Revenant (42 page)

We left the car a block away and walked back, not looking too unusual even after dark, since the town hadn’t gone to bed yet, it being Saturday and only an hour past sunset. Like Borba and Vila Viçosa, the town was white with marble and plaster except for the church itself. A small staircase led up between the massive stone-edged church and a smaller building on the east that was so perfectly white it looked like a house made of sugar and decorated with restrained piping of white frosting around the top, windows, and doorway. Facing the staircase, a delicate black iron grille protected an arched window below a white plaster frieze of leaves and curlicues with the words
CAPELA DOS OSSOS
painted in neat black lettering between the plasterwork and the top of the window arch. Behind the window, barely lit by a candle from within and streetlight without, rows of white skulls lined the ledge like pies in a macabre bakery. A priest in a long cassock was walking up the stairs ahead of us, one hand clutching a fold of his robe to keep from stepping on his hem, a ring of keys held in the other.

Carlos caught up to him in two long strides and said,
“Padre, um momento
.
”

The priest turned, an expression of mild surprise on his long, bland face.
“Sim?”

They spoke for a minute, the priest shaking his head and gesturing to the chapel.

Carlos turned back to us, his eyes gleaming. “The priest says that the chapel is closed—it was broken into and vandalized this morning.”

“What was taken?” I asked.

“I hope we may discover that ourselves.”

He turned back to the priest, who was frowning at us. “I speak a little of English,” the priest said, his voice very soft but carrying down the marble stairs clearly. “What interests you in the bones here?”

Carlos provided an edited version of the truth. “Other ossuaries have been desecrated recently. We wish to discover if there is a pattern to the vandalism.” I could feel the weight of his persuasion bearing on the priest through the Grey. “May we see what happened here?”

The quiet priest narrowed his eyes, resisting Carlos’s magical nudging. “You are from the government?”

“The church. These two have brought reports of such damage in other parts of Europe. We fear the current economic and political stress may be causing anger misdirected at us—at God. It may be nothing,” he said, then added, “But . . .” He spread his hands, as if he were shrugging, but I could see a thin strand of magic pulling between them, growing ugly spikes of compulsion.

I stepped close, tilting Carlos a questioning look. He lifted his eyebrows, giving way to me in silence. I knew from experience that any such spell of Carlos’s tended to do damage and I didn’t see the point in harming the priest just to get a look in his chapel. If the Kostní Mágové had already been here, our only interest was in figuring out what they’d taken so we could guess what they’d go after next.

“Father,” I started, leaning lightly on the Grey—just enough to incline him to like me, “it is an imposition, I know, but while my colleague may have doubts, I don’t. You’ve heard about the ossuaries in the Algarve, I’m sure, and the desecration of the tomb of King Sebastian in Lisbon. But there have been so many others, in Poland, in France, even in Rome itself. We must stop this. We must not let people lose faith when they need it most.”

The priest was taken aback and blinked at me. “Oh. No. I had not heard. You wish to see the damage here?”

“Yes. If you can allow it.”

“Yes. Yes,” he repeated, walking to the chapel door with the keys ready in his hand.

I walked past Carlos, giving him a smug smile.

“Well played,” he muttered.

“Persuasion is my gift,” I whispered back.

Quinton ran up the steps and joined the tail end of our parade, pulling a pad of paper and a pen from his bag as if his job were to record what we discovered. Few people notice or question a secretary.

The priest unlocked the door and we filed through a small vestibule with a drinking fountain, a small counter, and a chair. Then we followed the priest down a short set of steps, into low light and the odor of crumbling mortar, must, and beeswax as he went to the altar to pay his respects to the cross above it. I found my chest tight with an unaccustomed pressure as I stepped into the room. It boiled with ghosts that thronged against me, whispering and sighing, crying, screaming in pain, or moaning in despair. I had to stop and close my eyes, my breathing short and sharp until the feeling eased and the shadows of the jumbled dead made room for me.

I opened my eyes and saw the priest looking up at me, concerned. “Daughter? You are unwell?”

“No. It’s just the chapel. It’s . . . overwhelming. There are so many. . . .” I stood still and looked around. Streetlight and faint moonlight shone through the large round window that took up most of the back wall and through the arched one on the side where we’d entered. The light limned the bones embedded in the mortared walls with silver, while a single fat candle glowed below the crucifix. The priest lit the four wax tapers on the altar, and four more in tall stands beside it, turning the illumination golden.

“Yes,” the priest replied. “You are sensible of them. There are many bones, many bodies. There was an explosion in 1732, then the Spanish siege, the wars, Napoleon. . . . So many in the graveyards . . . Then the cholera in 1765. We built the chapel for them—there were so many taken by the illness—but there are others here. All the bones here wait, as a reminder. We are all bones and all bones are dust. Only the glory of heaven is eternal.”

The room was much smaller within than it had looked from the outside, the walls a foot or more thick from the long bones that had been piled up, ends facing out, and mortared into place. The walls’ bottom third was all covered in skulls, like bizarre wainscoting, and the skulls were protected by thick sheets of clear Plexiglas. Every joint of the walls and the arched ceiling was delineated with lines of skulls. The floor was a smooth mosaic of small colored stones below the wing-like patterns of the bones and skulls that covered the wall surfaces and pillars that supported the roof. Even the ceiling was covered in the bones of arms and ribs, mortared in place like thatching above the shadowed niches and pointed arches made of the smallest bones.

Playing our parts, Carlos, Quinton, and I approached to genuflect and cross ourselves at the altar in the golden light. Only I hesitated, uncomfortable with my deception, wondering if the God of
the Old Testament would take exception to the way I did my job. But there was no lightning or thunder, and I turned away to look over the room again.

The priest knelt on one side of the altar and switched on a small electric floodlight that aimed its beam from the floor to the wall above. For a moment, the plain crucifix in front of a Plexiglas-covered bone altar piece was brightly lit, as were the vases of wilting flowers below. Then the priest turned the small light toward a section of the wall that lay farther back, near the rear windows, our shadows huge across it.

I caught my breath, seeing the crumbled section of wall, thick with bones and skulls, but now torn and raked as if by giant claws. I turned in a small circle to see the whole room. There were three niches in total, two on the wall facing the door and one on the door-side wall. It was the niche beside the door that was now empty, hidden from first view in the darkest part of the room by the way the stairs deposited visitors next to the altar, with their backs to the niche. The other two niches were untouched.

The long-faced priest took a taper from the altar and lit a silver oil lamp that hung from the ceiling by silver chains, adding to the golden light that touched the desecrated wall. He returned the candle and stopped near the lamp to look at the damage. “It is profane. The whole skeleton that stood in that niche is gone.”

“A whole skeleton? Of a single individual?” I asked.

The priest shook his head. “I cannot say for certain. This other one has mummified flesh which binds the bones,” he added, pointing to the niche across from the ruined one, “but the one that was taken did not. It is not recorded who the bones were in life.”

“This is terrible,” I said, walking up to the ruined wall and putting out my hands as if I could recall the missing skeleton by touching the
place it had stood. The priest laid his hand on the back of mine, stopping my movement as he said, “They are very old and fragile.”

“Of course,” I replied, lowering my hands. How could I talk to the ghost if I couldn’t touch the bones to make a connection to it . . . ? I looked at the priest again. “Could you allow us a moment to confer?” I asked, giving a little more psychic weight to the trust and persuasion I’d already established with him.

He looked uncomfortable, but he nodded as I leaned harder on the compulsion, feeling it like cold quills piercing my skin. “I shall wait in the vestibule,” he offered.

He walked through to the tiny antechamber and sat on the wooden chair at the head of the steps, but he didn’t close the door, keeping a benign eye on us from a respectful distance—or as much distance as the small space allowed. It would have to do. I stood staring at the wall for a moment, awash in ghosts. If only they would cleave to their own bones, this would be easier. I turned toward Carlos and moved close to him, which in such a small room required only a few steps. Quinton followed.

Carlos waited for me to speak, offering nothing. “I have an idea, but it depends on you,” I murmured.

“Go on,” he replied, matching my low tone.

“Can you, without touching the bones, force the ghosts to retreat to, say, their skulls? All of them. At the same time.”

He frowned. “All of them?”

“Yes. The ghost who has no skull to retreat to will remain isolated in the room and then I can hold him while you talk to him and find out what he or she can tell us.”

His frown darkened into a scowl as he thought about it. He turned to look around the room, raising his eyes toward the ceiling. It almost looked like he was praying. He turned his gaze back to me
and I shivered. “I can, but not without touching something of the chapel’s bone walls. To control them all will be difficult enough, but to do so with no contact is impossible. Your chance to catch the spirit in question will be short even then.”

“We’ll have to find a way. I know it will take a lot of energy and won’t be easy, but I can manage my end if you can manage yours.”

“I know how it can be done without the priest becoming upset. If you are ready . . . ?”

“Hang on,” said Quinton. “Maybe I can help.”

“You would have to die. That would not do.”

“No. I’m just thinking there might be another way. . . . Is there any reason to keep all these ghosts captive here? Aren’t they . . . kind of miserable? If you can isolate the ones that have bones still here, why can’t you just . . . absorb them? They
are
dead after all. . . . Then you’d only need to expend enough energy to isolate the first one and the rest will simply replace the energy used for the start cycle. The tricky bit is making sure you don’t suck up the one ghost we need.”

“That I will leave to your beloved.”

Quinton was pleased with himself for the idea and I was certain it wasn’t just because it was clever—Carlos in need of energy could become dangerous and unpredictable, and none of the humans in the area wanted to die to make him feel better.

“But I will need your help,” Carlos added.

Quinton paled. “Mine? What do you want me to do?”

“Pray.”

THIRTY-ONE

“W
hat?”

“Kneel, fold your hands, and let them rest on the edge of the altar while you bow your head. The balance of life and death is maintained so long as we each touch the edge of the altar—which is made of their bones. The ghosts will flow through you to me. It will be unpleasant, but it won’t kill you,” Carlos said, then added with a sharp, white grin, “It doesn’t matter if you pray or not, but I suspect you will.”

Quinton made a face and turned to look at the altar, muttering, “This is not what I had in mind.”

Carlos chuckled at him and sank to his knees, crossed himself, and clasped his hands, letting them rest at the edge of the Plexiglas barrier, tilting forward until his long fingers pressed against the altar built of skulls. He gazed up for a moment at the cross. Although I couldn’t see his face where I stood, his posture changed and he seemed to be truly praying to God. Then he dropped his head over his hands. I had to remind myself that he had been raised in the faith
and had fallen from it. It was doubtful his mind was on anything other than the task at hand, but he appeared to be one of the devout.

Quinton copied him, though his performance was less inspirational.

The air of the small chapel chilled and the room seemed to compress, the ghosts all stirring at once and looking toward the altar. One by one, they slid toward it, suddenly fluid. Quinton gasped and shuddered as the first glittering stream of spirit energy touched him. I wanted to run to him, to pull him away, but I stepped back, looking for the one phantom that was not mesmerized and turning toward the altar. In the writhing, silvery sea of them, a single oddity was hard to find and several more slipped away, making Quinton twitch and utter muffled cries of distress with their passage. It tore at me and I started moving around the room as if my pacing could break apart the impenetrable cloud of specters.

One eyeless face turned to watch me and I hurried to it, sinking slightly into the Grey to clutch the remnant of a soul more securely, the stinging burn of the thing’s energy piercing through my damaged fingertip, and slicing up the long bone of my arm. “I have it,” I said, ascending to the normal with the ghost in my grip, panting and shivering with tingling discomfort.

For a moment, nothing changed and I wanted to scream. “I have it!” I repeated, louder.

Carlos and Quinton stood up, and the priest in the vestibule did as well. I pulled the phantom closer to me so my hands didn’t seem to be clutching empty air a foot in front of my body. The tension among the remaining ghosts ebbed away, the room returning to its normal temperature as all three of the men came toward me and the ghosts drifted back into their muddled, endless flocking.