This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley Read Free Book Online

among the skulls and bones of the past until the thaw of spring, when the ground could finally be hacked at with shovels and pickaxes and gouged open by a backhoe. The novitiates say that the permittivity of the Home’s charnel house is unlike any other, that it’s a natural conduit for spirits, for demons, and for miracles. Perhaps that is why Billy, Julie, and Duncan find themselves drawn to this place: it has a memory and a sense of what has comeand gone, and the spirits here hold on to what remains, much like the children do with their dreams and their wishes.
    At the edge of the Garden of Holy Martyrs, the charnel house is a place rarely visited by other children or by priests, and only rarely by Mrs. Bergin, the monastery’s Swedish charwoman, but almost every day of the spring, after Father Malachy’s class, they come here. Sixteen whitewashed flagstone steps lead down to its arched, Byzantium entranceway. The door is made of maple three inches thick and decorated with the symbols of the lamb and the dove. You push open the door and step within and, as your eyes adjust to the shifting hues of shadow and light, you smell incense of storax and cascarilla, smoky ash and loam, the clear distinct metallic scent of running water.
    The charnel house is made up of a dozen or so barrel vaults, each fronted by finely wrought metal bars and gates through which the remains of the dead can be viewed—the bleached and aged skulls arranged facing out so that the Brothers and penitents can stare into the faces of the dead.
    In the center of the chamber, beneath the high domed skylight, is St. John’s Fountain, made of rough-hewn stone and from which well water gurgles and pools in a font, and then passes back into the stone once more to a natural subterranean cistern. When they are thirsty, they cup their hands and drink from its stone font, where the water is continuously rushing and cold and so clear that they can see the stone bottom of the well, sparkling with mica and quartz, even as the water churns and bubbles and cascades from the stone lip. They clench their teeth with the cold and Billy’s eyes seem all the bluer for the pleasurable shock of it.
    At the far end of the room, beyond the fountain, stairs lead to storage and to the old refectory, a long, narrow room where the Brothers and the bishop sat for meals a hundred years before the monastery became an orphanage and hospice for children. Along the staircase to the old refectory are niches with the remains of Brothers and Unknowns, children orphaned at the Home with no record and noname and no grieving parent. Some seem to be little more than babies, and Duncan imagines cradling one of their skulls in his hands and gently covering the shattered and as yet unformed fontanele, providing it the protection it never received in life.
    Julie dances through sunlight cast from the high-domed glass at the center of the ceiling. She lifts the hem of her dress and her pale legs seems to dissolve as she steps through the shafts of light; the slight muscles in her thighs flex and strain as she pushes off one foot and then the other. As she dances, she recites the tale of her abandonment at the Home and of her mother’s stardom. Her words resound in the hollow barrel vaults of the stone room and off the casks, barrels of wax and pitch, the jars of pickled vegetables and meats stored for the long winter.
    My mother is a Great Actress, she says, and intones in an exaggerated English accent, a Great Actress who left me here to hone my theatrical skills. Allow me to introduce myself, fellow thespians. I am Madame Julie Preston, of the Royal Thule Academy! And now, let me perform for you my own special rendition of Preston Coldwater’s
Patti and Belle
!
    Bees drone lazily in the air. Sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, Billy and Duncan nod sluggishly as Julie dances in the heat, dances until her dress is plastered to her skin, her bare feet