But whatever sense of relief or safety he’d expected, it had not come. He didn’t feel that he had locked anything out.
On the contrary, he felt that he had locked something in.
Under the shower, even with the hot water running at full blast, he couldn’t get warm. After making his brief and surreptitious nightly broadcast to his foreign contact, he had gotten into bed with every blanket and sheet he owned piled on top of him. What the hell was wrong with him? Had he suddenly caught the flu, or some bizarre disease carried on that wind out of nowhere? It wasn’t like he’d be able to ask any of the others — Delaney, Lucas, or that Simone somebody — if they were feeling ill themselves. To do that, he’d have had to admit he’d been there in the first place.
The next morning, he’d awakened feeling even worse, so bad he’d contemplated going to the campus infirmary. He hadn’t felt like himself. Brushing his teeth, he hadn’t felt it was his own hand, under his own control, holding the brush. Shaving, he’d been wary of holding the blade close to his own neck. His eyes had a faint yellowish cast, like jaundice, and more than once he’d had the bizarre impression that someone else was looking out of them.
Even his actions had felt slightly… remote. Delayed. His mind had gone to a terrible place, to fatal diseases of muscular degeneration. He’d dropped to the floor and done a set of pushups, just to be sure that he still could. Then he had jogged in place with the radio news on. The war wasn’t going so well for the Axis powers on the Western Front. The four-hundred-mile long Siegfried Line, built by Hitler in the late 1930s to protect the borders of the old German empire, was under attack. A CBS reporter announced, “With any luck, the German redoubts are going to fall like dominoes. It won’t be easy — nothing in war ever is — but it looks like it will just be a matter of time before the Stars and Stripes are flying over the Fatherland.”
What, he had wondered, would happen to him when the war ended? In victory, his future would be assured… but in defeat? Would he wind up marooned in America?
But then, in a stroke of luck he could never have foreseen, Lucas and Delaney had dropped into his lap exactly what he wanted — a batch of bones and bone fragments that Andy knew had come straight out of that ossuary.
Pretending ignorance, he’d asked, “Where did these come from?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Lucas had replied.
“It does to an anthropologist.”
“Okay, then, from an anonymous donor. I just need you to tell me, as soon as possible, everything you can about their origin and anatomy.”
Sorting through them, Andy had seen a femur and a fibula, a tibia, a patella, a scapula, assorted odds and ends, and two skulls, one plainly misshapen.
“I’m especially interested,” Lucas had said, “in what they’re from — human or animal — and in how the creatures died. I also want to know if there are any signs of violence or disease having played a part. Can you do that for me?”
Not wanting to betray his eagerness, Andy’d said, “Well, I do have a lot of prep work to do for my senior seminar in—”
“Skip it. Do this first.”
And so he had. So he had.
Drawing the stool up to the lab counter now, he picked up where he had left off the day before — with the last fragment he had been working on. It was a nub of yellowed bone the size of a fat thumb, with a blunt base and sharpened end — and he held it again under the high-intensity lamp.
A knock sounded, and the door opened just enough for Lucas to put his head in. Andy had always meant to ask him how he’d lost that eye.
“Glad to see you’re hard at it,” Lucas said, coming in.
“That’s what you do when you don’t have tenure.”
“If it’s any comfort, I don’t either.”
“Maybe so, but they’re not going to let a combat veteran like you, a war hero, go.”
Lucas didn’t take the bait and divulge anything. Coming close enough to see the stub that Andy was studying, he asked, “That is one of the bones I gave you, right?”
“Yep.”
“So, what’s the verdict?”
Andy put it down. “I can tell you what it isn’t,” he said. Even then, he had to wonder if he should be sharing his findings so freely. After all, it wasn’t like Lucas and Delaney were his allies.
“Why don’t you start by telling me what you do know about the bones.”
But if he didn’t share what he had learned, he might find himself cut off from any further teamwork on this project — a project his superiors deemed of the utmost importance. “What I do know is that we’ve got a pretty eclectic selection here.” For the time being, he decided to err, if err it was, on the side of cooperation. Gesturing at the human skull and some other bones arranged on a worktable in the corner, he said, “Over there, we’ve got one almost complete skeleton.”
“Of what?”
“A man, on the tall side, and, putting aside the evident antiquity of the bones, very elderly. I know Delaney has some other samples — has he figured out anything of their actual age?” he asked innocently.
“They’re old. Maybe a couple of thousand years. Go on.”
“Okay,” Andy said, drawing the word out.
“Do you know what he died of?”
“Hard to say with any certainty. I can tell you that he led a hell of a hard life. There’s evidence of extreme nutritional deficiencies, along with more marks of physical violence than I can count, ranging from scratches and bites to fractures and bone breaks. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy had been a soldier or a gladiator or maybe even a slave. In any case, he took a lot of beatings.”
Lucas nodded, absorbing it all.
“I mean, by the end of his life, the guy had maybe six fingers and three teeth left, and judging from the indentation of the right zygomatic bone, I’d be surprised if he still had that eye at all.” He paused before adding, “Sorry, I guess you know how that goes.”
Ignoring the apology, Lucas said, “What about the other skull and fragments?”
Andy shrugged and turned on his stool to face the counter right behind him. “This one’s much more of a puzzle.”
“Why?”
He held up the smaller skull with its sloping brow, broad nasal plane, and unusually elongated mouth, to which several pointed incisors still clung. “You might think it’s human — and it’s close — but there are enough substantial anomalies to rule that out. I assumed it was one of our close simian cousins, maybe one of them that had died young, before it had grown to its full proportions.”
“And is it?”
“The contours of the bones and some of the tiny cartilaginous remnants are what you might expect to find in a sample like that,” Andy conceded, “but then there are some things that you definitely wouldn’t.”
“Such as?”
“Such as this,” he said, picking up the nubbin he’d been studying when Lucas came in.
“It looks like a shard of stone to me.”
“Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s definitely organic.”
“Is it a finger? You said the other skeleton was missing several of them.”
“It’s not that, either.”
“I don’t have all day, Brandt. What are you getting at?”
“A horn. It’s a piece of horn, like from a goat.”
“Okay, it’s from a goat.”
“Only it’s not. And it’s not from a bull or a rhino or anything else I can think of offhand.” He twirled it under the lamp. “Of course, it might help if you could provide me with some salient information on how and where you found it.” It was time, he thought, for a little quid pro quo. He wanted to hear, from Lucas himself, what he already knew about the ossuary. He wanted to elicit at least that one small vote of trust.