Heaven's Bones (10 page)

“Will'e get better, miss? Is there aught we can do? I can't afford no doctor, but if I must …”

Her hands twisted harder.

Another bone on the beach. In my mind's eye, I picked it up and looked at its polished surface. I saw another time, a month ago, the girl with the too-short skirt left to look after the baby while her mother worked. It was teething, and cried, and cried, and would not be consoled for all she could do. She rocked, she dandled, she paced up and down with it in her arms and still the constant, tearing sound did not abate. And she was tired, so tired with the night work of sewing the gloves her ma brought home every evening, and they were lucky to have the work, but
still she was so
tired
, and if the baby slept she could too, but it
wouldn't shut up
.

And she held it up, face to red, squalling face, and shook it.

And it was quiet.

And it was always quiet.

Now the girl crouched by her brother, trying to feed him, trying to bring him back, wondering if I knew, if I would tell her mother
.

I shook my head.

“There isn't anything you can do,” I said, gently as I could. “These things happen. There isn't anything anyone can do.”

“Will he die?”

“Yes.”

She looked down quickly, although it was the answer she'd been expecting. A single drop fell to the floor and darkened a spot where a dead man's hand had splayed, purple with the infection.

She was at the stairs when I called her back.

“Bessie mustn't take the factory work,” I told her, still seeing that girl dripping milk into the baby's mouth.

Her shoulders sagged with despair.

“But I only got the chance of putting her up for it once,” she said. “And I don't know no others.”

“Still,” I said. I could explain about the foreman with the insistent hands, the dark corner, the desperate need to keep paying work that enforced silence, the back street abortion—but she knew about the risk of these things as well as I. It would be of no use to tell her they were assured.

“Listen,” I said. “St. Ann's Church, past Newell—you know it?”

She nodded, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“Minister's wife is looking for a girl to do for her. Cleaning the parish house and such. If Bess shows up early tomorrow, clean as can be and makes her curtsey, she'll have work.”

She bit her knuckle nervously. “Truly? You wouldn't lie to me, miss?”

“It must be tomorrow. First thing, and clean and patched—do you understand?”

“That I do.”

She bobbed me an uneven curtsey and trotted up the stairs, and I turned back to the reddening coal, for a chill was striking through the hollowed sandstone.

The next day I found, wrapped in a scrap of greasy newsprint, a small cake that had been left on the stairs where she'd found me. It smelled of lemon.

The fog was a solid wall, and Weldon stared at it and felt his slow-burning anger flare.

How dare something so
insubstantial
try to imprison him? He was master of this place, no matter what happened. He would not be bound by a phenomenon of weather.

He walked off the porch into the gray bank of fog, half-expecting to hit a solid barrier.

But he didn't, and it seemed to him that the mist gave way before him, not dissipating entirely but dissolving enough that he walked in his own circle, able to see the ground before him and breathing air that was less heavy than the moisture-laden substance of the mist.

Weldon paused. Was this a trick of this strange place? Was something in the fog—perhaps the fog itself, absurd as it sounded—trying to lure him to some unimaginable doom? Was not the isolation, the mocking, invisible servants, the reminders of his once-absolute power, and the presence of that grotesque creature upstairs, once his wife—was that not enough?

He realized he couldn't hear the ever-present babble of the river. Perhaps the insidious mist was trying to trick him into stumbling in and drowning.

Well then, let it. He strode defiantly into the gray bank and it opened before him, closing up behind as he passed. The river was still silent, and it appeared that many of the familiar features of Riverbend
had vanished—the ground never sloped beneath his feet, and the footing was strangely uniform. He stopped, breathing heavily.

By this point, he should be in the forest or in the river. But neither was anywhere near.

Somewhere ahead of him he heard a groan.

A cold sweat sprang across Weldon's forehead. He'd never heard a sound quite like that before, and he was used to the sounds of people in pain, despairing, pleading for a scrap of hope.

This was different. Perhaps it was an animal? A cow, stuck in the river mud, wherever the damnable river was.

The sound was repeated, just a few yards away.

Of course, it could simply be a wounded rabbit, or a dog. Fog this thick could twist and distort sound; he'd witnessed it often enough.

He swallowed and proceeded, feeling in front of him with his walking stick.

But he did see it in time—a huddled mass curled in the fetal position on the featureless ground.

It could have been a heap of trash, or a bundle of old clothes, but it wasn't.

Weldon approached and crouched down beside the figure, who groaned again, faintly. His felt for a pulse at the throat—it was there, although weak and thready. The skin beneath his fingers was as cold and clammy as a frog's belly.

It was a man, and Weldon gasped to see hair and features that resembled closely, more than anyone he'd seen after, the party of gypsies that shared their meal with him on the Perfect Day. But it wasn't actually one of them; he was sure of that.

The man was convulsed in on himself, as if a great pain had struck him in the gut. The respiration was shallow, and Weldon thought it likely, given the exposure to the elements the man had endured, that he was suffering from hypothermia.

He rolled the man to his back and the eyes fluttered open for a brief moment. They were an extraordinary color: pale green that darkened at the center of the iris.

The man blinked up at him, unfocused, and then turned away. Perhaps he thought Weldon was a mirage.

Weldon couldn't see any outward sign of injury; the man's clothing was once rich, now tattered, and showed no bloodstains. Perhaps he had some kind of internal damage.

What could have happened to him here, in the mist? Weldon glanced around nervously.

The man was looking past him and muttering something beneath his breath. Weldon bent close to listen.

“Wings. They need wings. How are they to fly if they have no wings?”

Those words were clear—the rest devolved into incoherent syllables.

Weldon rocked back on his heels, considering. What was he going to do with this odd specimen?

He knew some would say once a physician, always a physician, and that the oaths of his profession still held: he was obliged to tend to the sick and suffering, and not refuse help.

But Alistair Weldon had long since considered himself above the bonds of any trifling oath. He was a law unto himself, and since the Fire, absolute law.

It would be very easy to kill this interloper.

Experimentally, he placed his hand around the man's neck. Weldon's hands were quite big: The tenuous life beneath his fingers was at his disposal. It would be little effort to choke him.

Or to tip him in the river and let the waters carry him away.

Then his mystery would be lost, and perhaps the man's presence had something to do with what had happened to him, to his house, and his estate.

And Weldon was bored—bored with having servants he couldn't see, couldn't touch. This man would prove a diversion for a while, and if he became boring as well, then …

… well then. Perhaps a return to old
divertissements
was in order.

The man continued to mutter under his breath, his eyes still unfocused as if he was blind. Weldon wondered how he was to get him to the house—in fact, how was he to find the house in all this unnatural mist?

But it was dissipating, drifting away in great clots, and Weldon turned and laughed to see what was behind him.

The wide, white-painted front steps, not twenty feet away.

Weldon was a powerfully built man, and had not yet run entirely to seed, and the man of the Mists, though above average height, was slightly built. Weldon heaved his unresisting form over his shoulder and faced the house, its wide windows staring at him like the faceted eyes of some enormous insect.

“Wake up, my little sprites,” he called, and heard bodiless voices answer. “We have company!”

As Fanny walked through the fog she listened intently for the trickle of the river on her right side, clinging to it as if the sound were a thread she could follow to get through a minotaur's maze. Behind her and to each side the mist was a solid gray wall, but before her it churned its substance into the form of a tunnel, a passageway that opened as she advanced into it. The passage was like a lens through which she could see clearly the ground, hedges, trees and rocks in front of her.

She had to be careful to concentrate to make it so—when she grew distracted the passageway would begin to close, and the confusing, dislocating banks of mist would start to close in—but with a thought they parted again, and she could see her way clear.

Once she stopped, listening to unfamiliar birdsong, and when she looked around again the Mists had gathered around her—but she listened again for the river on the right, and yet again they parted like a curtain.

But now there was someone crouched on the ground before her, a few yards away. To her surprise she recognized her father, and then saw he was kneeling beside another figure on the ground.

She started to call him, then hesitated.

Don't disturb your father at his work
.

Was that her mother's voice she remembered?

Sudden sweat sprang cold all over her body, and she tasted bile at the back of her throat.

Don't disturb your father at his work
.

Fanny closed her eyes and fought for control. She felt the Mists close in over her and this time the vaporous strands felt like they were caressing her face. She felt oddly comforted.

Presently the nausea and dizziness passed and she could open her eyes again. The way was still clear and her father had barely moved.

Now she saw that his hand was around the other figure's neck.

“Father!” she called, her voice quavering.

He didn't react.

She walked closer, not bothering to walk quietly, letting the twigs break beneath her boots. The figure on the ground was a man, but she could see that he was insubstantial, solid through the center but feathery at the edges, as if his flesh were trickling into the fog like a small stream into the river.

Or maybe it was that he was forming out of the fog, because as she watched he appeared to become more solid.

She was standing directly behind her father now, but he still did not seem to be aware of her presence.

She reached out and touched his shoulder.

Her fingers went through the broadcloth of his coat. She felt nothing.

Fanny gasped and snatched back her hand. The man on the ground opened his eyes and looked at her vaguely. His strange green eyes narrowed.

“Wings,” he muttered. “On the sixth day God gave them wings.”

Fanny was rubbing her fingers as if they pained her. Abruptly she turned away from the couple on the foggy ground and walked away.

She didn't know whether she was happy or frightened that her father couldn't see her—that she herself was invisible, insubstantial.

The strange man and her father were lost in the mist behind her when she realized that the sound of the river was on her left side, not her right. Yet she could swear she was going in the same direction.

She was beginning to suspect that direction didn't matter to the Mists that had infiltrated Riverbend.

But the Mists were dissolving now, opening before her like a gauzy curtain disappearing in shreds. The smell of old, stale smoke came to her, and charcoal, and the air tasted of ashes.

In front of her was a gnarled pile of blackened wood, shards and boards, some tumbled to the ground, some reaching up to the sky as if in appeal. It took her a few seconds to realize what it was.

It was the charred remains of a plantation house. She recognized the burnt rounds that had once been proud pillars, the hollows, still studded with broken, melted glass where windows once looked out. Around the house was a dead zone where the grass had burned and where a few privets stood, their leaves brown and curled. There was a haze over the structure, as if smoke still rose from its entrails and Fanny wondered if embers still glowed deep underneath.

Another shock of recognition, close upon the first when she realized the ruins had been a house. It was
her
house.