The Bone Key (14 page)

“I’m glad,” I said before I could stop myself, and he laughed ruefully.

“I will talk with them about Amelia. And the family has kept up my grandmother’s spiritualist connections. We will work things out.”

“I, er . . . that is, I’m sure you will.”

We stood for a moment; I hoped that the Stapletons would find a way to lay their spoiled, sad, angry ghost to rest.

Then Mr. Stapleton said, “Would you care to help me celebrate, Mr. Booth?”

“Celebrate?”

“A bonfire.”

“Oh, yes, of course. But celebrate
what
exactly?”

“November fifth,” said Mr. Stapleton gravely. “Guy Fawkes Day.”

It was November twentieth. I helped him carry the remains of the vanity out of the house, and we stood together and watched it burn. And if he felt the prickling sensation on the back of his neck, as I did, that there was something in the house behind us that did not love us, he did not speak of it, and the silence around us was as thick as the dust in Georgiana’s room.

D
ROWNING
P
ALMER

I had made the mistake of admitting I had been at school with John Pelham Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe was now an archaeologist of considerable repute—although I remembered him as a pensive, unpleasant boy given to picking his nose in public—and Dr. Starkweather, in consequence of a number of Ratcliffe’s recent publications, had become determined to lure him away from the Midwestern museum which currently funded his excavations in Greece and the Levant. Our Persian collection was (Dr. Starkweather felt and said, often and loudly) criminally inadequate, and Ratcliffe was just the man to redress the imbalance. Also, I believe there was a long-standing rivalry with the director of that Midwestern museum, but that was not a matter into which I cared to inquire.

Dr. Starkweather seized on the fact that I had known Ratcliffe fifteen years before, ignoring all my protests, caveats, and disclaimers, and insisted that I was the perfect person to approach Ratcliffe on the Parrington’s behalf. I said (truthfully) that I was sure Ratcliffe would not remember me; Dr. Starkweather countered with the blood-chillingly logical proposal that I should reintroduce myself to him in a context that would remind him naturally of my identity. When I objected that I did not think any such context existed, he glared at me for several unnerving moments and said, “You knew him at school. Which school?”

“Brockstone.”

“Private school, isn’t it? Wealthy, upper-crust?”

“Er, fairly, I suppose.”

“Then you have reunions, don’t you?”

“Er, yes . . . that is, I’ve never been to one—”

“When’s the next one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“ . . . Yes.”

“Well, then!” he said triumphantly.

“But what if . . . what if Ratcliffe isn’t there?”

“Then you write and say how sorry you are to have missed him at the reunion and so on.”

“Can’t I . . . can’t I do that
without
going?”

His glare became alarmingly thoughtful. “Mr. Booth, sometimes I wonder if you are as dedicated to your work as you say you are.”

“Dr. Starkweather, I . . . I assure you . . . ”

“Well, then,” he said with sinister emphasis, and I said, “Yes, Dr. Starkweather,” as if he had been Brockstone School’s formidable headmaster, Dr. Grisamore.

And that was how I came to attend the fifteen-year reunion of my class of Brockstone Scholars.

Brockstone School was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by a group of well-to-do English recusants who wished their sons to be educated as proper gentlemen. I do not know why they chose to come to America, nor why they chose to settle in this part of the country, but I have always suspected the influence of
The Dial
and the more impassioned writings of Emerson.

The school itself was never Catholic, and it quickly attracted those families in the surrounding area—such as my father’s—who did not wish to demean themselves by competing with the Boston Brahmins. Within a generation, Brockstone had become the school of the Twenty—the city’s elite—and their satellites and clients; some of the boys with whom I was at school had grandfathers who had been in the first graduating class.

Especially since the war, Brockstone had taken to having its reunions in batches, to try to mitigate the melancholy sparsity of its alumni population. Therefore, my fifteen-year reunion was being held concurrently with twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, and sixteen-year reunions. The train to Bourne was full of men about my age, all peering nervously into each others’ faces, trying to determine whether this gentleman in coat and tie was a former dearest friend or someone with whom they had sworn undying enmity. I barricaded myself behind my research and prayed not to be noticed at all.

The reunion was an all-weekend affair, beginning on Friday and ending Sunday. I had suggested to Dr. Starkweather that surely I needed go down only for one day—an afternoon perhaps—and had been withered by his incredulous reaction. Thus I was doomed to follow the ordained schedule: a reminder in its own right of the past, when every aspect of my existence at school had been regimented by bells, dictated by the schedule written out in Mrs. Grisamore’s beautiful copperplate. The schedule of events for the reunion was typed, on a sheet of paper that had been crisp and white before my nervous fidgeting had crumpled it, smearing the ink and creasing the lines.

Friday’s schedule began with a Welcome Dinner. Saturday was full of ceremonies and speeches, while the highlight of Sunday seemed to be the baseball game between the graduating class and the alumni. I would let Dr. Starkweather fire me before I participated in that event. But the rest of it was drearily inescapable. I wondered, with a fresh chill, if the sports master, Mr. North, was still there to accuse me of lacking “spirit.”

I am thirty-three, I said to myself. But somehow fifteen seemed closer and more real.

The station at Bourne did not help, being crowded and sooty and horrendously loud, just as I remembered it being. The fact that the people jostling me were grown men instead of adolescent boys helped less than one might expect. Some of them were reverting to adolescence there on the platform, bawling each others’ school nicknames and obsolete shibboleths across the crowd. I wished I had had the wit to fall down the Parrington’s main staircase and break my leg. Or my neck.

The school omnibus at least was new, a motorized vehicle instead of the old horse-drawn wagon. I boarded reluctantly; each passing moment, each step I took toward Brockstone School, made it increasingly likely that one of my fellow alumni would, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, deduce my identity. And the barricade of books and papers which worked so well on a train was not feasible on an omnibus. I sat and suffered and waited for discovery.

It did not come, although I was aware of the puzzled glances of my fellow passengers. I recognized several of them: Horace Webster, Charles Cressingham, Albert Vanbeek, Robert Claudel. But I had had no friends at Brockstone School, and none of my cautiously non-hostile acquaintances were on the omnibus. I did not feel brave enough to make overtures to men who had called me half-wit, coward, freak, twenty years ago. I was afraid their opinions would not have changed.

The typed schedule also informed us alumni of where we were to sleep. We were being housed in the student dormitories, which seemed in my current overwrought state an unnecessary piece of cruelty. I was only grateful I had not been given my own old room, but I supposed that refinement was beyond even Brockstone’s institutional sadism.

I found—and was filled by the discovery with something akin to despair—that I remembered the route to the dormitories with perfect clarity. Leaving my increasingly raucous fellow alumni in the vast formal entry-hall of the main building, known always and forever as the School, I started up the stairs, wondering in some remote corner of my mind if this was what it felt like to cross the Bridge of Sighs on the way to one’s execution.

The only mercy was that we were not housed in the juniors’ dormitories—although I learned later that groups of alumni could and did request them—but were extended the same privilege we had been extended as upperclassmen. Each of us was granted a separate room. The room I had been assigned for this purgatorial weekend was not even on the same hallway as the room I had occupied as a student. So much of my attention was consumed with being grateful for that, and in the remembered relief of acquiring a private room in the first place, that I had the door of my temporary sanctuary open before I fully took in what I had seen on the card of the door next to mine.

I froze, like one of the victims of the Gorgon Medusa, then slowly, stiffly, forced myself to step back for another look. Neatly typed, the name J
OHN
P
ELHAM
R
ATCLIFFE
stared me blandly in the face.

For a wild moment, it seemed to me as if the authorities of Brockstone School must have entered into some dark-purposed conspiracy with Dr. Starkweather. But rationality returned with the realization that, while I would put nothing past Brockstone itself, Dr. Starkweather was the last man in the world one could plausibly cast as a Machiavel; his idea of subtlety was to send me to talk to Ratcliffe. This was merely the malignant hand of coincidence.

And just when, by these reflections, I had succeeded in calming my pounding heart and was on the point of retreating into my assigned room, the door at which I was staring opened, and John Pelham Ratcliffe emerged, so abruptly and with such velocity that we only narrowly averted a collision.

He had changed remarkably. Where I remembered a weedy, sniffling rat of a boy, here was a small, spare, dry man, with fierce bright round eyes like those of a hunting hawk. Even if it had not been necessary, I suspect I would have gone back a pace.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, and even his voice did not match my memories, although that was more a matter of his decisively brisk speech than of the inevitable shift in timbre. “Mr. . . . ” He frowned up at me—nearly a foot, for I am six-three, and he could not have been more than five-five.

“ . . . Booth,” I said. “Kyle Murchison Booth. We, er . . . we were the same year.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, without enthusiasm. His memories of me were clearly no kinder than were my memories of him.

I should have left it there. I knew it, and yet, as if in a bad dream, I heard my voice continuing, “I, er, I work for the Parrington now.”

“The museum?”

“Yes. And the director, Dr. Starkweather . . . he wanted me to ask you . . . ”

“Yes?” Ratcliffe said, one eyebrow sardonically raised. He knew what I was going to say, and we both knew what his answer was going to be, and still I bleated on, “Ask you if perhaps you, er, you might be interested in . . . that is, he admires your work very much and . . . ”

Ratcliffe stood there, watching me twist and thrash; I had not hated him when we were boys, but for a moment I hated him then, and from the depths of that hatred managed finally to spit it out: “If you would care to be funded by the Parrington on your next expedition?”

“No, thank you,” said Ratcliffe, turned on his heel, and walked away.

I stood and watched him go, my face burning, my hands clenching and unclenching uselessly at my sides.

If there had been an evening train back from Bourne, I would have taken it. There was not, and the sordid, brute fact of the matter was that I was hungry.
Ergo
, I attended the Welcome Dinner.

It was three hours of unrelieved misery. I saw one person I knew—aside from Ratcliffe and his slight sardonic smirk—and that was Barnabas Wilcox, a bully I had feared and loathed. He was an overweight, inarticulate businessman now. He mumbled some vague greeting and thereafter left me strictly alone. Otherwise, it was a sea of half-familiar faces, voices whose adult timbres I could not retranspose into their childish ranges. The men to either side of me were two years younger than myself and close friends; they talked across me all through dinner. I kept my eyes on my plate and said nothing to no one, escaping upstairs to bed at the earliest possible opportunity. It was all too vividly like my memories of my first day at Brockstone, except that then I had been in a room with five other boys, and had not even had the dubious solace of solitude.

I was exhausted; I changed into my pajamas and lay down on the bed—narrow and not quite long enough, so that I ended up curled awkwardly, like one of the strange creatures drawn in the margins of medieval manuscripts. And yet, despite the discomfort, I fell asleep almost before I could wonder whether I would be woken by a muscle cramp in the small, dark hours of the morning.

I was not surprised to find myself dreaming about the school. I was a little surprised, at first, to find myself dreaming about the swimming pool, which I had always avoided to the greatest extent possible, but then I realized that in my dream I was not myself, and dismissed the matter from my consideration.

In the dream, in which I was not myself, I was running through the pavilion which housed the swimming pool, a monstrous mid-Victorian edifice like the spawn of a cathedral and a greenhouse and having the worst characteristics of both. Behind me, there were voices yelling, and I knew they were the voices of the boys chasing me. At first I thought they were yelling, “Pelham! We’re gonna getcha, Pelham!” and almost woke myself with my frantic assertions that I was
not
Ratcliffe, and would not be for love, money, or ten pounds of tea. But before I succeeded in disrupting the dream sufficiently to escape it, I realized they were yelling “Palmer!” not “Pelham!” and I ceased struggling. It was, after all, only a dream, and I did not care if I was someone else, as long as it was someone I did not know.

And a moment later, it was too late; running, as Palmer, I glanced over my shoulder, a quick terrified glimpse of the boys following, dark horrible figures like demons, and looked back barely in time to prevent myself running straight into the water.

For a moment I teetered on the edge of the pool, arms windmilling, and then a pair of hands shoved suddenly and hard against my shoulder blades, and I fell.

The water was tepid, brackish; I surfaced, gasping, and instinctively thrashed away from the boys now standing in a solemn row along the side of the pool. There were six of them; the only names I knew were those of the two largest, the ringleaders: Grimes and Carleton. I hated and feared them both.

The light was thick, slow, syrupy with late afternoon. It was a Sunday, the one day when the swimming pool was not in use for lessons or coaching or races between years to build “spirit.” There would be no one in earshot, except the six boys standing and watching.

I know how to swim. I am as ungainly and awkward in the water as I am on land, but I can swim. But in the dream, as Palmer, I could not. I splashed and floundered; the pool was a uniform ten feet deep from end to end, the bottom far below the reach of my heavy schoolboy shoes. I begged the boys to help me; they stood and watched, and the looks on their faces were terrible: solemn and exalted and inhuman, as perfectly inhuman as the faces of owls. Not one of them moved.