A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  If Johnston expected Louis to take issue with his conclusions, he was destined to be disappointed. Speculating on an occult underpinning for Louis’s choice of restaurant was one thing—he took his dining selections too seriously to leave them up to scrivening, or any other form of supernatural intervention—but Louis, through Parker, had seen too much to dismiss singularity without first giving consideration to it. He had experienced the strangeness of Quayle and Mors at close quarters, taking two bullets for his trouble. He also knew about the pages from the Atlas, and the manner in which they had altered and distorted the book in which they were concealed.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” said Louis. “We still need to find Quayle, no matter how old he is.”

  “Sellars,” said Parker. “We break him, and we get to Quayle.”

  Thanks to Johnston’s research efforts, aided by some of Parker’s online contacts, they had secured employment records for Christopher Sellars and his wife, along with a home address, landline and cell phone numbers, and a copy of Sellars’s driver’s license. If Parker had asked Ross for help, he could probably also have obtained bank and credit card records, but for now he still preferred to keep the feds at arm’s length. He’d have to contact Ross soon, though, if only to maintain some pretense of keeping him in the loop, and had already bought another SIM card for that purpose. Soon he’d have so many SIMs and burners, he’d have to start labeling them to avoid confusion.

  Following Sellars, though, would entail Angel and Louis leaving London for Manchester, and might not yield any results. If Sellars was working with Quayle via Carenor, then he understood the value of caution. The confirmation they sought might only be found in his bank records, or on his phone. Perhaps Parker would have to involve Ross after all.

  Their server offered them dessert, but none of them had the appetite for it. They walked together back to Soho, but first detoured to take in Hawksmoor’s Christ Church. Its design was more reminiscent of a temple than a chapel, its tower as much obelisk as steeple, and its dimensions peculiarly top heavy, so that when examined from below, the whole structure appeared on the verge of tumbling down. It was, Parker supposed, breathtaking, yet he did not believe that the spirit of any god of love or pity had ever resided in its environs. Whatever Hawksmoor might have built it to honor, it was not a deity Parker recognized.

  Just across from Christ Church, in Miller’s Court, Mary Kelly—“Black Mary”—had been found naked in her bed on the morning of November 9, 1888, her breasts removed and her abdomen emptied of its organs. Her uterus and kidneys were placed under her head, her intestines laid to the right of her body, her spleen to the left, and her liver lodged between her feet. Her face was so badly mutilated as to render her unidentifiable. She was assumed to be the final victim of Jack the Ripper, although there were those who dissented, pointing out that she was much younger than the previous victims, and the damage to her body bore no trace of the surgical skill associated with the other killings, none of which would have been of interest or consolation to Mary Kelly while she was being butchered in the shadow of Hawksmoor’s greatest creation.

  And even here, the echo of Quayle’s name persisted, for Hawksmoor, in his capacity as Mellust’s clerk, must have encountered his employer’s attorney. Mellust, potentially a dabbler in the occult, had both served, and been served by, Creighton Quayle, an adept in those arts. Decades later, with Mellust long dead, Hawksmoor had embarked on his great project: the building of six strange churches, each informed by knowledge and fascinations that were far from Christian. Parker was sure that, if one looked hard enough, some evidence of Quayle’s influence on Hawksmoor might have been discovered. For now, though, it seemed to Parker that the very air of London was infused with Quayle’s essence. He was part of its hidden history.

  This was his city.

  BLACK MARY’S DEATH SONG

  MAGGS: OLD MAGGSY THE BOOK scout, forever haunting barrows and shelves, sniffing his way through miles of shelving like a pig truffling in a forest. They all knew him, the dealers on the Charing Cross Road, and in Piccadilly. If Maggs wanted it, there must be money in it, and if he was willing to pay even close to what they were asking, then they’d missed a trick, because Maggs never missed any tricks at all. He had his routines, did Maggs, and if he didn’t show up on the appointed day each week, they would wonder if he might be ailing for something, or more likely on the scent of better pickings, because there could be no other reasons for his absence, mortality excepted, and Maggs was immortal. He would tell them so, if he had a glass or two under his belt, for Maggs never drank more than a couple, and then only small beer. Needed to keep a clear head, did Maggs. Couldn’t be too careful. Old Maggsy knew what was out there. Seen the worst of it, he had. Seen things that would turn your hair white.

  They believed him, too, for the most part, although not because of anything to do with his hair. Admittedly, Maggsy’s hair was white, although it didn’t happen overnight, Maggs being no Marie Antoinette. But those who knew him best could see it in his eyes when he emerged from one brief—and, as has been established, entirely uncharacteristic—period of seclusion. He’d changed, had Maggs. He wasn’t the same man at all, mentally or physically. Didn’t need to be a doctor to make the diagnosis.

  And that was before he displayed for them his skin.

  “Show them to us, Maggsy,” they’d say, when they were in their cups. “Show us your markings. Give us a flash of your tattoos.”

  And always came the same reply.

  “They’re not tattoos,” said Maggs, “not in any sense you’d understand. Wrote on me, he did. Wrote on me without even a by-your-leave. Turned me into a book. Poisoned me.”

  “Who did? Who poisoned you, Maggsy?”

  They’d be sniggering, too, the more ignorant of them, the ones who didn’t know Maggs as he used to be. A man entirely without imagination was Maggs. Never one for novels. Loved books, though, all books. Loved the sight and the feel and the smell of them, loved being surrounded by them, loved buying and selling them, but read only treatises on art, science, history, and philosophy. An educated man, in his way. Came from nothing—less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition—but learned his letters, and put them to good use. With a better start, and some minor adaptations of character, he might have found a position more befitting his talents. But Maggs was what he was, and what he was not was a liar.

  Which was what made the story of the markings so peculiar, because Maggsy claimed that he had discovered a book—although he couldn’t recall how, exactly, seeing as he hadn’t bought it, and would swear never to have laid eyes on it until he pulled it from a box of other volumes he’d acquired, each one picked and plucked by his own hand, but not this particular fruit—and over the course of a number of nights, this book, written in some unknown script, transferred its contents to all the other books on Maggsy’s shelves. He returned one afternoon to find that every one of them had been overwritten, despoiling everything he owned, and virtually reducing him to penury in the process.

  But that wasn’t the end, or even the worst of it, not by any means.

  * * *

  So sometimes, if the mood of the room was right, Maggs would display for certain eyes the markings on his body. Faded they were, with a violet tinge to them, although Maggs claimed they had never looked fresh, not even when they were first formed, but always appeared old. They covered his entire torso, line after line of them, and seemed to represent some form of language, although none that any man could read. The exception to this was one recurring set of symbols in Arabic, which a sailor with some knowledge of the region translated for Maggs as djinni. It was not a word that Maggs cared to hear spoken aloud, and I have to confess to being ignorant of its meaning, until the sailor told me that djinn were mythical beings, being something akin to demons for the Muslim.

  I should stress that at this time I did not know Maggs ver
y well. As a bibliophile of sorts myself, when funds permitted, I was familiar with his reputation, and had indeed put some money his way in return for welcome additions to my own small collection, but we were no more than business acquaintances. But I had always found him to be a plain dealer, and while he never knowingly undervalued a book, neither did he ever set out to gouge a customer, and remained always open to negotiation, up to a point. This is important for what is to follow: you must understand and accept the fact of Maggs’s honesty. Otherwise, whatever I have to share will be without meaning or value.

  But let us return to the nature of the markings on Maggs’s body. Like many others, I took them to be tattoos at first, despite their bearer’s claims to the contrary, and could only imagine the hours that had gone into their creation, and the pain it must have caused. Yet later, as I came to comprehend him better, Maggs told me that the devices had all been added to his skin in one night, and for much of that time he had been unconscious, and therefore unaware of what was happening to him. But even then, he was disinclined to elaborate, and I could only surmise that some narcoleptic stupor had caused him to become sedated, although I still struggled to believe that any human hand could have so adorned Maggs’s torso between sunset and sunrise.

  It was only toward the end of his life that Maggs shared with me the truth, and it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that I was, at first, reluctant to accept it. Maggs, by his own description, had been rendered accursed. The book that found its way into his collection was more tomb than tome, but whatever was interred within it was far from dead: trapped in its pages was a djinni, and Maggs, in a moment of unintentional carelessness, had liberated this entity from its confinement.

  I laughed when he told me this; of course I did. Who would not have laughed? This was the stuff of Burton and The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, not the conversation of rational men. It was only when Maggs mentioned that it was the bookseller and occultist Eliza Dunwidge herself who had confirmed the essence of his predicament that my laughter ceased. Eliza Dunwidge did not joke about such matters. Eliza Dunwidge did not joke about anything.

  “What can I do?” Maggs asked her, but it seemed that there was nothing to be done, nothing at all, beyond suffer, and pray, although Maggs was not the praying kind.

  At least he did not have long to wait.

  The djinni came for Maggs. He woke to its touch, but by then its work was almost complete. A thing of old flesh it was, a being of discards and ruination, smelling of blood and rot, the miasma of the abattoir. Even after all those years, Maggs struggled to describe it in detail, although never did a waking hour pass for him without some recollection of that night. He spoke of a cloak of brawn, like diseased tripe, and small dark eyes set above the remnants of a sliced-off nose, such as one might have glimpsed in more primitive times, when the removal of the nasal pyramid was considered appropriate punishment for panderers and adulterers. He confessed, though, that the djinni was also strangely formless and indistinct, and he might have taken it for some product of his own imaginings were it not for the damage inflicted by it.

  But what Maggs never had trouble bringing to mind was the nib used to mutilate him. It was itself part of the djinni, for one of the entity’s limbs ended not in a hand but a single, narrow, chitinous extremity, and this the djinni dipped into a wound in its own flesh in order to inscribe its message upon Maggs’s skin. At this point, Maggs said, he lapsed back into merciful unconsciousness, and when he woke again the djinni was gone, but not before leaving him with a permanent dermal reminder of its former presence in his life.

  But even these aspects of the case—the undeniable strange-

  ness of the branding, the involvement of Eliza Dunwidge, Maggs’s deserved reputation for a kind of essential probity—would not have been sufficient to convince me of the truth of the tale were it not for one additional factor: the writing on his skin was not fixed in form. It altered. The arrangement of the words varied over time, as though some ongoing narrative were being projected onto Maggs’s body, morphing as one plate was exchanged for the next, and the lamplight permitted to shine through. Maggs said that he could sometimes feel the letters moving, like insects crawling beneath his skin. I saw it for myself, or rather I witnessed the results of this con-

  stant rearrangement, having memorized one section below the collarbone at Maggs’s request only to find it written anew a week later.

  Maggs had not lied. He was cursed.

  No, he was doubly cursed.

  Because in the week before he died, Maggs finally told me of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly; of the woman named Dea Tacita.

  And of the lawyer, Quayle.

  * * *

  This is what we have been leading up to. This is the story.

  Of Black Mary, as they called her on the streets, all that need be known is that she was a tall girl, and buxom, but with features not yet reduced to coarseness by whoredom. Had she lived longer, she would have seen her looks fade rapidly, not helped by what Maggs described as a tendency to overindulge in cheap liquor. She lived in Miller’s Court with a market porter named Barnett, with whom she shared a single room consisting of a bed, a table, and three chairs, so at least they could claim the luxury of one surplus item of furniture between them. Black Mary and Barnett had a falling-out in the days before her death, but it was not sufficient to remove him entirely from her affections, such as they were, and he continued to enjoy the run of her body until the night of her death.

  And God have mercy, what a death she met.

  By then, Maggs was also living in Miller’s Court. He was a much younger man, this being 1888: barely nineteen, and working in Billingsgate Fish Market, which was how he had become familiar with Barnett, who was also employed there for a time, and thus with Black Mary. In fact, it was she who informed Maggs that a room had recently become vacant at Miller’s Court, after its occupant was called to a pressing appointment with God, hastened on his way by the actions of an ax wielded by a rival in love. Maggs, who was one of six men sharing two beds in a tenement within sight and smell of the market, and competing for even this meager comfort with a multitude of assorted vermin, leaped at the opportunity to seek a modicum of comfort and privacy, even if it was in the worst street in London.

  But Maggs was unusual in knowing his numbers and letters, and was popular among his fellow porters due to his ability to read aloud the contents of various newspapers and periodicals. He had also, thanks to an accident of fate, become aware of the value residing in certain old volumes. John McCarthy, the landlord of Miller’s Court and many of the surrounding slums—as well as being a pimp and racketeer of note—was disposing of the possessions of one of his deceased tenants, among which were various books and papers, of which Maggs, in passing, helped himself to an armful. His growing love of books was out of all proportion to the size of his own library, and so he had taken to scavenging volumes where he could. Unfortunately, most of this latest crop were in Latin, and therefore beyond his ken, but he judged their bindings to be sound, and even, in some cases, remarkably fine. On a whim, he brought the cream of them to Sotheran’s of Piccadilly. An hour later, once it had been established that he was no thief, Maggs emerged from the premises with more money in his pockets than he could have earned in many months of Billingsgate toil, with the promise of greater quantities to come should his keen eye chance upon similar treasures. His career as a book scout had begun.

  For now, though, he was still resident at Miller’s Court on Dorset Street, a thoroughfare that even the Peelers avoided, and one notorious for accommodating criminals of every sort. His newfound wealth he entrusted to the parish priest at St. James’s of Spanish Place, whom he knew to be honest, until such time as he could find more suitable, and less dangerous, living quarters. By night he lay awake and listened to the whores and their clients, and sometimes he would hear Black Mary sing, and would marvel that a woman so abused could still find the inner strength to incant such beautiful melodies;
or perhaps they were all that kept her sane. He did not know, and he could never bring himself to ask.

  On the night of November 9, 1888, Maggs listened to Black Mary sing “A Violet I Plucked from Mother’s Grave When a Boy.” Earlier he had brought her a piece of cod from Billingsgate, salvaged from the castoffs, and she had cooked it with some potatoes. He could have saved it for himself, but she needed it more than he, and now she was singing. He went to his window that he might hear her better, and saw a woman in the yard below, standing still as a statue. Maggs paid her no mind, because women came and went in Miller’s Court at all hours of the day and night, and he took it that this one had paused merely to listen to the song. Maggs went to his bed, and the sound of Black Mary’s voice lulled him to sleep.

  When he woke the next morning, Black Mary lay butchered in her bed.

  * * *

  This is how she is remembered: as Mary Jane Kelly, and Marie Jeanette; as Ginger, and Black Mary; as an Irish whore, but with little badness to her; as an educated, lettered woman who had fallen on hard times, or an illiterate who required Barnett to read aloud to her the stories from the newspapers; and as the final victim of Jack the Ripper. Only some of these assertions can be true, but one is entirely false, and that is the final statement. I know this because Maggs told me so, and Maggs never lied.