The Book of Skulls

The dawn was coming now.

The first gleam of sunlight tumbled upon me out of the eastern hills. I assumed the sunset squat and stared at that point of rosy light growing on the horizon, and I drank the sun’s breath. My eyes were twin conduits; the holy flame leaped through them and into the labyrinth of my body. I was in total control, directing that wondrous blaze at will, shunting the warmth as I pleased into my left lung, into my spleen, into my liver, into my right kneecap. The sun broke the line of the horizon and sailed into full view, a perfect globe, dawn’s red swiftly declining into morning’s gold, and I took my fill of its radiance.

At length, ecstatic, I returned to the House of Skulls. As I neared the entrance a figure emerged from the tu

“Timothy?”

He did not halt.

“Timothy, where are you going? Answer me, Timothy.”

He turned. Giving me a look of frosty contempt, he said, “I’m splitting, man. Why the crap do you have to be skulking around this early in the morning?”

“You can’t go.”

“I can’t?”

“It’ll shatter the Receptacle,” I said.

“Fuck the Receptacle. You think I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this castle for idiots?” He shook his head. Then his expression softened, and he said less coarsely, “Eli, look, come to your senses, will you? You’re trying to live a fantasy. It won’t work. We’ve got to get back to the real world.”

“No.”

“Those two are hopeless, but you still can think rationally, maybe. We can have breakfast in Phoenix and make the first plane for New York.”

“No.”

“Last chance.”

“No, Timothy.”

He shrugged and turned away from me. “All right. Stay with your crazy friends, then. I’ve had it, man! I’ve had it.”

I stood frozen as he crossed the clearing, stepped between two of the small stone skulls set in the sand, and approached the begi

chapter forty-one

Ned

I tried to get Oliver to help with the task of burying Timothy, but he sulked in his room like Achilles in his tent, so the job fell entirely to Eli and me. Oliver wouldn’t open his door, he wouldn’t even acknowledge my knock wjth a surly grunt from within. I left him and rejoined the group outside the building. Eli, standing beside fallen Timothy, wore a seraphic, transfigured look; he glowed. His face was flushed and his body glistened with a coating of sweat in the morning light. Surrounding him were four of the fraters, the four Keepers, Fraters Antony, Miklos, Javier, and Franz. They were calm and seemed gratified by what had occurred. Frater Franz had brought gravediggers’ tools, picks and shovels. The burying ground, said Frater Antony, was a short distance into the desert.

Perhaps for reasons of ritual purity, the fraters would not touch the corpse. I doubted that Eli and I could carry Timothy as much as ten yards by ourselves, but Eli was not at all daunted. Kneeling, he knotted Timothy’s feet around each other and put his shoulder under Timothy’s calves, signaling to me to grab Timothy by the middle. Hup! and we heaved and hauled and lifted that inert 200-pound hulk from the ground, staggering a little. With Frater Antony leading us, Eli and I marched toward the burying ground, the other fraters somewhere to the rear. Though dawn was not far behind us, the sun was already remorseless, and the effort of bearing that terrible burden through the shimmering heat haze of the desert cast me into a quasi-hallucinatory state; my pores opened, my knees swayed, my eyes lost focus, I felt an invisible hand clutching my throat. I entered an instant-replay trip, seeing again the flashback shots of Eli’s great moment in slow motion, the camera stopping at the critical intervals. I saw Eli ru

“We have reached the place,” said Frater Antony.

Was this a graveyard? I saw no tombstones, no markers of any kind. The low leathery-leaved gray plants of the thirsty wasteland grew in random splotches on an empty field. I looked more closely then, perceiving things with the strange tripped-out intensity of exhaustion, and noticed certain irregularities in the terrain, a patch here that seemed sunken by a few inches, a patch there that looked to be elevated above the rest, as though there had indeed been some disturbances of the surface. Carefully we lowered Timothy. When we put him down my body, relieved, seemed to float; I thought actually I would leave the ground. My limbs trembled and my arms, of their own accord, rose shoulder-high. It was a short respite. Frater Franz handed us the tools and we began to dig the grave. He alone assisted us; the other three Keepers stood apart, like votive statues, motionless, aloof. The soil was coarse and soft, perhaps having had all the cohesion baked out of it by ten million years of Arizona sun. We dug like slaves, like ants, like machines, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, thrust and heave, each of us making his own little pit and then joining the three pits. Occasionally we intruded on someone else’s work area; once Eli nearly speared my bare foot with his pick. But we got the job done. At length a rough trench, perhaps seven feet long, three feet wide, four feet deep, lay open before us. “It is sufficient,” said Frater Franz. Gasping, sweat-shiny, dizzied, we threw down our tools and stepped back. I was at the edge of exhaustion and could barely remain standing. An attack of dry heaves threatened me; I fought it and converted it, absurdly, into hiccups. Frater Antony said, “Place the dead man in the ground.” Just like that? No coffin, no covering at all? Dirt in the face? Dust to dust? It seemed that way. We found a final reservoir of energy and lifted Timothy, swung him out over our excavation, eased him down. He lay on his back, the ruined head •cradled on soft earth, the eyes — did they show a look of surprise? — staring up at us. Eli reached in, closed the eyes, turned Timothy’s head slightly to the side, a position more like that of sleep, a more comfortable way to spend one’s eternal rest. The four Keepers now took up stations at the four corners of the grave. Fraters Miklos, Franz, and Javier put their hands to their pendants and bowed their heads. Frater Antony, staring straight ahead, recited a brief service in that liquid, unintelligible language that the fraters use when talking to the priestesses (Aztec? Atlantean? The Cro-Magnon muttersprach?), and, switching to Latin for the final phrases, spoke something which Eli told me later, confirming my own guess, was the text of the Ninth Mystery. Then he gestured to Eli and me to fill the grave. We seized our shovels and flung dirt. Farewell, Timothy! Golden scion of the Wasps, heir to eight generations of careful breeding! Who will have your trust funds, who will carry the family name onward? Dust to dust. A thin layer of Arizona sand now covering the burly frame. Like robots we toil, Timothy, and you disappear from view. As it was ordained in the begi