Sleepwalker (4 page)

It was a delicate, perfect circle, the blood-and-sunlight glow of ancient gold. Higg set it aside. “I will show you the other treasure, from our current dig, in a moment. But first I must tell you what is happening in York. And I really don't know how to begin.”

Dr. Higg glanced away for a moment. “There are troubles, Davis. Mysterious troubles.”

Davis knew enough to wait, and listen. Dr. Higg leaned back in his leather chair. “The dig on York has become even more important than I thought when we first talked.” Dr. Higg sighed. “I thought, when you called, that this work would be the best thing for you.”

“I was losing my mind.” Davis explained again, as he had over the telephone. His waking dreams. His sleepwalking. How badly he missed Margaret, and how much he needed to work.

Dr. Higg smiled sadly. “And, of course, work is the cure for sorrow. I understand you well, Davis. Or I think I do. You want to join Margaret. You want to die, and be with her.”

Davis shrank back into the leather. The truth had a sharpness to it, a chill. He watched the fire. A part of him, it was no doubt true, did want to join Margaret in death. But a stronger part of him wanted to live. Dr. Higg, however, did not know the entire truth.

Dr. Higg turned, and placed a wooden box on his knee. “We need you among the living, Davis.”

The evident kindness and sincerity behind this statement brought tears to Davis's eyes.

“And we particularly need your help in York. There have been serious troubles, and we need your experienced hand.”

Dr. Higg described the unexplained accidents that had troubled the Skeldergate site since the beginning, and shook his head as he described the collapse of the bank in Trench Five. “Peter Chambers worked quickly. You know the man. Can be very firm, and very much the right man when you need a hole dug, or a man pulled out of an avalanche. But it is precisely Peter who has me most troubled.”

“I worked with him—”

“At York, back when we were all together. I remember, and quite well. But there are things that his colleagues generally don't know about Peter. He has had a troubled past. I suppose I can speak in confidence, and fairly explicitly. He had psychiatric problems as a very young man. You are all in your late thirties, and I had hoped Peter had gotten his emotional legs under him by now. And I always admired his energy. A good man, in many ways. So we took a risk. It was my responsibility.”

“I hadn't realized that Peter had such troubles. A temper, as I recall.”

“He had very serious troubles.” Dr. Higg opened the box on his lap and took out a rust-crippled object.

“What sort of troubles—” Davis began, but then he decided that he really didn't want to know. He remembered Peter Chambers as a competent, serious scientist.

Dr. Higg held the red-black object in the light from the fireplace. His expression softened as he gazed at it. “This is one of the finds I asked them to send down to me from York. You know what it is.”

Davis did not hesitate. “Norse sword hilt, Danish iron, dating from eight hundred, give or take twenty years on either side. If we could read it, it would have a prayer on the crosspiece in Roman letters. It's a larger than usual example.”

“Ceremonial, I should imagine. Lovely.” Dr. Higg returned it to its box. “You ask what sort of problems Peter suffered, and I hesitate to even talk about them. I'll be brief. You might as well know the truth about Peter. He tortured animals to death.”

“Good Lord.”

“Throughout his career, and I've been watching him from a distance for years, he has continued to outgrow his early problems. But lately, I have become concerned. This site has developed into a very strange place. Peculiar things tend to happen there. Just the odd accident, you understand. But Peter's calls to me have begun to sound strained. He has difficulties with Langton, his immediate superior. I have begun to be concerned. Perhaps this assignment is too much for him.”

He set the box aside. “And now there's this. This newest discovery. It will be world famous. Equal to the Bog Men of Denmark.” He tugged a folder from the table beside him. “Really something most unusual.”

Davis was accustomed to airy understatement from Dr. Higg. There was the slightest trembling in his hand as he reached for the folder. And the slightest hesitation. Then he took the folder and put it on his lap. He did not open it.

“Go ahead and open it. You won't be disappointed.”

The folder fell open.

He studied the black-and-white glossies. The photographs nearly slipped from his fingers. There had been several bog men over the years, bodies discovered preserved in peat tannin. Most had suffered some degree of decay or deformation.

This body was perfect.

Davis could not speak.

“Quite,” said Dr. Higg. “I feel exactly as you do.”

Davis closed the folder. “How are they keeping it?”

“We are relying on the experience of past bog finds. Some people say keep them wet. Some say keep them dry. We are keeping our man dry, in a stable environment. Quite literally under lock and key. What happens to him next is entirely under your jurisdiction.”

“When is the last train out of King's Cross?”

“You certainly don't have to leap out of your chair like that. I was just beginning to feel cozy myself, and just about to consider another whiskey.”

Davis waved the folder. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime!”

“Yes, I quite agree. But you'll arrive in York at well after midnight, dear Davis. I can't imagine how you'll get into your flat. I can ring Peter, I suppose, but he can be a bit nasty on the telephone.”

Davis caught the ten o'clock from King's Cross, and the distant lights of houses and cars drifted slowly past in the darkness. Davis knew that by daylight the countryside would have been serene and winter green.

Now he had his own reflection for company, and a single drunken young man, whose nose was bleeding. Two other young men in black leather lurched down the train and sat on the arms of chairs. They showed off how they could fight nonexistent opponents, punching the air and laughing.

Everyone but Davis got off at Peterborough, and he had, it seemed, the entire train to himself. The black country stared back, and one or two lights floated by.

Ahead of him, across the night, a twelve-hundred-year-old man was waiting.

4

The station was empty. The gates had been shut, except for one at the far end through which Davis huddled. It was colder here in the Northeast. It had been years since he had seen the city walls of York, and he strained to see a familiar landmark. The walls were dark. His luggage clattered behind him on its wheels. A sole figure worked past on a bicycle, barely illuminated by a streetlight. The cold wind made Davis take a step backward for a moment. He gathered his coat about him, and peered into the cold for some sign of Peter.

But there was no one. Not even a taxi. He had no idea where to go.

A hand gripped his arm.

“I didn't forget you,” said Peter.

Bundled into a very small, pale Austin, Davis shivered in the gust of apparently freezing air from the car heater. “Your flat is just above mine,” said Peter.

“Take me to the find.”

“There'll be time for that in the morning.”

“Take me to it now. Please.”

“Good,” said Peter. “I was hoping you would say that.”

Peter stood on the brakes, and they waited at a stoplight, unnecessarily, it seemed to Davis. There were no other cars. “It's more amazing than you think,” said Peter. “The photographs can't begin to show how astounding it is.”

“Where are you—we—keeping it?”

Peter slammed the car into first, and the tires squealed. The light was still red. “We have a lab in the cellar of Saint Andrews College. It's a very secure place, and the facilities are good.”

“Any sign of post-find deterioration?”

“None. We have it sealed, of course. And its future depends a good deal on what you decide to do. But perhaps I shouldn't refer to our friend as ‘it.' ‘He' is entirely more appropriate.”

“What else do we know—aside from his sex?”

“You sound cold.”

“I'm excited. And cold, too.”

“You'll be even more excited when you see him.”

“You sound like you're hiding something.”

“I'm just keeping an odd little secret about our new friend. You'll see what it is.”

They had all worked together at a dig beside the Ouse, east of York. Margaret and Peter and Davis had not been close, but they had enjoyed each other's company. And perhaps Margaret had been fond of Peter. Davis couldn't remember. Perhaps there had been something between them.

Since then, Davis had gone on to several other digs in Britain, including the dig that had uncovered the theater in Saint Albans. The dig at Tulum, in the Yucatán, had established Davis's career. His book on that dig,
Mayan Blood, Mayan Gold
, which he had begun as a day-by-day journal, had become popular enough to establish him as a photogenic, scholarly scientist, expert enough to be taken seriously in the profession, and good-looking and articulate enough to warrant tours of television talk shows.

Peter had the same sharp profile Davis remembered. Perhaps a little more sharp than it had been. He drove with the same edge-of-fury eagerness that Davis recalled. Peter had published in many of the professional quarterlies, and had specialized in Davis's own first love, Anglo-Saxon artifacts. But Peter had not enjoyed—or been distracted by—the kind of popular success which had fallen to Davis. Peter was a scientist's scientist, and Davis admired this. Davis was, at times, slightly embarrassed at his public image. He preferred the Peter Chambers sort of archaeologist, a man who went about the business of discovering the past. It would be good to work with Peter again.

The car fishtailed and lurched to a stop. Peter leaped from the car, and Davis followed. Great skeletal trees reached above him into the wind. As he watched, a star was blotted by black.

St. Andrews College was a handsome series of brick buildings and a nineteenth-century Gothic chapel, surrounded by black trees. In the dark, Davis had to use his imagination to see the green lawns and the age-charred red brick. The city walls of York were behind the two men as they hurried through the cold. A key tinkled, and they descended stairs. A naked bulb cast bad light. A steel door required two keys, and there was yet another, colder, darker set of stairs.

“They did top-secret work here during the war,” said Peter. “Developed superior sulfa drugs, and they were afraid the German spies might get a hold of the secret.” His breath was white in the half light, each syllable a plume. “Since then, scientists have used it for their most sensitive work. They had typhoid bacillus here at one time, trying to develop antidotes to it in case of germ warfare during the fifties.”

Davis reflected that despite his troubled past, Peter sounded entirely competent, completely lucid. Perhaps Dr. Higg's fears were completely unfounded.

The third door, an even thicker slab of steel, did not open. Peter worked the key, grunting with the effort. “Dr. Higg arranged for us to have this lab as soon as he heard about our find.”

“When did you discover him?”

“Just a fortnight ago.”

A few days, thought Davis, after I walked off my twelfth-story balcony.

“We needed the lab space, anyway,” Peter was saying. “Virtually no one knows this lab is here. I suppose it doesn't matter to us, but it's considered bombproof.”

Fluorescent lights stuttered, and went out. And then blinked, and stayed on.

There were banks of lab tables, of the sort suitable for dissection of human cadavers. There were stainless steel sinks, and cupboards. Finds trays were stacked along one wall. A peek into one showed paper tags and scraps of pottery and bone. A sample of the work ahead of him, Davis considered cheerfully. Doors opened to offices. And at the far end of the vast room locked doors sealed off, he guessed, yet more lab space.

It was cold. It smelled of earth and damp. They were underground. Davis paused. He did not want to step any closer to those sealed doors.

Run away. Don't go any closer. Don't let him open the door.

Because he knew which door it was. It was that door. That one there. This was the moment his career had waited for, and yet all he could think was, Don't open that door.

He was a fool. He could not begin to understand his strange reluctance.

“You're still shivering,” said Peter, not unkindly. “I can't say I blame you. It's always freezing down here. We have a few portable heaters set about, enough to warm our toes.”

Don't open that door.

Another key found a lock, and a bolt clicked. The door opened, silently. There was only more darkness. Peter put his hand into the dark, as though afraid to enter it.

“It's the perfect place to keep him,” said Davis.

He shrank back, away from the sudden light in the room just before him.

Peter beckoned him forward.

The doorway was a rectangle of light. This room was even colder. The walls were the off-green favored by governments around the world. It was the green of a post office in Dallas, and the airport in Izmir.

This was the green tiled floor of a hospital. Or a morgue. There was a single dissection table, waist high. On the table was a plastic blanket, thick and black. Under the plastic was the unmistakable shape of a human figure. Davis breathed into his hands.

Perhaps Dr. Higg was right. Perhaps he wanted to join Margaret.

He was being foolish. Now that he was in England, all his troubled times were behind him. Impatient with himself, he gripped a corner of the black plastic, and flung it back.

A smaller black plastic bag glistened under the light. A body bag, Davis found himself thinking. His hand crept toward the zipper, found the tab, and began to tug the zipper down, the tiny teeth releasing with a loud rasp in the great stillness of the room.