The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  The school omnibus at least was new, a motorized vehicle instead of the old horse-drawn wagon. I boarded reluctantly; each passing moment, each step I took toward Brockstone School, made it increasingly likely that one of my fellow alumni would, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, deduce my identity. And the barricade of books and papers which worked so well on a train was not feasible on an omnibus. I sat and suffered and waited for discovery.

  It did not come, although I was aware of the puzzled glances of my fellow passengers. I recognized several of them: Horace Webster, Charles Cressingham, Albert Vanbeek, Robert Claudel. But I had had no friends at Brockstone School, and none of my cautiously non-hostile acquaintances were on the omnibus. I did not feel brave enough to make overtures to men who had called me half-wit, coward, freak, twenty years ago. I was afraid their opinions would not have changed.

  The typed schedule also informed us alumni of where we were to sleep. We were being housed in the student dormitories, which seemed in my current overwrought state an unnecessary piece of cruelty. I was only grateful I had not been given my own old room, but I supposed that refinement was beyond even Brockstone’s institutional sadism.

  I found—and was filled by the discovery with something akin to despair—that I remembered the route to the dormitories with perfect clarity. Leaving my increasingly raucous fellow alumni in the vast formal entry-hall of the main building, known always and forever as the School, I started up the stairs, wondering in some remote corner of my mind if this was what it felt like to cross the Bridge of Sighs on the way to one’s execution.

  The only mercy was that we were not housed in the juniors’ dormitories—although I learned later that groups of alumni could and did request them—but were extended the same privilege we had been extended as upperclassmen. Each of us was granted a separate room. The room I had been assigned for this purgatorial weekend was not even on the same hallway as the room I had occupied as a student. So much of my attention was consumed with being grateful for that, and in the remembered relief of acquiring a private room in the first place, that I had the door of my temporary sanctuary open before I fully took in what I had seen on the card of the door next to mine.

  I froze, like one of the victims of the Gorgon Medusa, then slowly, stiffly, forced myself to step back for another look. Neatly typed, the name JOHN PELHAM RATCLIFFE stared me blandly in the face.

  For a wild moment, it seemed to me as if the authorities of Brockstone School must have entered into some dark-purposed conspiracy with Dr. Starkweather. But rationality returned with the realization that, while I would put nothing past Brockstone itself, Dr. Starkweather was the last man in the world one could plausibly cast as a Machiavel; his idea of subtlety was to send me to talk to Ratcliffe. This was merely the malignant hand of coincidence.

  And just when, by these reflections, I had succeeded in calming my pounding heart and was on the point of retreating into my assigned room, the door at which I was staring opened, and John Pelham Ratcliffe emerged, so abruptly and with such velocity that we only narrowly averted a collision.

  He had changed remarkably. Where I remembered a weedy, sniffling rat of a boy, here was a small, spare, dry man, with fierce bright round eyes like those of a hunting hawk. Even if it had not been necessary, I suspect I would have gone back a pace.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, and even his voice did not match my memories, although that was more a matter of his decisively brisk speech than of the inevitable shift in timbre. “Mr. . . . ” He frowned up at me—nearly a foot, for I am six-three, and he could not have been more than five-five.

  “ . . . Booth,” I said. “Kyle Murchison Booth. We, er . . . we were the same year.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, without enthusiasm. His memories of me were clearly no kinder than were my memories of him.

  I should have left it there. I knew it, and yet, as if in a bad dream, I heard my voice continuing, “I, er, I work for the Parrington now.”

  “The museum?”

  “Yes. And the director, Dr. Starkweather . . . he wanted me to ask you . . . ”

  “Yes?” Ratcliffe said, one eyebrow sardonically raised. He knew what I was going to say, and we both knew what his answer was going to be, and still I bleated on, “Ask you if perhaps you, er, you might be interested in . . . that is, he admires your work very much and . . . ”

  Ratcliffe stood there, watching me twist and thrash; I had not hated him when we were boys, but for a moment I hated him then, and from the depths of that hatred managed finally to spit it out: “If you would care to be funded by the Parrington on your next expedition?”

  “No, thank you,” said Ratcliffe, turned on his heel, and walked away.

  I stood and watched him go, my face burning, my hands clenching and unclenching uselessly at my sides.

  If there had been an evening train back from Bourne, I would have taken it. There was not, and the sordid, brute fact of the matter was that I was hungry. Ergo, I attended the Welcome Dinner.

  It was three hours of unrelieved misery. I saw one person I knew—aside from Ratcliffe and his slight sardonic smirk—and that was Barnabas Wilcox, a bully I had feared and loathed. He was an overweight, inarticulate businessman now. He mumbled some vague greeting and thereafter left me strictly alone. Otherwise, it was a sea of half-familiar faces, voices whose adult timbres I could not retranspose into their childish ranges. The men to either side of me were two years younger than myself and close friends; they talked across me all through dinner. I kept my eyes on my plate and said nothing to no one, escaping upstairs to bed at the earliest possible opportunity. It was all too vividly like my memories of my first day at Brockstone, except that then I had been in a room with five other boys, and had not even had the dubious solace of solitude.

  I was exhausted; I changed into my pajamas and lay down on the bed—narrow and not quite long enough, so that I ended up curled awkwardly, like one of the strange creatures drawn in the margins of medieval manuscripts. And yet, despite the discomfort, I fell asleep almost before I could wonder whether I would be woken by a muscle cramp in the small, dark hours of the morning.

  I was not surprised to find myself dreaming about the school. I was a little surprised, at first, to find myself dreaming about the swimming pool, which I had always avoided to the greatest extent possible, but then I realized that in my dream I was not myself, and dismissed the matter from my consideration.

  In the dream, in which I was not myself, I was running through the pavilion which housed the swimming pool, a monstrous mid-Victorian edifice like the spawn of a cathedral and a greenhouse and having the worst characteristics of both. Behind me, there were voices yelling, and I knew they were the voices of the boys chasing me. At first I thought they were yelling, “Pelham! We’re gonna getcha, Pelham!” and almost woke myself with my frantic assertions that I was not Ratcliffe, and would not be for love, money, or ten pounds of tea. But before I succeeded in disrupting the dream sufficiently to escape it, I realized they were yelling “Palmer!” not “Pelham!” and I ceased struggling. It was, after all, only a dream, and I did not care if I was someone else, as long as it was someone I did not know.

  And a moment later, it was too late; running, as Palmer, I glanced over my shoulder, a quick terrified glimpse of the boys following, dark horrible figures like demons, and looked back barely in time to prevent myself running straight into the water.

  For a moment I teetered on the edge of the pool, arms windmilling, and then a pair of hands shoved suddenly and hard against my shoulder blades, and I fell.

  The water was tepid, brackish; I surfaced, gasping, and instinctively thrashed away from the boys now standing in a solemn row along the side of the pool. There were six of them; the only names I knew were those of the two largest, the ringleaders: Grimes and Carleton. I hated and feared them both.

  The light was thick, slow, syrupy with late afternoon. It was a Sunday, the one day when the swimming pool was not in use for lessons or coa
ching or races between years to build “spirit.” There would be no one in earshot, except the six boys standing and watching.

  I know how to swim. I am as ungainly and awkward in the water as I am on land, but I can swim. But in the dream, as Palmer, I could not. I splashed and floundered; the pool was a uniform ten feet deep from end to end, the bottom far below the reach of my heavy schoolboy shoes. I begged the boys to help me; they stood and watched, and the looks on their faces were terrible: solemn and exalted and inhuman, as perfectly inhuman as the faces of owls. Not one of them moved.

  I tired rapidly. My clothes were heavy; I had already been near exhaustion from the blind, terrified run that had ended with me in this dark pool. And I was panicking, thrashing more and more frantically, going under and getting great mouthfuls of water in my open, screaming mouth.

  And the boys on the side of the pool stood and watched. Once they laughed, and their laughter was as cruel and remote as their faces; it might have been the laughter of hyenas. Their laughter rang in my ears, even after they stopped. It was still echoing when I went under for the last time, felt mouth and throat and lungs and body fill with water, and sank slowly toward the bottom of the pool, still staring upwards at the dim, dusty light and the black wavering shapes of the boys.

  I woke myself by the brutal expedient of falling out of bed, tangled in sheets and blanket and catching myself a tremendous crack on the hip as I hit the floor. I did not even notice for several minutes; hyperventilating, half-hysterical, I curled myself into an awkward knot, both hands clenched in my hair and my face pressed into my knees, every atom of control I possessed channeled into the fierce and frantic effort not to make a noise loud enough to be heard from the hall or the next room. I do not know how long I stayed that way; when I finally calmed enough to notice my throbbing hip, to raise my head, the sun was rising.

  Slowly, grimly, one shattered piece at a time, I assembled my armor to face the day. More than ever, I wished I could simply leave, but now, entirely regardless of Dr. Starkweather, I could not. That scene in the pavilion had been real. I knew that as clearly as I knew my own name, as profoundly as I felt the throbbing pain in my hip. That boy Palmer had truly drowned, and his death had truly been watched by six of his so-called peers. I discovered that I remembered two names and paused, knowing the ephemerality of dreams, to write them in my pocket notebook: Grimes, Carleton.

  I bathed, shaved, dressed. The bathroom mirror told me I was bloodlessly pale, and there was a jitter in my hands that I could not quell, but I did not expect anyone at Brockstone School would look at me too carefully. They never had before.

  But on the way back to my room, for the second time in as many days, I came within an inch of colliding with Ratcliffe, and this time when he frowned up at me, he said, “You look dreadful. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said and tried to sidestep, but he sidestepped with me.

  “You look like you’ve been dragged through Hell’s own bramble bushes backwards. Is it the reunion? I know it’s a bit of a pain, but—”

  “No, nothing like that. Please.”

  I sidestepped again, and he sidestepped with me; for a moment I wavered perilously between laughter—even John Pelham Ratcliffe was not at his most formidable in a ratty old bathrobe, armed with a sponge bag and toiletries kit—and tears of pure frustration. Then he said, “Look. I came by car. Let me get washed up, and I’ll drive you into Bourne where we can get decent coffee, and you can tell me about it.”

  “But we can’t,” I said. “The . . . the schedule . . . ”

  “To hell with the schedule. What are they going to do? Expel us?”

  This time I did laugh, although the noise was choked and strange.

  “Will you wait?” Ratcliffe said.

  “Yes. But . . . why?”

  His mouth quirked sardonically. “In celebration of the fact that we are no longer fourteen.” And with that, he stepped neatly around me and headed for the bathrooms.

  Ratcliffe knew, he said cheerfully, exactly where we ought to go. He guided his car—as sleek, stream-lined, and impressive as he was himself, if considerably larger—to Bourne’s only hotel, a rickety old monster called the St. James which had seen the temporary housing of the families of Brockstone scholars for three generations now. The St. James’s restaurant was open for breakfast, and the smell of coffee was entirely ambrosial, even to me. I do not normally drink coffee, but Ratcliffe said firmly that I needed it, and I was past the point of arguing with him.

  I startled myself by being ravenously hungry, and Ratcliffe let me eat in peace, himself absently consuming a vast quantity of food while discoursing, freely, learnedly, and frequently scurrilously on his excavations in Asia Minor. But when we were both replete, he beckoned the waitress over to refill our coffee cups and said, “Now. Tell me why you were in the hall this morning at six a.m., fully dressed and looking like Banquo’s ghost after a hard night’s haunting.”

  I had had the whole meal to work out my answer. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, but it was just a nightmare. I am prone to them.”

  “Are you?” He gave me a strange look. “What was your nightmare about?”

  “Why do you care?” The next moment I was apologizing in a welter of mortification, but he waved me to silence much as he had waved the waitress over to refill our coffee cups.

  “Call it guilt,” he said and then laughed at the expression on my face. “The fact that I would no more work for a Napoleonic egomaniac like Emerson Starkweather than I would paint my face bright green and propose marriage to a Bactrian camel is no reason to be rude to you. It’s just that, for a moment—” He spread his hands in a gesture of rueful helplessness. “For a moment, I was fourteen again. I want to make amends.”

  “But, Dr. Ratcliffe—”

  “Please. ‘Ratcliffe’ is fine. Or my friends call me Ratty, if you can bring yourself to it.”

  “It was just a dream,” I said doggedly.

  “Not by the expression on your face this morning. And I’ve never quite understood dismissing things as ‘just’ dreams. Why should that make them any less important?” He paused, then asked in a voice unexpectedly warm with sympathy, “Was it about the school?”

  I found myself telling him the whole thing, with details and names and even, because he listened with such attention and concern, my belief that I had dreamed about something that had really happened. I did not mention my falling out of bed.

  He was silent for a long time when I had finished, and I finally asked timidly, “You do . . . you do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, as if the matter hardly warranted discussion. I must have looked startled, for he said, “Archaeology is a strange field, and Asia Minor an even stranger place. I have a colleague who has dreamed of the fall of Troy once a year for the past thirty years. Always on the same date and always the same dream. He doesn’t excavate in Troy—never has—and says there isn’t a power on Earth that could make him. He dreams, you see, that he is one of the women.”

  We were silent for a moment, watching the bright play of sunlight on the tableware; then Ratcliffe said briskly, “So I don’t see any inherent implausibility in the idea that you dreamed about a real murder.”

  “Murder?” I said, although that was how I characterized it to myself.

  “They pushed him in, and they didn’t drag him out. Murder by omission is murder nonetheless. It was the swimming pool, for goodness sakes! It isn’t as if there’s an undertow.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”

  “You know,” said Ratcliffe, “there’s a master at the school named Carleton.”

  “There is?”

  “He wasn’t there in our time. But they needed a new Mathematics master a few years ago, and he took the position. My friends who are active in the Alumni Council tell me that Old Boys often do.”

  “He was a student?”

  “Forty years ago, yes. You didn’t know about him, did you?”
>
  “No. I don’t . . . that is, I haven’t been . . . ”

  “And that makes this a very interesting coincidence. I think we might proceed with forging our own agenda by calling to have a small chat with Mr. Carleton.”

  I followed helplessly in Ratcliffe’s wake, like a sailboat caught by an ocean-liner—or perhaps, given the disparity in our heights, an ocean-liner caught by a sailboat. It was a little after nine when we returned to the school. Ratcliffe marched briskly and decisively through the grounds and the buildings and the carefully organized schedule, waving aside all efforts to intercept or deflect him, until he found the office of Mr. Frederick Carleton, M.A., Brockstone’s Master of Mathematics.

  The odds were extremely good that Mr. Carleton, like Ratcliffe and I, was supposed to be out somewhere participating in the reunion festivities, but when Ratcliffe rapped smartly on the door, an irritable voice from within demanded, “What in the name of God is it now?”

  Ratcliffe chose to interpret that as meaning “Come in,” and opened the door. “Mr. Carleton,” he said, “we were wondering if you could spare us a few minutes of your time.”

  Frederick Carleton was a short, owl-like man, stocky body, round eyes, upstanding tufts of hair, and all. He was seated on the floor amid a jumbled confusion of file boxes, folders, textbooks, and papers; either he was genuinely in the middle of a massive organizational endeavor, or he had hit upon that as the most inarguable excuse he could provide for avoiding the reunion.

  He looked from Ratcliffe to me, clearly trying to deduce a context in which we might both fit. He said, “If this is about the baseball game—”

  Heroically, Ratcliffe turned a laugh into a cough. “No, nothing of the sort. We wanted to ask you about a boy named Palmer.”

  “No Palmer in any of my classes. If you’re concerned about his progress, I suggest you go talk to—”