The Bone Key (18 page)

When Wilcox returned, he came to the library and apologized for being so late. Startled, I looked at my watch and saw that it was past eight o’clock.

Wilcox laughed, not pleasantly to my ear. “Same old Booth. Come on and eat.”

I went to turn the lamp off before I followed him, and the paper on the desk caught my eye. “Oh! I found this under the desk.”

I handed it to him. He glanced at it, said, “More of Uncle Loosh’s nonsense, looks like to me. Thanks.” He stuffed it in his pocket, and we left the room.

Dinner consisted of sandwiches and soup. Wilcox was restless, fidgeting even as he ate, getting up periodically to stride over to the windows and stare out at the darkness. Finally, I said, “Is something the matter?”

“I’m having those damn trees down tomorrow!”

“Oh,” I said, not usefully.

“I’m sorry. They get on my nerves, and it seems like every time I turn around, there’s Flood telling me how much Uncle Loosh loved the hollies. All the more reason they should go.”

“There was, er . . . there was something about them on that paper I found.”

He raised his eyebrows in a disagreeable sneer, but did not comment.

“It looks like . . . however he thought he was going to, er, cheat death, it looks like the hollies . . . ”

Wilcox stared at me, his brows drawing down in an ugly, brooding expression. Then, all at once, he burst out laughing. “My God, Booth, don’t tell me you believe in that nonsense!”

I felt my face flood red; I could not answer him.

“I bet you do!” Wilcox hooted with laughter. “You’re as crazy as Uncle Loosh!”

I stood up, said, “Good night, Wilcox,” with what vestiges of dignity I could, and walked out of the room. I would have liked to return to work in the library, but I was afraid Wilcox would find me there. I went up to my bedroom and locked the door. I could leave tomorrow afternoon—maybe even tomorrow morning. I could ask Flood about trains before breakfast.

I did not expect to sleep at all, but I changed into my pajamas and climbed into bed. If nothing else, I could read comfortably. About half an hour later, I heard Wilcox come upstairs. His footsteps stopped outside my door, but he did not knock or speak. I was just as glad.

I read long enough to quiet my nerves. When I looked at the clock, it was five minutes past midnight, and the house was perfectly still. No one would notice or care if I went back down to the library for a couple of hours. I would feel better about leaving—less like I was running away—if I had at least completed the task Wilcox had asked me here to perform.

I got up, put my book carefully back in my valise, and put on my dressing gown, already rehearsing my story should I run into Flood or Wilcox. I needed something to read—what better reason to be found creeping downstairs to the library in the middle of the night?

But the house might as well have been deserted, for all the signs of life it showed. I made it to the library without incident and shut the doors carefully behind me before I turned on the light. In that single moment of darkness, I suffered the horrible conviction that there was someone sitting behind the desk, but when I turned on the light, no one was there.

I worked peacefully for almost five hours, slowly restoring order to the chaos of Mr. Preston Wilcox’s library. The darkness beyond the windows was softening to gray, the sun’s first rays reaching up above the brooding hollies, when I pulled a book out of the lowest shelf of the bookcase behind the desk and with it fell a second book, which flipped itself open to its title page.

I stared at that second book for a long time, perfectly still, just as I would have stared at a tarantula that might or might not have been dead. The book was not listed in Mr. Preston Wilcox’s catalogue. I had only ever seen a copy once before. But now I knew why those notes referring to “the Guide” and “the Vessel” had looked familiar. It was
The Book of Whispers
—not the nineteenth-century fake, but the genuine edition from 1605. I could not bring myself to touch it.

And while I was standing there, staring at that small, fragile volume, I heard Wilcox coming down the stairs. I clutched my dressing gown closed at the neck. I could not let him see me like this: in my pajamas with my hair uncombed and my face stubbled. He would never believe me then, and the matter had suddenly become much larger than our enmity, preserved like an ant in amber, and my wounded pride.

Then I thought, He’ll go in to breakfast. I can get upstairs and get decent without him seeing me.

At the same moment at which I remembered it was only a quarter after five, far too early for breakfast, I heard the front door slam. I knew then, and the knowledge made me cold. He intended to have those hollies down today; he was going out to look at them, to plan his attack.

I had seen
The Book of Whispers
; I knew what was waiting for him among the holly trees.

“Wilcox!” I shouted uselessly and plunged for the door.

The door would not open. I tugged and rattled, but the latch stayed jammed. The first part of my dream from Friday night came back; I remembered the old man saying, “Stay in the library.”

But whether I liked Wilcox or not, I could not leave him to his fate, to the terrible thing Lucius Preston Wilcox intended.

“Flood!” I shouted and then caught myself; Flood had his own role to play among the holly trees. I shouted for the housekeeper instead, Mrs. Grant, and pounded on the door in between my frantic assaults on the doorknob. I could feel the old man’s black eyes watching me from behind the desk. I did not turn around, afraid that I would find the feeling to be more than just nerves.

The library was not far from the kitchen, and Mrs. Grant got up at dawn to bake the day’s bread. Although it felt like hours, it was no more than ten minutes—maybe only five—before I heard her on the other side of the door, saying, “What on Earth—?”

“The door’s stuck!”

“Stuck? It’s never been stuck before.”

For her, the door swung smoothly open. I wasted no time in explanations, apologies, or curses, but bolted past her. The front door did not resist me; I threw it open just in time to see Wilcox disappear into the close-serried ranks of holly.

“
Wilcox!
” I shouted and started running.

I lost both my carpet slippers within ten feet, but ran on regardless. Stones and sticks and shed holly leaves hurt my feet, but there was still a chance. If I could get to the hollies, get Wilcox out of the hollies . . . 

I reached the trees, ducked between them as Wilcox had, and came face to face with Flood.

“Where’s Mr. Wilcox?”

“Mr. Wilcox has met with an accident,” he said smoothly, well-rehearsed, “but I think—”

“Let it go, Flood.”

Those smooth, perfect pebbles stared at me.

“Let
him
go.”

“I don’t understand you, Mr. Booth.”

“You’re the Guide, aren’t you? And poor Wilcox is the Vessel. I found the book.”

His face twisted; I remembered how he had stood in the doorway of the library, refusing to come in. And I remembered the carvings on the library doors; that thing I had taken for a box could just as easily be a book. I wondered, distractedly, my hackles rising, just what Flood had been before Mr. Preston Wilcox had used the book to command him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Booth,” he said. “I think you misunderstood me. Mr. Wilcox—”

“What on Earth are you doing out here, Booth?”

I whipped around, my heart hammering in my throat. Wilcox was approaching through the trees.

“Wilcox?” I said weakly.

“Good God, man, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s the matter?”

“N-nothing.” I could not stop staring at him, his ruddy face and aggressively square body, his rumpled hair and— “What happened to your hand?”

Flood said, “I was trying to tell you, Mr. Booth. Mr. Wilcox met with an accident.”

“Bumping around like a bull in a china shop,” Wilcox said cheerfully. “Fell over and bashed my hand on some damn rock. I was just going back to the house for some meurochrome. Come on, and we’ll get Mrs. Grant to make you some tea.”

“All right,” I said, numb and bewildered, and we started back toward Hollyhill. I could feel embarrassment rising, washing over me like a tide. “I’m done in the library, and I, er . . . that is, is there a morning train?”

“Ten o’clock,” Wilcox said. “Capital work, old man. I’ll have Flood drive you. Oh, and Flood!”

As he glanced over his shoulder at Flood, I saw his eyes plainly in the clarifying dawn light. They were Wilcox’s little, sandy-lashed eyes, but surely Wilcox’s eyes had been hazel, not that obsidian-hard black.

“Tell the men not to bother about the hollies,” Wilcox said. “They’re starting to grow on me.”

I left by the ten o’clock train. Flood and I said nothing to each other. What could we say? We both knew what had happened; we both knew that no one would believe me if I tried to tell them the truth, and even if I were believed, there was nothing that anyone could do. After he let me out at the station, I saw him hiss at me like a cat through the windshield before the car pulled away.

I have not heard from Wilcox since.

E
LEGY FOR A
D
EMON
L
OVER

I first saw him at the corner of Atwood and Haye.

It was dusk; I was on my way home from the museum, standing at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change. Even now, I do not know what made me look up. I only know that I did look, and I saw him. He was standing on the opposite corner, a tall, slender figure in a gray overcoat. His hair was a shock of gold over his pale face, and even at that distance I could see the brilliance of his blue eyes. I looked away at once.

The light changed. I stepped down into the street. I had no intention whatsoever of looking at him again, but as I neared the middle of the street, my eyes rose of their own accord. He was perhaps five feet away, and he was staring at me. He walked like a conqueror, like a lion. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His eyes were not merely vivid blue; they were intense, blazing, as if they were lit from within, as if this young man was burning with a flame that no one else could feel. His mouth was twisted in a mocking smile. He had known that I would look. I looked away at once, my face reddening, and then we were past each other.

I went home. I locked the door behind me and then circled the apartment, nervously checking the windows, the door to my postage-stamp balcony. But when I asked myself, I did not know what I was nervous of. It is a wonder I did not burn myself badly as I made dinner, for all the time I was listening, although I did not know for what. I ate without tasting anything, and as I washed the dishes my mind was so far away that I was washing the same saucepan for the third time before I noticed what I was doing. And all the time I was listening without knowing what I listened for and fearing when I did not know what there was to fear.

I did not attempt to go to bed that night. I picked a book at random from the shelves and stayed reading by the fire. Eventually, I did sleep, although I only realized it when I woke, my head thick and my neck stiff, to the knowledge that I had been dreaming of his blue eyes and beautiful, arrogant face. I looked at the book, lying open on my lap like a dead bird, and discovered that I had spent the dark hours staring at the pages of Wells-Burton’s
Demonologica
without taking in a single letter of its dry, disturbing text.

It was four in the morning. I put the
Demonologica
back on the shelf, showered, shaved, and changed my clothes. I met no one on my way to the Parrington, and I did not see the blond man, not even in the darkest shadows where my nerves insisted he must be standing, watching me. I was so overwrought by the time I reached the museum that it took me three tries to open the door and two to lock it again when I was safely inside. I do not know why or how I knew that the blond man would not find me inside the museum, but I did know it; the knowledge was at once reassuring and disappointing.

I was distracted all day, without quite knowing why, unable to concentrate on anything. The people I talked to in the course of my duties looked at me strangely. Mr. Lucent asked if I was ill, and I did not quite know how to answer him. I did not feel ill, but I did not feel normal; from the look on his face, I knew that the febrile shimmer I sensed in my blood must somehow be showing through.

As I knew he would be, the young man was waiting for me on the steps of the museum when I came out at sundown. It was he, indisputably, the man who had stared at me in the cross-walk the day before, the man whose face had haunted my thin dreams. He was leaning against one of the great stone sphinxes that flanked the portico and smoking a narrow, foreign cigarette. There was no scent of smoke, although I could see it wreathing his head, only the sweet, strong scent of viburnum. His blue eyes were full of fire and darkness.

I knew that I should walk past him, go down the stairs and into the city, to a theater or a restaurant or even the house of my former guardians. I knew that, but I could not do it. I stayed where I was, as if I had been turned to stone, a new column for the portico, ugly and graceless.

He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his left foot. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised in inquiry. “Are you Lot’s wife, that you can only stare at me and not speak? What is your name?” His voice was warm and rich and smooth, like the scent of viburnum that surrounded him. He had a trace of an accent, though I could not place it.

I opened my mouth; the hinges of my jaw seemed corroded with rust. “Kyle Murchison Booth.” My voice was deeper than his, husky and rasping, like the caw of a crow.

“Kyle,” he said and smiled. I stood transfixed; no one had ever smiled at me like that in my life. “My name is Ivo Balthasar, and I hope you do not intend to stand here all night.”

We went out to dinner. Ivo said he was a stranger to the city, but I knew most of the restaurants near the Parrington, and I took him to the best of them, a bistro run by a fat, cheerful Parisian. We talked through dinner; Ivo did not seem annoyed by my stammering inarticulateness, and he listened to what I told him without the faintest hint of boredom or impatience. When at one point I apologized for talking too much, he said, “Don’t be silly. I think your problem is that you don’t talk enough.” I found myself telling him things I had never told anyone else, things about my parents, about the Siddonses, about prep school and college, even about my friend Blaine, who was dead. Ivo sat and listened, the look in his blue eyes enrapt, and I knew, though I could hardly believe it, that he was not bored or uninterested, that to him I mattered as I had never mattered to anyone in my life.

We walked back to my apartment through the dark, deserted streets, Ivo making me laugh with the story of a strange thing that had happened to him in Cairo. He seemed to have traveled everywhere, despite his youth; I had never been farther than two hundred miles from the house in which I had been born, and I could have listened to his stories of London and Berlin, Johannesburg and Moscow and Beijing, for the rest of my life.

He came upstairs with me when we reached my building; I unlocked my door and stepped inside, then looked back at him.

He was standing in the hallway, watching me. “Well, Kyle, aren’t you going to invite me in?”

A blush scalded my cheekbones; his smile told me he had noticed. “Please,” I said, “ . . . come in.”

“Thank you,” he murmured and stepped past me into the apartment.

Cat-like, he insisted on exploring every nook and cranny, the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, study, even the closets and the narrow stair that twisted up to the attic. He admired the prints on the walls, the rugs on the floor. I stood in the living room, once I had hung up our overcoats, and waited for him to come back to me, aware of something fluttering in the pit of my stomach like a bird. Eventually he returned, his blue eyes sparkling.

“This is very nice, Kyle,” he said, “but it seems so cold.”

“Cold?”

He came up to me, tilting his head back slightly to look me in the eyes; he was tall, but I was taller, as I was taller than almost everyone, all knees and elbows and clumsiness. “Have you ever loved anyone in these rooms?”

I could not meet his eyes. “I . . . I don’t know what you mean.”

“No?” His tone was gently teasing, and I knew he could see the blush that made my skin feel as if it were burning. He raised his hand; his nails were like a woman’s, long and sharp and slightly hooked. I flinched from his touch.

“Kyle,” he said. The scent of viburnum was very strong. “Do you think I intend to hurt you?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t know what you want.”

He laughed, and although his laugh was as beautiful as his voice, something in it disturbed me, some hint of a wolf’s howl, or of the cry of a loon. Then he was speaking again; I could not help but listen. “And here I thought I had been as transparent as glass. Kyle.” He touched my face; I could feel the heat of his fingers, and this time I did not flinch away, although I was trembling. “I want to make love to you. Will you let me?”

I did not know how to answer him; I could not imagine words either to reject or accept. As if I were reaching out to put my fingers into flame, I looked up into his face. There was no mockery there, no sign that this was some huge and elaborate joke at my expense. He was waiting for my answer, the hard lines of his face softened, his blue eyes containing nothing but warmth and something that almost seemed to be anxiety.

I said, a stupid, senseless non-sequitur: “No one calls me Kyle.”

But Ivo did not snort with laughter, or sigh with impatience; he did not turn and walk back out into the darkness. He said, “Then I think it’s high time someone did.” His smile was sweet and warm, like the lifting of a burden. “Kyle. Come to me.” I felt the hardness of his nails at the back of my neck as he gently pulled my head down so that his mouth could meet mine. His lips were soft, his teeth wickedly sharp behind them.

After a moment he released me, moving back a little so he could look me in the eyes. “Kyle, are you a virgin?”

Of course I was. I had never before met anyone who would look twice at me. My heart was clamoring in my chest as if I had been running, and I looked away from him.

“Beloved,” Ivo said, “there is no shame, only an undiscovered country to explore. Come.” His hands slid down gently to where my hands hung stiff and icy at my sides. The heat of his flesh was like fire. He took my hands and stepped slowly backwards, leading me step by halting step into the bedroom.

My life became bifurcated. From eight to five I was the museum’s Mr. Booth, following the rounds of my duties as I always had, and I did not think of Ivo at all, except to remember to keep my cuffs carefully buttoned, so that the long welts left by his nails would not be noticed. And even that caution was queerly divorced from Ivo himself; it was simply something I knew I had to be careful about, without knowing or caring why.

At five, I went home and became Ivo’s Kyle. I do not know what Ivo did while I was at work; he was always there, waiting, when I returned. The apartment became filled with the scent of viburnum and the darker scent of sex. I trusted Ivo as blindly as a child; he taught me pleasure and pain and the shadowed places in-between. It ceased to matter that I was ten years or more older than he; his knowledge and experience were more than I could have gathered in three lifetimes. I asked him no questions about himself; he told me stories of his travels but nothing more personal. There was only the slender beauty of his body, the flawless marble whiteness of his skin, the pleasures which he taught me to give as well as receive.

I had always been an insomniac; now I slept only when I had to, both of us loath to lose the beauties we could share. Moreover, when I did sleep, my dreams were bad and ugly. I dreamed of humiliation and shame and guilt; words like
monstrosity
and
abomination
shouted themselves through my dreaming mind, and when I woke, my eyes would be raw with unshed tears.

After one such dream—I had lost all track of the calendar, so I do not know how long Ivo had been there, how long I had known him—I rolled over, away from the moonlight streaming between the slats of the Venetian blinds. My eyes opened as my head came down on the pillow again, and I startled back so violently I nearly fell off the bed.

Ivo was lying there, perfectly still, his face as serene as a statue’s, his eyes open, fixed, and brilliant with moonlight. He looked as if he had been lying there for hours, just watching me sleep.

“Ivo?”

His face did not change, but he said, “Kyle?” his voice as warm and caressing as ever.

“Are you . . . that is . . . ” I could not articulate what was bothering me, and so fell silent. I did not know why he frightened me, lying there so still and quiet, except that he did not seem to be blinking. I realized that though I had seen Ivo close his eyes, I had never noticed him blink.

“Is all well with you, beloved? Another bad dream?” He did not move, and I could not, lying there, our faces inches apart, staring.

“Yes,” I said. I did not lie to Ivo, although I would have to anyone else. I was staring, transfixed, at the opalescent brilliance of his eyes in the moonlight.

He moved then, one hand reaching forward to caress my hip. “Do you wish to sleep again?”

All at once, out of my fear and the memories of my dreams, I blurted, “Ivo, are you all right?”

“Of course,” he said, his lips curving in a smile, although still he did not blink. “I am here with you, Kyle. How could I be otherwise?” His hand moved, and my breath caught in my throat.

I forgot my questions, forgot my fear. But as we moved closer together, the moonlight still lighting his eyes like lamps, I saw something I had never seen before, although I could not count the hours I had spent staring into Ivo’s eyes: his pupils were vertically slit, like a cat’s.

I could not think about Ivo. I discovered this only slowly, out of a nagging, angering sense that there was something I was missing, some blind spot in my mind. At the museum my thoughts would slide away from him, and I would only remember two or three hours later that I had been trying to put together the things I had observed. And then it would be another two or three hours before I remembered remembering that. At home, when Ivo was there, I could not think at all, mesmerized by his brilliant eyes, the scent of viburnum that surrounded him, the burning warmth of his skin. It was as if I had been divided in two. One part of me knew about Ivo; the other part was capable of rational thought. I could not bring the two together.

But I was more and more aware that something was wrong. In the washroom at the museum, when I rolled up my cuffs to wash my hands, I would look at the angry welts on my forearms, and I would not know how I had come by them. At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat’s do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey. And although I still wanted his touch, wanted the kaleidoscopic passion that only he could give me, at the same time I was coming to fear his hands, their heat and sharpness, as I feared his mouth and the roughness of his tongue.