Sleepwalker (10 page)

But one of Langton's strengths was that he bore impatience well. He knew a superior man when he walked beside one, and Dr. Higg was that, in every way.

“Too many little mishaps,” Langton continued. “Little bits here and there going wrong.”

The light flashed a small green man. They hurried across the street, Dr. Higg striding just slightly in front, head forward in thought or determination.

“I thought, at first,” said Langton, “that with Davis aboard much of it would be sorted out. But things haven't gone well, at all. I can't say they've gone worse, but they certainly haven't gone more smoothly, either.”

A man was roasting chestnuts at the gate to the museum. He was burning them, actually, but the smell was delicious, a rich, charred scent nearly like seared beef. Guards nodded greeting to Dr. Higg, and he waved to them absentmindedly and grandly.

The real problem was something that Langton could not quite bring himself to address. He continued to nibble around the edges. “Of course, the site is extremely rich. I've never known a site to be such a treasure of finds and information. And the response to such discoveries as our Skeldergate Man is always very great.”

“Is it,” said Dr. Higg at last, “a matter of safety?”

“Only in the most general terms.” Langton knew that this was a very incomplete answer, and that even Dr. Higg would grow impatient after a while. This was all a matter of his duty, Langton knew, but he really would rather be in York, where he always felt much happier. Langton understood York, and had always seen London as somehow un-English, a stew of Americans and Frenchmen, all with too much money. He wished, for a moment, he were in York, away from this traffic, watching his border collie sport in the marsh of Clifton Ing. But this was mere wishful thinking, and pointless. “Of course it is a matter of safety.”

“There is something you are not quite telling me, Charles.”

Langton did not respond.

“And I think I can imagine, in general terms, what it is.”

Langton rather doubted this. He wondered, very briefly, if vanity was in fact an important part of the wiser man's makeup. Langton had been known, from time to time, to bet a pound on a horse or two. He would be willing to bet, now, that Dr. Higg could not guess what Langton's news was, when it was trimmed of all its dressing.

Langton decided to be as circumspect as possible. “Of course, the basic reason for your asking me to travel two hundred miles was no doubt to improve my own morale—”

“Our morale, Charles, is relatively unimportant. We are expendable. It is the morale of our warriors—our workers, our time-soldiers, I like to call them. That is all that matters.”

They had entered Dr. Higg's office. Shelves were lined with tobacco-brown skulls, and plaster-yellow casts of skulls, and the sun-red gleam of gold buckles and pins. The desk itself was bare, except for a pen and blotter, but it was plain that Dr. Higg's interest was drawn to the walls around him, to the frame that held a span of Anglo-Saxon wool, and the row of Romano-British spearheads.

Dr. Higg asked Langton to sit, but wandered, for a moment, enjoying his collection. He brought a clay ring back to the desk, and held it in his hand as he considered what Langton had—and had not—told him. The ring was a loom weight, an object not unlike an American doughnut. It was heavy, and the clay was hard. He toyed with it, thinking how simple his life had become in recent years.

At one time he had lived a cluttered life, always leaving for Chicago or Mexico City. He had taught at York University and Stanford. He had given lectures in cities around the world—even, in slow English, at the University of Moscow—and he had sweated in the field in sites on every continent. He allowed himself one memory, because he did not like to look back, a characteristic perhaps ironic in a scholar dedicated to mankind's past. He was not sentimental. He was a realist when it came to himself. He allowed himself a moment to recall the stony beaches of Samos, and how he had swum into the sea until the meltimi, that brisk Greek summer wind, had blown salt into his eyes, and he'd had to turn back half blind, and in love with life. They had found a colossal head of Aphrodite, not far from the ancient ruined town of Kamiros. Even now, the remainder of that great statue slept somewhere, broken into boulders in the foundations of buildings, or lost in the olive groves, just below the surface of the earth.

Higg loved archaeology, and he loved the homeliest objects that men and women had made as much as he loved the royal golden baubles of Sutton Hoo. He kept his life simple. His wife had died five years before, and now all that existed for him was his science. He had this office, and he had his study in St. John's Wood, a nightly whiskey, and dreamless sleep.

But he knew the things that could go wrong during a dig. He knew the footsteps a scientist dreams of at night, the unholy songs he hears in the abandoned tombs of Oaxaca, and the figures just shrinking from torchlight in the death corridors of Mitla. All creations of the imagination, he knew. But the imagination was everything. What was man, but a mammal which imagined the world?

“Tell me, Charles. Is there any rumor about among the workers, and among the scientists, that the dig might be—and I want to use the right word—haunted?”

Langton was visibly surprised. He was also secretly irritated. He had lost his private bet with himself. “This is what I wanted to tell you. I was afraid to mention it, really. It is so terribly irrational.…”

Higg ran his fingers over the ancient loom weight. He could feel the indentations of fingerprints that had been dust for fifteen hundred years. “You were right to tell me.” He sighed. “I can't unmake my decisions. But perhaps I was wrong to send Davis there, a man so recently bereaved. If I had thought through the implications of having him work on an ancient corpse, I would have sent him to Paris, to work on the excavations at the Cluny Museum. They are uncovering more of the Roman baths there.”

“Davis is doing reasonably well. No more disturbed, as far as I can tell, than anyone else. Besides, I don't think Davis is alone in feeling disturbed. The entire team is troubled, and I must point out that our friend Peter is—”

Higg would not finish Langton's sentence for him.

Langton finished manfully. “Our friend Peter is not doing well. He looks ill.”

Higg looked away. Peter had always been the real risk. “So we have troubles.”

“Of course, the local people have long thought of Skeldergate as haunted. It was a point of amusement, really. I remember running past the old warehouses there when I was a boy. But we never took it especially seriously, even as children. York has its haunted pubs, and haunted churches. We don't take them terribly seriously. But now, suddenly, even the most rational of our team seems troubled. It's all quite ridiculous, of course.”

“No, Charles, it's irrational, but it's not ridiculous. We deal, after all, not only with gold and bits of iron, but also with the dead, and the dead are potent beings, if only in our minds. It is the mind that is so powerful it can raise the dead, if only in our dreams.”

Langton smiled nervously, or perhaps with a show of interest he only half felt. Langton was an administrator, thought Higg. A good man. But he was not in love with his science as Higg was, as he had been since as a boy his father took him to Stonehenge, that ring of watchful stones in the midst of Salisbury plain. Some people have found them disappointing, those enigmatic ruins of a dead religion. The five-year-old Higg had found them, as he would find them today if he traveled there, as alive and exciting as a herd of phantom dinosaurs.

“You've done well, Charles. Thank you for coming to see me.” Still, Higg had to be honest with himself. Langton was a good man, but he was also a terrible bore.

Langton smiled, flattered, no doubt, but then he leaned sideways in his chair and lifted his eyebrows. Surely, his body language said, you have more to say than that?

Yes, thought Higg. He had much more to say. Langton had, years ago, thought of joining the Foreign Office. What a disaster that would have been, thought Higg. Langton had a better touch with dogs than he did with people. It would be dismal to spend any time at all in his company, but he had little choice. “I'm coming with you,” he said. “To York.”

Part Two

13

In the dark the brick buildings were like empty black caverns. The streetlights were dim smudges. The stones of the pavement glistened, although it was not raining, and it had not been raining for hours. There were no stars.

It had not been like this for years. Peter didn't care. The voice in him was clear, and his penis was swollen at the sound of it. All he had to do was catch one of the naughty, naughty creatures.

He had a tin of Norwegian sardines, and he had all the patience of justice. How could he have forgotten how wonderful this was? A simple trick, a box propped on a stick, a long string, and a tin of sardines. Just like the days behind the tiny gardens, among the rubbish bins, those days the smiling doctors had assured him were gone forever.

He had seen one here before, a black-and-white one. You could tell what a creature like that is thinking, just by looking. You can see into its heart and see what evil little things, all the evil little things, it wants to do. Lick the private parts of women. Things like that, nasty, naughty things like that. It had been years since he had thought like this, and now it made him so hard to think about it. Think of all the years of pleasure he had missed by forgetting all of this.

Naughty creature, you'll have to be punished very badly.

He sat in the darkest part of the alley behind Queen Anne's Road. Three nights of this and it hadn't worked. But it would. It always used to work, eventually. All he had to do was wait. Sometimes a door slammed and he froze. His box didn't look like a trap. It looked like a pile of rubbish children had been playing with, and in a way that was all it was, really.

Oh, please, sir, it's nothing, only a toy, like, to play with, like.

It was so cold. He had his thick, fur-lined gloves on, and three pairs of stockings, but it was still so cold. All a part of the game, though. A little cold to whet his appetite. He sat with his back to a brick wall, and he waited.

Oh no, sir, I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt a cat, sir.

Wind swayed nearly invisible clouds, dragged them away. Sometimes one star barely throbbed through the black, and then dissolved again. All the bedroom windows were black. Everyone was asleep. The city was empty. The trees in the dim streetlight were a tangle of dried veins. Nothing moved on the ground. Nothing moved in him, except blood to his lust that was so hard now it hurt.

Nasty creature. So naughty.

He drowsed, and woke. What a fool to nod off like this, after all these hours. What if it came now, with him asleep?

But it didn't. There was the box on its single stilt. There was the dark, all around. He was invisible here, but nothing came.

It wasn't coming tonight, either. It was never coming.

Then it was there.

After being not-there, it was like a trick, like something impossible. Just as simply as if he imagined it. There in the box, its haunches and tail protruding out, the white parts of it so white, the black like parts that weren't there. There was wind shaking the sky, and a dry leaf months old scratched the ground, and he pulled the string.

Oh no, sir, I wouldn't know anything about any hurt cats.

The box fell, and the cat backed away, and nearly escaped. It wore the box like a hat too large, and the box made a dragging sound as the cat pulled back. Peter lunged, and fell across the box. The cat made a cry—a low cry, a cry not like the sweet, begging call cats made, a low, deep, strange note, the song cats make when they know.

He slid the flat stiff cardboard under it. He taped the cardboard up the sides of the box, and then he could turn it over. He had done this all before, so many years ago. It was such a pleasure. Why had he waited so long?

He hurried with the cat struggling inside, punching the cardboard with its head. Such a naughty creature, doing such nasty things with your tongue, and we know all about it. We will show you what happens to such naughtiness when it is found out, and when it is caught. Such bad, bad nastiness—you won't get away with it anymore.

Out onto the great black emptiness of the football field beside the river, the town a stipple of lights, barely there, the river a quaking black nothing.

The hand peeled back the cardboard, and the head of the creature was out, like a snake, urgent and surging, a serpent of nastiness.

At arm's length—it must be like that, or the naughty creature will do harm. It can do such nasty harm, this terrible, terrible thing. The box fell away. Holding the cat out at arm's length, the leather gloves around the neck, and the strong sleeves, leather under the wool coat, all armor against not simply the cold.

The gloves squeezed the throat. The cat was a struggling blur. It clawed the sleeves with its hind legs, arched itself, swung itself around, nearly breaking its neck with its fight. So much fight. The eyes in the dim starlight bulging. The mouth with its fine white fangs open in a scream that became air.

The jerking body clawed the dark, urine and feces spurting. The eyes popped out, like beans borne from soil on their own sprouts. It was all over now, but the body didn't know it, fighting and clawing at nothing.

Until, swung by the tail, it spun and sailed through the air, into the deep wet nothing of the river.

14

Higg was pleased to be back in York. The Minster was, as always, a magnificent sight, and the city walls, on their steep green embankments, were, as always, a sight that improved him. He took a brisk tour of the city with Langton tagging along behind. It was barely cool, and this meant that spring was nearly here. He was perfectly comfortable in his dark blue Moss Brothers overcoat, years old and fitting better each year. He did have some doubts about his new Smith Brothers blackthorn, replacing a stick he had lost in the Arno the summer before. He had been watching the fishermen and had experienced a moment of such absorption it amounted to complete absentmindedness, although it was not a sign, he hoped, of age.