“I told you, it doesn’t matter,” Lucas replied distractedly. “Just put down everything you’ve told me in a written report, right away. I need it.”
“Who for?”
Now Lucas looked irritated. “Has it ever occurred to you simply to do what you’re asked?”
“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not my boss?” Andy shot back, before he could stop himself. “You’re not even in my department. I’m the one doing you the favor.”
Lucas couldn’t argue with that, and Andy knew it. Still, it wasn’t a smart move to piss him off; he should have held his tongue.
“You’re right,” Lucas replied, in an even tone of voice that Andy could see was costing him. “Slip it under my study door at your earliest convenience.”
Well, that had not been the most fruitful exchange, Andy thought — he’d given out plenty, and he’d received nothing in return, except for the renewed sense that these bones were important — very important — and it behooved him to figure out why.
For the next couple of hours, he worked on the written report, while sipping hot tea one moment to warm himself up, and a glass of cold water the next to cool himself down. It was as if his body was at war with itself. Outside, he could hear the occasional sound of a tuba or a trombone blaring as a marching band member made his way down toward the stadium. There was a football game that afternoon, though he could not recall the opponent. Was it Columbia, or maybe Dartmouth? On the one hand, he tried to participate in all these collegiate events; he wanted to give the impression he was devoted to the school and to his employment there, however tenuous. In truth, though, he couldn’t stand all this rah-rah nonsense. At Heidelberg, the university had been a temple dedicated to things of the mind, not the body, and that was just one of the myriad ways in which the German system, in his estimation, surpassed the American.
He was getting too tired to see straight. The notes he was typing up were rife with misspellings, and his back was killing him from sitting on the stool. Shutting down the lab, he put on his coat, locked the door behind him, and went out into the dim exhibition hall.
Tucking in his scarf on the way to the front doors, he noticed that something was lying on the floor at the base of the Caithness Man’s display case, and went over to pick it up.
It was an open pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, which had no doubt fallen out of the pocket of one of those brats he’d chased out of the building earlier. Oh well, it was his own good fortune now, as the pack was nearly full. He took out a stick, and was about to put the rest in his pocket, when, in jest, he offered one to the Caithness Man.
“Gum?” he said, but the word froze in his throat as he stared at his own reflection in the glass — or what should have been his own reflection. What he saw there instead, pressed up against the glass, was the face of a leering gargoyle with beady golden eyes and a slash of mouth that stretched from ear to pointed ear. He reared back, and as he did, the image — the hallucination — evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Now it was only the Caithness Man again, lashed to his stake.
Bumping into a rack of primitive tools behind him, and still keeping his eye on the display case, he stumbled to the doors, and then outside onto the sunlit steps.
Somebody blasted a trumpet, and some others laughed, on their way to the game.
Andy clung to the railing with both hands, the blood thrumming in his veins, and his thoughts in turmoil. This work was getting to him in a way nothing else had ever done, enough to make him wonder, just what had he been studying in his lab?
And what, perhaps, had been studying him?
CHAPTER TWENTY
If you had to attend a football game, this was the kind of day to do it, Lucas thought. The sun was shining in a bright blue sky, the air was crisp and cold, and the crowd passing through the high arches into the Princeton stadium was in a festive mood, waving pennants and calling out to each other in boisterous voices.
Still, if President Dodds hadn’t made faculty attendance so imperative — his earlier admonition had been succeeded by an envelope containing tickets to the reserved seating area and inscribed with “See you there!”—Lucas would have continued to do nothing but focus on the ossuary and the aftermath of its opening.
Christ, it had been a hard couple of days. Once the wind had died down in the conservation wing and there seemed nothing else to do that night, Delaney, looking pale and perturbed, had packed up his tools and wandered off toward his lab again, while Lucas had removed the film canister from the camera, locked up the room, and escorted Simone through the murky corridors of the museum and out into the dismal night. He hadn’t had to say he was walking her back to the Nassau Inn; it was understood. And truth be told, he was doing it as much for himself as for her. Neither one of them would have wanted to be alone with the knowledge of what they had just witnessed. Lucas felt like something at his very core — call it a coldly empirical cast of mind — had been turned upside down, like a cocktail shaker, and rattled hard.
Simone was quiet as they walked along the puddled pathways across the campus, and she made no objection when Lucas looped a protective arm around her shoulders. Indeed, she seemed to melt into his body, so that the two of them were walking less like participants in an academic endeavor than lovers. Not since leaving Europe had Lucas experienced such an onslaught of feelings — everything from shock to confusion, tenderness to guilt at having exposed Simone, and Delaney, too, to such a troubling and possibly dangerous event. He could barely sort through the unfamiliar rush of emotions. Emotions were what he had been trying to keep at bay ever since the iron mine.
Like moths drawn to flame, he and Simone made their way through the darkness and toward the lights of town. Most of the storefronts were closed down for the night, but the lights were on in the windows of the Nassau Inn, and even the lobby was bustling with people. A placard on a stand welcomed the members of the Northeast Bottling Association to their annual convention, still in progress in the Gold Ballroom upstairs.
“It will be much quieter downstairs,” Simone said, leading Lucas to the taproom, where only a few of the revelers had found their way to the bar. Two wingback chairs, flanking the roaring fireplace, were unoccupied, and Simone and Lucas took them. Lucas ordered her a Campari and soda, the drink he’d seen her imbibe the day they met, and a double Scotch on the rocks for himself.
Despite the glow from the hearth, Simone still looked pale. Her eyes stayed riveted on the orange flames and crackling wood in the fireplace. “I should have told you sooner,” she finally said.
“Told me what?”
“The ossuary. My father and I believe it contains the bones of Saint Anthony. We found it in the White Desert, the empty quarter of the Sahara.”
“Saint Anthony,” he repeated. It was the second time in a matter of hours he had heard the name. Wasn’t Wally Gregg dying from something called Saint Anthony’s fire? Could this really be just a coincidence?
“He was a saint who wrestled with demons.”
“Okay,” Lucas replied, evenly. Why not? In his experience, most saints had colorful and extraordinary tales told about them; it was how they’d become saints in the first place.
“My father…” Simone hesitated. “He thinks that the box might hold not only the saint’s relics, but some residue of his powers, too.”
Lucas took a strong slug of his Scotch, absorbing all that she was finally telling him. “So, are you suggesting that we might have released some holy spirit into the world?” he said skeptically.