Few came to Merrick just to see Brother Thorne, but fewer left without paying him a visit. His shack on the promenade drew the curious as well as the devout. Children splashed in the surf as their parents bantered with the eternal prophet, the temporarily embarassed messiah, or whoever he was doing business as today.
There he was, grinning and giving the camera a thumbs-up with his other arm around a blank-eyed woman who had never heard of him. Her friends cheered as the shutter snapped. “You came all the way from Sute?” he said, grabbing a book from the table in front of the shack. “Signed copy. On the house.” It was his autobiography, Spread Those Words!
“Thanks,” she said, being a good sport about the whole thing.
“Brother,” said an intense-looking young man, “why put Rabb’s The Cathedral of Ego beside your own works? It’s one of the most hostile books ever written about you. It’s a complete hatchet job.”
He gave the young man a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “My friend, I believe in holding nothing back. You must know the man I was to understand the man I am.” The hatchet job sold better than all of his own books put together, and he needed the money. Plus, the current edition included that exclusive interview with him in which he subtly dismissed every one of Rabb’s accusations. It was one of the advantages of outliving your critics.
“How are you going to die this time?” someone yelled out, drawing hard looks and few hisses.
Thorne took it in stride. “Well, certainly not from eating at Maggie’s Crab Shack! Right here on the promenade, they’re the perfect place to take the family for dinner after a long day at the beach.” He had a cross-promotional deal with Maggie, who had his posters plastered all over her restaurant. A wave of laughter and applause greeted the plug. Even his most ardent followers understood that he had to make a living.
It beats the alternative, he would tell anyone who complained. He was older than anyone here. He was older than the seaside town that he called home. He was older than the hills that surrounded it. He had come back from the dead two hundred and eight times so far. He didn’t have the answers to the big mysteries. He only knew what lay beyond them.
Most days he volunteered at the local hospital, chatting with patients, keeping up the spirits of the infirm and the bedridden, trying not to make too many promises about the worlds yet to come. New on the ward today was a middle-aged woman on the second floor; a tourist, the nurse at the desk told him, injured in a traffic accident. Her name was Mel.
She regarded him with a sour expression as he swept into her room, clocking him right away as a holy man. “Which god are you shilling for?”
“None,” he said, dropping into the chair beside her bed, “they’re all dead.”
The look on her face was worth it. She was alone in the room, the other bed empty and stripped of sheets. This combined with the late afternoon light coming through the yellow blinds gave the room the sense of something abandoned and forgotten about. Mel herself was brunette and a little ruddy, from what little he could see of her.
“Wasn’t expecting that.”
“It’s true. I’m completely freelance.” He reached into his knapsack and pulled out his merchandise. “You’ll find all the details in my autobiography, as well as my personal testament, tips for a better life, and even a few recipes.”
Mel looked from the book cover to his grin and back again, regaining some of her earlier distaste. “I was warned about you.”
“And rightfully so.” He stuffed the book back into the knapsack. It never hurt to test the waters, but he did have a job to do here. “As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a member of the local clergy, or near enough that they let me into the ward. I can help you with little things. Get you books, records if you like, even run small errands. Or just a chat, if you’re up for it.”
“How about healing the sick?” she said with a smirk, though without any hint of acidity.
“Done. You’re healing.” He winked. “Traffic accident? Really? How do you get into a high-speed collision in Merrick?”
“Some asshole ran over my foot.” Her leg moved under the covers and she grimaced. “I’ll walk again, so they tell me. But I doubt I’ll ever enjoy it.”
“Ah,” said Thorne, “I am sorry, Mel. Truly.” He reached over to pat her hand and changed his mind at the last minute, giving the mattress an affectionate tap instead. His fingers played over the beige coverlet for a moment as if he were trying to wring music out of it. “Want me to get the prick who did it?”
She giggled like a child. “You’re not serious. You’re not, are you?”
“I am a committed pacifist, I’m afraid. But I can be one hell of a nuisance.”
“I’ll bet.” Her smile was fading, but she was beginning to relax. “Maybe it’s just as well. Getting my foot run over, I mean. Now I’ve got an excuse to do nothing.”
“That’s pretty standard for a vacation.”
“Oh, I’m not here for a good time.”
“Why are you here, Mel?”
She glanced at his loose tunic and his purple scarf and for a moment he thought she was going to bust out that oldest of gags. That’s what I want you to tell ME, holy man. Instead, she just sighed.
“I have to get rid of my mother’s bones.”
Most of the beachfront properties in Merrick didn’t come with easements, so when the beachgoers flocked to their backyards they had to grit their teeth and bear it. Mel’s mother, on the other hand, had bought a place with title to the shoreline. It was a crappy little strip of grassy sand, but it was private. Thorne noted the single beach chair facing the ocean and the table beside it and nodded in satisfaction. She’d had a good retirement.
She had also had a mild case of dementia, according to Mel, who had become concerned about her living alone. Her father hadn’t been in the picture for decades and her mother had seen little point in making new friends. Mel had fretted and tried to make plans and then one morning had arrived to find her mother wandering the beach, calling out for her. Where have you been, Mel? It’s time for school! Plans had to be moved forward.
The house was two stories and not nearly as glassed-up as most of the houses that lined the beach. The builder had intended this one to be lived in, not shown off. Thorne took out the keys that Mel had given him and opened the back door.
The inside was in transition, or so it seemed. Someone had been clearing and packing up the house while also living in it and trying not to add to the clutter. It was Mel, of course, before her accident. There were food packages arranged over the kitchen counter. A box of crackers had been left open. He sealed it tightly. There was a whispering of sorts in the background and he hoped it wasn’t mice.
In the living room he found a couch and some blankets and the first evidence of the problem he’d promised to help Mel with. On the sideboard was a human skull that appeared to be caught in the act of flying apart.
Fascinated, he knelt down in front of it. The skull had been expertly disassembled into its separate bones and mounted back into place, but with a little extra space to allow each to be examined and turned and rotated. He’d seen something like this before: that museum in Piedmont? That had been three hundred years ago so it probably wasn’t worth making the trip to see if it was still there.
He turned the polished wooden base around and found the maker’s mark stamped in brass. L Bouie. It was indeed the work of Lisa Bouie, mother of Mel. She was an anatomist, Mel had told him with a roll of her eyes. Spent her whole life working with bones. Bones all over the house. I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was in college. I’m not bitter, of course.
A staircase led up to the second floor. Thorne put the skull down with care and went to the landing. Whatever that whispering was, it was stronger here. He turned his head, trying to catch any sense in the sound, but there didn’t seem to be any. Possibly it was just the hiss of the waves resonating in some odd way through the house. He shrugged and hopped up the stairs.
On the top landing he found a bedroom to one side, sparsely decorated but cozy and comforting in a manner familiar to anyone who lived alone. It was a one-person nest. He stood at the door for a moment and got to know Lisa Bouie a little better, then crossed the hall and opened the other door.
The whispering became a roar, but that wasn’t what immediately drew his attention.
The walls were bones. Yes, they were plaster and wood somewhere underneath, but in all practical senses they were bones, the scaffolding of all vertebrates. Hooks and rods had been expertly drilled into the studs at regular points to create a support matrix on which specimens could be placed and replaced with ease. Glancing around the room, Thorne was able to pick out a wing, a canine skull, the ribcage of some large animal.
He was picking up a cadence in the whispering roar, not quite speech but something resembling it, but that wasn’t what drew his attention next.
None of the forms that hung on the walls were of creatures that he had ever seen in his life, and at first he wondered if he was simply ignorant of life’s diversity. The one that looked as if a moth had expanded in size and converted to endoskeletonism: some variety of tropical bird? That large feline form with the fins: a seal from unfamiliar shores? There, on the workbench in mid-assembly: a previously unknown species of hominid?
It was the workbench that tipped him off. He walked into the room, stepping carefully, as if into a temple where he did not know the rituals. The hominid was missing multiple ribs and its right leg, and its coccyx extended into a whip-like tail. It was short, shorter than himself, but nothing about its structure suggested a monkey or a great ape. He examined the bench top for diagrams or sketches, but found nothing. Whatever had guided Lisa Bouie in the construction of this specimen, it seemed to have come from within.
The whispering roar was quite insistent now. With some reluctance he turned from the bench and looked around for the source, expecting to find a mistuned radio or novelty noisemaker. He made three complete turns before realizing that the noise was non-directional. In confusion, he clapped his hands over his ears. The noise continued, undiminished. It was in his head, not his ears.
Thorne grinned, suddenly intrigued. Here was a mystery. He ran from the room, closed the door, and nodded in satisfaction as the noise level dropped. It was not entirely physical, but it could be attenuated. He opened the door again and examined the workbench, the shelves above it, and the drawers below it.
A thick slab of wood, probably intended as a base for mounting a large specimen, was jammed into the bottom drawer. He maneuvered it up and out, straining with the tips of his fingers, then held it out at arms length like a shield. As he spun in place, he listened to the noise in his head, and when he turned toward the corner on the left side of the door he was rewarded with a faint dip in volume. He inched toward the corner with his shield, moving it this way and that, until he was certain of the source.
It was remarkable for being unremarkable: a human finger bone. Not the tip but lower down, with a characteristic rounded notch at one end. It was resting on the corner shelf, unlabeled, unmounted, though with a definite sense of having been placed there intentionally. He peered at it from multiple angles, then reached out to touch it.
“It’s marvelous work, of course.” Thorne handed over the pad of paper he had stolen from the front desk and scribbled over. “Before you start throwing things out, please call a few people on that list. Yvette lives in Castleon; that’s right down the road; there’s her tellme code. She can get some other people involved.”
Mel frowned at the scribbles. “Do any of these people own dumps?”
“Come on, now.” Thorne smiled, or tried to. “The museums and galleries on that list would do the work of packing and shipping the specimens. It’s a win all around, Mel.”
Mel sighed and shifted, easing down into the hospital bed as if searching for comfort. “No.”
“If you don’t want to deal with them, I would be happy to act as your agent.”
That drew a suspicious look. “Would you now.”
“For the same fee that we agreed on.”
“Then why not just do the work that we agreed on?”
It was his turn to sigh. Yes, the deal had been for him to pick up where she had left off, packing up the specimens for disposal. The fee had been more than enough to compensate for a few days of lost sales of his books and signed photographs. But he had expected a house full of inexpertly assembled bone collages, not the work of an artist.
His response came out angrier than he had intended. “I think her final pieces deserve better than to be treated like garbage.”
“You’re awfully possessive about someone you’ve never met.” Mel’s smile held bitterness. “You’re not talking about some undiscovered genius. Her work’s already in museums. And schools, and in hospitals. All that weird shit she made toward the end, that was the dementia. And she hated them. She cried about it! Everything she did came out weird and she hated it. You think she’d want to put those in front of people? As her legacy? Not a chance.”
Thorne started to reply, hesitated, then started over in a gentler tone. “I’m sorry. That was terribly presumptious of me, and I apologize.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, waving her hand, mollified. “You didn’t know. She was skilled. I know it. But none of that stuff up there holds any value for her. I get that it’s sad to throw it away. But that’s what happens to things nobody wants.”
“Of course.” He decided to switch to his next topic. “Did you ever notice an odd noise when you went into her workroom?”
“No,” she said, but she was clearly bothered by the question. “I mean, the sea’s in your ears the whole time. You’re going to hear things.”
“Of course,” he said again. “I don’t suppose she kept records of where her specimens came from?”
“She might have.” Mel shrugged, but there was an edge to her voice. “Why?”
“Just curious.”
“That’s not what I would call a curious question.” Her suspicions were aroused once more. “That is what I would call an up to something question. Look, if this is about holy relics or whatever, I don’t care if you walk away with a bone in your pocket. Or your tunic. Whatever. Tell everyone it’s Saint Ding-Dong’s dick bone and they can kiss it for luck.”
“I assure you,” said Thorne, with no small dignity, “that I would never–”
“You would.” She held his gaze. “You have. I was warned about you, remember.”
“Ah,” said Thorne, but he had no idea what to say after that, and shut his mouth.
“I accept your apology.” She held out her hand. “Now either do the job or hand over the keys.”
He stared at her hand for a moment, then nodded in resignation. The life of a holy man was steeped in humility, even at the best of times.
Pain flared in Thorne’s lower back as he hefted the garbage can, and he groaned and grit his teeth as he set it back down on the floor. He rubbed the small of his back and sighed, thinking of all the physical labor he had done in his life and how it never seemed to be enough. Age was catching up to him once more, and soon the cycle would restart.
His early incarnations had usually ended in the heretic’s fire, or at the wrong end of a rifle, or from the starvation and exposure that came with the life of an itinerant monk. Though he hadn’t suffered a violent death in ages, the sense of the inevitable end creeping up still made his stomach tighten. He had no death wish, but to be resurrected endlessly, forever the degenerate messiah of Rabb’s miserable polemic? There was no purpose in it. If he could not give absolution, if he could not lead others to redemption, what was the point?
He glanced over at the whispering finger bone. He had taken it from the workroom and set it on the table in the living room, where he was laying out specimens for disposal. The floor was draped in old bedsheets and criscrossed with odd skeletons and looked like a crime in progress. Rigid rods held most of the specimens together, making disposal a chore unless he wanted to get creative with a sledgehammer. Even knowing that no one cared was not enough to convince him to do this.
He was trying to work out how many of them he could fit in his shack on the promenade, though he was not planning to dismantle them to sell as relics to rubes, as Mel had insinuated. They just appealed to him, both as art and as something deeper that he had almost grasped.
He took a deep breath and hefted the garbage can once more. It contained all of the odds and ends of bone that had not made it into specimens. He carried the can outside, listening to the dry rattle of loose bones against the metal. The whispering deep within his mind faded as he exited the house and was lost in the crash of surf against the shoreline.
Damp rags and papers littered the ground. Mel had missed at least one pickup, he guessed, and had overstuffed the can so that some of its contents had spilled out. He glanced over the trash as he put down the can, noting a sodden pamphlet: EASY BREEZES REST HOME. From the photograph it looked like a resort, though the cheerful men and women on the cover wore the uniforms of nurses rather than waiters. Certainly there were less pleasant places to wait out the end of your life.
He wished Lisa Bouie a pleasant wait. She had kept extensive records of all her transactions and in one ledger he had found an entry for 1 (one) proximal phalange, homo sapiens, and measurements that allowed him to confirm it as the whispering bone. It had come from a port in the town of Eich. He had been there, though not recently.
As he rounded the corner of the house, the gentle murmurs started again, the sensations taking on additional dimensions. Shapes twisted through the air like the ripples over a bonfire and brushed against his skin. He followed them back into the living room where they darted toward the weird anatomies spread across the bedsheets. They swept in and out and over and through the skeletons as if trying to bring them to life. He watched, entranced.
The shapes slowed, settled, grew substantial. When he saw how they lined up with the specimens on the floor, another little mystery was solved. He hurried to wrap the specimens for transport. One last mystery to go, and he thought he already might have the solution.
The Easy Breezes Rest Home was tucked into the woods far outside of Merrick. Thorne wondered if this was so that escapees would simply expire in the forest rather than causing trouble in town, though he didn’t ask any of the attendants to confirm this. He simply presented himself as a cleric with a free day. Did they have any residents who needed cheering up? Without much effort he was able to convince them to give him a directory and the run of the place.
He found Lisa Bouie at a table in the walled garden, not out of sight of the attendants but removed enough to provide a sense of privacy. Four people could have sat at the table, laughing, playing cards, sharing memories, but she was alone. He took a seat beside her and waited, studying her.
She was pale and rail-thin, not quite an older version of Mel, though the jawline was the same and the white hairs might once have been brunette. Her expression was empty of anything. She seemed to be frozen in place, waiting for someone to come along and wind her up or change her batteries. Hoping he was right, Thorne took the finger bone from his tunic and set it on the table in front of her.
Lisa blinked and swallowed, but her eyes did not change their focus. Well, he didn’t have all day. He gently took her hand and placed it on the bone. She did not resist. When her palm touched its surface, her hand clenched as if in reflex. She inhaled. Her mouth quivered. Her eyes twitched to and fro, and locked onto him.
He smiled, welcoming her back to the world. “Hello, Lisa.”
Her eyes registered confusion, then the shock of recognition, which was another kind of confusion. “You,” she said, with obvious effort. “That shack on the promenade. Some kind of monk.”
“That’s right.” He nodded in encouragement. “I’m Brother Thorne.”
She looked around, as if looking for someone she expected to be there. “Mel?”
“Mel isn’t here. She’s in the hospital. Nothing serious, but she’ll need to stay in bed for a bit.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
He couldn’t quite say that she had sent him, so he didn’t. “I’m helping her out.”
“I see.” There was skepticism in her voice and in her eyes. She cleared her throat and coughed, her hand flying from the table to her mouth. When she opened her eyes again, they had lost focus. She brought her hand back down to the table slowly, as if trying to remember where she had dropped something, then noticed the bone and snatched it up. Her hand clenched, and shook with the effort.
“You’ve been like this for a long time,” said Thorne, trying to be gentle.
Her voice was soft but clear. “I was all right as long as I stuck to my routine. But Mel showed up unannounced. Or I forgot she was coming, and then I forgot where I put this.” She rapped the table with the fist that held the bone. “But you knew to bring it. How?”
“You might say that I’ve seen it before,” said Thorne, dodging the question. “I assume you’ve had it for some time.”
She nodded, slowly. “It was in a package of unsorted bones. I would get those from time to time. I used them for practice. Trying out different techniques. But this one, I put it aside and forgot about it.” She looked down, suddenly bashful, like a little girl. “And one day it started talking to me. And I saw things. Creatures. I knew I was losing my mind, but not like this. I thought of drawing them, painting them, but I’ve never been an artist. I only have my craft.”
“You captured them well. They’re beautiful.”
Lisa scoffed at that, rolling her head and sending her wisps of white hair fluttering. “Silly things.” She still could not look at him. “Dreams. Nonsense.”
“Do you want to know the story?”
She looked up at him at last, regaining her earlier firmness. “I am not buying anything from you.”
“I have nothing to sell,” said Thorne, who was enjoying himself too much to be offended, “except the truth. And I’m giving that away. Let me ease your mind and I’ll be on my way.”
Her mouth was tight and her eyes were still hard, but there was a subtle shift in her expression and he knew he had her. He sat back in the chair and held his hands above the table, palms up.
“When I die, I go to the Forest to wait for the next cycle to begin, and I wait in the shadows of the great mountains that stretch beyond the skies, and in the broken temples of those who came before. The dead gods behind all of our living faiths.”
He paused to gauge her reaction. She clearly wasn’t a fan of the liturgical style, and he decided to shift to a more casual mode of expression. He dropped his hands to the table and leaned foward, as if speaking to an intimate friend.
“I don’t know much about the gods, except that they’re dead. I explored the temple ruins and found writing on the walls, which I couldn’t read. I have found images, though. Drawings and carvings of day to day life. It’s all in my autobiography, if you’re interested. No? No.”
“Get to the point, please.”
“Some of these images,” said Thorne, moving on, “depict the little creatures that play in the Forest.”
Lisa perked up at this, though it wasn’t clear if she believed any of it. “Creatures?”
“I get the sense that they were once pets. In the drawings, they are smaller, and less varied. Smart enough to amuse their keepers. But one day, however it happened, they were left on their own.” He took a deep breath. “Some would say they learned to take care of themselves. I suspect it was more that they learned to take care of each other. They grew. They changed. They spread out and became their own things. Like when big trees fall, and the full weight of the sun falls on the little ones.”
“Little gods,” said Lisa, with a faraway look.
“Maybe. I don’t think they’ve decided yet.” He caught her eye. “Sometimes when I’m in the Forest, waiting for the world to swallow me up again, they come to me. They are not quite animals and not exactly people, but they can show love. I wondered if they might ever reach into the world to show it. And it seems that they have at last. They really must have liked your sculptures.”
“They liked my sculptures, so they influenced me to make them? That’s backwards, even you must see that.”
“There’s no time in the Forest.” He rose from the table. “And not much left in the day. My public awaits, Lisa.”
“Wait.” She was slowly catching up. “What about this bone? The finger? Where did it come from?”
“From Eich, as you well know. Nice little place, or it was the last time I was there. That was during the Years of Ease. At least that’s what they came to be called.” He smiled. “Some historians have a brutal sense of humor, don’t they?”
“The Years of Ease,” she said, frowning as if trying to recall a difficult lesson.
“They hanged me as a heretic, just for a change. I assumed they threw the body into a mass grave, but it seems the anatomists had their way with me first. What? That’s my finger, Lisa. Hold on to it for me, all right? As long as you can.”
Sometimes once the day was over and the crowds had abandoned the beaches and the only sound was the sea lapping at the sand, he would walk in its wake and wonder if he could follow the line of the coast all the way back to his own vanishing footsteps. Tonight, he was thinking of love, and how it could follow a strange path of its own, all the way around the Forest and back to its source.
He waved a hand in the air, listening to the roar and hiss of the waves, and watched as the shadows danced around him. One dove into the surf, and for a moment, the water took on a new shape.
He laughed. “Give me a knife. Who needs a little finger?” A wave splashed over his footprints, but the sand held their imprints. “Not bad for a first miracle.”