The Killing Kind

We walked quickly back to the house. Rachel came out onto the porch to meet us. The blood had drained from her face, and I thought that she was going to faint.

“Rachel?” I said, my hands gripping her shoulders. “What is it?”

She looked up at me.

“See for yourself,” she whispered.

I found Marcy Becker sitting in one of the big armchairs, her legs curled into her body. She was looking at the wall, tearing at one of her fingernails with her teeth. She glanced at me, then her eyes flicked to what lay on the floor before she returned her gaze quickly to the blank wall. We stayed in those positions for what seemed like a long, long time, until I felt Louis behind me and heard him swear softly as he saw what lay before us.

It was a book.

A book of bones.

IV

A great book is like great evil

– CALLIMACHUS (C. 305-C. 240 B.C.)

25

THE BOOK WAS ABOUT FOURTEEN INCHES LONG and seven inches wide. Six small bones curled horizontally across its spine in three equidistant sets of two. They were slightly yellow and coated with some form of preservative that made them gleam in the sunlight. I wasn't certain, but I thought they might once have been the ends of ribs. They felt slick to the touch compared to the texture of the material upon which they lay. The cover of the book had been dyed a deep red, through which lines and wrinkles showed. Close to the top left-hand corner, a raised mole stood.

It was human skin. The hide had been dried, then sewn together in patches, using what appeared to be tendon and gut for stitching. When I moved my fingers gently over the cover, I felt not only the pores and lines of the dermis used to construct it but also the shapes of the bones that formed the framework beneath: radius and ulna, I suspected, and probably more ribs. It was as if the book itself had once been a living thing, skin over bone, lacking only flesh and blood to make it whole again.

There was no writing on either the cover or the spine, no indication of what the book might contain. The only marking was the cover illustration, Jansenist in style with its single central motif repeated in each of the four corners: a spider, indented in gold leaf, its eight legs curled inward to hold a single golden key.

Using only the tips of my fingers, I opened the book. Its spine was a human spine, held together with gold wire, the only material used that did not appear to have come from a human body. The pages had been attached to it using more tendon. The inside covers had not been dyed, and the differentiations in the pigments of the various skins used in its construction could be more clearly distinguished. From the top of the spine a bookmark curled down, constructed from lengths of human hair tightly bound, scavenged from bodies that, for reasons of discretion and concealment, could not be marked in more obvious ways.

There were about thirty pages of varying sizes in the book. Two or three were constructed from single patches of skin, twice as large as the book itself. These had been folded, then bound through the fold, creating a double page; other pages had been made up from smaller sections of skin sewn carefully together, some of them no bigger than two or three square inches. The pages varied in thickness; one was so thin that the color of my hand showed through beneath, but others were more thickly layered. Most appeared to be sections taken from the lower back or shoulders, although one page showed the strange sunken hole of a human navel and another bore, close to its center, a shrunken nipple. Like the bifolios of old, the parchments made from goatskin and calfskin used by medieval scribes, one side of the page was smooth where any remaining body hair had been rubbed off, while the other was rough. The smooth sides had been used for the illustrations and the script, so that on any one double page only the right-hand side was filled.

On page after page, in beautiful ornate script, were sections from the book of Revelation: some were complete chapters, others simply quotes used to elaborate upon the meaning of the illustrations contained in the book. The writing was Carolingian in origin, a version of the beautiful clear script inspired by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin of York, with each italic letter being given its own distinct but simple shape to aid legibility. Faulkner had worked around the natural flaws and holes of the skin, disguising them, where necessary, with a suitable letter or ornamentation. The capital letters on each page were uncials, each one an inch high and carefully created from hundreds of individual pen strokes. Animal and human grotesques cavorted around their bases and stems.

But it was the illustrations that drew the eye. There were echoes of Dürer and Duvet in them, of Blake and Cranach and later artists too: Goerg and Meidner and Masereel. They were not copies of the original illustrations, but variations on a theme. Some were painted in ornate colors, while others used only carbon black mixed with iron gall to create a dense ink that stood out from the page. A version of Hell Mouth drawn from the Winchester Psalter marked the first page, hundreds of tiny bodies twisting in what looked like the jaws of a creature half man, half fish. A greenish tint had been added to the human figures so that they stood out from the skin on which they had been inscribed, and the scales of the fish were marked individually in shades of blue and red. Elsewhere, I found Cranach's Four Horsemen in red and black; Burgkmair's Harvest of the World in tones of green and gold; a vision of an arachnid beast, inspired by the twentieth-century artist Edouard Goerg, beside the words, “The beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them all, and kill them”; and a richly detailed variation on Duvet's frontispiece for his 1555 Apocalypse, depicting St. John against a backdrop of a great city, surrounded by emblems of death, including a swan with an arrow in its mouth.

I flicked forward to the last completed illustration, which accompanied a quotation from Revelation 10:10: “And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.” Inspired by Dürer, the illustration depicted, once again, St. John, a sword in one hand as he consumed a representation of the very book I now held in my hand, the human spine and the spider with the key clearly visible as he fed it to himself. An angel watched him, its feet pillars of fire, its head like the sun.

St. John had been drawn in black ink and enormous effort had been expended in detailing the expression on his face. It was a representation of Faulkner as he was in his younger days, reminiscent of the picture of him that I had seen in the newspaper following the discovery of the bodies to the north. There was the same high brow, the same sunken cheeks and almost feminine mouth, the same straight, dark brows. He was swathed in a long white cloak, his left hand raising the sword toward the sky above.

Faulkner was in every illustration. He was one of the Four Horsemen; he was the jaws of hell; he was St. John; he was the beast. Faulkner: judging, tormenting, consuming, killing; creating a book that was both a record of punishment and a punishment in itself; an unveiling and a concealing of the truth; a vanity and a mockery of vanities; a work of art and an act of ca