8

Oliver, redheaded and sweating, was attacking a stump of concrete in the side of Trench Three. A graduate student, a pale, pudgy young man with glasses, was scraping the surface of the trench floor. He was scraping in the approved manner, always in one direction, a small ridge of scrapings always before him, until it became a crest, and could be dumped carefully into a black bucket.

Peter had spent the morning repairing the generator. The repair had been simple. A belt had broken. Belts are made to be broken, and Peter had kept a spare in the tools department, but the spare was missing. An auto supply shop on Bootham had every kind of belt but the one he needed. At last, a shop in Fulford had a used belt, and Peter brought it back to the site, carrying it to the generator like a prize eel.

Now the generator rumbled pleasantly. The office lights were on, and Peter sat in the Portakabin, wiping his hands on the old Mickey Mouse T-shirt he kept for such purposes. He watched Oliver through the window as he crunched the dagger end of the mattock into the stump of concrete. Bits of concrete flew.

Oliver was a wiry man, long recovered from his minor concussion. For a lean man, he was very strong. Concrete burst through the air, and sweat gleamed on Oliver’s arms.

Time stopped. The head of the mattock detached itself from the shaft. It seemed to will itself upward, spinning, a tight blur that looked too small to be a great span of iron. Peter parted his lips, but he could not cry out. He could not move. He could do nothing.

The spinning iron reached the apex of its flight, and seemed to hover. It rolled over, as though to view the scene below, deliberately. It was this apparent deliberateness that froze Peter. The mattock head adjusted the angle of its fall, did one slow cartwheel, and then it fell straight to the head of the graduate student. There was a sickening crack—a quiet crack, bone and iron.

The young man sagged forward, and for an instant looked like someone demonstrating the myth of the ostrich. Then he fell sideways, and his eyes were open.

Peter leaped down the steps, ran to the edge of the pit, and jumped. He fell much longer than he had expected to fall, but he had no thought for himself, or for his body. He sprawled when he landed, and scrambled, calling to Oliver, “Lift his legs!”

Peter searched for a pulse. There was nothing.

“Good God in heaven,” murmured Oliver. He held the man’s feet, one under each arm.

“Where’s his helmet?” muttered Peter. But it was obvious where it was. It lay at the foot of the ladder, beside the young man’s coat, which he had carefully folded.

“I called for an ambulance,” cried Jane, far above.

“Wake up,” said Peter, putting his lips beside the young man’s ear. “Wake up. We’re all with you. Wake up—everything will be all right.”

He was talking to a dead man.

Peter gave him the kiss of life, working with trembling hands.

There was no pulse. The eyes stared. Peter’s breath filled the lungs, and wheezed out of them, again and again. An ambulance wended from the east. The high-low, one-two of its call seemed to grow farther away at times. Time was not standing still, now. It was moving in jerks.

“Wake up,” called Peter. “Please wake up.”

“Dear God in heaven,” said Oliver.

Afterward, Peter would relive this moment time and time again. His hands were on the young man’s throat, this inert flesh, realizing he didn’t even know the name of this young volunteer. The eyes were still open, and the lips were gray.

And then the eyes closed. A corpse, and the eyes closed. Peter straightened, unable to believe what he was seeing.

The body laughed.

A dead body, laughing. A chuckle, really, and a derisive one. Oliver dropped the legs.

Both men watched as the body stirred. The eyes opened, and the whites clouded from flushed pink to bruise gray to black. The lips darkened to gray, and then, as both men held their breath, the lips, too, were black. The corpse seemed to stare at both of them with eyes that were black holes.

And then it laughed, an ugly, husky sound, like the baying of an ancient dog. The body shuddered, arms shivering, legs twitching. There was a single inhaled breath, an intake of air so hard it was nearly a scream. Its chest rose and fell, in jerks.

Peter sank to his knees, wondering what lay before him. The young man’s lips began to color again, from eggshell blue to flesh pink. Peter put his hands on the young man’s chest.

The whites of his eyes were a normal color again, and the eyes were blinking. A tremor passed through his arms. His lips parted. His broken voice asked, “What happened?”

“You’ll be fine,” said Peter.

“You were dead,” said Oliver. “But you came back to life.” He looked at Peter. “Didn’t he?”

Peter didn’t answer.

But the broken voice stayed with Peter as he surveyed the trench. The ambulance had come and gone, and Peter was thankful to have the world return to its rubble and mud. Muck and rock: this was what he understood.

But what had happened? There had been a dead body here in the trench, killed by a violent accident. It had died and returned to life. More than that, the mattock head had seemed to move on its own, purposefully.

Then his questions evaporated. Peter laughed. It was all, in a way, a bad joke. And, if one really thought about it, a fairly funny joke. This was not going to soothe the nervous workers. This was not going to help anyone work more calmly. This was not going to help Davis either. This was not going to help the grieving American sleep better at night.

Because as he gazed at the empty trench, and at the head of the mattock as it lay in a puddle, Peter understood something. He understood how much he hated Davis. It was as though a genius of hatred blossomed within him, and he could see clearly all that had been a blur before now.

He was going to make Davis regret coming back to York. He was going to frighten Davis, very badly. He was going to destroy Davis’s sanity.

And then, Peter promised himself, there would be that most delicious task, a goal worth struggling to achieve. It would be entertaining. It would be great sport.

He would not simply murder him—that would be too simple. He would frighten Davis out of his mind, and then, with the ease of a man controlling a distant airplane, he would destroy the man he hated above all else in the world.

Even then, Peter tried to shake away this great hunger. Was it, he thought, just, really? Wasn’t it a return to the old times, those old, buried nights, when he thought only of killing?

Don’t do it, he tried to tell himself, actually speaking the words through his teeth.

Don’t do it. Don’t kill him.