Once Every Never (3 page)

But to Clare’s glazed-over eyes nothing in those cases could compare with the stuff on display in Harrods department store. A couple of the glass boxes in the Ancient Britain room contained polite little paper notices informing visitors that artifacts had been removed while the gallery was under renovation. Frankly, Clare couldn’t see how that made the exhibit any
less
interesting.

It had been such a major disappointment when she’d first discovered that charmingly dishevelled, quip-slinging, adventure-loving archaeologists were
totally
the creation of some Hollywood executive’s fevered brain. Mystical artifacts and quests for priceless treasure, more of the same.

“Could this stuff possibly be any more boring?” she muttered, earning a disapproving glance from a white-haired security guard who sat on a little folding chair by the entrance to the room. Drinking tea.

Oh yeah. Definitely a hotbed of action
, Clare thought.
I expect a treasure heist any second now …

It was about half an hour into the tour and even Al had long since tuned out the guide’s nasally drone. The two girls dawdled far behind the throng of keener students as they entered the Special Exhibits room, where the lights were dimmer than the rest of the museum and a banner proclaimed
SPECTRAL WARRIORS: BOG BODIES OF THE NORFOLK BROADS
.

Aha. So this was the object of Al and the curator’s gruesome enthusiasm.

The bog guys.

“What’s a ‘broad’?” Clare asked Al. “I mean, other than the standard definition.”

“It’s what they call a bunch of wetlands around Norwich. Rivers and swamps and marshes. Come on. Let’s check this stuff out.” Al tugged her by the sleeve farther into the shadowy room.

A field of chest-high plinths topped with environmentally controlled, clear Perspex boxes about the size of coffins stretched from one end of the room to the other. Clare peered with idle curiosity into the first box, unable at first to make out what was in it. A plaque on the wall bore the words
CLAXTON MAN
—and identified the contents of the display case as the first of thirteen bodies discovered by a bunch of turf cutters a few years earlier, and named, apparently, after the tiny town perched at the edge of the soupy bit of real estate in Norfolk under which it had been discovered.

Clare’s eyes wandered past the rest of the text and focused instead on the accompanying photo—an artist’s reconstruction of what the dead guy might have looked like back in the day: young, with dark reddish-brown hair tied back from a noble-looking face.
Good bone structure
, Clare thought. With a cool haircut and some styling he might have even passed for cute.

She turned back to the case and leaned over, almost pressing her nose to the glass in suddenly acute, totally morbid fascination. The remains looked nothing like the young man in the picture. Nothing like a man at all, really. More like saddle leather that had been cut in a pattern and sewn together in the vague shape of a human being—and then discarded in a rumpled heap like a Halloween costume on the first of November. Clare could see that his head still had hair on it and that there was stubble on his cheeks and chin. She stared and stared, intrigued in spite of herself. The quality of preservation was fairly astonishing, actually. She could even make out the remains of a fox-fur armband that circled his left bicep, just above the elbow, and a thin rope cord that had been tied around his neck above a simple, decorative metal ring he wore like a collar. He had a small gold hoop in one ear and around his wrists were intricately designed matched cuffs made, apparently, of silver—although it was hard to tell. They had long since lost their sheen.

Clare was still staring when she noticed that her reflection in the glass seemed to have grown a second head. Al had come up behind her and was gazing at the bog man with detached curiosity.

“See? I told you,” she murmured. “Creepy. Definitely creepy.”

“I dunno.” Clare shrugged. “Looks kinda … peaceful.”

“How peaceful can you be when you’ve been stabbed, bludgeoned, strangled, and thrown into a bog to die?” Al turned and looked at Clare, who stood blinking, her mouth hanging open. “That’s what the sign says.” She straightened up and pointed at the plaque.

“Oh.” Clare struggled for a moment, groping for a witty rejoinder, and then gave up. There wasn’t much she could say to that. She glanced back at the reconstruction photo and thought that the eyes of the face in the picture looked sad. She shivered a little and turned back to where Al had circled around to the other side of the glass case. She was staring with keen eyes at the morbid remains and glancing back and forth between that and the brochure in her hand.

“Maybe you’re right, though,” she continued. “Maybe they didn’t feel a thing. According to this, archaeologists found traces of ergot in their digestive tracts.”

“Which is?”

“Toxic slime mould.”

“Ew.”

“In small quantities, it produces hallucinations,” Al read. “What the ancient Druids would have considered to be powerful mystical ‘visions.’ But it has to be ingested in the right quantities, otherwise it just causes horrible, screaming-painful death.”

“Sounds delightful.” Clare looked down at another one of the leathery bodies and wrinkled her nose. “But why go to all the trouble of getting these poor suckers all hepped up if they were just gonna off them?”

Al shrugged. “Apparently, there’s a theory that these guys weren’t just run-of-the-mill sacrifices, but an elite class of warriors that were ritually killed on the eve of a major battle so that they could become kinda like ghost warriors.”

“Wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep your best fighters alive so they could actually, I dunno,
fight
for you?” Clare asked dryly.

Al shrugged. “Their spirits were supposed to mystically empower the troops, I guess.”

“That’s stupid.”

“War’s pretty stupid in general, if you ask me,” Al said, continuing to thumb through the display descriptions in her brochure. “Ooh! It says you can still see the marks of a tattoo on this one’s arm …”

“You know,” Clare said as they wandered from case to case looking at the grim displays, “more and more, I have the sneaking suspicion that you actually truly dig all this mouldy old stuff.”

“Did you just pun?” Al looked at her in surprise.

“What?” Clare blinked. “No!”

“I just thought—‘dig’ … never mind.”

“Totally unintentional. Let us never speak of it again.”

“Aha!” Dr. Jenkins’s voice made Clare and Al jump. “Here you are—and I see you’ve found old ‘Pete Marsh’ and friends!”

The girls turned and stared at the grinning archaeologist, who bestowed upon them a cheesy, exaggerated wink.

“That’s what we in the trade like to call the bog men.” She chortled a bit to herself and said, “You know—it’s a pun! Because it was a
peat marsh
that … well. You get the gist.”

“You see?” Clare murmured to Al. “Punning
bad
.”

“Right.” Dr. Jenkins clapped her hands briskly, fished a pair of “Visitor” security passes with little metal clips on them out of her lab-coat pocket, and handed them over to the girls. “Put these on and come along down to Restoration Room D when you’ve had your fill of the boggy men, girls. Clarinet, your Auntie Magda is a wonder. We’ve only a few more installation details to go over and then we’re finished, so don’t dawdle … Ta!”

“Pete Marsh?”
Al wondered aloud in Dr. Jenkins’s wake. “Holy crap. That’s the best a bunch of intellectuals could come up with? I am
so
disappointed.”

Clare glanced over her shoulder at the spirit warriors’ remains. Suddenly it felt to her as though the temperature in the room had plummeted—like a shadow racing over the face of the sun. She shivered and pulled Al by the sleeve. “C’mon. Let’s ditch the bogloids. This whole room is starting to give me the creeps.”

Somewhere in front of them the guide warbled something about a fifteen-minute film presentation on corpse-preservation techniques. Al’s mouth quirked in a lopsided grin. “If you insist,” she said. “Even
I
have limits to my eggheadery.”

RESTORATION ROOM D
was a great, vaulting subterranean chamber filled with row upon row of industrial metal shelving units filled with numbered bins and boxes of artifacts that Clare could identify only as “unidentifiable.” In her earlier visits with Maggie it had been the same—smelling of dust and just about as interesting.

Except this time.

Even Clare was forced to drop her jaded, world-weary stance upon entering the room. There were things laid out on the tables that actually looked like …
things
. Bits of chariots, an ancient bronze cauldron with a huge dent and a piece missing from the rim, lengths of chain, and faces carved in stone. There was even a helmet with two cone-shaped horns sticking out of either side. And in the middle of the biggest table lay a smallish shield—about half as tall as Clare. It was roughly rectangular with rounded corners and looked as though it was made out of a single sheet of bronze. Three circular bumps, two smaller ones at either end and a large one in the middle, were swirly and decorative and inlaid in places with the remains of bits of coloured enamel. And there were
thick, ornately decorated neck rings—Clare remembered from the tour that they were called “torcs.” On the same table as the shield was one particular neck ring that even Clare had noticed in the museum brochure. It was called the Snettisham Great Torc, and it
was
, she thought, pretty great. Gleaming and gorgeous, intricately decorated, the torc looked to be made out of hundreds of strands of twisted precious metal that ended in two heavy, swirling loops. It was almost as thick as Clare’s wrist.

Al gasped. “Is that
gold
?”

It was. And it was staggeringly beautiful.

“What’s all this stuff doing out in the open like this?” Clare asked.

“Oh, it’s quite safe.” Dr. Jenkins bestowed one of her awkward, patronizing smiles on Clare. “We’ve top security around here, you know.”

Clare stared at the curator. “Phew,” she said flatly. “I
was
gonna lose sleep …”

Dr. Jenkins tilted her head and frowned.

“The museum is almost done revitalizing the Ancient Britain exhibit,” Maggie intervened, shooting her niece a warning look. “We’re repositioning some of the artifacts and giving the Snettisham Torc its own separate display plinth. The pieces are here to be cleaned before being replaced.” She steered Dr. Jenkins over to a table in an alcove covered in architectural drawings. “We’ll be done in a moment, girls. Now, you know the rules …”

Clare rolled her eyes at Al and together they moved closer to the table to get a better look at the ancient swag. It must have been an almost mystical feat to have created an object so exquisite by hand, Clare mused. She actually felt affected by its beauty and shook her head in wonder, a little surprised with herself.

It wasn’t just the torc, though—all the artifacts looked ancient and very out of place in the brightly lit room. The fact that a computer sat in a corner on a rolling cart only added to the incongruity, as did the blond, moustached security guard hovering by the far door. The very modern-looking gun strapped to his hip heightened the effect. Evidently the stuff on the table was worth an awful lot more than just its “historical value.”

Clare had been around her aunt long enough to know the rules where antiquities were concerned—most of which started with the phrase “NO TOUCHING” and ended with the phrase “NO TOUCHING” and usually included the admonition “UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES” and the word “EVER.” But with Maggie and Dr. Jenkins on the other side of the room happily engrossed in egghead chat and the guard posing like a gun-slinger at the OK Corral and basically ignoring anything as non-threatening as a pair of seventeen-year-old girls, Clare couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from the shield, away from its lustrous bronze surface, and the need to touch it came as a sudden, overwhelming compulsion. A distant buzzing started up in her ears, like faraway voices heard through walls. Almost without thinking, she reached out her hand. She laid a finger upon one sinewy curve, tracing the raised design …

And the world around her began to fall away.

3

T
he restoration room went dim and shadowy as though a thick midnight fog had rolled in, and Clare suddenly felt as if she was falling forward. There were flares at the edges of her vision as though fireworks had gone off behind her eyes and it seemed to her as if—where she had touched the cool gleaming metal of the shield—her hand had passed right
through
it. She could feel the blood pulsing in her veins and hear the whispering of those far-off voices … then there was an electric crackle, bright and sharp as though she’d been hit by lightning or stuck her finger in a light socket. Her whole body began to tingle and she felt as though she was coming apart like a cloud of fireflies scattering. She squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them again, nothing was as it should have been.

She was outside and it was deep night. All around her was darkness. She could smell the odour of damp vegetation and wet mud, and the sound of rushing water made her half-turn to glance over her shoulder. As her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, Clare realized she was standing on the bank of a broad expanse of a mighty river flowing past, a wide black ribbon under the pale light of a thin crescent moon. She heard the sound of low voices and turned the rest of the way around …