The Book of Bones

by Natasha Narayan

  I knew then that my strange paralysis at the start of this battle had not been cowardice. Yin had somehow arranged it, for I was not ready. I would have been battered to death by this blank-faced army.

  Never had I seen a more dazzling display of mortal combat. This was half a fight, half a dance. You wouldn’t think a fight could be beautiful, would you? But this was. Yin had told me that the men were programmed with all the thirty-six strategies of Shaolin Kung Fu. I could see now that there were a limited number of moves the men could make. The secret of Yin’s success was in starting a move—then changing it halfway through to another position. She took the automatons’ expectations and threw them back in their faces. I was watching a giant game of chess here, and Yin was the grandmaster.

  She also knew how to attack their weak points—their joints, knees and elbows, where the different parts of these wooden puppets were attached.

  Then Yin was at the end of the row of warriors. Behind her were two rows of wrecked puppets, lying in splinters and chunks of wood. Turning to me she made the O signal with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Come on, Kit,” I said. “She’s calling us.”

  At the end of the vanquished warriors, I spied a pedestal holding a glass casket. My heart hammered, for I was convinced that this, finally, was what we sought. The Book of Bones. We were agonizingly close to the thing that could give Kit back her life. So close. To get to it, all we had to do was climb over wooden guts.

  “Time to go.”

  Kit moaned but didn’t move from her crouch.

  “Don’t give up on me now, Kit! We’re nearly there.”

  She peered at me, as if she didn’t know who I was.

  “Do you need my help?”

  Without waiting for an answer, I took her by her shoulders and heaved. Her eyelashes were flickering, her pupils dilated. Beads of sweat bloomed on her skin, a row of them above her lips. She leaned on me and we walked through the bloodless battlefield. Kit became heavier and slower as we neared Yin. I was impatient with my friend. Trust Kit! She would chose the very worst time to swoon on me, I thought. Then the both of us were by the marble pedestal. Kit leaning on me, heavy as a horse.

  Dust puffed from the casket as Yin opened it. I held my breath. Yin took something out. Not a precious leather-bound book, not even a faded old manuscript. They looked like a handful of old bones. The sort of animal bones you see scattered by the roadside in China, bleached by the sun.

  “What is that?”

  “The Book of Bones,” Yin replied.

  “What? That’s it? That’s what we’ve been chasing all these weeks? It’s not even a book, it’s bones and—”

  “A book, Waldo, is anything that you can read.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you can read bones?”

  “These aren’t ordinary bones. They belong to Bodhidharma—the great mystic who founded the Shaolin temple. Look over there.” Yin pointed to the opposite wall of the cave. I could see a faint outline on the wall, like a dark shadow etched into the rock.

  “That is the Bodhidharma’s soul on the rocks. He sat for so many years, still as a statue in silent meditation just here, that his impression is graven on the rocks. It is a sacred place.”

  I nodded, though I didn’t understand how a man could sit still like that. I could see that this place had something far beyond my understanding.

  “The fame of the Bodhidharma’s bones has grown far and wide. Some monks can read their message.”

  “So this is what they’re all looking for. The Baker Brothers, the Imperial government … I’ll be willing to bet that even Hilda Salter’s spies want it!” I began to laugh. “But it’s all one great big con trick—!”

  Kit gave a convulsive shudder, cutting off my laughter. I turned to look at her. She had jerked upright and was gazing at the bones in Yin’s hand. I have never seen such a look on Kit’s face. It was fascinated, almost greedy. Yes, that’s it. She was staring at the bones as if she wanted to gobble them up.

  “Can I?” she asked.

  Yin nodded.

  With stumbling steps Kit walked over to the casket and took something out. She held it up, where it was caught by a sunbeam from the ceiling of the cave. A skull. It was slightly broken at the apex, the eye sockets gaping. The thing seemed to glow. My alarm was growing. Kit was having some kind of fit. Bright spots stood out on her cheeks and the look in her eyes was positively lunatic.

  “NO. No,” Kit whispered. She was talking to the skull. “What can you see?”

  She was silent a moment, the skull quivering in her hand. It was as if she were listening.

  “Stop this at once,” I hissed to Yin, but she shushed me.

  “You know. Why can’t you tell me?” Kit moaned.

  “Who knows?” I interrupted.

  “The Shaman.”

  “What Shaman? What does he know?”

  “Everything,” Kit said, and turned back to the skull. “I can’t go on if I don’t—please—no more! I can’t—”

  In the middle of her sentence, her lips stopped, her hands opened and she dropped the skull. Yin sprang to catch it, just as Kit collapsed. She lay in a heap by the base of the pedestal, all crumpled up. I crashed toward her and took her hand, gently pulling her up.

  “Kit! This is no time to go all ladylike on me,” I said, trying to hide my terror.

  Her hand was clammy. Her face chalky white. No pulse in her wrist. Kit was gone. Instead of Kit lay this corpse. I backed away in horror, blundering into the pedestal.

  “She’s dead—”

  Yin was crouching over Kit, her lips closing over my friend’s. Her hands worked away, pumping at Kit’s chest. The kiss of life. I stood there helpless, praying she would revive my friend. If anyone could work miracles, it was Yin.

  Kit’s lips, when Yin came up for air, were bluish, not a flutter of breath under her nostrils.

  “What happened? One moment—”

  “Be still!” Yin said and moved back to Kit.

  The moments ticked by, long moments.

  “Yin?”

  She didn’t answer, but her face as she came up told me all I needed to know. Kit was gone. I sat down and sobbed. The pain in my chest was choking me.

  Kit was gone. Kit was gone. Kit was gone and I had promised to look after her.

  Yin was laying her flat, gently easing her limbs straight, folding her hands across her chest. She smoothed the damp hair back from her forehead. She was preparing her for her funeral. In China they hold funerals straight away to prevent the corpse from decomposing.

  A shimmer of light fell on Kit’s face. I looked up and there was Gray Eyebrows.

  “You move her too soon,” Gray Eyebrows said to Yen. “She walks among us still.”

  Yin looked up, confused.

  “Talk sense! Kit is not walking,” I choked. “She’s dead. Stone-cold dead.”

  “Not dead. No. But not alive.”

  “You’re either one thing or the other,” I said. “There’s no such thing as in-between.”

  “In-between the world of the living and the great beyond,” Gray Eyebrows replied. “At this moment your friend listens to every word we speak, but she cannot speak herself.”

  “What are you babbling on about?”

  Yin smiled, the relief shining from her. “You call it coma. This is your scientists’ name for the half-life.”

  Yin began to murmur in Mandarin as I considered what Gray Eyebrows had said. I did not ask why she believed Kit was still alive. The scientific part of me thought it was utter nonsense. Kit was dead. She had no pulse, no heartbeat, no breath, was cold to the touch. But I wanted to hope. She had offered me this much and I wanted to grab at it.

  Gray Eyebrows retrieved the skull and returned it to the casket. She has put the genie back in the bottle, I thought, wondering if it was the skull that had harmed Kit. Gray Eyebrows placed her hand on my arm. It was burning hot.

  “Your friend has a worm inside her. It lives on her,
feeding on her desires. It is always hungry, this grub. It has a mouth the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain.”

  I turned to stare at her, shaking off her hand. At this moment I did not want comfort. Besides, her words made no sense. At this awful time she was talking in riddles. “What are you trying to say?”

  “The grub always wants to eat more and more,” Gray Eyebrows replied. “It has been bleeding your friend, sucking her energies ever since she entered the sacred place.”

  “What place?”

  “Shambala. It was there that the monster entered Kit’s soul.”

  “Shambala!” I murmured. “But she never drank the water. She told me so!”

  “Perhaps not. But just to stand there, to breathe in the magic of those waters, is enough for one so young.

  “When she came close to this holy relic, the power of the bones struck at the grub. And the grub struck back. The bones sought to kill the worm. But—a fight so terrible, what mere human could survive? If she had drunk freely of the water she would be beyond anyone’s help. Look, I will show you.”

  The nun led the way behind the casket to the back of the cave. There, laid out on a jutting stone ledge, was a thing. I cannot call it a man, as it looked more like a shriveled ape. The waxy skin surrounded by rotting wrinkles was loathsome. I looked upon the man with horror. I knew without being told that it was Jorge, the monkey-man who had entered Shambala as the Baker Brothers’ servant. The ancient, grasping soul who Kit had talked of, just once, as a creature of horror.

  Gray Eyebrows’ voice washed over me. “See him.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “He too entered Shambala, twice, to bathe in the waters of immortal life. He was warned. He knew that to desire too much—to want immortality before you are ready to give up desire—is a curse. But he was a magician and very arrogant. So he drank, and meanwhile the grub drank too. It grew fat in him, coiled like a giant slug around his heart.

  “Eventually this man knew, and his masters knew too, that their immortality was a curse. He was rotting from the inside. He believed the Book of Bones would save him. Instead it destroyed him.”

  “You’re lying!” I shouted. “What about the poison? The Baker Brothers poisoned Kit. They will give us the antidote as soon we give them what they want. You’re only making this up to protect these moldy old bones and to stop us from taking them back to England.”

  The nun regarded me. “You know this is not true.”

  “But the poison. Kit was dying.”

  “Those Brothers, they never poisoned Kit. It was a trick.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Kit was never poisoned,” she repeated. “The only poison inside her was the grub, the darkness from Shambala. The Bakers knew this; they used this to fool you.”

  “Kit was never poisoned,” I repeated in a daze. If this was true, our whole journey to China had been a gigantic trick. The Baker Brothers had played a gruesome practical joke on us.

  “I told you, the Brothers make up a story to trick you. Because these two men also drank the waters in Shambala. They too have the worm gnawing at them, making their breath decay and their skin rot. They know their time of beauty and youth is short. They think the Book of Bones can cure them! But they are scared to seek it themselves. So they send first this man, this Jorge. When he failed to steal the book, they send Kit.”

  The silence hung in the air between the three of us, with Kit’s slumped body behind us and the corpse of Jorge laid out on the ledge.

  “So this is it, is it?” I said finally. “This is what happens to Kit? She’s left here on a ledge like … like that foul monkey thing … till her bones crumble to dust?”

  “Of course not.” Gray Eyebrows frowned. “You must save her.”

  “How? How can I save her?” I asked. “I’ll do—anything. Anything.”

  “I do not know. Just one thing—talk to her.”

  “And say what?”

  “What you feel.”

  We reach the end of our story. We might have found it hard to make our voyage home, except for the appearance of a group of British soldiers through the ruins of the Wooden Men Lane. What were they doing there? you might wonder. The answer lies with that lady of mystery, Hilda Salter.

  It was she who had set off the fireworks on the mountainside to signal to a “Special Battalion of her Majesty’s Secret Forces.” These men, with the leathery skin of the hardened traveler, were half spies and half soldiers. They came to find the Book of Bones—and as an American patriot I’ve never been so pleased to see English soldiers in all my life.

  But as they appeared—just as suddenly did Gray Eyebrows vanish, taking the Bodhidharma’s bones with her. I tell you, she vanished. One minute she was there in the dripping cave, surrounded by solid rock. The next minute both the bones and the nun were gone.

  What an adventure, yet what disappointment at the last. There was no Book, just moldering bones, albeit holy ones that some monks claimed to be able to read. No poison—instead a foul grub that was sucking Kit’s life away. We had been cruelly tricked into pursuing a phantom goal. So our voyage to China ended in misery. We didn’t even find anything of value to carry back home with us.

  Hilda Salter hired a nurse to look after Kit on the steamer back to England, even though we all argued. Her aunt waved away our protests. So Mrs. Dalrymple, an elderly Yorkshirewoman, plain of face and blunt of speech, came into our lives. This lady was friendly to Rachel. I think she welcomed someone to share her load. But she treated me with suspicion. It was as if she didn’t believe a boy could be Kit’s real friend. Often, at the beginning of the voyage, she would shoo me out of the sickroom when I came to say hello to Kit.

  Remembering Gray Eyebrows’ advice, I persevered.

  Once I was sitting alone with Kit, having relieved Rachel of the task, when Mrs. Dalrymple came in.

  “What are you doing here?” she barked, peering at me through her wire-rimmed spectacles. “It ain’t right.”

  “Oh, don’t be so foolish,” I exploded. “She’s my friend.”

  “She should have a chaperone. Alone with a boy any time of day or night!”

  “It may have escaped your notice but she’s unconscious. She’s hardly going to start kissing me. Anyway, even when Kit was properly herself, we were hardly on kissing terms.”

  “Should hope not.”

  “She was more likely to give me a kick than make eyes at me.”

  Mrs. Dalrymple began to laugh. “You are a funny bunch and no mistake. I never met a queerer lot than you three.”

  “You mean us four. There have always been four of us,” I said quietly. “The three of us aren’t much use without Kit.”

  After this conversation things were easier and Mrs. Dalrymple made no further objections to my presence in the sickroom. When I sat at Kit’s bedside I would remember what Gray Eyebrows had said; I’d take her hand and talk to her. “Who is this Shaman?” I would ask her, recalling her last words. “What does he know?” Sometimes I would talk nonsense to her—the jumbled words of the prophecy continued to haunt me. What is the Black Snake? … Where is the land of the white sun? … White suns, black snakes, Yin and Yang. It was all gibberish—wasn’t it? Only one thing rang true—the reference to the one “who rides the great sleep.” Who else but Kit?

  She never answered my broken questions, though she was breathing evenly now. I didn’t mind. I would talk to her, tell her my plans and dreams. Things I hoped we would do together. Perhaps I wouldn’t have dared to speak to the other Kit like this, she was always so sarcastic. But on that ship I opened my heart to her as I have never done to anyone before.

  I thought back to that last time, our row in those stalactite-studded tunnels. I had teased her about not being “pretty enough”—and seen with pleasure how annoyed she had become. Now I wished I had been more honest. I had been childish to stoke her jealousy over Emily. What did I care for curls and eyelashes? What did I
care for rosebud lips? There were a thousand pretty girls, but only one Kit. Why had I never told her this?

  Mrs. Dalrymple, Rachel and I were the main ones who looked after Kit. Aunt Hilda rarely found the time, even on a long ocean voyage she was occupied with mysterious activities. Isaac, I think, found it too distressing and would scurry away at the first opportunity. We would take it in turns to sit with her and feed her, forcing soup and pureed chicken livers down her throat. Her mouth would not open; one had to push the stuff down her gullet, where a swallowing reflex would take it to her stomach. The first few times I found this ritual hard, even revolting. But I grew used to it and took satisfaction in the fact that I was keeping her alive. Bathing Kit, dressing her, was of course undertaken by the nurse or Rachel.

  Sometimes I would fancy Kit was becoming stronger, that a tinge of pink was returning to her cheeks. At other, dark moments, I saw a translucent cast to her flesh. Her skin, always delicate however much she denied it, was taking on a bluish, waxy tone.

  I kept waiting for her to start to complain. “Waldo, you great sissy,” she’d say. “Stop talking such rot!” Her voice would be gruff—too similar to her Aunt Hilda’s for any man’s comfort. But I wouldn’t mind because Kit would be back and ordering me around again. There was nothing so much fun as simply refusing to fit in with her plans! We would have one of our blazing rows. She would end up telling me there was no one as pig-headed as me on the face of this earth.

  She would sit up in her big brass bed. Sit up, glare at me as if I was a mere worm and call me the worst fool in the world for letting her go through that cursed Wooden Men Lane. But she never did. And so we steamed back to England.

  An Interview with the Author

  Where do you get your ideas for Kit’s adventures?

  The oddest ideas pop into my head when I’m lying in the bath or drifting off to sleep. Also from the jumble of life: reading, chatting to friends, talking to my kids. Everything can wind up in a story.