Bones and Heart

A Night and Nothing Short Tale

By Katherine Harbour

T
he spirit-things took whatever shape they desired. This one, for years, had pretended to be a comely young man, luring the desperate and the curious to their demise. It had left the corpse of a wealthy merchant’s daughter in a London ruin, and Jack had seen her remains. The dark mass Jack’s father had exorcised had murdered her—the spirit had been a young man until his father had invoked poetry and flung silver dust into its face. Jack, who at sixteen had resented being left behind and had followed his father from the inn room to witness the exorcism, had been hiding and had watched the young man break apart into a living shadow.

Chasing the spirit now, Jack wished two things: that he hadn’t worn so many talismans, which jingled faintly whenever he moved; and that he still had his Rambler bicycle, because he really could have used it for this. Not more than an hour ago, his father had driven the creature from the city ruin, hoping to trap it in the spirit bottle he’d bought with the merchant’s money.

The London night was silver with fog that muffled the sounds of noisy pubs and horse-drawn carriages. There weren’t many people out at this hour in this part of the city, but Jack had a pistol if the human element ever became a problem. His grandfather’s top hat and the greatcoat his mother had made for him
concealed his physicality, but he knew the thing he trailed could identify him in other ways.

The shadow mass, scuttling like a giant spider, had disappeared into a burned-down house. Past the blackened timbers, Jack saw a darkness that was sentient, wily.
Waiting.
His father had let the thing escape after the failure with the bottle. What Jack didn’t understand was . . .
why?

From within the mess of charred timbers, he heard a scream that sent his heart galloping. He gripped the silver dagger in his pocket, his hand sweaty around the pommel.

A girl lunged from the shadows, dark hair veiling her face, her red coat billowing. She fell. When she looked up, Jack saw the terror in her eyes.

He dashed forward, grabbed her hand, and hauled her up just as the thing appeared—a buzzing mass of darkness whose presence burst a vessel in his nostrils and made the air crackle. His father had warned him about this, the disorientation of another reality forcing its way into the true world.
Reassert your own reality.

He and the girl backed away as the shadows twined into a silver-eyed young man with a mournful mouth and a focused routine. The shadow man whispered, “Please, beautiful maiden. Save m—”

“I’m not a maiden.” Jack stabbed the silver blade into its white face.

The mansion sat, menacing on a New Orleans street forgotten by the modern Renaissance. With its shuttered windows and garden shrouded in creepers, haunted by statues from a myriad of mythologies, the abandoned place seemed to whisper:
Stay away.

Jack Fata regarded the relic. As a nearby streetlamp flickered, his comrade, Phouka, walked around her Cadillac parked at the curb and stood beside him. Her eyes glinted an eerie silver.

“Mr. Bones.” Jack’s coat swept around him in a wind riddled with dead leaves and cobwebs. “What a name.”

Phouka, sleek in black suede and motorcycle boots, her auburn hair spikily knotted, tilted her head. “What do you think of his haunt?”

“There’s no glamour. You’d think he’d welcome us by prettifying his lair a bit.”

“It does have that air of ‘Stay-away-or-you’ll-die-a-horrible-death’ chic. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting us?”

Jack began walking. “What does she want with this ghoul?”

“It’s almost All Hallows,” she reminded him.

Sorrow uncurled within the toxic garden flourishing around the hollow that had replaced his heart. “And we wouldn’t want anything to go wrong with that, would we?”

“No, Jack.” Phouka frowned at him. “We wouldn’t.”

“What were you
thinking
?”

Nikolai Hawthorn, who had taken his wife’s surname along with this alternative life, was tossing belongings into a satchel while his son, scowling, crouched on the floor. Jack had been cleaning the equipment—the blessed daggers, talismans, and charms—when he told his father what he’d done.

“I
saved
a girl.”

“You
killed
one of
them.
We’re not supposed to murder them. Only prevent their harm. There are rules, boy, and you’ve broken a major one.” His father shoved a hand through his dark hair, the pewter ring on his forefinger—a hound curled around a sardonyx—catching the light.

“What are
these
for then?” Jack swept a hand over the assortment of daggers his father had collected during his travels: misericordes from Italy, a kuttar from India, and an antique parazonium from Greece. He hadn’t slept since killing the creature in the burned-out house. The green-eyed girl had run away—he didn’t blame her—and the hand in which he’d gripped the dagger was still numb, as if he’d sunk it into a snowbank for hours. Recalling how the spirit mimic’s face had broken beneath the silver blade, and the darkness that had spilled out, he struggled with an urge to retch. “If we don’t kill them, what use are we?
They
kill. They are not spirits—they are
monsters
.”

“Even monsters have friends, Jack. Monsters have
families
.”

“Like Grendel’s mother in Beowulf.” Jack felt a pang, remembering the story his mother had used to read to him. The wound of his mother’s recent death
from illness still bled between them. “You said what you drove out of people were only bad spirits.” Jack rose. “This one was not like the others.
What are you not telling me?
”

“Jack.” His father didn’t raise his head, only said in a voice that meant the discussion was over, “We are leaving.
Now—
”

“
Da.
” Jack indicated the door, his eyes wide.

Nikolai Hawthorn set his hand on the silver revolver engraved with the leaping hounds that were the signature of a famous Italian gun maker. Jack had never seen him use it before.

At his father’s nod, Jack yanked the door open.

The figure on the other side, swathed in a char-black greatcoat and a tricornered hat, kept its face in shadow. It spoke in a low, female voice that pressed against Jack’s eardrums. “I mean you no harm. I am here to ask for your assistance. Only that.”

Jack’s father said, calmly, “I’ve told you . . . I’ll have nothing to do with your kind—”

“How very impolite.” The hatted head turned toward Jack, who felt slicked in ice water as the eyes in the shadowed face gleamed like mirrors. “For your son’s sake, I think you will.”

Jack regarded the door knocker of the New Orleans house with amusement. “A skull. How unique.”

“Maybe it’s to keep Jehovah’s Witnesses away.” Phouka eyed it.

“I can’t imagine”—Jack lifted his gaze to the house’s stained façade—“that would ever be a problem.”

Phouka raised the metal hoop in the skull’s mouth, and let it fall. The resulting
boom
echoed throughout the rattletrap mansion. If Jack had still been mortal, he would have shuddered. Since he wasn’t, he merely said, “That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

The door opened silently, revealing an elegant corridor with crimson walls and a tribe of taxidermy crocodiles attached, upside down, to the ceiling. At the
end of the hall, a chandelier of dingy glass threw splotchy light on a three-foot figure that didn’t move or speak.

Jack exchanged a look with Phouka. He narrowed his eyes at the little shadow, which giggled and pattered away, its child’s gown flashing pale in a strand of light.

“He’s got haunts.” Jack said “haunts” the way someone might say “cockroaches.” “I hate those things.”

“Let’s get this over with.” Phouka adjusted her newsboy cap.

And they stepped into the crimson hall, beneath the upside-down crocodiles.

Nikolai Hawthorn’s visitor kept to the shadows the entire time she spoke with Jack’s father. Jack, listening to his father and the creature out of the darkest fairy tales exchange words, had kept silent.

He now stood in an expensive drawing room, his hands clenched around a Celtic cross made of stone as Nikolai Hawthorn circled a young woman tied to a chair. Even for autumn, the air in the drawing room was tomb cold. The hands of the clock on the mantelpiece were slowly winding backward. Jack’s ears buzzed. Blood had already begun to thread from his left nostril.

The girl, blond and pretty, was as white as the inside of an apple, her lips too red. She smelled of Cuticura soap and Essence of Violets. The thing that had come to their inn room, the thing disguised as a woman with auburn hair, had called this girl one of the blessed, and she was under the shadow woman’s protection. She was infected, the shadow/fairy woman had claimed, by a malevolent spirit that needed to be driven out.

After the fairy creature had left their room, Jack had asked his father:
Are there good ones among them?

No,
his father had grimly replied.
Only those less likely to cause harm.

Tonight, his father didn’t use prayers or chants for his work. Tonight, he held silver bells in one hand and an open poetry book in the other.

The girl’s eyes flew open. Her face took on a ghastly expression, as if something savage peered from behind her skin. Her eyes . . . Jack couldn’t look away
from them . . . those eyes were a laughing, alien silver. The voice that emerged from her was low, prowling: “She’s seen you, pretty boy.”

Nikolai Hawthorn turned to Jack. “Get out.”

“Da . . .” Jack rose. “You can’t do this alone—”

“
Jack,
” the demon continued slyly. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” A smile, all teeth, distorted the lower half of the girl’s face. “How ironic. Considering her plans for you.
Jack.
”

Jack slid a glance toward the window. Night slanted against the glass. He’d had a nightmare just the evening before, of a figure in a gown that dripped red.

The malevolence inhabiting the girl began to growl, “Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. No matter how far you run, you’ll become her loveliest trick . . .”

“Go!” his father yelled.

Jack stumbled backward and out the door.

The crimson, crocodile hall of the New Orleans mansion led to a baroque salon where
fleur-du-mal
lamps and ebony masses of furniture were arranged before an obsidian mirror hanging on the wall. The black mirror reflected only darkness and seemed to have rotted the emerald-green wallpaper around it. Elaborately costumed skeletons in saintly poses guarded the room’s four points: East, West, North, and South. Jack narrowed his eyes at a life-size wax mannequin seated in a chair. The doll, its face unformed, wore an old-fashioned suit.

“Don’t look into the mirror.” Mr. Bones moved from the shadows of an archway and leaned against a glass cabinet filled with fossils: trilobites, mollusks, and nightmarish fish. There were those who didn’t bother concealing their strangeness, and Mr. Bones was one of them. Golden hair spilled from his black top hat, its band decorated with the skulls of small lizards and tiny doll heads. His black suit was expensive and modern. He’d painted his face to resemble a glittery Day of the Dead skull. He tipped his hat. “So you’re the
ban nathair
’s newest ones? I’m Mr. Bones. You may call me Lacroix.”

“Phouka. Jack.” Phouka didn’t waste words. “And I believe you know what the
ban nathair
wants.”

“It’s a very expensive order.” Lacroix didn’t move from his slouch. “There are
physical materials. And then there are the ethereal bits. I’ve already completed one. Come see it?”

Jack and Phouka followed him through a wooden door carved with screaming faces, into a courtyard of exotic plants glittering with dew and spiderwebs. At a stone table set with a porcelain pot and teacups sat a—

Jack hissed through clenched teeth. “
That’s
what we’ve come to collect?”

“Three of them, actually.” Phouka regarded the life-size bride doll seated at the table. The doll’s face was beautiful and childlike, with wide eyes. Ball-jointed fingers daintily held a teacup.

“She’s exquisite, isn’t she?” Lacroix lovingly gathered one of the doll’s ropes of white hair from beneath the veil and stroked it. “The bones inside of her come from an heiress—”

“I’m good without an explanation, thank you” Jack gazed at the doll with revulsion.

Phouka walked around the thing, admiring. “Is it triggered?”

“Not yet.”

But it was sentient. Jack could feel an insect intelligence within its dark glass eyes. The nails on those dainty hands were black and sharp. It was a weapon. He met Lacroix’s ghostly gaze. “The other two are almost finished?”

“Almost.” Lacroix smiled. Jack hated it when they smiled—smiles were their way of metaphorically sinking their teeth into a vulnerable throat.

“Right, then.” Jack turned on his heel and strode away with Phouka beside him. “We’ll be back for the other two.”

Jack stalked down All Saints Street as dusk stained the soot-grimed buildings around him. His hands shoved into his pockets, his hatted head bowed, he was aware of other pedestrians and avoided horses and coaches. The only sign of autumn in this cold, filthy city was the occasional flurry of fallen leaves.

A tension in the air made his head jerk up. His sullen mood vanished with the bite of terror.

Before him was a gate of black metal spikes. Beyond was a messy landscape of yew trees and briars screening a mansion fallen to neglect, its walls grimed, its
windows black. Wolf statues guarded the broken stair. One tower was cloaked in ivy that was still serpent-green despite the autumn. It looked diseased, the house, its stone scalloped with fungi and lichen.

Seated on the stair was a girl in a red gown and hooded coat. The green-eyed girl he’d rescued from the spider spirit had worn the same color.

“Miss . . .” He pushed open the rusty gate and strode toward her, wincing as the thorns on the briar roses stung his hands and wrists. As he drew closer to the mansion, he began to hear a buzzing sound, tasted salt on his lips—