‘Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the East Riding of Yorkshire, Collected and Edited by Mrs Gutch,’ Parker read aloud. ‘Who’s Mrs Gutch?’
‘Eliza Gutch. It was she who suggested the foundation of the Folklore Society in England in the nineteenth century. Take a look at the contents page.’
Parker did. It covered Natural and Inorganic Objects; Respect Paid to Trees and Plants in Alphabetical Order; and Beasts, Birds, Insects, but all of this represented only Mrs Gutch’s efforts to soften the reader up for the good stuff, including Goblindom; Leechcraft; Witchcraft; Wife-Selling; Death Portent; Dog-Whipping Day; Finding of Drowned Body; and Creaking Boots.
‘It looks like Mrs Gutch embraced a wide range of interests,’ he said.
‘Disturbingly so,’ said Williamson. ‘Useful woman, though. Without her efforts, a great deal of valuable material might have been lost. That study of the East Riding is especially meticulous, which makes what it leaves out even more fascinating.’
‘Dead kings?’
‘Very good.’
‘Maybe she just hadn’t heard of them.’
‘If she hadn’t heard of something, then it didn’t exist. That’s just it, though: she had heard of dead kings, but she chose not to include them in her collection.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because my grandfather interviewed her for his book, and she confirmed it in private to him.’
‘So why exclude them?’
‘Because someone told her to.’
‘She said that?’
‘More or less. My grandfather’s notes indicate that it was the only time he detected signs of avoidance in Mrs Gutch. This was a woman perfectly at home with mythology and folklore: I can’t say how much of it she believed was real, but she clearly wasn’t easily disturbed.’
‘Did your grandfather draw any conclusions from this?’
‘He suspected, but could never prove, that somewhere in the East Riding of Yorkshire was a dead king.’
‘Which brings us to the core question,’ said Parker. ‘Namely, what exactly is a dead king?’
Outside Ashby House, a group of students tossed a miniature football around the parking lot. Across the street, a small line had formed to enter the art museum. Most of the buildings along Maine Street were owned by, or connected to, Bowdoin, even if Massachusetts Hall, the oldest college building in the state, was some distance away, on the north side of the original quadrangle. It gave the individual departments the feeling of outposts, of being their own self-contained universes, and Williamson’s office, with its crosses and mandalas, its shofars, its murtis of the Hindu deities, seemed particularly like a world of its own, especially when the pagan artifacts were included: images of fertility goddesses or massively phallic males, and half-glimpsed demons carved in stone so worn by time that, from a certain angle, they might be viewed as retreating into the material as belief in them faded or, alternatively, emerging slowly from the rocks in which they had hidden themselves, believing that their time had come again.
‘What do you know of hands of glory?’ asked Williamson.
‘Nothing that wouldn’t be considered rude.’
Williamson raised his eyes to whatever god he happened to be researching at that particular time. ‘I already have hundreds of teenagers to try my patience,’ he said, ‘but you just had to add yourself to their number.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Never mind, I’m used to it. A hand of glory is the dried, preserved hand of a hanged man: it’s usually the left although, in the case of a murderer, a preference might be expressed for the hand that committed the crime. Numerous preparations were suggested for its preservation, including soaking it in varieties of urine, but the ultimate end was to ensure what remained was a talisman that could be used to cure illness or, if fitted with a candle, to take away the power of motion and speech. It wasn’t just hands, either. People fought under the scaffold for teeth, ears, bits of hair, anything that might retain the essence of the deceased.
‘Maybe even severed heads.’
Here he gave a tug at his chin, as though to ensure that his own head remained intact and in place.
‘Heads, heads, heads …’
Williamson went to a shelf and found a small silver coin, which he handed to Parker. The coin had a hole cut close to the edge, perhaps through which to pass a chain.
‘What is it?’ asked Parker.
‘An Aethelred penny, minted in Cambridge, England. It’s over a millennium old. What you’re holding may once have been in contact with a dead king.’
Parker stopped gently rubbing the coin and put it on the table between them. He still wasn’t sure what a dead king was, and until he was he wanted to limit his exposure.
‘Dead kings may have originated in England – certainly, the oldest of them was found there – but it’s possible the tradition may also have been influenced by Viking mercenaries. In 2009, a burial pit was revealed at Ridgeway Hill, Dorset, in the southwest of England, which is where that coin was discovered. The pit contained the remains of over fifty young Viking men – fifty-four, to be exact, for reasons that will become clear in a moment – all of whom had been murdered and then decapitated. While it’s not entirely certain who they were, a Cambridge researcher named Dr Britt Baillie has concluded that they were Jomsvikings: elite killers, mercenaries who operated from a base in Jomsborg on the Baltic coast. The order to kill them may have come from the Anglo-Saxon ruler Aethelred II, known as Aethelred the Unready because of his reluctance to listen to counsel, who decided to have all the Vikings in England slaughtered on St Brice’s Day, November 13, 1002. Aethelred employed bands of Viking mercenaries to do his dirty work, but he was growing tired of Viking raids on his coast, and feared for his life, so he seems to have decided to get rid of the lot of them, and have done with it. At Ridgeway Hill, the Jomsvikings, if that is indeed who they were, were systematically executed from the front. In other words, they were looking their executioners in the eye when they were beheaded, which bespeaks no small amount of bravery.
‘So fifty-four bodies were found in the grave, which would lead one to suspect that there should also be fifty-four skulls, as the heads were all piled together at the far side of the pit. Yet there were not fifty-four heads at Ridgeway, but fifty-five.’
‘A lost body?’ Parker suggested. ‘Someone executed elsewhere, with only the head transported because it was too much trouble to haul along the corpse?’
‘It would make sense if the fifty-fifth head was also that of a Norseman, but it wasn’t. Isotope testing on the teeth revealed that the head originated in southern Europe, probably from what was then the Caliphate of Cordoba. It was also at least a century and a half older than the other remains, and holes in the skull suggested that it had once been adorned in some way, probably with gold or precious stones, or coins’ – he gestured at the silver penny on the table – ‘all of which had been removed by the killers of the Vikings.’
‘What’s the explanation?’
‘The skull was a totem, a talisman. One of the first – maybe even the first – of the dead kings. The Vikings roamed as far east as the Khazar Khanate, between the Black and Caspian Seas. Cordoba was on that route, and had been raided as early as the ninth century.
‘My grandfather, it’s safe to say, would have been fascinated by the Ridgeway find. In his absence, I took the time to visit the site when I was home for a few weeks. It seemed the least I could do to honor the first Professor Williamson. A dead king, then, is a kind of effigy, typically centered on the skull of a victim, but very rare, even in its most basic form, and the creation of one, as far as we can tell, is entirely the preserve of the most extreme of criminal groups or gangs. By its nature, it requires a certain specialization in killing, because the potency, and therefore the efficacy, of the totem is enhanced by the addition of further body parts from new victims. It doesn’t really matter how big or small the remains are; what’s important is that they represe
nt something of the life force of the dead.
‘Think of it like the natives of certain tribes who consumed the flesh of those whom they had killed in battle. The braver the dead warrior, the more potent the meat. Potency is linked to belief. In a way, you have one of the greatest dead kings of them all visible in almost every Christian church: the crucified Christ. He may not be constructed from actual body parts, but the Christian church makes up for it by having enough relics of saints to fill a good-sized cemetery. And in the Catholic faith transubstantiation turns the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist into not merely the figurative or symbolic, but the actual body and blood of Christ – if that’s what you’re prepared to believe.
‘Anyway, when those natives eat their enemies, the vitality of the fallen warrior passes to them. A dead king is trickier: it’s not just a symbol, and it’s not lightly named. You serve a dead king. You’re its subject. As it is added to, and its potency grows, so too does its hold on those who created it increase.’
Parker watched Williamson as he spoke, his hands moving rapidly to emphasize his pronouncements. Beside the silver coin on the table lay the copy of his grandfather’s book. All this, Parker thought, from a single reference in an old book, happened across after hours of searching on the Internet. He should have thought it odd that a link to what he might be seeking had come in the form of a man who lived only thirty minutes up the highway from Portland, an academic from whom he had sought help in the past, and whose grandfather happened to have been the one to make a passing reference to dead kings in his work.
But he did not find it strange at all.
There was a time when the detective had almost lost his faith, in the weeks and months after the loss of his wife and first daughter. He wondered what kind of god would allow that level of suffering and violence to be inflicted on two innocents, and had been tempted to conclude that the only answer was no god at all. But he had seen too much since then to believe that what lay beyond death was nothingness, for Jennifer had returned, and others too, and he himself had sat by the shores of a still lake, waiting for a car to take him on the last journey, the Long Ride.
Whatever entity ruled in the next world – benevolent, uncaring, or simply wanton in its cruelty – had not burned every clue. It had left traces of itself, and if one glanced over them, not heeding, not noticing, they could be passed off as coincidence, or luck. And sometimes that was all it was, but the trick was to be able to tell the difference between accident and intent.
If what Williamson was telling him was correct, then the men who had been with Harpur Griffin at the Porterhouse were involved in the creation of a dead king. Jerome Burnel, it seemed, had come to their attention when he killed two of their number at Dunstan’s Gas Station, and that had doomed him.
But what of Burnel’s wife? She and Griffin came from the same county in West Virginia. If she had somehow sold out her husband to the servants of a dead king, a plan undone by her husband’s secret acquisition of a weapon, and had then set out to ruin him, did she do so on her own initiative, or at the instigation of others? If it was the latter, then it could only be that those same individuals had also urged Griffin to make Burnel’s time in prison as miserable and painful as possible. What linked Griffin to Burnel’s wife, Burnel himself apart, was where they had come from.
Somewhere in Plassey County, West Virginia, was a dead king.
‘There is one more thing you should consider,’ said Williamson. He looked serious, and almost sad.
‘What would that be?’
‘This man Griffin didn’t say a dead king, he specified the dead king. It may just have been a turn of phrase, and could mean nothing.’
‘Or?’
‘What Mrs Gutch told my grandfather was this: if you create a dry, safe place in your garden, then a creature will make its home there. You’ll find a spider or an earwig, or even something larger, like a bat or a bird. A dead king is similar: if it becomes strong enough, potent enough, it can act as a magnet. It’ll attract something to itself, something that will be happy to make its nest amid old bones. It may not have a name, or a form, not until a composite of the dead supplies it, but once it gets in there, it won’t leave. Suddenly, those who wanted a talisman to protect them, who paid a kind of lip service to it in return, and called it a dead king, will find that their ruler isn’t quite as lifeless as they once thought. They may even discover that they prefer it that way.
‘So if that nest of bones is old and powerful enough, it will draw to it a malignancy of similar age and power, and then what you have isn’t just a dead king anymore. You’ve given physicality and purpose to something very unpleasant indeed. If Harpur Griffin didn’t misspeak, then he wasn’t just referring to a talismanic object.
‘He was speaking of an entity.’
49
As he had watched Parker arrive, so too did Williamson watch him leave. The academic stood at his office window, keeping the private detective in sight as he crossed Maine Street and headed in the direction of the museum and its Nocturnes exhibition. It was appropriate, thought Williamson: Parker was a creature of the dark.
Almost absentmindedly, Williamson reached for a round glass display case on a nearby shelf. Contained within it was a fragment of the ruined church at Prosperous. Williamson lifted the glass and rolled the piece of stone between his fingers. He thought he felt the slightest of vibrations from it, the vestigial remains of the power that it had once contained.
Williamson had traveled a long way to get close to Parker. He had turned down better-paying jobs in favor of the post at Bowdoin, and had exhausted every testimonial and promise of support in order to obtain it.
Now Parker had come to him.
50
Oberon was working on the engine of his truck, winterizing it for the months ahead. It was a little early to be starting on it, but it paid to be careful with the weather being as unpredictable as it was. Regardless, the routine allowed him a degree of solitude and space to think, his hands and eyes taking care of the actions while his mind worked on the problems to hand.
Around him the branches of the ash trees were bare, retaining only the dark seed bunches. The leaves of the beeches had turned a deep yellow, the Virginia creeper the red of wine. The scent of apples was in the air as a team of women and small children manipulated the cast-iron presses behind the Square, filling bottles with juice and setting the mush aside to feed to the pigs.
Oberon worked up a fifty-fifty mix of antifreeze and water that would protect the truck against temperatures as low as twenty degrees below zero. The Cut was unusual meteorologically as well as geographically: its temperature was always a couple of degrees lower than the rest of the county, which was welcome in summer but less so in winter.
Henkel. Henkel was a threat.
Oberon added distilled water to the battery to cover the lead plates, checked the cables and terminals, then set the battery to recharge because the water would have diluted the electrolyte solution.
Killian and Huff. Those damned bodies …
He then went through the truck’s 4WD system, ensuring that the transfer lever, locking hubs, and push button engagement were all moving well. He didn’t bother to install new wipers, as the ones in place were only a couple of months old, and he’d performed an oil check a week or two before. Finally, he gave the truck a good coat of wax to protect the finish from ice and salt, took a soda from the little refrigerator in his garage, and walked into the woods. He’d placed a carved wooden bench in a glade well out of sight of his house, and his family tried not to disturb him when he went there. Oberon brushed some leaves from the seat, then sat and watched a pair of deer move through a big stand of conifers that his father had planted to provide the animals with winter cover from wind and snow. The deer, Oberon knew, would already have begun to decrease their food consumption in preparation for the coming cold, during which they’d rely on their fat reserves and their ability to conserve energy to survive, as deer co
uld live for up to a month without eating. People who didn’t know any better sometimes put out food for them in winter, but deer were sensitive creatures, and could take weeks to adjust to a new food source. Corn was the worst: it caused acute acidosis, which could kill a deer agonizingly within days.
Nobody hunted in the Cut except the people of the Cut themselves, and they were careful to take no more than they needed. Oberon didn’t hunt at all because he no longer ate meat; he’d stopped a decade before because it made him feel sluggish, and now he consumed mostly vegetables and fruit, with some fish for protein.
Life in the Cut, although hard, was also somewhat idyllic, but an idyll had to be protected and supported, which required funds. Some of that came from the ranges, the name the Cut gave to their systemized robberies and burglaries, but less so than in the past ever since the deaths of his sons. Oberon thought of them often. Years had gone by before he risked the trip to Maine to visit their pauper’s graves, and even then he had not lingered.
Up there, where the law had failed to trace their origins, they were Tobin Simus and Henry Forde. To Oberon, they were Gideon and Balder – Balder the prince, the heir – born to different mothers but of the same father. Oberon knew that Russ Dugar might have been aware of who they were, even though they had left the Cut years earlier to roam as part of Balder’s apprenticeship, returning only rarely and discreetly to their home. The old sheriff had handed Oberon a copy of photographs from the men’s licenses, which had been circulated to law enforcement agencies around the country following their deaths in Maine. Dugar had torn the document into four neat pieces before placing them in an envelope and giving them to Oberon. Neither had said a single word about it again, not even after Oberon left a package containing $10,000 on Dugar’s porch mat.
Gideon, the younger of his sons, had been dangerously depraved, and Oberon recognized that he might have been forced to kill him himself if his behavior continued to deteriorate, had Jerome Burnel not done it for him, but Balder was to have been his successor, the leader of the Cut. Now Oberon had no male heirs, and Cassander might soon make a move against him.