Twenty-Seven Bones

11

If Lewis had gone peeping at the overseer’s house Tuesday night, he wouldn’t have found any hanky-panky going on.

Bennie was alone in his room, rereading Moby-Dick, which for reasons the Epps had never been able to ascertain, he read like some Christians read their Bible, or Muslims their Koran. When he reached Finis he’d turn to the beginning and start over again at Call Me Ishmael.

Phil and Emily were watching home movies in the living room. They were in the process of cataloging Phil’s old collection, from his first tour of duty on Nias, twenty-five years before he met Emily, prior to having it digitized. The colors were already badly faded, and the images flickered and jumped, but much of the footage was priceless nonetheless.

The film currently spooling through the projector was labeled Fahombe Ceremony, South Pulau Nias, 8/57. Two pillars of stone stood at the end of a broad plaza paved with great stone tiles and flanked by tall, narrow houses with fantastically pitched ski-jump roofs and hooded, overhanging gables. The nearer pillar was about a yard high, the farther one twice as tall, with wooden spikes embedded in the top.

A brown-skinned Niassian boy of sixteen or so, dressed only in a loincloth, leapt sideways into the frame, brandishing a sword and a torch over his head. He danced around for a few seconds, bouncing from one bare foot to the other and grimacing fiercely, then turned and ran away from the camera, straight down the middle of the plaza toward the first of the two stone pillars, which he used as if it were a springboard to propel himself feetfirst over the top of the second pillar. And no matter how many times Emily had seen the film, she still gasped as the boy twisted and turned in midair, torch and sword waving above his head: there seemed to be no way for him to avoid being impaled on the sharpened spikes.

But as always, he drew his feet up at the last second to clear the spikes by the barest fraction of an inch before disappearing behind the second pillar.

The screen went white; the last frames of brittle old celluloid slid through the gate and flipflipflipflipflipped around the uptake reel until Phil reached over to turn off the motor.

“I hear a hundred and fifty thousand roops will buy you a private performance,” he told Emily as he rethreaded the film the short way for rewinding. He’d recently learned from a correspondent that the Fahombe, once used to train young warriors to jump over the walls of enemy villages, had been terribly commercialized in recent years. “Minus the spikes, of course.”

“Of course. What’s that nowadays?”

“Hard to say-twenty, twenty-five bucks? — the rupiah’s pretty volatile.”

“So’s the dollar, for that matter,” said Emily, over the whirr of the reversed projector motor. She switched on the lamp next to her armchair and made some notes while Phil relabeled the film canister numerically for transfer to disk. “Have you given any thought about whom you want to get for the next sacrifice?” It was Phil’s turn next.

“I’m not sure yet. I did plant a seed with Miss Holly this afternoon.”

“Treasure?”

“Yes. I think there’s a good chance she’ll go for it.”

“Be a shame to chop off one of those wonderful hands, though.”

“I know,” said Phil. “I’ve also been thinking about another virgin-it’s been a long time.”

“You and your virgins-you just want a young girl, you perv,” said Emily, almost affectionately. She didn’t mind the little girls-it was the high-bosomed young ladies that sometimes gave her a twinge of jealousy.

“And what if I do? You have to admit they’re a lot easier to handle than these big bruisers you’re always choosing.”

“I didn’t hear any complaints from you yesterday.” Not only were the Epps both highly sexed individuals (the big four-oh had scarcely slowed Emily down, and if there was such a thing as male menopause, it hadn’t hit Phil yet-he still got hard at the drop of a hat, and the age or sex of the person who’d dropped it didn’t much matter to him), but according to their way of thinking, they had long since transcended any culturally based sexual mores.

This transcendence they thought of as an occupational hazard, or benefit, depending on how you looked at it. Because to an anthropologist-or at least to a good anthropologist, in their opinion-every culture, society, and religion had its taboos and proscriptions. None were universal, and none had a place above or below any of the others on an objective moral scale, for the simple reason that there was no objective moral scale.

That’s how they saw it, anyway. A psychiatrist would probably have disagreed, diagnosing them instead with primary Antisocial Personality Disorder, and secondary Delusional Disorder, Subtype Grandiose, which is to say, they were both psychopaths with literal delusions of grandeur. In their case, they believed that they had stumbled upon-or had been fated to stumble upon-an important discovery, with potentially earthshaking implications.

But even if they’d received their diagnosis from the lips of Freud himself, they’d have been unconvinced and unimpressed. Psychopaths consider themselves superior to psychiatrists. Nothing personal there: for the most part, psychopaths consider themselves superior to everybody. They also believe in their hearts that none of the rules that hold other people’s wills in check apply to them-even those that believe in God, believe in a God that thinks and feels as they do.

Phil took another film out of its canister, slipped the reel onto the projector, and began threading it. The truth was, until he said it out loud, he didn’t even know he was thinking about another virgin. The last one had been the Jenkuns girl, whose untimely reappearance had spurred them to find the caves and the Oubliette. A virgin, yes, but at twelve she’d already had a few coils of soft curly black hairs at the pubis, and swollen little bubbies.

This time he was thinking of something younger-like that little mixed-race girl he’d seen with Holly in August, at the strip mall. Prettiest little thing he’d ever set eyes on. Phil had been loitering around the phone booth outside the supermarket, waiting for a call from Tex Wanger at the time, so he hadn’t approached them, but he’d asked Holly about the girl at their next session. Her niece, she said; six years old, she said. Which meant the child was a virgin for sure-how sweet that would be, Phil told himself. And there was yet another advantage to choosing the niece: when it was all over, the aunt would still be around to give him one of her marvelous massages.