Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  I was halfway up the stairs when I heard footsteps in the upstairs hall.

  Curses! I thought.

  Legs appeared between the upper bannisters: legs wearing black trousers.

  A moment later, the rest of Dogger appeared.

  “I shall be up directly with the hot water,” he said quietly from the corner of his mouth as he passed me on the stairs.

  The man was uncanny.

  I was soaking in my tin hip bath, trying not to think too hard about the various bits that were floating to the surface of the steaming stew. The hot water, in addition to my fatigue, must have caused me to nod off. One instant I was wrinkling like a dumpling and the next I was again at St. Tancred’s, sitting on the organ bench.

  I watched with fascination as long white fingers stroked the keys, illuminated only by a pair of candles, one at each end of the music rack.

  The rest of the church was in darkness.

  Black notes flying across a white page. Black shadows of the hands flying like spiders across white ivory.

  I recognized the music as Chopin’s funeral march: Feely had played it just two weeks ago as old Mrs. Fuller was led down the aisle for the last time.

  Dum-dum-da-DUM, dum-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM

  It had such an air of finality about it. Once you’re sent to the grave there’s no going back. Unless you’re dug up again, of course.

  “Feely,” I said with a shudder, “do you think—”

  I turned to look at my sister—but it was not Feely beside me on the organ bench.

  The black, piggish snout turned slowly toward me in the darkness, its glassy eyes brimming with blood. Even before it spoke, I could smell its filthy rubber skin, the graveyard reek of its hot, rotting breath.

  “Harriet,” the thing croaked. “Ha-r-r-i-et.”

  I awoke screaming, my hands flailing the water and my feet thrashing. I leapt out of the tub, sending a tidal wave splashing onto the floor.

  My teeth were chattering. My skin, in spite of the now tepid water, was icy cold. I lurched across the room, struggled into my bathrobe, and collapsed into a huddle on the bed.

  It was all I could manage. My breath was still coming in ragged gasps, my heart pounding like a madman beating away on a drum.

  There was a light knock at the door, but I could not find within myself whatever it took to answer. After a few moments, it opened slowly and Dogger’s face appeared.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, sizing me up as he came across the room toward me.

  I overcame the iron muscles in my neck just enough to nod stiffly.

  Dogger touched my forehead with the inside of his wrist, then placed a thumb under the angle of my jaw.

  “You’ve had a fright,” he said.

  “It was a dream.”

  “Ah,” he said, wrapping a quilt round my shoulders. “Dreams will sometimes do that. Lie down, please.”

  As I stretched out on the bed, Dogger placed a pillow beneath my feet.

  “Dreams,” he said. “Very beneficial things, dreams. Most useful.”

  I must have looked at him with begging in my eyes.

  “Fright can be remarkably healing,” he said. “It has been known even to cure gout and to alleviate fever.”

  “Gout?” I murmured.

  “A painful disease of elderly gentlemen who love their wine more than their livers.”

  I think I smiled, but my eyelids were suddenly made of lead.

  Iron neck, leaden eyes, I thought. I’m growing stronger.

  And then I slept.

  •EIGHT•

  When I opened my eyes, there was daylight at my windows, although the sun had not yet risen. The hands of my brass alarm clock pointed sleepily to five-thirty.

  Rats! I had slept straight through my intended midnight visit to the crypt. Now I should have to wait for another twenty-four hours, by which time, the police would probably—

  “Good morning, Miss Flavia,” said a voice at my elbow, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Oh! Dogger! I didn’t know you were here. You startled me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to. I trust you slept well?”

  By the slow, stiff way in which he was unfolding himself from the chair at my bedside, I knew that he had been sitting there all through the night.

  “Very well, thank you, Dogger. I think I rather overdid things yesterday.”

  “Indeed,” he agreed. “But I believe you are much improved this morning.”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “In ten minutes I shall be breakfasting on tea and toast in the kitchen if you care to join me,” Dogger said.

  “Bags I the crust!” I said, fully aware of what a tremendous honor it was to be asked.

  When Dogger had gone, I washed my face and neatly rebraided my pigtails, going so far even to tie each one with a bit of fresh white (for Easter) ribbon. After Dogger’s sleepless night, the least I could do, I thought, was to look decent at the breakfast table.

  We were seated in the kitchen, Dogger and I. The rest of the household was not yet awake, and Mrs. Mullet wouldn’t arrive from the village for another hour.

  There had fallen between us what Dogger once referred to as “a companionable silence,” a little parcel of time during which neither of us felt any particular need to talk.

  The only sound in the kitchen was the scrutching of our knives on toast, and the slight ticking of the silver toaster as the little red snakes of its innards turned white bread to brown. It was quite wonderful, when you came to think of it: the way in which the red-hot electric element’s dry heat caused the bread’s sugars to interact with its amino acids, producing a whole new set of flavors. The Maillard reaction, it was called, after Louis-Camille Maillard, the French chemist who had made a study of toasting and suntanning.

  As my teeth crunched into the tasty crust, I realized suddenly that toast eaten hot and fresh from the toaster is vastly superior in taste to toast brought to a distant table. Although there seemed to be a lesson here, I couldn’t for the moment think what it might be.

  I was the first to break the silence.

  “Have you ever heard of a person named Adam Sowerby?” I asked.

  “An acquaintance of your father’s, I believe,” Dogger said. “Rather a well-known botanist nowadays. They were at school together.”

  A friend of Father’s? Why hadn’t Adam told me so? Why had Father never mentioned his name?

  “His work often takes him to old churches,” Dogger continued, not looking at me.

  “I know,” I said. “He’s hoping to find old seeds in Saint Tancred’s tomb. He gave me a lift into the village yesterday.”

  “Yes,” Dogger said, helping himself to another piece of toast and spreading the honey with surgical precision. “I watched you from an upstairs window.”

  No one looked up as I entered the dining room. Father, Feely, and Daffy were sitting as they always sat, each in their own invisible compartment.

  The only difference this morning was Feely’s appearance: Her face was chalky white, with purplish rims round her red eyelids. She had, without a doubt, spent the night grieving for the late Mr. Collicutt. I could almost smell the candles.

  Evidently, she had not yet shared the news of his demise with Father. For some complicated reason she was keeping it to herself. Almost as if she were treasuring it.

  A shiver of cold air told me I had just brushed shoulders with a ghost.

  I slipped into my chair and lifted the lid of the patent food warmer. This morning’s main dish consisted of Mrs. Mullet’s Omelettes Royale: those flat rubber pancakes of pale egg embedded with particles of red and green peppers and chunks of chutney, which, when Father was not present, we called “toad-on-the-road.”

  I speared one of these squidlike monstrosities with my fork and passed it on a plate to Feely.

  She covered her mouth with the palm of her hand, made a slight but still detectable retching noise, pushed back her chair, and hur
ried from the room.

  I raised a quizzical eyebrow at Father as he looked up from The London Philatelist, but he was not to be distracted from his hobby. For a moment he listened to Feely’s retreating footsteps, as if hearing the baying of a distant hound, then went back to reading his journal.

  “I met a friend of yours yesterday, Father,” I said. “His name is Adam Sowerby.”

  Father came slowly up again out of the depths.

  “Sowerby?” he said at last. “Wherever did you meet him?”

  “Here,” I said. “At Buckshaw. In the forecourt. He has the most remarkable old Roller—full of plants.”

  “Mmm,” Father said, and returned to reading about engravings of Queen Victoria’s head.

  “He gave me a lift into the village,” I went on. “He’s here to look for ancient seeds when they open Saint Tancred’s tomb.”

  Again Father surfaced. It was like carrying on a conversation with a deep-sea diver who re-submerged after every sentence.

  “Sowerby, you say?”

  “Yes, Adam Sowerby. Dogger says he’s an old friend of yours.”

  Father closed his journal, removed his reading spectacles and tucked them into his waistcoat pocket. “An old friend? Yes, I daresay he is.”

  “Speaking of Saint Tancred’s tomb, by the way,” I said casually, now that I had Father’s undivided attention, “Mr. Collicutt was found dead in it yesterday.”

  Daffy’s head snapped up from her book. She had been listening all along.

  “Colly?” she said. “Colly dead? Does Feely know?

  I nodded. I did not say that she had known since yesterday at breakfast. “He appeared to have been murdered.”

  “Appeared?” Father asked instantly. I had to give him full marks for lightning-quick perception. “Appeared? Do you mean you were there? That you saw him—dead?”

  “I discovered the body,” I said modestly.

  Daffy’s jaw fell open like a hangman’s trap.

  “Really, Flavia,” Father said. “This is simply too much.”

  He fished out his spectacles, put them on, removed them, and put them on again. In the past, he had seemed rather proud of the corpses I had happened upon, but even corpses, I suppose, have their limit.

  “Collicut, you say? The organist chap? What’s he doing dead?”

  It was a silly question, but also an excellent one.

  Mrs. Mullet, who had come in from the kitchen as Father spoke, sniffed: “They say as ’ow ’e ’ad it comin’, that one. All them carryin’s-on in the churchyard. Turned into a sow by devils, ’e was, like them gaberdine swine in the Bible.”

  Carryings-on in the churchyard? Whatever could she mean by that? When I talked to him in the tower, Mr. Haskins had mentioned mysterious lights seen floating in the churchyard by the ARP and the fire-watchers, but that had been years ago, during the war. Could these strange ceremonies, or whatever they were, still be taking place?

  One thing of which I was almost certain which connected that remote past with the present was this: Since there was now only one mask left in the trunk, the gas mask strapped to poor dead Mr. Collicutt’s face must have come from that same wooden chest in the tower. There would surely have been more than one, originally.

  In fact, I would be willing to bet my Bunsen burner that the two were identical.

  Not that I was an expert on gas masks.

  There was Daffy’s, of course, a gaily colored Mickey Mouse mask of red India rubber with a blue tin nozzle that had been issued to her when she was no more than three years old, and which she still kept hanging close at hand from its straps at the side of her looking glass.

  “You never know,” she once told me, with rather an odd look on her face.

  Then, too, there was that mask of early vintage which was kept in my laboratory in case of certain chemical accidents. It had been given personally to Uncle Tar not long before his death in 1928, by Winston Churchill, who was, at the time, chancellor of the exchequer. I had gleaned the details of their meeting from one of Uncle Tar’s extensive diaries, a volume of which I always kept at hand on my night table for gripping bedtime reading.

  Churchill had paid an autumnal visit to Uncle Tar at Buckshaw, and as they strolled together beside the Ornamental Lake, Churchill had offered a cigar (which, since his particular weakness was Pimm’s No. 2 Cup, Uncle Tar had politely refused) and said: “There is war in the wind, Tarquin. I can smell it. England can ill afford to lose a de Luce.”

  I could almost hear the voice of that bulldog man uttering the words, which certainly had a Churchillian ring to them.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Mullet,” Father was saying as my thoughts came back to the present. He was thanking her not for her tales of dire doings in the churchyard, but for the toad-on-the-road whose remains she was now removing from the table.

  Daffy, marking her place in The Monk with one of the crepe paper serviettes we had been forced to adopt since “Hard Times” (her words) had fallen upon us, slipped silently from the room.

  Father was not far behind her.

  “Tell me about the sows in the churchyard, Mrs. Mullet,” I said, now that we were alone. “I’ve become quite keen on Bible studies recently. In fact I’ve been thinking of starting a scrapbook of New Testament animals and their—”

  “That isn’t safe for ears the likes of yours,” she replied, rather snappishly, I thought. “Alf says Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate, tipped ’im off that ’tisn’t safe to be ’angin’ about that church till a elephant of justice ’as been served, which makes good sense to me.”

  “Oh, piffle,” I said, changing tactics. “It’s no more than village gossip. Father’s always warning us about village gossip, and I think he’s quite right.”

  I could hardly believe my mouth was saying this.

  “Oh, village gossip, is it?” Mrs. Mullet snorted, putting down the stack of dishes she had been carrying and planting her hands on her hips. “Then tell me, if you please, miss, why they ’ad to call Dr. Darby to give Missus Richardson a shot after what she seen in the churchyard?”

  I let my mouth loll open. If I could have drooled at will, I would have.

  “Tell me,” I begged. “Please—what was it?”

  Mrs. Mullet bit her lip, fighting like mad the urge to be discreet.

  “A ghost a-comin’ up out of ’er grave! That’s what!” she said in a low, harsh voice, her eyes, wide as saucers, nervously scanning the four corners of the room.

  “In daylight!” she added. “In broad daylight!

  “Mind you, I’ve said nothin’.”

  Although I was still a little shaky from my nightmare, I was soon pedaling back toward the church, as if drawn by a magnet. The fresh air would do me good, I thought: a bit more oxygen to spike the old seawater.

  Even as I approached the churchyard, I could see that my way was barred. Although the blue Vauxhall was parked in a different spot from where it had been yesterday, it was still uncomfortably close to the front door. It was not Sergeant Woolmer who sat in it this time, but Sergeant Graves, my sister’s failed suitor.

  I skidded to a stop, dismounted from Gladys, and ducked down behind the stone wall. How could I get past the man?

  It is remarkable how the human mind works.

  I was thinking of the church—which reminded me of hymns—when what popped into my head, as if by magic, were these words: “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.”

  Hymn 373.

  Of course!

  Right there, growing wild along the wall, were the first flowers of spring: crocuses, snowdrops, primroses—even a huddle of daffodils which had likely been turfed out after some funeral or another and had taken wild refuge in the shelter of the stones.

  I picked a sampling of these and gathered them into a quite decent bouquet, whose blues, yellows, and whites were dazzling in the morning sun. As a final touch, I removed one of my white hair ribbons and gave it several turns round the stems, tying it into an elaborate,
and actually quite pretty, bow.

  Then I walked up the path to the church door as bold as you please.

  “Flowers for the altar,” I said, waving the bouquet under the sergeant’s nose as I swept past him.

  What man would dare stand in my way?

  I had almost reached the door when Sergeant Graves spoke.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  I stopped, turned, and raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  He suddenly went all casual, shrugging and examining his fingernails as if what he were about to say didn’t matter, as if it were nothing—no more than an afterthought.

  “Is it true what they say about your sister? I’ve heard she’s getting married.”

  “Why, whoever told you that?”

  I was fishing.

  “The police hear things,” he said sadly, and as he spoke the words, I noticed that for the first time since I had met him, Sergeant Graves was not wearing his perpetual boyish smile.

  “It might be only a rumor,” I said, unwilling to be the one to break the sergeant’s heart.

  For a moment we stood staring into one another’s eyes: just a couple of human beings.

  And then I turned away and stepped into the church.

  To keep from hugging him.

  The interior was a cool, dim, tinted twilight, and was filled with that vague and unnerving vibration that churches have when they are empty, as if the souls of those in the crypts below are singing—or perhaps cursing—at a pitch too high or too low for the rest of us to hear.

  But what I was detecting now was no choir of souls. A choir of hornets was more like it: a rising and falling—what was that word that Daffy loved to use? Ululation? Yes, that was it, ululation: a faint howling, like the wail of distant air-raid sirens snatched away now and then by the wind.

  I stood motionless beside a stone pillar.

  The sound continued, echoing back from the vaulted roof.

  I could see no one. I took a cautious step or two—and then a few more.