The Bone Children & The Darkness
Some subterranean future mythological weird fiction - episode 1
To celebrate the start of December, the darkest month of the year (up here anyway), I’m sharing a story that dives into a dark full of old gods and lost things. It was inspired by the story of Ariadne and the Minotaur, and also by the question of who gets to decide who the monster is? Who gets to decide what is monstrous?
We’re seeing narratives played out in the news right now framing the same acts as monstrous or justified depending on who carried them out & it’s so familiar isn’t it? This twisting of perspectives to suit the powerful. I’ve always felt a little haunted by this element of the Minotaur myth and so this story was me exploring that in a half-familiar, wholly strange world.
I’ll post episodes every day for the next four days, please let me know what you think (of the post length & format too - I’m a Substack newbie). Click subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any & happy reading…
As the sun turned the last snow on the mountain-top carmine, the news came through the village that two boys were missing. Theos listened to Padma, the lines around her mouth shaping drama and sorrow as she talked, and then he ducked his head in the most cursory of bows before turning away to enter his house. Padma remained in the street, her disapproval matching perfectly the storm clouds piling against the southern sky, turning the sea sullen and hiding the far Africs.
Theos brushed his knuckles against the wood of his doorframe and left her disgust on the threshold where he could pick it up again later. The roof of the goat shelter needed tying down, and this would be a more bearable thing than listening to Padma’s worn voice telling him worn things.
It had been two years since the last loss. Theos wrestled scavenged bricks into place beneath the wall and anchored rope around them once, twice, thrice; thoughts of vanished boys becoming one with the empty house behind him. A goat appeared at the corner of the building, its clever, mad gaze making him unreasoningly furious and Theos straightened up with the bones of his spine sounding years older than they ought be, as if all the days his father had been robbed of were added to his own soul. Allah, he thought to the goat and the mountain, where are the boundaries of guilt? How, Oh He Who Is Greatest, do I find the margins of my shame?
The goat did not answer, chewing steadily on the rope Theos had just tied, but the snow of the mountain slid from blood-red to black and shadows fled up the slopes, rendering olive grove and citrus, ruins and garrigue all unto ashes. Theos gazed upon Allah’s answer; darkness and penance, he thought, and shivered.
Wind rattled the tiles of the house, the goat shook its head, and Theos could hear voices moving through the village. He knew where they would be going, what would be said, and his dearest wish was to stay here and be silent. But they would notice his absence despite the tarnish of dishonour, so Theos walked back through the darkening house, warmth already slipping from the tiles that had broken his father’s skull. It would be raining by the time he returned but he did not take a coat, passing over the threshold and carrying that other burden with him into the crowd.
They came to the square at the heart of the village where torches formed an oasis against the night. The house here had once been large, although that was no measure of anything in a land scattered with buildings that had once been large and now were not. Many of them were nothing anymore, shallow soil making false carpets out of orchid and anemone, and the occasional twist of wire or unfathomable plastic. The ones with concrete had not lasted so well as the ones of stone, and these less well again than the tombs. This house was built of stone with a third of its roof made of wisteria and the branches of an orange tree.
“Effendi,” one man called through the closed door.
The villagers waited, that coming storm pulling at the shawls of the women so that they seemed more restless than they were. Theos saw Agapé several paces away and might once have sidled closer despite her husband. Her hurt was broken glass in her eyes, but he could not separate out the memory of lying with her from the knowledge of his father falling. Illicit pleasure as his father bled; her flesh and his father’s solitary death.
It was a relief when Nicanor bin Latif stepped from the house yet still Theos felt the muscles of his fingers tightening, felt others doing the same.
“Our boys,” the tea-seller’s wife said. “Our boys, Nicanor-effendi.”
“Yet again, and once again,” said the tractor-owner, whose tractor had not worked in living memory, but who cleaned it weekly with a cloth of rarest cotton.
Nicanor bin Latif nodded gravely, moving his smooth hands in a gesture of commiseration. “I have heard the news, friends, and I am saddened.” Lypāme—I am saddened, and also, I am sorry; and Theos knew that Nicanor bin Latif had no honour.
“Where is she, Nicanor-effendi?” The tractor-owner said amid murmurs. “Where is your wife?”
Nicanor opened the door at his back and reached a hand into the shadows, pulling her into the light. The voices rose like drowsy bees or distant thunder and then died away. She was always so much smaller than Theos remembered, the thought of her a larger, more sharp-edged thing than her bird-thin body could ever contain. Her eyes were huge in the light of battened flames, oceans in a face delicate enough to belie the horror of her, the awe.
“Oracle,” someone whispered. And then someone else, louder. “Oracle.”
She tilted her head, her husband’s grip so tight on her arm that even where Theos stood he could see the blood leaching from her flesh. Her free hand moved, floating in the air at the height of her ribs, and when she spoke it was to something there, within her palm.
“The place where the air fills with blood,” she whispered. There was no other sound, even the wind waiting. “The allotted days are counted out. And bones. Knuckle bones are good for counting, and finger bones. Little bones are best. But not too small, oh no, if they are too small then they slip between your fingers and the old gods feast…”
Some-one began to wail, the ululation climbing alone and terrible until another joined it, and then another. Nicanor shook his wife, but she kept talking. “I saw them in the empty space with grey-red, rusty-red, old, old lines beneath their feet. I saw them laughing. I saw them stop.”
Theos could barely hear her over the women so he pushed his way forward even as all the marks on his soul told him to stay in the shadows where the tarnish would not show. Everyone had other things to whisper of tonight.
“Where are they now?” Theos said before he knew he meant to.
She looked at him directly for the length of an inhaled breath, and when she smiled, he flinched. “Hello, son of kings,” she said.
“Merciful Allah,” he murmured, wishing himself away from this mad, bruised woman and her terrible eyes. “Where are they now, Oracle?” he asked again.
She looked at her husband, her eyes losing their focus so quickly that it made Theos’ skin itch beneath his clothes. The sounds of mourning clamoured at his ears, and he saw the exact moment that she heard it too. “I… oh, they have gone too far, and I have lost them. I cannot see…” she looked back at her hand and her voice lilted again. “I cannot see in the dark. No, I can, I can, but only until the bone children eat my eyes. Then I will not—”
“Fool,” Nicanor hissed at her, pulling again until she stumbled back against him.
“No!” she shrieked, so high and so sharp that the women fell silent and even her husband loosened his grip. “No,” she said again, her face turning this way and that, eyes owl-like and desperate. “I will find them. I will go down and down and down and all the sunlight in my skin will make maps of the dark and I will find them by their laughter and their bones.”
“Inshallah,” said a woman’s voice with all the finality of a decision that had been waiting to be made.
“She can find our boys,” said a man. At the edge of Theos’ vision, someone averted evil with their fingertips.
“You would send my wife down into the mines?” Nicanor said, but he pushed her forward.
“If she would go, Nicanor-effendi,” Davos the Elder said quietly. “Inshallah, she would have a hope of finding our boys. More hope than any other.”
“It is her fault they went.” Thus, it began; the broken edges to the voice spoke worlds. “Her gabbling about the mines and what is down there, it makes them curious. She is Hades-tainted.”
“It may break the curse of the place.” Agapé’s voice was harsh as a crow.
Nicanor nodded slowly, his head bowed. She had value to him, in pilgrims and fear. But Nicanor was a trader, and she also had a cost.
“I will go down and down and down,” his wife repeated, her too-dark eyes drifting.
“She might die,” Nicanor said, ignoring her. “It would be a great risk she took for you.”
Theos turned away, pushing back through the crowd, disgust making his mouth sour. Nicanor disgusted him, the villagers disgusted him; he disgusted himself with his fear of her when she was so clearly broken.
Then she spoke, her voice pure enough to cut through the bargaining for her sacrifice. “The son of kings will go with me.”
Theos stood still, his back to her, and again met Agapé’s eyes three paces away from him. “No,” she mouthed, moving towards him. “No, Theos.” He looked down at the dirt and tried to imagine the mines beneath, remembering his father telling him of the thousand and one people lost in them hunting for riches or monsters or fame. He had said, a hand on Theos’ shoulder, “Such things are not for us, Theos-jan. Only those who are already lost go searching in the dark.” But the mountain had turned from blood to ashes in judgement.
Without looking at Agapé even as she reached covertly for his hand beneath the cover of her shawl, pressed it against her body, Theos turned back around.
“Theos—” Agapé whispered, but Theos shook away from her, and she fell silent. His father had begged him to stop seeing her. Theos had promised, and gone anyway.
“Son of kings,” the Oracle sang. Her husband held her on the step of their house and frowned across the small distance at Theos.
“Who will go with the Oracle in search of your lost boys?” Nicanor bin Latif said caustically. “Is there anyone willing to volunteer, besides my wife?”
The wind raced in from the sea, rain whispering in the valley beyond them, coming closer.
“So many brave men,” a woman’s voice said. “I will go.”
Movement, a sort of communal, systemic shame, and then Davos the Younger said. “I also, if the Oracle wills it.”
“I will it,” Nicanor said, shaking his wife’s arm in emphasis. “Davos the Younger, and Pilar ibn Xanthos.”
“And I,” Theos said redundantly. The Oracle had spoken, as had the Allknowing. Here, then, was his penance.
“And Theos Athenas,” Nicanor amended slowly.
More tomorrow…
[This story was first published in Stalking Leviathan, eds J.A. Ironside & Matt Willis, 2016, then reprinted in Noir Fire, The Future Fire, eds Valeria Vitalie & Djibril Al-Ayad, 2022]