The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  “It might be more pleasant without the, er, the paneling.”

  “Oh, but that paneling’s valuable. They don’t make stuff like that any more.”

  “Yes, but it’s quite dark.”

  “Better lights would solve that,” he said, staring up at the chandelier with disapprobation. “Well, that I can take care of tomorrow. I fancy I’ll have to leave you on your own most of the day, Booth. There’s quite a list of things that need buying, and for some reason Flood hasn’t done any of it.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, because I did not want to be a witness to what already seemed like an alarming escalation of hostilities between Wilcox and Flood, “perhaps he didn’t like to do anything without . . . that is, without asking you first.”

  “Good God, it takes no more than common sense to see that I shan’t kick over buying enough plaster to repair a great gaping hole in the cellar wall!” Wilcox stared at me; for a moment he was the bully I remembered from Brockstone. Then he said, more mildly, “I daresay you’re right. Flood and I have rubbed each other the wrong way a bit, but we’ll get along all right soon enough. I know Uncle Loosh couldn’t speak highly enough of him.”

  I managed to mutter something about “time,” and Wilcox turned the conversation to bridge, of which he appeared to be an addict. I do not play myself, disliking any form of activity which requires a partner, but Wilcox needed no encouragement to discourse at length.

  After dinner, he said, “D’you want to look at the library now?”

  “I, er . . . yes, while you’re here to . . . ”

  He rolled his eyes. “Come on, then.”

  The doors to the library—vast, carved things like cathedral doors—were locked. While Wilcox, grumbling, sorted through his key-ring, I examined the carvings. They were crude, almost primitive, in design and execution, and their crudeness bothered me because I could not quite tell what the reliefs were meant to represent. There were trees—I was sure of that—and there was one figure, always holding a box and thus easy to identify, that seemed quite reliably to be human, but the rest of it was disturbingly muddled, so that I could not determine whether the other shapes were persecuting the human shape or obeying its commands.

  “Ha!” said Wilcox and unlocked the doors.

  In the library, at last, we found a well-lit and comfortably appointed room. It was quite large, large enough that it disrupted the severely square proportions of the house by jutting out into the back garden. Although the windows were still small and mean, in the library it seemed almost reasonable that they should be so, since every inch of wall space, including both above and below the windows, was taken up with bookshelves, themselves crammed with books. Where the shelves were deep enough and the books small enough, the books had been double-stacked; everywhere, books had been shoved sideways on top of the rows, and there were stacks on the floor in front of the bookcases, stacks on the desk, stacks on the two small tables—so that the impression was less of a collection and more of an explosion of books.

  “Good God,” Wilcox said faintly.

  After a moment, I said, “You mentioned a catalogue. Do you know . . . er, can you find it?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilcox said, staring around helplessly. “I just know it’s mentioned in the will.”

  “Flood might . . . ”

  “Or the lawyer, Dropcloth or whatever his name is. But I’ll ask Flood.” There was a bell-pull, conveniently situated by the desk; Wilcox pulled it briskly.

  Flood appeared in the doorway, and I thought again how round and flat his eyes seemed. Wilcox put his question, and Flood said, “Oh, yes, sir. I believe you’ll find the catalogue in Mr. Preston Wilcox’s desk. He was making notes just before his last illness.” Flood did not come into the library; it struck me, perhaps unjustly, that he regarded the massed books with some distaste. Wilcox started opening desk drawers and said, “Thank you, Flood, that was all I wanted,” without looking up.

  “Yes, sir. Good night, sir,” said Flood, and I did not like the expression in those round, flat eyes. He vanished as silently as he had appeared.

  “How long was he, er, with your uncle?”

  “Flood? Ages and ages. I remember him from when I was a boy, looking just as he does now. Why?”

  “ . . . No reason. He just . . . that is, I don’t . . . ”

  “He gives you the creeps,” Wilcox said, resorting to the lowest and deepest desk drawer, which seemed to be crammed to the brim with paper. “He does me, too. I don’t expect I’ll keep him on. Get my own people in. New blood and all that.”

  “ . . . Yes,” I said, although I found myself wishing he had not used the word “blood,” and then did not know why it bothered me.

  “This must be it,” Wilcox said; he dragged a leather-bound ledger from the bottom of the drawer, sending sheets of paper flying in a kind of fountain. “Blast. Here, you take a look at this, and I’ll get this stuff back in the drawer.” He shoved the catalogue into my hands.

  Lucius Preston Wilcox’s rigidly legible handwriting marched across the pages of his catalogue like a conquering army. I noted the careful descriptions of the books, including provenances and conditions, and then, obedient to the signs of Wilcox’s growing impatience, allowed myself to be herded out of the library and up to bed.

  I slept badly that night. In itself, that was not surprising. I am an insomniac—I rarely sleep more than six hours a night, frequently no more than four, sometimes not at all—and I am always nervous in strange bedrooms.

  I had not expected to sleep at all, had come prepared with a book on forgers’ techniques. But my eyes grew heavy, and finally the book slipped out of my fingers entirely, and I found myself in a dream.

  Even at the time, I knew it was a dream, which was some comfort. I was dreaming of being a boy again, thirteen or fourteen, the age at which I had most hated Barnabas Wilcox. I was standing on a staircase; in the dream, it was the main staircase at Brockstone School, but I recognized it as the staircase here at Hollyhill, the one I had just climbed in Wilcox’s company on the way to our respective rooms. I was on the landing, by the newel-post, and two boys came running past me down the stairs. I recognized one as Wilcox and tensed, clutching the bannister. But they did not notice me; I wondered hopefully if I was invisible.

  I followed them downstairs, where they had been caught by a master and were being scolded for something. He was an old man, with bright, piercing eyes. The dream insisted that he was Dr. Smayle, the Greek master, but I kept thinking that he was really someone else, although I did not know whom.

  “Useless the both of you!” he was saying. “Senseless as stones. Can’t lift your heads above the animal reek of the world, can you, lads?”

  “But, sir,” said Wilcox, “Tony’s dead.”

  At that I recognized the other boy as Wilcox’s older brother, the one who had died in the war.

  “Makes no difference,” said the old man. “Alive or dead, you just can’t see. Your friend would be more use than you are. What’s your name, boy?”

  Then I’m not invisible, I thought sadly, and said, “Booth.”

  “Booth?” said Wilcox, twisting around to look at me, his face sneering. “What are you doing here?”

  “You brought him, you lunk,” the old man said. He wasn’t Dr. Smayle now, and he never had been. “Brought him right into the middle of something you don’t have the motherwit to understand.” I fell back a pace under the hammerfall of his eyes. They were not Dr. Smayle’s kind blue eyes; they were black and hard. “Booth, you said your name is. Stay in the library, Booth. Don’t let Barney drag you out.”

  “That’s right,” said Wilcox. “Don’t come out of the library, or I’ll make you sorry.”

  The dream changed then, became a different dream, a dream of Wilcox chasing me through Brockstone School, Wilcox and his thuggish friends. I ran until I woke up.

  At breakfast, Wilcox looked as haggard as I felt. He did not look like the Wilcox of my dream, but I still felt ed
gy, as if the fourteen-year-old boys we had been were watching us, each horrified at the perceived betrayal in our eating breakfast together. I was grateful that he did not speak.

  He disappeared promptly after breakfast, with a mutter about “business.” I went into the library and settled down to work.

  There was no great difficulty. The catalogue was carefully kept and accurate in all its details. My worst trouble was in finding each volume; the shelves looked to have undergone at least two partial reorganizations, so that the volumes wedged in sideways might as easily be among Mr. Preston Wilcox’s first purchases as among his last. I ended up making stacks of my own on his desk, and it was inevitable that around two o’clock that afternoon I knocked one stack over, sending books sliding across the desk and onto the floor.

  I gave a yelp of dismay and dove after them. Happily, none had been damaged; it was as I was crawling out from beneath the desk, having retrieved the last of them (Life among the Anthropophagi of the South Pacific), that the corner of a piece of paper caught my eye.

  I realized that it had to be one of the papers Wilcox had dropped the night before. It had slid all the way under the bottom drawer, so that no one who did not crawl entirely beneath the desk, as I had done, would ever see it. I put Life among the Anthropophagi on the desk and went back after the paper.

  It was a page of notes, clearly belonging to Mr. Preston Wilcox. I recognized the handwriting from the catalogue, and the contents matched up with Wilcox’s description of his uncle’s obsessions. Elliptical and oblique, they were notes to jog the old man’s memory, not to enlighten anyone else. There were references to the holly trees, and to something he called “the Guide” and something else he called “the Vessel.” It did not make sense to me, but I was troubled by a feeling that it ought to, that I had seen something like this somewhere before. But every time I tried to track that feeling down, I found myself remembering my dream of the previous night—Wilcox chasing me through endless hallways, calling me “freak” and “coward” and worse things. In the end, I put the paper on the desk and returned to the catalogue.

  When Wilcox returned, he came to the library and apologized for being so late. Startled, I looked at my watch and saw that it was past eight o’clock.

  Wilcox laughed, not pleasantly to my ear. “Same old Booth. Come on and eat.”

  I went to turn the lamp off before I followed him, and the paper on the desk caught my eye. “Oh! I found this under the desk.”

  I handed it to him. He glanced at it, said, “More of Uncle Loosh’s nonsense, looks like to me. Thanks.” He stuffed it in his pocket, and we left the room.

  Dinner consisted of sandwiches and soup. Wilcox was restless, fidgeting even as he ate, getting up periodically to stride over to the windows and stare out at the darkness. Finally, I said, “Is something the matter?”

  “I’m having those damn trees down tomorrow!”

  “Oh,” I said, not usefully.

  “I’m sorry. They get on my nerves, and it seems like every time I turn around, there’s Flood telling me how much Uncle Loosh loved the hollies. All the more reason they should go.”

  “There was, er . . . there was something about them on that paper I found.”

  He raised his eyebrows in a disagreeable sneer, but did not comment.

  “It looks like . . . however he thought he was going to, er, cheat death, it looks like the hollies . . . ”

  Wilcox stared at me, his brows drawing down in an ugly, brooding expression. Then, all at once, he burst out laughing. “My God, Booth, don’t tell me you believe in that nonsense!”

  I felt my face flood red; I could not answer him.

  “I bet you do!” Wilcox hooted with laughter. “You’re as crazy as Uncle Loosh!”

  I stood up, said, “Good night, Wilcox,” with what vestiges of dignity I could, and walked out of the room. I would have liked to return to work in the library, but I was afraid Wilcox would find me there. I went up to my bedroom and locked the door. I could leave tomorrow afternoon—maybe even tomorrow morning. I could ask Flood about trains before breakfast.

  I did not expect to sleep at all, but I changed into my pajamas and climbed into bed. If nothing else, I could read comfortably. About half an hour later, I heard Wilcox come upstairs. His footsteps stopped outside my door, but he did not knock or speak. I was just as glad.

  I read long enough to quiet my nerves. When I looked at the clock, it was five minutes past midnight, and the house was perfectly still. No one would notice or care if I went back down to the library for a couple of hours. I would feel better about leaving—less like I was running away—if I had at least completed the task Wilcox had asked me here to perform.

  I got up, put my book carefully back in my valise, and put on my dressing gown, already rehearsing my story should I run into Flood or Wilcox. I needed something to read—what better reason to be found creeping downstairs to the library in the middle of the night?

  But the house might as well have been deserted, for all the signs of life it showed. I made it to the library without incident and shut the doors carefully behind me before I turned on the light. In that single moment of darkness, I suffered the horrible conviction that there was someone sitting behind the desk, but when I turned on the light, no one was there.

  I worked peacefully for almost five hours, slowly restoring order to the chaos of Mr. Preston Wilcox’s library. The darkness beyond the windows was softening to gray, the sun’s first rays reaching up above the brooding hollies, when I pulled a book out of the lowest shelf of the bookcase behind the desk and with it fell a second book, which flipped itself open to its title page.

  I stared at that second book for a long time, perfectly still, just as I would have stared at a tarantula that might or might not have been dead. The book was not listed in Mr. Preston Wilcox’s catalogue. I had only ever seen a copy once before. But now I knew why those notes referring to “the Guide” and “the Vessel” had looked familiar. It was The Book of Whispers—not the nineteenth-century fake, but the genuine edition from 1605. I could not bring myself to touch it.

  And while I was standing there, staring at that small, fragile volume, I heard Wilcox coming down the stairs. I clutched my dressing gown closed at the neck. I could not let him see me like this: in my pajamas with my hair uncombed and my face stubbled. He would never believe me then, and the matter had suddenly become much larger than our enmity, preserved like an ant in amber, and my wounded pride.

  Then I thought, He’ll go in to breakfast. I can get upstairs and get decent without him seeing me.

  At the same moment at which I remembered it was only a quarter after five, far too early for breakfast, I heard the front door slam. I knew then, and the knowledge made me cold. He intended to have those hollies down today; he was going out to look at them, to plan his attack.

  I had seen The Book of Whispers; I knew what was waiting for him among the holly trees.

  “Wilcox!” I shouted uselessly and plunged for the door.

  The door would not open. I tugged and rattled, but the latch stayed jammed. The first part of my dream from Friday night came back; I remembered the old man saying, “Stay in the library.”

  But whether I liked Wilcox or not, I could not leave him to his fate, to the terrible thing Lucius Preston Wilcox intended.

  “Flood!” I shouted and then caught myself; Flood had his own role to play among the holly trees. I shouted for the housekeeper instead, Mrs. Grant, and pounded on the door in between my frantic assaults on the doorknob. I could feel the old man’s black eyes watching me from behind the desk. I did not turn around, afraid that I would find the feeling to be more than just nerves.

  The library was not far from the kitchen, and Mrs. Grant got up at dawn to bake the day’s bread. Although it felt like hours, it was no more than ten minutes—maybe only five—before I heard her on the other side of the door, saying, “What on Earth—?”

  “The door’s stuck!”

  �
��Stuck? It’s never been stuck before.”

  For her, the door swung smoothly open. I wasted no time in explanations, apologies, or curses, but bolted past her. The front door did not resist me; I threw it open just in time to see Wilcox disappear into the close-serried ranks of holly.

  “Wilcox!” I shouted and started running.

  I lost both my carpet slippers within ten feet, but ran on regardless. Stones and sticks and shed holly leaves hurt my feet, but there was still a chance. If I could get to the hollies, get Wilcox out of the hollies . . .

  I reached the trees, ducked between them as Wilcox had, and came face to face with Flood.

  “Where’s Mr. Wilcox?”

  “Mr. Wilcox has met with an accident,” he said smoothly, well-rehearsed, “but I think—”

  “Let it go, Flood.”

  Those smooth, perfect pebbles stared at me.

  “Let him go.”

  “I don’t understand you, Mr. Booth.”

  “You’re the Guide, aren’t you? And poor Wilcox is the Vessel. I found the book.”

  His face twisted; I remembered how he had stood in the doorway of the library, refusing to come in. And I remembered the carvings on the library doors; that thing I had taken for a box could just as easily be a book. I wondered, distractedly, my hackles rising, just what Flood had been before Mr. Preston Wilcox had used the book to command him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Booth,” he said. “I think you misunderstood me. Mr. Wilcox—”

  “What on Earth are you doing out here, Booth?”

  I whipped around, my heart hammering in my throat. Wilcox was approaching through the trees.

  “Wilcox?” I said weakly.

  “Good God, man, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s the matter?”

  “N-nothing.” I could not stop staring at him, his ruddy face and aggressively square body, his rumpled hair and— “What happened to your hand?”