The Bone Artists Read online

  “’Cause we can afford that.” Oliver chuckled and tossed his head.

  “Just the cheap stuff, nothing crazy.”

  “And anyway, I can’t,” he said. “I promised Micah I would . . .”

  I promised Micah I would help him rob a grave.

  “That I’d help make gumbo for his church thing. He needs like three giant batches and it’d take him forever on his own.”

  “You two idiots don’t know how to cook a good gumbo. I can stop by,” she said with a shrug, but she had looked away, retreating a little. She wanted to celebrate and damn it, now Oliver had to lie to protect her.

  It really is for your own good.

  Briony and the others he saw sometimes at drop-offs never did anything, per se, but Oliver got the distinct impression they could. There was something unnatural, something vicious about that woman. Nobody ought to be able to walk in heels that high and that pointy without falling over. And the others? Well, they were worse, in a way, often so silent, just hunched over, working, working, scraping, carving. . . .

  “Babe, you know how his people are,” Oliver said softly, meaningfully, in the voice he hated to use, the one that always made him feel like he was naked and screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Ha. Yeah. His grandmother and black people. Just one more reason he should keep his crazy ass away from Diane.”

  “You know how he is when he gets an idea in his head,” Oliver said, hiding behind his glass. Micah was on his way back to the table, cookie-heaped plate in hand, a smile on his face like he needed to seduce the whole world, including his best friends.

  “Yes,” Sabrina said with a sigh. “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t know why he’d listen to me over you.”

  “Because your bro-code bullshit has reached peak levels,” she muttered. “And he never listens to me anyway.”

  “I’ll talk to him, Bri, I promise. Tonight, okay? We’ll have the whole night to talk, just two bros making gumbo.”

  Making gumbo. Robbing graves. What was the difference, really?

  “You know, Briony called me today. She call you at all?”

  Micah hurried along next to him, thumbs hooked into the straps of the backpack bouncing on his shoulders. “Me? No.”

  They both hunched over, heads partially obscured by dark hooded sweatshirts. Parking on Derbigny, they walked the rest of the way to the cemetery’s entrance. A big, flashy muscle car sitting right by their destination wouldn’t exactly have been subtle.

  “What did she want?”

  “She’s impatient. She wants the Roland job finished. I’m supposed to drop everything off at the shop tomorrow. . . .” Make that today. Two in the morning. He’d probably look a tired mess, just grabbing a few hours of sleep before he had to be up and helping in the family shop. “I hate when she calls. It’s like she can see me through my damn phone.”

  “Maybe she can.”

  Oliver swatted his friend on the shoulder, sticking close as they rounded the corner, following the jagged outline of wrought-iron fencing that outlined the cemetery. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Who’s being an idiot?” Micah threw a quick glance toward the aboveground mausoleums rising like dunes in the darkness. “Oh. Of course. Mr. Skeptical . . .”

  Oliver lowered his voice, checking to make sure nobody was following them as they neared the gates of St. Roch’s. “What? You think she’s a witch or something? That’s farfetched, even for you.”

  “Not a witch, no. But ain’t nothing wrong with having a healthy fear of what you don’t understand.”

  “I understand that she’s rich and that she has us by the balls until we get this done and she forks over the cash.”

  Any fear Oliver had of that woman was grounded in reality. She probably hid guns and worse in her fancy little blazers.

  The entrance to St. Roch’s stood guarded by two white statues, pious women with their hair braided around their heads like crowns. But Oliver and Micah weren’t going in the conventional way, not when the gates would be shut for the night. They stopped well shy of the main entrance, stooping in the looming bulk of a crenellated brick building. Micah knelt and made a cradle out of his hands, helping Oliver step before hoisting him up, holding there until Oliver could scramble safely over the top of the fence. He landed with a thud, remembering to bend his knees to make for a softer descent. Micah climbed the iron bars with no trouble at all, practically a monkey from his years of athletic training.

  Once inside, surrounded by waist-high monuments and graves, the boys fell silent. Oliver didn’t believe in any of the old-school, mystical, Voudon junk Micah did, but graveyards spooked him all the same. The thought that there were bones everywhere beneath their feet, eyeless skulls watching them just below the surface of the earth, spindly fingers crossed over their chests or at their sides, or reaching . . .

  Micah smacked him on the chest, nodding toward the path to the left, and farther down that way, the chapel. Not a single tree broke up the line of sight between the gates and the chapel itself, giving the cemetery a stark, desolate feel. No oaks hung with moss and resurrection fern, just open air and the profile of the chapel rising against the moon and stars. Someone down the block had cooked barbecue that night, a smoky, tangy scent lingering over the graves. Oliver’s stomach turned at the combination of cooked flesh and what he knew lurked below his sneakers.

  His friend led the way, dodging nimbly around stone markers and mausoleums. By day, St. Roch’s wasn’t much cheerier, not in Oliver’s opinion. It was an institution, and a kind of macabre mecca for Southern loreseekers. He had never been inside the place before, but Micah had. They swept clear of the front doors of the narrow, tall, white building, keeping to the right side. As they’d previously discussed, both of them stayed low, Oliver turning to keep an eye out for security guards or curious pedestrians on the sidewalk. The spring heat worked in their favor, coaxing most folks, even those keen for an evening stroll, to stay inside by a fan or AC unit.

  Micah, meanwhile, did what he did best.

  A latch clicked over his shoulder, and Oliver braced. It just seemed wrong, sneaking into a chapel, into a place of worship, poking around where people had prayed and where the two boys didn’t belong.

  Or maybe just he didn’t belong.

  Micah held the crooked old window open long enough for Oliver to squeeze through and then slid in behind him, chuckling softly as he did so. Breaking in, sneaking around . . . It came to Micah as naturally as breathing. He had gotten busted for stealing little stuff when they were younger, a candy bar here, a CD there, but Micah always found a way to talk himself out of it and walk away with a slap on the wrist.

  But that was Micah through and through, changeable with the wind. The good little church-going, God-fearing kid one week and the big bad influence the next. Oliver never knew which one would show up on any given day.

  And without him you wouldn’t be even close to affording tuition. Suck it up.

  Two thousand bucks to dig around for a few pocket watches and necklaces was too good to pass up.

  “Did you bring the list?” Oliver whispered. The chapel had to be empty at that time of night, but he kept his voice low all the same. Micah walked quickly to what looked like a low shelving unit and a bunch of lumps on the wall opposite from where they had broken in. His boots crunched over cockroach shells.

  “It’s in here,” his friend replied, tapping his left temple. He pulled a box of matches from his pocket and struck a light, then leaned forward and touched the flame to a half dozen candles of varying heights scattered across the lowest shelf.

  Oliver gasped as the room and all that was in it flared to life.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

  “Kind of inappropriate, mm? Given the circumstances,” his friend chided playfully. “Stop gawking, we have shit to take care of.”

  “Sorry, it’s just . . .” Horrifying.

  The word died on his lips but stayed vivid in his m
ind. The wall was covered in pieces of human beings, or rather, plastic and wood and glass parts of former owners. Prosthetics. Plaster feet, plaster hands, masks, arms, even glass eyeballs skewed and directionless, watching him under the warm glow of the candles. Most of the hands and feet hung from metal hooks pushed into the plaster.

  A chipped, yellowed statue of Mary presided over the collection from a nearby corner.

  “I’d heard about this place, just didn’t realize it would look like this,” he said, approaching the abandoned relics slowly.

  Micah, meanwhile, had shoved his face close to what appeared to be a carved wooden peg leg. He squinted, peering over his glasses and twisting his head, trying to read something on its side. “Yeah. Freaky, huh? They’re mostly just repros. Thanks for healing my hand, Saint Roch, here’s a model of it. It’s a little easier to swallow in the daylight.”

  Somehow Oliver doubted that.

  Not that he was a stranger to odd artifacts—his father’s shop was full of the stuff, little taxidermied raccoons and alligator claws and bird skeletons. . . . But there was something different about these left-behind pieces. He reached out and, with trembling fingers, touched one of the smooth, white hands. He shuddered; it was warm to the touch, heated by the candles, but felt as if it had just been plucked from a living owner.

  “So who was this Roland person anyway?” Oliver murmured, recoiling from the wall.

  Micah didn’t seem to mind doing the bulk of the work, searching along the wall for his target. “Does it matter? We just need to find his hand thingie and his fingers.”

  “Wait. Fingers? You don’t actually mean—”

  Snorting, Micah shot him a wry look, finally unhooking a plaster-cast hand from the right corner of the shrine. “Do you honestly think grabbing this thing off the wall is worth two grand to someone? Come on, Oliver. Use your head.”

  He felt suddenly queasy, watching Micah stuff the hand in his backpack, the open zipper revealing a sliver of a small garden trowel. The other boy leaned down and blew out the candles, leaving them abruptly in darkness, the shrine filtered through coils of smoke.

  “I thought we were just taking stuff, not bones. That’s messed up.”

  And it’s not what I signed up for.

  Micah crossed to him, his face hovering just an inch or so away, his eyes a dull, dark gray as they roamed over Oliver’s face. Then he clapped Oliver on the shoulder and shrugged, nodding toward the jimmied window behind him. “I don’t like it either, man, but do you honestly want to back out now?”

  Immediately he thought of Briony, of getting on her bad side.

  “These aren’t good people, Ollie,” Micah was saying, going to hold the window open for him to crawl through. “They do shit I do not agree with. There are forces they play with that guys like you and guys like me do not get. That we have no business trucking in. They ain’t called Bone Artists because they carve wood.”

  Oliver nodded, pulling in a shaky breath. “I get it. I’m just not sure I can—”

  “I’ll do it,” Micah told him in a soft, strange voice, pitying, maybe. “Just keep watch. It’ll be slower that way, but at least we won’t get caught.”

  Oliver was beginning to sweat heavily in his sweatshirt.

  It was the humidity, sure, but it was also the sounds. He listened to the scraping of Micah’s trowel as he dug out the corner grave in the cemetery. Try as he might, he couldn’t drown out the sounds—the shhesh-shhush as Micah made piles of the displaced dirt, the louder breathing as the heat and the work took its toll, the sudden bursts of loud, cackling laughter from a house down the street. . . .

  “Are you almost done?” It was a stupid question. Oliver wasn’t foolish enough to think unearthing a coffin was a moment’s work. He shifted, trying to stay low enough to blend with the gravestones and mausoleums. With no trees and little shadow, they were completely exposed to the night and to whoever might come looking.

  That smoky, unsettling barbecue smell drifted over the cemetery, mingling sickeningly with the heat.

  Micah said nothing, continuing to dig.

  “Listen, I told Sabrina I’d talk to you about this Diane thing. She’s not happy about it. Y’all are grown-ups and it’s none of my business, I know that, but like . . . Don’t you think with your family and everything it’s just not a great idea?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly be bringing her around for supper.”

  “That’s what I mean. Don’t you think that’s wrong?”

  “Could you shut up? I’m trying to work here. . . .”

  Oliver winced, turning to make sure nobody was watching them from the rear fence of the cemetery. Silence. Silence and then that sudden laughter and the smell of cooked, smoked flesh filling his nose . . . He tightened the muscles over his stomach, forcing down a wave of nausea. Closing his eyes, he visualized that two grand. He pictured getting his first tuition bill, setting up loans, trying to make this degree work with what little he could scrape together.

  And anyway, Micah was taking the bullet, doing the worst of the work.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, wiping at the sweat pouring off his temples.

  He rested his arm against the stone of a stout, rectangular mausoleum, feeling the stone gradually warm against his overheated skin. With no trees there were no strange shadows to wreak havoc on his imagination, but without that cover he felt watched, and maybe he should. If all the mystic mumbo-jumbo Micah believed in was even half true then surely their actions were stirring up the dead.

  Shivering even in the humidity, he grew still, hearing the trowel make a hollow cracking noise, bumping against more than dirt.

  Micah mumbled something, maybe a prayer, and then Oliver heard a rusted latch giving way to metal snips. He had to wonder just how many tools of the trade Micah had in his bag; Oliver had never asked for a tutorial. If he knew how to break into a secured building or pick a lock, then he’d have no reason to bring Micah along on these jobs. He’d have to go alone, and that, he thought with a noisy swallow, was not an option.

  He turned and knelt in the disturbed dirt heaped beside the grave. Micah hadn’t dug very far. Oliver wondered if maybe the hurricane had left the graveyard with less topsoil and therefore less to cover the grave. St. Roch’s had been under standing water just like everywhere else. The coffin was old, or maybe that was just what earth, wear and tear, and a flood did to a wooden box. Almost all of the other marked graves were above ground, corpses safely covered by stone or within the mausoleum itself, much smarter for flood country.

  This grave, he noticed, wasn’t marked at all.

  “Are you going to keep watch or help?” Micah asked, out of breath. He jammed the trowel between the lid and side of the coffin, wiggling it.

  The lid began to give and Oliver felt his courage waver. “Keep watch, I guess. Um, let me know if you need help.”

  But actually please don’t.

  He swiveled, closing his eyes again as the sounds continued, painting almost as vivid a picture as if he were watching the robbery itself. His mind filled with sudden doubts. He really should have read up on the penalties for getting caught doing this stuff. Was it better or worse that they were stealing from a dead person? No injured parties, really, but trafficking in body parts couldn’t be nothing in the eyes of the law, either. Shit. Maybe he should have told Sabrina more about this. She was clever, clever enough to stay away from shady crap like this. . . .

  But not clever enough to stay away from me.

  “Bingo,” he heard Micah whisper. There was another sound, the worst one, listening to the quick, meaty chop as Micah severed the fingers from the hand. Flesh. Jesus, that meant the body couldn’t be that old. Micah winced, trowel scraping along the bottom of the box as he scooped up the bones.

  “This is so disgusting,” Oliver hissed.

  “There’s no blood or anything.”

  “Not the point, man.”

  “I’ve got what we need,” Micah said, ignoring him. “Let me
cover this back up and we can—”

  “Hey!” Oliver froze at the sound. It was a man’s voice, loud and clear, calling to them from across the yard and back toward the entrance gate. “Hey there! Is someone there? What do y’all think you’re doing over there?”

  “Shit! Run!” Micah shoved the trowel and a plastic baggy into his backpack and took off running, closing the gap between the unearthed grave and the back fence of the cemetery.

  Oliver tripped into a sprint, chest squeezing with sudden panic. They were caught. It was over. That guy would call the police and they would get picked up, bye-bye, Austin. . . .

  “Faster than that, moron!” Micah whispered, dropping to his knee and motioning for Oliver to hurry his ass up. Oliver pumped his legs faster, listening to the man bang his fists on the iron gate, shouting at them still and getting louder. He didn’t hesitate, grabbing the closest bars and using Micah’s hands to vault over the tall, sharp points of the fencing. Micah landed beside him a second later and grabbed him by the sleeve, yanking him along a weedy, paved plot to cut diagonally back toward the car.

  Was that a siren? Was his mind messing with him?

  As they fled, Oliver took one last look behind him, breath lodging in his throat as he noticed the figure in the distance. Just a shadow, maybe, just a trick of the eye, but it looked like a tall silhouette stood over the unmarked grave, watching them run.

  Oliver dragged his feet as he went to the back room. Six forty-five p.m. Briony would be there any minute to pick up the package. He shouldered the curtain aside near the register of the shop, vaguely aware of his dad trying to sell a customer on a refurbished coffee table. Ugh. Coffee. He could use a gallon right about then.

  He hadn’t slept. Not at all. When he’d closed his eyes he’d heard Micah’s trowel hitting the coffin lid. He’d heard the fingers separating from the hand, so much severed meat. He’d heard that man shouting and the rattle of the iron fence. He’d seen the shadow watching them, right by the grave. Too close to the grave.