The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  “Nobody believed her. By that time everyone in the hotel knew Mary Anne wasn’t frightened of anything from a spanking to eternal damnation. But she said she was frightened, and she sounded frightened.”

  “Her mama asked her what she was frightened of, and she said she didn’t know.”

  “Collie came up then, mad as a hornet, and he started in yelling at Mrs. Dennys about why couldn’t she keep an eye on her hellborn brat and more of the same, with poor Mrs. Dennys getting paler and paler and shakier and shakier. And then Mary Anne started screaming.”

  “Really screaming.”

  “She wasn’t faking. You can tell the difference, and nobody screams like that if they don’t mean it. Collie took off like a rocket, racing up to the attic where all the machinery is, and he got that elevator unstuck in maybe half an hour.”

  “Mary Anne stopped screaming after ten minutes.”

  “She was dead when they opened the doors.”

  “No sign of what killed her.”

  “Just some scratches on her hands and face, and she might have got those trying to get out.”

  “They had an autopsy, and they didn’t find a thing.”

  “One of the maids told me her brother worked for the county morgue, and he said the coroner said the little girl just plain died of fright.”

  “And me and Carrie, we’ve been wondering ever since what could have scared Mary Anne Dennys that bad.”

  “Hard as nails, that girl.”

  Carrie cocked her head. “Doris, I think we’re frightening Mr. Booth.”

  “No, no,” I said feebly.

  “Just don’t go in the elevator, and you’re fine,” Doris said. I could tell she meant to be comforting.

  “How many others . . . ”

  “Oh, nobody like Mary Anne,” Carrie said. “There have been a couple of heart attacks, I think, but nobody’s died.”

  “Not since Mr. Nelson,” Doris said.

  “You’re right, Doris. I was forgetting Mr. Nelson.”

  “He was here with his wife. He screamed, too, like Mary Anne.”

  “Stay out of the elevator,” Carrie said.

  “Thank you, I will,” I said. And since they were frightening me and I was feeling shaky, I thanked them for their patience and crawled up to bed. I stood in front of my door for some minutes, looking down the hall toward the elevator, but nothing in the world could have made me go near it.

  Wednesday morning in the garden, Mr. Ormont approached me. “Good morning, Mr. Booth.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Ormont,” I said. He was fiftyish and stout, with exophthalmic blue eyes and white wispy hair. I had read his volumes of poetry—The Velvet Phoenix, The Ambassador of Night, Roses for Horatio—and admired them very deeply. The second or third time I had been placed next to him at dinner, I had worked up all my courage and told him so. He had seemed pleased, but that had been the extent of our conversation. I hoped he knew that I listened when he spoke about books with Mrs. Whittaker, but no matter how much I wanted to, I could not find the nerve to join in.

  “May I walk with you?” he asked.

  “Er . . . if you wish,” I said.

  We walked maybe thirty yards in silence before he said, “Mr. Marten tells me you’ve been archiving his records for him.”

  “I . . . I suppose so,” I said. “I’ve been trying.”

  “Have you found anything of interest?”

  “I . . . well, it depends on what you mean by ‘interest.’ ”

  “I have stayed here three times, and on each occasion, something odd has happened.”

  “Odd?” I said, thinking of Doris and Carrie’s inexhaustible well of “oddness.”

  “Odd,” said Mr. Ormont. He was looking at a topiary rabbit. “The first time, when I was a boy, I came here with my mother, who had been advised to see if the waters would do anything for her liver. They would not, and she died the next year. That was before Mr. Marten’s time, of course. The place was run by a married couple. I have forgotten their names . . . ”

  “Victor and Selena Thackeray.”

  “Thank you, yes. I knew it was something like that, but I wanted to say Wordsworth. In any event, near the end of the month which we stayed, one of the chambermaids killed herself. Her name was Jemima Kell. She hanged herself in the conservatory and left a letter, which I heard about by hiding under one of the sofas in the parlor. In the letter she confessed that she had been, ahem, submitting to the virile affections of Mr. Thackeray for several months. She was afraid to leave the hotel, knowing that they wouldn’t give her a character, but, she said, she couldn’t bear Mrs. Thackeray coming to her bedroom at night to revile her. She’d been waiting and waiting to be turned off, and it wasn’t happening, and she couldn’t stand the waiting any longer, so she chose suicide instead. The odd part,” and he turned his head to look at me, “is that Mrs. Thackeray had not the slightest idea that her husband was disporting himself with the maids. Not so much as an inkling. She left him that same night—or, rather, she was carried out the front door by her brother, herself being in strong hysterics.”

  He was waiting for a response. I said, “But if she didn’t know . . . ”

  “Exactly. Who was whispering poison in Jemima Kell’s ears? No one ever came forward, although of course I don’t imagine that the culprit would.”

  “No,” I said faintly, “I imagine not.”

  “The second time was only five years ago.”

  “What happened five years ago?” I had not found anything, except for a consumptive girl who seemed to have succumbed to her disease rather more swiftly than anyone had expected.

  “Nothing too alarming—at least, no one died. It was just that I kept seeing a young man in the garden. I walked a great deal, as you do. And I would see a man, young, dark, always on a different path than mine, always heading off at an angle from where I was going. I never saw him near to, and I never got a good look at his face.”

  “And there were no dark young men staying at the hotel.”

  “Exactly. I have been looking for him this time, but I have not seen him.”

  “ . . . Perhaps he found who he was looking for.”

  “Perhaps.” He gave me a look like an owl’s, the round eye under the steep, tufted eyebrow. “But you see, I am not the sort of man around whom supernatural events occur. Those two things, and now our poltergeist, are the only paranormal activity—if I have the phrase correct—that I have ever witnessed. And so the question has crossed my mind, is it perhaps something about the hotel?”

  “Perhaps,” I said unhappily.

  “What have you found, Mr. Booth?”

  “Odd things, Mr. Ormont.” I paused, gathering my thoughts. “People tend to die here—I suppose, in a way, that isn’t surprising, as this is a convalescent hotel. I almost . . . that is, I could easily have died here myself.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, and . . . and the people who do die here often aren’t the people you’d expect. Carrie and Doris told me . . . there was a man named Ampleforth who died last year. I found his name in the register, and it said . . . that is, he was here for ‘nerves.’ ”

  “A convenient umbrella. I am here for ‘nerves’ myself.”

  “Yes, but it’s not the sort of thing one dies of . . . generally.”

  “Not without some forethought, no.”

  It was a grim way of putting it. I said, “And that’s what’s odd. Mr. Ampleforth didn’t commit suicide. He simply died.”

  “How simply?”

  “They . . . they found him dead one morning when he didn’t come down to breakfast. Mr. Marten kept the clippings of the inquest, and no apparent cause of death was found. They put ‘heart failure.’ ”

  “Which we all die of, yes, I see.”

  “ . . . And Mr. Ampleforth isn’t the only one. It gets harder as you go back to—to figure out whose deaths might be, er, odd. There’s a suspicious number of women who checked in for postpartum depression and n
ever checked out again. And then I found Marina Stedman.” I didn’t want to talk about Mary Anne Dennys and the elevator; I’d had nightmares about it all night.

  “Something tells me I shall be sorry I asked, but who is Marina Stedman?”

  “A lady who checked in and never checked out.”

  “Mr. Booth, you are becoming increasingly gnomic.”

  “I’m sorry. You see, she didn’t check out, but she didn’t die, either, at least . . . not that anyone knows. She just vanished.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Into thin air. There’s a long entry in the ledger—this was during the . . . the reign of Mr. Haverforth, who ran the hotel before the Thackerays. She liked to walk in the gardens, it says. One sunny afternoon, five people saw her walk into that gazebo—” I pointed; it was a pretty gothic curlicue in the middle of the roses, the same gazebo where Mr. Granger had been discovered, hanged with a woman’s rose-patterned scarf that no one in the hotel had ever seen before— “and she never walked out.”

  “Oh, come now,” said Mr. Ormont uneasily.

  “There’s only one door to the gazebo. An active and vigorous young woman—which Miss Stedman wasn’t, being in the middle stages of dying of tuberculosis—a healthy young woman might have climbed out another way, but she couldn’t have done so without . . . there would have been signs. And yet Miss Stedman walked into the gazebo at 3:33 p.m., by the watch of one Mr. Cypresson, who was testing the sundial, and at quarter of four, when one of her friends went to ask her if she wanted to join the group on the terrace for tea, she was nowhere to be found. They searched for her high and low, but they never found so much as a hair ribbon.”

  I stopped, nervously, realizing how much I had been talking. Mr. and Mrs. Siddons had always preferred me when I was silent, and Blaine had chided me sometimes about talking too much about boring things. But Mr. Ormont merely looked bleak and thoughtful.

  “Vanished into thin air,” he said.

  He was listening and interested. I gathered my courage and plunged on: “And I’ve, er, there are several complaints from Mrs. Thackeray to the agency she used to hire maids. She says that she’s tired of them sending out morbidly imaginative girls who can’t look into a teacup without seeing disaster. And the turnover rate for servants here has always been abnormally high.”

  “I am not comforted,” Mr. Ormont said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, why should you be? But I had hoped I was being ‘morbidly imaginative.’ Poets tend that way, you know.”

  “I’m afraid this isn’t your imagination. This hotel seems to be a very odd place.” And then there were Carrie and Doris—but I knew that Mr. Ormont liked them.

  “You’re taking it very calmly.”

  I grimaced. “I have some experience of . . . oddness, and I feel a debt to Mr. Marten. But you aren’t running either, Mr. Ormont.”

  “I’m with Mrs. Whittaker. It doesn’t seem to me that this poltergeist is intent on hurting anyone. Its disturbances take place at night, when no one is around, and they really aren’t more than petty destruction.”

  “ . . . Except for the urn.”

  “Yes, I know. It could have fallen on Miss Hunter.”

  “Do you think she’s in danger?” I said, since it was a thought that had occurred to me.

  “I think she might be. That was why I wanted to talk to you. None of things which I have witnessed, you see, have done anyone any direct physical harm. I am afraid there can be no doubt that the unfortunate Jemima Kell hanged herself.”

  “I understand. You were looking to see if the pattern would hold.”

  “Yes, but I find that it does not. The story of Marina Stedman is most disturbing.”

  “Yes,” I said. And the story of Mary Anne Dennys even more so, but I could not bring myself to speak of it. I knew my voice would shake.

  “Have you found any other evidence of poltergeists?” Mr. Ormont asked.

  “I wasn’t looking particularly, and certainly no one left any records, as Mr. Haverforth did. . . . But I remember that in the books for the hotelkeeper before him, a Mr. Lazenby, there was a run of about six months with inordinately high purchases of china. I assumed he had been changing the pattern, but perhaps . . . perhaps that assumption was unwarranted.”

  “Perhaps.” Mr. Ormont sighed deeply. “Food for thought, Mr. Booth. Food for thought.”

  The gong sounded for lunch, and we went in.

  Friday night, I dreamed about Blaine. He had died three years previously, in one of those episodes of “oddness” I had mentioned to Mr. Ormont, and I had dreamed about him and his death on and off for months. But it had been nearly a year since the last dream, and even sleeping I was aware of that oh-God-not-again feeling with which we greet nightmares that have grown almost too familiar to be disturbing. Almost.

  In my dream, I was walking back into the apartment we had shared as undergraduates, although I was thirty-five and myself. And there, as I had known he would be, was Augustus Blaine, sitting in the overstuffed armchair by the bay window; he was still twenty—an undergraduate with the world in the palm of his hand—except for his eyes, which were the eyes of the man he had been when he died.

  “Hello, Booth,” Blaine said. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I can’t stay long.”

  “Do you know what the wall of clouds is, Booth?”

  “The . . . it’s something out of a book I read as a child.”

  “That’s what you think it is.” Blaine winked at me grotesquely, his fresh, youthful face contorting around his ravaged, staring eyes. “Try again.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Boothie, Boothie.” He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger. “Come on. I know you’re not that dumb. What’s the wall of clouds?”

  “It’s what imprisons the maiden.”

  “That’s better! That’s almost right. But you’re still not thinking.”

  “I don’t know what you want!”

  “I don’t want anything, Booth my boy. This is just a dream.”

  As he said it, I woke up. I lay there for a moment, my heart hammering at my ribs, afraid—as I was always afraid when I woke from dreams of Blaine—to sit up or roll over or even open my eyes, lest I should find myself staring at Blaine’s shape in the darkness of my room. As I was lying there, my hands clenched together beneath my pillow, I heard a noise.

  It was a noise I had grown accustomed to in the weeks of my illness. One of the boards in the passage creaked when weight was put on it, more or less loudly depending on the weight and vigor of the person involved. This time, it was barely a gasp; if I had not been straining my ears, praying not to hear any noise that would signal Blaine’s presence, I might not have heard it at all.

  I was not afraid of anything outside my room, although it would later occur to me how exquisitely stupid that was. I got up and grabbed my dressing gown without a second thought for Blaine, and opened my door just in time to see a dim shape drifting around the corner at the end of the hall. By the long hair, I knew it was a woman. I remembered Mr. Haverforth’s account of Marina Stedman’s disappearance, and this woman was headed for the stairs, not the elevator, so I followed her.

  There was only one way she could go without the telltale rattle and click of a door-latch, so I followed the corridor around to the stairs and down. There was no sign of the woman in the front hall, and I was standing, wondering which way to go, when I heard a crash like the fall of the Tower of Babel from the conservatory. In the daylight, I would have hesitated. In the middle of the night, dreamlike and brave, I ran to the conservatory door and looked in.

  I believe I had been entertaining some confused notion that our poltergeist was not a poltergeist at all, but a purely material being intent on mischief. That idea was dispelled immediately.

  The woman, a pale shape in the moonlit dimness, was standing motionless in the middle of the room. All around her potted plants were whirl
ing like moons circling a planet. The crash I had heard had been one of the monstrous philodendrons; as I watched, another tipped and strewed its length across the floor. The woman was perfectly motionless, and she was nowhere near them. She was smallish and fair; of all the women in the hotel, there was only one she could be.

  “Miss Hunter!” I said. And then, although I had never used her Christian name before, “Rosemary!”

  Her eyes flew open. The pots crashed down around her, and she screamed, her hands going up to clutch at her face. I heard the breath she pulled in, like the prelude to a sob, and she cried out, “Oh God, where am I? What’s going on?”

  “I think you’ve had a bad dream, Miss Hunter,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Mr. Booth? What are you doing down here? What am I doing down here?”

  “I heard . . . that is, I followed you. I think you were sleepwalking. It’s . . . it’s all right.”

  “But . . . ” She was looking around, her eyes dark pits above her white, clutching fingers. “Oh, no. Did I do this?”

  “Miss Hunter—”

  “I did, didn’t I?” She began to laugh, the pealing chimes of hysteria. “I’m the poltergeist! I broke the plates! I tipped the urn! I only wish it had smashed Aunt Erda!” And then she was sobbing in earnest, her hands covering her face, standing still in the midst of the wreckage.

  I picked my way across to her, cautiously. “Miss Hunter,” I said, “don’t you—”

  “Oh, can’t you call me Rosemary?” Suddenly, she flung her arms around me, pressing her face into the front of my dressing gown. “If only you knew! I’ve been waiting and hoping, but you wouldn’t say anything, and no one ever does! I feel like there’s a wall around me, a wall nobody can see, and I can’t break it down myself but if someone outside would just push!”

  “The wall of clouds,” I said without meaning to, putting one hand up awkwardly to pat her shoulder.

  “Yes,” she said, sobbing and laughing, her face still pressed against me. “That’s exactly what it is, a wall of clouds. You try to push through it, and it’s not where your hands are, it’s everywhere else. Oh, I hate it, I hate it!”

  “Miss Hunter,” I said, trapped by the iron grip she had on my dressing gown, “why haven’t you left your aunt?”