A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  Parker and Hood walked together to the latter’s cottage, Jess at their heels. A wind blew over the moors, making Parker glad of his coat. His rental car was parked on the road below, far from the path he had taken to the Familist site, but Hood promised to give him a ride back to it in his Land Rover when they were done.

  They made one detour on the way to the cottage, because Parker wanted to see whence the Familists had come. He was surprised by how much of the original settlement survived. The houses were roofless, and most of them were single-room dwellings in which families would have lived next to livestock, so only the outer walls remained, yet they appeared remarkably resilient. One or two of the stones were defaced by graffiti, but there was no garbage, no broken glass or discarded beer cans, nothing to suggest that this was a place that attracted visitors, or ones that stayed for long.

  “Folks don’t come up here much,” said Hood, when Parker remarked upon it. “Even the hikers give it a wide berth.”

  “Why?”

  “Legends. Tales of disappearances. And it feels wrong. Gets in your bones if you hang around. There was evil in the Familists, and they didn’t take all of it with them when they went to America. You saw the weeds at the old church hollow, and the blackening of the grass. I’ll show you what’s left of my garden as well. That’s not normal.”

  “Has it happened before?”

  “Not in my lifetime. It’s recent. Something’s changed—or returned.”

  “What do you think has caused it?”

  Hood didn’t hesitate. “The killing of that young woman.”

  * * *

  THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY−−FROM the Greek words “theos,” meaning a god, and “sophia,” meaning wisdom—was founded in New York City in 1875 as a non-sectarian body with the aim of encouraging the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science, and the investigation of what was believed to be the ancient, hidden wisdom underlying all the world’s major religions, whether they chose to recognize it or not. The Theosophists regarded this world as an illusion, and were convinced that through the development of a higher intuition, the interior or invisible world might be perceived.

  Whether Quayle subscribed to any of these beliefs was immaterial, and since the Theosophists greatly valued tolerance as part of their desire for universal brotherhood, he was unlikely ever to be challenged on the subject. What mattered to him was that the society’s London headquarters in Gloucester Place held one of the finest collections of esoteric and occult books in Europe, from which members could borrow in person or by mail. Quayle had no time to wait for the librarian to hunt down and send out the volumes he sought, and so had elected to visit the library in person. In any case, he required sight of only three books, and the references he wished to cross-check would take up less than an hour of his time. While the library was usually closed on Sundays, a phone call had been enough to assure Quayle that someone would be present to admit him, provided he did not plan to tarry.

  Unfortunately, upon his arrival he found that all three of the required volumes had recently been checked out by a visiting subscriber, and the librarian politely declined to share the identity of this individual with him, although, if the need was urgent, he did offer to pass on Quayle’s contact details to the subscriber in question, or else the library could inform him as soon as the books were returned. Neither option suited, so Quayle left the society in a bad mood, if not yet overly apprehensive. The absence of the works he required was probably a coincidence, and nothing more.

  London, as it was wont to do in summer, even in the season’s early weeks, was holding in the heat as assuredly as if the city were trapped under glass, and the air was heavy with humidity. This did not trouble Quayle, who was always cold, but as the temperature of the city rose, so too did that of its citizenry. As he walked to Marylebone Road to hail a cab, he heard shouts from the vicinity of Old Marylebone Town Hall, and witnessed a scuffle involving two older men, one wearing a Sikh turban and the other a luminous tabard. Quayle couldn’t make out all that was passing between them, but it was clear that the man in the tabard, who was white, had mistaken the Sikh for a “Muslim bastard,” and the subsequent exchange of words had escalated to blows. A crowd had gathered around them, but no one seemed inclined to intervene. Instead they egged on the antagonists according to their sympathies, or in order to ensure that the entertainment did not conclude too soon. A policeman arriving to break up the scuffle had to fight his way through the onlookers, and a chorus of jeers accompanied his separation of the two men.

  Similar scenes were being played out in cities and towns across the land, and the hostilities had even spread to the Continent, where ultra-right-wing nationalists were using the killings in Britain to take preemptive action against Muslims in their own countries, along with any other immigrants unfortunate enough to cross their paths. It didn’t matter that religious leaders and politicians were calling for calm, or rational voices were pointing out that, beyond the presence of the misbaha on the victims’ bodies, there was no evidence of the crimes having been committed by a Muslim, and the prayer beads might well be an attempt to incite precisely the very discord currently being witnessed. Ears were blocked to reason, and eyes closed to goodness. The Atlas, now so close to completion, was altering the topography of the world at an accelerating rate.

  Unseen by all but Quayle, the Pale Child crouched at a street corner, stretching out a hand at random to touch those that passed. Quayle saw its fingers brush against the belly of a pregnant woman, and watched her stumble before regaining her balance. She walked on, rubbing her stretched skin at the place where the Pale Child had marked her.

  Quayle wondered if she had felt the infant die in her womb.

  A cab stopped, and he directed the driver to take him to Fleet Street. He had endured enough of the city and its people. He needed seclusion, and his books. Yet the incident at the Theosophical library began to trouble him.

  Why those volumes? he thought. Why now?

  * * *

  PARKER HAD EXPECTED HOOD’S home to be some version of Cold Comfort Farm, but discovered instead the congenial dwelling of a man who tolerated inclemency while out on the moors, but saw no reason to endure further hardship inside his own four walls. Those same walls were decorated with landscape scenes and various prints of dogs and horses, while the furniture, for the most part, was old but well maintained. Only a large-screen television, a satellite box, and a Roberts satellite radio would have appeared out of place a century earlier. The cottage itself was unusual in its design, constructed as it was with thick walls, small windows, and a low ceiling on the ground floor, with even smaller slit windows on the level above. Hood explained that it was one of the last bastles built on the moor, a bastle being a stone farmhouse designed for defense, and dating originally from the seventeenth century, when disputes between border families often descended into bloodshed.

  “So you live in a fortress,” said Parker.

  “And glad I am of it,” said Hood.

  He boiled a kettle and warmed the teapot, before adding leaves and water. He stood the pot on a metal stand and left the tea to brew while he dug out a tin box that contained a thick slab of fruit cake, and took from the refrigerator a square of deep yellow butter that didn’t look to Parker like it had come wrapped in any paper with a brand name. He cut Parker a slice of cake, and offered him the butter.

  “I don’t use it, thanks.”

  For the first time since they’d met, Hood looked actively shocked.

  “Don’t Americans use butter?”

  “Not this American.”

  “What do you put on your bread?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  Hood regarded Parker with new puzzlement.

  “Why would a man choose to eat his bread dry?”

  He made it sound less like an inquiry about food, and more an existential issue to be addressed. It made Parker feel as though
he had missed a life lesson.

  Parker shrugged. “I’ve been that way ever since I was a kid.”

  “I suppose you don’t take sugar in your tea, either.”

  “As it happens, I don’t.”

  Hood shook his head at the queerness of some folk.

  “You might as well be in jail,” he said.

  “You’re not the first person to suggest that.”

  Hood poured the tea.

  “If I’d known what you were like,” he said glumly, “I’d have used tea bags.”

  CHAPTER XCV

  The Wittenham Clumps, formed from chalk and standing high above the River Thames in Oxfordshire, have been a locus of power and worship since the Ice Age. The tallest of them, at almost 400 feet, is Round Hill, but the most important is Castle Hill, which was the site of a hill fort from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age—one that, at its apogee, was protected by concentric levels of wall, ditch, and stockade. But by 300 BC, the fortress lay abandoned, and no cause for its desertion was ever established. The only clue came in the form of a burial pit in which was discovered the huddled body of a man, and upon him, separated by a fine layer of earth, the dismembered remains of a woman. Iron Age settlers did not bury their dead in this manner. These, it seems, were sacrifices, but they had not been sufficient, and so the Clumps were left to old gods, their names long forgotten.

  Now, more than two thousand years later, a vixen dug amid the beeches on Castle Hill, her paws scattering fine showers of earth as she sought methodically for the source of the scent that had lured her here. At last, her claws struck softer stuff.

  The vixen lowered her head, and began to feed.

  CHAPTER XCVI

  Hood lit a fire. The cottage was cool, but not so much as to call for a blaze.

  “Force of habit,” Hood explained. “I always find an empty grate depressing. And anyway—”

  Parker waited, but Hood did not go on.

  “And?” he prompted.

  Hood stabbed at the pile of wood with a poker, sending a small shower of sparks flying.

  “All green things fear fire,” he finished.

  They drank the last of the tea, and Hood recounted for Parker his discovery of Romana Moon’s body, and the events that followed. He spoke also of the Familists, and what he knew of their history, even though they were long departed from this island, they and their chapel decorated with images of the Green Man; gone to the New World, gone to Maine, there to thrive until they drew the wrong man to them, this man, the one sitting opposite, whom they tried to kill—did kill—but who was restored to life by the actions of surgeons or the will of God, depending on what one chose to believe.

  “You’re certain they’re all gone from the area?” Parker asked.

  “Why would they hide themselves now?” said Hood. “We no longer burn heretics at the stake.”

  “Then what’s happening here?” said Parker. “Why did Romana Moon die on these moors?”

  “Are you a gardening man?” Hood asked.

  “I have a garden.”

  “That’s not the same thing, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Then no, I wouldn’t claim to be a gardener.”

  “There are seeds that can lie dormant for long periods, waiting for rain. Over in Israel, they planted a two-thousand-year-old seed found in the ruins of a fortress called Masada, and it grew into a Judean date palm that had been extinct since AD 500. The Russians dug up seeds from a squirrel burrow, and germinated a campion that had died out thirty-two thousand years earlier. Maybe the Familists left behind a seed, a little part of their green god hibernating under the ground, and now someone has put blood in the earth to wake it.”

  “But not a Familist, not if you’re right about them.”

  “Old places have power,” said Hood, “and this is a very old place. Beltingham’s another, not far from here.”

  “Where they found the body of the boy?” Parker had heard something about it on the car radio.

  “Sacrificed to a yew tree.”

  “Is that what you think was done to him?”

  “What else would it be?”

  “There’s nothing to suggest a link between the crimes.”

  “You’re not keeping up with events. They’re saying Romana Moon taught that boy in school, so they’re connected, all right. Someone killed his brother, too, over in Newcastle. Then there’s Helen Wylie, and the Hicks girl, both left, like Romana, with beads in their mouths. They haven’t found Hicks yet, but my guess is she was murdered somewhere with a history of worship, and maybe also of trouble and ruin, though her body may lie elsewhere.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because whoever killed Romana moved her body from the chapel site after she was dead. He didn’t want it known that she’d died there. He was trying to hide the fact.”

  “Then why leave the dead boy in the yew?”

  “You’re the detective. I’m just a simple farmer.”

  Parker let that one go. He looked at his watch. It was time to leave, but he had one more thing to do, one service he could perform for Hood, and for all these people. It had come to him as he stood amid the ruins of the settlement, whispered in a voice that sounded like that of his dead daughter, but faint, as though heard from afar.

  “Can we take a detour to the hollow on the way back to my car?” he said.

  Hood didn’t look overjoyed at the prospect. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Humor me.”

  Hood stood, the dog rising with him, and found the keys to his Land Rover.

  “Nothing humorous about it,” he said.

  * * *

  SELLARS SAT AT THE kitchen table with his wife and daughters, eating pasta and listening to one of the new digital stations the girls liked because they played dance music, the kind he couldn’t have identified even if someone placed a gun to his head. His wife knew all those songs: it was another point of separation between them, another factor distancing him from his womenfolk, three against one. He suspected it was deliberate on Lauren’s part.

  The children recognized that something had changed between their parents, although they had yet to be informed of the cause. Lauren had agreed to wait a couple of days before telling the kids about the separation. Now that the subject had been raised and discussed, and a path forward seemingly agreed, some of the tension had gone out of her, and she was more relaxed than she had been in months, even years. She laughed with the girls, and was polite with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. She could afford to be magnanimous because she would shortly be getting what she wanted: to keep the house, which had always felt more like hers anyway; to have the girls to herself, apart from a weekend or two a month, and perhaps a couple of evenings here and there, depending on how generous she and the court decided to be; and to rid herself of the burden of him, and therefore also to be freed from the suspicions that had tormented her for so long. Once a respectable amount of time had passed, she’d take another man to her bed, the bed in which she and Sellars had conceived their two beautiful daughters. She’d probably even keep the mattress. It was only a year old, and mattresses were expensive.

  Lauren made a joke, and Kelly smiled along with it, but Louise didn’t. She was the more sensitive of the girls, even though she was the younger, and hadn’t yet learned to hide her emotions as well as her sister. Kelly was her mother’s daughter, but Louise was more like her father. She glanced at him now as she sucked the tagliatelle from her fork, and his heart hurt. How could Lauren ever have imagined that he’d just walk away from these girls to become some absentee father who would have to ask permission to visit when he started missing them too much; who wouldn’t be with them when they opened their gifts on Christmas morning; who would no longer be able to look in on them when he got home, no matter how late, because he needed to be sure they were safe in their beds before he could close his eyes; who would eventually be forced to play second fiddle to someone called Steve, Bobby, Ricky, or whatever other fucke
r Lauren was already lining up as his replacement. He saw how the men looked at her in the pub when they thought he wasn’t paying attention. Lauren was an attractive woman, head and shoulders above any of the others in their local. They’d be sniffing around her like the dogs they were before he’d even had a chance to collect the last of his belongings from the house and move them to whatever rotten little rental he could afford with the money left to him after the settlement.

  His hand had closed so tightly on his fork that his knuckles were white. He willed himself to relax. It wasn’t going to happen, none of it. Mors would take care of it, and when it was over, he would be left to raise the girls alone. He would no longer be free to take on overnight pickups and deliveries, or dawn-to-dusk runs, which might mean finding another job, but he didn’t mind. The most important thing to him was his daughters and their happiness. He still hadn’t decided whether it would be better for them if their mother’s remains were found, so that her fate would be known, or if Lauren should simply vanish entirely. He was leaning toward the former; it would be harder for them at first, but at least they wouldn’t always be seeking her face in a crowd. Eventually he might drive them to the Hexhamshire Moors, and they’d lie on the ground together, all three of them, and listen to the Green Man growing big and strong beneath the earth.

  Fingers touched his, and Lauren said, “You all right?”

  He resisted the urge to pull his hand away. “I’m fine. Why?”

  “You’ve been sitting there for ages with the same forkful of pasta hanging in front of your face. I thought you might have turned to stone.”

  Kelly giggled. Even Louise smiled properly.

  “Like Mr. Tumnus,” said Louise, and Kelly giggled harder. Lauren joined in, and soon all three of them were laughing at him.

  He couldn’t remember who Mr. Tumnus was, until Kelly said, “Daddy’s a faun,” and then he understood: half man, half beast, with horns on his head and cloven hooves for feet.