Free The Book of Bones by Natasha Narayan Page A

liver pâté and foie gras. It was a ship that traded in flesh. In Bombay the
Mandalay
had picked up opium; now we were sailing through the Malacca Straits with it. We would take this cargo to Shanghai, exchange it for silver—and then fill those great pens with bonded laborers for the factories and railroads of the New World.
    I had made a mistake. The cages were not used to transport animals. The iron rings in the walls weren’t to hook cattle, but to punish disobedient slaves. Those dark patches on the walls could well be dried blood.
    Human blood.

Chapter Eleven
    Up on the quarter-deck I heard it again. The wailing had first woken me back in the Bakers’ fortress, Hadden Castle. Those cries of distress had punctuated my dreams on the long weeks of this voyage. I heard it again now as we silently returned to our quarters. I didn’t know about the others, but I was desperate to get back to our cabin. I longed for clean white sheets and a chance to close my eyes and rid my mind of the disturbing images we’d seen down below.
    That awful crying.
    I had thought I had dreamed it up, that it was a figment of my imagination. I had thought the wailing was made by a ghost. But now I heard it quite clearly, coming from behind an iron door.
    â€œSomeone’s crying!” I said, halting. “Over there.”
    The others had frozen too. For some reason, I had never mentioned the wailing. No one had. But now from my friends’ faces I realized that I wasn’t the only one to have heard it. Isaac got out his lock-pick and wentto work. The Chubb lock clicked loose and the door opened a fraction.
    The cabin was dark, an apish shape looming in the corner. The wailing stopped for a second as we entered, then resumed, as high pitched as the whine of a boiling kettle. I could sense shuffling. Something was looking at us.
    â€œHurry!” I snapped to Isaac, who was fumbling with the damp matches to light a new candle.
    There was a smell of sulfur but no light. Isaac finally managed to strike a match, a weak flame. Our wavering candlelight illuminated the scene.
    A Chinese child propped on pillows. A waif, no more than seven or eight or nine years old. Its shrunken limbs were shrouded by a white sheet. The face was wide with delicate lips and slanting, almond-shaped eyes. Sick eyes, full of a milky pus in which magnified pupils hung dark. I was reminded of Pippin, the Baker Brothers’ poisoned Labrador.
    Awful as that had been, this was far worse. Repelled, but consumed by curiosity, I moved closer.
    The child’s skull had been shaved bald as an egg. Black lines had been painted on the scalp, dividing it into wavy, irregular sections, each of which was numbered. Some of the sections were filled with spidery writing. MORALITY fitted into 21, TIME into 31, PERCEPTION into 27. Itwas hard to make out the writing for a contraption had been fitted over the head. It was a cage, made of wide copper bands, held together by thick bolts. Probes went down to the head and curly wires connected the
thing
to another contraption, which stood on a tripod near the bed. There were batteries gleaming on the tripod—and it was making a hissing sound as needles moved.
    â€œWhat abomination is this?” Rachel asked in an agonized whisper.
    No one replied. We were all silenced by horror.
    The child was looking at us, but without
seeing
. That awful wailing whistle had halted when we came with our candle into the room. But now it started again, redoubled. A chill entered us, which blew away the tropical heat and enfolded our bones in ice.
    â€œI think I can guess,” Isaac said at last, staring at the conscious sleeper.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œPhrenology.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou know, bumpology. They call themselves scientists, those quacks who believe they can read people’s minds by the bumps on their heads.”
    â€œI’ve heard of it,” said Waldo. “I think my