The Bone Key Read online

  “People, er, seem to think so.”

  “The thing is,” Blaine said, “the thing is that I think I need a spot of help.”

  “Anything you need, Blaine. I . . . that is, you know that.”

  He looked at me for a moment, his face stiff with suspicion like an African mask, and then he smiled. “By God, I think you mean that. All right, then. It’s this book.” He set his briefcase on his lap and opened it. The lid concealed the contents of the briefcase from me, but he closed it again swiftly, left-handed, and put it back on the floor. His right hand was holding the book.

  It was a slender quarto, leather-bound and badly chipped. The title had once been on the spine, but someone had carefully burned it out. “You don’t want to know how much I paid for this,” Blaine said, with a grin on his face that I found frightening. “It’ll all be worth it, though. I’m sure. But the deuce of it is, Boothie, I can’t read it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s in some kind of cipher. I’ve been tearing my hair out over it for weeks, trying to crack the damn thing. And then I thought of my old friend, Kyle Murchison Booth.” He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous. “This should be right up your alley, Boothie.”

  “What, er . . . what’s the book about, Blaine?”

  “Didn’t I say? I think there’s a way I can bring Helena back.”

  I was so startled—as much aghast at his matter-of-fact manner as at what he had said—that I knocked the skull fragments off my desk.

  Blaine and I had met as freshmen in college. Blaine had almost immediately decided and announced that we were going to be friends. To this day, I do not know why. The things we had in common—education, wealth, the sort of genealogy that passes in America for aristocratic—did not seem to me as if they could possibly bridge the gulf between us, the gulf I had always felt between myself and people like Blaine. The only theory I had was that I offered Blaine someone with whom to discuss topics other than athletic pursuits and alcohol. He could talk to me as he could talk to no one else in his world. He was my only friend—that says, I imagine, as much about me as anyone needs to know.

  Blaine was interested in everything; it was part of the way he was put together—a relentless, bright-eyed interest in everything under the sun. The action of his mind often reminded me of a lighthouse light, revolving and revolving, sending its bright, piercing beam out into the darkness in every direction, never stopping on any one thing for long, but continuing to search. He was interested in chemistry and biology and physics; he was interested in history and archaeology and anthropology; he took classes in French, German, Russian, Greek, Latin, never more than a semester or two of any of them, the beam sweeping restlessly onward. He must have taken courses in every department on campus, and he could talk for hours, scintillatingly, compellingly, about any of them.

  In this, as in so many other respects, I was Blaine’s opposite. Next to him I was a dull, ugly crow, without even the wit to hide myself in peacock feathers. I listened to Blaine for hours, but could find nothing of any interest to say myself. I stuck to my dry, safe work in history and archaeology, looking already toward the dim, dusty halls of the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum.

  Blaine had always teased me about my love of puzzles: crosswords, acrostics, ciphers, anagrams. I solved them obsessively, as I solved the archival puzzles set by my professors; they were practice for what was to become my life’s work. I am sure that Blaine remembered timing me on the ciphers I found in books of logical puzzles; I am sure that the memory is why he sought me out, and therefore my freakish skill makes me responsible for his death.

  I sometimes offer myself the false comfort that Helena was even more to blame than I. Helena Pryde was the sister of Blaine’s friend Tobias Pryde. Blaine met her because Tobias—good-natured, warmly gregarious, not very bright, one of the few of Blaine’s friends who did not treat me like some strange pet of Blaine’s—invited us both home with him for the spring vacation of our junior year. The Prydes’ house (“the House of Pryde” Blaine kept calling it and snickering at his own pun) was well-proportioned and handsome, beautifully situated in an oak grove. Mr. and Mrs. Pryde were people as imperceptive and generous as their son. Helena Pryde, Tobias’s younger sister, was a changeling.

  She was tall and slender, with hair of an amazing dark, ruddy gold. Her hair was also unusually thick and heavy, and she habitually wore it loose, so that it hung like a cloak of fire past her hips. The effect was stunning, quite literally so; I heard Blaine’s breath hitch in at his first sight of her. I suppose she was pretty—at least, everyone seemed to think so—but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes were hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped just slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.

  She flirted with Blaine from the moment they were introduced. Blaine—who had dated one girl after another for the three years I had known him, an endless parade of Elizabeths, Marys, Charlottes, and Julias—responded enthusiastically in kind, and before the week was half over, he was spending more time with Helena than with either Tobias or me.

  I doubt Tobias even noticed, but I was aware of it—aware of the hard, predatory light in Helena’s eyes when she looked at Blaine, even more aware that his expression when he looked back at her showed that he did not see her as I did. He could not see her for what she was. Thursday at dinner, I overheard them discussing how they could meet again after this visit was over, and where and when. Friday morning, after a night spent staring sleeplessly into the darkness of my room, I had determined that I had to talk to Blaine, that it was my duty as his friend to try to make him see what sort of person Helena Pryde was.

  I searched for Blaine all Friday morning, wandering in and out of the gracious, unobservant rooms of the House of Pryde. Finally, nearly at lunchtime, I thought I heard voices in the library. The Prydes’ library curved in an L-shape around two sides of the house; it was full of beautiful old books at which I doubt anyone in the family ever looked twice. They were dusted faithfully by the maids, however, and they were freely available for any guest who wished to browse. I already knew the library well, preferring its dim, serene coolness to the bright heat of the tennis court where Blaine and Tobias and Helena and a steady rotation of Helena’s friends played doubles in the afternoons.

  I went into the library. The lights were off, and the room was full of the cool, dreamlike, underwater glow of sunlight through oak leaves.

  “Blaine?” I called. “Are you in here?”

  Someone said something in a muffled voice, and there was a burst of laughter.

  “Blaine?” I said, advancing until I could see into the other half of the L. “Are you . . . ”

  He was sitting on one of the enormous leather couches. His hair was ruffled and his tie askew. Possessively close beside him sat Helena Pryde, a little smirk on her ungenerous mouth. It took no special perspicacity to see what they had been doing. I felt my face heat.

  But I had come this far. “Blaine, I, er, wanted to—”

  “Go away, Boothie,” Blaine said.

  The one mannerism of Blaine’s that I hated was that nickname, invented one night in our sophomore year when he was giddy with wine. I would not have minded so much if it had been a private nickname, although even then I thought it silly, but Blaine used it in front of other people. He did so partly to tease me, but partly to reassure his friends that he had more savoir-faire than to treat me as an equal.

  I said, hating what I heard in my own voice, “Can we talk later?”

  “When we get back to school, Boothie,” Blaine said. “Miss Pryde has just done me the honor of consenting to our betrothal.” At this they both started giggling, like schoolchildren at a smutty joke. “And I fancy I’m going to be rather occupied for the rest of our visit.”

  “Darling Auggie,” said Miss Pryde fondly.
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  “ . . . All right, Blaine,” I said—there was nothing else I could say, no words of mine to which he would listen—and left. Just before I closed the library door, I heard them laughing again, and I knew they were laughing at me. Helena had won.

  I saw the headlines when she died, of course. Helena Pryde Blaine was a society darling, always being photographed in fancy night clubs or at charity galas, her amazing hair flowing darkly, hypnotically, even in newsprint. Blaine went unremarked in the society pages, except very rarely as part of the entity “Mr. and Mrs. Augustus Blaine.” That absence alone told me that the marriage was not a happy one, and I had the dour satisfaction of having been right all along. For nine years, that was all I had; Blaine, obediently following the family tradition, was not the sort of lawyer whose clients made the papers.

  But the death of Helena Pryde Blaine was a lurid scandal that not even the Blaines’ influence could cover up. She died of an overdose of cocaine, in the apartment of a man who was less than a husband but more than a friend. His name was Rutherford Chapin; I had gone to prep school with him and remembered him with loathing. The two of them, Rutherford Chapin and Helena Pryde Blaine, might have been made for each other, and I was only sorry, for Blaine’s sake, that she had not found Chapin first.

  I sent Blaine a letter of condolence; I could not bring myself to attend the funeral or to send flowers. I was not sorry that she was dead. I hoped for a while—the stupid sort of fantasy that keeps one awake at night—that Blaine might answer me with a letter or even a visit, but I received nothing more than a “thank you for your sympathy” note, clearly written by one of Blaine’s sisters. Only the signature was his; I recognized it, despite the spiky scrawl into which his handwriting had degenerated. I continued stupidly to hope, but I did not hear anything from or about Blaine for another year, until the night when he appeared in my office at the museum with his abhorrent book.

  It took me a long time to get the story out of him—not because he did not want to tell me, but because he had been living alone with his obsession for so long that he had developed his own private shorthand, and he kept forgetting that he was not talking to his reflection in the mirror. He was impatient when I asked questions—and that was very like the Blaine I remembered—but I did finally piece together a narrative of the past year.

  He had nearly gone crazy at first, he said (and it occurred to me that many people would question that “nearly”), looking for Helena everywhere, expecting to hear her voice every time he answered the telephone. When the truth finally sank in, the great lighthouse of Blaine’s mind locked unswervingly on the idea of, as he said, “bringing Helena back.” He never used the word “necromancy,” or any other phrase that held an open acknowledgment of her death. A person who did not know better would imagine from his conversation that she had simply been stranded in some dangerous and barbaric part of the world, the Himalayas, perhaps, or the Sahara.

  As an up-and-coming young lawyer, Blaine naturally knew nothing of the black arts, but a powerful intellect and money to burn can compensate for a remarkable number of deficiencies, and Blaine had remedied his ignorance in startlingly little time. He had read every book of dark arcana he could find, and he had found some dreadfully obscure things. He even claimed to have a copy of The Book of Whispers, but I suspect that the book gracing his shelves was really the elegant and convincing nineteenth-century fake by Isaiah Hope Turnbull. Even so, the collection he had amassed was astounding and disturbing.

  Blaine had tried everything, everything his books suggested, and none of it had worked. “None of it!” he shouted at me, pounding his fist so violently on my desk that I was only just in time to keep the skull fragments from crashing to the floor again.

  He had been in despair. But then the dealer who had found the other books for him (and who had gulled him so egregiously over The Book of Whispers) had come to him with stories of another book, even more obscure and powerful. Blaine said he would have paid any sum the man named. I was appalled, as much by his reckless credulity as by anything else. The possibility began to loom very large in my mind that the book Blaine clutched so fiercely was yet another fake, something the dealer had cobbled together to exploit this fabulous windfall still further. That being the case, there could be no harm in humoring Blaine, especially when it meant he would have to come back in a week and talk to me. I took the book home.

  Here is where my guilt begins: not in humoring Blaine, but in opening that damnable book. There was nothing to prevent me from keeping the book for a week without so much as touching it, then bringing it back with an admission of defeat. I had seen Blaine’s desperation; he had come to me only because he could not think of anything rational to do. He would be disappointed, but neither surprised nor suspicious. But if I did that, he would leave again. And I wanted to surprise him, to show him that I could help him. Perhaps that was the root of my folly: I wanted Blaine finally to take me seriously.

  I opened the book. It was, as Blaine had said, in cipher, but it was not a terribly difficult cipher. I thought I recognized it after looking at a few lines, and my estimation of the unknown forger went up several notches. It might not have been difficult, but it was quite obscure, a cipher invented and used almost exclusively by a circle of Flemish occultists who had flourished in the late sixteenth century. Even then, it did not occur to me that the book might be genuine, only that the forger had done his homework. I refreshed my memory of the cipher and got to work.

  Within a page, I knew that the book was no fake, but by then it had trapped me.

  I dare not describe it too closely, for fear that there may be another copy somewhere in existence, and that I may excite curiosity about it. If there is another copy, let it molder to dust wherever it lies.

  I have dreams sometimes, in which I throw the book again on the fire, but this time it does not burn. It simply rests on top of the flames, its pages flipping randomly back and forth. I can feel my hands twitching and trembling with the need to reach into the fire and rescue it. Inevitably, I do reach. I plunge my hands into the fire, and I wake up. Although my hands are marred by neither blisters nor burns, they throb and sear for hours afterwards as if the fire in my dreams were real.

  I will not give the book’s true title. I have since found a few veiled references to it in the writings of those Flemish occultists, and they refer to it always as the Mortui Liber Magistri—The Book of the Master of the Dead or, perhaps, The Book of the Dead Master. I will do the same. Freed of the cipher, the Mortui Liber Magistri was written in perfectly straightforward Latin, with all the mesmerizing power of a cobra’s inhuman gaze. Once I had read the first two sentences, I was lost. I could neither look away nor put it aside, and I finished my translation just as the sun was rising.

  Then I telephoned Blaine. When Blaine answered, I wanted to say, Blaine, this book is an abomination. I think you should burn it. But the words that came out of my mouth, calmly and rationally, were nothing like that at all. The words I spoke were the words the Mortui Liber Magistri wanted spoken: “I know how to do it.”

  Blaine was amazed, delighted. We made our plans. We would meet that night at his house, and I would show him how to bring Helena back. Then we would perform the ritual. “Very good,” I said to Blaine, replaced the telephone receiver, and staggered to bed.

  I slept until sunset, when I woke up screaming.

  I will not—cannot—describe the ritual. If I could excise it from my brain, believe that I would. I cannot, and the ineradicability of the memory is no more than I deserve. The ritual was an evil, perverted thing, and I neither know, nor want to know, where Blaine found the materials he used—except for the human blood. That was mine.

  Blaine had always been able to persuade me to do what he wanted, and he was full of good, rational reasons why it had to be my blood instead of his. Sometimes, when my insomnia is particularly sere—a vast, arid, cracking wasteland in which the dead trees do not give shelter—I wonder if perhaps that was the crux
at which things began to go wrong. Blaine loved his wife enough to spend thousands of dollars and to perform this obscene ritual, but not quite enough to open a vein in his own arm and let his own blood pool on the obsidian slab in his cellar.

  There is a hard, angry little voice in my head, a voice like hers, that says, Blaine deserved his death. That is not true, and I know it. What Blaine deserved was a friend good enough and strong enough to stop him, but I was not that friend.

  The book had released me as soon as I had explained everything to Blaine, so I have no excuse. Where a stronger, better man would have said, Blaine, this is madness, I looked into his burning, haunted, driven eyes, and I rolled back the cuff of my shirt.

  The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me a sign not merely that the world is not rational, but that it is in fact entirely insane, a murderous lunatic gibbering in the corner of a padded cell.

  The ritual worked. The patterns of blood and graveyard earth, the stench of burning entrails, the repulsive Latin phrases that Blaine chanted, they combined exactly as the book said they would. A presence coalesced in the middle of Blaine’s obsidian slab. It was shapeless and colorless at first, but as Blaine’s incantations mounted in fervor and monstrosity, it drew itself together, taking on Helena’s shape and garbing itself in her chic, severely tailored clothes. The colors were slower to come, but I remember the way her hair washed in, a torrent of blood and gold down her back. She was facing away from us.

  “Helena,” Blaine said, breathless with wonder and desire. “Helena, darling, it’s me.”

  The shape did not turn.

  “Helena, it’s me, it’s Augustus. Darling, can you hear me?”

  Still she did not turn, but a voice, undeniably hers, said, “Where’s Ruthie? I want Ruthie.”

  “Helena!”

  She moved a little, restlessly, in the circle, but still she would not turn. “Ruthie loves me,” she said. “He says so.”