The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  “Not one of your students,” Ratcliffe interrupted, mild but inexorable. “One of your classmates.”

  Carleton stared at him blankly, as if Ratcliffe were some strange beast he had never before seen or imagined. “One of my classmates . . . Here! What is this all about?” Truculently, he came to his feet.

  Ratcliffe glanced at me; clearly his ingenuity had not extended to concocting a plausible reason for our query. And I saw unspoken in his face: After all, it was your dream.

  “Er,” I said. I could think of no convincing lie, and I could tell that the truth would not help us; I said, “You needn’t talk to us if you don’t want to.”

  Ratcliffe’s glare became positively agonized, but Carleton, deprived of an adversary, deflated like a collapsing tent. “No, no,” he said, and now that he did not sound pugnacious, he sounded merely tired and much more like a man of nearly sixty. “There’s no reason not to tell you about Palmer, though I can’t imagine what good it will do you. Please, sit down.”

  Despite the chaos of the floor, it took only a few moments to clear two chairs. Ratcliffe and I sat down. Carleton retreated behind his desk and became pedantic.

  “I assume,” he said, “it is the safety of the swimming pool that concerns you?”

  “Among other things,” Ratcliffe said.

  “Well, on that score I can reassure you. Stuart Palmer drowned because he was violating school rules. The boys are strictly forbidden to enter the pavilion unless escorted by a master.”

  Ratcliffe and I exchanged a look, both of us remembering how frequently—and how easily—that rule had been flouted in our school days, particularly by upperclassmen, and Ratcliffe said, “Suppose you simply tell us what happened.”

  “I can only tell you the events as they were reconstructed at the inquest,” Carleton said stiffly.

  “Of course,” Ratcliffe murmured, as smooth and gracious as any prosecuting attorney.

  I startled myself by asking, “Was Palmer of your year?”

  “No. A year ahead,” Carleton said with a slight resurgence of his customary glower. “You want the story or not? I have other things to do, you understand . . . ”

  “We are listening,” Ratcliffe said.

  “It was a Sunday,” said Carleton, bringing out a pipe and beginning the slow, ineffectual search for tobacco pouch and matches so characteristic of pipe smokers, particularly when they want to buy time. I winced—I hate pipe smoke—but held my tongue. I did not want to derail Carleton’s story, fiction though Ratcliffe and I both already suspected it was going to be.

  “Then, as now,” Carleton continued, “the pavilion is closed on Sundays, so there were no witnesses to say how Palmer got in there in the first place.”

  I remembered my dream: the pounding footsteps, the baying pursuers.

  “Somehow or another he came to fall in. Probably skylarking about.” He paused and added heavily, “Palmer was a facetious child. And since there was no one within earshot and since Palmer could not swim, he drowned. I pray God it was quick.”

  You know exactly how long it took, I thought. You stood there and watched. But still I did not speak.

  “He was missed at the roll-call for dinner. It took some time to determine that he was not in the School, and longer still to find him. By then he had been dead several hours. That’s the story, gentlemen. A pointless, senseless, stupid tragedy. Boys are frequently thoughtless. It is only by God’s mercy that the consequences are generally less final.”

  It was a chilling way to view the subject, even without my deep-seated conviction that Carleton was lying. But he had finally gotten his pipe to draw and was rapidly barricading himself behind a wall of smoke. It was clear we would get no more out of him. Ratcliffe thanked him for his time and we made our departure.

  At the door, I paused and turned back. “Mr. Carleton, did you have a brother?”

  “A brother?” He stared at me through his veiling pipe smoke, his owl-eyes round and blank. “I did have an elder brother, but he’s been dead for thirty years. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Thank you.” And I shut the door.

  Ratcliffe all but pounced on me. “What did you think?”

  “One of us must be lying. Or . . . or deranged.”

  We started back the way we had come.

  “Of course he was lying,” Ratcliffe said impatiently. “But do you think he was the boy who was in your dream?”

  “I . . . I don’t think so. That is, I’m not sure. He did have an older brother, so—”

  “Did he?” Ratcliffe said, and I imagined he got that same bright intentness in his eyes when he was fitting fragments into a reconstruction of a vase or an inscription. “Let’s go look for Carleton Major.”

  I realized after a moment that I had stopped walking and had to trot to catch up with him. “Look for . . . what do you mean?”

  He grinned at me, delighted with himself. “I’m willing to bet the pictures that adorned the library in our day are still there. Come on.”

  The library was—in a grandiose phrase I remembered hearing the current headmaster use in his speech the night before—the memory of the school. It was the repository of all the artifacts and memorabilia that such a school inevitably generates, including photographs and daguerreotypes commemorating every imaginable event, going all the way back to the school’s founding. The first headmaster had been a fanatic and a pioneer of photography.

  It took some searching to find what we wanted, the cleverly paired group portraits of each class, entering and graduating, each portrait with its carefully written label. We started at the beginning and worked forward, staring at row after row of round, alien faces.

  The faces from my dream jumped out at me unexpectedly, even though I had been looking for them. “There,” I said, my voice an uneven croak. “This boy and the one next to him. Carleton and Grimes.”

  Ratcliffe craned to look at them. “Nasty, smirking pair of codfish. Yes, here we are. ‘V. Carleton’ and ‘N. Grimes.’ ”

  He did not sound at all surprised, and I said before I could stop myself, “You believed me.”

  “Of course I believed you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you obviously weren’t lying.”

  “But . . . I, er . . . ”

  He took pity on me. “Peter Ludgate—do you remember him?”

  “The artist?” He, too, had been a member of our class, a shy, dreamy-eyed boy as awkward and silent as myself. We had frequently been in the library at the same time, peacefully unspeaking for hours, until either someone else came in or the librarian made us leave.

  “Yes. His wife’s always after him to come to these things—potential patrons and so on. Peter came once. After the first night, he insisted on leaving by the earliest possible train, and he hasn’t been back since, despite everything Eleanor can say to him. He won’t talk about why, but the image of the drowned child has become a recurrent theme in his work.”

  “You seriously think . . . ”

  “I think the coincidence is suggestive. And I don’t think it’s coincidence. Now, do you recognize any of these other horrid specimens?”

  I looked again at Grimes and Carleton’s year, and then at the three years following. “There’s Mr. Carleton,” I said after a moment. He was as owl-eyed and scowling a child as he was an adult. “And I think . . . ” I pointed to another boy in the younger Carleton’s year, and then two in the year behind V. Carleton and N. Grimes. “I think these are the others.”

  “Six of them,” Ratcliffe said and sighed. “Like many predators, boys hunt in packs.” He found their names and noted them down on the back of an envelope. In the meantime, I found myself, without wanting to, searching for Stuart Palmer. I did not know what he had looked like, so had to scan the list of names the year before Mr. Carleton’s for “S. Palmer,” and then count over in the row of blank-faced first year boys until I found him. He was a thin, ferret-faced child, his mouth hanging slightly o
pen; I could almost imagine the adenoidal wheeze of his breathing. In my head, I heard the terrified, panting sobs of the last breaths he had ever taken.

  Ratcliffe said, startling me out of my morbid contemplation, “I think we’ve learned about all we can here. Booth?”

  “ . . . Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Don’t brood,” Ratcliffe said, almost gently.

  “I, er . . . that is, no.”

  “Good.” He led the way out of the library, talking briskly and cheerfully over his shoulder as he went. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to find out if any of these boys are listed in the alumni records. Then we can—”

  He pushed open the library doors, straight into cries of “Ratty!” “Where have you been?” “Come on! Lunch!”

  Ratcliffe twisted around to look for me, but his friends were boisterous and had clearly been indulging in pre-luncheon cocktails. All he managed was the single word “Later!” before he was swept out of sight.

  I walked alone to the dining hall, where in the teeming confusion I found myself wedged in next to Barnabas Wilcox, a fate which in my ‘teens I would have considered worse than death. Now it was merely strange and insuperably awkward. Wilcox attempted to make polite adult conversation, asking me about my work, but after a brief, limping exchange, it was clear that without hatred we had nothing in common, and he turned his attention to his other neighbor. I ate silently and quickly and thought bleakly of Ratcliffe’s remark that boys hunted in packs. That was how Palmer had seen his pursuers, his murderers, and I had a faint nagging feeling that if I could follow that thought far enough, it could make clear to me some of the things about which Carleton had been lying. But every time I tried, I came back to Palmer’s last, dark, wavering view of the boys who had watched him die, and I could go no farther.

  By the time I was finished eating, the conversation at the table had turned to the infamous and scandalous among our fellow alumni. I did not wish to listen to gossip, and they were all as enthralled as Scheherazade’s sultan. I got up quietly and left.

  I had somehow lost my typewritten schedule and, emboldened by Ratcliffe’s example, I did not care. I had never played truant as a child; it was in some strange way exhilarating now to cut behind the school chapel and walk across the quadrangle, knowing that wherever I was supposed to be and whatever I was supposed to be doing, it was not here and it was not this.

  I wandered in pleasant aimlessness for some time, enjoying the Brockstone campus as I never had as a child, glorying in my much-belated delinquency. But eventually—and, I suppose, inevitably—I found myself outside the swimming pavilion.

  It had been refurbished since my graduation: a new coat of paint, dazzlingly white in the summer sunshine, modern and well-hung doors. But the changes were not enough to free it from the dark tints of my dream.

  I should have turned away, gone back to the School and the safety of the schedule. But instead I walked up and tried the doors. They were unlocked, and I slipped into the pavilion.

  It was dark inside, and the air was heavy with water. I should have left, and I knew it, but I crossed the atrium, cut through the students’ changing room—the same dull tile in desperate need of regrouting that I remembered—and emerged into the great echoing vault that housed the swimming pool itself.

  There were electric lights now. I pressed the switch and watched them flare into life along the walls. The pool lay blue and serene, as if it were as natural as a lake. In the glare of electricity, it looked nothing like the pool I remembered, nothing like the pool in my dream.

  I suppose it was that which made me foolhardy enough to advance to the edge of the pool. I stood and looked at the water and waited madly to hear voices yelling behind me, to feel myself suddenly propelled by nothing into the water. I felt recklessly defiant, as if I had drunk champagne instead of water with lunch, and ready to face down any number of bullying ghosts.

  They did not come, of course, and I was about to turn away and forsake my foolishness when I realized something was happening. At first it was just a disturbance in the water, an isolated eddy. But as I watched, it increased in size and intensity until there was a great cloudy roiling in the middle of the pool. And from it, with a frantic splash and a half-choked scream, emerged a boy’s head and flailing arms.

  A voice beside me called, “What’s the matter, Palmer? Can’t you swim?” and laughter, like the cries of hyenas, echoed through the pavilion.

  Without turning my head, I knew the voice had been Grimes’s. But the laughter had been everyone’s, even my own. I wondered if I was going insane; inside my head I could hear myself screaming like poor Palmer—and surely whatever he had deserved it had not been this—but it was as if that screaming voice had been locked in a cellar. The denizens of the house could hear it, but they did not care.

  And then, suddenly—so suddenly that I staggered and almost fell into the pool after all—it was gone. The turbulence, the drowning boy, the pack of predators along the side . . . the pack of which I had been a member.

  I left the pavilion through the faculty changing room, taking no chances with what might be lingering, haunting, on the student side.

  I walked for hours after that, though I have only the barest memory of where I went. I was horrified—mesmerized—by what had happened in the pavilion, but I realized very quickly after the initial shock had worn off, that as with my dream, there was a significant sense in which I had not been myself. I did not know what Grimes had sounded like; I had no idea whether Palmer had “deserved” anything or not, although I was inclined to doubt it. Those thoughts, and that strange, hysterical entrancement, had belonged to someone else, someone I was now willing to wager was Frederick Carleton. I had neither proof nor explanation, only that mad inner surety that I suspect is characteristic of all those who hear voices in an empty room, whether those voices be spectral or merely delusional.

  As the shadows began to lengthen toward dusk, I realized I needed to talk to Ratcliffe. I had the knowledge, but I did not know what, if anything, I ought to do about it. It was certainly pointless to attempt to try Carleton for Stuart Palmer’s murder when the evidence was only my dreams and megrims. And remembering what it had felt like to be Carleton, even briefly, I did not think that cold, blind, judicial Justice could make sense of Palmer’s death.

  But beyond that I could not go. I was too close, caught in the oscillation of terror between Palmer and Carleton, both of whom were drowning, albeit in water only one of them would die of.

  I walked back to the School and straight into the convivial press of cocktail hour. Noise and light and the heat of crowding bodies struck me together like a stunning blow. If it had not been for my need to talk to Ratcliffe, I would have turned tail and fled. But I knew better than to imagine I could face the rising night of Brockstone without some kind of human contact and support, so I fought my way grimly through the throng, and at last ran Ratcliffe to earth in one of the window embrasures. Surrounded by his friends.

  I pulled up short, cursing myself for an idiot. I had come so completely to think of Ratcliffe as an ally that I had forgotten he was not like me. He was not here under duress. He had been remarkably patient, giving up half his Saturday to my disordered imaginings, and I had no right to expect any more of him or to attempt to drag him away from his friends.

  I was about to turn away when the image of Palmer’s flailing hands burned across my mind like a comet. I wondered if Carleton was haunted by that same image and imagined what it would be like to be presented with that every time I closed my eyes, every night for the next forty years.

  The ancient Greeks had a word, καθαρσις, the exact translation of which is still hotly debated among classicists. At that moment it seemed to me no more elusive or troublesome than the word “justice.” I was not sure if either could be achieved. But I understood now why the Grail Knights had continued with their quest, even knowing it was hopeless, doomed, futile. Some things demand that you search for them
, even though you will not find them.

  It was a pretty flight of fancy, imagining myself as a Grail Knight, but not enough to disguise the iron-cold meaning beneath it: I still had to talk to Ratcliffe.

  I had been in this situation a thousand times. I could feel it ahead of me like the steps of a ritual: my advance, clumsier and more ungainly than ever; the polite, mocking silence as they waited for me to speak; my voice, stammering incoherencies; a pause, like the moment before the marksman fires; and then the dismissal, cool and stinging, leaving me with nothing to do except stumble away again, praying that they would contain their laughter until I was out of earshot. That was how it always went.

  I took a deep breath in a vain effort to steady myself and started forward.

  Ratcliffe looked up at my approach and, unbelievably, smiled and rose to greet me.

  “Booth! Where have you been?”

  “ . . . I, er . . . ”

  “Charlie, you remember Booth, don’t you? Mr. Booth, Mr. Cressingham. Mr. Cressingham, Mr. Booth.”

  Mechanically, I shook hands with Charles Cressingham, who looked as if he had swallowed a live spider. “Ratcliffe, I need to talk to you.”

  “Do you?” His bright eyes summed me up, seeming to recognize that indeed I did. “All right. Excuse us a moment, gentlemen, if you would.” And he steered me away through the crowd, leaving his friends goggling after us like a collection of frogs.

  Once out of the atrium, Ratcliffe simply picked the nearest classroom. When we were in school, it had been the domain of the terrifying Herr Brueckner, who taught history and German. Now Ratcliffe propped himself against the desk with insouciant lèse-majesté, and waved at me to speak.

  I told him as quickly and clearly as I could of what had befallen me in the swimming pavilion. I fear I was neither particularly clear nor particularly quick, but he heard me out in patient silence. When I had at last stammered to a halt, he considered a moment longer and then said, “What do you wish to do?”

  “What do I wish to do?”