A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  She wanted to shower again. She’d been reading up on chronic itching, and found that many sufferers claimed showering eased their discomfort, sometimes for hours. Armitage had showered before going to bed, and applied moisturizer. It must have helped, because she’d managed to get some rest. According to the clock on her locker, it was just after 2 a.m., and she’d been in bed by 11 p.m. Three hours’ sleep: better than nothing, and she hadn’t even taken any pills. She was due at the embassy by 8 a.m., and had hoped to arrive with something resembling a clear head, but what use was it to eschew medication if the result was a night of misery? There was some Benadryl in the medicine cabinet. It might make her drowsy enough to get back to sleep without turning her into a zombie for the rest of the day.

  The song in her head resumed, some piece of popular trash she didn’t even like, as if her misery weren’t already great enough.

  “Stop!” Armitage said, aloud. “Please, for the love of God!”

  She sat on the edge of her bed and rubbed her eyes, but it didn’t help; she still couldn’t see any better. Tentatively, she got to her feet and made her way to the tiny private bathroom to the left of her bed. She hit the light, shielding her eyes so she didn’t blind herself entirely. When she felt it was safe to do so, she lowered her hand. Naked, she stood before the full-length mirror on the wall.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no…”

  Her entire body was covered in letters, the same alphabet that had been used to disfigure the books in her library. The ink was purple and faded, in the manner of tattoos that had been in place for many years. They formed words she could not read, snaking along her arms and over her breasts, across her belly and her upper back, over her thighs and calves, her feet and ankles, on her neck and her face—

  Jesus, her face.

  She opened her mouth. There were letters on her tongue.

  And letters on the whites of her eyes.

  But one pattern recurred more often than any other, one that was familiar to her:

  Armitage stumbled away from the mirror. Her phone was by her bed. She had to call someone. She needed help. She needed—

  Armitage paused. Her body had been marked—no, inscribed—while she slept. An implement had been used to write upon her skin, transforming her into a living page of vellum.

  Which meant that someone had done this to her.

  Someone had been in her apartment.

  Someone might yet be.

  She’d disposed of the gun used to kill Gruner, but still had her own service weapon. Officially, as far as the Dutch were concerned, the legats were unarmed. But unofficially, well, that was a different matter.

  Armitage stepped back into the bedroom. She had never been so aware of her own nakedness, but she noticed that the music was no longer troubling her. Fear had seen to that. If she could get to the locker, she would have her phone and a weapon. One step, two, three…

  She was almost at the bed when she heard movement behind her, and smelled something both meaty and rank, like the odor in a butcher’s store at the close of a warm day’s business. She saw a pair of dark, lidless eyes regarding her from the shadows, and a jagged, circular mouth like a mutilation to the tissue of the face, the whole surrounded by a cloak of flesh that puddled on the floor. The figure shifted its weight with a wet sound, and a single thin digit reached toward her, topped by a sharp chitinous nib. An inky bubble of purple liquid hung from the tip.

  Maggs’s demon.

  Maggs’s djinni.

  And from the place of his burning, Cornelie Gruner laughed.

  CHAPTER CXXIX

  Parker sat against the screen between the chancel and tower of St. Mary’s, hidden by the darkness. Angel had opened the small door on the northern wall, and Parker had told him to lock it again behind him. If Quayle decided to enter the same way—and it seemed likely that he might do so, since it was largely hidden from view—Parker did not want him to be alerted by finding it unlocked.

  The interior of the church was cold, and he was grateful for his jacket. He’d found a cushion under one of the benches, which eased his discomfort a little, but he had nothing to do except wait. He thought of Bob Johnston, and the great plans he had been concocting for the final years of his life. He thought of Sam, of Jennifer, and of Rachel. In the solitude of St. Mary’s, he lived other lives. He had a wife, and another child, although he could put a face to neither. They existed only as nebulous presences, entities unreal, and exuded no more warmth than the stones of the church.

  Above and before him only the faintest of moonlight gave life to the stained-glass windows, leaving most of their details lost and enshadowed, yet the intentions of their creators remained clear to him. On the windows to the north, the persecutors of the church—among them Judas Iscariot; the high priests Annas and Caiaphas; and Herod the Great, with a child impaled upon his sword—faced the saints and martyrs, while angels hovered over the heads of the good, and demons capered above those of the foul.

  And between them stood the Last Judgment of the great West Window, the final page of the Fractured Atlas.

  * * *

  SAM STOOD BY THE window of her bedroom in Vermont, gazing over lawn and forest, but seeing none of it. She looked far to the east, to her father. Her hands lay in her lap, clenched into fists. She was alone, but a second presence was reflected beside her own in the glass: a dead moon in the form of a child.

  Such concentration on their faces, such effort, such love; the words of the one spoken aloud, the words of the other a whispered echo, willed over land and sea.

  “Daddy.”

  daddy

  “Don’t sleep…”

  don’t sleep

  * * *

  PARKER CLOSED HIS EYES. From the walls above, a voice called to him. He had tried to pray, but this church was too old, too strange. This was not his denomination. He no longer even knew what faith he truly followed. He knew only that he must bleed, and keep bleeding, until he made recompense for his sins. He would assume the burden of pain—his own, and the pain of others—because of all that he had failed to do: he had failed to protect his wife, failed to protect his child. He had failed as a husband, failed as a father.

  daddy

  And he would fail here, too, in the end. He would fail, and light would fade from the earth. When he was dead, and his loss complete, he would wait by a lakeshore in the next world, wait to join the great tide of souls flowing into the eternal sea, but all faces would be turned from him, including the face of God Himself. Not even Jennifer would be able to save him, and so she would leave him at the last rather than share his exile.

  This wasted existence, passed in loneliness and suffering; this self-inflicted punishment, all because it was easier to endure new torments than reach an accommodation with the old; this rage, concealed by a mask of empathy; this sadness, with self-pity as a substitute for remorse.

  For someone to take your life would be an act of charity.

  For you to take your own would be an act of courage.

  daddy

  Do it in this place, before your Old God.

  Do it in this place, before us.

  wake up

  Parker opened his eyes. The pistol was between his lips, its twin barrels pressed against the roof of his mouth.

  they’re coming

  CHAPTER CXXX

  New light illuminated the windows—light to the north, and light to the west—although it seemed not to be shining from outside but from within the glass itself. Where formerly the figures and motifs had been occluded, now they were entirely distinct, so that Parker could see clearly the blue-skinned demon looking down on Judas Iscariot; the creature like a mutated lamb that might almost have been reaching out from the pane to grasp the severed head of a martyr raised on the halberd of a soldier; and the darker, horned entity above Annas, little more than a pair of bright malevolent eyes in a face otherwise without feature. The impression they created was less of images fixed in glass and more of creature
s circling the panes from without, pressing their bodies against them in an effort to gain access.

  Across the West Window, in defiance of logic, a darkness was spreading, so that slowly all those on the right hand of Christ were lost to sight, the cloud obliterating the top half of the window and most of the lower, leaving untouched only the three panes depicting Hell and the affliction of the damned, the flames from the mouth of the all-consuming Leviathan appearing to flicker in the altered illumination.

  Parker heard footsteps. Rising slightly from his place of concealment, he was able to see into the Lady Chapel containing the tomb of John Tame, the great patron of St. Mary’s. Beside the tomb stood a small altar draped in blue cloth, but one of its panels now lay upon the stones, and from the gap emerged Mors, leading a girl by the right hand. Quayle was already in the nave of the church, heading toward the West Window, a second, younger child in his arms. They had not needed to enter by any of the doors because Quayle, so long lived, knew this church and its environs better than anyone: what lay within, what lay beneath.

  And what lay beyond, because now the vision of Hell flared and vanished, as though finally consumed by its own fires, leaving behind only ash and charred wastes. The West Window became entirely transparent, its images lost. The ceiling faded away, the church transformed to the status of a ruin with unfamiliar skies above, adorned with constellations no human eye had ever glimpsed. The chill grew deeper, and the stones became so cold that Parker, too slow in lifting his left hand as the temperature dropped, bequeathed to them the skin from his fingertips.

  Yet he was also conscious that, somehow, the ceiling remained in place, the decorated windows were still visible, and the stones were no colder than they had been before, even as blood beaded and froze on the ends of his fingers. Were the church doors to have opened, admitting some stranger, he would have seen St. Mary’s as it had always been. Whether he would also have seen Parker, or Quayle and Mors, or two female children, one now prostrated before the West Window, the other stumbling along beside her captor, was another question. What he might have glimpsed, were he a believer in such matters, were specters and pale relicts, as past, present, and future became one; all pasts, all presents, all futures, now with a single conclusion.

  Quayle removed a book from a large leather bag hanging by his side, and placed it on the floor before the West Window. The Fractured Atlas was a more primitive construct than Parker had anticipated. Its spine and cover, both a deep red, were unadorned, its page edges rough and unfinished. Even from a distance, he could pick out the scars and veins in the material that had been used to bind it, the flaws that betrayed its origins in the skin of a once-living creature.

  A movement at the West Window distracted him as a monstrosity crawled across the exterior of the glass. It was the corpulent body of a man, with the legs of a spider protruding from either side of his torso. The man’s own legs had withered almost to nothing and now dragged along uselessly behind him, but his arms remained mobile, and with them he tested the integrity of the panes, digging at their lead with his fingernails. The top of his head was missing, and small black spiders swarmed from their nest in the cavity. The chimera pressed his face against the glass, and Parker recognized him: Elias Pudd, or some version of him. Pudd, the arachnophile, who had helped to mutilate Angel, and taken a bullet for his troubles; Pudd, whose father had himself created bound tomes celebrating the Apocalypse, the last of them, like the Atlas, formed from skin and bone; Pudd, the son of a man who, Parker now realized, might knowingly or unknowingly have been replicating this same Atlas with his own works; Pudd, consigned to his own particular desolation, because the worst of men received the damnation they deserved.

  Now more faces appeared at the windows to the north, and more presences splayed themselves upon the glass. Some were familiar to Parker from the paintings and illustrations sourced by Johnston: the dark spirits that populated the Last Judgments of Hieronymus Bosch, Luca Signorelli, and Fra Angelico; the haunters of the anonymous Vision of Tundale and Lorenzo Maitani’s bas-relief in Orvieto Cathedral; and the mutant hybrids sent to scourge St. Anthony in the paintings of Matthias Grünewald and Jan van der Venne. Humanity had given form to them. They had crept unbidden into the nightmares of artists, invading their fever dreams, becoming concretized in their work. Others were misshapen, unfinished, as though waiting for similar imaginations to imbue them with physicality, while the rest were nebulous, like clouds of polluted smoke. How they might be named, or what shapes they might ultimately assume, was of no consequence. They were all manifestations of the same fear, of what might be waiting for us in the lightless honeycombs of this world and the next. Even Parker himself was not immune; something in his own subconscious, buried all these years, had called out to the dark, and a vision of Pudd had answered.

  As quickly as it had appeared, the Pudd mutation was gone, vanished like the images on the glass. Only stars now shone in their place, alien clusters, until one by one they began to flicker out, like the dying of fireflies, and the West Window was transformed once more by a multitude of great presences approaching. They kept to no single configuration, no set disposition, so that they remained eternally in a process of embodiment and disincarnation: wings, eyes, tails, hair, scales, flame, ice; beauty beyond imagining, at once so empyrean yet so blighted that one could not long look upon them without wishing to scour the sight from one’s vision, and the taint from one’s soul.

  But these were only the harbingers. They threw themselves against the glass of the West Window, and Parker felt the church shudder at the impact, before they were gone, lost to the margins, and all that remained was what their coming had presaged.

  All that was left was the Not-Gods.

  In the void hung two children, their hair perfectly white, their skin translucent, their bodies sexless. Darkness poured from the hollow sockets of their eyes like ink rising through water, flowing from lips moving in silent litany. On the floor of the church, the older of the Sellars girls began to scream. She tried to pull away from Mors, who knocked her to the ground with an open hand, and continued to strike at her until she lay still. Quayle opened the Atlas, revealing a page depicting the interior of the church, an illustration so detailed as to be near photographic in quality, an impression confirmed by the presence in it of the figures before the altar: Quayle, Mors, the girls.

  “It’s time,” said Quayle.

  Mors, squatting over the subdued child, produced a blade as though from thin air, the steel seeming to form itself from the atoms of the church. By Quayle’s feet, the second Sellars girl had recovered some of her strength, and was trying to crawl away. Quayle knelt on her back, pinning her in place, and drew his own knife from a scabbard on his belt. He raised his face to the window as, unnoticed by him, the page before him changed once more, its contents shifting.

  Not four figures near the altar now, but five.

  Mors turned in surprise, just in time to register the man approaching from the nave, a small, twin-barreled pistol in his raised right hand.

  Parker fired, and the first shot took Mors above the right breast. She was thrown backward, tripping over the prone child, and landed heavily on the floor. Parker fired again, this time not at Mors but at Quayle. A hole burst in the back of Quayle’s coat, and he fell on the girl before him. She kicked her way out from under him and ran toward Parker while he fumbled for the speed loader in the butt of the gun. The girl’s head hit him heavily in the midriff, and the loader bounced from his hand to be forfeited to the gloom of the church.

  But now Mors was back on her feet. She was bleeding from her chest, but she wasn’t bleeding enough.

  With the last of her strength, she came for Parker.

  CHAPTER CXXXI

  In a series of existences, all unfolding parallel to one another, versions of the man who called himself Atol Quayle ceased their labors.

  Candlelight licked at Josias Quayle as the old Huguenot, Gardiol, breathed his last. Creighton Quayle paused
in the act of deciphering the notes of the Jesuit, Martin del Río, in the Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex. Jonas Quayle dripped an excess of candlewax on the envelope containing his donation to the Reverend Shipman at Fairfax. Bennett Quayle watched Dea Tacita stand naked before him, her body bathed in Black Mary’s blood.

  Each feeling Atol’s pain, each urging him on.

  Each desiring oblivion.

  CHAPTER CXXXII

  Faced with the advancing Mors, Parker took the only option available to him under the circumstances: he pushed the child away, and threw the empty gun. It hit Mors on the forehead, causing her to reel momentarily, and giving Parker enough time to pounce. He struck hard at her right hand, hoping to knock the knife from her grip, but she held tightly to it, and used the blade to slash at him. The tip nicked his jacket but missed his body, and the momentum took the blade far enough to one side for him to be able to grasp Mors’s forearm and prevent her from using the weapon again. He feinted at her face, and she lifted her left arm to block him, even as he dipped his fist and used it to strike hard at the wound above her right breast.

  Mors screamed, and her face went gray, but she somehow found the strength to butt Parker with the top of her skull. She connected with his nose, and he felt something break wetly inside. The pain briefly blinded him, and he tried to put some space between him and Mors until the redness cleared. He could hear noises from the back of the church, but could not identify them. When his vision returned, he saw that Quayle had disappeared during the struggle with Mors. At the West Window, two childlike figures scratched desperately at the glass, the sound of it like an animal’s cry, and now their mouths were clearly forming a single word, a name spoken over and over as their faces were transfigured, as they were made beautiful to him.