Free The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

where the jaw might originally have lain. I was poking my shovel around the base of a stone coffin when a voice said at my ear, “Have you lost something, sir?”
    I didn’t mark until later the heavy sarcasm. I forgot that he was a watchman and I was a grave-robber whose conviction could mean public dismemberment. In my single-minded excitement I acted guiltless, even with a bag of questionable tools slung over my shoulder and a shovel in my hand, and my manner disarmed him completely.
    “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I demanded, thrusting the jawbone under his nose.
    “Cludd!” he cried, backing away. “That’s a ghoul. Leave it, sir, put it down! To touch one of them—you don’t know what it might do.”
    I laughed. “There are no ghouls,” I said, mocking the wisdom of the Anatomical Institute.
    He shook his head violently. He was a big, red-faced brute, but he looked as if he might weep or faint. “You don’t know, sir, you don’t know!” Still backing away, he waved a weighty arm in the direction of my grandparents’ tomb. “I heard one of them laughing just last night.”
    * * * *
    Last night I had briefly seen myself taking a battle-ax down from the wall and giving the Anatomical Institute the housecleaning it deserved. As judges are more apt to be lords than scholars, I probably would have suffered nothing worse than banishment from the city for a few years, and would have returned to enjoy a piquant notoriety. In my absence the students would have thought twice about puking on our steps.
    Such roaring deeds were alien to my nature, however, and my strange discovery jolted me back to my true self. Next day, instead of going to the Institute to bathe in the blood of scholars, I trotted up the steps to consult them politely about the jawbone wrapped under my arm.
    I paused before my great-grandfather’s statue, letting the scholarly swarm find paths around me while I studied it attentively for the first time. I had remembered it as being odd beyond its depiction of a wise old head with the body of a young athlete, for that was a convention of public sculpture. My memory suggested that he sat on a bench, but now I saw that his seat was a coffin with the lid suggestively shoved aside. He examined a skull in his hand, surely a fit occupation for the patron of the Institute, but his expression was queerly unscientific. With great subtlety the artist had hinted that he was not so much meditating on the skull as leering at it. If the statue had come to life, he might in the next instant have kissed it, or gnawed it.
    I dismissed these fancies and began my search for Dr. Porfat’s office. The other scholar’s contempt had raised him in my esteem; and if derision were a good gauge, he rose higher each time I asked the way. I wondered if the name were not some comic catchword, not only from the smirks or giggles, but also from the imaginative directions it evoked. After climbing marble stairs, then wooden ones, then a metal ladder or two, and at one point creeping across a precipitously sloped roof of loose slates, I found my way to a door under the cobwebbed eaves of the remotest tower, where the hieroglyph for Porfat had been burned into the wood many years ago. The door was locked, and no amount of knocking produced a response, so I opened it.
    Except for more dust than any tomb, and for towers of books and bones and papers, some of them seeming to support the high ceiling and others wavering ominously to my steps on the uneven floor, the room was empty. One of the windows was not entirely blocked by heaped manuscripts, and one grimy pane commanded a misguided toymaker’s view of the necropolis. I lingered there a long time, picking out likely tombs I had not entered and marking concealed pockets and byways of the rumpled terrain whose existence not even I had suspected. I took some notes on the back of a handy paper.
    “Dr. Por—oh!”
    I kept writing as I glanced up with feigned annoyance.