The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  “Mr. Booth?”

  “Mr. Garfield, I am truly sorry. But do you believe in ghosts?”

  I could not believe I had said it. Both my hands were pressed to my mouth, as if it were not already too late to keep the words pent in.

  But Mr. Garfield did not shout for Mrs. O’Mara to see the lunatic out. He said, “I’ve been blind for twenty years. I hear things. And even more so in my line of work. I could tell you stories about a Steinway on McClaren Avenue that would make your hair stand on end. And even before . . . ” He sighed, folding his hands together on the head of his cane. “I don’t remember much of anything before the day he said to me, ‘You’re Gareth Merton now,’ and shoved me at the door of Mrs. Merton’s house.”

  “He?”

  “I’ll get to that. I wasn’t Gareth Merton, of course, and the lady knew it, although her husband took longer. I think Mr. Merton would have been happy enough to let me be Gareth Merton, as long as I could be raised up to do the right thing with all that money. But Mrs. Merton was having none of it. She was a kind lady, and a lovely one, but she would not lie, and she would not let her husband lie. And when she told me not to lie to her . . . well, I couldn’t, that’s all. Even though he said I had to. And I don’t know if it was her, or him, or just something in me, but I’ve never been quite—never been quite in harmony with this world. It was a relief, actually, when the cataracts started to make everything go dim, because it meant I didn’t have to try to believe what my eyes told me any longer. My ears and my hands. They don’t lie to me, the same way I didn’t lie to Mrs. Merton. And they tell me now that there’s something on the porch, and it’s something you don’t like.”

  “Oh God,” I said breathlessly.

  “It’s what drove you here, I’m guessing.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “It’s Gareth Merton. He says he’s lost, and he wants to go home.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Garfield. “I’m sorry for you, Mr. Booth.”

  “I, er, I brought it on myself. Er, mostly. But thank you. Can you help me?”

  “And this is where we get back to him.” Although he said the pronoun with no particular emphasis, I realized that every time he used it, he meant the same person. The same man.

  “I don’t think he was my father,” Mr. Garfield said. “Although he might have been. He had big, hard hands. He always smelled of blood, because he worked in a slaughterhouse and he wasn’t too particular about soap. They asked me his name, but I never knew it. I don’t know where he lived, or if I lived with him. He made me swear that I would never tell anyone I wasn’t Gareth Merton, that I would never tell anyone about him, and that I would never forget what I owed him. He made me swear on Gareth Merton’s body.”

  “And thus ensured,” I said, very quietly, “that you would never forget Gareth Merton.”

  Mr. Garfield nodded once, convulsively. “I can no more forget him than my heart can forget to beat, though I never knew him when he was alive.”

  “He is not alive now,” I said and did not—did not—look at the revenant standing on the porch. But I did not have to look at it to know it, to understand finally what it wanted.

  “Mr. Booth?”

  Gareth Merton had been a cause célèbre once, but that had been sixty years ago. Everyone who had known him, who could remember him, was dead—everyone except for a blind piano-tuner who had once been a cause célèbre himself. Language was ashes and mud in my mouth. “I’m sorry, but I think . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “I, er . . . I . . . I think you might be his home.”

  “I beg your pardon?” His head tilted as if that would help him to hear my meaning instead of just my flailing words.

  “Gareth Merton wants to go home, Mr. Garfield. But his house burned down twenty years ago. His family is dead. A cemetery is not a home.”

  “And you think . . . ”

  “I think . . . that is, you’re as close as he gets.”

  “Yes. And I . . . I have no home, either. ‘Mervyn Garfield’ isn’t the name I was born with, you know. I don’t know what is. I’ve thought sometimes that we both died that June, although I was brought back to life—a sort of life—and he was not.”

  “You understand,” I said, relieved.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m all that’s left.”

  He held out his hand, and I gave him Gareth Merton’s bone.

  His head tilted, that posture of listening; after a long moment, he nodded. “It’s all right, Mr. Booth. I hear him. I hear him just fine.”

  And when I turned to look out the window again, the revenant was gone.

  STORY NOTES

  “Bringing Helena Back”

  “Bringing Helena Back” is the first Booth story, both in internal and external chronology. It is also the second successful short story I ever wrote [the first, for those who are interested, is “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day” (Ideomancer 5.3)] and my first sale.

  “Bringing Helena Back” springs directly from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” which is the first person testimony of a sensitive, rather timid man who lets his domineering, brilliant friend talk him into doing something he knows is stupid.

  Sound familiar?

  It took some doing to jam consistent characterization and realistic psychology into the framework of a Lovecraft story, and by the time I was done, my poor hapless narrator had become someone I was fond of, someone I wanted to know more about. And so, although I’d intended “Bringing Helena Back” as a one-off, instead it became merely the first of an on-going series of stories about the frequently unsettling experiences of Kyle Murchison Booth.

  “The Venebretti Necklace”

  “The Venebretti Necklace” starts where “The Cask of Amontillado” ends. It was also the first story in which I explored Booth’s working environment, the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum.

  The Parrington is a mash-up of a number of different museums: the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches in Vienna; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the splendid Field Museum in Chicago. The Foucault’s pendulum in the rotunda is from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. And of course, it’s an excuse for me to invent flourishes and tiny side stories, which is one of the things I most enjoy about writing speculative fiction.

  Maria Vittoria Venebretti is based loosely on the Vittoria Corombona, John Webster’s White Devil.

  “The Bone Key”

  I knew before I finished “Bringing Helena Back” that Booth was suffering under a family curse. “The Bone Key” (which started out as a story called “The Curse of the Murchisons”) took a long time to write, largely because I had trouble keeping Booth’s ghastly Murchison cousins from running away with the whole thing, and it was hard to get at the story underneath the story: the tragedy of Thekla Murchison and Grimbold Booth. And the tragedy of their son.

  “Wait for Me”

  The background of “Wait for Me” requires some explaining.

  I have a friend named Elise Matthesen, who has a habit of giving titles to the necklaces and earrings she makes. And a further habit of selling them to people who then write poems or stories using those titles. I’m one; Elizabeth Bear is another. And there are many more.

  “Wait for Me” is one of four stories that came out of a necklace of Elise’s named “Why Do You Linger?” (The other three are “Why Do You Linger?”, “Ashes, Ashes,” and “Katabasis: Seraphic Trains,” for those who are interested.) The necklace, which is a long, eerie, beautiful thing, has a sequence of key charms, and really, a story about a locked room was from that point utterly inevitable.

  “Drowning Palmer”

  Although in internal chronology, “Drowning Palmer” comes before “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox,” I actually wrote them in the opposite order, so it was the latter story that gave me the set up for this one. Brockstone School takes its name from M.R. James’ story, “The Uncommon Prayer Book,” and James, of course, was provost of Eton C
ollege for the last eighteen years of his life.

  John Pelham Ratcliffe may be my personal favorite of the secondary characters surrounding Booth, because he is mindfully trying to transcend his past self—and succeeding more often than not.

  “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox”

  “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox” is my purest M.R. James pastiche, and as such I am ridiculously proud and fond of it. Also, Barnabas Wilcox makes an interesting foil to John Pelham Ratcliffe; Wilcox can’t transcend his past self, and that, in the end, is what dooms him.

  “Elegy for a Demon Lover”

  This story started out as a poem. Nothing to do with Booth—the main character was a woman. It was not, unfortunately, a very good poem, but the central conceit—the idea that the demon could only be sensed and remembered at night—was so cool that even after I’d admitted the poem wasn’t any good, I still wanted to use the idea. And then it crossed paths in my brain with Booth, who would surely never embark on a love affair if he wasn’t being influenced by an incubus.

  “The Wall of Clouds”

  I doubt it’s ever clear to anyone but me, and it doesn’t affect either understanding or enjoyment of either story, but it’s Ivo Balthasar (and the effort of destroying him) who makes Booth so desperately ill. As Booth predicts at the end of “Elegy for a Demon Lover,” he does not remember Ivo in this or any other story, but that doesn’t mean Ivo doesn’t have consequences.

  In its original publication, “The Wall of Clouds” had an epigraph from Edward Gorey’s The Iron Tonic. I decided that, while it was an excellent epigraph for the story on its own, it was a little off when it was part of a series of (loosely) linked stories. But certainly, if you can imagine Edward Gorey illustrations, you will not be wrong.

  “The Green Glass Paperweight”

  Like most horror writers, I’m rarely scared by my own stories, but “The Green Glass Paperweight” is one that manages it. The paperweight itself is from John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost, and the story was originally intended more as an homage to Bellairs’s books (which I loved as a kid) than anything else. But it twisted as I was writing it and became something that is, for me, genuinely horrifying.

  “Listening to Bone”

  I have a reluctant fascination for stories about stolen children; I think “Listening to Bone” came partly from Sarah Smith’s excellent historical novel, The Vanished Child, and partly from an episode of The X-Files that I wanted to write about in my dissertation and didn’t have time or space for, “Invocation.” And it became a story, like Mercer Mayer’s There’s a Nightmare in my Closet, about trying to understand the thing that frightens us, instead of only trying to destroy it.

  Where the pianos got into it, I have no idea.

  —Sarah Monette

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 105-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies. Short story collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, was published by Prime Books in fall 2011. Sarah has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves, Tor Books, 2007; The Tempering of Men, Tor Books, 2011) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

  Lynne M. Thomas (aka Dr. L. Marie Howard) is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, where she is responsible for popular culture special collections that include the literary papers of over fifty SF/F authors (including Sarah Monette). Lynn will also be the editor of Apex Magazine as of late 2011. She is the co-author of Special Collections 2.0, a book about web 2.0 technologies and special collections in libraries with Beth Whittaker (Libraries Unlimited, 2009), as well as academic articles about cross-dressing in dime novels and using libraries to survive the zombie apocalypse. She is perhaps best known as the co-editor of the Hugo-nominated Chicks Dig Time Lords (2010) with Tara O’Shea, and Whedonistas (2011) with Deborah Stanish, essay collections celebrating women involved in media fandoms and the production of television series, published by Mad Norwegian Press. Her next book will be Chicks Dig Comics, with Sigrid Ellis (2012).

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to the editors in whose publications these stories first saw daylight, especially Barbara and Christopher Roden, and Steve Pasechnick.

  Thanks also to Sonya Taaffe, without whose enthusiasm this collection would not exist. And to Sean Wallace, who listened to her.

  “The Wall of Clouds” first appeared in Alchemy 1 (December 2003).

  “Bringing Helena Back” first appeared in All Hallows 35 (February 2004).

  “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox” first appeared in Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries 7 (May 2004).

  “The Green Glass Paperweight” first appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated 25 (August 2004).

  “The Venebretti Necklace” first appeared in Alchemy 2 (September 2004).

  “Wait for Me” first appeared in an online magazine, Naked Snake Online (September 2004), and then on www.sarahmonette.com.

  “Elegy for a Demon Lover” first appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated 26 (October 2005), and was reprinted in The Best of the Rest 4 (2006).

  “Drowning Palmer” first appeared in All Hallows 41 (February 2006) and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 20th Annual Collection (2007).

  “The Bone Key” first appeared in Say . . . What’s the Combination? (May 2007).

  “Listening to Bone” appeared for the first time in this collection.

  FOOTNOTES

  1. Roman, Steven. “Neurasthenia and the Fantastic: A Case Study” Journal of Nervous Disorders 27:3 (Fall 2008): 54-65.

  2. Taylor, Damian. “Paranormal Visitations at the Parrington” Yale Paranormal Bulletin 334 (Winter 2009): 4-7.

  3. Fors, Marie. “Police Investigate Mysterious Disappearance at The Parrington” Sentinel Journal Gazette (May 25, 2010): 3.

  4. Chappell, Fred. “The Waters of Memory” The Sewanee Review 108:2 (Spring, 2000): 234-248.

  5. Booth, Kyle Murchison. [Reading Journals]. [n.d.] Kyle Murchison Booth Papers, Box 2, Folders 3-4, Parrington Museum Archives. See also: Turk, Tisha. “Archival Confidential: The Rhetoric of Reading in the Journals of Kyle Murchison Booth” PMLA 252 (New Series, 2009): 34-47.

  6. Wolfe, M. “The Strange Afterlife of Henri III” Renaissance Studies 10:4 (December 1996): 474-489. See also: Bibliothèque nationale (France). Département des imprimés. Title: Catalogue général des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque nationale. Auteurs. Published: Paris: Imprimerie nationale. 1897-1981; Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World By Kimberly B. Stratton. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

  7. Index librorum prohibitorum, SS. mi D.N. Pii PP. XII iussu editus, anno MDCCCCXLVIII. [In Civitate Vaticana] Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1948.

  8. Guazzo, Francisco Maria. Compendium Maleficarium. Milan: Apud Haeredes Augustini Tradani, 1608.

  9. Parrington Museum Archives. Mathilda Rushton Parrington Memorial Library Annex Collection ω DIRLOG4.3. Log of Director Havilland DeWitt. [n.d.]

  10. “‘Jewels of the Madonna’ Latest Opera Novelty Here” New York Times Feb 25, 1912: SM10

  11. Wishnevsky, S.E. “Genealogists Seek Family Ties at the Parrington.” Parrington Museum Newsletter (Fall 2007): 3-5.; Howard, L. Marie. “Kyle Murchison Booth Papers Now Available to Researchers” Parrington Points: The Official Blog of the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum (August 2009) http://www.parringtonmuseum.org/blog.

  12.
Thomas, Bethany. “Authorial Autonomy and Matricidal Madness in Kyle Murchison Booth’s “The Bone Key” Journal of Foucaultian Studies 32:4 (Winter 2010): 32-44.

  13. Howitt, Anna Maria. “The School of Life” The Illustrated Magazine of Art Vol. 2 (1853); Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1855.

  14. Tennyson, Alfred. “Hail Briton” and “Tithon”. Heath Ms. Cambridge University Library. As quoted in Donahue, Mary Joan. “Tennyson’s Hail, Briton! and Tithon in the Heath Manuscript.” PMLA 64:3 (Jun. 1949): 385-416.

  15. Banham Bridges, K.M. “Factors Contributing to Juvenile Delinquency” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. 17:4 (Feb. 1927): 531-580.

  16. Puhvel, Martin. “The Swimming Prowess of Beowulf” Folklore 82:4 (Winter, 1971): 276-280.

  17. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1957) As cited in Evans, Lawrence Gove, “A Biblical Allusion in Troilus and Criseyde” Modern Language Notes 74:7 (Nov., 1959): 584-587. For an art historical interpretation, see “The Unicorn Tapestries” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin New Series 32:1; The Unicorn Tapestries (1973 – 1974): 177-224.

  18. Stapleton, M.L. “Thou Art Exact of Taste”: The Ars Amatoria as Intertext in “Paradise Lost” Comparative Literature Studies 36:2 (1999): 83-109.

  19. McReynolds, Rosalee. “The Sexual Politics of Illness in Turn of the Century Libraries” Libraries & Culture 25:2 (Spring 1990): 194-217; Wharton, Annabel. “Two Waldorf-Astorias: Spatial Economies as Totem and Fetish” The Art Bulletin 85:3 (Sep. 2003): 523-543; Butler, Harold B. “Social Aspects of Scientific Progress” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 15:4 Current Problems of Unemployment and Recovery Measures in Operation (Jan, 1934): 51-62; Givner, Jessie. “Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot’s Middlemarch” ELH 69:1 (Spring, 2002): 223-243.