The Bonesman

The Dead Shall Be Raised.

Perhaps in a sunlit, grassy cemetery such words would be comforting. Here, carved in block letters on a cemetery gate designed to look like the entrance of an ancient Egyptian temple, the words sound more like a threat.

Tonight, I hope it’s a threat that comes true.

This side of Grove Street Cemetery is closed off by a wrought-iron fence, pointed at the top. I pause before the gates, firmly locked for the night, and stare up at those words.

The night is wild. January is a tempestuous month, and a bitter wind shakes the gates. The barren tree branches rattle against each other like old bones. The distant stars and half-moon are obscured and then revealed by the shadows of dark clouds scudding across the sky. I huddle deeper in my ratty coat, nuzzling my stinging nose into my threadbare scarf. Hesitation gnaws at me, just as the cold chews through my flesh. Potential–for what, I don’t know–is tossed about by the wind.

Then I think of the anniversary, and the rumors that have scuttled down my street like fallen leaves. The Isis Society. And I make up my mind. I jog over to the next street corner, where a large tree conveniently blocks me from the view of the street. Here the barrier between me and the cemetery beyond is only a large moss-covered brick wall. With a lot of scrambling, and a lot of praying that there’s no security car nearby, I make it over.

Within the confines of the wall, the cemetery is very dark. Pale moonlight briefly illuminates the flat expanse of the graveyard, unevenly broken up by looming obelisks and monumental gravestones. The cemetery is laid out like New Haven itself, a city of the dead. Apparently the father of American football is buried here, and the Webster dictionary guy. Yale’s founder too–Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin. Smart, rich bastards, all of them. Why do they get to be buried beneath trees and huge gravestones, while she…just a pile of ashes?

The wind carries whispers and hints of a monotone chanting. I strain my ears as I pick my way towards the center of the graveyard. Is it just the creak of the tree branches? Or are they really here?

There. An obelisk near the center is ringed by spectral figures. Wispy. White. Swaying out of time with the wind. A circle of candles flickers in between their feet. I hold my breath as I approach, the crunch of my footsteps on long-fallen leaves making me flinch.

The chanting grows louder, and the corporeal form of the figures becomes more apparent. These are not phantoms. They are women. The Isis Society made flesh.

One of them catches sight of me and breaks away from the circle. Several of the others glance over at her, eyeing her departure, but they do not waver in their chanting or swaying. I, on the other hand, freeze on the path.

“Who are you?” the girl hisses at me. Her white robe draped over her body ripples in the wind and she flips her long, dark braided hair away from her face.

“...Carly?” I say.

“What are you doing here? This isn’t something you can interrupt.”

“Are you…the Isis Society?” I say.

She narrows her eyes at me.

“I hear you can—communicate with the dead,” I say in a rush.

She pauses at this, cocking her head. “Communicate…with the dead? That’s actually not–really within our repertoire. Are you a first year?”

I glance down at my clothes. “I’m not a Yale student.”

She looks me up and down. “The Isis Society is a Yale secret society.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So I’ve heard. The only one exclusively women.”

“Yeah, well, the old boys power club have had theirs for a long enough time. So I think we’re entitled to one of our own.”

“You don’t communicate with the dead? At all?”

She shakes her head.

“Then…what do you do?”

She takes hold of my shoulders, turning me slightly toward the gate. “We’re a secret society.”

That’s the end of it then.

But then another voice speaks and I jump.

“Why do you need to communicate with the dead?”

This girl is tall, with straight black hair spilling over her shoulders. In the dark and the candlelight, she could be a sorceress.

“I-my mother…” I swallow. “I wanted to speak to my mother.”

“Your mother? She’s…” The unspoken words hangs heavy in the air. “How?”

“That’s why I wanted to ask. I have my…suspicions.”

“Suspicions. Like, what? Murder?”

A pause. “Yeah,” I finally answer.

“Damn. I think…should we?”

The first girl shrugs. “She’s not a student.”

This girl, the sorceress, turns and locks gazes with me. Her eyes are incredibly dark, midnight reflected in her irises.

“A Yalie?” she asks. She’s not asking about me.

“A Bonesman.”

She raises her eyebrows. “A Bonesman,” she repeats, a note of disbelief in her voice–or perhaps its glee? She laughs then-short, almost humorless, throwing her head back.

“I think this calls for a little extispicy,” she says, beckoning me into the circle. She jerks her head at another young woman. “A robe.”

Suddenly a woman appears on either side of me, pulling a white robe over my head. Meanwhile, the tall student has rolled up her sleeves.

“You know, I object to the name of our little group,” she calls out to me. “The Isis Society. Everyone loves Isis–ancient Egyptian goddess of magic. God, the Romans loved her far too much.” She laughs again, a bark of laughter. “You know what I study, Townie? Assyriology. Now the Assyrians, they knew how to read the world. Obsessed with omens, the lot of them. And lucky for you too.”

Another girl puts a table before her, or more like a tall barstool. That’s when I notice the cooler tucked behind the obelisk. A white-robed student opens the lid and lifts something dripping into a large flat-bottomed bowl which she then sets on top of the table. I shrink back a little at the sight of some kind of organ, red and fleshy, oozing blood.

“Sheep’s liver,” someone whispers into my ear. Perhaps its the wind shrieking through the barren trees.

“This will let me speak with my mother?” I ask, my voice so quiet I’m not sure they can hear me above the wind. Is it her voice that wails among the trees?

“No. We don’t communicate with the dead that way,” someone says. The first girl, I think.

The tall girl has lit a stick of incense and is waving it above the bowl, her eyes closed and her head thrown back. The others began to chant words that sound like nonsense to me. It’s not English, but I don’t think it's Latin either. At least not the kind of Latin used in movies.

After a moment, the girl opens her eyes and looks straight at me. Candlelight reflects in her eyes.

“Mother’s name?”

“Esther Brown,” I stammer.

“Was Esther Brown murdered?” the girl shouts, waving the incense stick over the bowl. She then beckons another girl over with a candle. With bare fingers she flips over the liver in the bowl and begins to prod at it.

“Discoloration in this upper right section…interpretation?

Another girl swipes through a document on her phone, asking some questions.

“Interpretation unclear. Not a no, but not a clear yes either. Perhaps not intended murder?”

She stares me down again. “Suspect?”

The name is bitter in my mouth. “Thurston Sharples.”

The eyebrow raise again. A name she must recognize. He is a Bonesman after all.

Again she shouts the question, again she pokes and prods at the liver, consulting with the girl on her phone. This time an abnormality in some part of the liver with a name I don’t understand. She whirls to look at me.

“Yes,” she says.

I taste blood in my mouth. “I knew it. They covered it up. That’s what power and money get you, isn’t it. He has such a bright future.”

Someone has brought me a clay figurine and a knife. I don’t ask what to do. I snatch them up and carve his name into the figurine, cracks appearing as I drive the knifepoint in too forcefully at some points. The wind has picked up, the sky fully obscured by clouds. When I’m done, I hurl the figure to the ground with a loud scream, magnified by the howl of the wind above. I watch as the clay smashes against the ground, splintering into a thousand pieces.

“Quite the abbreviated excretion ritual,” someone mutters to my left. “But effective.”

Hands land on my shoulder and I look up, right into the dark eyes of the sorceress.“Now you can forgive,” she says. “Let the curse do its own work.”

I look up into her dark eyes. “Forgive?” And I see that this is all just a game for her. Playacting. Mysterious rituals in the cemetery for famous people. A jab at the rich boys from the privileged girls.

“Never,” I spit. I turn on my heel, marching towards the gate.

“Wait!” the girl calls after me. “What are you going to do?”

I ignore her. I ignore them all. I only hear my mother’s howl in the wind. The cracking of the tree branches is the crack of her skull on a polished wooden floor. I haul myself over the wall again, scraping my palms against the brick.

My blood runs hot in my veins as I walk through the deserted streets. I see Harkness Tower up ahead. It stands across from Yale’s Old Campus, a tower of narrow windows and spiked spires. I usually avoid walking through campus if I can, but tonight I don’t. It begins to rain, but even the shock of icy rain doesn’t cool my rage.

That’s when I see the men filing out of the Skull and Crossbones tomb–the hulking, windowless building right near Old Campus, the famous meeting place of Yale’s most well-known secret society for students. It’s a Thursday night. One of their two meeting days. Thurston Sharples will be among them. I don’t think twice–I hurl myself at the closest one, pinning him up against the brick wall.

“The hell?

“Thurston Sharples?” I demand, trying to get a look at his face. I can see he is pasty white, even on a stormy dark night like this.

“Yeah? Get off me.”

I put my arm like a bar across his throat and press hard. He begins to choke. I hear the others begin to clamor behind me–jeering and laughing. I can smell alcohol on him, and I too begin to choke–on the scent, on the memories.

I went with my mother to his house one time, where she cleaned and sometimes cooked. It was a world away from our rickety apartment on the third floor of a narrow house. Our apartment always smelled like stale cigarette smoke, the walls painted a dingy gray and the floors always slanted downwards to the center. This place was shiny, smelling of polished leather and wood, full of light from sparkling windows.

“You killed my mother,” I snarl at him. I see recognition spark in his eyes–as lightning flashes overhead.

Something inside me breaks, like a pillar holding up the roof cracking into two. I wrap my hand around his wrist like a shackle and haul him away from the wall, down the street. He pulls against me, but weakly. I don’t know if it’s because my rage has made me strong or because his guilt has made him weak. I find myself stumbling down the street, towing this boy behind me, my vision blurred by rain and tears.

Somehow I find myself inside Harkness Tower, a dungeon-like entryway with brick walls pressing close with a concrete staircase leading up to the main attraction–the spiraling staircase that takes up to the top. I drag Thurston Sharples up to the spiral staircase and began to shove him up the narrow steps.

“What are you doing?” he screams at me.

“Did you kill my mother?” I scream back.

“Your mother? What are you talking about?”

“I know you remember!”

The staircase is nearly pitch-black, the red brick walls narrow. Climbing the steps is dizzying–I feel almost as if I might just fall back into a whirlpool of darkness. But then it opens up, to a straight staircase with an empty room off to one side. All that is inside is an abandoned dusty desk. In front is another spiral staircase, this one black iron.

I drag Thurston Sharples up this one too…up and up, into more darkness.

“Esther Brown,” I shout at him. “I dare you to say you don’t remember her.”

I feel him go limp. We’ve almost reached the top after going in circles upon circles of steps. We pass by large metal bells, larger than a person. They begin to toll as we reach the top–there are no windows here. Wind and rain buffet us, the storm unleashed around us. I feel Thurston shaking–perhaps it is the whole building, shaking with rain and wind and thunder. The bells ring, their vibrations echoing through my skull, my body.

“It was an accident! I was drunk…the stairs…” He is fully sobbing down, hands clasped together, pleading. “Forgive me!”

“What did she do to deserve dying that way?” I scream at him.

“She didn’t! She was pretty…I just tried to give her a little kiss. I didn’t mean to shove her so hard…”

My body shakes with laughter–or with sobs. The bell tolls louder, I can feel its sway from side to side beneath me, the force of it sending tremors through the whole building. Thunder cracks outside–is the tower itself splitting apart?

“Forgive me, please!” he begs.

I kneel beside him, to hiss in his ear. “Only the powerful can forgive. For the weak it is just permission for worms like you to trample us further.”

I don’t remember anything else.

I woke the next morning in my creaky old bed, feeling a bit sore and exhausted. An alert was all over the news about a student falling from Harkness Tower during last night’s storm–something that should have been impossible. A Bonesman. A boy’s bright future cut short.