The Throne of Bones Read online

  I raised the sword. The baleful, yellow eyes rolled round to glare at me. The white arm streaked with mold and dirt swept backward, bearing the back of a gigantic fist at its end. My face went suddenly numb. I remember being lifted into the air, but I don’t remember landing.

  * * * *

  I woke. I rolled onto my back. Seeing the moon helped me remember. It was large as before, and as low. No time had passed.

  My enemy was upon me!

  I jerked upright, flailing about for my sword, but I was in no danger. The moon now hung behind the city of the living. It had fully sailed its majestic course over my blind face.

  The rank weeds lay trampled in a wide circle, as by a fight, or by inexhaustible lovers. A stench of rut and rot thickened the air I tried to breathe. My sword lay broken in three pieces, contemptuously, as if over the monster’s knee. I pictured Umbra pleading for my life as I lay helpless, and I screamed at the shame of it.

  An echo of my scream surprised me, and I turned to see that the door of the tomb yawned open on broken hinges. I mounted one, then two of the cracked steps for a closer look, but the interior was utterly black. For such an old tomb, one whose occupants had long gone to feed the bloated oak that had burst through its roof, the smell hanging at the black doorway was unaccountably vile.

  “Umbra?” I called, and I heard the echo again. The flat emptiness of the tomb gave her name a sardonic edge. Retrieving the pieces of my sword, I wondered why this disused ground should be littered with so many fragments of relatively new bones. In case something watched me from the tomb, I refrained from picking them up for a closer look. I would return to this place with a light, and with an unbroken weapon.

  As for Umbra, she could lie with the worms in hell, and I was well rid of her. Then why did tears roll down my cheeks? When I wiped them I felt crusted blood and winced at the pain of a split lip and probably broken nose. I laughed. Ghouls were real.

  I didn’t go to the stable in order to look for her. If she had not been spirited away to the underground, as a woman taken by the fairies of ballads, I assumed she would have the sense to avoid me by mundane means. I went there to clean out my museum. I would open the hayloft door and shove it all out to burn. But why bother? I would burn the stable with its contents. I felt the need of a grand gesture to shut my past behind me.

  When I had climbed to the loft and lit the lamp, Umbra sat up in bed and stared at me. The duvet slipped from breasts abraded by coarse grass. Her lips were swollen from eager kisses, her arms bruised by clutching hands. Her eyes looked even darker than plums as she watched me.

  I said, “If Dr. Porfat’s theory is correct, you should be well on your way to full ghoulhood.” My tone was mild, but as I spoke I was pulling down skulls from the shelves and stamping on them. They were hard to break.

  “What do you want from me?” she screamed. “You’re the ghoul, you! You want to devour me. You watch me with your great, knowing eyes, trying to crawl inside my head and paw my soul, like some nasty boy poking at a spider in a bottle.”

  “I wonder what you ever could have seen in me,” I said, kicking a tormented mummy into yellow bones and powder.

  “I thought you looked like a ghoul, I thought you laughed like one. Oh, was I ever wrong! You? You’re a pig like all the rest of them, a squeamish, prissy pig, tiptoeing into tombs and out again with a girlish shudder. You’re nothing but a sneak-thief too timid to steal from the living.”

  I guess her words hit home. Without forming the intention, I hurled a dried head. It struck her hard in the eye, but it didn’t stop her shrieking tirade. “You aren’t fit to infest the bristles on a ghoul’s balls, you with your dry, pecky kisses and your pathetic little pecker! Why don’t you go and stick it in your precious, filthy-minded old bitch of a mother, that’s what you both probably want—”

  I seized something to hit her. I didn’t realize, until its point had slipped into one side of her neck and peeked from the other, that it was a baling-hook. I had to laugh at her goggling astonishment. When she tried to spout even more venom, her mouth gushed blood. She thrashed wildly as a gaffed fish and blubbered inarticulate words.

  I wrenched the hook forward, tearing her throat out, and pounded her face with my fist until her struggles became a convulsion that bent her body upward in a jerking arc. The quilt slipped away, revealing the bruises on her legs and the inflammation of her overtaxed sex. I jammed the hook into it and ripped a hole more fit for a ghoul, though I then claimed it as my own. I regretted that she felt so little of this, for her eyes were dead as glass before I had finished.

  “That was very nice,” I said in her own, detached tone.

  * * * *

  Mother put out the lamp when she entered a short while later, for morning outshone its light. The noise must have been terrible indeed to draw her into the dark tangle of junk that filled the lower floor.

  “I heard you laughing,” she said. “I knew something was wrong.”

  She studied the body. She surveyed the disordered collection of necrophiliac trophies, whose existence I doubt she had suspected. She said, “You’ve ruined a perfectly good duvet.”

  I said, “She deceived me with ... someone else. I went mad.”

  “Better you than her. All the Vendrens are crazy, you know. It was only a matter of time before she murdered you in your bed, or before one of her inbred, degenerate brothers did it.”

  She arranged Umbra in a mockery of peace and tucked the quilt over her. “Whatever you do, don’t add her to your collection,” she said. “You must bury her as quickly as possible, then give out your story about her infidelity. That may satisfy the Vendrens, especially if we grant her the honor of proper burial in our family tomb. But we don’t want them to see her body.”

  “You have some experience with this sort of thing,” I said, referring to that which was never mentioned, the family massacre.

  She tried to wither me with her displeasure and stare me down, but I was no longer the little boy who persisted in repeating a naughty word. She dropped her eyes first. She said as she made to leave, “I have to organize the servants to clean up your mess.”

  “It’s time we spoke of this,” I said, blocking her way to the ladder.

  “It has nothing at all to do with you,” she said. “Get out of my way!”

  “Nothing at all to do with me? That my own grandparents and my father were taken from me, one way or another, by violence?”

  “With this, I mean, with what you’ve done to your crazy whore of a wife. That’s your only problem now. Keep your mind on that, why don’t you?”

  “And why should it have anything to do with this? Keep talking, Mother, you’re telling me things. Did you imagine that I believed I killed Umbra because Grandfather happened to be a ghoul?”

  That was no random shot. I had at last connected the face of Umbra’s lover with the sculpted head it had caricatured: my grandfather’s. I had no idea why, or how, but Mother could tell me some of it, that was plain from her dismay. She rolled her eyes with the wild stare of a panicked horse, looking for some other exit from the loft, but I gripped her frail shoulders.

  “No!” she cried. “That’s not true, that’s vile to say that! He suffered from a ... a growth disorder, that’s all, his bones kept growing, he became grotesque, and his mind was affected. His own father had endowed the Institute in the hope they would find a cure for him, but he wanted no part of those mountebanks, he wanted his palace back, as I do, as you do. He was like you. He had a scientific turn of mind. He collected specimens from the graveyard, too, the bones of fellow-sufferers.”

  “A ghoul,” I groaned, dropping my hands and turning away. “Sleithreethra!”

  “No!” she shrieked, making the protective sign. “No, he wasn’t!”

  “He nevertheless murdered all the others, didn’t he?”

  Her escape route was clear now, but she didn’t take it. She said, “We locked him up most of the time, toward the end, but he had his good days.
He seemed entirely his old self on the night we had him down to dinner, but he complained about the food, especially the saddle of lamb. He would chew some and spit it out, making truly horrible faces, then chew some more and spit it out.... We could see he was working himself up to a violent state, and Mother was about to call the servants to take him back to his room, but.... He said, ‘I’ll show you what kind of meat I crave!’, and he seized your father. There was nothing we could do. It was over before I could rise from my chair, and with those jaws of his, and those hideous hands—he tore your father apart before my eyes, and ate him.

  “Mother tried to stop him, but he struck her just once and broke her neck. The servants, too, he fought them off and killed two of them without interrupting his ... his meal.

  “I had a dagger at my belt, a silver dagger that he himself had given me, and I plunged it into his back, but he clawed at it and pulled it out. And then he turned to me. I thought it was the end, I couldn’t move, but he extended the dagger to me, hilt first, and said in his most charming way—it was ghastly, to recognize his normal, courtly self behind that face—he said, ‘I appreciate your effort to help me, dear girl, but it won’t do any good.’ And he laughed.

  “He had taught me to use the dagger, to stab upward for the heart, and that’s what I did. He was no ghoul, just a mortal man. He fell down dead.”

  “You’re sure you killed him?”

  “Glyphtard, murdering one’s father is not the same as locking a door or putting out a light. I’m sure.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. Ghoul, indeed! The poor man was ill. No one would have believed that, though, from the condition of your father. They say that a madman has the strength of ten, and it must be true of the appetite, as well. We buried what little remained of him in the garden, and we told everyone that the intruder made off with his body.”

  “So that everyone thinks he was the murderer.”

  “Yes, but he was a Fand, don’t you see? If people wanted to believe that, it was no stain on the honor of the Glyphts.”

  * * * *

  Organizing the servants was no simple task, for Mother chose only the oldest and presumably most trustworthy to bathe and anoint Umbra and sew her shroud. They doddered, wailed, gossiped, sent one of their number to fetch the water they had neglected to bring, went to find the woman who had gone to fetch the water, misplaced the holy oils, lunched, lost their needles, wandered off, napped, and had her ready for burial by sundown. In a fury of impatience by then, I nearly slipped by telling Mother I didn’t need it when she gave me the key to the family tomb.

  * * * *

  I dismissed the slaves, far younger men purchased with my new wealth, who had carried Umbra to the tomb and laid her in the vacant sarcophagus that had been meant for my father. I told them I would watch over her that night. One of them warned me to lock the door against ghouls. I think my laugh at this offended his sense of decency.

  Alone, I stared at Grandfather, he at me. I had no doubt of it: howsoever bulged and extruded by a massive growth of bone and teeth, howsoever dehumanized by owls’ orbs of glowing yellow, this was the face I had seen last night. The ghoul that Mother had killed had risen from his stone coffin, dined on the body of his wife, and gone off to join his kind. Grandfather’s life as a human being had spanned more than six decades; but after two decades more as a ghoul he was still strong enough to bat me aside like a puppy, virile enough to satisfy my wife.

  “Vengeance,” I said, patting his stone cheek. “Vengeance, indeed!” I whipped off my cloak to veil his bust. After a moment I covered Grandmother’s, too.

  I cast aside the lid of Umbra’s sarcophagus and tore open the shroud that had cost so much time and trouble. Even by the liberal standards for a corpse she was no longer lovely. Aside from the marks of my ripping and pounding, garishly but ineffectively cosmeticized, her flesh had gone puffy and yellow. As the servants had warned it would, deploring the way we rushed them, rigor mortis had seized her. Her knees were drawn up and her hands clawed as if to ward me off, her lips were lifted from her splintered teeth in a defiant snarl. I certainly knew what a dead body felt like, but I was shocked that these breasts should be so cold when I cupped them in my hands, that these nipples should not rise when I played with them.

  I heard myself sigh, perhaps from regret, as I abandoned that diversion and opened the bag I had brought, not my usual tools, but a collection I had prepared while the servants were laying her out. I took a boning-knife I had sharpened like a razor and cut between her breasts, then forced the flesh aside to bare her ribs. It was impossible to crack them open in the cramped quarters of the coffin. I rolled up one of Mother’s extravagant carpets so as not to soil it and hauled Umbra out, dumping her on the tiled floor. Then I forced her ribcage wide and cut her heart loose from its tubing.

  As a bitter joke, I kissed the heart I had been unable to move before setting it by, but I wasn’t defiling her corpse just to amuse myself. An old wives’ tale had it that a ghoul’s body must be exposed to sunlight for a full day before it can be called truly dead. Having heard Mother’s story of Grandfather’s death, having seen him in the filth he now used for flesh, I was willing to credit that belief and anything else, no matter how bizarre, that I had ever heard about those vermin. According to an even less credible tale, a ghoul can for a time assume the identity of a corpse whose heart and brain it eats. I would take no chances. The ghouls had had enough fun with my wife, and she with them. I had brought a stone crock for her organs, and I would take them home with me to lock away in a safe place.

  I cut a ring beneath her still-lovely auburn curls. Her scalp squeaked a protest when I ripped it off. I peeled her face down, no great loss now, to reveal the raw bone beneath. Sawing her skull was arduous work, as it was slippery and hard to hold, and I wanted my cut to be precise. I would leave no slightest morsel of her brain to amuse a ghoul.

  My hands by now were smeared with clotted gore, and when I paused to rest I was horrified to catch myself absently licking them clean. I had never tasted human blood, or the congealed slime that was like Umbra’s blood, and I wondered why it didn’t sicken me. I deliberately licked my hand. Except for the idea of it, I found nothing to dislike.

  I turned her over, revealing a huge bruise of pooled blood on her back. I had to stamp on her buttocks and crack some of her bones to compose her more comfortably for sawing the back of her head, but by then I was too weary to go on. In the hope of refreshing myself, I reached for the food I had put by.

  I wish I could make my thoughts and feelings at that time clear, but they weren’t clear then, nor are they now. I had seen the great love of my life—yes, she was—polluted by the foulest of fiends, I had been beaten senseless, I had murdered her that morning, I had heard and guessed more than enough about my heritage to drive anyone mad, and now I was violating her body in accord with a superstition I would have laughed at yesterday: it would be inadequate to say I was overwrought.

  I may have been asleep for a moment without knowing it, because the final horror began just like a dream: I was eating something that I assumed I had brought with me, but I couldn’t remember bringing anything, nor could I say what I was eating. Instead of looking in my hand, as any sane, waking man would have, I pondered the question while continuing to chew and swallow.

  I put the food aside and resumed sawing, stopping every now and then for another bite. Only when I had sawed off the top of Umbra’s skull did I know in a dim way that I had devoured her heart. I began to scoop out gobbets of her brain and eat them, too.

  * * * *

  I had no idea why I was wearing my husband’s clothes. The sleeves were too long, they got in the way of ... what I was doing.

  It couldn’t be his stupid joke, as I thought when I came to myself and noticed the clothes, because I was the one doing it: I was the one eating this unknown woman’s corpse. The mere fact didn’t repel me. I had wanted to join Exudimord in his feasts. I had wanted to sha
re his pleasures. But the things he offered me always stank and crawled with maggots, and my weak, human stomach would rebel. Not even his promise that I would become a ghoul if I acted like one had given me the strength to overcome my despised nature.

  Why had he never given me fresh meat like this? It was delicious! He must have been testing me.

  And I knew he must have arranged this treat. Had I passed his tests at last? “Exudimord?” I called. Sleithreethra! Just saying his name made me squirm inside, made me moist and ready for him.

  He wasn’t here. No one was, just me and the corpse, inside a little box I identified from murals celebrating their fatuousness as the tomb of the Glyphts. Lord Glyphtard! I had to laugh. If the lowest of Vendrens pissed on the highest of Glyphts, the stream would disperse to a golden dew before it fell far enough to touch him, and he would think he had been kissed by the fairies.

  Living near the cemetery, collecting those amusing relics, he had duped me into believing him something more than human, but he was only a cheap tradesman, posing as a nobleman and playing at ghoul. I tore off his hateful clothes.

  The clothes were his best, Fand-green silk and lace, that he might wear to a ball, but—I pulled off the hat and confirmed my suspicion, that it was one of those black things with a flat crown you wore to funerals. His mother? I spat out my mouthful. No, it wasn’t she: I couldn’t be absolutely sure, since the body had been ripped and disjointed and spread in a circle around me, but I believed this had been a much younger woman. At length I found confirmation of this, not one of the crone’s calloused hoofs, but an intact foot almost as pretty as my own.

  However hard it was not to, I shouldn’t hate Glyphtard’s mother. The bitch had unwittingly made my wildest dreams come true. Spying on me, as always, she had seen me coming home from the cemetery one morning and had implored me not to go near the oldest section at night, and especially nowhere near the tomb of the ancient pornographer, Chalcedor. A particularly vile ghoul, devoted to that writer’s lubricities in his human life and now consumed by an itch for young women that he could seldom satisfy with living ones, was reputed to lurk beneath the tomb. One day, perhaps, I would tell her how right she’d been, and thank her.