16

Her reflection was sliced by the surface of the water. She was drifting toward him.

He began to walk toward her. The water broke under one foot, but then healed around it, and the other foot pressed the breathing water down, and the water supported his weight.

He began to try to cry out, and wrestle with the dream, but he could not speak, and he could not move. Margaret was continuing, wafting toward him, and he began to drift toward her. He wanted to break the dream, and he couldn’t. They were approaching each other more and more quickly.

He held her. He could feel the shape of her body in his arms. Margaret, he wanted to say. After all these months. The change began, as it always did. The skin of her face wrinkled, a fan of fissures breaking across it. Flakes of flesh fluttered away, exposing the carbon-black skull.

“Davis,” said a voice.

Who is it?

“Davis. Wake up.”

Davis woke.

Irene held him.

“You were moaning so, Davis,” she said. “Was it your nightmare again?”

He did not speak for a moment. “Yes. The nightmare. Did I try to get out of bed?”

“In your sleep?”

“Did I try to get up and walk?”

“You simply lay there asleep and moaning, and I woke you up. If you had begun to walk, I might not have awakened you, though. I have heard that it can be very frightening to be awakened while walking in sleep.”

He was still shivering. He ran his hands through her hair. “What will you do,” he said, “when I begin to walk in my sleep again?”

“I will walk with you.”

Davis laughed, despite himself.

“I will go with you, and all will be well.”

“I wonder if it will be that simple.”

“Yes, Davis, I think so.”

They both lay down again, and soon Irene was breathing slowly, lost in sleep.

Margaret.

She had always been unfaithful to him, from the very beginning. She had been quick to love him. “I want to stand like this forever,” she had said in the rain of Quintana Roo, having turned to him suddenly. His arms had closed around her. That night she had told him she loved him, and would never want any other man but him, and this was surprising as well as exciting.

In the scrub jungle, with mosquitoes and iguanas, they began an affair. Davis believed that she had, in truth, loved him. Certainly, after a few days, he loved her. But there were so many other men, from the beginning. As soon as they reached San Diego, where Davis was lecturing that summer, she was on the telephone, hanging up when he entered the room. She broke lunch dates, calling him at the last minute, and there was that feeling about her of other men.

He had asked her to marry him, thinking that she would change. There was a quick taxi ride to the airport, and a short flight to Las Vegas, and then telephone calls to friends and family to explain, after the fact, what they had done. Everyone accepted the suddenness of it. The consensus seemed to be that they were the two smartest and best-looking people anywhere on the horizon, and that naturally they would rush to be married. It was the only rational thing to do.

But she insisted on going to conventions alone. Davis encouraged her, because he knew that she should continue her own career. When she returned she was passionate, but Davis knew. There was no pretending after a while. She had affairs. He challenged her and she shrugged. “You knew how I was. There are many attractive men in archaeology.”

She drank. Often in the morning, before breakfast, she would have a vodka and beef bouillon she described as “medicine.” Of course, she needed medicine, Davis knew, to help her through the hangover from the night before. But on the few occasions she would actually make it to a lunch in San Francisco, at one of their favorite North Beach spots, she would inhale prelunch martinis, and share a bottle of wine, and then have her dessert martini, or two. She showed little damage from all of this, except that she went to bed shortly after the seven o’clock news, and in the morning sometimes put ice cubes into a washcloth for the puffiness around her eyes.

She gave brilliant lectures, and wrote well, although her articles were not often published, being in various ways argumentative, challenging the articles that had appeared in a journal just months before. Editors “admired” her work, but tended to feel “this was not the right time.” If one scientist reasoned that a jaw found in the Calico Mountains was that of an early Indian based on C-fourteen and location of the find, Margaret would write an article proving that the Calico Mountains were so acid that no bone would last ten thousand years, no matter what the carbon test indicated.

She loved parties, the kind of party that finds its place in the society pages, parties that required dresses as expensive as automobiles, and involved a pre-party drink at Donatello’s and champagne and cocktails and after-party drinks, and sometimes Davis would not know where she was for days. Yet no one seemed to perceive that Davis and Margaret were not a loving, happy couple. Davis was always flying back from New York as Margaret was leaving for a party on a yacht in Tiburon, or flying to give a paper in Houston.

He had left her once, and rented an apartment in Sausalito. He had reasoned with her, and fought with her, but it had done no good. She begged him tearfully to come back to her, and he had.

He loved her, and her absences made him see her as, unavoidably, a fantasy figure as well as an actual woman. He was always planning that perfect weekend, in their own apartment beside San Francisco Bay, or in a cabin at Lake Tahoe, or on a spur-of-the-moment fling in Rome. These weekends never occurred. There were only fights, embraces, and passion, and afterward the cycle would begin again. If I could only win her completely, he thought.

Archaeologists who are also celebrities do not necessarily have strongboxes of Spanish gold. Margaret loved cars, and what she could not buy she leased, and, from time to time, borrowed. There was a series of accidents, often in a distant city. Davis knew he was losing her, but he could not guess to what.

But the source of his guilt, and the reason the dream kept returning, was in a meeting in a sunny coffee shop on Solano Avenue.

She had looked beautiful, and Davis saw how ironic it was to meet for lunch like this, like lovers who still did not know each other well. She had mentioned that perhaps they should discuss their future, as though seeing her over breakfast, or on her way out the door to a convention, did not give them a chance to talk about their lives. But she was right, of course. Their lives had become a string of brief meetings. They had to meet like this, like near strangers, to discover something resembling a future.

Davis was due to deliver a paper on early navigation in San Diego that weekend. He was awash in concepts of landfall and dead reckoning. It was a convention of archaeologists from around the world, and the chance to deliver a paper there was a genuine prize.

She had ordered espresso, and said she was not hungry, and after a moment Davis saw that her energetic glow was the aura of pure panic.

“Davis,” she said, and she nearly could not speak. “I wake up in the morning, and I can’t remember anything after Eyewitness News.”

Davis had heard this before, but never with such feeling. “You should get help,” he said. He added, with what he hoped sounded like sympathy, “I want to help you, Margaret.”

“I’ll change,” she said, tugging a Kleenex from her purse. “You don’t think I can, do you?”

“I think you can.”

“But listen to how you say it. So tentatively. I’m off to Seattle tonight. Did you forget?”

“I knew you were going somewhere.”

“Come with me. Please, Davis. We can—”

She saw him shake his head and look away.

Her voice was husky, like the voice of a much older person when she said, “It would mean so much to me.”

“I have that paper to give. The one on ship’s ballast and how Drake enjoyed his California vacation.”

He had tried to make a joke of it, but Margaret bunched her Kleenex tightly. “You’ve been working on that paper for months.”

She said this with a smile that troubled him.

If he tasted his coffee now, he knew it would taste like purest acid. “I’ll fly back up to see you in Seattle. Right after I give my paper.”

She did not speak for a while. Then, “I don’t think I’ll go. I can’t stand to be alone anymore. It’s just the University of Washington. I’ll tell them I’m sick.”

“They’ll talk, you know.”

“What will they say?”

“You know exactly what they’ll say.”

“They’ll say that I drink. And I do. Can the truth really hurt me?”

He did not respond to that question, because Davis believed that of all things in the world, it is truth that is most relentless. “Then I’ll fly back early. I’ll just spend Friday night, just enough time to slaughter a few French vowels and try to dig up my German. I’ll give my paper at ten, and be back in time for lunch.”

But he should have canceled. He nearly did. It would have been so easy to make a phone call, and bow out of this convention. There would always be another. But the work he had put into the paper, and his vanity, and perhaps even his exasperation with her, made him feel that he would go for just the one night.

“You promise you’ll fly back early?”

Davis promised. And he did fly back early, after giving the paper, a shimmering swimming pool in the distance behind a flock of scholarly heads.

There had been applause, and then offers to have lunch. Davis managed to excuse himself in three languages, and each time added, in English, that he had promised to see his wife for lunch, six hundred miles away.

It was his last morning as an ignorant man. The truth had not broken upon him, and would not until he returned to phone calls from friends as soon as he had stepped into the empty apartment.

No one needed to accuse him. He knew the truth. Margaret had every right to resent him, to hate him, to hold him responsible for her death. He should have been with her.

At two o’clock that morning Margaret had driven a vintage MG the wrong way down the Bay Shore Freeway. He had imagined it so many times he felt that he had seen it happen. Cars avoided her, spinning and squealing. She drove, seemingly oblivious, past the Army Street turnoff. The night was wet. There was a drizzle, fine as flour. She collided with a Chrysler driven by a man wanted in two states for various crimes. To make his trip easier, this man had carried plastic antifreeze containers of gasoline in the back seat.

The two cars burned for three hours, and what was left was, judging from the single agonizing Chronicle photograph Davis had seen before he could avoid looking, a pile of white ash.

Maybe she hadn’t felt it. Maybe she hadn’t known.

Grief had devastated Davis. For weeks he had been unable to focus a single thought except She’s gone.

He only gradually returned to his lectures, and the lab at the university campus. When the dreams, and the sleepwalking began, after three or four months, he had known he might never recover fully from losing Margaret.

Perhaps he never would. Only now, with Irene beside him, could he imagine a time when, like a normal person, like his old self, he would experience, day after day, a productive life. He was lucky to have called Dr. Higg. Dr. Higg had always believed in the power of work, and Davis had always believed in the magic of travel.

Irene was a wonder. For a moment Davis felt a feeling he could only call gratitude. Toward Dr. Higg. And toward Irene, and the powers, whatever they were, that knitted life.

Davis was up at dawn, and went for a quick run on the rugby field beside the Ouse. It felt cold, but there was no frost, and as the sun leaked over the Minster in the distance, its light was warm.

“Today, we will go visit a very important man,” said Irene. “We will visit a man who knows everything about the history of York. I have mentioned him to you many times. He is called August Foote. You have no doubt seen his bookstore.”

Davis unlaced his Reeboks. “I need to spend as much time with Dr. Higg as possible today.”

“But he returns to London at noon. You will have all afternoon.”

“How can Mr. Foote help us? Or are we simply working on educating me on the rich lore of York? You don’t have to convince me. I love this town.”

“There are things you do not know.”

Davis conceded that without a murmur. He knew very little, certainly, about life and death, and most of that was probably wrong.

“Except that Dr. Foote does not like archaeologists, so you will find it a very amusing meeting.”

“He doesn’t like what?”

“He hates us.” Irene laughed. “You will be very amused.”

“How could someone dislike archaeologists? Or is it our team in particular he doesn’t like?”

“You will see. He will especially hate you when he sees you. I had to beg him. ‘Oh, please, do talk to us.’ He is a very grumpy man.”

“I think I’ll go back to London with Dr. Higg.”

“It will be very amusing.”

They had planned to meet at Langton’s office, but Mrs. Webster, the secretary, was setting forth the cups and spoons unattended by Higg or Mr. Langton. She had not heard from either man, and she was irritated. “They could at least ring me and explain that they had a delay, couldn’t they? It wouldn’t be too much to ask, would it?”

Jane sat with her arms crossed, looking both prim and sullen. She wished Davis and Irene a good morning in a sweet voice, but did not meet anyone’s eyes. Mandy was delighted to see everyone, it seemed, and described a Jimmy Stewart movie she had seen on television the night before as “his best movie, fullstop.” Irene offered that she had not seen it, and Mandy began telling the plot.

Peter arrived, his work boots slashed with dew, looking disheveled, although this was usual for a field-working archaeologist. His fingers trembled as he rolled a cigarette. “I do hate meetings,” he said. “Especially when they are so slow starting.”

This one was remarkably slow starting. The entire tale of the Jimmy Stewart western was unwound by the time Davis suggested a telephone call to Mr. Langton.

Irene and Mandy chatted happily. Jane read articles, which she underlined with a nylon-tipped red pen. Peter smoked, and gazed at his cigarette smoke thoughtfully. Davis gathered that his old colleague did not feel up to conversation. Peter seemed determined to create the world’s oddest-looking cigarette. Each one he rolled was more peculiar in shape than the one before it. Davis considered it a miracle of physics that smoke could be drawn through such paper tubes.

“Mr. Langton extends his most earnest apologies. He says,” reported Mrs. Webster, “that he overslept.”

She paused, and repositioned the coffee cups. “The alarm, he said.”

“It didn’t go off,” said Mandy.

“It happens, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Webster.

When Langton arrived, pink-cheeked and wispy but otherwise much as he always looked, he gazed quickly around without managing to speak. He apologized, vaguely, but was evidently alarmed.

“Dr. Higg isn’t here yet,” Davis volunteered.

Langton blinked. “I don’t like this at all,” he said.

Davis and Mandy asked a stream of questions, but Langton hurried to his desk and dialed one number, and then another.

“I don’t like it a bit,” he said, replacing the receiver. “No answer at the laboratory. I don’t know what to think.”

Davis asked a series of questions which Langton ignored, until at last he answered all of them in a burst. Dr. Higg had gone off to spend the night in the laboratory. Langton was not sure why, but it was no doubt to discover how the Skeldergate Man was moved during the night. “Or some such thing, I don’t know. He’s a very determined man, you know.”

Davis turned to Peter. “Did you bring your car?” he asked.

“Not today,” said Peter, tapping ash from his cigarette. “I walked.”

Davis excused himself, and ran down the stairs, into the bright, cold morning. It was an easy run up Gillygate. The only pedestrians were people in a hurry to get somewhere, and there were no window-shoppers or tourists.

Davis ran up Lord Mayor’s Walk, and sprinted across the street in the heavy traffic. At first he had been only moderately worried. This was only a precaution, to make sure that Dr. Higg was not, for example, trapped in the lab by a door that stuck, or some equally silly accident.

But as he bounded across the glistening green grass, sending a blackbird from its place on the garden wall, he was not so sure. He reasoned with himself that by acting so hastily he was causing himself to worry for no real reason.

The outside door to the lab was unlocked. Davis could not decide whether this was a good sign or not. It meant, he decided, thumping down the dark stairs, that Higg had not left the lab. He surely would have remembered to lock the door.

Unless he had been in a great hurry.

The stairs seemed endless, but each door was unlocked until he stood in the great lab itself, brightly lit and cold, as always.

Everything was exactly as it should be, thought Davis. Every table was straight. The finds trays were all stacked neatly. Everything was in perfect order.

Davis approached the door to the small room at the end very slowly. He called out Dr. Higg’s name several times, but there was no sound. The door to the small room was just slightly ajar. This was a good sign, thought Davis.

But it wasn’t really. All it meant was that no one had shut the door behind them. And it showed that the light was still on in the small room.

Davis did not want to move.

Hurry. There might be something wrong. Be quick.

Davis warily crept to the door and parted his lips to say Dr. Higg’s name, but he did not bother. He put his forefinger on the door handle and pushed.

The door would not open. Davis put his weight against it. The door reluctantly lurched open, slowly and more slowly, with a weight behind it the nature of which Davis guessed, with a knot in his stomach.

Dr. Higg was on the floor, bent sideways where the door had half pushed and half rolled him. His face was a mask of horror—mouth agape, eyes wide. There was a sigh from Dr. Higg as Davis rolled him flat, and warm breath came and went at his nostrils, although his eyes continued to stare.

Only then did Davis register in his mind what he had seen as he squeezed into the room, in his haste to attend to Dr. Higg.

Davis stood slowly, straightening to his full height.

The Skeldergate Man was gone.