The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  “Your identification again, please,” he said. “I want to be sure.”

  I handed him my license.

  “Maine,” he said. “There are some good stores in Maine.”

  “You mean L.L. Bean?”

  The scowl deepened.

  “I was talking about antiques. Well, I suppose you’d better come in. We can’t have you standing around in the dead of night.”

  He partially closed the door, undid the chains, then stepped aside to let me enter. Inside, a flight of worn steps led up to what I assumed were Neddo’s living quarters, while to the right a door gave access to the store itself. It was through this door that Neddo led me, past glass display cases filled with antique silver, between rows of battered chairs and scuffed tables, until we came to a small back room furnished with a telephone, a huge gray filing cabinet that looked like it belonged in a Soviet bureaucrat’s office, and a desk lit by a lamp with an adjustable arm and a magnifying glass fitted halfway down its length. A curtain at the rear of the office had been pulled across almost far enough to conceal the door behind it.

  Neddo sat down at the desk and removed a pair of glasses from the pocket of his dressing gown.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  I placed the statue on a plinth, then removed the skulls and laid them at either side of it. Neddo barely glanced at the skulls. Instead, his attention was focused on the bone sculpture. He didn’t touch it directly, instead using the plinth to turn it while employing a large magnifying glass to peruse it in great detail. He did not speak throughout his examination. At last he pushed it away and removed his glasses.

  “What made you think I’d be interested in this?” he said. He was trying very hard to remain poker-faced, but his hands were trembling.

  “Shouldn’t you have asked me that before you invited me in? The fact that I’m here in your office kind of answers your question for you.”

  Neddo grunted. “Let me rephrase it, then: who led you to believe that I might be interested in such an item?”

  “Sarah Yeates. She works at the Museum of Natural History.”

  “The librarian? A bright girl. I greatly enjoyed her occasional visits.”

  The scowl on Neddo’s face relaxed slightly, and his little eyes grew animated. Judging by his words, it was clear that Sarah didn’t come around so much anymore, and from the expression on his face—one of mingled lust and regret—I was pretty sure why Sarah now kept her distance from him.

  “Do you always work so late?” he said.

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “I don’t sleep very much. I am troubled by insomnia.”

  He slipped on a pair of plastic gloves and turned his attention to the skulls. I noticed that he handled them delicately, almost respectfully, as though fearing to commit some desecration on the remains. It was hard to think of anything worse than what had already been done, but then I was no expert. The pelvic bone upon which the skull rested jutted out slightly from beneath the jaw, like an ossified tongue. Neddo laid it on a piece of black velvet and adjusted the lamp so that the skull shone.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “In an apartment.”

  “There were others like this?”

  I didn’t know how much to tell him. My hesitation gave me away.

  “I’m guessing that there were, since you seem reluctant to answer. Never mind. Tell me, how exactly were these skulls placed when you found them?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Were they arranged in a particular way? Were they resting on anything else?”

  I thought about the question.

  “There were four bones to one side of the statue and between the skulls, piled one on top of the other. They were curved. They looked like sections of hip. Behind it was a length of vertebrae, probably from the base of a spine.”

  Neddo nodded.

  “It was incomplete.”

  “You’ve seen something like this before?”

  Neddo lifted the skull and gazed into the empty sockets of its eyes.

  “Oh yes,” he said softly.

  He turned to me.

  “Don’t you think that there’s something beautiful about it, Mr. Parker? Don’t you find edifying the idea that someone would take bones and use them to create a piece of art?”

  “No,” I said, with more force than I should have used.

  Neddo looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

  “And why is that?”

  “I’ve met people before who tried to make art out of bone and blood. I didn’t much care for them.”

  Neddo waved a hand in dismissal. “Nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know what manner of men you’re speaking of but—”

  “Faulkner,” I said.

  Neddo stopped talking. It was a guess, nothing more, but anyone who was interested in such matters could not help but know of the Reverend Faulkner, and perhaps also of others whom I had encountered. I needed Neddo’s help, and if that meant dangling the promise of revelations before him, then I was content to do that.

  “Yes,” he said, after a time, and now he seemed to be looking at me with renewed interest. “Yes, the Reverend Faulkner was such an individual. You met him? Wait, wait, you’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the detective who found him? Yes, I remember now. Faulkner vanished.”

  “So they say.”

  Neddo was now rigid with excitement.

  “Then you saw it? You saw the book?”

  “I saw it. There was no beauty to it. He made it from skin and bone. People died for its creation.”

  Neddo shook his head. “Still, I would give a great deal to look upon it. Whatever you may say or feel about him, he was a part of a tradition. The book did not exist in isolation. There were others like it: not so ornate, perhaps, or so ambitious in their construction, but the raw materials remain the same, and such anthropodermic bindings are sought after items among collectors of a certain mien.”

  “Anthropodermic?”

  “Bindings made of human skin,” said Neddo, matter-of-factly. “The Library of Congress holds a copy of the Scrutinium Scripturarum, printed in Strasbourg some time before 1470. It was presented to the library by one Dr. Vollbehr, who noted that its wooden boards had been covered in human skin during the nineteenth century. It is claimed also that the Harvard Law Library’s second volume of Juan Gutierrez’s Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae Liber Secundus from the seventeenth century is similarly bound with the skin of one Jonas Wright, although the identity of the gentleman remains in question. Then there is the Boston Athenaeum’s copy of The Highwayman by James Allen, or George Walton, as the scoundrel was also known. A most unusual item. Upon Allen’s death, a section of his epidermis was removed and tanned to look like deer-skin, then used to bind a copy of his own book, which was then presented to one John Fenno Jr., who had narrowly escaped death at Allen’s hands during a robbery. That I have seen, although I can’t vouch for any of the others. I seem to recall that it had a most unusual smell….

  “So you see that, regardless of any feelings of disgust or animosity you may have for the Reverend Faulkner, he was by no means unique in his efforts. Unpleasant, perhaps, and probably homicidal, but an artist of sorts nevertheless. Which brings us to this item.”

  He placed it back upon the velvet once again.

  “The person who made this was also working in a tradition: that of using human remains as ornamentation, or memento mori, if you prefer. You know what ‘mem—’”

  He stopped. He looked almost embarrassed.

  “Of course you do. I’m sorry. Now that you’ve mentioned Faulkner, I recall the rest, and the other one. Terrible, just terrible.”

  And yet, beneath the veneer of sympathy, I could see his fascination bubble, and I knew that, if he could, he would have asked me about it all: Faulkner, the book, the Traveling Man. The chance would never come his way again, and his frustration was almost palpable.


  “Where was I?” he said. “Yes, bones as ornamentation…”

  And so Neddo began to speak, and I listened and learned from him.

  In medieval times, the word “church” referred not merely to the building itself, but to the area around it, including the “chimiter” or cemetery. Processions and services were sometimes held within the courtyard, or atrium, of the church, and similarly, when it came to the disposal of the bodies of the dead, people were buried within the main building, against its walls, even under the rain spouts, or sub stillicidio as it was termed, as the rainwater was adjudged to have received the sanctity of the church while running down its roof and walls. “Cemetery” usually meant the outer church area, the atrium in Latin, or aitre in French. But the French also had another word for aitre: the charnier, or charnel house. It came to mean a particular part of the cemetery, namely the galleries along the churchyard, above which were placed ossuaries.

  Thus, as Neddo explained it, a churchyard in the Middle Ages typically had four sides, of which the church itself generally formed one, with the three remaining walls decorated with arcades or porticoes in which the bodies of the dead were placed, rather like the cloisters of a monastery (which themselves served as cemeteries for the monks). Above the porticoes, the skulls and limbs of the dead would be stored once they had dried out sufficiently, frequently arranged in artistic compositions. Most of the bones came from the fosses aux pauvres, the great common graves of the poor in the center of the atrium. These were little more than ditches, thirty feet deep and fifteen or twenty feet across, into which the dead were cast sewn up in their shrouds, sometimes as many as fifteen hundred in a single pit covered by a thin layer of dirt, their remains easy prey for wolves and the grave robbers who supplied the anatomists. The soil was so putrefying that bodies quickly rotted, and it was said of some common graves, such as Les Innocents in Paris and Alyscamps in the Alps, that they could consume a body in as few as nine days, a quality regarded as miraculous. As one ditch filled, another, older one was opened up and emptied of its bones, which were then put to use in the ossuaries. Even the remains of the wealthy were pressed into service, although they were first buried in the church building, typically interred in the dirt beneath its flagstones. Up to the seventeenth century, it mattered little to most people where their bones ended up just as long as they remained in the vicinity of the church, so it was common to see human remains in the galleries of the charnels, or the church porch, even in small chapels specially designed for the purpose.

  “Churches and crypts decorated in such a manner were thus not uncommon,” concluded Neddo, “but the model for this construction is most particular, I think: Sedlec, in the Czech Republic.”

  His fingers traced the contours of the skull, then inserted themselves into the gap at the base of the head so that he could touch the cavity within. As I watched, his body grew tense. He stole a glance at me, but I pretended not to notice. I picked up a silver scalpel with a bone handle and proceeded to examine it, watching in the blade as Neddo turned the skull upside down and allowed the lamplight to illuminate what was inside. While his attention was distracted, I drew aside the curtain at the back of the office.

  “You have to go now,” I heard him say, and his tone had changed. Interest and curiosity had been replaced by alarm.

  The door behind the curtain was closed, but not locked. I opened it. From behind me I heard Neddo give a shout, but he was too late. I was already inside.

  The room was tiny, barely the size of a closet, and lit by a pair of red bulbs inset into the wall. Four skulls sat in a neat line beside a sink that smelled strongly of cleaning products. There were more bones on shelves lining the room, sorted according to size and the area of the skeleton from which they had come. I saw pieces of flesh suspended in glass jars: hands, feet, lungs, a heart. Seven containers of yellowing liquid stood in a small glass cabinet, apparently specially constructed to hold them. Each held a fetus in varying stages of development, the last jar exhibiting a child that appeared fully formed to my eye.

  Elsewhere there were picture frames made from femurs; an array of flutes of different sizes constructed from hollowed-out bones; even a chair built from human remains, with a red velvet cushion at its heart like a slab of raw meat. I saw crude candlesticks and crosses, and a deformed skull made monstrous by some terrible disorder of the body that had caused cauliflowerlike growths to explode from the forehead.

  “You must leave,” said Neddo. He was panicked, although I didn’t know whether that was due to the fact that I had entered his storeroom or because of what he had felt and seen in the interior of the skull. “You shouldn’t be here. There’s nothing more that I can tell you.”

  “You haven’t told me anything at all,” I said.

  “Take everything to the museum in the morning. Take all of it to the police, if you wish, but I can’t help you any further.”

  I picked up one of the skulls from beside the sink.

  “Put that down,” said Neddo.

  I turned the skull in my hand. It had a neat hole low down, close to where the vertebrae would once have connected to it. I could see similar holes in the other skulls. They were execution shots.

  “You must do well when there are revivals of Hamlet,” I said.

  I let the skull rest on my palm.

  “Alas, Poor Yorick. A fellow of infinite jest, as long as you understood a little Chinese.”

  I showed him the hole in the skull.

  “China is where these skulls came from, right? There aren’t too many other places where people get executed so neatly. Who do you think paid for the bullet, Mr. Neddo? Isn’t that how it works in China? You get driven in a truck to a football stadium, then someone shoots you in the head and sends the bill to your relatives? Except these poor souls probably didn’t have any relatives to claim them, so some enterprising individuals took it upon themselves to sell their remains. Maybe they first harvested the liver, the kidneys, even the heart, then stripped the flesh from the bones and offered the rest to you, or someone like you. There must be a law against trading in the remains of executed prisoners, don’t you think?”

  Neddo took the skull from my hand and returned it to its place beside the others.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. It sounded hollow.

  “Tell me about what I brought, or I’ll inform some people of what you have here,” I said. “Your life will become very difficult as a result, I guarantee it.”

  Neddo stepped out of the closet doorway and returned to his desk.

  “You knew it was there, didn’t you, the mark inside the skull?” he said.

  “I felt it with my fingertips, just like you did. What is it?”

  Neddo appeared to be growing smaller as I watched, deflating in his chair. Even his robe suddenly seemed to fit him less snugly.

  “The numbers inside the first skull indicate that its origins were recorded,” he said. “It may have come from a body donated to medical science, or from an old museum display. In any event, it was originally legitimately acquired. The second skull bears no such number, only the mark. There are others who can tell you more than I can about it. I do know that it is very inadvisable to become involved with the individuals responsible for making it. They call themselves ‘Believers.’”

  “Why was it marked?”

  He answered my question with another.

  “How old do you think that skull is, Mr. Parker?”

  I drew closer to the desk. The skull looked battered and slightly yellowed.

  “I don’t know. Decades, maybe?”

  Neddo shook his head.

  “Months, perhaps even weeks. It has been artificially aged, run through dirt and sand, then soaked in a preparation of urine. You can probably smell it on your fingers.”

  I decided not to check.

  “Where did it come from?”

  He shrugged. “It looks Caucasian, probably male. There are no obvious signs of injury, but th
at means little. It could have come from a mortuary, I suppose, or a hospital, except that, as you seem to have surmised from the additions to my storeroom, human remains are hard to acquire in this country. Most of them, apart from the ones donated to medical science, have to be purchased from elsewhere. Eastern Europe was a good source, for a time, but it is now more difficult to obtain unregistered cadavers in such countries. China, as you’ve gathered, is less particular, but there are problems with the provenance of such remains, and they are expensive to obtain. There are few other options, apart from the obvious.”

  “Such as supplying your own.”

  “Yes.”

  “Killing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what that mark means?”

  “I believe so.”

  I asked if he had a camera, and he produced a dusty Kodak instant from a drawer in his desk. I took about five photographs of the outside of the skull, and three or four of its interior, adjusting the distance each time in the hope that the mark would come out clearly in at least one of them. In the end, I got two good images, once the photographs had developed on the desk before us.

  “Have you ever met any of these ‘Believers’?” I said.

  Neddo squirmed in his seat. “I meet a great many distinctive people in the course of my business. One might go so far as to say that some of them are sinister, even actively unpleasant. So, yes, I have met Believers.”

  “How do you know?”

  Neddo pointed at the sleeve of his gown, about an inch above his wrist.

  “They bear the grapnel mark here.”

  “A tattoo?”

  “No,” said Neddo. “They burn it into their flesh.”

  “Did you get any names?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t they have names?”

  Neddo looked positively ill.

  “Oh, they all have names, the worst of them anyway.”

  His words seemed familiar to me. I tried to remember where I had heard them before.

  They all have names.