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.

When the bag was unzipped all the way, Davis seized the upper half of the plastic and whisked it aside, and then stepped back, until the wall pushed him from behind.

He had not been prepared for this.

Before him was a perfect, sleeping man. He was as dark as the darkest coffee. He was unshaven—there was the white gloss of two or three days’ beard on his chin and cheeks. He wore a tunic of coarse wool, tar black, and reduced to rags. One hand stretched forth, as though it had just stopped moving. The head was slightly turned to one side.

A dreamer.

In a moment of blank horror, Davis saw his own hand stretch forth, hesitate, and close around the wrist. To his disbelief, he found himself seeking a pulse.

There was no pulse. His hand closed around the wrist as it would close around an empty boot leg. The arm was boneless. Davis shrank back, squeezing his own wrist. He had expected this, of course. The tannic acid that had preserved this body had dissolved most of the bones. And yet, it had surprised him.

Davis saw the secret Peter had referred to. It was easy to miss it, at first. He looked up, and Peter nodded.

“That’s it,” said Peter.

There was a second mouth in the man’s throat, a gaping slit. His throat had been cut.

“He was murdered,” Davis whispered.

“It does look that way.”

“I’ll do a complete examination,” said Davis, perhaps too briskly, “as soon as I can.”

“There’s an excellent assistant I might suggest. A young woman from New Delhi called Irene Saarni. She’s very experienced at handling such finds.”

“I could use her help,” said Davis, thankful to be discussing procedure. It took his mind off the ancient wound before him under the bitter light.

Then Davis stirred himself. His dazed expression must look anything but professional. “Yes, please ask her to see me. We’ll do a postmortem—a considerably-post mortem I guess I’d have to call it. How did you transport him?”

“We covered him with polystyrene pellets. The body turns out, actually, to be quite supple, but we assumed it was fragile, and treated it as though it were made of glass.”

“I imagine the CAT scan will show fairly good preservation of intercranial contents. That’s usual in such cases. Teeth are visible, without manipulating the mandible.” Davis fished the tape recorder out of his inner jacket pocket. He thumbed the button. The teeth were black, as though carved out of charcoal. “Both the color of the teeth and the spacing indicate loss of enamel. The teeth are really quite far apart. We can measure later.”

He wiggled his fingers to show what he needed, and Peter opened a drawer. Davis tugged on a pair of surgical gloves. He bent closer to examine the wound on the throat.

“We didn’t rule out the possibility that the apparent wound was postmortem, due to tissue stress,” Peter was saying.

“I’m afraid not. I’m afraid he was murdered. The superior border of the right lamina of the thyroid cartilage has been cut. This is a wound entirely consistent with a blade of some sort. An especially sharp blade.”

“He bled to death.”

“I’m afraid so. I wish—it sounds pointless, but I wish he had suffered a heart attack. There’s something about this I don’t like.”

Peter seemed reluctant to speak for a moment. “Some of the hired men refused to come anywhere near the trench. They joked about it. But they said—well, they didn’t like the fact that he’d been found at all, and when rumor got about that he’d been murdered.… You might be surprised how much superstition there is about.”

“Maybe there was a fight. We’ll look for fractures, but with so much calcium gone—”

“He weighs about thirty pounds.”

The pubic hair was ginger, and the penis and scrotum well preserved, although slightly atrophied. Fingernails and toenails were all present. “An examination under magnification will be interesting. We’ll want to know if he was a laborer. His unshaven appearance makes him look like someone who was normally clean-shaven but who for some reason neglected his toilet in the last days of his life.”

“I get the impression,” said Peter, “that he was usually fairly tidy. The nails are close-cropped. His hair is as short as mine.”

“I wonder why he hadn’t shaved.”

“Perhaps he was in hiding.”

“If so, they certainly found him. Not much callus on his feet or hands. His clothes are pretty gunked-up with peat. No jewelry. Anything on the site yet?”

“We’re going very slowly. No jewelry yet.”

“And no murder weapon?”

The truth seemed to close around the two men. They had a murder victim who had been dead for over a thousand years, and they were talking as though they were detectives considering a fresh crime. Time seemed to have stopped mattering. This man had lost his life. Davis wanted justice for him. And he felt compassion for this victim. And for his friends, and his family, all vanished, centuries ago.

“Were the police notified?”

“Naturally. But as soon as they saw it they knew it wasn’t a case for them. The C-fourteen tests came back from three different labs just yesterday. Plus or minus three hundred years, he’s twelve hundred years old.”

It was still dark, but it was a predawn dark. The Minster, that great cathedral, pierced the black like a stone giant made beautiful by a spell. The stones of Bootham Bar, turreted, ancient, seemed to glow from within.

Peter drove fast, the tires squealing as he spun into Saint Mary’s. He shifted gears, punishing the tiny car, and hissed to a stop beside a row of rubbish bins.

The two men banged up the stairs with Davis’s luggage, climbing in virtual darkness. “We have a name for him,” said Peter. “Several names, actually. Every bog man has a name. We had a few names which we rejected. Minster Man. That’s a stupid name. York Man is an adequate name, but hardly a name to stir the breast. Here, stop by my flat for a drink. You can climb all the way to the top later. Private Funds Man would please the bureaucrats.”

They sat in the cramped kitchen. Peter poured gin into two glasses. “So my thought is to name him after the road on which the dig is located. Skeldergate. What do you think?”

Davis lifted his glass. “Here’s to our friend. The Skeldergate Man.”

Peter shook out a pouch of Samson. He sprinkled tobacco into a sheet of Rizla, and watched Davis from the corner of his eye. Davis had always had that square jaw. He was blond, and looked as intelligent as he was. But he was, as well, a man who had been through hell. The look in his eyes was not simple travel fatigue. Peter guessed that losing Margaret had been a terrible thing for Davis. That, and the fact that his observations regarding the Skeldergate Man had all been remarkably professional, convinced Peter that Davis would, indeed, not be so difficult to work with. Besides, perhaps Peter owed it to his memory of Margaret.

“I was terribly sorry to hear about Margaret,” said Peter. “We were all so awfully fond of her.”

The sound of her name turned Davis away, like a man struck across the face. Davis thanked him, and said that he had nearly lost his mind.

Peter rattled the red box of Winner’s matches, and lit his cigarette. “Another drink?”

In a voice without self-pity, Davis told him about his sleepwalking, and about the nightmares he had suffered. “The hard part is that I am always, at first, very happy to see her.”

Peter listened, and did not show his surprise that such a solid-looking man could be so close to losing his sanity. Even now, he was not quite sound of mind. Davis would still need a great deal of time. He was still not a man ready for all the confusion and pain the world could give him.

“You want cheering up, is what you want,” said Peter. “Come into the sitting room for a moment.”

It was too large to be a toy, but that’s apparently what it was. It was red and white, and it was heavy. It was not the flimsy, tiny plastic car Davis had known as a boy.

“It’s a Grabber four-wheel drive. You operate it with one of these little black boxes. Taiyo two-channel radio controls. It’s a hobby—or a passion—of mine. That, and radio-controlled flight. I suppose there are some things one never actually outgrows.”

Davis found himself holding a black box with a single telescoping antenna. He switched one dial, and then another. The machine at his side growled. He set it on the carpet, and it flipped over against the leg of a chair. “I need a little practice.”

“You can’t hurt it. It’s got a polycarbonate body—fairly strong.”

Davis set the car on its wheels again, and it sped toward the wall. It collided with the metal grid of the artificial fireplace, a heater with plastic coals. The heater resounded with the force of the crash.

The car would not respond.

“Here,” said Peter. “A battery fell out. It uses eight one-point-five batteries, these red ones. Called double A in the U.S.”

“You must go through a lot of batteries.”

“I have a recharger—only cost seven pounds fifty. I take a Cessna or a Spitfire flying up the river, when the weather allows. I’ve always loved R-C devices. I just wanted you to know it won’t be all bog men and bones here in York.”

The racing car snaked through the legs of the chair, and bounded over a wrinkle in the carpet. It vanished into the hall, and the whirring wheels continued, grinding faintly in the next room.

Peter twisted a dial with a boyish smile, lost, for a moment, in pleasure. The car threaded its way through unseen rooms.

“You have to have a good mental picture of where things are in the next room,” said Peter. “This is more satisfying, in a way, than the airplanes, which you can see up there in the sky every moment. This is a challenge—missing bed legs and the odd discarded shoe. I must have run over a sock just now. It slowed down for a moment. Here it comes.”

And then it was not fun.

The car was a wasplike drill somewhere in the next room, unseen, but guided by intelligence, nearly intelligent itself. It thudded over the hall carpet, and burst upon them.

It sought Davis. He lifted his feet, cringing involuntarily from the red-and-white demon. The devilish toy leaped, and spun through the air, and landed wheels upward in his lap. It was a sight Davis found surprisingly repulsive, like the many working legs of a trapped cockroach.

It struggled in his hands, and then went dead. He held it like a brilliant husk, the carapace of an amazing, bright-hued insect.

Peter had a look of glee on his face. It was not a pretty expression.

“I like tennis,” said Davis, attempting to carry the conversation. “But I guess my favorite hobby would have to be snorkling.”

“A difficult hobby to pursue here. Both the Foss and the Ouse are cold and fairly muddy. Mallards and moorhens, and visibility of about ten centimeters.”

That momentary expression was gone. Peter looked sane again.

Davis described the parrot fish of Cozumel, and how hypnotic it had been to see a surge of silvery fish part around him. “They have an ugly name, those silver fish,” said Davis. “French grunt.”

“Let me show you to your flat.”

His flat was smaller than Peter’s. It had a view, from the bedroom window, of the Minster. The stone of the Minster, soaring, seemingly withered with its articulations and pinnacles, was pink with dawn.

Watch over me, he found himself thinking. He opened the window, and propped it with its notched slide. The roof was slate, sloping downward, and it was too cold to leave the window open for long.

The Minster did not, for the moment, seem so much a guardian as a threat.