Bones

by Pil Lee

A cold wind blew across the top of the cliff and the woman pulled her fleece in close to her body. Monroe tightened his grip on her arm as he led her slowly along to the top of the path. She asked him to stop for a moment and he watched her face into the wind, her unseeing eyes fixed on the early morning horizon.

“Is it below us?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Tell me what you see.”

Monroe gazed down the slope at the ground below. “The bones are arranged as if the person fell down off the cliff and landed flat on their back. The arms and legs are spread out and the feet are towards us and the head away from us.”

“But there is no head?”

“No, and the bones are all the wrong shape. It’s like someone made a sculpture out of animal bones that’s arranged like a person.”

“But I was told the bones are human.”

Monroe saw the local sergeant start to shift impatiently and he threw him a warning glance. “Yes, they haven’t been moved but scrapings from different areas have all tested human. Even the cats’ skulls.”

For the first time the woman turned her head in Monroe’s direction and stared towards him.

“What cats?’

“The chest area, or where the chest should be, is full of a mass of little skulls, about twenty, that look like little cat skulls.”

“Or maybe racoon,” put in the sergeant from behind them.

“But they have human DNA too, do they?” she asked.

“Yep.” Monroe heard the sergeant mutter “racoon” belligerently and he pulled the woman away from him and towards the path again. “I’m taking Miss Conran down to the scene,” he said over his shoulder. “Stay here and make sure no-one else approaches.”

They made their way down the path, the blind woman taking one careful step at a time, but when they reached the bottom she let go his arm and knelt to run her hands over the grass.

“Um, the bones are to your left, Miss Conran,” he began, but she waved him silent.

“I’ll just find my own way to them. I like to feel the surroundings as well. And call me Melissa,” she added.

Monroe sat down on his heels a few feet from her and watched her slow progress. He had never worked with ‘that crazy blind chick’ as his DI had called her, and he had didn’t expect anything except a boring morning watching her crawl around the grass. Apparently she’d ‘pulled some amazing shit out of her arse’, in the DI’s colourful terms, but he didn’t really see what use a blind private detective could be.

He stood up as Melissa reached the bones and moved to her side. She hadn’t touched them yet, and he gazed down on them again with the same disbelief he’d felt when the Doc had said the shapes certainly wasn’t human but the DNA was. The arms were thin spindly sticks, ending in three long fingers each with no joints and no thumbs. The legs were more normal looking but the feet had no toes, or rather, each foot was just one long thin toe. And the chest… He glanced again at that mass of tiny feline animal skulls and shivered. How could they be human?

“She is still warm,” said the woman from his feet, startling him. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in. When was she found?”

“This morning, about 5 hours ago,” he said, before he could catch himself. Then he shook his head at her. “What do you mean ‘warm’?” he said, annoyed. “There is no body.” He looked at Melissa’s hands, moving in the air beside the bones.

“You’re not even touching it. How would you know whether it was warm or not?”

“She,” Melissa gently corrected. “Not ‘It’, ‘She’. And I am touching her. I can’t feel her bones because they’re inside her body.” She gazed sightlessly up at the bewildered detective. “I don’t understand. You told me you had found bare bones.”

“You don’t understand!” he said. “I don’t understand. I know what I see. There is no body there. Is this some weird psychic thing,” he asked, starting to get really pissed off with the DI and his wacko friend. “Do you feel some kind of aura, is that what you’re going to tell me?”

There was a silence and the kneeling woman gave him a patient blind stare as he calmed down, embarrassed by his outburst.

“Let’s go back a few steps and try to respect each other, shall we, Inspector Monroe,” she said quietly. “You say you see bones, weird bones, animal bones.”

He nodded, then realised of course that she couldn’t see him and grunted assent.

“And I say I FEEL a woman’s body. Right here, right now on the ground in front of me.” She sat back and reached up to take his hand with unerring aim, pulling him down beside her. “I don’t understand this either, and I don’t think you’re the type to have organised some bad taste joke for a blind person, so I must assume that we’re both right.” She pushed his arm towards the bones. “You have to make a lot of assumptions when you’re blind.”

When his hand hovered above the grotesque mass of tiny skulls in the middle of the chest area she reached up with her other hand and put it lightly across his eyes. “Close your eyes,” she said, pressing on his eyelids. “Be like me.”

Then she let go and he lowered his hand hesitantly down towards the skeleton, resting it with a shock on a lukewarm, still patch of skin.

He snatched his hand back and opened his eyes to see the same macabre arrangement before him. Very slowly he reached out again and this time he felt only cold, hard bone. He looked back at Melissa, not able to see or touch the bones at all, and closed his eyes again.

This time he put his hand down more confidently and ran it over the shape of the body. The skin on her face was smooth, unwrinkled, and the hair on her head was lush and soft. His fingers found her carotid artery and he pressed down, searching for a pulse, but there was none. As he felt down her arms and legs he could feel the onset of rigor mortis in the waxiness of her skin and a creeping stiffness.

Suddenly it was all too much for him and he sat back suddenly, at a loss.

“Has this ever happened to you before?” he asked the private investigator.

“No! You?” she said.

He laughed, shaking his head. “Uh, no, can’t say that it has.” He glanced towards the cliff above and saw the sergeant watching them as they sat on the ground together. He laughed again at the bizarre turn his morning had taken and closed his eyes, leaning back on the grass behind him. And that is when he felt the second body.