Twenty-Seven Bones

7

It must have been dark in the Omo Sebua. The video was grainy, the colors muddy. Emily narrated, translated. Lewis had no trouble recognizing her in the video, but it took him a few seconds to place the younger Bennie. Phil appeared only briefly, as a shadow on the wall, holding a shadow camera.

After the stolen breath, the murder, and the dying man’s kiss, Emily stopped the tape and kept it frozen on the image of her younger self grinning triumphantly at the camera, her eyes glazed, her mouth smeared with blood. “Well?”

“Dying breath?” said Lewis incredulously, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Bennie wasn’t creeping up on him with the sap. “That’s why you killed all those people, to get their dying breaths? It’s insane. It’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Why?”

“Because…it just is, that’s all.”

“How do you know? How do you know the soul isn’t contained in the dying breath? Ever tried it?”

“No.”

“I have. We have. Time and time again. Think about it, Lew. Make a little room in your mind-just a postulate. Say it’s true. Say some ancients discovered it accidentally. Like I did, like Phil did a few years later. Are they going to broadcast it? It’d be wholesale slaughter-no one would ever die of old age.

“So instead, they codify it, they ritualize it, they hierarchize it. All over the world, there are cultures that ritualize the dying breath. The Ibos, the Ijaws, the Niassians, several Amazon tribes. Don’t be a fool, Lewis. Let us show you the way to the fountain of youth and strength and health, and everything that money can’t buy. All you have to do is come with us tonight and take that first sip. We have to give the police a straw man anyway. It’s either that or the gallows-what do you have to lose?”

Lewis was spooked. Every time he looked away from the shadow puppets on the wall, then looked back at them, they seemed to be in a slightly different position. He could hear the Epps whispering in the corner bedroom. He hadn’t had a drink in two hours, but felt almost as if he were tripping. The world was slightly atilt. Definitions were shifting. What was real and what wasn’t. What was possible and what was impossible.

On the surface of it, Emily’s story was insane. But as she’d pointed out, there was no logical way to disprove it. He’d seen the video, he’d seen the severed hands. But the dying breath? The soul? Lewis remembered reading about an experiment somebody had done once. They’d gone into a hospital or a nursing home or something, and somehow contrived to put dying people on an incredibly sensitive and accurate scale. Weighed them just before and just after death. The bodies were always lighter afterward. Not much. A few milligrams-but more than would have been accounted for by the weight of expelled gas alone.

Which didn’t prove that the soul or spirit or the sahoohey fatooey or whatever Emily called it actually existed, or if so, whether it was exhaled along with the last breath, or conferred any sort of benefit upon the recipient, much less represented the fountain of youth, health, and everything else money couldn’t buy.

But while in the long run, the implications were indeed staggering if the Epps’s theory turned out to be legitimate, in the short run, thought Lewis, it didn’t matter whether it was legitimate-what mattered was that the Epps obviously believed it. And motivated by that belief, this vaguely creepy couple had become two of the most prolific and successful serial killers in the history of homicide.

They’d been doing it for fifteen years, Emily had told him, without so much as a cross word from the authorities. Lewis believed her: in addition to the video, she’d shown him the Polaroids of Andy Arena, Tex Wanger, and Frieda Schaller stretched out on the cross in the cave.

He even recognized the cave: irony upon irony, it was under Apgard land. Steep, useless, unsalable land half a mile inland from the Carib cliffs, land from which the mahogany and the other valuable hardwoods had been clear-cut two hundred years ago, leaving behind only high second growth, the valueless turpentines, and a single elephant’s ear tree.

Lewis, who was a bit claustrophobic, had only explored the caves once, as a teenager; a few years later the Guv had had the entrance sealed with a boulder when the cavers first started showing up. Liability issues.

And now, the Epps had turned it into a…what? abattoir? torture chamber? And they wanted him to join them. To partner up. Lucky him.

Hokey, Hokey, Hokey, thought Lewis: why didn’t you just let me cut down the goddamn trees?

Phil proved a harder sell than Lewis. He’d already signed off on the general outlines of Emily’s plan, but had assumed they would only be using Apgard as an alibi, in the unlikely event they were even questioned. Success had bred confidence over the years, and with the added camouflage of age, he felt more cop-proof than ever.

“Why now?” he asked Emily. They were sitting on the edge of the bed, whispering with their heads together. Phil had of course overheard most of the conversation in the living room, and had noted with mixed satisfaction that Emily hadn’t had any more success conveying the experience of the dying breath than he had. “We’ve never needed outside help before.”

“I told you, I have a feeling about Lewis.” Emily touched her lower belly again. “You’re aging slower, thanks to the ehehas, but you’re aging, Phil. So is Bennie. You won’t be able to lug bodies around when you’re eighty or ninety or a hundred years old. Apgard is young, healthy, rich-I can’t think of a more useful ally. And if we don’t live forever, or decide we don’t want to, we have a responsibility to pass on what we know.” She nodded toward the typewriter and the sheaf of manuscript on the card table. “It’s like you said the other day, it would be an unholy shame if our secret died with us.”

Long pause, then: “Is that really the reason you’re bringing him in?”

Good grief, thought Emily: he’s jealous. Of Apgard. How sweet, how very sweet. She took his grizzled head between her hands, pulled it against her bosom. “Philly, I’d fuck that young man in a twinkling, and so would you. But that doesn’t mean I want to replace you with him, even if I could.”

“Promise?” Phil whispered into her decolletage.

“I promise.” She stroked his head for a few seconds, then pushed him away. “It’s Sunday night-where do we find our down-islander and our hooker?”