Twenty-Seven Bones

10

Hokey went to bed early-tomorrow was her morning to volunteer at the rest home named for Lewis’s father and grandfather. Lewis watched Lou Dobbs on the TV in his study. Hokey was a member of the St. Luke Historical Preservation Society, so the satellite dish was mounted on the roof in the back of the stable/garage, where it couldn’t be seen from the drive.

The financial news was not good. Lewis made a few notes, then switched to a soft porn channel. But soft porn wasn’t making it either. Absent any of his other drugs, he needed something harder, so he went online, surfing his favorite voyeur-themed sites, of which there were dozens available. Most of it was pretty tame stuff, though: guys using peephole and minidigital cameras to take up-skirts or down-blouses, or capture their wives or girlfriends sleeping, peeing, bathing, or stepping out of the shower. Before the Net, Lewis wouldn’t have believed how sick so many people were.

Some of the sites, however, had membership areas, where for a premium Lewis could download jpegs and mpegs of real people having sex-real people who hadn’t known they were being spied upon. That had been Lewis’s secret passion (he didn’t really think of it as a vice) since he was a boy, even before puberty. (And wouldn’t Dr. Vogler have loved to hear about that; fat chance, Doc.)

It had gotten him in trouble more than once, but even nowadays, when thousands upon thousands of images were available on the Web for less than it cost to buy binoculars, he still found himself going out on the prowl occasionally.

Because it wasn’t only the images that Lewis craved, it was also the risk, the uncertainty, the thrill of the hunt. And unlike the stereotypical Peeping Tom of movies and literature, who stalks only the prettiest of young women, looks were not of paramount concern to Lewis. In fact, one of his more memorable strikes in recent years had involved his tenants in the overseer’s house, the Drs. Epp. And their so-called houseman Bennie-Lewis knew a thing or two about that household they wouldn’t have wanted broadcast to the general public.

Just thinking about the time he’d seen the three of them together gave Lewis more of a rise than any of the digital images he was accessing. One of these nights he’d have to check in on the old reprobates again, he promised himself as he logged on to yet another disappointing site. One of these nights soon.

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