The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

“Is it such an odd question? They are your dreams, your visions. Surely the decision must be yours, as well.”

  “But I don’t know what to do!” I cried and realized too late that it had become a wail.

  “Well, let us consider your options. You can do nothing—”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “There. You see? Or you can go to the police.” His quirked eyebrows and ironic tone indicated that he knew the feckless lunacy of that idea as well as I did. “Or you could, I don’t know, hire a medium to speak to the departed spirit of Stuart Palmer. Or,” and he raised one finger for emphasis, “you could talk to Frederick Carleton again.”

  “But—”

  “You said you were him in your second vision. And he is both alive and here, as the other members of that group are not—least of all Stuart Palmer, God rest his soul. I agree that this is not a situation covered by the etiquette manuals and it is difficult to know how to proceed, but if there are any indications at all to be gleaned, they are pointing you at Frederick Carleton.”

  “Yes,” I agreed dismally.

  “Look. Come and have dinner, and then afterwards we can go up and beard the lion in his den.”

  “We?”

  “Good Lord, yes! You don’t think I’d bow out now, do you?”

  “I didn’t . . . that is . . . ”

  “I’ll come with you,” Ratcliffe said. “Now come and eat.”

  Dinner was surprisingly pleasant. Ratcliffe’s friends did not know what to make of his sponsorship of me, but he said something about archaeology and museums, and they fell over themselves in their anxiety not to learn anything more. When none of them was watching, Ratcliffe winked at me.

  I was left politely alone—which is a very different thing from being ignored. They looked at me if their remarks were generally addressed, including me in the social life of the table, but they did not demand a response or ask me questions. They seemed like a litter of half-grown puppies, good-natured, clumsy, and anxious to please, and I found it difficult to remember that they were all within a year or two of my own age. I realized somewhere in the salad course that they valued Ratcliffe’s good opinion very highly. I listened attentively to their conversation and remembered not a word of it five minutes after we had risen from the table.

  They were headed in pursuit of after-dinner drinks, and Ratcliffe had some difficulty in extracting himself from their conviviality. But he persevered and in the end prevailed, and he and I made our way to the masters’ wing. We did not speak; Ratcliffe seemed to understand that I could not speak lightly, as his friends did, and that the subject of our excursion was something about which I was on the verge of being unable to speak at all.

  As he had that morning, he led me with assurance. My perplexity must have shown on my face, for he grinned as he opened the door at the top of the fourth staircase we had climbed and said, “My father’s on the Board, but he sends me to be his proxy if I happen to be in the country for the annual meeting. I try not to be, but I’ve still been taken over the school in loving, excruciating detail three times in the last ten years. I know where everything is.”

  “Is that why you’re so . . . concerned?”

  “No, not a bit of it. Can’t resist a mystery, that’s all. And here we are.” He knocked with brisk authority on Frederick Carleton’s door.

  The door was opened remarkably quickly, almost as if Carleton had been waiting for us. He was still fully dressed, even down to the undisturbed knot in his tie.

  “What do you want?” he said, words and scowl hostile, but his voice was tired.

  “May we come in?” Ratcliffe said.

  “I suppose.” Carleton stood aside.

  It was the first time I had ever been inside a master’s chambers. Though far larger than any living space I had had as a student, Carleton’s rooms were dark and depressing, and the oppressive woodwork made me not at all certain that the masters had gotten the better end of the deal.

  Carleton slumped into a battered armchair and waved an apathetic hand at the Chesterfield, which itself had seen better days. Ratcliffe and I sat down, and Carleton repeated dully, “What do you want?”

  Ratcliffe looked at me, and I realized, my heart sinking, that he was right. He had played my Virgil all day, but he could not take this final step for me.

  “Er,” I said. “Mr. Carleton, I need to tell you about a dream I had last night, and something that happened to me this afternoon.”

  He sat, inert as stone, while I fumbled and stammered my way through a description of what I had witnessed from two angles; when I had finished, he said, still in that flat, monotonous voice, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  That seemed to rouse him; there was more than a hint of a defiant snarl in his voice when he said, “What do you want me to do? Turn myself in to the police? Write a confession to the headmaster? Take flowers to Palmer’s wretched grave? What? What can I possibly do that will make the slightest difference?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said with a savage parody of courtesy. “I thought that was what you had just told me.”

  “No,” I said. “The rest of it.”

  For the first time, Carleton looked frightened. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, but he and I both knew he was lying.

  “Tell me how it happened. Tell me what Grimes and your brother wanted. I know you didn’t want Palmer to die.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “No, I didn’t. Not really.” He sat up straighter, as if he had come to a decision and in so doing had been relieved of a burden. When he spoke again, his voice was quicker, sharper. I imagined that was what he sounded like when he was teaching.

  “You have to understand that none of us liked Palmer. Things would never have gone even half as far as they did if Palmer hadn’t been what he was.”

  “Which was?” Ratcliffe asked.

  “I have boys like him in my classes now,” Carleton said, so distantly that if he had not been answering Ratcliffe’s question, I would have thought he had not heard it. “Smart boys, sharp boys, but they won’t learn the rules. Can’t keep their mouths shut. Can’t see that it all applies to them.”

  “Oh,” I said involuntarily. There had been boys like that in my year; though none of them had been as relentless as Barnabas Wilcox, they had been among my most inventive tormentors—when they were not being tormented by other boys themselves.

  Carleton nodded at me. “Palmer was a natural target. And Victor was looking for one.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes. My elder brother, Victor, and his dear friend Norman Grimes.” Carleton’s face twisted, and it was a moment before he continued: “I don’t know how much of it was deliberate—by which I mean I don’t know how much they intended, and how much of it they simply let happen. Victor and I never talked about it, and I was grateful when he died because it meant I never had to ask.”

  He stood up abruptly. “I need a drink. If you want to get me fired, go ahead and tell Jernigan. That’ll get me fired faster than you can say Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.”

  Ratcliffe and I looked at each other and said nothing as Carleton disappeared into what was presumably his bedroom. He returned with a tumbler three-quarters full of scotch, sat down, and took a large gulp. Then he continued with his story.

  “Palmer had crossed Victor. I don’t know how. We younger boys didn’t ask questions—we knew what the rules were if we wanted to be ‘friends’ with Victor and Grimes.” He invested the word friends with heavy sarcasm; what he really meant, of course, was slaves. “It was worst for Teddy Thorpe and me; we were only allowed to be part of the pack because I was Victor’s younger brother and Teddy was my best friend.”

  “ ‘Pack’?” Ratcliffe said.

  “I’ve never been able to think of a better word,” Carleton said. “We weren’t a group of friends. We were like a pack of wolves. Or jackals. Victor was the leader, and Grime
s was his lieutenant, and the other four of us skirmished and suffered and cowered and crawled behind them. It gave me and Teddy cachet with the other first-years, and kept us both from being trampled underfoot. I know now that it wasn’t worth it, but I didn’t know that when I was eleven. At least, not before Palmer.”

  He took another mouthful of scotch. “Grimes’s father was a devoted follower of the philosophy of Herbert Spencer.”

  “Social Darwinism,” Ratcliffe said grimly.

  “Exactly. I don’t know how much of what Grimes said was what his father actually believed and how much of it was his misunderstanding . . . never having had the misfortune of meeting Grimes Senior I can happily form no opinion of his intellectual capacity. But Grimes had taken it to mean that bullying wasn’t bullying; it was admirable work done in the name of advancing the species. Come to think of it, I don’t know if Grimes actually believed that himself, or if he just found it convenient. I don’t know if Victor believed it either, but he certainly liked it. That’s what they used to shout when they had us ganging up, six on one, on some poor boy who’d gotten better marks than Grimes or made Victor look stupid in Latin: ‘Survival of the fittest!’ ”

  “Palmer,” Ratcliffe said.

  “Yes, Palmer. He had crossed Victor. I don’t know what he did. All I know is that that Sunday, Victor and Grimes told us we were going out to ‘get’ Palmer.” He sighed heavily, sinking deeper into his chair. “He ran. That was his first mistake. They tell you never to run away from wild animals, and I know why. Because the longer we chased him, the more serious it got. I don’t think I can explain it properly, although goodness knows I’ve made this speech in my head several thousand times since then. But, at first, we were just going to beat him up, or tear his clothes off and make him walk back to the School naked, or something like that. Some stupid humiliation, the sort that gets served out a dozen times a day in any school you care to name. But he ran. And we chased him, and well, after you’ve been chasing after someone for half-an-hour, you can’t just punch him and yell ‘Tag you’re it!’ and run away. Whatever you do has to be worth the effort he’s put into trying to escape it. Do you see?”

  I am not sure either of us did, but Carleton was no longer paying any particular attention to us. He paused only long enough to drink some more scotch. His words were coming faster now, as if the story was developing some inner urgency of its own. “You know what happened. We chased him into the pavilion; someone shoved him into the pool. And I know it sounds nonsensical, but I can’t tell you which one of us it was. I don’t think it was me, but some days I’m not even sure of that. And then we all stood there and watched him drown.”

  The silence was heavy and brackish, like the water in my dream. Carleton finished his scotch and said, “I can’t explain it. Except that I knew then and know now, as clearly as I will ever know anything, that if any of us—Wrexton, Griffith, Teddy, me—if any of us had tried to help Palmer, or tried to run for help, Victor and Grimes would have thrown us in. If they’d had to, they would have held us under. And they didn’t have to because we were . . . we were caught. Not by them, or not exactly. By something . . . ” He made a despairing gesture with his hands. “Something deeper, darker. Something worse than those two stupid sixteen-year-old boys—although they were bad enough, and I did not weep at Victor’s funeral. We watched Palmer drown and we laughed.”

  He looked at his glass, as if surprised to discover it held no more scotch. “Afterwards, when we’d left the pavilion, Victor and Grimes told us not to say anything. We didn’t, and it never occurred to any of the masters, or the coroner, or anyone, that we might have had something to do with it. I don’t believe it ever crossed anyone’s mind that it might not have been an accident.”

  He stood up, and Ratcliffe and I stood up with him. “Swimming was made compulsory the next year,” Carleton said, setting his glass down on the mantelpiece and beginning to herd us, like a surly old collie with two stupid sheep, towards the door. “Every day for six years, I had to swim in that pool and not think about Palmer drowning. When I had nightmares—and both Teddy and I did, although I don’t know about the others—I had to lie there, sleepless and sweating until dawn, and not make a sound, waiting for Palmer’s cold, wet, dead hand to touch my face. I know that I am damned. I have been damned since I was eleven years old, and Hell has not waited for my death. What more do you want of me?”

  “We want nothing of you,” I said.

  He stopped where he was, staring at us. Ratcliffe opened the door and waved me through. In the hall, I turned. Ratcliffe was still standing in the doorway, looking at Carleton, who was still staring at us as if had never seen anything so strange in all his life. Ratcliffe said levelly, “Despair is also a mortal sin,” and came out, shutting the door behind him.

  In unspoken accord, we said nothing as we retraced our route through the masters’ wing. On the other side of the enormous double doors, Ratcliffe looked at me and said, “Are you going to be able to sleep tonight?”

  “No,” I said, startled into honesty.

  “Neither am I. If I drive you back to the city, will you promise never to tell Starkweather?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good. Let’s get out of here.”

  Scarcely half-an-hour later, we departed from Brockstone School; Ratcliffe had left a glib, facilely apologetic explanation with one of his many friends. The moon, almost at the full, was hanging in the sky like a lamp set to guide lost travelers. Ratcliffe said nothing until we had passed the school gates; then he said abruptly, “Will you go back?”

  “No.”

  “No,” he echoed. He drove silently and extremely fast for three-quarters of an hour, then asked, just as abruptly, “Do you think you’ll have that dream again?”

  “No,” I said. “I think . . . I think it belongs to the school. I think that’s why Carleton had to go back. He’s the only one left, you know.”

  “He is? Did you look at the alumni records?”

  “No. I looked at the five black-bordered photographs on his wall.”

  Silence caught us then, and held us, through the hours of darkness as Ratcliffe drove toward the city and the moon.

  THE INHERITANCE OF BARNABAS WILCOX

  Some four months after I attended the fifteen-year reunion at Brockstone School, I received a letter from Barnabas Wilcox. I was puzzled, for there was no love lost between Wilcox and me, but instead of doing the sensible thing and throwing the letter unopened on the fire, I read it.

  Dear Booth (Wilcox wrote):

  I’m writing to you because you know all about old books. The case is that I have recently inherited a house in the country from my Uncle Lucius, and there’s a stipulation in his will that his library catalogue should be made up-to-date. Would you care to come down with me this weekend and take a look at it? I don’t know anyone else who would even know where to begin.

  Yrs,

  And then an involved squiggle in which a “B” and a “W” were dimly perceptible.

  It took no great leap of intuition to guess that Wilcox’s “Uncle Lucius” had to be the noted antiquary Lucius Preston Wilcox, and that lure overcame my dislike of Wilcox. Friday I took a half-day, packed my bag, and met Wilcox on the platform at quarter of three. He was a big, square, red-faced man, with thick, blunt-fingered hands and smallish, squinty hazel eyes. Despite my white hair, he looked easily ten years older than I; when we shook hands, I smelled liquor on his breath.

  “How are you, Booth?” he said when we were settled in our compartment. “It’s good of you to come.”

  “I, er,” I said. “ . . . I like libraries.”

  “Well, old Uncle Loosh should keep you happy then. I remember, my brother and I used to think the books had to be fake, he had so many.”

  I recollected in time that Wilcox’s brother had died in the war, and asked instead, “When did your uncle die? I don’t remember reading an obituary.”

  “Daft old coot. He wouldn’t have one
written. It was the first stipulation in his will, and he’d told his lawyer and his housekeeper and everybody about it. And, after all, there’s no law that says you have to publish one. It’s just that people usually do. But Uncle Loosh was crazy.”

  “ . . . Crazy?”

  “He got into some weird things. He used to write me these long letters saying he’d figured out how to cheat death and was going to live forever. I couldn’t understand half of what he said.”

  “That’s not a very pleasant occupation.”

  “Uncle Loosh wasn’t a very pleasant person. I can’t think why he left everything to me. We didn’t get along.”

  The train began to move. With a muttered apology, Wilcox dug some papers out of his attaché case and settled in to work. I stared out the window and watched as the train left the city behind.

  The estate of Wilcox’s uncle was called Hollyhill and was accurately named in both respects. The house stood on a prominence among the farms and woods of the gently rolling countryside, and was surrounded by as thriving a stand of holly trees as I had ever seen.

  “I shall have those cut down first thing,” Wilcox said as we turned through the gates. “I don’t know what Uncle Loosh was thinking of, letting them grow like that.”

  In the rearview mirror, I caught the eyes of the driver; his name was Esau Flood, and he had been Mr. Preston Wilcox’s groundskeeper. He was small, very tan, with a head of thick white hair. His eyes were gray and reminded me strongly of the sort of smooth, round pebbles one finds in a swiftly-moving stream. He said, “Mr. Preston Wilcox was very fond of the holly, sir.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Wilcox said disagreeably. “I’m not.”

  “I’m sure not, sir,” said Flood, too politely.

  The house itself was remarkably unattractive, with an aggressively square façade and windows that seemed too small for the proportions. Inside, I was oppressed to discover that the entire house was paneled with dark-varnished oak, and that the windows gave as little light as one would expect. They had uncommonly thick curtains. Wilcox seemed uncomfortable as well; he said several times over dinner that he did not know why his uncle had left him the place, and he was not sure but that the best thing to do would be to sell it—”not that I could find a buyer,” he added.