The Bone Children & The Darkness
Some subterranean future mythological weird fiction - episode 2
Thank you for joining me for the second episode in this short story, prepare yourselves for the dark!
Read the first episode here & click subscribe to get the next!
By morning the clouds had passed on towards Athens, so the dawn fell against the entrance to the mines; a rock thrush sang from an oleander and wild tulips opened in the cracks of the old road. Theos waited, Davos and Pilar beside him. No-one else was there and yet the village below was busier than normal. People finding reasons to linger in the square, in their fields, with their faces towards the mountain.
“You have your knives?” Davos asked
“I do,” Theos said, even though two of them were visible on his hips. “Did either of you go in, as children?”
Davos said “No” at the same moment that Pilar said “Yes.” She and Theos shared a small smile. “You too?” she asked.
“Not far,” Theos began just as Nicanor bin Latif and his wife came around the nearest bend, his hand still on her arm and her eyes on the sunrise. She was singing softly, a lullaby that Theos did not know he had forgotten until he heard it again. “But if the Oracle is still seeing rusted lines, then I know where to start.”
“Kalimera sas,” Nicanor said once he was beside them. “Although how can I bid you ‘good morning’? Kalinihta, and kali tihi, instead.” Goodnight and good luck. Beneath the light of an unblemished dawn, it was an offhand eulogy.
“Nicanor bin Latif,” Theos said, his eyes sliding up again to where that bird was singing. There were white orchids beneath it and passing low above, two ravens conversing.
“Theos Athenas.” The Oracle’s husband lifted both his hands. “We shall be praying for you.”
The Oracle half-turned so that the dawn sun gilded her face. Bowing, Theos touched fingers to forehead as Nicanor did the same, then he lifted a hand to the Oracle. Not to touch of course, but to usher her into the darkness. Nicanor turned to Davos and Pilar, and held their gazes in a moment of strange, taut silence before bowing to them also.
“Down and down and down,” the Oracle murmured. “To speak with the darkness and touch the bones and breathe the air filled with blood.” They stepped over the line separating sunlight from the mountain and lit their oil-lamps.
“Merciful Allah,” Pilar murmured, walking steadily. “He Who Is Greatest—”
“Not here,” the Oracle interrupted, smiling childlike and unfurling one hand as if it held something precious. “He cannot see in here and it is crowded, so very crowded; chatter chatter chatter.”
“She sounds happy to be here,” Davos the Younger said to Theos, lifting his lamp with an uncomfortable twitch of his shoulders.
“She is,” she said. “Yes, she is happy. Down here are all her nightmares, all gathered and waiting, and she will find them one and two and three, and they will feast and feast. It will be quiet in her dreams then. At last, she will sleep, and it will be finished.”
Theos frowned down at the top of her head, the lamplight adding gold and red to the blacks of her hair. She saw her own death, and yet was fearless? It had never occurred to him that her madness might make her braver than them all.
“And the son of kings must come into the darkness,” the Oracle added.
“Why does she call you that?” Pilar asked.
His father had always been kind to her, pitied her. Was it simply this? “I do not know,” he said. “She sees someone other than me, perhaps.”
“Does she?” the Oracle murmured to herself. “Does she?” and then, “Oh!” far more loudly two moments before the light from their lamps fell outwards. “The empty space,” she said and ran forward with her hands stretched wide. Theos cursed and leaped forward to stop her, his fingers clutching at her clothes to avoid contact with her skin. Davos and Pilar both gasped, but she stopped at the first brush of his touch, her eyes drifting away and away.
“You saw them here, Oracle?” he asked, his voice echoing high above.
She did not speak or move. Then one hand lift to rub at her other arm and he released his hold on her tunic as if scalded, and when she turned wide eyes to him, he forced himself not to look away. “The red-rust lines at their feet and into darkness, small feet. Small bones. No good, the small bones…” she trailed off, and then said in the quietest of whispers. “I saw them here.”
“The lines,” he said after a moment, stepping back from her, his lungs expanding as he bowed. “The metal…” searching for the old word, rusted word for a rusted thing. “…rails. They are in the centre, I believe.”
In one forbidden adventure, his boy-self had reached thus far, and then re-emerged haunted and defiant to face his father’s fury and his terror. In perfectly parallel lines, black- and red-spotted with a dozen decays, the rails led them and this time he followed. They followed, into another tunnel which bore them down, and when the rails split, like some strange skeletal tree, they paused, all of them looking and trying not to look at the Oracle.
“Check the lamps,” Theos said to Davos, and as Davos began to do so, Theos caught Pilar’s eye. She lifted her chin and spoke loud enough to make all of them flinch. Then quieter, “Which way would you have us go, Oracle?” with a bow and her fingers hard against her forehead like one who had not made the gesture ten thousand times. The Oracle was brushing her hands against the peninsula of wall where the two tunnels parted, she did not turn to face them but pressed her cheek against the rock.
“Vucub-Came?” she whispered, so quietly that Theos took an involuntary step closer. On a long wavering note, “Ohhh yes. Seven Death and Wing, Packstrap and Bone Sceptre. They come to watch. They watch and their fingers are tap-tapping on all the bones they have eaten. A thousand and one. A thousand and one, and two, and three.” She shuddered and pressed her face harder into the wall.
Theos stared at Davos and Pilar mutely. Davos was so pale that the soft light rendered him insubstantial, and Pilar looked half-enraged. This would not do, Theos thought. He took up his lamp again, crouching beyond their own footsteps to swing the light slowly over the dust and rust. First the right-hand tunnel, and then the left. He went slowly, and when he rose to his feet simply pointed right. The other two began to move, and Theos whispered, “Come, Oracle,” then again, “Come” and on the third time, “Come… Aline,” she stepped back from the wall and walked ahead of him. Their feet smudging the shoe-prints of children, and other footprints made by small feet unfleshed that Theos hoped no-one else had seen.
They could not measure how far they walked but the tunnel split twice more before they ate, and thrice more before they stopped to sleep. The dark was timeless, but their bodies were not and Theos was glad to stop moving, to sit with the mountain’s vastness against his back and look at faces instead of the line where the light ceased. The Oracle trailed a finger in the dust between her leg and Theos’ but Theos did not watch her, not wanting to know if she were outlining the imprint of heel bones and toe bones.
“Flesh and suns,” she said, cutting over Pilar who was talking of nothing to hide from the silence, “Hmm,” crooning, “new flesh and tiny suns have come into their house, and Bone Sceptre is smiling. Oh yes, we will deal out the flesh and deal out the bones, and the tiny suns that are so bright will die. The trapped one dreams of fields and snow and sunrise but in our house, there is no sun, only blood and bones and dancing.”
“Allah, make her stop,” Davos whispered. Pilar kicked her foot against his leg. They looked at one another and then quickly away, and Theos did not know what that meant.
“Where are the boys, Oracle?” he asked, because no-one else was going to.
She lifted her hand to study the dark smears on her fingertips. They looked like bruises. “Bones,” she murmured, and then lifted her head so suddenly that Theos was trapped by her gaze before he could look away. There was the entirety of the universe in her eyes and a man could lose himself a thousand times over before he’d taken a single breath. “Packstrap wanted them, and Seven Death claimed them, and jackal-headed Anpu laughed with bloody teeth. Bloody Teeth had bloody teeth but was not laughing and the monster… the monster… oh, he is so trapped and so hungry. Little bones do not make the mountain open and even fresh blood is not like sunshine. It is sweet, oh yes, sweet; but it is not sunshine.” She fell silent, then reached out swift as a bird to press her dusty fingers to Theos’ face.
His heart faltered and raced and faltered again, the rasp of Pilar and Davos’ breaths was like rockfalls but there were not enough muscles in his body to let him pull away. “Oh, son of kings,” she said, and he would have sworn that all the galaxies in her eyes filled with the sea. “You will kill your son.” He flinched and she tapped his cheek once, twice. “Thank you,” she said, as if his flinch or this unfathomable foretold infanticide were a gift.
The Oracle curled into herself like a kitten and slept, and eventually Theos must have too because it was from sleep that Pilar shook him later. She placed a hand over his mouth and beckoned, Theos drew a knife and followed to where Davos waited several long paces away. The pack on his back brought Theos sharply awake.
“Is it morning?” he said.
“Hush,” Davos said, lifting a hand and checking furtively behind Theos where the Oracle lay motionless as stone. “No, it is deep night, but we must go while she sleeps.”
“Pardon?”
“Theos Athenas,” Pilar said, pressing her hand around his forearm and looking up into his face with her brows lowered. “We must go. Nicanor bin Latif bid us do this. The Oracle belongs here, you have seen that this is so.”
“The boys—”
“The boys are dead!” Pilar whispered harshly. “Or nearly so. We are hunting bones, and it will get us killed. We must go.”
He still did not understand; he wondered whether this were a dream and if so, when his father would come to ask why Theos had broken his promise and left him alone to die. “Why leave the Oracle?”
Taking a long, hissing breath and dropping her hand from his arm to her hip, Pilar looked from Davos back to him, then spoke slowly, enunciating each word as if they tasted foul. “The Oracle is a curse on the village. It is her who tempts people into the mountain, and without her we will be safe from it. Her husband does not wish her back.”
“She is a liability, and we must rid him of it?” He had an awful feeling that his father was not coming. He remembered Nicanor’s farewells, the look shared with these two, that there had been neither look nor word for his wife.
“It is a kindness,” Davos said quietly, rubbing a hand along his cheek and then hefting his pack’s weight. “You know how it will go if we bring her out, if he does it himself. At least here it will be quick.”
“Come, Theos Athenas, you know it is true. Let us leave her while she is sleeping.”
Theos did not look over his shoulder at the Oracle because this moment was not about her. His father should not have died, and Allah had spoken his penance across this very mountain. Was this truly the price he must pay for a broken promise; for sordid pleasures stolen while the old man stumbled on steps he should not have been climbing? His father had always pitied the Oracle.
Theos closed his eyes then opened them again, moving back from the half-lit figures before him and bowing without raising his hands at all.
Davos simply shook his head, but Pilar said, “It will be your death.”
It may be, yes. And the thought filled Theos with a sudden joy. “Perhaps,” he said, not bothering to whisper now and the others twitched. “Yet if I die here, then I shall not kill my son as she foretold. And if I live here, then I live. I cannot lose,” he said, smiling. It must have been a smile filled with madness and teeth, because they left him with no further words.
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]