The Darkness of Bones

by Sam Millar

  “Have you ever chased the dragon?” asked Judith, tilting her head slightly.

  Adrian frowned. “I don’t think so. What is it? What do you mean?”

  Judith smiled while removing the tin foil containing the heroin from a small wooden box, resting atop a chair. A small burner accompanied it.

  Placing everything on the floor, she hunched directly beside Adrian.

  “It started off in Hong Kong, long before your time.” Judith spread the tin foil open, revealing the brown substance, before creating a tiny flame on the burner. “It is called chui lung, which means chasing the dragon. The spiralling smoke looks like a dragon’s tail. Mister Spittle introduced me to it, when I was very young. He introduced me to quite a few things.”

  Adrian smiled uncomfortably. It sounded like she was telling him a dark fairytale.

  “Who’s Mister Spittle?”

  “See how it slithers away?” she asked, ignoring his question.

  Curious, Adrian leaned over and watched her hands. The brown powder was liquefying quite rapidly, slithering like a snake—or dragon—through the crevices of foil.

  “Not everyone can chase the dragon,” continued Judith. “You have to learn, have to be taught.” From the same small box, Judith produced a tiny metal tube.

  Adrian watched, fascinated, while Judith—tube placed between her teeth—sucked in the fumes ghosting from the tin foil, the smoke pooling around her mouth.

  Scanning Judith’s face, Adrian felt tiny knots inside his stomach beginning to multiply. Her face looked strange, in the darkness. It frightened and fascinated him as she leaned towards him, pressing her lips against his own, forcing them open with her tongue, exhaling the smoke into his mouth. It tasted weird; it tasted dark and forbidden.

  “Inhale it, journey with it to your body, allow it to burn, make your eyes bleed …”

  Within seconds, the smoke had coated Adrian’s system and induced an involuntary paralysis of his limbs for a few heart-stopping seconds. He listened as the dragon’s breath reached into his lungs and began to chant a song, silently. He tried to think what the song was, but his memory was becoming cloudy, something about a bullfrog.

  “Do you miss your mother?”

  His head was spinning, but in a nice way.

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “I can be your mother,” whispered Judith, her eyes dense with concentration. “I can keep you safe; love you like you’ve never been loved. Would you like that?”

  Words clogged in his throat while the skin on his neck tingled. The blanket slipped from his shoulders, exposing most of his nakedness. He did not try to right it, and this amazed him, the audacity of it all.

  “Would you like that?” she repeated, her eyes shining all-pupil, black and dangerous, inviting him in.

  “Yes,” he croaked, feeling the area between his legs tighten as the blanket slipped further, completely exposing everything he possessed.

  Standing, Judith stripped off all her clothes, her shadow towering over him. Within seconds, he could see the dark, hairy “v” between her legs.

  Reaching towards the chair, Judith reeled in the needle, while her finger and thumb worked on the liquid-filled syringe.

  “This is the queen of all dragons,” she whispered, placing the needle to her left breast, tapping gently for arousal on the thimble-shaped nipple before injecting metal and liquid into it.

  Adrian couldn’t remember when he had felt this good. Nothing seemed to matter, as if all his problems and worries had been siphoned from him. He felt marvellous as she moved tighter towards him, opening his legs slightly with her fingers, brushing her mound of breast against his face, her nipple resting on his lip like a pebble.

  “Suck,” she soothed, stroking his hair lovingly. “Suck the dragon’s power …”

  Hypnotised by her words, Adrian gently sucked on the erect nipple, tasting the vinegary taste on the roof of his mouth.

  “Good. Very good,” she encouraged. “Suck harder. It’s waiting for you. It will give you new life. It will bring you places not even an imagination can reach.”

  Obediently, his mouth worked harder on the nipple, like a piglet on a sow.

  “Good little pig,” she whispered, her breath fanning his hair away.

  Adrian felt movement on his penis, like the invisible fingers of a ghost. He heard her voice vibrate through his ribcage and he wanted to die with excitement and joy as the fingers manoeuvred on his firm and slightly sticky penis, curled in its little black nest of hair.

  “It’s okay,” she soothed, and he felt her body on top of his, sliding his stiffness into her wetness.

  The veins around Judith’s neck began to bulge and throb like some invisible hand was choking her. The more she pushed into him, the farther her eyes rolled back into her head and the tighter the walls of her pussy squeezed.

  Adrian had never experienced anything like this. It was violent, it was beautiful, like she was giving birth to his penis, as if she wanted it to be a part of her.

  Without warning, Judith steered his fingers along the curve of her buttocks, guiding them into her forbidden darkness. And just when he thought it was all over, she plunged his fingers inside her arse.

  “Oh fuck, oh fuck,” she moaned, and she was off again.

  Had Adrian looked over to his left, just as the moon’s light climbed through the window, he would have seen the prophet, studying him, his face a contortion of jealousy and hatred as he witnessed Judith orgasm for the first time.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service …”

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn:

  The Poet’s Tale—The Birds of Killingworth

  JACK WAS SEETHING, his hands white and trembling as he dialled the number of Benson’s office.

  “Benson,” said the uninterested voice at the other end. “What can I do for you?”

  “Do? You fuck! You can start by telling me what the fuck you’re playing at, informing the media that I had an argument with Adrian.” Jack held the offending newspaper article at arm’s length. It was on page eight. A small, but detailed account of local teenager, Adrian Calvert, missing since Wednesday, possibly a runaway, after an argument at home.

  “Jack? Jack, calm down. I didn’t—”

  “Don’t, you fucking bastard. Don’t even try that ‘it wasn’t me, Jack’. My son is missing and all you can do is try to cover your fat arse by leaking to the newspapers that I had an argument with Adrian? I thought I knew you, Harry. You were always rock-solid. What the fuck has happened to you in that place?”

  “If you would just calm down and listen for one minute. I had to make a report to Wilson. Someone tipped him off that I had instructed all personnel to be on the lookout for Adrian. I was lucky talking my way out of it. You know the procedure better than anyone, Jack. Wilson had me by the balls.”

  “And you told the media that I had had an argument with Adrian? Why?”

  There was a silence at the other end. Jack could hear a chair moving; he pictured Benson’s enormous bulk moving uncomfortably in the chair that seemed to have shrunk over the years as he piled the weight on.

  “I had no other choice. Wilson wasn’t allowing any more manpower to be used on what he called everyday occurrences. Kids go missing all the time, Jack. What would the media say if they discovered we were giving preferential treatment to ex-cops? Or if they knew he was my godson? What would the fucking dogs say?”

  Jack understood the logic behind Benson’s argument, knew he was only doing what he thought right. Still, it galled him. He had given too many years of his life to the force to be treated like a civilian.

  “Jack? You still there?”

  “Just.”

  “My gut feeling on this is that Adrian will be back, sooner rather than later. Probably today—Saturday at the very latest.”

  “Your fat gut? Wrong answer,” said Jack, slamming the phone down before making hi
s way up the stairs, into Adrian’s room.

  The cop in him said he shouldn’t enter the bedroom. If something had happened to Adrian, this room could be of vital importance and he was contaminating it. But the father in him won out. He couldn’t wait for his old buddies to come to their senses, didn’t have that luxury. He had already phoned Adrian’s friends, hoping beyond hope that he was staying with them, only to be told that they hadn’t seen him in a few days. Even the manager at the local Warhammer shop—Adrian’s frequent hideout—couldn’t recall when he last saw him.

  Stepping inside the room, Jack was amazed at how it had changed over the years. But amazement was quickly replaced by a feeling of guilt. Was it a testament to his own parental neglect that he had hardly been in this room in months? Or was it simply his granting of respect and privacy to a growing son? Superheroes had been replaced by scantily clad women and sporting personalities. Hard-rock posters had taken the place where maps of the world had once been.

  Sighing, Jack resigned himself to the task ahead, hating the thought of going through Adrian’s possessions, knowing how protective his son was of his privacy. But slowly and surely the father was being replaced by the keen and relentless mind of a former detective.

  Searching the wardrobe first, Jack was careful not to disturb too many items. A couple of magazines fell from a box. Playboy. He glanced at the pages, and couldn’t prevent a wry grin from appearing on his face.

  “Used to be Batman comics.”

  He wondered if Linda had ever seen the Playboy magazines, when she cleaned out the room. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have said a word. Still, he felt slightly embarrassed, as if he had intruded on his son’s most intimate thoughts.

  Ducking down to peer under the bed, the stench of overripe fruit attacked Jack’s nostrils. Hardened socks, discarded, rested in knots covered with dust. A sticky sweet wrapper adhered to one of the socks, like a magnet.

  He shook his head. “Now, those wouldn’t be tolerated by your mother, Adrian,” whispered Jack, the wry smile lengthening. “Dirty mags, perhaps, but never—ever—dirty clothes.”

  Placing the dirty socks in an unused laundry basket, Jack glanced about the room, his eyes resting at a chest of drawers. Stationed atop the chest of drawers stood an impressive array of highly detailed resin models from the worlds of Warhammer. It had always baffled Jack how such tiny figures could be so beautifully painted and with such loving detail, transforming tiny pieces of metal into works of art.

  Opening the drawers and searching for anything, he found little. Only crumpled-up underwear and some school ties coiled like snakes basking in the sun. There was a picture of Linda, smiling, ruffling Adrian’s hair, Adrian looking embarrassed.

  Jack smiled at the memory. Adrian’s tenth birthday. On the back of the photo was Adrian’s handwriting: Mum, I will always love you.

  The six words were too much for Jack. Fearing an emotional breakdown, he quickly set the photo back.

  “Oh, Linda, what am I going to do?”

  His eyes went to the small drawer attached to the bed. The drawer blended perfectly with the bed, almost camouflaging it.

  Opening it, Jack was immediately shocked at the contents. “Oh God!” His stomach went cold, and he blinked a couple of times to steady his head.

  “My gun? What have you been up to, Adrian? How did …?” Then something came to him; something vaguely mortifying. He remembered cleaning the gun while drinking beer and scotch, destroying his own commandments. There had been a reckless frustration in him, a frustration that bent all commonsense and prudence into a warped acceptance of intolerable conduct, shooting at the TV, narrowly missing, hitting the armchair instead. He vaguely remembered what he was shooting at: Wilson, the bastard, his face that of a politician, boasting and lying in front of the cameras that crime was down; people were safer now than ever.

  Jack shook his head with embarrassment at his dangerous behaviour. As if Adrian wasn’t going through enough. That’s all he needed—a drunk for a father, wallowing in self-pity and cheap fucking booze, a gun dangling from his hand. A loose cannon, in more ways than one.

  “If Linda could see you now. Pathetic. Useless,” he mumbled, wishing for his son’s footsteps to sound on the stairs outside; wanting him to kick in the door, to scream and curse at him, asking what the hell his father was doing snooping in his room.

  Sitting back on the chair, Jack wondered what to do next, where to search. It was then that he saw them, as startling as spilt oil on snow, nestling in the corner of the drawer. One black. One white.

  The feather and the bone.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

  Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi, The Scientist Speculates

  OPENING THE DOOR of Shaw’s office, Jack walked in without being invited.

  “Ever hear of knocking?” asked Shaw, peering up from the rim of his coffee cup, his elbows a “v” on the tabletop. “I hear that you are now persona non grata. Are you trying to test my autonomy, get me into a quarrel with Wilson?”

  “Any answers for me on that bone?” asked Jack. Impatience was gnawing at him, but he knew better than to rush or try to intimidate Shaw.

  Shaw took an exaggerated sip before placing the cup down on a perfectly formed “o” branded into the wood by years of hot coffee.

  “Monday mornings are bedlam here. Three murders, two possible suicides, and the day has barely begun; yet you want me to drop everything for one damn bone? The name is Claude, not God—though at times I have my doubts.”

  “Is that coffee fresh?” asked Jack, pouring some of the lethal-looking black liquid into a badly chipped and stained cup, ignoring Shaw’s acidic tongue.

  “Coffee’s fine, but I can’t say the same for that cup in your hand. I used it last week to extract some ghastly-looking fluid from a corpse.”

  Studying the contents of the cup, Jack brought it to his lips, and sipped. “Extra strong. Good. Just the way I like it.” He sat down, directly facing Shaw at the opposite end of the table. “What did you find?”

  “It’s more complex than that. It’s like art; it takes time to form a picture. You being a so-called artist should know all about that.”

  “Wasn’t it you who once told me that every bone is an author, and that your skill has always been to read the tales of death written on the bones? Just read what it tells you, then.”

  “So, you did listen to me, all those times you were pretending to be asleep.” A wafer-thin smile wiggled on to Shaw’s face. “Almost as soon as the sun touches them, most bones start to tell their story. That’s true. But it’s not that simple. Except for the skull, few experts are able to distinguish between human and animal bones, with certainty. Any expert would have difficulty determining their origin.”

  Jack placed the cup on the table. “Modesty doesn’t become you. You’re not any old expert, Shaw. You once boasted that all you needed to decipher an entire family of murder victims was a wisdom tooth. I’ve given you much more than a tooth.”

  Shaw’s smile widened, exposing ill-fitting false teeth as yellow as hardened butter.

  “If a bone has a pathology that can be matched to pre-mortem records, that’s a start. But it requires confirmation of human origin by applying the precipitin test. The problem is that up to ninety per cent of all remains brought to forensic anthropologists turn out to be those of animals. Sometimes, however, the bones do turn out to be human.” Shaw brought the cup to his mouth and sipped noisily.

  Jack’s heart moved up a beat. He wanted to reach over and pull the cup away, fling it in the corner. “This is one of those sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “I can verify that the bone is human in origin, but it will take me some time to establish the primary characteristics—sex, age, height, etc.,” continued Shaw. “My belief is that the bone is more than likely to be pre-pubertal.”

  Jack sucked a quick intake of
air through his nose. Oh lord … “A child? Are you certain?”

  “As certain as I can be. When we are born, the skeleton has almost three hundred and fifty bones. By the time we become an adult, we will only have two hundred and six. This is because, as we grow, some of the bones knit together to form one bone. I would say this is part of the three hundred and fifty.”

  “How long has the child been dead? Can you determine that?”

  “The child?” asked Shaw, his forehead frowning. “The subject, you mean. Be professional, Calvert. It’s a bone. No longer a child. Never allow emotion to cloud your thinking. Too damn dangerous. Anyway, there are several variables in determining how long the bone could have survived, but I have not as yet determined a time.”

  “What about the feather?”

  Swivelling on his chair, Shaw stretched and removed a large printed drawing from a specimen drawer. “It belongs to the most intelligent of birds. Corvidae. Crows, to you.”

  “A crow?” Immediately, Jack’s brain began to work. Relations and chance: were the two items related, or was it simply chance which had brought them together? He hoped for the former, but the latter seemed—for now—the most plausible. He didn’t want to divert attention to a dead end, wasting precious time on a hunch rather than a principle or on a handful of ruptured assumptions where only certainties needed to be.

  “You never did say where you discovered the bone. I need that information for the report,” said Shaw.

  Placing the cup to his lips, Jack took another brave sip from the brown substance, aware of Shaw’s hawk-like gaze.

  “In my son’s room,” he said finally, reluctantly.

  Shaw said nothing, as if he hadn’t heard Jack’s reply.

  “I’ve got to get going.” Jack stood to go. “I suspect that bone belongs to the McTier girl, Nancy, the one who went missing three years ago.”

  “Until I do more tests, you can’t be positive of anything related to the bone,” replied Shaw, looking slightly vexed.