Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

He typed the name into the search bar. He clicked, then clicked again; the next page took him to a website.

A blue whale served as a heading. Below that, dinosaurs, and the Chicago skyline set as a backdrop. Then came your standard museum menu: Recent Exhibitions, Coming Attractions. Halfway down the page were the Special Programs—and below that, something that promised Fun for Kids.

He browsed the Special Programs, but nothing jumped out at him as being particularly pertinent.

Down at the bottom of the screen, he clicked the About Us button. He picked “Our Staff,” then scrolled down through the names. Eleven pages of names. Eleven pages of job descriptions. Biologists, zoologists, curators, a dozen other titles. An army of workers, page after page of smiling museum staff.

“Ah,” he said when he saw it. And then he remembered.

That’s why the name had stuck out.

“Of course.”

There were only a limited number of places where talented, ambitious students ended up. He’d heard that after graduate studies she’d gone on to teaching. Then work in a museum.

In the middle of a page of little thumbnail photos was a small picture that caught his attention: a photo of a dark-haired woman and, below that, a name and job title. Lillivati Gajjar, research assistant, paleographic analysis.

That night, Paul took the long way home. He pulled a bottle of cheap red wine from the fridge and poured himself a glass. The glass emptied, so he refilled it. He refilled it again. Then again.

He saw James, standing in the sun. Herpetology, mate .

He felt the steel enter his eye, heard the sound it made inside his head. The rasp of blade on bone, a sound you heard with your entire skull, not just your eardrums.

His right hand wandered up to his eye patch.

He saw Lillivati standing in the cages, her right arm covered in blood. The new hires all want the monkeys.

Junior year, she’d snuck him into the medical research library after hours. She had keys to the entire research building, so she could get through any door. He’d tracked her half-naked between the canyons of books—stumbling first upon her blouse, then her socks and shoes, finally her pants, lying between the shelves of ancient tomes that dated back to Sophocles. He’d caught up to her on the top floor of the library—near the shelves at the very back, where the ancient boiler system (also from Sophocles’s time) discarded its excess heat most efficiently, producing a beautiful pocket of warmth in the otherwise cold and drafty building. Her location of capture was no accident on her part, he suspected.

He’d come around the corner and found her lounging on the table, naked and waiting, panties shed like some molted skin. She was so beautiful in that moment that it hurt to breathe, streetlights distilled through the high windows, cutting strange shadows across rows of books. He moved forward and kissed her. He took her on the table in the middle of the room, while her sounds echoed in the empty library. Somehow, the table held them.

Afterward, they dressed, and she used her keys to let them behind the checkout desk. “Want to see the other rooms?”

“Why?”

“Because they’re locked.”

There were conference rooms and offices and a strange room that seemed to house every photocopier in the world.

“What about that room?” Paul asked, pointing to a door in the deepest, most forgotten part of the library.

“Off-limits,” she said.

“Sounds interesting.”

“Yes, but no,” she said. “I could lose my privileges for showing you.”

“What about what we just did up there?” he asked, gesturing with his head toward the top level and the warm place from which they’d just come. “You couldn’t lose your privileges for that?”

She smiled. “Well, for that, too,” she said. “But opening this door would be much more serious.” She considered the possibility for a moment. “Also, less worth it.”

A few weeks later, Lilli got out of classes early. She surprised him and joined him in the rodent room just before the end of his work shift.

He didn’t see her enter.

The rodent room was enormous. The repository of thousands and thousands of mice, like a constantly churning engine into which food was teaspooned on one end and out of which baby mice were retrieved on the other—with waste products recycled, data archived, biological material processed and shipped. It was beyond Paul’s wildest boyhood dreams. The engine churned and Paul met the lab’s contractual obligations. He produced mice for the various scientific departments. He produced feeders, and research mice, and inbred strains. All carefully cataloged. All carefully controlled and accounted for.

But within this big churning engine, small irregularities sometimes arose and persisted.

Like energy lost from a system due to the heat of friction, barely noticeable, siphoned away—a small, private stock.

In the end, of course, he could not resist.

“It started with a piebald mouse,” he told her. “I came across it in a mixed litter. He carried white spotting, like a lot of the mice here, but it was expressed to a degree that was unusual. The white patches covered more than half his body. I picked another mouse that had a lot of white spotting, and I bred him to her. I kept it up for several generations, retaining the mice with the least amount of color. I was a half dozen generations in when I noticed the drooping ears. The ears were small, deformed. The cartilage didn’t develop right. I bred that mouse to other closely related mice, and I had a whole strain of mice with drooping ears.”

“How long have you been doing it?”

“More than a year now. Seven generations.”

He reached into the cage and pulled out a mouse. It was mostly white, with only a small patch of color on its rump.

“It’s so calm,” she said, eyeing the little rodent in his hand.

“That’s the other thing,” he said. “As a strain, they’re very docile. They don’t seem to have much of a fear reaction. They’re also sort of slow.”

“You bred for that?”

“No, I only bred for maximum expression of white spotting. The drooping ears and docility seemed to just happen.”

Her expression grew serious. She was quiet for a moment; then she said, “There’s something that you have to see.” She took him by the hand.

“Now?”

“Now.”

She led him back to the research library and slid her key into the forbidden lock.

“I thought you said you couldn’t show me what’s in here.”

“You need to see this,” she responded.

She led him down a narrow hall and opened a metal gate.

“These are the banned books,” she said.

They stepped inside the tiny room. Every surface seemed lined with books. Floor to ceiling. On the floor, in stacks, books had been piled into tall columns. There were books by Charles Lyell, Friedrich Nietzsche, Asa Gray, Thomas Henry Huxley. Paul spied Philosophie Zoologique, The Principles of Biology, and even a battered old leather-bound edition of Modern Synthesis. And many other books, too, whose authors and titles were unfamiliar to him.

“Why do they keep them?”

“Well, they’re books. You can’t burn them. That’s always a PR nightmare. But you can lock them away where nobody can read them.”

Paul thought of the secret repositories of books that must be hidden away the world over. How many other books were piled behind locked doors?

She went to a particular shelf. She scanned the titles.

“Here it is,” she said. She opened the book and riffled through the pages.

“What is it?”