Prophet of Bones A Novel Read online

  “No, never. Why are you asking?”

  “Because I’m going to enter this year. And I’m going to win.”

  “You sound sure.”

  “Sure enough,” he said. His steps slowed. “Be careful, the ice is weak here.”

  Their feet made crunching sounds on the snow.

  Rebecca touched his arm. “I see one.”

  Paul stopped. He looked to where his friend was pointing, up the river, near the bend. “Yeah, I see it. Green spinner bait.”

  They walked slowly. Rebecca moved ahead.

  “Getting thin,” Paul warned.

  “I know.”

  “Slow down.”

  “Come on, Grandma. Don’t be a wuss.”

  They inched forward. Paul stopped again. He studied the ice with his feet. Like Eskimos, they had a dozen names for ice, their own private language—the jargon of ice walkers. There was slick ice, and new ice, and chalk ice. There was rotten ice. There was ice-you-did-not-walk-on. You could feel the give, the gentle flex, a kind of sag. Ice on the river didn’t break without warning. It wasn’t like the movies: one minute you’re standing there, then a loud crack—and splash, you’re under. In reality, the ice had flex. And the sound … the sound was more of a creaking, like old leather, or the sound a tree makes in the two seconds between when it starts to fall and when it hits the ground—the low cry of rending fiber, of nature bending, failing. Of that which had been structured becoming unstructured.

  In truth, you only heard a loud crack when the ice was good and strong. That’s when you hear the cracks like gunfire, invisible beneath a layer of snow—a shotgun sound that propagates forward so fast that you hear it beneath you and up ahead at the same time.

  They advanced.

  Near the bend, the snow was darker, revealing a cycle of freeze and melt.

  Paul walked until the ice creaked like old leather. Rebecca looked back at him. The wind blew through the trees, clacking branches against branches.

  “You should stop,” Paul said.

  “It’s not much farther.”

  “No, you should stop.”

  Paul spread his feet. He watched his friend; he listened.

  Rebecca inched ahead. The ice groaned. She turned and made eye contact with him, her cheeks rosy with the cold. Long brown hair spilled out from beneath her knitted hat. She smiled at him, and something fluttered in his stomach, and it occurred to him at that moment that she was pretty. Her smile shifted into a look of determination, and she turned back toward the lure.

  The lure dangled just ahead of her, ten feet forward at chest level.

  Ten more feet and she’d have it.

  Rebecca shifted her weight and took another step as the ice creaked like an oak in a storm. She paused, as if unsure of herself, before stepping again—a slow, gentle sag forming beneath her feet, barely perceptible. She stopped. You’d only see it if you knew what to look for, but Paul did see it—the way the whole area beneath her seemed to give, just a little, as she stood balanced in perfect equipoise. A bare centimeter at first, then more, a slow downward flex of the ice. There would be no warning beyond this. Rebecca shot Paul another look, then shifted her weight again—

  —and took a long step back.

  And another, and another. Backing away, accepting defeat.

  The lure would stay where it was for another season.

  “Next time,” he told her when she was back on the thick ice again.

  She shook her head. “It was this time or nothing.”

  Paul clapped her on the shoulder, and together they turned and headed for home.

  As they walked, the sky darkened, evening coming on. Paul looked at his friend and imagined what it would be like to die that way, to drown in the cold and dark, carried forward beneath the ice by the force of the current.

  He imagined crawling out on the ice on his stomach and reaching for her through the hole, because he couldn’t have left her there to drown, not without trying—and he imagined the ice breaking and both of them going under.

  The dark and numbing cold. An end to everything.

  It wouldn’t be so bad.

  * * *

  An hour later they were at her door, shivering from the cold.

  “Shut your eyes,” she said. It was dark now. The only light came from the streetlamp on the corner. Her face was a shape in the shadows.

  Paul closed his eyes.

  Her lips touched his. A gentle kiss. The first of his life.

  She pulled away. “After today, I’m not allowed to spend time with you anymore.”

  Paul opened his eyes. “Why not?”

  “Your father visited my parents.”

  “He what?” Paul stared at her, horror-stricken.

  “He came and told them he didn’t want me over there.”

  “But why?”

  She shrugged. “He said we’re getting too old to be playing together. We should play with kids from our own schools.”

  Paul looked at her. In their town, Catholics went to the public schools; Presbyterians, Baptists, and Lutherans all had their own private institutions. “But you came today,” he said.

  “One last time. To tell you.”

  “Your parents don’t have to listen. We can still hang out when he’s not around.”

  “We can’t,” she said. “My parents don’t want me to.”

  “Why?”

  “Your father.” She lowered her eyes. “My parents think he’s crazy.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Paul stood in the dim attic light next to the cages.

  “This is what I wanted you to see,” he told his mother.

  His mother stood in the half-light.

  “What is this?” There was something in his mother’s voice. Some mixture of emotions he couldn’t identify. She stood facing the cages, a startled expression on her face.

  Paul held Bertha up by her tail for his mother to see. The mouse was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.

  “She’s the most recent generation,” Paul said. “An F4.”

  “An F4, you say?” She shook her head with wonder. “Where did you learn these terms?”

  “Books.” Paul smiled as he looked down at the mouse. “She’s kin to herself.”

  “So this is your project for the fair?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”

  “That’s a big mouse,” his mother said.

  “The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”

  Paul stroked the mouse’s tawny fur. The little nose twitched—long colorless whiskers that existed at the very edge of visibility. Paul gave the mouse a tiny sunflower seed, and it rose up on its haunches, gripping the seed in tiny front paws. Paul had always thought there was something strangely human about a mouse’s stance when it fed that way.

  “What have you been feeding it to get so big?” she asked.

  Paul put the mouse on her hand. “It has nothing to do with food,” he said. “I feed all the mice the same. Look at this.” Paul showed her the charts he’d graphed on the white poster board, like the figure in his life sciences book, a gentle upward ellipse between the x- and y-axes—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.

  “One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to several of the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days old and picked the biggest four. Then I bred those and did the same thing with the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all.”

  “You just bred the biggest ones?” his mother said.

  “Yeah. I keep the big ones in the glass aquariums, apart from the others.”

  “It was easy as that?”

  “It’s the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock fo
r the last five thousand years. Cattle are bigger now than they used to be. Sheep give more wool. Our chickens lay more eggs.”

  “But this didn’t take thousands of years.”

  “No, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn’t even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she’s only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like. I think I can make them even bigger.”

  She laughed nervously. “It sounds like you want to turn them into rats.”

  “Rats are a different species, but I bet with enough time … hundreds of generations … I might be able to get them close to that size.”

  Her face grew serious. “You shouldn’t talk like that.”

  “It’s just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it’s amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom ninety-five percent of the bell curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I wanted, made them smaller.”

  “You father won’t like this,” she said. She handed the mouse back to Paul.

  “I know. I’ll tell him about it at the science fair. After I’ve won. He can’t get mad at me then.”

  His mother’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if he finds them before the fair?”

  “He won’t,” Paul said. He put the brindle mouse back in the aquarium. It scampered across the cedar chips toward the food dish. “Besides,” he said softly, so that his mother couldn’t hear. “This is all I have now.”

  “Just be careful,” she said.

  “There’s one thing that surprised me though, something I only noticed recently.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it’s down to about one in ten.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “I never consciously decided to select against that.”

  “So?”

  “So, when I did culls … when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same on two mice, so I’d just pick one. I thought I was picking randomly, but now I’m not so sure. I think I just happened to like one kind more than the other.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  “So what if it happens that way in nature?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like the dinosaurs. Or woolly mammoths, or cavemen. They were here once; we know that because we keep finding their bones. But now they’re gone, and we can only see them in museums.” He paused. “God made all life about six thousand years ago, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But some of it isn’t here anymore.” Paul looked at his mice. “What if it’s like that with God? It wouldn’t have to be on purpose, just a few percentiles of difference, the slightest perturbation from random, this big hand reaching down, picking which ones stay and which ones go.”

  Paul put the lid back on the aquarium. “Some kinds die out along the way.”

  5

  It happened on a weekend. Bertha was pregnant, obscenely, monstrously. Her distended abdomen spread around her as she squatted on her haunches and nibbled at a piece of lettuce.

  Bertha sat alone in the smallest aquarium, an island unto herself isolated on a table in the middle of the room. A little tissue box sat in the corner of her glass enclosure, and Bertha had shredded bits of paper into a comfortable nest in which to give birth to the next generation of goliath mice.

  Paul dropped another piece of lettuce into the cage and smiled.

  Whiskers twitching, Bertha lumbered forward across the cedar chips and sniffed the new arrival.

  Then Paul heard it: the sudden hum of the garage door. He froze.

  His father was home early.

  When the garage door finally stopped, Paul heard his father’s car ease into the open parking bay below. The brakes squeaked as the car pulled to a stop, and then his father cut the engine. Paul considered turning off the attic light but knew it would only draw suspicion. Instead he waited, hoping.

  The garage was strangely quiet, the only sound the ticking of the car’s engine down below. Paul listened, waiting for the tread of his father’s footsteps heading into the house. The sound didn’t come.

  Paul’s stomach dropped when he heard the creak of his father’s weight on the ladder.

  There was a moment of panic then—a single hunted moment when Paul’s eyes darted for a place to hide the cages. It was ridiculous; there was no place to go.

  The creaking ladder grew louder as Paul’s father ascended.

  “What’s that smell?” his father asked as his head cleared the attic floor. He stopped and looked around, a pale disembodied head jutting from the floorboards. “Oh.”

  And that was all he said at first.

  That was all he said as he climbed the rest of the way. He rose to his height and stood like a giant, taking it in. The single bare bulb draped his eyes in shadow. The muscle in his jaw clenched and loosened. “What is this?” he said finally. His dead voice turned Paul’s stomach to ice.

  “What is this?” Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul’s father stomped toward him, above him.

  “Are you going to answer me? What is this!” The words more shriek than question, spit flying from his mouth.

  “I, I thought—”

  A big hand shot out and slammed into Paul’s chest, balling his T-shirt into a fist, yanking him off his feet.

  “What the fuck is this? Didn’t I tell you no pets?” The bright light of the family, the famous man.

  “They’re not pets, they’re—”

  “God, it fucking stinks up here. You brought these things into the house?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad, I—”

  “You brought this vermin into the house? Into my house!”

  “It’s a projec—”

  The arm flexed, sending Paul backward into the big cages, toppling one of the tables—a flash of pain, wood and mesh crashing to the floor, the squeak of mice and twisted hinges, months and months and months of work.

  His father kicked at the wood, splintering the frame, crushing the cage in on itself, stomping it to twisted wreckage. “You brought these things into my house!”

  Paul scrambled away, just out of reach.

  His father followed, arm raised, and the big hand came down on Paul’s shoulder, knocking him to the floor, where his chin split against the rough wood. And still his father came, stomping toward him, while Paul rolled away. His big leg lashed out and missed. And he came again, arm raised high—but then stopped, attention snagged. His head turned toward the glass box. He strode to the middle of the room. He grabbed Bertha’s aquarium in his big hands.

  “Dad, no!”

  He lifted it high over his head—and there was a moment when Paul imagined he could almost see it, almost see Bertha inside, and the babies inside her, a final generation that would never be born.

  Then his father’s arms came down like a force of nature, like a cataclysm.

  Paul closed his eyes against exploding glass, and all he could think was This is how it happens. This is exactly how it happens.

  6

  There is a place where the sky touches the ground. Martial Joseph Johansson knew that place. He stared out through the glass bubble of the helicopter as it tunneled through the downpour. Rain sheeted off the glass, transformed by the curvature of the windshield into writhing little rivers that streamed away, found edges, fell. Became rain again.

  “Five minutes, sir!”

  The horizon, Martial Johansson knew, was an illusion of perspective. Below a certain altitude, each point in the sky occupies the horizon when viewed from some specific corresponding vantage. A formula could be deduced involving the curvature of the earth, the altitude of the helicopter, and the distance from the observer. So from some theoretical miles-off viewpoint, the helicopter sat like a microscopic insect on the dark line of the horizon. A lightning bug in a storm.

  Martia
l closed his eyes.

  The helicopter bucked beneath him, a deep vibration felt in every cell of his body.

  Beside him sat his assistant Guthrie, looking at his watch. His knuckles were white on the handle of his briefcase. Although he’d worked for Martial for six years, Guthrie still hadn’t gotten used to the frequent flights. Running a corporation the size of Axiom required Martial to be on three coasts, often in the same day. Mostly, that meant jets, but every now and then the helicopter was required. Guthrie still seemed a bit nervous in the helicopter, even in the best of weather. This was not the best of weather.

  Martial coughed phlegm into a dark handkerchief. It took a moment for the coughing to subside.

  “You okay?” Guthrie shouted over the roar of the helicopter.

  Martial nodded.

  The noise discouraged conversation. But this was okay. Martial was a man with little use for small talk.

  The helicopter banked against the wind, and the world swiveled. Martial’s stomach went light and feathery as he looked out through the glass. They were almost there. He could see it. From this height, the facility looked like any nice hotel retreat. Or maybe a high school campus that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed—all hard angles and elegant symmetry. A structure built so perfectly into the landscape that you secretly suspected it had always been there. Huge and beautiful, a sprawling compound of laboratories and research buildings, interconnected by a series of covered walkways. This was Axiom’s epicenter, his third home.

  The helicopter swiveled again, changing the world’s orientation. Lights and a red cross, a helipad—and standing there, against the rain, waiting for the helicopter to land, three men in suits.

  Always three men. Martial liked it that way. His security detail. Though he’d learned a long time ago not to trust anyone completely—even those closest to him.

  All three had guns, but only two of the guns were loaded with live rounds. Nobody knew which two.

  Not even the men.

  * * *

  The helicopter touched down with a gentle thump. The door swung open and cold, wet air blasted Martial’s face.

  He followed Guthrie out into the storm.

  “Two transplants, and this fucking rain will be the death of me!” Martial shouted into the roar of the machine. The tropical storm had been born in the Gulf, two hundred miles to the south, and now it lashed the Gulf States, shedding its moisture as it moved inland.