The mountain began to breathe around them again. The wind slid inside the stall and made the tents shudder and flap. Walker stared at the pill bottle, then clutched it in his hand and looked at Kim again. The chill cut into his flesh as if his thick layers of clothing meant nothing.
“If you’d seen the things that came after us in Guatemala, you’d want as many drugs as your body could handle,” he said quietly. He shook the pill bottle again and then stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “I’ve got a couple of fused vertebrae in my back. The scars on my abdomen where they tore me open still pull and tug when I move, and there’s pain inside where the surgeons knitted things back together. And when it’s cold like this, the pins in my right leg feel like they’re stabbing me. I’m in a hell of a lot of pain on a good day. Up here, right now… well, we both know it’s not a good day.”
Kim had paled even further. He saw the judgment and aloofness melt from her gaze. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how—”
“Really, though,” he interrupted. “It hurts like hell, even with the drugs, but probably half of the addiction is about my ex-wife. Some days that’s worse because my spine and my other injuries… monsters did that. How badly I messed up my marriage, that pain is self-inflicted.”
This time when she smiled, he smiled in return. They weren’t happy people, but they understood each other now. Or at least they’d begun to.
“What about you?” Walker asked. “You doing all right? Any signs of you going mental again?”
Now she laughed. “The anxiety’s still there,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “And I had some terrible nightmares about the cadaver—”
“The horns are pretty unsettling.”
“—but I’m all right.”
He heard the hesitation in her voice and felt himself soften. They were all haunted in this cave, both by whatever ghosts they’d brought with them and by the fear they’d found when they arrived. The talk of nightmares also disturbed him, for he’d been having some fairly dreadful dreams of his own.
“Our horned friend is dead,” he said. “I’m standing firm on it being human. There was a time someone born with physical defects would have been considered tainted or unclean, an abomination.”
Kim shuddered and hugged herself against the cold. “Do you really believe that’s what we’ve found? Some human abomination?”
“It’s what I want to believe,” Walker said, and suddenly the space vanished between them, leaving a quiet intimacy that made him hold his breath a moment.
“But?” she asked.
“The way people have been behaving—both of us included—is abnormal, even in a heightened situation like this one. We’re all supposed to be professionals. Even the students had to have at least a bit of experience to be chosen for this. And the workers are Kurds who’ve lived on this mountain their whole lives.”
“Don’t underestimate the religious factor,” Kim said, glancing over her shoulder as if afraid to be overheard. “If everyone’s on edge, is that so surprising?”
Walker studied her face, the curve of her cheek, the glint in her eyes, and realized that they had become allies. They were in this together.
“It feels like more than that,” he said. “Sometimes you run across a person you just know doesn’t wish you well. You can feel it. And sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or get some water, and it’s dark in the house and you get that feeling, the sense of a quiet presence there with you. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve had that feeling, alone in the middle of the night, of something filling up the darkness in a room like air inflating a balloon. You ask me about this tomorrow, where people can hear me, and I’ll deny it, but I’ve been feeling that since the second we got here. Both things. The weird closeness in the air that maybe is just claustrophobia talking but maybe isn’t, along with that other thing, that—”
“Malice,” Kim said.
Walker nodded slowly, staring at her, appreciating the surprising knowledge that he was not alone here.
“Yes, exactly. Malice.”
Adam rubbed grit from his eyes and realized he had watched the same two minutes of footage five times. He’d hit PLAY, let the argument at dinner start to run, and then his mind would drift. Swearing quietly, frustrated with himself, he hit PAUSE and stared at the frozen image on his laptop. Meryam, angry and snapping at Hakan. Adam knew her better than anyone, but to him, the woman in that frozen image didn’t look like Meryam at all. She had a gift for sarcasm and her temper could flare from time to time, but this wasn’t her. More than that—she looked unwell. Her features were drawn and there were hollows under her eyes. Her pallor, normally a soft coffee, seemed almost jaundiced.
Enough, he thought, shutting the laptop. He left the tent, immediately wishing he’d put on his gloves and hat. Instead of turning back, he flipped up his collar and zipped his coat, rubbing his hands together as he moved through the walls and tents and plastic sheeting that made up the camp on level two. A lot of the sleeping quarters were here, but the crew had developed the habit of not hanging around unless they were sleeping, so he knew Meryam had to be elsewhere. More often than not, she could be found in a stall on level one, not far from where Helen’s team had done their very first work on the project. There had been latticed remnants of what Helen believed were birdcages in the stall, but nothing else. Those remnants had been packed away with other artifacts and already removed from the site and Meryam had turned the stall into a sort of home base. Her office. As project manager, she’d claimed the space for herself. Meryam had embraced the KHAP with such ferocity that it left him feeling like an observer… an outsider on his own project. In the process, she had been running herself ragged, and every time he had tried to talk to her about it, she would change the subject.
With every passing day he felt more and more frozen out, until he had begun to feel like it wasn’t his project at all anymore. Officially it was the Karga-Holzer Ark Project, but when people said KHAP out loud, the H was silent. As if Holzer contributed nothing at all.
The cold cut through him as he climbed down the ladder. Just touching the frozen wood seared his skin.
When he reached the bottom, he blew into his hands and rubbed them together. Her tenure as project manager had been taking a bad turn. Someone had to tell her, and it would have to be him, but he knew Meryam. She would never accept that she had been screwing up. They both knew that she loved the work more than she would ever love him, and she would assume that his criticism was rooted in resentment.
The blissful days immediately after their engagement seemed so distant now, and a joyful wedding day seemed almost impossible.
Adam took one more step and came to a halt as that thought took hold. Almost impossible. Was that what he really thought?
A hundred feet to his left, the mouth of the cave opened into the darkness. Snow had drifted in, several inches deep. Voices came to him on the wind and he turned to see several figures out at the edge of the cave, too near the drop-off for his tastes. They were smoking, bright orange cigarette tips glinting in the dark, but given the snow he was not going to rat them out to Meryam. No fire was going to start in the middle of this. Beyond them, he could see only the dark, as if those three burning cigarette tips were the last signs of life in the world, and nothing remained of humanity beyond them. Up here, in the storm, they might as well have been on another planet.
Freezing, his fingers numb, he hunched over and hurried toward the passage that led along the left side wall of the ark. Already he could see a warm golden light back there, and he knew he’d chosen correctly, that Meryam was in her “office” after all. He dropped his head again, staring at the footsteps in the snow as he tried to protect himself from the cold. When he lifted his gaze, he could see the open face of the stall twenty feet ahead.