He had missed the marker the last time he’d passed through this way: a large, tilting, square block at the head of the central mound. It didn’t have RIP carved into its bland, blank face, but he supposed it served well enough as a gravestone. Now that Aubrey was on his feet, looking around, it was hard to imagine how he hadn’t realized the first time he saw it that this was a place of burial. But then he supposed he was often guilty of trying not to see what was right in front of him.
He sank to his knees, pushed his fingers into the cold, stiff paste of the first grave. He was tired and didn’t want to have to dig with his hands. The work would be easier with a shovel. He shut his eyes and bowed his head and tried to visualize one, a perfect three-foot spade. But when he opened his eyes, there was no shovel conveniently to hand and the Junicorn had moved off a few yards to stare at him with unmistakable disdain. Aubrey thought it was the first time the cloud had denied him anything. He was almost glad. He took it as a sign he’d found himself some work worth doing.
He yanked at the zipper of his jumpsuit. His smartphone was in one pocket of his cargo shorts. It was less a shovel, more a blunted garden trowel, but it was better than nothing. He chipped and dug. Pieces of cloud fell away, and more billowed in to fill the holes, like mud sliding into a ditch on a rainy day. But for all that, the cloud stuff seemed to need half an instant to flow into place and set, and it couldn’t keep up with him. As he worked, he shed his fatigue. The steady prickle of pain in his abdomen sharpened his focus.
He pried loose a tumbling heap of soft white rock to reveal a swatch of faded black cotton and a splash of bright yellow silk—and at that moment the cloud seemed to surrender to him. The burial mound collapsed and spilled away in every direction, and a body emerged from the fog. White vapor smoked from empty, staring eye sockets.
The skeleton wore a handsome antique suit, a three-piece with tails. A canary-colored handkerchief was folded neatly into the breast pocket. The vivid yellow of it was a shock to Aubrey, and as refreshing in a way as it had been to plunge his head into cold water. In the cloud world, everything was the white of monuments, of marble, of bone. Those folds of yellow were like a shout of childish laughter in a mausoleum.
It was not hard to see how the man had died. The skull had been staved in on one side by the hammer blow of some great force. The dead man didn’t seem too upset about it. He grinned up at Aubrey, his little gray teeth as delicate as kernels of corn. One skeletal hand clutched the brim of a stovepipe hat.
Aubrey turned to begin on the next grave, but the smoke had already melted away, the cloud giving up its dead. A woman. She’d been buried with her parasol. Tiny black leather boots protruded from beneath her dress and petticoats. The bridge of bone between her eyes had collapsed. Aubrey didn’t know if that was a natural result of decay or a sign of injury.
On the other side of the woman was a second man. He must’ve been a fat man in his life. His bones swam in a voluminous black suit. One claw clutched a King James Bible. The other held a pistol with big iron barrels. He must’ve put it in his mouth before he fired. That was the only way to explain the great hole right in the top of his skull.
Aubrey’s breathing slowed. He was headachy, and his insides stung, and he wanted to lie down with these three skeletons and rest. Instead he crawled around to the fat man and tugged the Bible free. It fell open to a place just inside the cover, bookmarked by an ancient burgundy ribbon.
On the verso it read, “To Marshall and Nell on their wedding day, February, 4th, 1859. Love never fails, Corinthians. With love from Aunt Gail.”
The words on the recto had been written in a dark brown ink, blotted there with a shaking hand.
“They would’ve left me—the balloonist and Nell—so I killed them both. This is the closest I shall ever come to heaven now! Not that I still believe in Our Lord. Not one word of this foolish book is true. There is no God, and the skies belong to the Devil.”
The Bible felt very heavy in Aubrey’s hand, a brick, not a book. He set it back on the fat man’s chest.
Murder and then suicide. Marshall had shot the one in the stovepipe hat—the balloonist, no doubt—and then his bride, and finally himself. Their bones had been floating around on this cloud ever since, almost a hundred and sixty years now judging by the date in the Bible. Nell wasn’t wearing white, so they hadn’t gone up on the day of their wedding, but maybe they’d decided to make a romantic ascent at some point on their honeymoon. Aubrey turned over Marshall’s other hand, the one clutching the pistol, for a look at his wedding ring, a simple gold band that had dulled with age.
He loosened the pistol from its nest of bones. It had not one, not two, but four barrels, etched with whorls and feathers, and a curved handle of black walnut. The words CHARLES LANCASTER NEW BOND STREET LONDON had been stamped into the groove between the top two barrels. New Bond Street. Aubrey had walked past it almost every day when he left the Royal Academy of Music to find himself lunch. It gave him a shock of wonder, to find some of the world he knew, up here, in heaven’s own bewildering country.
He broke the gun open. The cartridges looked less like the usual ammunition for a pistol and more like shotgun rounds. Aubrey shook out the bullets. Three of the copper casings were spent, but a fourth held a bullet the size of a blue jay’s egg, so big it was almost funny. Almost—but not quite.
Left one for you, kiddo, he imagined the fat man telling him. Marshall’s skull grinned with small, sharp, slanting teeth. Might come in handy. You never know. In another couple days, when you’re too weak to stand, it might be just what the doctor ordered. Swallow one as needed for pain and call me never.
When Aubrey came to his feet, all the blood rushed away from his head and the afternoon went dim. He swayed, almost sat back down. Bed, he thought. Rest. He could ponder the tragic fate of the balloonists when he felt better. He even took a step toward the Junicorn, which was pawing restlessly at the puffy ground, before he noticed he was still holding the four-barreled pistol. That gave him another chill. It felt like he’d made a decision of some kind without even consciously realizing it. No reason to take the gun with him unless, on some level, he was open to using it.
He turned and considered putting it back. The bodies lay exposed to the day, the girl’s head at the foot of the big, blocky grave marker.
Aubrey made a rapid series of associations then, threading half a dozen beads of trivia onto a single shining thread.