GPS Coordinates: –118.2436849, 34.0522342
March 12, 2010
By the time Claire Matthews had finished writing her doctoral dissertation she was regarded by many of her colleagues to be one of the world’s most promising young contributors to the emerging field of cryptozoology. For this, she had an unusual pot-bellied herbivore to thank. Although no bigger than a common goat, the Ha Tinh pygmy rhinoceros, as it was now known the world over, had promised to get Claire in the door of an elitist community of male scientists that every now and then tolerated a Madame Curie in their ranks. Claire had been a lead member of the research team who had confirmed the existence of the pygmy rhinoceros, a taciturn creature whose most prominent features were a pair of vestigial horns on its snout and zebra stripes about its rump. However, the discovery that should have rocketed her to relative stardom fizzled mightily, and her career had more or less blown up on the launch pad nearly five years ago.
Admittedly, tracking down species thought to be extinct or merely rumored to exist was not going to make a celebrity out of her, but there was something inherently noble and gratifying about opening the eyes of the world to the mystery and diversity of fauna that had populated the planet long before there were humans to level forests for toilet paper. She also liked proving the skeptics wrong. They were men mostly, burnt-out practitioners of hard data and established facts, who regarded her passion for the unknown with the same scorn many of Copernicus’s contemporaries had regarded the renegade astronomer’s heretical model of earth’s solar system.
For decades, people in the remote mountain villages of Laos and Vietnam had reported sightings of a reclusive mammal unclassified in modern taxonomy, but no one had paid any serious attention. That is until Claire had produced credible evidence of the Ha Tinh’s existence in the form of badly decomposed remains. She had received the parcel via overnight mail by secret arrangement with an anonymous zoo acquisitionist operating without a permit in the balmy highlands of Ha Tinh province. In actuality, there was no zoo acquisitionist and the decomposed remains had belonged to a stillborn hippopotamus, but the ruse had been enough to convince the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History where she had been interning to fund a modest expedition. It was a big gamble. Claire knew that failure would’ve meant exposure as a fraud and the end of a career in its infancy; however, she was absolutely certain that something, if not the rumored pygmy rhinoceros, was out there waiting to be discovered. Once upon a time she had been an incurable optimist. Besides, she was not going to make it in a man’s world playing by the rules. She had to take chances, make her own way. She had learned early on that her survival depended on her ability to adapt, eke out a niche in a field saturated with testosterone. Her hunch had paid off and after only three leech-infested weeks in the jungle she and the other members of the team had documented two adult and one juvenile Ha Tinh pygmy rhinoceros. It was the most significant addition to the Class Mammalia since biologists had confirmed the existence of the Vu Quang ox in 1992.
Despite her early notoriety she now lived with the distinct possibility that she was never going to be able to match the success of her first expedition, a triumph eclipsed by an over-inflated controversy that haunted her to this day. Already there were those who described her, in addition to less flattering appellations, as a “one hit wonder.” Mostly, these were the same aging armchair scientists who had doubted her from the beginning, envious hemorrhoid sufferers who ruled university Natural Science departments and the professional journals with an arrogant dedication to rehashing what was already known. But the label bothered her anyway. Claire had known all along that her chosen field was with few exceptions little more than a bastion of male ego. Still, she had done nothing to deserve this.
Teaching general biology at Los Caminos Community College, an under funded, overcrowded haven for anyone who could afford the twenty-five dollars per unit enrollment fee was nothing short of a slap in the face. The gloomy little college was equidistant from every third-rate inner-city high-school in the area, and spitting distance from UCLA, and her alma mater, USC, powerhouses of scientific inquiry.
The majority of her students, most of whom were more interested in getting high and having sex than getting an education, couldn’t have told the difference between an Arabian Oryx and a single-celled protozoan. But for the occasional outburst of a rabid creationist asserting that dinosaur fossils were nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by Satan to ensnare the faithless, her classes were painfully tedious and life-draining. Worse yet was the fact that funding at the community college level was harder to come by than inspiration. Claire had drafted countless grant proposals, any of which if approved would have helped to resurrect Los Caminos from the ashes of academic obscurity. All, however, had been summarily rejected in favor of more pressing needs—specifically the college’s perennially lackluster athletics program.
Although it was poison to her system Claire couldn’t help following the “work” of Dr. Ethan Hatcher. Hatcher had more or less stolen the position she had earned at USC and was now up to his armpits in honoraria and grant money. He had been a fellow grad student, museum intern, and team member of the Ha Tinh expedition back in 1999. The unscrupulous bastard was also the one primarily responsible for her ongoing exile in the wastelands of academic purgatory.
Hatcher had convinced Ellington Nosworthy, Ph.D., a self-styled intellectual and great glob of a man in charge of acquisitions at the Museum of Natural History, that it was foolish and a waste of time to go all the way to Southeast Asia without procuring a living specimen of the creature they intended to catalogue and study. With the exception of a few regrettable months in the summer before the expedition, Claire had seen Hatcher for what he was: a petty, unremarkable ghoul who believed the only way to truly understand something was to kill it. Okay, maybe she was exaggerating the facts a bit. Face it, she resented the knowledge that Hatcher was living the life of which she’d always dreamed.
From the moment Claire had been informed of the plan to return to Los Angeles with a living specimen of the pygmy rhino she was determined to make sure that it never happened. The fact that a creature yet undocumented were in all probability endangered, if not poised on the brink of extinction, didn’t seem to bother Hatcher and Nosworthy. To the thoughtless pair, the Ha Tinh rhino was a living, breathing opportunity to advance their careers, no matter the cost. Claire had gently reminded them of the fate of Benjamin, the Tasmanian Tiger—the last of its kind dying alone in a cage at the Hobart Zoo in 1936—but she had known better than to press the issue. If she didn’t have the stomach for “hard science” Nosworthy had reminded her with the artless condescension of a homicide detective, there were others who would be grateful to take her place.
In spite of a few logistical problems, Claire had known that deceiving Hatcher would be a snap. She had fooled him once already with the faked Ha Tinh remains, his powers of perception, as was his eye for empirical data, notoriously indiscriminate. As part of a ploy to demonstrate team spirit she had admitted her earlier lapse in judgment and had, herself, selected the container they would use to air freight the specimen back to Los Angeles in the event such a “golden” opportunity presented itself. With the exception of a few small breathing holes the portable enclosure was entirely sealed, offering scant visibility of the cargo within. Claire had little difficulty convincing her self-involved colleagues that it would be best to shelter the creature from any unnecessary stimuli. Emotional trauma, she explained, could drastically reduce the value of their investment, both scientifically and financially. After all, they wanted a specimen that would be responsive to their poking and prodding, not a wide-eyed, defecating beast on the verge of cardiac arrest.
After landing in Hanoi, Claire, Hatcher and the three other members of the expedition traveled overland into the dense montane forests of the Annamite mountains. They spent twenty-six kidney-jarring hours bouncing over unpaved roads in a U.S. Army supply truck that had been captured by the Vietcong during the war. While Claire and the others reviewed the data on the purported whereabouts and living habits of the pygmy rhinoceros, Hatcher familiarized himself with the operation and feel of the tranquilizer gun the museum had provided. He spent the majority of the drive with the loaded weapon resting carelessly across his lap, eyes narrowed into cagey slits as if he was Ernest Hemingway on the trail of Cape buffalo.
“Careful, Ethan,” Claire had warned. “You’re going to put somebody to sleep if that thing accidentally goes off.”
Everyone laughed but Hatcher. “You’re a great girl,” he apologized sadistically, “but I’ve moved on. Maybe you should think about doing the same. Our work here is too important to let our personal differences interfere with it.”
Truth be told, it was Claire who had dumped Hatcher. Once they had started dating it hadn’t taken her long to realize that he was a blue ribbon asshole, plain and simple. Unfortunately, the lesson came a little too late. A few short weeks before they’d broken up Claire had come down with a case of strep throat. She had taken the antibiotics and gone about the business of her life which she now dreaded to admit included having sex with Hatcher. She didn’t understand how exactly but the antibiotics had somehow reacted with her birth control pills, rendering her only measure of protection temporarily ineffective. Hatcher was adamant that Claire have an abortion. He said that they didn’t have time for distractions. A baby would only get in the way. Until then Claire hadn’t seriously considered keeping the baby. She had no intention of staying with Hatcher and hoped that if and when she had a child that she would also have a husband she loved by her side. However, Hatcher’s blasé attitude about the whole thing had nearly compelled her to make the worst decision of her life. At one point she had actually threatened to keep the baby if only to prove that she had a say in it. Hatcher freaked out. She had an abortion. And the rest was emotional baggage. Guilt mostly, but also wonder.
By the time they arrived in Vietnam, Claire had more or less gotten over the worst of it. That is until Hatcher had stirred things up with his vindictive rebuff. It was this exchange that Claire played over in her mind three weeks later as she released Hatcher’s prize Ha Tinh specimen, a young female, while he and the others slept in a village hut nearby. By the time they had awakened the following morning Claire had replaced the emancipated rhinoceros with a pig of the same approximate weight and dimensions she had secretly purchased from a sympathetic local.
Hatcher’s rage upon seeing that he had returned from halfway around the world with eighty-five kilos of bacon was only outdone by his shame at having to explain to Nosworthy how he had been duped by a woman. While Claire had managed to spare the Ha Tinh the indignity of becoming a lab animal, she had not fared equally well. Though Nosworthy could not prove that she had been responsible for the switch, the spiteful son of a bitch had made it his lifelong mission to see that she languish in professional obscurity—that she, like the species she so desperately desired to catalogue, remain undiscovered.
Claire had to hand it to old Nosworthy. The greasy blowhard was more influential than she had given him credit for. More than a decade had passed since the expedition to Vietnam and subsequent scandal, and other than an occasional sniff from some out-of-the-way foreign studies academy in Haiti or the United Arab Emirates she had been effectively shut out of the university hiring pool. Had Nosworthy’s quest to avenge his bruised ego ended there, Claire might have been able to live with it. However, the fact that he had expended an equal amount of energy in furthering Hatcher’s career had caused her no end of grief.
While the self-aggrandizing publicity hound headed lavishly-funded expeditions to the primeval forests of Borneo and the frigid waters of Loch Ness in search of creatures whose existence only the tabloids took seriously, Claire was stuck grading papers whose careless, uninspired responses assured her in no uncertain terms that her life was helplessly futile. No two ways about it, she had died and gone to hell.
This was Ethan’s second meeting with Okum. Same location, same subject, same lousy food. But with one important twist. The first time they had met everything had been in place: the team, the station, the objectives. Now there was nothing left but a bombed-out crater, a handful of dead scientists, and a shitload of unanswered questions. Ethan wasn’t exactly looking forward to their lunch date. He had no idea what to expect, but had gotten the distinct impression that he was now in deeper than ever. Okum had mentioned something about switching to Plan B, but wouldn’t give him any details over the phone. In the past forty-eight hours Ethan had developed a profound distrust of the second letter of the alphabet.
“Have a seat,” said Okum, scowling benevolently over the top of a menu smeared with greasy fingerprints. “The lemonade’s for you. Drink up.”
Ethan eyed the glass sweating on the table in front of him. The ice was half-melted and the contents looked like watered-down piss. Frozen concentrate. “Thanks.”
“You hungry? I was thinking about having the steak sandwich, but I don’t know about the sauce they put on it. What in the name of Saint Peter is a-oh-lee?”
“Aioli is garlic-mayonnaise. It’s good.”
Okum folded the menu and laid it on the table. “You were right about us sending in specialists to do this. Ivan may have been just a bit too hot for you and your guys to handle.” He shrugged. “Live and learn, right?”
Easy now. There’s no point losing your temper. “Can we make this quick? I’ve got a class to teach in forty-five minutes.”
Okum steepled his hands as if he were about to pray and looked searchingly at Ethan. “I’ve gotta say we’re a bit concerned with what happened down there.”
Ethan couldn’t help it. He was furious. “Concerned?” he echoed. “My best friend is dead.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Okum answered calmly.
“Are you telling me Alan might still be alive? We had a memorial service for him. His parents cried their eyes out!”
Okum’s face hardened. “Well, boo fucking hoo. Your friend might be involved in something. Shit, for all anyone knows he’s sipping mai-tais on a beach somewhere while we reminisce about what a swell guy he was.”
“You make it sound as if Alan was a spy or something?” Ethan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you insane? He rode a bicycle to work because cars leave too big a carbon footprint on the environment.”
“Sure, and he used corn cobs to wipe his ass,” Okum added dryly. He blotted the sweat from his forehead with a paper napkin. “Until we’re sure that every member of your team died in the explosion there’s the possibility that one of them—not your friend necessarily—destroyed the station to cover his tracks.”
“You’re joking?”
“I leave the jokes to the politicians,” said Okum. “Something like Ivan turns up in a Middle Eastern weapons bazaar and every rogue nation, terrorist, and civil servant with a grudge will want a taste.”
“I’m here and I’m alive. Shouldn’t I be your number one suspect?”
“We’re looking into that.” Okum massaged his jaw. “In the meantime, we’ve put together another team. We’d like you to serve as a field consultant.”
“What kind of team?”
“A military forensics unit. JPAC. Top notch. Give ’em a nose hair and they can tell you who it belonged to, cause of death, and how he liked his eggs done.”
“Now you want me to play Sherlock Holmes?”
“You spent some time there,” said Okum. “You know what to expect. I don’t care if you end up serving coffee and donuts as long as this gets done. If and when our team identifies and accounts for the remains of every member of your team . . . Well then, case closed. Via con Dios and fuck-you very much.”
“And that’s it?” Ethan felt sick to his stomach. Alan had died for nothing. Worse than nothing. He had died because Ethan had fudged on his taxes. “What about Ivan?”
“Between what happened to the Russians once upon a time, and now this . . . Let’s just say that strike three isn’t worth the risk. We’ve decided to go in another direction. Call me fickle, but Ivan’s just not right for us at this time.”
“This isn’t a blind date.”
“Love ’em and leave ’em.” Okum spread his arms and flashed a shit-eating grin. “Which reminds me . . .” He dug something out of his pocket and passed it across the table to Ethan. It was a photograph. “I understand you two know each other.”
“Who gave you this?” said Ethan. Five years had gone by, but he remembered the moment well. In fact, it was Alan who had snapped the picture in a little village high in the mountains of Ha Tinh province.
“My sources tell me she’s got some pretty interesting ideas about Ivan.”
Ethan was tongue-tied.
“Don’t look so surprised,” said Okum. “Actually, Dr. Matthews was our first choice. But we couldn’t dig up any dirt on her so we settled on you. I guess we should have dug a little deeper. Her expertise might have saved your buddy’s life.” Okum fingered the picture beneath his nose. He was practically drooling over Claire’s long tanned muscular legs. “Tell me about her. I hear you two knocked boots once upon a time.”
If there had been any doubt of Claire’s current locale, it was promptly laid to rest that afternoon when Ethan Hatcher, the devil himself, unexpectedly appeared in her office. Although it had been years since they had been alone together, they had exchanged words on more than one occasion, heated Q&A sessions presided over by the rancor each felt for one another. The last time such an exchange had taken place was at the National Conference on Specialized Biology, a forum Hatcher had exploited to drum up financial backing for an expedition to Puerto Rico. That was nearly a year ago. It wasn’t fair that she be subjected to him again so soon.
“Knock-knock!” said Hatcher, drawing closed the door behind him.
Clad in a pair of camouflage cargo shorts and a fitted jersey bearing the logo of some Podunk lacrosse team, he looked as if he had wandered out of the pages of the Abercrombie & Fitch fall catalog. No one in their right mind would’ve have taken him for a full professor of biology at USC. Not half bad for thirty-five considering this was the man who’d ruined her life.
“It’s customary to knock before entering,” Claire informed him coolly. “But since we’re doing things in reverse order, let me begin by saying goodbye.”
“Is that any way to treat a colleague?” he asked, extending his hand.
Claire remained seated at her desk, hands planted firmly on the stack of essays she had been grading. “Thanks to you and your buddy, Nosworthy, I don’t have any colleagues.”
“Look, Claire,” he said, softening his tone, “I didn’t come here to spar with you. I need a favor.”
Why did he have to be so damn good-looking? It would have been a hell of a lot easier telling him to go fuck himself if he had begun to fall apart like other men his age. She was normally above the trivial ill-will that was the spurned woman’s MO, but she couldn’t help being a little disappointed that Hatcher’s hair was still intact and more luxuriant than ever. Dark and unruly, it was the envy of much younger men, and had the irritating knack of looking styled no matter how unkempt it happened to be.
“So . . . You look good,” she relented stubbornly. “Sharp teeth, good thick coat, clear eyes. Life at the top of the food chain must be treating you well, Ethan.”
“Come to Antarctica with me.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m serious,” he said in his deep flinty voice. “I need you.”
“Don’t make me call Campus Police.”
“This is big, a chance to do some real fieldwork on someone else’s dime.”
“I’m dialing.” Claire picked up her phone, index finger poised at the ready.
“I’m offering you a chance to save yourself from . . . From this.” Grimly, he surveyed Claire’s office. Professional journals, textbooks and her own research filled to capacity the ‘L’-configured bookcase jammed in the corner near her beat-up wood desk (circa 1959, the year the school began serving the community) and not-matching blue poly-fiber Office Depot chair that was a Jackson Pollack of mystery stains bequeathed her by its previous long-term occupant. “What’s going on here?” Hatcher went on jokingly. “You auditioning for a spot on that sickening show about human packrats, or something? Hoarders, that’s it! They’ve got people on who bury themselves alive beneath mountains of pizza boxes and junk mail.”
Claire squirmed inside her skin but masked it behind a cool chuckle. “You know I’ve never been the Susie Homemaker-type.”
“I know I liked playing house with you,” Hatcher breathed in that deliberately creepy-playful way of his she used to think was sexy. He finished her off with a classic Hollywood smile, a little whiter than she remembered, though every bit as attractive.
“Please, I’ve managed to block most of it out.” Claire hung up the phone.
Still smiling and without skipping a beat, Hatcher remarked, “It stinks in here.”
He wasn’t being mean-spirited and Claire couldn’t argue with him. Her office was a crime scene. Between the poor ventilation, the moldering stacks of books, and the fact that she was one floor below the Faculty Men’s room—not to mention the advanced age of every permanent fixture, coat of lead-based paint and asbestos fiber acoustic ceiling tile—the crypt-like little room was certainly guilty of the smell of death. Though it might simply have been her dead career. “It’s a little musty,” she responded, “but it adds character.”
Hatcher noticed the stacks of yet-to-be-graded papers occupying nearly every square inch of her desktop. “These are almost two months old,” Hatcher commented, amusement evident in his voice.
“Evolution’s a slow process, or were you out with a hangover the day they covered that in class?”
“Just an observation.” He held up his hands in a peace-keeping gesture. “You’re better than this place, that’s all. It’s a compliment—take it.”
“Thanks for the backhanded vote of confidence, you arrogant prick!” She was too disturbed by the truth to give Hatcher the satisfaction of admitting to it. “I love it here!” she declared perhaps too vehemently. “The classes I teach are so low-level that I could do it in my sleep, I have next to nil in the way of committee responsibilities, total autonomy, and here there’s zero pressure to publish.” She delivered her lines convincingly, but the words left a bad taste in her mouth.
“It seems like every time I turn around you’ve published something new. You belong up the road with us in scenic South Central. In fact,” Hatcher went on, “there’s going to be a vacancy in the department this fall. Sam Russell’s finally hanging it up.”
“Not Sam . . .”
“The man’s seventy-one years-old . . . I guess fieldwork isn’t sexy forever, even to a man like Sam.” Hatcher reflected soberly. “Our body only gives us so much time, then it’s off to the glue factory.”
Sam Russell—Dr. Russell as Claire had known him back when, had served on Claire’s doctoral committee. He was a brilliant man, one of her most influential mentors, and had conducted more fieldwork than any biologist she knew of. His were some big shoes to fill, but it was an exciting notion. “Why on earth are you telling me this?”
“I can’t make you any guarantees, but I’m chairing the hiring committee . . .”
Claire reached for the phone again.
“Stop,” said Hatcher. “I’m serious. I want you to interview with us.”
“The catch?”
“No catch. Just give me five minutes to pitch the expedition. If you’re still not begging me to go after you see what I have in my pocket—no problem. The offer to interview stands, and I swear I’ll do everything in my power to see that your name is on the short-list.”
“I’ve already seen what’s in your pocket, and I’ve gotta say I wasn’t very impressed.”
Hatcher ignored her, the sudden downshift in his tone and facial expression conveying the somberness of the situation. “You remember Alan Whitehurst?”
“Of course, Alan’s a sweetie. I should’ve dated him instead of you.”
Claire had always liked Alan regardless of the fact that he and Hatcher were close friends. Alan was very much like her, a dedicated scientist who put the planet and its ecological health first. She had always suspected that he had secretly applauded her switch of the Ha Tinh rhino. Although he hadn’t come out and said so—Alan was too practical to risk openly allying himself with a black sheep—he had kept in touch with her over the years, offering his friendship and encouragement when times were tough.
“Alan’s dead.”
“That’s not funny,” said Claire, fighting back a chill.
Hatcher’s expression flatlined. For the first time Claire noticed how exhausted he looked. Dark crescents underscored his gray granite-flecked eyes.
“Alan died two weeks ago in an explosion,” Hatcher went on. “He wasn’t the only one. There were five others—my team—all of them dead.”
Although Claire hadn’t spoken with Alan in close to a year it seemed just like yesterday that the two of them had sat in her office laughing about the horrified look on Nosworthy’s face when the pig had trotted out of the shipping container. She wanted to say something—to mark the moment so that she could leave it behind—but she simply couldn’t find the words.
“He and the others were at our research station near the South Pole. Apparently the fuel we used to run the generator ignited. I haven’t been back to see the damage for myself, but I hear it’s not pretty.”
Claire was close to losing it. She could feel the hot sting of salt in her eyes. Don’t you dare! You’re not a child. And with that she forced back the tears. “I don’t believe you.”
“I couldn’t get him on the satellite phone for a few days so I asked one of the Air National Guard supply pilots at McMurdo fly out to pay them a visit. When he got there, half the station was completely gone, wiped off the proverbial map. He said it looked as if a bomb had gone off.”
Instinctively, Claire abandoned her refuge behind her desk and walked over to where Ethan was recalling the nightmare blankly. She hugged him. What else could she do? He was in pain; a mutual friend had died. The idea of not hugging him seemed callous to her.
“We held a small service last week,” Ethan continued. He did not react to the hug, but stood there incanting the words emotionlessly. “I would’ve invited you, but my mind wasn’t—isn’t—working right. It still doesn’t seem real to me. I don’t know—maybe I’m better off,” he said, pulling away from Claire absently. “I’m not ready to face the facts.”
Claire’s face was numb. Alan was only thirty-three, two years older than her. And now he was dead. Ethan was right; it didn’t seem real. “The facts?”
Ethan took a deep breath. Were those actually the beginnings of tears in his eyes? “I should’ve been there,” he blurted. Suddenly Claire was the recipient of a hug. Ethan drew her into him and held her there pressed to his chest. “But I wasn’t and now Alan’s dead.”
“Listen to you!” she admonished him reassuringly. She held his face in her hands and forced eye contact. “You weren’t even there when it happened. How on earth could it have been your fault?”
“Don’t tell me there’s nothing I could’ve done.” He shot back at her with a tortured look. Their noses were practically touching. She could feel his breath on her face, hot and gusty. In ordinary circumstances she would’ve have mistaken it for sexual energy. But not this time; Ethan was hurting. “You don’t know that!” he ranted and pulled away from her so forcefully that it startled her.
“Survivor’s guilt,” Claire observed after taking a moment to gather her wits. “You got it bad.”
“So what if I do? I owe it to Alan and the others to see that we finish what we started. It’s too important; too much has already been lost for us to let it all go to shit now.” Ethan pinned her with his eyes. “You can help me make sure it doesn’t.”
“I’m listening.”
“The article you published on spongiform encephalopathies in the New England Review of Natural Science . . . I’m still a little skeptical about all that cowboys and Indians stuff way back when, but I think we may have found a living colony.”
For the second time in the last five minutes Claire was too stunned to speak. She hadn’t written a word on cryptozoology for nearly four years. Instead, she’d taken up a professional and personal interest in the science of evolutionary biology, prions in particular. The switch was a natural. Cryptozoology was fine for an idealistic grad student who believed that anything was possible. However, in the wake of the pygmy rhinoceros scandal and her subsequent black-balling, she’d had to reinvent herself to survive. The transformation from Claire Matthews, shooting star, to Claire Matthews, schoolmarm, had engendered in her a bittersweet appreciation of adaptability in all its forms. Classifiable as neither plant nor animal, these simple but deadly organisms comprised a kingdom of one. In fact no one could say for certain if prions were living or dead. As far as conventional science was concerned they were neither, lacking the very essence of life on earth as we know it. Then came the discovery of deep ocean hydrothermal vent communities and the diverse array of organisms that populated them. An entirely new class of life that depended on the process of chemosynthesis for survival forced the scientific community to rethink many of its most basic doctrines. If complex organisms could survive in a total absence of sunlight, then why must nucleic acid—one of the so-called building blocks of life conspicuously lacked by prions—be present to count them among the living?
In the past three years, Claire had published a handful of articles championing the misunderstood prion and its place in evolutionary biology. The journal of Father Augustín Terrero, a promising medical student turned Catholic priest who oversaw Arizona’s Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria Mission from 1863–1871 served as a lynchpin for much of her research. At this point it was still mostly theoretical, but Father Terrero’s graphic account of a band of renegade Iroquois braves who conducted a string of horrific raids on settlers and US troops alike was too compelling, too clinically precise to be overlooked without serious consideration. The deeper Claire dug, the more convinced she became that prion encephalitis was the source of the carnage the Iroquois war party had reportedly left in its wake. Eyewitnesses to the unprecedented savagery described the killing spree as nothing less than demoniac. In nine weeks, forty-odd Iroquois men cut a three-thousand-mile swath of death and destruction from the northeast territory through the heart of the American Midwest and into what is present day Arizona. Not a single life was spared until they mysteriously turned on each other. If Father Terrero’s grisly yarn had not been corroborated in a half-dozen newspapers Claire would have dismissed it as just that—a revved up morality tale documenting the perils awaiting the unsaved soul in this world and the next.
But there it was, a seemingly random bite of information the internet had regurgitated as she cross-referenced and conducted keyword queries into the pathogenesis of Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Kuru. By the time Claire was able to will herself away from the horrific page-turner and return to her work, she had begun to see the connection. The onset, symptoms and rapid mental degeneration were distinctly prion—right down to the telltale rod-shaped particles Father Terrero had identified in samples of brain tissue taken post-mortem from the slaughtered Iroquois braves. It was not long after his discovery that Father Terrero ordered that Mission Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria and everything in it be burned to the ground to prevent the risk of further infection. Decades earlier, smallpox had dealt a crippling blow to the Spanish Mission system. Father Terrero was not about to take any chances this time around.
Claire had published a number of related treatises under a pseudonym, the irony of which was that this was simply a form of adaptive behavior designed to camouflage her against Nosworthy’s vindictive eye. Evolutionary biology at work. She was like the Moma alpium, a scarce species of moth commonly known as the Merveille du Jour that patterns its wings after lichens to conceal itself from predators. A scared little Moma alpium. And now she was exposed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Dr. Clarence Shelby . . . Come on, Claire. You could’ve done better than that. Shelby was your father’s last name. You only started going by your mother’s maiden name, Matthews, after . . .”
“You bastard,” Claire uttered calmly. “You stole my ideas and now you want me to help you cash in. You’re out of your mind.”
“I know it looks bad. And I swear you’ll get equal credit for the discovery.”
“Like for the Ha Tinh—that kind of equal credit?” She was seething. “You’re an asshole, Ethan. And a thief. Go fuck yourself!”
“Listen, we think that whatever Alan and the others found may have somehow been responsible for their deaths.”
“We? . . . Who? . . . What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!”
“They want to poison the entire lake, Claire. Just to be sure.”
“The lake? What lake?”
“It doesn’t have a name. We burned a hole through the ice and—” Ethan lowered his voice. “The point is they’re afraid of something getting out and infecting the planet.”
Antarctica constituted 70 percent of Earth’s fresh water. Although most of it existed in the form of ice, a significant amount remained liquid in dozens, perhaps even hundreds of subglacial lakes sealed thousands of feet beneath the frozen crust. Undisturbed for eons, and older than many of the species on the planet, Claire believed that such lakes could hold the key to unlocking Earth’s evolutionary past. And now someone wanted to celebrate the discovery of the century by pumping it full of poison to kill whatever may or may not be down there.
“Who is ‘they?’” she asked, making no attempt to conceal her disgust. “Who’s afraid?”
“The CDC. They’re pretty worked up about the whole thing. They’re worried we may have released some sort of super virus into the world.”
“S. iroqouisii isn’t a virus.”
“You know what I meant.”
“Well, did you?”
Ethan shook his head wearily. “Like I said, I wasn’t there.” Stressed, he raked his fingers through his thick, dark hair. “I wish I knew.”
Claire was trying to make the pieces fit. So far Ethan hadn’t given her much. “You said that Alan and the others died in an explosion.”
“Yes, but—“
“But what?” she pressed, trying not to let her emotions get the better of her.
“There’s a possibility that the explosion was the effect, and not the cause as we’d originally thought.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing yet. It’s still just a theory.”
For a moment, Ethan actually looked his age, older even. He wasn’t acting—the last couple of weeks had been rough on him. It showed in the slump of his shoulders, in the hollow tone of his voice, in the way he stared dimly into space.
“What do you need me for?” asked Claire. “For better or worse, it sounds like you already got what you were after.”
“Confirmation,” he offered simply. “We want you to tell us whether or not—what did you call it?”
There was no point pretending. Ethan had her dead to rights. “S. iroquoisii.”
“Right . . . That S. iroquoisii, or one of its cousins, was to blame for all of this.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“That’s why we need you—you’re the best in the business.”
“We?”
“You, me—the rest of the team,” said Ethan. “JPAC.”
“What’s JPAC?”
“Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.”
“How long did it take you to memorize that?”
“Very funny . . . It’s the military agency responsible for locating and identifying the remains of American servicemen lost in battle.”
“What’s the military got to do with this?”
“Nothing. They just happen to be perfectly equipped to handle this sort of thing. JPAC specializes in recovering human remains in extreme conditions. The CDC set it up—easier to control the flow of information this way . . . Keep it all in-house so people don’t freak out.”
“You mean they want to keep it a secret.”
“This isn’t Hollywood. This is real. No conspiracies. No secret government plots. Just good, clean science and damage control.”
“Still, working with the military—I don’t like it.”
“It’s a military agency, but they’re not all military. They’ve got civilians on the payroll. Besides, it’s not like they’re green berets or something. These guys spend all of their time in the lab, not on some battlefield. Nothing shady, I promise. You should take a look at some of their résumés . . . Pretty impressive bunch of scientists, if you ask me.”
“I guess everything’s relative,” Claire replied blithely.
Ethan smiled and folded his hands over his heart, wounded. “You just don’t let up.”
“What if I say yes?” Claire couldn’t believe she was actually considering his offer.
“We leave in five days. We could be gone as long as a month. It all depends on what we find . . . Or don’t.”
“It’s the middle of the semester. I can’t just take off.”
“Resign. This is an opportunity to do some real good. If we can prove that Alan’s death was simply an accident, we can save the lake and whatever he discovered down there. That’s why I—Correction, that’s why we have to go back. This could be the most important discovery in the history of humankind . . . Think about it, a common denominator to every species on the planet. What did you call it? Evolution’s Rosetta Stone. We can’t let it be destroyed because some pencil pusher gets cold feet.”
Claire shook her head. She was crazy to even be considering it.
“Look,” continued Ethan. “If the science doesn’t interest you, do it for Alan’s parents. They want their son’s remains back in Orange County, not blowing around some windswept patch of ice on the ass-end of nowhere. Even if it’s only DNA. Come on, we owe them that. JPAC needs us there in case something pops up they haven’t seen before. These guys are forensics experts, not biologists. And who do you think is covering the bill? If Uncle Sam wasn’t in the mix, we could never afford to go back. We need them just as much as they need us.”
Claire was no longer listening. She was too excited at the prospect of getting her life back on track to think clearly. She didn’t care that she’d be freezing her butt off, that she’d be forfeiting any chance of tenure she may have had at Los Caminos, that Ethan was almost certainly using her to advance his own unscrupulous career. It was fieldwork, and it was somewhere other than here. And of course there was Alan to consider. Too often scientists toiled for years, pouring themselves into their life’s work, only to die in relative obscurity. Claire, herself, had all the makings of an excellent case in point. If Alan had made an important discovery he deserved better than to be acknowledged in a lame footnote in some inconsequential science journal.
“Alan gets equal credit for whatever we find down there,” Claire announced decisively. “The others, too. I want us all to be famous together.”
“I’ll leave myself out entirely,” Ethan replied earnestly, “if it’ll convince you to come.”
Credit! That’s the last thing in the world Ethan wanted if Alan and the others had in fact stumbled across Ivan the Terrible in that cold miserable godless place. Poor bastards. It would have been like taking credit for the Holocaust or the assassination of JFK. Only a psychopath wanted that kind of fame. Of course Claire couldn’t have known any of what was really going on, but this didn’t keep him from chuckling to himself as he dropped the top on his Mercedes SL65 AMG and started the engine. She was hopelessly good. Altruism had been, and always would be her Achilles’ heel. He checked himself in the rearview mirror and crept out of the Los Caminos parking lot, slowing to flash his laser-whitened smile at a hot little Latina who was eyeing him on her way to class. Tight body, but she was no Claire.
As he joined the bumper-to-bumper stream of cars on the 405 northbound, Ethan wondered if his ex was still the same horny bitch she’d been in college. Climbing into bed with Claire had been like stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson. You never knew if she was going to be satisfied rattling your teeth loose, or if she was going to take it a step further and bite off a piece of your ear. Those were the days. He didn’t know if it was her long toned runner’s legs, the fact that she was a hell of a lot smarter than him, or the knowledge that she despised him so goddamned much, but no one had even come close to turning him on the way she had.
“Dial, Dickhead,” he commanded in a loud clear voice. The SL65’s Bluetooth voice-recognition system responded immediately to the customized prompt and dialed the specified number. A few seconds later he had Okum on the line.
“Yeah, I got her,” Ethan informed him casually. “She’s the best scientist I know . . . As long as Alan gets credit for . . . Alan Whitehurst . . . My best friend . . . He died in the ex—”
The dial tone blared out of the speakers in digital stereo, a baseline reminder of who really sat atop the food chain. In this jungle, Okum was king.
Claire hadn’t been this excited in years. Although Hatcher’s spiel about S. iroquoisii was probably nothing more than a sales pitch, Antarctica was one of the last great wildernesses on earth. Here was an unspoiled living laboratory that until recently had existed outside the destructive influence of man. Although opinions within the scientific community varied, she was not the only who had speculated that the subglacial waters might harbor primitive ecological communities that could provide clues to the humble beginnings of all other life on earth. Many saw the hostile environment—a lightless world of extreme cold and unimaginable pressure—as a model for how extraterrestrial organisms might eke out an existence on celestial bodies that had long been regarded as incapable of sustaining life. As for Claire, the mere idea that she was being given the opportunity to explore a realm few human beings had ever seen, no less studied, had rekindled hopes that her life wasn’t going to be a total waste. There was now the possibility, however slight, that her next great contribution to humanity wouldn’t be spelled out on the organ donor card affixed to the back of her driver’s license.
Why then did she have this awful feeling in the pit of her stomach? Resigning mid-semester wasn’t going to be easy, but that wasn’t it. Saying goodbye to Los Caminos would be good for her. She hated grading the papers. She hated the slack-jawed disinterest that was epidemic among the ranks of high-school holdovers. She hated the absence of accountability, drive and dedication that characterized the average community college student. Most of all, though, she hated herself for not being a better teacher, for the feelings of hopelessness and futility she experienced because she could not touch the lives of her students the way she knew she ought to. She was the problem, not them. They deserved better, someone whose heart was in the job. And just like that the reason for the uneasiness she was feeling struck her.
Claire had met Eric at one of the mandatory Natural Science Department meetings held each month during the course of the semester. He was an anomaly and a godsend. An anomaly because he was above the petty bickering that part and parcel of the meetings. A godsend because he had replaced a member of Los Caminos’ old guard, Kate Madden, a frown-stricken professor of chemistry who never had a nice thing to say about anyone or anything. Eric had appealed to Claire as both a fellow scientist and as a human being. He was kind, good-looking, enthusiastic, and most importantly, intelligent. He liked his job at the college and made no secret that he found working with young people both challenging and gratifying. Claire admired his selfless dedication to the education and well-being of others whether or not they, themselves, appreciated it. It was Eric’s example, among numerous others, that had convinced her she wasn’t cut out to be an educator—at least not at the undergraduate level.
She and Eric had been friends for nearly a year but they had only been dating a little over a month. Still, it was the longest Claire had been intimately involved with anyone since the debacle with Hatcher. She attributed the success of their relationship to the fact that Eric treated her as his equal in every respect, never once succumbing to the gender stereotypes that governed the behavior of most men. When they ran the stairs in Santa Monica and Claire beat him to the top, he was always quick to give her a high-five. It didn’t matter to him if she was first, last, or somewhere in between. They were both fueled by the same competitive spirit and respected each others’ capabilities in every arena, be it physical or intellectual. The conversation was good, the sex better, and the fact that Eric had never once mentioned the possibility of marriage best of all. From the day they’d met he’d taken his time with her, never pushing, letting things progress fluidly, naturally. Things were unbelievably good between them and Claire was sure he wouldn’t have a problem waiting. Still, it was going to be difficult explaining to him that she was ducking out for a month, possibly longer, just when things were really starting to click.
It was after seven o’clock that evening when Claire arrived at Eric’s house in El Segundo. Built in the early 1940s, the beautifully restored craftsman’s bungalow was nestled in an unassuming middle-class neighborhood just a half mile from the beach. Although parking spaces could be hard to come by, she lucked out and pulled into a spot right in front that had been vacated moments earlier by a forest green minivan. The heady perfume of roses mingled with the cool coastal air as she strode briskly up the brick walkway in the lavender dusk.
Eric was meticulous about his garden. The grass was neatly trimmed and edged, the flower beds devoid of weeds, the plants thriving without the aid of chemical pesticides and inorganic fertilizers. Fastidiousness was a trait echoed virtually everywhere in his life. Claire, who was herself something of a slob, admired his attention to detail. Eric folded his laundry and stowed it neatly in dresser drawers. Claire’s laundry accumulated in haphazard piles around her apartment, or as was more often the case, went straight from the dryer to her body. Eric paid his bills on time and regularly balanced his checkbook. Claire’s budget included a monthly allowance for late fees, and her check register resembled the diary of an escaped mental patient. She called him Mr. OCD. He called her Flakey.
She entered without knocking—Eric never bothered to lock his front door—and found him in the kitchen. He was standing in front of the stove amid a sweet-smelling fog of sautéed garlic and olive oil. She could not imagine a situation in which the tantalizing aroma would fail to excite her taste buds. You could cook just about anything in garlic and be assured that it would taste wonderful.
“What’s for dinner?” asked Claire. She approached him from behind, entwined her arms about his waist and kissed him on the cheek.
“Capellini with bay scallops in a garlic-basil sauce,” said Eric. He added the scallops to the pan and reduced the flame. “And there’s a spinach salad in the fridge.”
“When do we eat?”
“You’ve got an appetite, huh?”
Claire lowered her voice to a whisper so that her breath prickled the tiny hairs on the back of Eric’s neck. “You could say that.”
She undid the top button of his shorts and slipped her hand down inside his boxers. She ran her palm over the shaft of his penis until it began to swell.
Eric breathed deeply. “If I leave the pasta in the water too much longer,” he explained, “it won’t be al dente.”
She squeezed his penis and continued stroking it until it was completely hard. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Eric was the only man Claire had ever slept with who’d had a vasectomy. At first she thought it was strange, him being so young and normal. But he’d explained that he was once engaged to be married, and that he and his fiancée, Nicole, had decided against children early on. Not because they didn’t want kids but because Nicole was burdened with a medical condition that would have been grievously aggravated by pregnancy. They decided adoption was the best and safest solution. Claire was moved by Eric’s commitment and self-sacrifice. But what had touched her most of all was his honesty and humility. Three weeks before the wedding, Nicole had left him for another man. Most guys in Eric’s shoes would have rather died than admit to being dumped at the altar. But Eric wasn’t most men. Claire was almost ashamed to take comfort in the fact that he could not get her pregnant. At least she didn’t have to risk birth control. IUD’s were scary, condoms for teenagers and the pill didn’t agree with her. Honestly, if Eric had been able to knock her up, she would have freaked out being this late for her period. Eight days, but who was counting? It’s just that the experience with Hatcher had left a bitter taste in her mouth. Like always, Eric had known exactly how to handle her, to make her see the light of her own folly. Just yesterday, Claire had suffered a mini-meltdown of sorts while the two of them were on their way to have lunch at a small Sushi bar near Los Caminos. Without a word, Eric had swung into a nearby Rite-Aid parking lot, ducked inside and emerged a few minutes later with a home pregnancy test in hand. “Here,” he offered understandingly. “It’s a two-pack. We’ll do it together as long as you promise to marry me if I’m pregnant.”
Eric abruptly killed the flame under the pan and turned to face her. He drew her in close to him so that their pelvises were pressed up against one another and slipped her top—a white and powder blue Adidas jog bra—off over her head. He then forced her breasts up and together and attacked her nipples with his mouth. Desire coiled uncontrollably inside of her like a spring that would break if wound any tighter. She grabbed Eric’s shirt by the hem and yanked it off over his head. Simultaneously, he kicked off his shoes and shorts, nearly toppling the two of them in the process. But even this didn’t slow them down. They couldn’t strip fast enough, their breath coming in quick hot gusts.
It was now dark outside. Claire could see their reflection in the French doors that opened onto the tiny backyard. Although Eric was not a gym junkie like herself, he was rangy and lean, and had a swimmer’s broad shoulders. His skin was smooth and always had a mild soapy scent as if he had just gotten out of the shower. Claire was turned on by the possibility that they were being watched going at it in the bright light of the kitchen like a couple of horny teenagers. She’d been wearing a pair of matching Adidas short-shorts that showed off her legs. She’d hoped the sexy little outfit would interest Eric more than the details of the expedition. It was best to keep things simple. The less involved Eric was the better. So far, so good. The shorts now lay twisted with her panties inside-out on the floor.
“Fuck me,” she breathed, pulling him into her as he lifted her off the ground and pinned her between the refrigerator and the island in the center of the small kitchen. With each thrust, the rubber soles of her running shoes squeaked in protest as she struggled for traction on the wood cabinet face.
For the first time in months, Claire felt absolutely free. Shortly after Hatcher had left her office, she had gone straight to the department chair’s office and resigned. Like burning a corset, the act was not only symbolic; it served the interest of promoting her emotional and physical well-being. She could breathe again. And . . . ! And . . . ! And now she was somewhere else, and had about as little interest in the mechanisms of her symbolic liberation as in the physical processes that left her raw, quivering and breathless.
“All that squeaking rubber . . .” Eric remarked when they had both come and it was over. “It was like basketball practice.”
They put their clothes back on and sat down to dinner a short time later. Claire was famished, although her appetite was buffered by an uneasy feeling. She didn’t want Eric to feel as though she was abandoning him. He was good to her and the thought that she might hurt him, even a little bit, made her feel like a jerk.
“Imagine how good the sex will be when I get back,” she said, squeezing his leg under the table.
“Stop apologizing,” he said sincerely. “You need this.”
“You sure?”
“A month is nothing,” he assured her. “You’ll be back before the sun comes up.”
It was nothing more than a casual observation—a coincidentally bad figure of speech—but Claire felt as if she had been blindsided by a speeding truck. Her heart skipped a beat and hung in the center of her chest like a hunk of lead. She was up and out of her chair by the time it had resumed pumping blood.
“Where are you going?” Eric called after her.
She was headed for the second bedroom he used as an office. “I’ve got to check something on the internet.”
She had the website bookmarked—timeanddate.com. Logging on was something of a daily ritual. The times of sunrise and sunset were as integral to her planning of each day as were horoscopes for the superstitious. Every shrink she’d ever seen had warned her away from this sort of hypervigilance, but she couldn’t help herself. In a matter of minutes she was back at the table with Eric, a nondescript printout dangling from her hand.
“I’m not going,” she explained simply. Her head was swimming. Her throat was tight and dry. “I can plead temporary insanity—tell the chair I was possessed—he’ll give me my job back.”
“Calm down and tell me what this is about.”
“He knew all along.” Claire responded weakly. She was an idiot not to have thought of it earlier. The excitement—she had been overwhelmed.
“Claire, I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.” Eric explained patiently. “Who knew what?”
“Hatcher.” Claire handed Eric the printout. “On March 24 the sun sets at 9:01 am.”
Eric glanced at the crowded columns of numbers but wasn’t immediately sure what to make of it. “Okay?”
“Don’t you see?” said Claire, reigning in her emotions. “The sun sets on March 24 but doesn’t come up again until September 21. Six months of total darkness! The bastard knew I wouldn’t be able to do it, that’s why he offered it to me.”
“Do you really think—”
“I know.”
Claire was up and dialing Hatcher’s cellular number before Eric could stop her. The deceitful prick answered on the second ring—a nonchalant “Yeah? . . .” There was music playing in the background.
“I changed my mind,” said Claire. “I’m not coming.”
“Claire? You’ll have to talk louder. I’m in my car.”
“You knew it was going to be dark, you sick fuck. That’s why you asked me.”
“You’re not still sleeping with the lights on, are you?”
“Get someone else.”
There was a moment of silence. “You never asked me about the money,” said Hatcher. “Aren’t you curious to know how much you’ll be getting paid?”
“Are you deaf?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“I don’t care about the money. Find someone else.”
“What about Alan?” asked Hatcher.
“He’d understand.”
“Are you near a computer?”
“I don’t see how—”
“Don’t cancel your reservations just yet,” said Hatcher. “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. I want to email you some pictures.”
Twenty minutes later, Claire and Eric sat glued to the computer monitor. Hatcher’s email included an attachment of a dozen digital stills snapped by a remote operated vehicle several days before the research station, and Alan along with it, had blown up. Hatcher had gotten his hands on them only recently—inexplicably delayed by a glitch in the satellite uplink Alan had used to transmit the data. The images weren’t exactly print quality, however this hardly diminished their jaw-dropping effect considering that they had originated 2,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica.
Claire examined the last image and looked at Eric. He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “You’re not going to like me for saying this,” he said. “But he’s right. You have to go.”
She nodded. “Let’s take a walk.”
Night walks were part of Claire’s self-prescribed therapeutic regimen to enable her to better cope with her fear of the dark. The concept was a simple one and relied on the same basic principle as that of a vaccine: expose herself to small doses of the source of her affliction and she would, at least theoretically, develop a resistance to it. Although the results had not been as immediate as she would have liked, she was making progress. It was all about establishing comfort zones. There was a time when she’d refused to drive at night, the mobile fortress of her car an inadequate shield against the ubiquitous domain of her fear. Employing the same technique she had gotten over the worst of it and was now able to get herself around by car after dark when necessary.
Walking at night, Eric liked to tease, was a “big step.” Minus the protective barrier of her car, the nightly jaunts took exposure to another level. She was even beginning to feel, for lack of a better word, relaxed provided she didn’t stray too far from Eric’s side and the comforting glow of the streetlamps. But she was still a long way from achieving her ultimate goal: total darkness, complete isolation, unfamiliar setting, and peace of mind.
Case studies had been written about dysfunctional relationships like her parents’. Claire’s father had been a hard-nosed alcoholic whose grip on reality and self-control diminished in direct proportion to amount of alcohol he’d consumed in any given time span. His life, as Claire’s mother had become increasingly aware, was governed by this dangerous equation. Two to three drinks and he’d become verbally abusive, his anger boiling over in great baritone waves the neighbors in the placid Orange County suburb in which they lived deliberately ignored. Four to five drinks and the man who’d contributed his DNA to Claire’s genetic makeup would become irrational and irate. He would storm around the house kicking the walls and furniture, muttering terrible things under his breath in a low guttural voice. After six drinks, James Shelby, husband and father, electrical systems analyst for Lockheed, would become someone—something—else altogether. It was a terrifying metamorphosis that Claire, who was only ten when things had come to a terrible climax, could not rationalize no less hope to understand.
Her father’s worst episodes typically evolved out of some sort of accusation aimed at her mother. To the best of Claire’s knowledge none of these were grounded in reality: wild declarations of infidelity, insensitivity, disrespect. Fueled by his wife’s denials and claims of innocence, her father’s paranoia would gather force, his long, angular frame acquiring the dark, foreboding mass of a thunderhead preparing to unleash an unspeakable wrath. Each episode was uniquely awful and frightening. Claire had often wondered if the man stalking through the house after her mother was actually her father at all. At various times in her life, she had believed that he was some kind of monster—a werewolf maybe—only it was what came out of the bottle and not the transmutative light of the full moon that changed him into the growling, uncontrollable beast they feared.
When sober, Jim Shelby was warm, loving and affectionate. Although such memories of him were dim and deferred to the greater staying power of his menacing alter ego, Claire vaguely remembered instances when she’d felt totally safe and protected beneath the umbrella of her father’s watchful eyes. Often, he would play with her, gladly giving himself over to games of make-believe and childish whimsy. Hide and seek was Claire’s favorite. For what seemed like hours she would hide somewhere in the house—in closets, under beds, behind doors—and her father would patiently hunt for her, calling out in a playful voice, “I’m going to find you.” Tucked stealthily away in her hiding place, Claire would giggle and tremble with nervous glee, trying not to reveal herself to her father’s tickling hands. But, again, this was when he was sober.
The ugly, grumbling monster that lived in her father’s shadow liked to play games too. But these were ghoulish variations on familiar themes all the more terrifying for their total lack of playfulness. On one particular occasion Claire’s parents had gotten into it pretty bad. Fed up with her father’s abusive behavior, Claire’s mother had stood up to him and told him exactly what she thought. She gave him an ultimatum: either he quit drinking and learn to control himself, or she was going to divorce him and take Claire with her.
Although Claire admired her mother’s courage in standing up to her husband, waiting until he had sobered up would have undoubtedly been much wiser under the circumstances. Who knows how many drinks her father had knocked back that night? One thing was certain: he was dangerously past the point of no return when his wife had confronted him in the living room. Courage notwithstanding, the actions of Claire’s mother that night had sent her to the emergency room with a broken arm and a badly bruised face, but not before the most terrifying episode in Claire’s young life had unfolded with everlasting clarity.
Summoned by her mother’s cries—a low, pitiful, keening lament not unlike that of a wounded animal—Claire arrived in the living room to find her father cradling his battered wife in his sinewy arms, shock having by then rendered her unconscious. Sensing Claire’s presence, her father looked up, tears streaming down his cheeks from wild bloodshot eyes, and motioned her towards him. Certain that her mother was dead, Claire froze. What little remained of her father’s rational mind must have recognized his daughter’s fear because he began to ramble on about his wife’s plan to leave him and take his little girl with her.
“You wouldn’t ever leave your daddy, would you, baby?” he’d asked, his voice taut with paranoid distrust.
Paralyzed by fear, Claire was unable to speak.
“We like to play games together, isn’t that right, Pumpkin?” her father continued, his mind desperately grasping for something to hold onto, reassurance.
Claire wanted to run and beg the neighbors to call the police, but she couldn’t move. She was transfixed, hypnotized by the deranged grin spreading across her father’s face, half expecting his drawn lips to reveal long, pointed fangs.
“Hide and seek,” her father declared as if by way of revelation. “We’ll play right now. I’ll count to twenty and you hide.”
He gently laid Claire’s mother on the sofa and began to count. Claire didn’t know what to think. None of it seemed real. Her father had already killed her mother and now he was going to kill her too. A sudden jolt shot through Claire’s body. This wasn’t a game. It was life or death. She ran and hid in one of upstairs closets where her mother kept the bath towels and bed linens. It wasn’t her best hiding place, but she had been too afraid to think clearly. Her father was going to kill her and she could only postpone the inevitable. Claire closed the door, retreated as far as she could into the corner beneath the bottom shelf and buried herself under a pile of towels.
“Here I come,” came her father’s muffled voice from the room below. “Come out, come out, wherever you are . . .”
For a time she had listened to him plodding from room to room, calling out to her, his heavy footsteps striking a chilling counterpoint to his slurred, half-human speech. Hours of interminable, terror-filled darkness gave way to a life of sinister childhood memories and irrational adult fears, but Claire’s father never found her. Too afraid to move, Claire had spent the entire night hiding in the closet with no idea that her mother was simply unconscious and not truly dead. Before dawn the following morning—her father having long since lapsed into the dark, dreamless oblivion that spelled his bouts of alcoholic dementia—Claire’s mother collected her from the floor of the closet and drove the two of them to the emergency room.
What had happened that night would forever alter the course of Claire’s life. Her mother and father separated for a time, the former agreeing not to press charges under two conditions: one, that Claire’s father move out of the house and quit drinking for good; two, that he return home when he was sober and ready to resume his role as head of the family. After five weeks of exile in a motel, he had returned home in compliance with his wife’s ultimatum. And after another five weeks, he had begun drinking again, rekindling the same cycle of delusional accusations and physical abuse.
And then finally one night—in keeping with the story line that make such tales of battered women almost cliché—Claire’s father had gone off the edge and almost beaten his wife to death. Claire could hardly recognize her own mother beneath the purplish mishmash of bruises and swelling distorting her face. Years later, Claire’s mother had joked that it had been her plan all along to let her father tire himself out in the early rounds and then steal the bout as fatigue caught up with him. Apparently the plan had worked like a charm. After twenty minutes or so, Claire’s father had dragged himself away, fists hanging like stones at his side. Tired of living in fear, Claire’s mother waited until he was passed-out face down on the cold tile floor of the bathroom, rolled him onto his back and stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife.
It was just as well—Claire had never been comfortable around her father in the wake of that unforgettable game of hide and seek. She did her best to avoid him in those last five weeks under the same roof, but it seemed that he was lurking around every corner, and that next time he would find her no matter where she hid. Still, Claire had always believed that her mother’s actions, though perhaps justified, may have gone too far. On one hand the incident had brought the two of them closer together. On the other, it had created a gulf between them. In the wake of her father’s death, Claire was equal parts gratitude and resentment. Once again, she could live without fear, but she was also living without a father.
She knew it was foolish, a vestige of ancient history and childhood emotional trauma, but somehow every horror from that period in her life—including the death of her father and mother’s subsequent criminal trial—was indelibly linked to that small eternity she had spent buried in the lightless depths of the closet. Her fear of the dark was every bit as tangible to her now as had been her fear of being raised an orphan prior to her mother’s acquittal on grounds of self-defense. Although her father was no longer in her life, Claire was forever haunted by the night she had spent huddled against the darkness and the demented pitch of his searching voice. When the lights went out she could hear him calling out to her just as clearly today as twenty-some years ago, a tortured howl slipping along the periphery of her imagination like a recurring nightmare.
Though Claire was guarded with information about her past and its effect on her, Eric knew better than to stray from their familiar well-lighted route. Every now and then, she discussed something from her childhood with him, but not to the extent that he had a fully-formed image of that terrible period. He knew that she slept with a night-light, that unlit spaces aroused something foreboding in her, and that it was better not to force the issue. She appreciated his sensitivity and understanding, his light-handed approach to making her feel comfortable, and more importantly, normal. Since ovarian cancer had claimed her mother’s life eighteen months ago, Eric was the only true confidante she had left. It was no wonder he was surprised when Claire suggested that they diverge from their usual route and walk down one of the unlit nonresidential streets north of the oil refinery.
“It’s dark,” Eric informed her plainly.
“That’s the idea,” she countered coyly. “I was thinking we could make out for awhile. This time where no one can see us.”
Eric didn’t exacerbate the situation by hesitating; he simply took her hand and followed her into the darkness. Claire’s heart raced but she steeled herself against the torrent of fear charging through her veins. She needed to do this, to test herself. In another few weeks she’d be enwombed in perpetual night. If she couldn’t keep it together for a few brief moments with Eric holding her hand, then what made her think she could survive for weeks without a flicker of daylight? Angered by her own frailty, she fought the urge to retreat into the light. She recognized the hot chemical rush from a thousand similar episodes in her life, moments when panic crept into her mind and sent her scrambling for the nearest patch of light or a couple of Ativan, whichever was closest.
They stopped mid-block in front of a dilapidated storefront where, during business hours, men in greasy coveralls rebuilt automotive transmissions. Eric encircled Claire in his strong comforting arms and pulled her into him.
“You’re shaking,” he said. His voice was warm and soothing. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Claire virtually attacked him, her fear igniting a flurry of passionate caresses and deep, groping kisses. Eric responded in kind, until the two of them were rushing back to his house to fuck each others’ brains out all over again, the darkness at their heels like the breath of something real and unmistakably evil.