Heaven's Bones (43 page)

Robarts didn't know how long he'd walked before he realized that he could not see anything before him, couldn't see his own hand before his face. He breathed the vapor in, and it pressed heavy on his lungs. He was saturated with it, drowning, but there was nothing to
do but walk, his footing miraculously sure on the overgrown path, one step after the other.

He fancied it was beginning to thin; he could see again, the dim shapes of bushes and hillocks to either side. A figure loomed ahead of him on the path, dark, with great outstretched wings like a bat, waiting.

Tamar. The stitches that held her mouth shut were torn away, the baby that protruded from her was dead or asleep. She smiled at him with her twisted lips.

“I'm lost, Tamar,” said Robarts. “And I can't find …”

He paused, trying to remember.

“You won't find him here,” said the Angel.

He took the knife from his pocket.

“I found this,” he said, pointing vaguely backward. “In the village. There was blood. We should tell someone.”

Gently she took the knife from him.

“Tell me, on the way home,” she said, turning away.

“Home?” he said.

“Yes,” said Tamar. “The Mists brought Bryani House here. They brought all of us here. We're home.”

“Home again,” said Weldon cheerfully, depositing Henry on a couch.

There was a strange singed smell, as if someone had held a handful of hair too close to a candle.

Henry fought for breath. He recognized the hallway outside the room he had entered and fled in horror. From inside came a weak mewling sound, and something else—the smell of burnt meat.

Weldon pulled him toward the door. The mewling continued: a long, sustained whine.

“Don't worry,” said Weldon, clearing his throat as if the air was
smoky. “I've restrained her. She can't hurt you.”

He reached past Henry and nudged the door fully open and pushed Henry inside.

Weak as a kitten, he couldn't resist.

Two oil lamps illuminated the interior of the boudoir. Any other detail was lost to Henry—he was caught up in the view of what lay on the four-poster bed before him.

Or, more accurately, what was bound there. Silk cloths tied each limb to the corresponding pillar at the corner of the bed. The woman was spread-eagled, facedown, as a sacrifice on an altar might be. He hadn't really seen her before; he'd only been aware of a twisted thing coming at him, and the smell …

Despite himself, Henry looked closer, fascinated and repelled. At first he thought she was covered with a crazy quilt in shades of red, maroon, and ochre. Then he realized, with a sickening jolt, that she was naked and that much of her skin had been burned and charred away. Sheets covered her to the waist and left her bare above, and as she writhed as if she would burrow into the bedding she resembled some sort of fantastically-colored, huge garden slug. The pieces of skin that were left were blackened and stuck on randomly, like ill-stitched patches, and the parts that weren't burned were blistered, some of the swellings whole and smooth, some leaking a clear lymphatic fluid.

He staggered back a few paces. “How … how …” He gestured at the figure, unable to articulate further.

Weldon frowned. “A house fire—the entire dwelling was consumed. She managed to make it out of the ruin, somehow. Might have been more merciful if she had died; however, God disposes …”

“God.” Henry began, then stopped. There was no God here.

This isn't right. This isn't natural. She shouldn't be alive
.

“What do you want?” he asked, his gorÃ¥ge rising.

“The same service you provided Robarts, of course,” replied the American. “Although this should be easier, and more interesting, really, with only one patient.”

“You must be mad,” gasped Henry.

Weldon was unperturbed. “By no means,” he said. “After all, why shouldn't I have my own Angel?”

No, thought Henry. I won't. Better to die.

And then.

The voice, Trueblood's voice, that had plagued him so in Bryani House, invading dream and waking-time, pushing and urging, and insinuating …

Look. Look, do you see?

He looked at the ravaged back. There, protruding from either side of the spinal ridge were the gray, mottled planes of the shoulder blades. One barely peeped out; the other rose from the surrounding meat like a new island in a receding sea.

You could mount wings there. Bolt them right into the scapula
. The voice was familiar, and persistent, as if it already had a comfortable purchase in his head. As if it was part of him.

It could be done.

No!

Had he said it aloud?

Why not?

He was tired, near-drowned and half-dead, the mud still sticky in his face. He wanted to sleep. The voice insinuated itself further.

Weldon's mad, and he'll kill you as soon as look at you, if you're not useful to him. Ask him what he did with his slaves, but not unless you want to know
.

What do I do?

Go along. Do what he wants. You can fix it later, when he trusts you more. But if you want to survive, you'll do as I say
.

Who are you? Trueblood?

Why no, I am yourself. I must be. Or else you are mad in your own turn. And besides …

What?

Wouldn't it be … interesting?

Henry looked at the woman again, the bones, the healed areas that were a horror in their own right, since human flesh should not be able to do that.

“I'll need,” he began, hardly believing he was saying it, “I'll need my tools, and materials,” he said.

“You'll have them,” said Weldon, in a coaxing voice. “You'll have everything you need.”

At midnight in Southwest France, in a small studio on the outskirts of Toulouse, M. Clement Ader sits before a drafting table, sorting a litter of papers. He picks up a tattered page covered with faded equations and frowns. The handwriting is not his own, although there is something familiar about it—something that stirs that memory: a shadow of a face; a voice, young and brash with an English accent. He puts it aside for perusal in the morning. By dawn, the paper remains but the equations have faded completely.

Sophia Huxley turns restlessly in her bed, on the edge of a nightmare. In her dream, she is running down a hallway that lengthens and lengthens before her, its walls anonymous and grey and devoid of door or window. She must remember something—someone—before it is too late. An inarticulate cry outside her window, an anonymous sound in the London night, wakes her and the dream shivers away like thin-worn glass. Later she sits in her dressing gown, holding a cup of silver tea, as Janet calls plain hot water, and tries to recall something, someone she's forgotten, whose existence has left a fading footprint in her mind.

In a cramped studio, bachelor lodgings, a stray breeze from a cracked window stirs the papers that lie on chair and table. The
landlord leans in the doorway, wondering how someone could have squatted here for any time without notice. These rooms have been empty for months, although he can't for the moment think of why: he's never had a problem getting a tenant before. A name flickers through his mind—Hubert? Henry?—and with it the fleeting memory of a face. But his wife calls from belowstairs and he turns to answer and the memory fades. He'll clear out the squatter's trash that afternoon, and the curious balsa-wood models will be sold to the rag and bone man.

Sophie kneeled before the small gravestone, its granite discolored by the London air. Still, the names carved into its face were as readable as the day they were made.

Margaret Robarts. Beloved wife and mother.

And then, underneath. Jonathan Robarts. And the year: 1867. Such a bare little number.

She took the medallion and its chain from her pocket and looped it around the stone, arranging it so that it hung between Margaret's name and her son's.

Sophie reached out and caressed the letters chiseled in the granite, feeling them through the tips of her thin gloves.

“Thank you for lending it to me, Mrs. Robarts,” she whispered. “But it's yours and it's time you had it back—both of you.”

She rose, her knees stiff with the cold. A clammy drizzle had started and the back of her neck was wet. She looked at her gloves ruefully. They were filthy.

“I never could keep my gloves clean,” she murmured to herself.

Artemis was waiting for her at the gate, his hat in his hand.

Without asking, he saw her home, and they fell into a companionable silence, their measured treads matching each other.

“Have you written your report?” she said, presently.

He laughed. “It's beyond my powers of composition. A madman
and his army of Angels. At the least I'd lose my job, at the worst, they'd lock me up as mad myself.”

He stopped, for they had reached the steps of her house.

“I am sorry they had to die,” said Sophie, raising her troubled face to him. “They were innocent, in the end.”

“Yes,” said Artemis. “Even Robarts, in a way.”

“Will you ever find him, do you think?”

He only smiled and shrugged wordlessly.

She put out her hand for him to shake, and after a pause he took it in both of his, and they stood there together, in the gathering fog, with dusk coming on fast.

Daniel Greensmith kneels at the base of a blasted oak. And old lightning scar twists white down its trunk, and only the south side of the tree is still alive, embracing its dead half. Beneath the great root of the tree and half-hidden by a fall of moss gapes the mouth of an old animal den.

Daniel can still smell the musk of the foxes that once lived there.

He's wearing the thick leather gloves he keeps for field work, knowing there might be snakes in the burrow. Cautiously, he probes the hole. It's deeper than it looks, and wider, and soon he's up to his shoulder, his cheek against the rough pad of moss.

There's only space and the smooth dirt walls beneath his gloved hands. Any deeper and he'll have to go home and find a shovel to dig it out.

His fingers scrape against something hard. It might be a tree root. He withdraws his arm and sheds the glove, risking the snakes, and probes again.

It's smoother than a root, like polished wood with a slight curve to it. He pulls it out, knowing what he'll see.

Long and smooth and mottled brown and ivory by years underground. There are still signs of char along its length, and the marks of small, sharp teeth on one knobby end.

It's a human thighbone, sculpted and delicate-looking as a violin
bow. It's shorter than his forearm. The owner must have been about four feet tall.

Daniel probes again and finds more: rib bones thin as willow branches, a handful of finger bones. He does have to go home eventually and fetch a shovel to dig up the lot, and spreads his find on the grass beneath the living and the dead branches of the oak.

It's not complete. The legs are there, and one arm, and most of the ribs. Only one vertebra remains, its companions lost to the ruins and the earth and the playful foxes. The skull is gone. Daniel searches for it, digging under the tangled roots. He must admit he's relieved not to have to face the bony gaze of Fanny Weldon after all.

He gathers the bones into the burlap sack he's brought and sits beside it a while, under the tree, gazing at the distant glint of the river that chuckles its way past the ruins and the woods, houses and graveyards and places where no man lives. It's the closest thing he has to a prayer.

Before sunset he buries the sack, neatly bundled together, in the tiny graveyard where the Weldon slaves were buried. He thinks he remembers where they buried Sadie, and there he lays Fanny beside her in the earth.

Daniel Greensmith never returned to the Riverbend ruins; he caught the influenza the next winter and was laid to rest in the colored cemetery in his turn. He never married and his lands fell to his brother's child, who, when work allowed, enjoyed a day's trout fishing at the same crook of the river that his uncle visited.

Neither he, nor anyone else, ever saw again the figure of a little girl, searching the shell of the house for something she'd forgotten.

An Angel stands, wings folded back, on the porch at Bryani House, Bryani-House-of-the-Mists, of course, because the stately manor of this world has long since fallen into ruin. The fog has retreated to
the border of the grounds, and she watches it unceasingly.

Sister
, I call to her, but she does not hear.

Something lurks in the fog, hungry and desirous, and this is what she watches for. Her arms are folded across her breast, and in her right hand she holds the knife that shattered Tibor, that knows his name, that keeps him at bay.