19

“These people are the lowest of the low, aren’t they?” The policeman was tall, and wore a black radio clipped to the lapel of his overcoat. “Thieves of one sort or another, the smart ones, the daft ones, all of them. The lowest of the low.”

Davis hardly felt like arguing with a policeman. He reflected, looking out the window at the trenches, that archaeology usually did not involve much contact with the police. Davis did not know how “low” most thieves were. Perhaps some were not so low. Davis had very little experience with thieves.

“Although,” said the policeman, “it looks as though you’ve got a clever one in this case. Someone low and clever, a real snake, whoever this one is.”

“You have no leads as to where the—I hate to call him simply a body—where the Skeldergate Man might be?”

The policeman made a kind smile. “It’s entirely too early for anything so concrete as that.”

Davis reflected. “Sometimes when a bog man is found, people come forth and try to confess to its murder. I can think of several instances in which men came forth claiming that an ancient body was the wife they had killed years before. Sometimes two or three men come forth to claim the murder of a given body. Some murders have been solved in that way.”

“The conscience does eat at a killer,” said the policeman, perhaps not quite following what Davis was beginning to suggest.

“Is it possible that someone believes this is someone they killed? Maybe they stole the body to destroy it. Burn the evidence, in a way.”

“This is an intelligent sort of a theory,” said the policeman, plainly not willing to trade theories with a scientist. “We’ll see what we can see.”

When the policeman was gone, Davis got up and found himself a helmet. He was sick of things he could not understand. The policeman had told him something very disturbing, and he wanted to dig for a while. Since the Man had vanished, it was a waste of time to spend his days in the lab, especially now. He had been spending more and more time here at the dig. He badly missed working with Irene, but he felt his presence here was, somehow, good for morale. He found a square-bladed Bulldog spade in the jumble of tools in the shed.

It was true, he nearly laughed. Ridiculous. Nothing stayed where you put it here at the dig. If there was a poltergeist, perhaps it had a sense of humor.

A yellow Nally backhoe clawed earth, clearing a new trench. Peter scraped earth at the bottom of Trench Five, the pit that had nearly taken lives. No one else would climb into it. The work in all the trenches had slowed, with men working and then stopping to talk. Every worker was thoughtful, measuring, chipping away at the soil, but not seeming to make any progress. Davis sensed that the team counted on him, now, to make sense of everything. Peter had become thin and pale, and Mr. Langton seemed to spend most of his time sitting in his office, beside a telephone he hoped would not ring.

Dr. Higg continued to lie in what was essentially a coma, although Dr. Hall likened it to a trance. Dr. Hall had become slightly more friendly over the last several days. Perhaps he had seen Davis visiting his unconscious mentor so many times that he felt a degree of compassion. “It’s a deep sleep, basically, from which he seems unable to awaken,” Dr. Hall had volunteered one afternoon. “He’s as close to dying as you can be without actually slipping over the threshold.”

The wage-earning workers, like Skip and Oliver, had long ago decided that the site was haunted, and were accustomed to it. They worked more slowly now, Skip with his pneumatic drill blasting like warfare at one edge of the dig, Oliver plying his mattock in one trench. They moved cautiously, as though nothing could be trusted.

Unable to awaken. Davis stabbed the spade into a wall of earth. He did not not like that phrase, and it repeated itself tirelessly in his mind.

He emptied earth into a black bucket. Irene was working steadily on the finds trays in the lab. Davis was working steadily at keeping up appearances. This was hardly a group of archaeologists anymore. It was a group of frightened people. Even Mandy had become quiet, screening the piles of earth for the odd bit of antler or teeth.

“What did the police have to say?” It was Jane, blond hair cascading from under her helmet.

“Nothing at all conclusive,” said Davis.

“You can tell me, Davis. I won’t spread any secrets.”

Jane, who had begun by being so flirtatious, had quickly seemed aloof. Davis leaned on his spade. He had seen daffodils, as yet unflowering, on the embankments of the city walls. A mild winter, Davis thought, and he knew that he was stalling in the crudest way, wanting to discuss the weather before he discussed what the police had said.

“The police know nothing,” he said.

“They spoke to you for twenty-five minutes and had nothing to say?”

“Being police, they spent more time asking questions than answering them.”

“You are, quite obviously, keeping some sort of secret.”

Davis attempted a reassuring smile. “What I know makes no sense. I’m confused by what the police told me. Why should you be confused, too?”

“They’ve discovered something.”

“Nothing very helpful.” He would, in truth, be happy to share what he had heard.

“I believe I will stay here beside you until you tell me what it is.”

She said it as though lightly, but Davis did not take Jane lightly. She was a determined woman.

“It’s my fault,” Davis began. “The police took prints in the room. Sprinkled powder, and used those little brushes. It took me days to clean up some of the smudges they left. Those powders can be very sticky.” He took a scoop of syrupy mud, and dumped it into a bucket. “They got a pretty good palm print off the door handle. Ran it through their computer, or whatever they do. Didn’t come up with anything. They were a little surprised. Usually they get a few possible matches, at least. This one wasn’t even close.”

“Certainly that wasn’t their news.”

Davis leaned on his spade again. He could not meet her bright, critical eyes. “Being a complete fool, I suggested that they try to match the palm print with someone we all know and love.”

Jane did not speak.

“The Man himself, Mr. Skeldergate. We had prints made of his hands and feet about the time we did the body cavity blood test. And it came back a winner. The print belongs to a man who died one thousand two hundred years ago.”

Davis shoveled mud for a moment. Then he stopped, and turned to Jane. “It could mean that the bog man got up and walked away. I believe it means that someone wants to make us think that he did, as a sort of joke.”

Jane still did not speak.

“It is funny, I suppose,” Davis mused, “in a cruel, ugly, putrid sort of way.”

“I have been doing a good deal of thinking, Davis. Regarding my career. I haven’t had the opportunity to really get to know you,” she said briskly, “and this is something I will have to consider a misfortune. I believe that it would be better for me to resign from the Skeldergate dig. I understand that there is an exciting dig about to begin in London. Bits of the Roman wall, even an interval tower. It would really be so much better for my career to be associated with that—”

“Instead of this chain of lurid mishaps.”

“Not the way I would put it. But, yes, actually.”

When he was alone again, Davis squared off the corner of the trench. Alf grinned down at him, his arms writhing with tattoos. “Getting our hands dirty again today, are we? Can get to be a habit, that.” He winched up the buckets one by one and trundled off with the wheelbarrow.

Davis heard the explosion after it knocked him down.

A flash, and a great slam, like a gigantic pane of glass blown in an instant. He had no memory of falling. He was sprawling, and then he was up again, pulling himself up the ladder.

The site was a photograph. No one moved. Pale faces were turned in one direction, toward a place behind one of the Portakabins. Davis himself felt unable to drag his body over the top of the ladder. The air was heavy, like wet sand.

Then, the scream.

Peter and Davis arrived at the back of the building at the same time, but both men staggered, half falling as another, smaller explosion flung a belt through the air. Engine parts hummed through the air past Davis’s ear, and he crouched to make himself a smaller target.

The generator had blown up. It lay sideways on the ground, only half of it left, the rest of it demolished, littering the ground like bits of black gravel. Blue smoke welled upward from twisting red flames. Peter vanished for a moment, and then shielded his eyes and wrestled with a fire extinguisher.

Smoke swelled. It was blacker, now, and heavy, with a foul, metallic taste. Then Davis saw it.

It can’t be true, he thought.

But the screams would not stop. He saw, and he could not pretend otherwise, although his mind cringed as Davis dived into the smoke and dragged Alf from the surging smoke.

Alf’s words were impossible to make out, but Davis did not have to understand what he was saying. Alf gripped the stump of his handless arm. Scarlet spouts of red arced through the air.

They were a team again. Skip and Oliver arrived with bright red fire extinguishers, and Jane whipped a tourniquet around Alf’s arm. The man was bellowing, and Davis was not certain it was pain, yet, so much as horror.

Smoke choked on the streams from the fire extinguishers. At times the smoke flashed away completely, only to fight back again from the charred, scattered machine.

There on the metal-strewn earth was a white star. Davis held his breath against the smoke, and dashed to the pale, flung treasure. It was still warm, and strangely bloodless in appearance. He carried it like a fragile treasure.

“His hand,” Davis said unnecessarily. Everyone glanced away, and went sweaty pale. The cut had been clean, straight, surgeon-perfect. The hand had, now that he carried it well away from the smoke, a surprising amount of weight to it, real heft, as though a body were still attached to it, pressing downward.

Davis gritted his teeth, and wrapped the hand in a sheet of plastic. Just before he covered it he saw the head of a tattooed snake on the ball of the thumb, where it had lost the rest of its body.

The team was stunned, and had trouble speaking, but they did not lose their sense that Alf would survive. They encouraged him, prompted him to sit up, and when the ambulance arrived, they helped strap him into the stretcher. Alf was screaming less. His voice was torn to a thread of anguish, and he gasped, from time to time, for air.

The severed hand was wrapped in white plastic, and rested beside Alf like a second victim.

When the ambulance was gone, with its dancing blue lights, Peter stayed on his knees. Firemen arrived to soak the machine with water, but they spent as much time recoiling their hoses as they had dousing the smoke. The fire had been extinguished before they arrived.

The firemen departed. Spectators, hands in their coat pockets, watched from the distant gate, but they gradually melted away.

Peter stayed, sitting on the ground, alone. Davis found him there and asked how he was.

“There was no reason for it to do that,” said Peter finally.

It was the first sentence Peter had spoken to Davis for days.

They both sat, gazing at the wreckage. A breath of smoke escaped a coil of ruined cowling. The area around the wrecked machine was black water.

“No reason at all,” Peter continued.

Davis dreaded the words. “A mechanical failure,” he suggested.

“What sort of mechanical failure would do that, Davis?”

“I have no idea.”

“Generators don’t blow up like that.”

“Come on inside, Peter. Don’t stay here like this.”

Peter was trembling. Davis dragged him to his feet, and led him into the main cabin, to his desk. Peter sat with his head in his hands and could not stop shivering. Davis knew exactly how he felt. Davis offered Peter some tea, or some coffee, but Peter seemed not to hear.

It seemed to Davis that he could still feel the weight of the severed hand in his.

“I can see now what the trouble is,” said Peter at last.

“Too many accidents.”

“This was not an accident.”

“Sabotage,” Davis suggested. “Some twisted scientist somewhere envies us our success. He decides to make it difficult for us.”

“Someone like me,” said Peter with a sneer.

“I didn’t mean anyone at all like you.”

“Someone bitter. And smart enough to do this sort of damage.”

“I had never considered you.”

“You should have. But I swear this, Davis. I didn’t make the generator explode. I wouldn’t know how to do that if I wanted to. Poor Alf. I wouldn’t want to do that to anybody.”

Peter despised the sound of his own voice. The shock of the explosion was leading him to near confession. He was being very foolish. He should stop chattering like this. He scattered tobacco onto the floor when he rolled a cigarette. Sit still and be quiet, he commanded himself. The explosion has you a little bit shaken. That’s quite understandable. No need to say anymore about it. He had been very good about working with Davis as though they were both nothing more than fellow professionals. It was essential to keep up the pretense, if only as a mental discipline.

“You hurt yourself,” said Davis.

Peter pulled his sleeve down over a red scratch on his wrist. “It’s nothing,” he said hoarsely.

Peter hurried along the river, nearly running by the time he reached the stairs to his flat. It’s best not to seem nervous, he warned himself. It’s best to seem calm, to smile and return the greetings offered by people as they pass.

But he had to hurry. It was important to be sure that no one had entered the flat while he was gone. It was always possible that one of the cleaning girls might want to Hoover, and might for some reason fumble about in the closet.

Besides, things were not going entirely well. Well enough, but not entirely. He paced the sitting room, until he forced himself into a chair. Someone might hear him pacing. He must seem calm.

He stared at the closet door.

First of all, too many things were happening which had nothing to do with his plans. He had discovered Dr. Higg unconscious on the floor. That had been a rude shock. And the Skeldergate Man had been lying beside Dr. Higg, inexplicably. It almost made one believe in all this talk of spirits. Almost. But not quite.

And this explosion today. That made no sense at all. And then there had been a disappointment. Peter had built a structure for the bog man’s body, a metal frame that allowed him to stand upright. He stood upright now, unseen, in the closet. That part worked admirably. There had, however, been a failure. Peter had hoped to design a mechanism that would cause the leather man to walk, and all of his notes and all of his genius—he could use the word privately, to himself—amounted to nothing.

All of his knowledge of radio-controlled devices could not supply him with a way to make the dead walk. It was as simple as that. He could mount the dead man on wheels, and have him move in that silly manner, but he would resemble a disturbing skateboarder more than anything else. And what Peter required was a means to drive Davis to the point of deathly fear.

Peter struck a Swan Vesta. Tobacco made him lucid, and he would need all of his mental acuity tonight. Because tonight he was going to experiment. He would not try to get the poor tanned gentleman to move. That was an old plan, to be set aside as colorful but unworkable.

Tonight, he would need to begin a new plan. He would experiment. And like any man about to experiment with something unheard of, he was perhaps a bit too excited.

He stood and stepped, as though afraid to wake someone, toward the closet. He had cut up an old black leather jacket. He had soaked old burlap he had bought at a jumble sale in motor oil. He had worked during the all too short nights, the nights that fled so quickly because he burned them up with his plans.

Convincing. He would need to look convincing. He opened the closet. The Man himself stood, covered with black plastic. The shapeless black rags, looking like a skinned man, hung on a hook.

The leather had been soaked in beef blood from the butcher’s on Bridge Street. He had then pounded it epidermal thin. The eyeholes fit exactly over Peter’s own eyes. The black, supple skin was, as he slipped it on, now his own.

He felt it around him, this new skin, this second body. He was no longer Peter Chambers.

He had crafty fingers, he had to admit to himself. Skilled fingers, and a faith that there was always a way around any problem.

The tunic fit over him, and tied with thongs that looked age-clotted. He had considered actually wearing the Skeldergate Man’s clothing, but this was a better fit. He had even considered wearing the Man’s actual leathered skin, but there were enough stalactites of skull and femur within the skin to make this impossible.

Peter pulled the black skin tight around his face, and tucked the lips he had worked at so patiently over his own. How, he asked himself, will this ancient murder victim walk? Will he drag one foot? Will he stride slowly? Very slowly. As though he knew exactly where he was going.

He was conjuring the dead, and as he stood before the bathroom mirror he saw not Peter, the man who understood the ways of cat and man. He saw the dead, with a dead man’s glittering eyes.

He laughed, dancing a strange jig into the kitchen. It was going to work! Tonight he would go for a ramble. Just a little stroll. Let the people of York continue to talk about spirits and a haunted site.

Tonight a dead man would walk among them.