’re not sending an entire delegation. It’s only three guys.”

  “Four.”

  “Who’s the fourth?”

  “A book dealer.”

  Holt opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t figure out what that should be, beyond taking the Lord’s name in vain for a second time, and so closed it again without saying anything.

  “Apparently,” said Ross, “they prefer to travel in comfort.”

  “Like kings, you mean.” Holt swallowed what was left of his beer. “Just transfer the money. We’re looking for foreign killers of American citizens: no oversight committee is going to object to the use of any and all means to bring them to justice. But if anyone asks, we were dealing with Parker alone, and resourcing him with strict guidelines on accountability, and assurances of his full cooperation with the legats.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  “Not that it’ll make any fucking difference,” said Holt, as he dropped a ten and a five on the table and pocketed the receipt.

  “No,” Ross admitted, “probably not.”

  CHAPTER LII

  Sellars drove home to Manchester, stopping only to fill up on fuel and confirm with the office that he would be back at work the following day. His encounter with Mors had left him shaken, but she had that effect on people. At least he could rationalize his fear of her, because he knew what she was capable of doing. He’d seen her handiwork for himself.

  Some years earlier, a Dutch investigator named Yvette Visser had begun taking an interest in certain shipments being made to and from the Continent, and in particular those arriving at, or originating from, a number of free ports in Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. “Free ports” was the term most commonly used to describe free economic zones, designated areas in which customs duties and taxes were suspended. They varied in size from entire ports to individual warehouses within the precincts of international transportation hubs, and were—depending upon the view one took—either secure, convenient locations in which the uber-wealthy could store valuable physical assets, including wines, vintage cars, and fine art; or more-or-less lawless shelters that, at their most unscrupulous, facilitated tax evasion, money laundering, and the concealment of stolen goods. Thus it was possible for the owner of a Picasso stored in a free port to sell the painting to a buyer, also allied to the free port, without the painting ever leaving the building, or even the room in which it was housed, thereby avoiding capital-gains or value-added taxes. And should the new owner elect to hang the latest acquisition on a wall in one of his or her many homes around the world, various shell companies, as well as other free ports, could be used to move the painting through enough countries that i
ts point of origin, and final destination, would be ascertainable only to God Himself.

  A significant part of Carenor’s business involved the discreet transportation of goods to and from some of these European free ports, which was how Sellars had initially become familiar with Mors—and, ultimately, Quayle. Sellars had since been responsible for conveying a number of valuable assets on their behalf, most often while engaged in legitimate or semi-legitimate business for Carenor.

  All had been going smoothly until the arrival of Yvette Visser. She specialized in tracking stolen art, and was working for a consortium of lawyers based in New York, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam. This consortium was seeking to resolve claims for paintings misappropriated during the Nazi era, most of them from Jews but some also from private and public collections looted by Fat Hermann Goering and his stooges. As part of this investigation, Visser had begun sniffing around the smaller of the two Luxembourg free ports, known as the Enclave Lusur, a slightly awkward play on the French phrase en lieu sûr, meaning “in a safe place.”

  The Enclave, as it was known to those who availed themselves of its services, was situated behind high walls close to Findel airport, and competed for business with the larger Le Freeport. While Le Freeport was a purpose-built facility that had been opened in 2014 by Luxembourg’s Grand Duke himself, the older Enclave was housed inside a redbrick warehouse bearing the faded name of its former occupant, a failed shipping company. Unlike Le Freeport, it had commenced operations with no fuss at all, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg having been quietly advised that it might be better to keep all public associations with the Enclave to a minimum. Its shareholders included Russians, Albanians, Nigerians—Nigeria being to free ports what Ronald McDonald was to fast food—along with the kind of minor royalty from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates whose names set off alarm bells in American and European intelligence agencies every time they boarded an international flight.