“Anthropodermic?”

“Bindings made of human skin,” said Neddo, matter-of-factly. “The Library of Congress holds a copy of the Scrutinium Scripturarum, printed in Strasbourg some time before 1470. It was presented to the library by one Dr. Vollbehr, who noted that its wooden boards had been covered in human skin during the nineteenth century. It is claimed also that the Harvard Law Library’s second volume of Juan Gutierrez’s Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae Liber Secundus from the seventeenth century is similarly bound with the skin of one Jonas Wright, although the identity of the gentleman remains in question. Then there is the Boston Athenaeum’s copy of The Highwayman by James Allen, or George Walton, as the scoundrel was also known. A most unusual item. Upon Allen’s death, a section of his epidermis was removed and tanned to look like deer-skin, then used to bind a copy of his own book, which was then presented to one John Fenno Jr., who had narrowly escaped death at Allen’s hands during a robbery. That I have seen, although I can’t vouch for any of the others. I seem to recall that it had a most unusual smell…

“So you see that, regardless of any feelings of disgust or animosity you may have for the Reverend Faulkner, he was by no means unique in his efforts. Unpleasant, perhaps, and probably homicidal, but an artist of sorts nevertheless. Which brings us to this item.”

He placed it back upon the velvet once again.

“The person who made this was also working in a tradition: that of using human remains as ornamentation, or memento mori, if you prefer. You know what ‘mem-’”

He stopped. He looked almost embarrassed.

“Of course you do. I’m sorry. Now that you’ve mentioned Faulkner, I recall the rest, and the other one. Terrible, just terrible.”

And yet, beneath the veneer of sympathy, I could see his fascination bubble, and I knew that, if he could, he would have asked me about it all: Faulkner, the book, the Traveling Man. The chance would never come his way again, and his frustration was almost palpable.

“Where was I?” he said. “Yes, bones as ornamentation…”

And so Neddo began to speak, and I listened and learned from him.

In medieval times, the word “church” referred not merely to the building itself, but to the area around it, including the “chimiter” or cemetery. Processions and services were sometimes held within the courtyard, or atrium, of the church, and similarly, when it came to the disposal of the bodies of the dead, people were buried within the main building, against its walls, even under the rain spouts, or sub stillicidio as it was termed, as the rainwater was adjudged to have received the sanctity of the church while running down its roof and walls. “Cemetery” usually meant the outer church area, the atrium in Latin, or aitre in French. But the French also had another word for aitre: the charnier, or charnel house. It came to mean a particular part of the cemetery, namely the galleries along the churchyard, above which were placed ossuaries.

Thus, as Neddo explained it, a churchyard in the Middle Ages typically had four sides, of which the church itself generally formed one, with the three remaining walls decorated with arcades or porticoes in which the bodies of the dead were placed, rather like the cloisters of a monastery (which themselves served as cemeteries for the monks). Above the porticoes, the skulls and limbs of the dead would be stored once they had dried out sufficiently, frequently arranged in artistic compositions. Most of the bones came from the fosses aux pauvres, the great common graves of the poor in the center of the atrium. These were little more than ditches, thirty feet deep and fifteen or twenty feet across, into which the dead were cast sewn up in their shrouds, sometimes as many as fifteen hundred in a single pit covered by a thin layer of dirt, their remains easy prey for wolves and the grave robbers who supplied the anatomists. The soil was so putrefying that bodies quickly rotted, and it was said of some common graves, such as Les Innocents in Paris and Alyscamps in the Alps, that they could consume a body in as few as nine days, a quality regarded as miraculous. As one ditch filled, another, older one was opened up and emptied of its bones, which were then put to use in the ossuaries. Even the remains of the wealthy were pressed into service, although they were first buried in the church building, typically interred in the dirt beneath its flagstones. Up to the seventeenth century, it mattered little to most people where their bones ended up just as long as they remained in the vicinity of the church, so it was common to see human remains in the galleries of the charnels, or the church porch, even in small chapels specially designed for the purpose.

“Churches and crypts decorated in such a manner were thus not uncommon,” concluded Neddo, “but the model for this construction is most particular, I think: Sedlec, in the Czech Republic.”

His fingers traced the contours of the skull, then inserted themselves into the gap at the base of the head so that he could touch the cavity within. As I watched, his body grew tense. He stole a glance at me, but I pretended not to notice. I picked up a silver scalpel with a bone handle and proceeded to examine it, watching in the blade as Neddo turned the skull upside down and allowed the lamplight to illuminate what was inside. While his attention was distracted, I drew aside the curtain at the back of the office.

“You have to go now,” I heard him say, and his tone had changed. Interest and curiosity had been replaced by alarm.

The door behind the curtain was closed, but not locked. I opened it. From behind me I heard Neddo give a shout, but he was too late. I was already inside.

The room was tiny, barely the size of a closet, and lit by a pair of red bulbs inset into the wall. Four skulls sat in a neat line beside a sink that smelled strongly of cleaning products. There were more bones on shelves lining the room, sorted according to size and the area of the skeleton from which they had come. I saw pieces of flesh suspended in glass jars: hands, feet, lungs, a heart. Seven containers of yellowing liquid stood in a small glass cabinet, apparently specially constructed to hold them. Each held a fetus in varying stages of development, the last jar exhibiting a child that appeared fully formed to my eye.

Elsewhere there were picture frames made from femurs; an array of flutes of different sizes constructed from hollowed-out bones; even a chair built from human remains, with a red velvet cushion at its heart like a slab of raw meat. I saw crude candlesticks and crosses, and a deformed skull made monstrous by some terrible disorder of the body that had caused cauliflowerlike growths to explode from the forehead.

“You must leave,” said Neddo. He was panicked, although I didn’t know whether that was due to the fact that I had entered his storeroom or because of what he had felt and seen in the interior of the skull. “You shouldn’t be here. There’s nothing more that I can tell you.”

“You haven’t told me anything at all,” I said.

“Take everything to the museum in the morning. Take all of it to the police, if you wish, but I can’t help you any further.”

I picked up one of the skulls from beside the sink.

“Put that down,” said Neddo.

I turned the skull in my hand. It had a neat hole low down, close to where the vertebrae would once have connected to it. I could see similar holes in the other skulls. They were execution shots.

“You must do well when there are revivals of Hamlet,” I said.

I let the skull rest on my palm.

“Alas, Poor Yorick. A fellow of infinite jest, as long as you understood a little Chinese.”

I showed him the hole in the skull.

“China is where these skulls came from, right? There aren’t too many other places where people get executed so neatly. Who do you think paid for the bullet, Mr. Neddo? Isn’t that how it works in China? You get driven in a truck to a football stadium, then someone shoots you in the head and sends the bill to your relatives? Except these poor souls probably didn’t have any relatives to claim them, so some enterprising individuals took it upon themselves to sell their remains. Maybe they first harvested the liver, the kidneys, even the heart, then stripped the flesh from the bones and offered the rest to you, or someone like you. There must be a law against trading in the remains of executed prisoners, don’t you think?”