Isle of Man

CHAPTER 12

The Funeral



“Breakfast in ten minutes, sir.”

Riley’s voice through the door wakes me.

I toss the covers back and look at my leg. The scrape is crusted over with scab, and the flesh surrounding it is swollen. I sure hope it isn’t infected. Ignoring the throbbing pain, I get up and step to the window and look out. The view is of the inland side of the castle where snow-dusted trees dot rolling hills of winter white. A road winds away through the trees, passing by some outbuildings and a stone and timber stable.

When I finally find the breakfast room, Jimmy is already seated at the table, pouring cream into a steaming mug.

“You’s limpin’ a little,” he says.

“I know it. What are you drinking there?”

“Ain’t totally sure, but it tastes great.”

The breakfast room window overlooks a garden where an old man walks the rows of plants, stooping to inspect them and carefully dusting their leaves free of snow.

Riley enters with a steaming mug for me.

“Good morning, sir. Your breakfast is just on its way.”

I take the mug and thank him. Then I reach for the cream from Jimmy.

“How’d you sleep?”

“Good, I guess,” he says.

When I first walked in, I had planned to tell him about the secret passageway, but sitting here now it feels weird to admit that I watched him sleeping, so I don’t say anything.

Next Riley brings a rack of toast with pads of butter and a dish of honey. Plates of sausages, poached eggs, and some kind of black potato cake follow. I watch the old man tend his plants out the window as I eat, and Jimmy watches, too. When Riley comes back to refill our teas, I thank him.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, bowing slightly.

“But I didn’t do anything except eat this great food.”

“And I thank you for it, sir.”

“You know,” I say, “we’d be happy to work it off.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Chores. Clean windows or mop floors or something.”

“Very kind of you, sir, but everything is quite taken care of. Perhaps when his Lordship has time to see you he’ll have some work for you, if that’s what you’re after. Until then, I’m happy to serve. Would you be staying on for the funeral then?”

“Funeral?” I ask.

“Yes. I’m sorry, sir. It appears as though the long wait has ended late last night. She suffers no more. We’ll be gathering to see the departed off later this morning.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t dare interrupt something so personal.”

“Quite the opposite, sir. While the preliminaries are a very personal time of mourning, of course, the passing itself is cause for celebration. It would be proper to attend. You must come.”

I look at Jimmy. He smiles and shakes his head, honoring his deal to leave the talking to me.

“Okay,” I say. “Sure.”

Riley smiles.

“Very well. We meet at the steps at eleven.”

“The steps?”

“Yes, sir. At the water’s edge.”

After breakfast we’re not sure what to do until the funeral, so Jimmy and I wander around the castle. It’s very homey, not at all pretentious. The walls are hung with tapestries and quilts, and the furnishings are big and comfortable. We find Junior in a room off the kitchen, eating with the deerhounds, all of them wet and dirty as if they’ve just come in from outside. Even though Junior has grown a lot, he’s still only a third their size, and his red-tinted fur and bushy tail stand out against their gray, matted coats. But he looks right at home. He sees us and runs over and licks our hands. Then he returns and forces his way past the deerhounds and buries his face back in the food.

“Made himself right comfortable, ain’t he?” Jimmy says.

“He better not get too comfortable,” I reply.

At the end of the great hall, we find a huge statue room. The high walls are lined with busts on shelves, and the floor is a maze of sculptures. It’s all very strange because many of the faces look familiar. As if I’d known them. I wonder if some of them aren’t famous people I might have seen likenesses of in educationals. Greek philosophers or something.

We stop to look at a sculpture of a topless woman. Both of her arms have been broken off, but the statue is still stunning. Jimmy caresses her cheek and I can’t help but wonder if he sees shades of his mother in her. We carry on. Warriors and athletes, mothers with child, kings and their horses, it’s an astounding collection. They must have been ancient long before the war.

Then I see it. At end of the room, standing in the light of a tall window. I recognize the statue instantly. There’s no other form like that. The David. It’s much larger than I’d imagined from the images I’ve seen, and much more beautiful, too.

“Wow!” Jimmy steps up beside me.

“Makes you proud to be human, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Must have taken a tribe to carve it?”

I shake my head.

“Just one man.”

“One man made this?”

I nod.

“An Italian Renaissance man.”

“Italian?”

“Yeah. It was a country on this side of the Atlantic.”

The David is easily three times as tall as I am, and his face is so alive that it draws me to look in the direction of his stare to see what it is he’s after, but I can’t seem to pull my eyes away for even a moment. Chiseled muscles, striking features, lean body poised for a perfect throw. His left arm at his shoulder gripping the sling, his right hand at his side, holding ...

“Jimmy, this is it. This is the hand!”

“I still cain’t believe one man carved it.”

“No. This is it. The clue. The David. ‘In the right hand of David you shall find your key.’ This must be it. The encryption key has to be hidden there somehow in his hand.”

“In the statue?” Jimmy asks.

“This had to be brought here by Radcliffe. He had smaller things he’d salvaged around the lake house.”

We stand on our tiptoes and inspect the statue’s hand. It is gripping something, perhaps a stone for his sling, but it’s all cut from the original block of marble and there doesn’t appear to be anything added. Suddenly, I feel self-conscious, as if all the eyes of all the busts and statues behind us are watching.

I turn around and am startled by a strange man standing behind us. He’s taller than I am, his shoulders filled out with muscle. And he’s wearing a white tunic tied at the waist, giving him the appearance of one of the statues having come to life. His golden hair hangs to his shoulders, his eyes are piercing blue. He’s older than we are, but still young. Maybe twenty-five or thirty.

“His hands always fascinate me too,” he says, nodding to the David’s hand that we had just been inspecting. “They seem so lifelike. If not a little large for the rest of his body, don’t you think? But then, perhaps that’s how they were.”

I wonder how long he’s been standing there and what he heard. I hold out my hand to shake, the way my father taught me too when meeting strangers.

“Hi. I’m Aubrey.”

Instead of shaking my hand, he catches my wrist and holds my hand up, inspecting it in the sunlight slanting in through the window. I feel awkward, caught in his strong grip as it dawns on me that it might not be their custom to shake.

“Amazing things, human hands are,” the man says. “Don’t you think so? You can use them to play a game, or to chisel a work of art, like this one here, or even to make a fist and strike down your brother. But the hand is indifferent, only doing the bidding of the mind.” He pauses and looks me in the eye and smiles. Then he says: “You’ve got good hands. Use them well.” He releases my hand and turns to Jimmy. “Let me see yours now.” Jimmy reluctantly holds out his hand, and the man looks it over. “You have good hands as well,” he says. “I’m assuming you’ve come for the games?”

Jimmy looks at me, confused.

“Yes,” I say, deciding to go along with it. “We have.”

“Good for you. It’s an honor many lesser men fear. You don’t look familiar to me, but perhaps I know your parents?”

“Both our parents are dead, sir.”

He sighs.

“Well, some of us get to go home sooner than others, I guess. Which is why I’ve come to fetch you, actually. I’d like your help with the catafalque.”

“The cata-what?”

“The lowering.”

“Oh, sure,” I say, still having no idea what he means.

“Good,” he says. “And please don’t call me sir. Or His Lordship. Or any of that fancy poppycock. I get enough of that from Riley. Just call me Finn, and we’ll get along fine. Now, you said your name was Aubrey?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, then quickly adding: “I mean, Finn.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Aubrey,” he says, bowing slightly. “And what’s your name, young man?”

“Jimmy.”

“Aubrey and Jimmy. Good solid names. I’ll cheer for you in the games. Very well, then. Shall we go and do our duty?”

We follow him across the great hall, through a large pair of double doors and into a chamber room where a corpse lies in waiting, its body wrapped in a thin, white sheet and its head resting on a pillow. It’s an old woman, her thin skin gray and sagging, but I can see the resemblance in her bone structure. She must be Finn’s mother. The old man we saw tending the garden through the breakfast window earlier kneels beside the corpse, securing the sheet corners with pins.

“I brought some strong hands to help, Angus,” Finn says.

Angus looks up without expression, nods to us, and turns back to his work.

“I promise he’s not being rude,” Finn says to us. “It’s just that Angus doesn’t speak. However, he hears just fine. Don’t you, Angus?” Angus nods. “Be a couple of champs there, you two, and grab the head,” Finn continues. “I’ll take the other end, and perhaps Angus here can get the door.”

Jimmy and I hesitate, making nervous starts toward the corpse, but not committing. Then I see that she’s resting on a moveable board. Relieved that I don’t have to actually touch the body, I grab a side of the board near her head, and Jimmy grabs the other. Then Finn snatches up the board at her feet, and we lift her from the platform and walk toward the door. She’s surprisingly light.

As we exit the chamber and cross the great hall, Finn walks backwards, always keeping her feet pointed in the direction that we’re heading. As he faces us over the corpse, he talks as if it were just another day and just another chore.

“I was sorry to see the snow,” he says. “It’s early this year. Might delay the games by a few days, but don’t worry, it’ll melt. Have you any interest in joining the hunt tomorrow morning?”

“The hunt?” I ask.

“The men won’t mind, I promise. We always celebrate a passing with a feast, and since you’re here and helping today, I see no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy the hunt tomorrow.”

When we arrive at end of the hall, Angus opens the same door Jimmy and I knocked on last night, and we carry the body outside. The castle exterior looks different in the light of day. Less frightening. The path has been cleared of snow, the steps sanded for traction. I can imagine in the summertime it’s a gorgeous seaside spectacle of green lawns and flowers.

Several rough-looking men stand by the seawall, assembling a wooden crane-like contraption, wheeled out from a nearby stone shed. The water beyond the seawall is calm and dappled with dull silver as the sun tries to burn through high clouds in gray skies. Somewhere out there is the submarine, hovering beneath the gentle waves. I look to the edges of the seawall as our landmarks and try to triangulate where I think it should be. It’s not as far out as I thought, but still an awfully long swim in the freezing black of night.

When we reach the last terrace, Finn steers us to the crane and lies the board in front of it. With all that timber scaffolding surrounding the corpse, it almost looks like the funeral pyre that I built in the cove, except the machine is connected with iron joints and iron hinges and the wear marks on the wood give it the appearance of something well used.

Finn thanks us and heads back into the castle, leaving us to watch as the men finish erecting the crane. I can’t discern its purpose, though. With a long, weighted crossbeam hinged in the middle, it almost looks like photos of catapults I’ve seen, except I can’t imagine hurling a dead body from a catapult.

The men eye us as they work, seemingly annoyed by our presence there. When their work on the crane is done, they return to the shed and wheel out a cast-stone firebox with an iron kettle suspended above it. While they load the box with wood and light a fire, one of them carries the kettle down the steps and scoops it full of seawater. With the kettle of sea water warming over the fire, the men drift off toward the shed and pass around a pouch, dipping something out and stuffing it into their lips and proceeding to spit on the ground while they visit.

People begin arriving in ones and twos. They drift down from the castle, carrying little pine wreaths woven with bright fabric bows. Each new visitor gazes a moment at the deceased and lays their wreath at the base of the machine. Then they mingle, discussing mundane things, mostly the weather.

“Is this how they go?”

“How what goes?” Jimmy asks.

“Funerals?”

“Pretty much so,” he says. “But we usually had a day of silence. Then we’d tell stories about whoever died ’round the fire. What’d ya’ll do?”

“We never had funerals.”

“You didn’t?”

“We just gathered at the platform and said goodbye when people left to retire.”

After the last stragglers arrive, Finn comes out from the castle wearing a crown of pine branches on his head and an elaborately stitched cape. He carries an iron helmet attached to the end of a thick chain. Riley follows him, ringing a bell. The guests fall quiet as Finn descends the steps and approaches the machine. As I watch Finn move through the small crowd, it becomes clear to me that these must be his relatives. They have the same high cheek bones and wide-set eyes.

Finn bends over his mother’s corpse, at least I assume it must be his mother, and caresses her gray and wrinkled cheek. Then he lifts the iron helmet on its chain and unclasps the sides and opens it like a clam shell on hinges. He slides the helmet over her head and closes and latches it again. Then he lifts the chain and hooks it to a rope running through a pulley on one end of the crane’s main beam.

The corpse lying there wearing an iron helmet attached to the crane by a chain is an unsettling image, but the spectators seem bothered not at all, as if it were a common occurrence. I’m busy watching their faces when a ratcheting sound turns me back to the Finn at the contraption.

Finn is pulling on a rope fed through pulleys and raising the corpse off the ground by her head. It looks like a strange resurrection. The chain brings her to a seated position with her arms still crossed at her chest, either pinned by the loose sheet or locked that way in some kind of death rigor. Then the chain continues pulling her up, until she stands, hanging woodenly from the crane like some medieval puppet dancer as she twists on her tiptoes. When she’s completely suspended, Finn ties off the rope and produces a knife from his tunic and bends down and slashes open her heels. No blood flows, but the flesh is flayed open to the yellow bone. I see Jimmy wince beside me. And he’s no stranger to gore.

Several of the workers join Finn and help him push the crane toward the seawall. The crowd moves with it, following the dangling corpse like a prize and scooping up their wreaths as they go. Jimmy and I stay put and watch from the elevated steps. They stop the crane just short of the seawall edge and one of the workers chalks the wheels with wooden wedges. Then they swing the armature out over the water.

The second the dangling corpse’s shadow hits the water, the sharks arrive. They rise to the surface in a boil of blue fins, their shadows gliding back and forth beneath the hanging body as if summoned by a dinner bell.

Jimmy and I turn to look at one another, our shared horror reflected in the other’s eyes.

“You think?”

“I’ll bet it was,” Jimmy says.

I look at my scabbed-over calf.

“But it wasn’t a bite.”

“No,” Jimmy says. “But their skin is rough as sandpaper.”

The thought of swimming past those sharks in the black of night makes me sick to my stomach. Almost as sick as watching what I know is about to happen.

Finn unties the rope and lowers the corpse slowly on its chain. The body turns left, then right, as if taking a moment to acknowledge each of the visitors through the iron eyeholes in the mask. Then her filleted heels hit the water and she sinks slowly from view until even the mask is submerged.

The sharks seem to hit the line at all once.

The chain pulls the rope taught, jerking back and forth in a froth of thrashing tails and white water. The crane strains, the timbers creak, the wheels slide a few inches against the chocks. A light breeze carries a spray of saltwater mist to my nose. I can’t decide whether they’re honoring the dead by returning her to the sea, or simply feeding their pet sharks.

It’s horrific, but not so much so when I think about what I saw done to my father in Eden, or to Jimmy’s family in the cove. This woman was old, and she obviously died of natural causes with her son at her bedside. And if this is their way of disposing of the corpse, then who am I to judge? There are many questions I’d like to ask, however, but I won’t risk giving away the fact that we’re not from around here, since nobody seems to suspect yet that we came from off the island.

The strain on the chain softens and the thrashing withers to an occasional tail breaking the water. Finn returns to the pulley and wrenches the chain up from the depths. Nothing remains except the head inside the iron helmet and a stump of vertebral column protruding where her neck had been. Finn undoes the clasps, opens the helmet, and removes his mother’s head and holds it cradled in his hands. He seems to be smiling and crying at the same time.

The people walk up to him one by one and gaze into the lifeless eyes of the severed head, before tossing their wreaths into the water. When all the wreaths are tossed and floating, Finn carries the head to the firebox, kisses it once on the lips, and drops it into the boiling kettle of water.

Then he turns to address the crowd:

“Thank you all very much indeed for coming. The feast shall be tomorrow evening, here as usual. And, of course, you’re each invited. Anyone who wishes to join the hunt should meet us at the stables half an hour prior to sunrise.”

Finn strides off into the castle with his cape billowing out behind him. The crowd drifts away. And we’re left alone with the boiling head and a few workers tending to the fire. I step closer and look into the pot. Hair swirls in the steaming water, and the severed head slowly turns to face me, an air bubble escaping her gaping mouth and rising to the surface like a silent cry for help. Then the head turns, and the face is gone.

The castle is deserted when we return. No sign of Finn, Riley, or Angus anywhere. We find Junior slumbering in front of the fireplace with the deerhounds, as if he’d always been among them. I slump down on the sofa to think.

“I’m glad now that the professor threw him out,” Jimmy says, kneeling in front of the fire and scratching Junior’s ears.

“You don’t think he did that on purpose?” I ask.

“I know he sure didn’t wanna be scoopin’ his poop.”

“Still,” I say, “Junior could’ve drowned.”

“That’s pro’ly what he was hopin’ for.”

“You never did like the professor, did you?”

“I dun’ like nobody who has anythin’ to do with the Park Service. And I never will.”

“Then let’s remember why we’re here,” I say. “We need to find that encryption key and stop the drones. Let’s go take a closer look at the David.”

Later, after our search yields nothing new, I lie in bed and wonder where the encryption key could be. The only thing I can think is that it must somehow be hidden inside the marble in the David’s right hand—perhaps in some kind of memory chip, or etched on a piece of inserted metal. But Jimmy and I didn’t discover any obvious patch marks in the marble.

It’s late and I can’t sleep again. I’m tempted to creep down the passageway to Jimmy’s room, but I can’t think of anything to say if he’s awake. Instead, I think about Hannah back at the Foundation. I wonder how she’s getting along with Red. I wonder if she worries about me. Then my thoughts turn to the island and these strange people. How long have they been here? How is Radcliffe connected to them? I wonder about this hunt tomorrow and these games that Lord Finn thinks we’ve come for. There must be a decent size population spread around the island since he didn’t seem to question where we came from.

I lie in bed and think about all kinds of things, which is fine with me as long as I’m not thinking about sharks.