Sleepwalker (23 page)

This sense of great happiness gave him a strange detachment from his fear, and he understood what had happened. It was funny, although he could not laugh. It was amazingly funny. The greatest joke ever played on anyone.

A brilliant joke.

Peter was a genius, and he was also very sick.

Davis clawed the brick wall, struggling to stand. It was a risk. If his ankles were sprained he would sprawl again. He leaned, sweating icily, and let the brick wall support him for a long time. He did not really have to move again for a long time.

Not for a long, long time.

Peter was mad.

Must move now. Must try to take a step.

The slashed thighs crippled him, and his ankles barely supported his weight. He staggered. The blood on his shirt was from his mouth, he discovered, exploring with his fingers. He had bit his lips badly. He did not seem to be missing any teeth.

The next part would be difficult. The back steps. But they weren't so hard. The back door was difficult, because it was locked. He would not have the strength to stagger around the row of buildings, to the front door to begin ringing flats, trying to wake someone to come down and haul him up.

He had the strength. Swaying, he crept around the building, climbed from spear to spear along the black rail fence, and dragged himself up the front steps.

He was gathering himself to begin pushing the buttons to all the flats, when a familiar figure hurried up the street in the dawn.

Davis grinned, and tried to wave.

Mr. Langton scurried toward the front steps, still not seeing what awaited him.

“Don't worry, Mr. Langton,” said Davis. “It's not as bad as it looks.”

Langton faltered and gasped. He fell to one knee and tried to drag himself to his feet, one hand on the rail.

“I'm all right, Mr. Langton,” said Davis. “Just a little bit banged up.”

Langton opened his mouth and shut it. “Davis,” he whispered. “Is that you?”

“I fell.”

“What has he done to you?”

That, Davis thought, will take some telling.

“We must get you to a doctor. Can you stand?”

Davis stood, hunched, and bleeding again, but on his feet. “I want you to listen to me,” Davis began, enunciating as clearly as he could with his puffy lips. “We have to hurry.”

“Indeed we will.” Langton began pushing bells to the flats. “Is there a telephone in this building?”

“Listen to me.”

“I'm responsible for this. I should have known that Peter was far more sick than we all thought. I was swept along by all the optimism.”

“Langton, shut up and listen to me.”

“Optimism is a half step ahead of foolhardiness.”

No one answered. Of course not, Davis thought. The missing Mandy was in the ground-floor flat, a furtive woman who was never home was, as usual, absent from the cellar flat, Peter was gone, and Davis was here on the steps. He tried to enumerate the flats on his fingers. There were one or two others he could not think of just now.

“This,” said Davis, “is what we will do.”

28

Davis opened the door of Langton's Ford, and dragged himself from the car. He tucked the crutches under one arm and hobbled along without them. The pain was bad, but he ignored it as well as he could.

The dig was exposed in the midmorning light, trenches and scaffolding which should have been a hive of scientific activity all silent and still.

Peter's Austin was parked beside the main cabin. The rear door was open. Davis lifted a hand to close it, but stopped himself.

Peter was here. Somewhere on the site. He would not leave his car like this, one door open. He was here, at this moment, watching them.

There were many places to hide. Various cabins and sheds, and, if he did not mind wallowing in groundwater, various trenches.

“Entirely foolish business,” said Langton.

Davis lifted a finger to his lips. It was not an easy gesture, as stiff as he was. “He's here.”

“Here?”

“I think he can hear us,” he whispered.

Langton stiffened. “I should have brought Harry, my dog. Harry would root him out, however he tried to hide.”

They hesitated at the main office. The door was open. Davis was extremely puzzled. There was something very odd about all of this. Had they interrupted Peter just now? Peter would have fled hours ago, Davis thought. There was no reason for him to lurk around the dig.

“If he can hear us, he may as well know what we think of him,” said Langton. There was not much confidence in his voice. If Peter was here, as sick as he was, this was a very dangerous place to be.

The office was the same as always, casually disorganized. There were spoons scattered on the floor, and a patch of what looked like beet juice.

But it was messier than usual, Davis realized. There was a white splinter of wood, and the stump of a spade leaning in the corner. That patch on the floor was not beet juice.

Davis could not have guessed why, but the first call he made was to Irene's flat here in York. He had no reason to expect her to be there, and yet his fingers made the decision for him. There was no answer.

Langton began heating some water. Langton was swept with disgust for himself and fury toward Peter. The sort of very sick mind that could invent a contrivance like that, as a cruel and repulsive joke, was a fit enemy for any man. Langton would not rest until Peter had paid some sort of ultimate price for this. It was unforgivable.

Langton was extremely uncertain regarding Davis's health. He was no doubt quite ill, and should be in hospital resting. The casualty physician had been appalled. “Surely you don't intend to leave,” he had said. Langton had found Davis's answer quite appropriate. “If a twelve-hundred-year-old man can walk around, then I can, too.” The doctor had been baffled, but Langton had, reluctantly, agreed.

“We're a tough lot,” Langton had said. “Archaeologists, you know. Always taking a fall over one thing or another.” Langton was thankful to share this burden with someone. Langton knew his own qualities. He was an excellent second-in-command, and a master at worrying over details. He had to admit, grudgingly, that Davis had a certain amount of character. The time for doing nothing was quite plainly past. This day would require decisiveness. Davis was a decisive man.

Davis put down the telephone, but at once picked it up again. Irene was not in her London flat. Her roommate, a soft-voiced young woman, said that Irene had not spent the night there. Davis was grateful to the cheerful and courteous information operators who found the magazine she worked for.

Miss Saarni was not at her desk.

“This is extremely urgent.”

“One moment, please.”

The phone line made fine, dry whispers, the electronic equivalent of silence.

No, Miss Saarni was not there. No one knew where she might be.

Langton stirred coffee. “Sugar?”

“Absolutely. Sugar and codeine. The working man's breakfast.”

“Any time you feel the need to lie down, Davis—”

“No need for that. I feel terrific.”

He was sitting at Peter's desk. The drawer had not been shut all the way. It could not be shut, he realized. It was a jumble of computer printouts and W. H. Smith spiral notebooks. It looked as though Peter had been ransacking his own desk, looking for something. Something had interrupted him.

“Don't you feel,” Davis began. “That there is something very strange?”

“Quite.”

“I mean—here. Something not right.”

Danger, thought Davis. He dragged himself to his feet. But not simply danger. He stood at the doorway, surveying the dig. There was something wrong. It was right before him, within view, and he could not tell what it was.

The Austin, with its back door open. The Ford. The trenches.

The blood on the floor. “I can't sit here like this. There's something wrong.”

“There's no reason to worry over Irene, Davis. She might have made other plans.”

A burly figure strode through the gate, and closed it behind him. The man waved.

“Skip!” cried Davis.

“Our old friend Skip!” cried Langton, because if anyone could defend them from a madman it was this stout man.

“I was glad to hear from you, Mr. Langton. I was thinking of all of you, all night. I kept wondering when we would start in again. But the others aren't here yet?” he asked, rubbing his hands together, in that half-question, half-statement Yorkshire lilt.

“We only wanted you,” said Davis. “A good deal has happened.”

Skip stroked his beard and sipped coffee while Davis spoke.

“All this is true?” he said at last. “What really happened?”

“All true,” said Davis.

“There's no end to what a sick mind might do,” said Langton.

Davis was not sure how to ask. “Have you, Skip, noticed anything strange about the dig?”

“Unusual, like?”

“There's something wrong here, and I can't think what it is.”

“That's easy. Trench Five has fallen in again.”

Davis went cold.

“I noticed it on my way in. It's as bad as the time it tried to kill Oliver and myself,” said Skip, finishing his coffee.

Davis took a lurching step. He did not like this. “Get a shovel,” he said softly.

Skip dug. He did not bother to empty the dirt into buckets. Quickly but carefully, he flung earth. One shallow scoop after another was tossed aside. It took skill, unpeeling just enough earth, and continuing, working lightly, but so quickly that earth quickly piled into a peak behind him.

At last he stopped. He turned to look up at Davis. “Something here, all right,” he said.

“Keep going,” said Davis. His mouth was dry. The worst possible thing had happened. Langton and Skip thought they had a battle with a madman on their hands. Davis knew better.

“There's something like an arm,” said Skip.

Mud the shape of a hand thrust itself from the earth. Davis prayed. There was still hope. Still a speck of hope. As Skip worked, the hand seemed to sculpt into an arm but it was still earth-black.

Skip used a brush. The mud was whisked free, and the true color of the hand was exposed.

It was pale.

Skip dragged Peter's body from the earth.

“We shouldn't move it,” said Langton.

Skip brushed mud from the slack face.

“I'll call the police,” said Langton, when he could speak.

Davis's grip on his arm stopped him. “What we do is this. Listen to me, Langton—you must do as I say.”

“I'm too tired to put up with anything like hysterics, Davis.”

“I don't think you understand what's happening. We must protect all of us, all of the living, from the fury of the dead.” He stopped himself. The phrase had surprised him, even as he had uttered it.

Skip was standing in the middle of the site. He had dropped the mattock, and was examining something in his hands, a small object that glittered.

“Lipstick,” he called.

Davis joined him.

“Never used,” said Skip.

Davis thought, at once, that Irene never used makeup, and that it was just like her to buy it and then forget that she had it in her handbag.

As he thought this he realized that there was no doubt in his mind. This had fallen out of Irene's handbag, and so had this. He knelt to pluck a green and orange British Rail ticket from a puddle. The milk-and-coffee-colored water had stained it, but he could read it easily. It was a return ticket from London to York. He could feel the crescent-shaped puncture hole where the ticket had been canceled.

“Irene is here,” he said, half to himself. Then he turned and called, “She's here!”

Both men stared a question.

“Irene is here!”

It did not take them long to find her resting place. Concrete slabs had been tipped to one side, and there was blood where her head had been, a small black spill of it.

But Irene was gone.

Davis sat in the Portakabin while the police searched, questioned, made notes, spoke into the little black radios they wore on their collars, and asked Davis three different times for a description of the missing woman, and three different times asked him what, exactly, was the relationship between Davis and Miss Saarni.

They questioned Skip on the discovery of Peter's body. The attitude of the police was dumbfounded displeasure. Langton was crisp with them. No one had any idea what had happened, what was happening, or what would happen. They recognized in him a man who knew how to write a potent letter of complaint, and so they left, at last, with something like a courteous farewell and a promise to get results.

Davis smoldered, waiting for the last policeman to leave. Irene was gone. And yet he could feel it in his bones—she was not far away. These police, he thought, with their officious searching and blood sampling and all their questions, would never find her. Perhaps they did not even believe that it was Irene who was missing. She would turn up, they might think, with a hangover in some hotel somewhere, with a good friend she had not gotten around to mentioning yet.

“Now that they've gone,” said Davis, finally, “we can start looking.”

He hobbled out, and gazed at the trenches. She could be anywhere. Here on the site. In the river. Gone completely.

Skip had gone off to the Petergate Fishery for a late lunch which he alone felt like eating. Langton paced the cabin, squinted at the sky, called his wife, and at last said, watching Davis limp among the scaffolding and wheelbarrows, “There's no use looking, Davis. The police gave things a good look-round, you know.”

What are we, thought Davis, if not people who, by professional inclination and training, find the lost, the buried?

“What do you suppose, Davis?” called Langton. “That she's gone down a hole somewhere?”

And then Davis saw it.

29

Irene felt the pain turning, a sheet that blew in the wind, sometimes reflecting angry light, and sometimes softness, shadow. If she moved, she knew, she would die of pain. So, she reasoned to herself, I will not move, for a very long time.