The Bone Key (27 page)

The boarding house on Hamish Street was a massive, moldering Queen Anne, its porch railings leaning erratically out of true and its clapboards peeling leprously. I rang the bell with a sense of dread not entirely attributable to the revenant which had trailed me all the way from the restaurant and was now standing at the bottom of the porch steps, its dull blue eyes fixed on me. It had not attempted to approach me, although that might have been because I set a pace fast enough that it was difficult for the creature to keep up at all.

The door was opened by a small woman, bright-eyed and neat as a wren; I observed that whatever the state of the exterior of the house, the interior was spotless. “Can I help you?”

“I, er, I’d like to speak to Mr. Garfield, please. Is he in?”

“Is it about a piano?”

“No. It’s, er, a personal matter.”

She seemed surprised, but said, “Yes, sir. Just a minute, and I’ll go to fetch him.”

I waited in the hall, regarded somnolently by two enormous white cats on the stair-landing. It was more than a minute, but less than five, before I heard the landlady’s voice “ . . . and mind the cats on the landing,” and Mr. Garfield’s cane came into view, followed by Mr. Garfield himself. I noticed that the cane nudged the cats only very gently, and the cats, clearly resigned to the eccentric behavior of human beings, did not even twitch.

Mr. Garfield stopped two steps up and said, “Mrs. O’Mara said there was someone here to see me?”

“Er, yes,” I said. “You don’t know me, but my name is Kyle Murchison Booth—”

“At the museum?” Mr. Garfield had turned his head toward the sound of my voice, although his clouded eyes seemed to be gazing past my left shoulder.

“ . . . Yes.”

“But you wouldn’t come about the Blüthners.” He came down the last two steps, as if the mention of the pianos somehow established my bona fides.

“Er, no.” I hesitated wretchedly, but there was no tactful way to introduce the subject, and I did not need to turn my head to know the revenant had come up onto the front porch. “I’m sorry, but I must ask you about Gareth Merton.”

For a moment, Mr. Garfield seemed not to understand what I had said; then I watched in helpless dismay as his face crumpled, not like an adult’s, but like a child’s, the child both he and Gareth Merton had once been. He drew breath as if against a great weight and said, “You’d better come sit down.”

I followed him into the parlor, chose a chair that put me with my back to the window and the dead, accusing eyes of the revenant. Mr. Garfield sat down and said sadly, “I thought people had forgotten about that.”

“I, er . . . I was reminded.”

He sighed, a noise like his heart tearing free inside his chest. “I love my work, Mr. Booth. I love my pianos and I love the fact that nobody ever notices me. I love being just Mr. Garfield, the blind piano-tuner. I don’t want to be the Gareth Merton Imposter again.”

“I won’t bring your name into it,” I said, hesitated, added, “The museum didn’t send me. You won’t, er . . . that is, you won’t lose . . . the pianos won’t . . . ”

“I understand.” He did not smile, but there was perhaps a little less grief in the lines of his face. “This is important to you.”

“Yes. Er. I actually . . . that is, I’m not really interested in the, er, imposture.”

“No?”

“No. I meant what I said. I need to know about Gareth Merton. There’s no one else left to ask. And I . . . ” Again, I could not help myself. I twisted to look out the window, and the revenant was there. I felt pinned between its glassy stare and Mr. Garfield’s clouded sightlessness.

“Mr. Booth?”

“Mr. Garfield, I am truly sorry. But do you believe in ghosts?”

I could not believe I had said it. Both my hands were pressed to my mouth, as if it were not already too late to keep the words pent in.

But Mr. Garfield did not shout for Mrs. O’Mara to see the lunatic out. He said, “I’ve been blind for twenty years. I hear things. And even more so in my line of work. I could tell you stories about a Steinway on McClaren Avenue that would make your hair stand on end. And even before . . . ” He sighed, folding his hands together on the head of his cane. “I don’t remember much of anything before the day he said to me, ‘You’re Gareth Merton now,’ and shoved me at the door of Mrs. Merton’s house.”

“He?”

“I’ll get to that. I wasn’t Gareth Merton, of course, and the lady knew it, although her husband took longer. I think Mr. Merton would have been happy enough to let me
be
Gareth Merton, as long as I could be raised up to do the right thing with all that money. But Mrs. Merton was having none of it. She was a kind lady, and a lovely one, but she would not lie, and she would not let her husband lie. And when she told me not to lie to her . . . well, I couldn’t, that’s all. Even though he said I had to. And I don’t know if it was her, or him, or just something in me, but I’ve never been quite—never been quite in harmony with this world. It was a relief, actually, when the cataracts started to make everything go dim, because it meant I didn’t have to try to believe what my eyes told me any longer. My ears and my hands. They don’t lie to me, the same way I didn’t lie to Mrs. Merton. And they tell me now that there’s something on the porch, and it’s something you don’t like.”

“Oh God,” I said breathlessly.

“It’s what drove you here, I’m guessing.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It’s Gareth Merton. He says he’s lost, and he wants to go home.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Garfield. “I’m sorry for you, Mr. Booth.”

“I, er, I brought it on myself. Er, mostly. But thank you. Can you help me?”

“And this is where we get back to him.” Although he said the pronoun with no particular emphasis, I realized that every time he used it, he meant the same person. The same man.

“I don’t think he was my father,” Mr. Garfield said. “Although he might have been. He had big, hard hands. He always smelled of blood, because he worked in a slaughterhouse and he wasn’t too particular about soap. They asked me his name, but I never knew it. I don’t know where he lived, or if I lived with him. He made me swear that I would never tell anyone I wasn’t Gareth Merton, that I would never tell anyone about him, and that I would never forget what I owed him. He made me swear on Gareth Merton’s body.”

“And thus ensured,” I said, very quietly, “that you would never forget Gareth Merton.”

Mr. Garfield nodded once, convulsively. “I can no more forget him than my heart can forget to beat, though I never knew him when he was alive.”

“He is not alive now,” I said and did not—
did not
—look at the revenant standing on the porch. But I did not have to look at it to know it, to understand finally what it wanted.

“Mr. Booth?”

Gareth Merton had been a
cause célèbre
once, but that had been sixty years ago. Everyone who had known him, who could remember him, was dead—everyone except for a blind piano-tuner who had once been a
cause célèbre
himself. Language was ashes and mud in my mouth. “I’m sorry, but I think . . . ”

“Yes?”

“I, er . . . I . . . I think you might be his home.”

“I beg your pardon?” His head tilted as if that would help him to hear my meaning instead of just my flailing words.

“Gareth Merton wants to go home, Mr. Garfield. But his house burned down twenty years ago. His family is dead. A cemetery is not a home.”

“And you think . . . ”

“I think . . . that is, you’re as close as he gets.”

“Yes. And I . . . I have no home, either. ‘Mervyn Garfield’ isn’t the name I was born with, you know. I don’t know what is. I’ve thought sometimes that we both died that June, although I was brought back to life—a sort of life—and he was not.”

“You understand,” I said, relieved.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m all that’s left.”

He held out his hand, and I gave him Gareth Merton’s bone.

His head tilted, that posture of listening; after a long moment, he nodded. “It’s all right, Mr. Booth. I hear him. I hear him just fine.”

And when I turned to look out the window again, the revenant was gone.

S
TORY
N
OTES

“Bringing Helena Back”

“Bringing Helena Back” is the first Booth story, both in internal and external chronology. It is also the second successful short story I ever wrote [the first, for those who are interested, is “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day” (
Ideomancer 5.3
)] and my first sale.

“Bringing Helena Back” springs directly from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” which is the first person testimony of a sensitive, rather timid man who lets his domineering, brilliant friend talk him into doing something he knows is stupid.

Sound familiar?

It took some doing to jam consistent characterization and realistic psychology into the framework of a Lovecraft story, and by the time I was done, my poor hapless narrator had become someone I was fond of, someone I wanted to know more about. And so, although I’d intended “Bringing Helena Back” as a one-off, instead it became merely the first of an on-going series of stories about the frequently unsettling experiences of Kyle Murchison Booth.

“The Venebretti Necklace”

“The Venebretti Necklace” starts where “The Cask of Amontillado” ends. It was also the first story in which I explored Booth’s working environment, the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum.

The Parrington is a mash-up of a number of different museums: the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches in Vienna; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the splendid Field Museum in Chicago. The Foucault’s pendulum in the rotunda is from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. And of course, it’s an excuse for me to invent flourishes and tiny side stories, which is one of the things I most enjoy about writing speculative fiction.

Maria Vittoria Venebretti is based loosely on the Vittoria Corombona, John Webster’s White Devil.

“The Bone Key”

I knew before I finished “Bringing Helena Back” that Booth was suffering under a family curse. “The Bone Key” (which started out as a story called “The Curse of the Murchisons”) took a long time to write, largely because I had trouble keeping Booth’s ghastly Murchison cousins from running away with the whole thing, and it was hard to get at the story underneath the story: the tragedy of Thekla Murchison and Grimbold Booth. And the tragedy of their son.

“Wait for Me”

The background of “Wait for Me” requires some explaining.

I have a friend named Elise Matthesen, who has a habit of giving titles to the necklaces and earrings she makes. And a further habit of selling them to people who then write poems or stories using those titles. I’m one; Elizabeth Bear is another. And there are many more.

“Wait for Me” is one of four stories that came out of a necklace of Elise’s named “Why Do You Linger?” (The other three are “Why Do You Linger?”, “Ashes, Ashes,” and “Katabasis: Seraphic Trains,” for those who are interested.) The necklace, which is a long, eerie, beautiful thing, has a sequence of key charms, and really, a story about a locked room was from that point utterly inevitable.

“Drowning Palmer”

Although in internal chronology, “Drowning Palmer” comes before “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox,” I actually wrote them in the opposite order, so it was the latter story that gave me the set up for this one. Brockstone School takes its name from M.R. James’ story, “The Uncommon Prayer Book,” and James, of course, was provost of Eton College for the last eighteen years of his life.

John Pelham Ratcliffe may be my personal favorite of the secondary characters surrounding Booth, because he is mindfully trying to transcend his past self—and succeeding more often than not.

“The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox”

“The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox” is my purest M.R. James pastiche, and as such I am ridiculously proud and fond of it. Also, Barnabas Wilcox makes an interesting foil to John Pelham Ratcliffe; Wilcox can’t transcend his past self, and that, in the end, is what dooms him.

“Elegy for a Demon Lover”

This story started out as a poem. Nothing to do with Booth—the main character was a woman. It was not, unfortunately, a very good poem, but the central conceit—the idea that the demon could only be sensed and remembered at night—was so cool that even after I’d admitted the poem wasn’t any good, I still wanted to use the idea. And then it crossed paths in my brain with Booth, who would surely never embark on a love affair if he
wasn’t
being influenced by an incubus.

“The Wall of Clouds”

I doubt it’s ever clear to anyone but me, and it doesn’t affect either understanding or enjoyment of either story, but it’s Ivo Balthasar (and the effort of destroying him) who makes Booth so desperately ill. As Booth predicts at the end of “Elegy for a Demon Lover,” he does not remember Ivo in this or any other story, but that doesn’t mean Ivo doesn’t have consequences.

In its original publication, “The Wall of Clouds” had an epigraph from Edward Gorey’s
The Iron Tonic
. I decided that, while it was an excellent epigraph for the story on its own, it was a little off when it was part of a series of (loosely) linked stories. But certainly, if you can imagine Edward Gorey illustrations, you will not be wrong.

“The Green Glass Paperweight”

Like most horror writers, I’m rarely scared by my own stories, but “The Green Glass Paperweight” is one that manages it. The paperweight itself is from John Bellairs’
The Face in the Frost
, and the story was originally intended more as an homage to Bellairs’s books (which I loved as a kid) than anything else. But it twisted as I was writing it and became something that is, for me, genuinely horrifying.

“Listening to Bone”

I have a reluctant fascination for stories about stolen children; I think “Listening to Bone” came partly from Sarah Smith’s excellent historical novel,
The Vanished Child
, and partly from an episode of
The X-Files
that I wanted to write about in my dissertation and didn’t have time or space for, “Invocation.” And it became a story, like Mercer Mayer’s
There’s a Nightmare in my Closet
, about trying to understand the thing that frightens us, instead of only trying to destroy it.

Where the pianos got into it, I have no idea.

—Sarah Monette