The Bone Artists (3 page)

Micah smacked him on the chest, nodding toward the path to the left, and farther down that way, the chapel. Not a single tree broke up the line of sight between the gates and the chapel itself, giving the cemetery a stark, desolate feel. No oaks hung with moss and resurrection fern, just open air and the profile of the chapel rising against the moon and stars. Someone down the block had cooked barbecue that night, a smoky, tangy scent lingering over the graves. Oliver’s stomach turned at the combination of cooked flesh and what he knew lurked below his sneakers.

His friend led the way, dodging nimbly around stone markers and mausoleums. By day, St. Roch’s wasn’t much cheerier, not in Oliver’s opinion. It was an institution, and a kind of macabre mecca for Southern loreseekers. He had never been inside the place before, but Micah had. They swept clear of the front doors of the narrow, tall, white building, keeping to the right side. As they’d previously discussed, both of them stayed low, Oliver turning to keep an eye out for security guards or curious pedestrians on the sidewalk. The spring heat worked in their favor, coaxing most folks, even those keen for an evening stroll, to stay inside by a fan or AC unit.

Micah, meanwhile, did what he did best.

A latch clicked over his shoulder, and Oliver braced. It just seemed wrong, sneaking into a chapel, into a place of worship, poking around where people had prayed and where the two boys didn’t belong.

O
r maybe just
he
didn’t belong.

Micah held the crooked old window open long enough for Oliver to squeeze through and then slid in behind him, chuckling softly as he did so. Breaking in, sneaking around . . . It came to Micah as naturally as breathing. He had gotten busted for stealing little stuff when they were younger, a candy bar here, a CD there, but Micah always found a way to talk himself out of it and walk away with a slap on the wrist.

But that was Micah through and through, changeable with the wind. The good little church-going, God-fearing kid one week and the big bad influence the next. Oliver never knew which one would show up on any given day.

And without him you wouldn’t be even close to affording tuition. Suck it up.

Two thousand bucks to dig around for a few pocket watches and necklaces was too good to pass up.

“Did you bring the list?” Oliver whispered. The chapel had to be empty at that time of night, but he kept his voice low all the same. Micah walked quickly to what looked like a low shelving unit and a bunch of lumps on the wall opposite from where they had broken in. His boots crunched over cockroach shells.

“It’s in here,” his friend replied, tapping his left temple. He pulled a box of matches from his pocket and struck a light, then
leaned forward and touched the flame to a half dozen candles of varying heights scattered across the lowest shelf.

Oliver gasped as the room and all that was in it flared to life.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“Kind of inappropriate, mm? Given the circumstances,” his friend chided playfully. “Stop gawking, we have shit to take care of.”

“Sorry, it’s just . . .”
Horrifying
.

The word died on his lips but stayed vivid in his mind. The wall was covered in pieces of human beings, or rather, plastic and wood and glass parts of former owners. Prosthetics. Plaster feet, plaster hands, masks, arms, even glass eyeballs skewed and directionless, watching him under the warm glow of the candles. Most of the hands and feet hung from metal hooks pushed into the plaster.

A chipped, yellowed statue of Mary presided over the collection from a nearby corner.

“I’d heard about this place, just didn’t realize it would look like this,” he said, approaching the abandoned relics slowly.

Micah, meanwhile, had shoved his face close to what appeared to be a carved wooden peg leg. He squinted, peering over his glasses and twisting his head, trying to read something on its side. “Yeah. Freaky, huh? They’re mostly just repros. Thanks for healing my hand, Saint Roch, here’s a model of it. It’s a little easier to swallow in the daylight.”

Somehow Oliver doubted that.

Not that he was a stranger to odd artifacts—his father’s shop was full of the stuff, little taxidermied raccoons and alligator claws and bird skeletons. . . . But there was something different
about these left-behind pieces. He reached out and, with trembling fingers, touched one of the smooth, white hands. He shuddered; it was warm to the touch, heated by the candles, but felt as if it had just been plucked from a living owner.

“So who was this Roland person anyway?” Oliver murmured, recoiling from the wall.

Micah didn’t seem to mind doing the bulk of the work, searching along the wall for his target. “Does it matter? We just need to find his hand thingie and his fingers.”

“Wait. Fingers? You don’t actually mean—”

Snorting, Micah shot him a wry look, finally unhooking a plaster-cast hand from the right corner of the shrine. “Do you honestly think grabbing this thing off the wall is worth two grand to someone? Come on, Oliver. Use your head.”

He felt suddenly queasy, watching Micah stuff the hand in his backpack, the open zipper revealing a sliver of a small garden trowel. The other boy leaned down and blew out the candles, leaving them abruptly in darkness, the shrine filtered through coils of smoke.

“I thought we were just taking
stuff
, not bones. That’s messed up.”

And it’s not what I signed up for.

Micah crossed to him, his face hovering just an inch or so away, his eyes a dull, dark gray as they roamed over Oliver’s face. Then he clapped Oliver on the shoulder and shrugged, nodding toward the jimmied window behind him. “I don’t like it either, man, but do you honestly want to back out now?”

Immediately he thought of Briony, of getting on her bad side.

“These aren’t good people, Ollie,” Micah was saying, going to
hold the window open for him to crawl through. “They do shit I do not agree with. There are forces they play with that guys like you and guys like me do not get. That we have no business trucking in. They ain’t called Bone Artists because they carve
wood
.”

Oliver nodded, pulling in a shaky breath. “I get it. I’m just not sure I can—”

“I’ll do it,” Micah told him in a soft, strange voice, pitying, maybe. “Just keep watch. It’ll be slower that way, but at least we won’t get caught.”

O
liver was beginning to sweat heavily in his sweatshirt.

It was the humidity, sure, but it was also the sounds. He listened to the scraping of Micah’s trowel as he dug out the corner grave in the cemetery. Try as he might, he couldn’t drown out the sounds—the
shhesh-shhush
as Micah made piles of the displaced dirt, the louder breathing as the heat and the work took its toll, the sudden bursts of loud, cackling laughter from a house down the street. . . .

“Are you almost done?” It was a stupid question. Oliver wasn’t foolish enough to think unearthing a coffin was a moment’s work. He shifted, trying to stay low enough to blend with the gravestones and mausoleums. With no trees and little shadow, they were completely exposed to the night and to whoever might come looking.

That smoky, unsettling barbecue smell drifted over the cemetery, mingling sickeningly with the heat.

Micah said nothing, continuing to dig.

“Listen, I told Sabrina I’d talk to you about this Diane thing. She’s not happy about it. Y’all are grown-ups and it’s none of my business, I know that, but like . . . Don’t you think with your family and everything it’s just not a great idea?”

“I wouldn’t exactly be bringing her around for supper.”

“That’s what I mean. Don’t you think that’s wrong?”

“Could you shut up? I’m trying to work here. . . .”

Oliver winced, turning to make sure nobody was watching them from the rear fence of the cemetery. Silence. Silence and then that sudden laughter and the smell of cooked, smoked flesh filling his nose . . . He tightened the muscles over his stomach, forcing down a wave of nausea. Closing his eyes, he visualized that two grand. He pictured getting his first tuition bill, setting up loans, trying to make this degree work with what little he could scrape together.

And anyway, Micah was taking the bullet, doing the worst of the work.

“Sorry,” he whispered, wiping at the sweat pouring off his temples.

He rested his arm against the stone of a stout, rectangular mausoleum, feeling the stone gradually warm against his overheated skin. With no trees there were no strange shadows to wreak havoc on his imagination, but without that cover he felt watched, and maybe he should. If all the mystic mumbo-jumbo Micah believed in was even half true then surely their actions were stirring up the dead.

Shivering even in the humidity, he grew still, hearing the trowel make a hollow cracking noise, bumping against more than dirt.

Micah mumbled something, maybe a prayer, and then Oliver heard a rusted latch giving way to metal snips. He had to wonder just how many tools of the trade Micah had in his bag; Oliver had never asked for a tutorial. If he knew how to break into a secured building or pick a lock, then he’d have no reason
to bring Micah along on these jobs. He’d have to go alone, and that, he thought with a noisy swallow, was not an option.

He turned and knelt in the disturbed dirt heaped beside the grave. Micah hadn’t dug very far. Oliver wondered if maybe the hurricane had left the graveyard with less topsoil and therefore less to cover the grave. St. Roch’s had been under standing water just like everywhere else. The coffin was old, or maybe that was just what earth, wear and tear, and a flood did to a wooden box. Almost all of the other marked graves were above ground, corpses safely covered by stone or within the mausoleum itself, much smarter for flood country.

This grave, he noticed, wasn’t marked at all.

“Are you going to keep watch or help?” Micah asked, out of breath. He jammed the trowel between the lid and side of the coffin, wiggling it.

The lid began to give and Oliver felt his courage waver. “Keep watch, I guess. Um, let me know if you need help.”

But actually please don’t.

He swiveled, closing his eyes again as the sounds continued, painting almost as vivid a picture as if he were watching the robbery itself. His mind filled with sudden doubts. He really should have read up on the penalties for getting caught doing this stuff. Was it better or worse that they were stealing from a dead person? No injured parties, really, but trafficking in body parts couldn’t be nothing in the eyes of the law, either. Shit. Maybe he should have told Sabrina more about this. She was clever, clever enough to stay away from shady crap like this. . . .

But not clever enough to stay away from me.

“Bingo,” he heard Micah whisper. There was another sound,
the worst one, listening to the quick, meaty chop as Micah severed the fingers from the hand. Flesh. Jesus, that meant the body couldn’t be
that
old. Micah winced, trowel scraping along the bottom of the box as he scooped up the bones.

“This is so disgusting,” Oliver hissed.

“There’s no blood or anything.”

“Not the point, man.”

“I’ve got what we need,” Micah said, ignoring him. “Let me cover this back up and we can—”

“Hey!” Oliver froze at the sound. It was a man’s voice, loud and clear, calling to them from across the yard and back toward the entrance gate. “Hey there! Is someone there? What do y’all think you’re doing over there?”

“Shit! Run!” Micah shoved the trowel and a plastic baggy into his backpack and took off running, closing the gap between the unearthed grave and the back fence of the cemetery.

Oliver tripped into a sprint, chest squeezing with sudden panic. They were caught. It was over. That guy would call the police and they would get picked up, bye-bye, Austin. . . .

“Faster than that, moron!” Micah whispered, dropping to his knee and motioning for Oliver to hurry his ass up. Oliver pumped his legs faster, listening to the man bang his fists on the iron gate, shouting at them still and getting louder. He didn’t hesitate, grabbing the closest bars and using Micah’s hands to vault over the tall, sharp points of the fencing. Micah landed beside him a second later and grabbed him by the sleeve, yanking him along a weedy, paved plot to cut diagonally back toward the car.