Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison

the connection? Cameron spoke of a man fetched in the night. Frasier spoke of what the Company brought from Edinburgh. Arnold and Woolford had made but one trip to Edinburgh, to bring Duncan. And they had brought him onto the ship in the night.
    “Nothing here explains what happened in the compass room,” he observed, fighting to keep his voice level.
    “Evering himself made the ritual,” Arnold proclaimed. “He placed his own buckle there, stole into the gallery for salt and blood and the heart, even that horrible eye, which the cook says came from a shark they had boarded the day before. The claw must be from one of his own collections.”
    “Why would he do such a thing?” Duncan asked.
    “He was deranged. Delirious. His grief erupted anew. Perhaps he saw something that set off a powerful memory. He was sending a final message to his wife before he took his own life.”
    “He was murdered. Not a suicide,” Woolford reminded Arnold.
    “He planned to commit suicide, McCallum may take that as certain,” the vicar replied. “He was deeply troubled. I am unable to divulge the secrets of prayer, but suffice it to say we often knelt together. He must have gathered the objects in the compass room as one last expression of his anguish. Nothing more than the work of a highly literate man whose emotions overwhelmed his intellect. Bones means death. Two stacks of bones means two deaths. His and his wife’s. The buckle signifies himself, a token from his own person. The eye is the evil that had stared down at him since his wife’s passing. The claw symbolizes the agony he has felt, the feather his plan to join his wife in the ranks of angels. The heart is his own broken heart, the salt the earth that he is about to leave.” Arnold’s words, tentative at first, finished with a triumphant flourish.
“Evering,” the vicar concluded in a superior tone, “was a romantic. The ritual at the compass proved it.”
    “Salt is also used to purify,” Duncan suggested. “And metal, even in a buckle, can be used to fight demons.”
    Arnold gave an impatient, warning sound. “Not by any Christian.”
    “The church I knew as a boy,” Duncan continued, “kept one foot in the old ways.”
    “At last we get to the truth of it,” Arnold said in a smug voice. “I have explained why it had to be Evering who began the ritual. You have given us proof of the origin of the one who interrupted him. You shall record it so, McCallum. The killer committed his heinous deed, then rearranged the objects in a way that would have meaning only to an illiterate whose priests were little more than Druids.”
    Duncan fought down the bile that rose with Arnold’s words. But he had to concede one germ of truth in what Arnold said, that the ritual seemed to have been prepared by two very different people, from two different worlds. “If it was not Evering who completed the ritual,” he pressed, watching Woolford carefully, “then perhaps that part not made by the professor was meant to be read by a mortal.”
    “Meaning what?” asked the lieutenant.
    “Meaning perhaps you will accept that it was a message for someone on board.”
    Woolford buried his head in his hands. When he looked up, his jaw was set in grim determination, as if he were about to do battle. “Half,” he said. “Half the men.”
    Duncan did not miss the way Arnold’s knuckles whitened. “I’m sorry?”
    “You asked me how many had been in the New World before.”
    “Half would seem more than coincidence. It would take some effort to find so many who had both fallen out with the law and been in America.”
    “A credential much to be desired,” Arnold interjected. “We had several weeks to fill the Company ranks, time to be selective.
Experience in the colonies told us they were strong, that they would require little time to adjust to the rigors of their new life.”
    Duncan had never known a man of the cloth who was an outright liar, but indeed had known many who