The Bone Key

  “I will hear nothing of the sort.” I found myself on my feet, shaking with a mixture of emotions I could not even name. “Mrs. Davenant, I have already heard more than I wish to. I will bid you good night.”

  I turned to go, and Mr. Ogilvy said, “We can find the cemetery without your help, Kyle, but are you quite sure you want to wash your hands of us entirely?”

  I froze. I knew what he meant; the sly, slow emphasis of “quite” was enough to convey his threat. Clearly, Mrs. Davenant was prepared to violate my mother’s grave; it was not such a large step to wonder what else she might be prepared to do. I was not naïve enough to imagine that Mr. Ogilvy would have made any push to stop her, even if he and I had not taken each other in instant and mutual antipathy. And the thought of Miss Locksley standing in Mavis Murchison Davenant’s way was merely ludicrous.

  I turned back slowly. “I could go to the police,” I said, but even in my own ears, my voice was not convincing.

  Mr. Ogilvy snorted. “And you think they’d believe you?” He waved a hand from himself to Mrs. Davenant to Miss Locksley: an unlikely trio of grave-robbers.

  “I will not help you,” I said.

  “Come,” said Mrs. Davenant, smiling again. “Sit with us, and we will ask the spirits for guidance.”

  Feeling as culpably helpless as I had the night of my father’s death, my mother’s suicide, I sat.

  To my horror, it was true that something spoke to Mrs. Davenant—something she called “the spirits.” I myself would have been far more cautious about giving it a name or assuming I understood its essence. I could think of candidates other than the benevolent dead.

  But whatever the true nature of her informant, it was accurate. I cursed myself for my ineffectuality as we emerged from the taxicab at the corner of Callum Street, cursed myself for my inability either to deter them from their purpose or simply to walk away. My mother had abandoned me when I was twelve; why should I not abandon her now?

  But I could not. I could not do her that great dishonor. I knew I would not be able to live with the dreams that would follow.

  Mr. Ogilvy had placed a telephone call before we left the hotel, and the results were awaiting us in front of the cemetery gates.

  “Cousin Dominic!” Mrs. Davenant said, moving ahead regally, as if the cloak she affected—which made her look even more pre-Raphaelite—were coronation robes.

  “We never lose track of the Murchison blood,” Mr. Ogilvy whispered, his breath nauseatingly hot in my ear. “Ever asked yourself why Thekla gave you that middle name, Kyle? She wanted us to find you.” My shudder was slight but comprehensive, and he laughed—a low, loathsome chuckle—as he moved away again to say something inaudible to Miss Locksley.

  Mrs. Davenant finished her conference with “Cousin Dominic.” The small group of men approached the cemetery gates; Mrs. Davenant returned to where Mr. Ogilvy, Miss Locksley, and I stood. I was not watching, and therefore I cannot say exactly what those men—“Murchison men,” Mr. Ogilvy would call them—did, but in a moment, one of them beckoned, and I could see the gates standing slightly ajar.

  Mrs. Davenant produced a flash-light from beneath her cloak; by its light her smile was ghastly. “Come, Cousin Kyle,” she said, as merrily as if she were proposing a picnic.

  I could not extricate myself from this nightmare; I followed Mrs. Davenant into the Resurrection Hill Cemetery, Mr. Ogilvy and Miss Locksley padding at my heels.

  Apparently, Mrs. Davenant’s “spirits” had not deserted her, for she found her way unerringly to my parents’ graves. “Here,” she said to the assembled sheep-like cousins. “Dig here.”

  Obediently, they dug.

  Lit only by Mrs. Davenant’s flash-light and by two small lanterns the cousins had brought, the scene looked like a Goya portrait of Burke and Hare. I never knew, then or later, whether the cousins had brought their own spades or had appropriated the caretaker’s; if it was the latter, I could only be grateful that the caretaker did not appear in search of his property. I felt certain that Mrs. Davenant would have ordered the cousins to beat his brains in with his own shovel.

  They dug lower and lower and I found myself flinching in anticipation of the moment when their spades would strike wood. And still, when it came, it shocked me. Mrs. Davenant was immediately there, standing on the edge of the grave. A muffled voice said something about “breaking open the casket.” It was like a horrible parody of my parents’ funeral, lacking only the presence of the Siddonses to complete the effect. I had to fight the impulse to search among the cousins for my twelve-year-old self.

  I said to Mrs. Davenant, “She is your own kin.”

  “But the fate of the body does not matter,” she said earnestly. “Truly, Cousin Kyle, this is nothing but clay.”

  “This,” I said, gesturing wildly at the grave, “was my mother. I cannot stop you from desecrating her body, but I ask you at least to go about it decently.”

  There was an uneasy murmur among the cousins at the word “desecrate.”

  In Mrs. Davenant’s frown, I saw the spoiled little girl she must once have been. But she, too, was aware of our audience, for she grudgingly acquiesced, and we both fell back as the cousins levered the coffin out of the grave.

  There was no difficulty in opening it—my mother’s coffin had been hastily and cheaply purchased by the Siddonses and the only wonder was that it had not broken of its own accord. Mrs. Davenant darted forward; I turned away, unwilling to have my memories of my mother, dim and troubled though they were, be replaced by an image of her as she looked after nearly twenty-four years in her grave.

  I heard Mrs. Davenant’s cry of triumph and turned back to see her brandishing the bone key aloft, the only ornament beside her wedding ring my mother had ever worn.

  My mother had strung the key on a black silk cord around her neck, an ivory rod the same length as her index finger, with stubby, almost vestigial wards. She had told me wonderful stories about it when I asked what it was and what it unlocked; it had been a kind of game between us, back in the days when my father had been well and my mother’s affection had overflowed like a fountain. She had never told me the truth.

  I could see the broken ends of the cord trailing from Mrs. Davenant’s fist.

  There was no bravery in what I did then, no thought, for if I had thought at all, I would surely have thought better of such rashness. I lunged forward—for once grateful for my gawky height—tore the key from Mrs. Davenant’s grasp, and before any of us realized that I meant to do it, broke the key in half.

  It broke with a brittle snap, an absurdly small noise. For a moment, it seemed the only noise in the entire night-bedecked world, and then Mrs. Davenant screamed, a skull-piercing banshee wail, her hands stretching like claws indiscriminately between me and the pieces of bone I held, and the cloud-louring sky.

  “Gone!” she shrieked, in a voice I would not have described as human had I not known it issued from a human mouth. “Gone!”

  The cousins shuffled and murmured. Mr. Ogilvy and I looked at each other. After a moment, he said, very cautiously, “What’s gone, Mavis?”

  “The power,” she wailed, sinking to her knees. “The power . . . the darkness . . . ”

  “The curse?” said a cousin.

  “The birthright?” said Miss Locksley.

  “All of it,” moaned Mrs. Davenant, folding forward, her hands covering her face. “All of it gone.” Her voice spiraled up again into a howl, “Gone!”

  “There, there, Mavis,” Mr. Ogilvy said uselessly.

  I put the broken pieces of the key in my pocket; it would not do to leave them where Mrs. Davenant could get her hands on them again. The key’s magic might be gone, but that did not mean it could not be put to other uses by a determined enough witch; I had a mortar and pestle, and I had thrown viler things than a handful of bone dust into the river that ran through the city like its mortal blood. After a moment, I took the velvet-wrapped daguerreotype out of my coat and tossed it into th
e coffin on top of the moldered, rotting remains of Thekla Murchison Booth.

  The cousins stared at me dumbly. Mrs. Davenant keened, a crumpled heap of darkness, Miss Locksley and Mr. Ogilvy hovering over her like ineffective asylum-nurses.

  “Put her back,” I said, with a weary gesture at the coffin, turning my back on my mother’s family, starting toward the cemetery gates. “Let her rest.”

  I returned to Resurrection Hill Cemetery a week later. Alone. The streetcar’s tracks ran through the neighborhood in which I had grown up. From the streetcar, I could just make out the scalloped shingles of the roof that had been ours, a distant glance rendered antiseptic by the dirty glass through which I stared and by the ladies’ hats which framed my view.

  I extricated myself from the streetcar at Callum Street and began walking, eastward and uphill, the sharp, bitter December wind blowing my coat out behind me.

  I had never made a regular habit of visiting my parents’ graves. Mrs. Siddons had forbidden it, stigmatizing my desire to do so as morbid and self-indulgent. I had always been afraid in college that my friend and roommate Augustus Blaine would agree with Mrs. Siddons and mock me for it. And then it had seemed too far and the journey too painful.

  I turned up the cemetery’s broad driveway, past the tiny chapel, and began picking my way through the tombstones and obelisks. I had come here once in the summer, and the trees that stood around my parents’ graves had been covered in tiny, sweet, white flowers whose petals wept like snow across the graves lying beneath.

  My parents had been buried side by side beneath a single tombstone. Its austerity had been my father’s choice: nothing more than their names and dates. He might have loved my mother to the point of madness and beyond, but it was not a love he had chosen to show to the rest of the world. Such had been his nature, secretive and ascetic, holding even his passions at arm’s length. It had been my mother who had filled the house with her easy affection; even now I could remember the warmth of her hugs, the gentle touch of her hand on my hair.

  But the truth, the burning core, of her love had been revealed in her death. If I closed my eyes, I knew, I would see her face again, as she had looked when she walked past me on the way to her death. I did not want to remember her like that, but I could not help it, that terrible ruthlessness that had looked at me and only seen that I was not him.

  She had loved in the same way that Alabaster Whalen Murchison had hated. Like John Whalen Murchison, I had been to my mother only a token of my father. And when that love was gone, when my father was dead, the token was useless to her. I could not . . . even if I had been able to face the idea of murdering a woman by marrying her, I could not abide the thought of inflicting that fate on another child, a child such as I had been.

  I stood for a long time. The cousins had done a good job of repairing the damage they had done, and I thought I would not hurt myself by choosing to believe it was a gesture of respect, of apology. The graves lay silently before me. The sleepers within the quiet earth did not rise up to speak to me, and I was grateful. This was my family now, and they made no demands I could not meet.

  WAIT FOR ME

  I have never been quite sure how it happened that I ended up with Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s diaries. I remember having a long, distracted conversation with Mr. Lucent, after our return from the Stapleton house, about how we should “divvy up our loot,” as he persisted in phrasing it. And it made sense that I should have the sad collection of children’s books, just as he rightly and properly took the poet’s working manuscripts and correspondence. But when I try to remember why he did not also take her diaries, I rack my brains to no avail. My suspicion is that we were both too unnerved to know what we were doing.

  Somehow, though, the box of diaries ended up in the corner of my office, along with the complete set of Lefevre first editions with the extra plates hand-colored by the author; Muriel Wilderhith’s six-volume biography of her uncle—Sir Cuthbert Wilderhith: A Life Spent Dreaming—inscribed by Miss Wilderhith to Samuel Mather Parrington; and a herd of rather battered file-boxes in which reposed the entire, explicit, and scandalous correspondence between the poet Gillian Mowbray Thorne and Dorothea, Viscountess Sain-ver, including the notorious account of the even more notorious funeral of Judge Lemarys.

  Although I fully intended to examine the Stapleton diaries, catalogue them, and send them into the stacks which housed the rest of the Parrington’s collection of diaries, a sudden spate of acquisitions in the Department of Rare Books, and certain affairs of my own, left me with neither time nor energy to spare. And since the box of Stapleton diaries looked very much like the boxes containing the Thorne-Sainver correspondence, giving it the protective coloration of an Arctic fox against snow, and since I had developed a slight aversion to Mildred Truelove Stapleton after the unpleasant things which had happened in her house, I am afraid I would have entirely forgotten about the diaries if it had not been for a small and unsettling coincidence.

  It was one of the nights when my insomnia was particularly abysmal, and rather than drift comfortlessly from room to room of my apartment, I had come down to the Parrington in hopes of removing at least a few of the papers, books, and other assorted objects which stood between me and the surface of my desk.

  I had dealt with a job lot of routine paperwork, cleared up a thorny question of provenance and dating which had entangled three of the junior archivists, and was peacefully sorting through a miscellany of bound pamphlets which Mr. Sullivan had bought for five cents in a thrift shop, “just in case it turned out to be interesting.” Mr. Sullivan was young, but eager, and he had a good eye. These seemed to be mostly seventeenth century English religious tracts and printed sermons, none of them already among the museum’s collection. I was noting the usual fiery denunciations of the atheistical, the disobedient, and those swollen with the sin of unrighteous pride—for the pamphlets were all staunchly Laudian, itself an interesting characteristic—when my eye was caught by a marginal gloss, “Of Spirits and mirrours.”

  Instantly, and with a force like being hit by a bolt of lightning, I remembered Miss Stapleton, lying on the floor of that bedroom saying, The girl in the mirror. The girl with no eyes.

  Mechanically, my eyes moved to the text before my protesting brain could articulate the objection that I did not want to know anything about Caroline beliefs concerning ghosts and mirrors. It was already too late.

  I read:

  As the Eyes are the Mirrours of the soul, so it is that Spirits have none, for their soules being departed it is but a husk that remaineth, like mindless Ecchoe in the pagan tale. And yet it is not true that Spirits are frighted by mirrours or that they do shun them. They appeare to the living in mirrours, and in a forme of their own chusing, so that one who was a wicked Sinner in life may appear a fair young man and thus cosen the Unwary. Truly, as Pride is the snare of the devil, so again do mirrours perform the Behests of the Ungodly and provide a Conduit for the devil to afflict Man and lead him from the path of Belief.

  And then the author, like a hound abandoning a false scent, was off and running again, baying the necessity of obeying king, church, and priest, and the troubling matter of ghosts and mirrors was left behind.

  Except that for me it had awakened those memories: that small, stifling room on the third floor of the Stapleton house, the dust, the brooding vanity, those battered books . . . and the sound of Miss Stapleton’s screams.

  Mr. Lucent and I, the senior archivists of the Department of Rare Books, had been sent to the Stapleton house to take possession of the bequest which Mildred Truelove Stapleton, the eminent poet, had left to the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum upon her death the previous winter. There had been a good deal of dissent and contention among Mrs. Stapleton’s four adult children about every clause of her will, and thus Dr. Starkweather had felt it better not to take any chances with the Museum’s new property, namely Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s library and papers.

  The process of transferral
had taken several days and had been, on that Thursday, almost complete. All that remained were what Miss Amelia Stapleton, the eldest of the four children, referred to as “Mother’s junk,” being the poet’s diaries, her working manuscripts, and that portion of her library which in her last, frail years she had insisted on keeping in her bedroom.

  Miss Stapleton was a tall, bony spinster with an unfortunate predilection for ruffles, floral prints, and soft colors suited to schoolgirls. Her voice was high, childlike, and yet unforgivingly hard; it had become clear on the first day that she considered Mr. Lucent and myself personally to blame for the “desecration” of her mother’s belongings. We had both developed the habit of avoiding her, and so my heart had sunk when I rang the bell on that last morning and was answered by her shrill demand to know who I was and what I wanted.

  But she had let me in, and even agreed to conduct me to the spare room in which the last oddments were kept. I climbed the stairs in her wake, one set, then a second. Two doors down the third floor hallway, she stopped and said, “This, Mr. Booth, is the haunted room.”

  “The, er, what?” I said.

  “Oh, that’s what we call it. My mother insisted it was haunted and never used it. I don’t believe in ghosts. We’ve been using it for storage, and Mother’s junk is in there. I will warn you to wedge the door. It locks itself if you’re not careful.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The room revealed when Miss Stapleton opened the door did not look haunted. It was dusty and cluttered; clearly no one had lived in this room for many years. The appurtenances of a girl’s bedroom were bundled into one corner: a lace-swagged canopy for the disassembled four-poster, a vanity with a dried and withered posy still stuck in the frame, attesting, like the pale flowered wallpaper, to the life this room had once held. In another corner, following Miss Stapleton’s pointing finger, I found the last of what was to become the Mildred Truelove Stapleton Collection.

  I understood immediately why the poet had not left her books and papers to her children. The papers were at least in boxes, although they looked as if they had merely been dumped in by the armful; the books, including her diaries, had been thrown into the corner, a careless heap like a child’s discarded playthings. It seemed horrible to me that a poet’s children could take out their anger at their mother on her innocent and helpless books.