A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  It was said that the great Albrecht Dürer himself had designed the stained-glass artwork, although Shipman had been unable to establish the truth of this assertion, and anyway, he regarded their human authorship as irrelevant in the main. They were the work of God Himself, acting through the hands of men—and now that same God, acting through nature, had left them in ruins, or so attested the more dolorous of worshippers, who regarded the visitation as proof of the general disobedience of humanity, and its ongoing rush toward damnation.

  But Shipman was reluctant to ascribe to God every misfortune incurred by man, even if he kept this opinion largely to himself. The Lord had created the world, and every creature in it, but this did not make Him responsible for each dog bite, bee sting, or spoiled jug of milk; and if this were true, then neither did He choose deliberately to visit storms, famines, and pestilences upon his greatest creation. God had made the world, then left it to function according to His design while He watched how man might respond, and in what manner he might deal with its turbulences.

  So Shipman did not lose faith, but recovered his strength to lead his flock in the clearing of the debris, and the long, costly process of restoration to come. He spent that first day supervising the removal of the broken glass, excepting those parts sufficiently large as to prove salvageable, and which might be returned to the West Window at some point in the future. He ordered the fallen battlements lowered from the porch, and set three men to covering the hole in the roof that had resulted from the lost lead. It was hard, dusty labor—and bloody with it, thanks to glass shards, wood splinters, and fragments of sharp stone—but many hands meant it progressed faster than anticipated, and by day’s end the floor of the church was clear of detritus, and no longer exposed to the elements; the roof was whole once more; and wood had been fixed to the West Window to prevent the wind from blowing in, thereby securing the glass against further damage. In the evening dark, Shipman knelt before the West Window and gave thanks to God.

  As he was getting to his feet, and contemplating the benefits of a good scrub and a hot meal, he heard a sound from the porch. It seemed to him that it might be a dog, because it was not footsteps he discerned but the scratching of claws on the stone. He waited for the animal to leave, but instead it commenced an abrasion of the door, tearing at the wood as though to force a way into the church.

  Shipman had no patience for any further damage to St. Mary’s, and rushed to send the beast on its way, with a swift kick in the arse for its troubles. Yet he could see the door shaking in the frame, and began to fear that this was no ordinary hound; if so, then to aim a kick at such a monster would be to risk losing his boot to its jaws, along with the foot it contained.

  He had almost reached the door when the scratching stopped, only for it to be replaced by another sound, because Shipman now clearly heard the claws working at the wall, moving up the wall of the porch and onto the roof. A bird, then? But what bird could cause a heavy oak door almost to bend inward with the force of its blows?

  The impact of talon on stone continued, shifting from the porch roof to the main wall of the church. Shipman paused to raise another prayer to the Lord, opened the door, and stepped outside.

  His first thought was that the evening was darker than it had any right to be, given the hour. He looked to the sky and saw heavy clouds so low they seemed to brush the church spire. It was these clouds that had cast the church and its surrounds into shadow. Now Shipman backed out of the porch, the better to see what was ascending the north wall. At first, he could distinguish nothing at all due to the pall over the town, but slowly he picked out a shape against the brickwork. It looked like a child, but no boy or girl could have scaled such sheer walls unaided.

  “Ho!” said Shipman. “Ho there! Come down.”

  The figure responded to the call, but in no human fashion. Instead it scuttled sideways like a lizard and thus proceeded across the exterior of the church. Its skin was entirely black, but of a hue that seemed to absorb all light, so that it resembled a hole torn in the fabric of the world, revealing only void beyond. Shipman thought he could discern horns on its head, and a short, pointed tail.

  The presence looked down, and was suddenly familiar to him.

  On the north wall of the church, above the stained-glass representations of the persecutors of the faith, was a series of smaller windows, each inhabited by the image of a demon. One of these was a horned figure with black skin and white eyes. It was those same eyes that now regarded Shipman.

  So shocked was the reverend gentleman that he failed to notice further movement, but it did not take him long to register. It was as though in becoming aware of the one presence, he became aware of the many, the way a man who spots one ant will quickly find his vision accommodating itself to the comings and goings of the entire nest. Shipman’s church was alive with creeping, scrambling silhouettes, some familiar from the windows of his church, others too strange for glass, but all without relation to any creatures found in nature.

  And in the churchyard stood one more: it was larger than the rest, with a greatly distorted skull, and sickly illumination seemed to shine from the core of its being. Within the light, Shipman thought he could perceive a broken, malformed child, pale and naked, its limbs misshapen, its head at once fetal and birdlike.

  Beyond the churchyard was the town. Shipman could see people walking its streets, could even see the windows of his own home, his wife moving through the rooms behind, but none looked his way, and he noticed that the gloom cast by the clouds had not extended to the rest of Fairford, and appeared confined to the church and its environs. He tried to call for help, but the words emerged muffled and indistinct. He was alone.

  At that moment, something impacted him with great force on the back of the head, and all consciousness was lost to him.

  * * *

  Shipman awoke in his own bed, to which he had been carried on a pallet by a group of parishioners who had come across their shepherd’s prostrate figure as they returned from the fields. It appeared he had been struck by a piece of masonry that had fallen from the damaged church, although it was not clear how it had managed to land on the unfortunate cleric’s head, so far was he found from the chapel, and it was concluded that the stonework must have taken a bounce along the way, imbuing it with the velocity and trajectory required to cause him harm.

  An examination of Shipman by the local bonesetter revealed that no lasting damage had been done, and the skull was unbroken. The wound, which had bled profusely, was stitched up, leaving Shipman miserable and in pain. He was prevailed upon to accept some laudanum, which rendered him unconscious for the night, and the best part of the day that followed. When he woke, he spoke only with his wife of what he had seen, expecting her to be immediately dismissive, and to ascribe his words to the aftereffects of the narcotic. Instead she told him that she had woken the previous night to a scratching at the glass, and upon looking out had glimpsed a black shape climbing the wall into the churchyard, before it was lost to the shadows of the gravestones.

  “I think that same entity threw the stone at my head,” said Shipman. “I believe it wanted to knock my brains out.”

  “Yet what was it, husband?”

  But Shipman only closed his eyes, and waited for her to leave.

  * * *

  Two days after his accident, Shipman finally felt well enough to rise from his bed. He returned to the church, and found that work had already commenced on repairing the damaged windows, if only with clear sheet-glass. He also examined the door of the church, and discovered that a piece of wood had been fixed to its base.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “We think a dog might have tried to get in,” said one of the laborers. “The defacement was so great that we had no choice but to cover it up as best we could, for now.”

  Shipman said nothing. He went inside and inspected the progress. All of the holes in the glass had now been covered, save one: high on the north wall, two men were fixing a
crack in the glass above the depiction of Annas, the very window that contained the image of the beast Shipman had seen climbing the wall of the church. He noticed that one of the workers had a bandaged hand, and could offer only limited assistance to his fellow on the scaffolding.

  “What happened to you?” Shipman called up.

  “I caught it on the glass, Mr. Shipman,” came the reply. “Can’t think how. We’ve had a job with this one, and no mistake.”

  His colleague grunted. “You’d almost say it didn’t want to be fixed,” he said. “We’ll see it done, though.”

  And they did, although both men would later say that they suffered more injuries, more cuts, scrapes, and splinters, in the repairing of the single fissure to that window than they did in all the rest of the works combined.

  * * *

  The restoration of the church would be a long, slow process, aided by donations of time, skill—and money, because the laborer must be paid. Not a day went by during those first weeks without Shipman being obliged to show visitors around St. Mary’s, explaining to them the history of the windows, and how the damaged panes might be returned to something of their former grandeur, in the hope of receiving some contribution in return for his efforts. He guided lords and their ladies, commoners and professional men, and rarely did they leave without making an offering. But he also received gifts from those who did not trouble him for his time, and who had not even visited the church, or not to his knowledge. One of the most generous had come from Jonas Quayle of London, a lawyer—a notoriously tight-fisted profession, which made the donation all the more surprising.

  Yet in those same days and weeks Shipman heard whispers, and began to connect a series of peculiar incidents: the farmer’s wife whose entire flock of chickens was ripped apart as though by a fox, except that all of the heads were missing, only later to be discovered in a pile by the base of the church’s north wall; the blacksmith who lost the use of his left hand when he was distracted—or so he claimed—by a horned creature with dark skin and white eyes that seemed drawn to the flames of his furnace; and two children who saw what they believed to be a naked, deformed figure kneeling by a pond to drink, only for it to grasp one of them by the arm and drag her beneath the surface, where she drowned, leaving the survivor to tell the tale. There were other accounts, too, but some Shipman dismissed as the usual strange lore of village life. Only those that resonated with his personal experience, or described sightings with some correspondence to the windows of the church, troubled him, and would continue to do so to the grave.

  But so also would he grow increasingly interested in the history of the glaziers who had created the stained glass, and the tales of their presence passed down through generations of villagers at Fairford: how they had been troubled by nightmares that left two of them in Bedlam, and caused one to kill another in error, having mistaken him for an image in the windows come to life; of the designs rejected by Barnard Flower, and consigned to the fire, because he believed no one would worship in any church that contained them, or no devotee of a Christian bent; and of the glaziers from Tilburg, five in all, who shared the same dream of a buried book that called to them from the depths of the earth.

  And sometimes Shipman would think back to those final excised lines from his letter to Defoe, and wonder if he should have left them in, even at a cost to his reputation, or his living.

  “It is my opinion that, in shattering the glass of our church, nature briefly gave license to roam to that which should have been contained; and, by repairing the damage, order was restored to this place. But how, or why, the images should have assumed such physical forms, I cannot say…”

  9

  Besides I find this tree hath never been

  Like other fruit trees, walled or hedged in,

  But in the highway standing many a year,

  It never yet was robbed, as I could hear.

  The reason is apparent to our eyes,

  That what it bears, are dead commodities…

  —John Taylor, “The Description of Tyburn”

  CHAPTER LXXXVIII

  A trio of yews dominates the churchyard of St. Cuthbert’s in Beltingham, Northumberland. To the south and southwest, respectively, stand a male and female pairing at least four centuries in age—and perhaps even older than this, for the main body of St. Cuthbert’s dates back to the fifteenth century, and it is not unlikely that the two yews might have been planted at the same time as the church was raised.

  Yet parts of St. Cuthbert’s are more ancient still, because structural elements have been dated to 1260, and to the east can be seen the broken shaft of a seventh-century Saxon cross, indicating that this place has been sacred to Christians for almost a millennium and a half, although if an early Saxon church ever existed in the same spot (and this remains in dispute), it has long since vanished, its wooden walls reclaimed by the earth. Most likely, though, the cross was the only symbol of their belief that the Saxons erected there.

  They were being most careful.

  Look closer at this cross, and regard its plinths: they are the remains of a Roman altar from the same site, which means that this ground has seen devotion since at least the second century, when the Romans first invaded. With barely a glance, we have moved from centuries of veneration to millennia.

  Old, so very old.

  But why this place? Perhaps it is because Beltingham sits only a few miles from what was oft considered the geographical heart of the British mainland at Haltwhistle; is, in fact, the parent parish of the region, and was in all likelihood a center of Druidic worship centuries before the Romans nailed Christ to the cross.

  Not Haltwhistle, but Beltingham.

  And there is more to come.

  Let us return to the yews in the churchyard. The yew is a sacred tree, linked to death, burial, and rebirth in early Nordic, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon traditions. In ancient Greece, it is associated with the underworld, providing a gateway from this world to the next. It was no great stretch for Christianity to adapt these beliefs to the concept of resurrection, and just as the early Church repurposed pagan sites for the veneration of the One True God, so also did it lay claim to the yew, protecting and nurturing it, so that even as the wild yews vanished from the land, the church yews flourished.

  But what of the third yew at St. Cuthbert’s? It is a male tree, standing to the north. The trunk is split and twisted, lending it the aspect of a suffering martyr, an impression reinforced by a slight redness to the bark, as though stained long ago by blood. This seemingly tormented creature, its branches cobwebbed, its exterior flaking like skin, is actually in the process of regenerating: the trunk is hollow, the interior heartwood and sapwood rotting away while a new cloak of bark forms around it. In a century or so, the tree will look completely different.

  This male yew was already old when St. Cuthbert’s was being built in the fifteenth century; old, even, when the thirteenth-century stones were being put in place. It has sheltered Christians from the storm for at least nine hundred years, but probably much longer, and may well be the scion of a predecessor that towered over pagans in its time, when this place had no walls and gods showed no mercy. After all, the Fortingall yew to the north, which sits at the center of the Scottish east-west axis, is two thousand years old, at the lowest estimate.

  Such power in the earth; such memories.

  All these dead.

  All this blood.

  * * *

  KARENZA LUMLEY HAD SPENT her teenage years despising her given name—due in no small part to the tendency of packs of young men and women to nip and tear at any signs of difference or individuality—and her adulthood cherishing its distinctiveness. Her mother’s people were originally from Cornwall, and Karenza’s name was derived from “car,” the Cornish word for love. How her ancestors had ended up traveling from the southwest corner of the country to the northeast was unclear, but family lore suggested it was a matter of the heart, which probably meant an unanticipated pregnancy outsi
de the bonds of marriage, back when such mishaps brought serious consequences for all involved.

  Karenza was a sensible bluestocking, a retired schoolmistress who voted Conservative, and approved of Britain giving two fingers to the European Union. She would never have expressed it in those terms, of course, some variation on “damn” being the crudest epithet permitted to pass her lips, and the idea of raising a non-Churchillian—indeed, non-metaphorical—two fingers to anyone being anathema to her. She loved her country, and she loved this little church. It was said that the remains of St. Cuthbert had been hidden nearby to save them from the Vikings, and something of his spirit continued to imbue the church and its surroundings with a sense of tranquillity. Karenza didn’t know if this was true, and it didn’t concern her greatly either way. Like her Christianity, her views on such matters were entirely practical: this was a peaceful place, and if St. Cuthbert was responsible for its grace, then more power to the lingering effects of his old bones. If St. Cuthbert had nothing to do with it, his absence didn’t detract from the fact of its calm.

  Karenza had never married. She had never particularly felt the need for male—or, God forbid, female—companionship of a sexual kind when she was younger, and the absence of any such desire had only deepened in the intervening years. While aware that autumn romances were not uncommon, she held out little expectation of any alteration to the pattern of her life at this late stage, and would have welcomed it even less. There were committees to be chaired and jams to be sold; pews to be polished and floors to be swept; prayers to be said and hymns to be sung, because apparently God liked that sort of thing, and it was good for the lungs. Was Karenza ever lonely? Not that she would have admitted, but in recent years, as her limbs began to ache more deeply, and her energy levels started to flag more noticeably, she had become aware of a certain emptiness, a dearth that was almost physical. When she tried to picture it in an effort to understand its nature, she was drawn again and again to the image of a vase that had never been filled with flowers: a plain object, not entirely unpretty, gathering dust, paper clips, and discarded coins, whereas it might once have been permitted to sit in sunlight, all stem green and blossom red, thereby discovering that this was a purpose to be preferred.