Sleepwalker (12 page)

Langton grew solemn. “Do you really intend to spend the night there?”

“Alone, unless you intend to join me. I've spent worse nights in the field. I was bitten by a rattlesnake in New Mexico once on getting out of my sleeping bag. We were excavating pueblos near Taos. It was dark, and he had found my body warmth somehow pleasant. Fortunately, I was sleeping with my boots on, and the snake was so ill prepared he merely scratched the leather and left two little spurts of venom. He wasn't a very large snake, poor fellow. The men we had with us shot him and skinned him within a minute. He bit a dog when he was dead. The dog was very sick, but didn't die. The only time I can imagine a dead creature doing anything like harm. But here, you have me reminiscing, and this is very much unlike me.”

“You should write your memoirs, William,” said Langton. He was irritated with Dr. Higg. Langton felt vaguely responsible to Higg as long as he was in York. Higg would not have traveled to York if Langton had somehow managed to keep things sorted out. Langton was not nervous about the Skeldergate Man, but he was hardly going to sit up all night with Dr. Higg, who had twice his energy, and would no doubt want to spend the night discussing cranial volume or body art among the Papuans or some other ungodly subject. Langton admired Higg, but did not crave his constant companionship.

Besides, if you really considered it, there was something wrong about spending a night in that room. Langton couldn't decide what it was. Something willful and stubborn and something else, too. It seemed, at bottom, very unwise. Langton could not suppose why. Langton himself had a wife and a border collie, and it was late. The dog would want a walk, and it would be fortunate to make it to Clifton Green tonight. Langton was tired.

Langton asked after Higg's requirements. Bedding would not be necessary, said Dr. Higg. He would spend the night reading, and writing up his notes. It would, he said, be like the nights in the Yucatán, when rumors simmered that bandits were about and the unarmed scientists had to take turns staying up all night, reading to the hiss of a Coleman lantern.

Langton walked Higg to the college. Higg swung his blackthorn in one hand, and jingled the keys in the other. He would be glad to be alone. For some reason, he had spent too much time thinking about the past during the last day or two. And worse, talking about the past. Higg was far from young, but he was a man with many present interests. Nostalgia had no place in his intellectual landscape.

Langton wished him good night, and added, to Higg's mild annoyance, “Are you quite sure you want to do this, William?”

“Entirely, thank you, Charles.”

At last, Higg was alone. He fumbled with the keys, and found the right one, door after door, until he stood in the brightly lit lab, thankful for his overcoat. He selected the one key he had not used, and strolled toward the room that held his friend, the Skeldergate Man.

Why did he feel that this was an adventure of sorts? He simply wanted to establish the fact that there was nothing at all supernatural about the Skeldergate Man, or the laboratory, and communicate it to his young colleagues. All it would take would be patience.

He could see his own breath. He unlocked the door, and the door handle would not open for a moment. It felt as though someone held it from the inside. Higg was not a particularly good man with devices of any sort. He supposed a door handle was, in its way, a device.

The door opened, as though relenting. Foolishly, Higg found himself hesitating before the darkness of the room within. For some reason, he had not expected dark. He wanted to laugh at himself. He had never in his life been, even for a moment, afraid of the dark.

He found the light switch. The fluorescent tubes stuttered and went out. They came on again, and stayed on, making that high, insect hum.

The Skeldergate Man was under a black plastic sheet. Its profile was discernible. It could be nothing else; only a human body would have had these contours. Higg found the only chair in the room, and pulled the results of the CAT scan from his inner pocket. He decided to leave his overcoat on in this cold room—cold and silent, except for the high, fine sound of the lights. He should have brought a flask of coffee.

Hadn't there always been that footstep just beyond hearing, that skull he could not bear to have sitting beside him as he slept? He had always put away a skull he might have sitting about before he switched out the lights. He had always had an imagination.

He unfurled a sheaf of paper showing what looked like the topography of a complicated range of mountains. He let the paper fall to the floor. He really, indeed, should have brought a flask of coffee, or something to read aside from this report on the smuggling of icons from the Soviet Union, and this one, on the wear patterns on molars from the Roman cemetery in Aries. Both subjects would have been fascinating at any other time, but now, for some reason, he could not concentrate on them at all.

It had, after all, been a long day, but he was accustomed to work. He was not tired. It was something else. He was not sleepy, not a bit—there was something entirely different troubling him and making it impossible to read. Or to sit still. Or to think of anything else.

Except for the figure under the black plastic sheet. He had known a young woman working on the excavations in the ancient crypt of Spitalfields who had gone quite mad from working with the dead. It had been an especially difficult task, with high lead levels in the air from the old coffins, and both “wet” dead and “dry” dead, as they called them. Higg did not blame the young woman for her troubles, but usually these mental problems were the result of a preexisting stress. The more morbid aspects of archaeology could be easily dissipated by a rational approach. Naturally, it was a very good idea to screen the younger scientists carefully, and in this light Peter still troubled him.

Higg was itching with a very great desire to peek under the plastic sheet. Just a peek.

Why shouldn't he, really, if one really stopped and thought about it? He could take a quick look, if he wanted to. Why was he even hesitating?

But he did hesitate. He should sit still, and read. There was no reason to pay any notice to the poor fragment of a human life that lay under the black plastic sheet.

Just a peek.

There had always been that sense that something was watching, on those star-filled nights in New Mexico. One of the old wranglers who handled the horses had laughed about the snake. “It is a gift,” he had said. “Of luck from the other world.”

From the Other World.

This was impossible. He was sitting, unable to read, fidgeting like a boy. The thing to do was very simple: stand up, and step over to the table and take that good, long peek, just to get it done and out of the way. Then he could sit and read, and the article about the icons was really quite interesting, in its way.

Don't.

Higg was extremely annoyed with himself now. His body would not rise from the chair. He could not reach the table from here. It was quite impossible for him to examine the Skeldergate Man without rising from the chair—as he did now, at last—and stepping to the table.

At last his arms and legs were cooperating. This was very kind of them, he thought. Now I will put my hands on the black plastic, and pull it to one side.

No.

His hand was trembling. This was most irritating, and made Higg think that perhaps there might be some medical trouble. There was no reason he could think of that would account for this extreme cold he was feeling, and the great difficulty he had in getting his hands to obey his will.

Higg calmed himself, taking deep, regular breaths, and realized as he did so that he had been, and probably still was, afraid. Afraid! It was really thoroughly absurd, and he knew one quick way to dispel any such nonsense immediately from his mind.

He grasped the edge of the plastic between his thumb and his forefinger, and he whisked the sheet aside.

16

Her reflection was sliced by the surface of the water. She was drifting toward him.

He began to walk toward her. The water broke under one foot, but then healed around it, and the other foot pressed the breathing water down, and the water supported his weight.

He began to try to cry out, and wrestle with the dream, but he could not speak, and he could not move. Margaret was continuing, wafting toward him, and he began to drift toward her. He wanted to break the dream, and he couldn't. They were approaching each other more and more quickly.

He held her. He could feel the shape of her body in his arms. Margaret, he wanted to say. After all these months. The change began, as it always did. The skin of her face wrinkled, a fan of fissures breaking across it. Flakes of flesh fluttered away, exposing the carbon-black skull.

“Davis,” said a voice.

Who is it?

“Davis. Wake up.”

Davis woke.

Irene held him.

“You were moaning so, Davis,” she said. “Was it your nightmare again?”

He did not speak for a moment. “Yes. The nightmare. Did I try to get out of bed?”

“In your sleep?”

“Did I try to get up and walk?”

“You simply lay there asleep and moaning, and I woke you up. If you had begun to walk, I might not have awakened you, though. I have heard that it can be very frightening to be awakened while walking in sleep.”

He was still shivering. He ran his hands through her hair. “What will you do,” he said, “when I begin to walk in my sleep again?”

“I will walk with you.”

Davis laughed, despite himself.

“I will go with you, and all will be well.”

“I wonder if it will be that simple.”

“Yes, Davis, I think so.”

They both lay down again, and soon Irene was breathing slowly, lost in sleep.

Margaret.

She had always been unfaithful to him, from the very beginning. She had been quick to love him. “I want to stand like this forever,” she had said in the rain of Quintana Roo, having turned to him suddenly. His arms had closed around her. That night she had told him she loved him, and would never want any other man but him, and this was surprising as well as exciting.

In the scrub jungle, with mosquitoes and iguanas, they began an affair. Davis believed that she had, in truth, loved him. Certainly, after a few days, he loved her. But there were so many other men, from the beginning. As soon as they reached San Diego, where Davis was lecturing that summer, she was on the telephone, hanging up when he entered the room. She broke lunch dates, calling him at the last minute, and there was that feeling about her of other men.

He had asked her to marry him, thinking that she would change. There was a quick taxi ride to the airport, and a short flight to Las Vegas, and then telephone calls to friends and family to explain, after the fact, what they had done. Everyone accepted the suddenness of it. The consensus seemed to be that they were the two smartest and best-looking people anywhere on the horizon, and that naturally they would rush to be married. It was the only rational thing to do.

But she insisted on going to conventions alone. Davis encouraged her, because he knew that she should continue her own career. When she returned she was passionate, but Davis knew. There was no pretending after a while. She had affairs. He challenged her and she shrugged. “You knew how I was. There are many attractive men in archaeology.”

She drank. Often in the morning, before breakfast, she would have a vodka and beef bouillon she described as “medicine.” Of course, she needed medicine, Davis knew, to help her through the hangover from the night before. But on the few occasions she would actually make it to a lunch in San Francisco, at one of their favorite North Beach spots, she would inhale prelunch martinis, and share a bottle of wine, and then have her dessert martini, or two. She showed little damage from all of this, except that she went to bed shortly after the seven o'clock news, and in the morning sometimes put ice cubes into a washcloth for the puffiness around her eyes.

She gave brilliant lectures, and wrote well, although her articles were not often published, being in various ways argumentative, challenging the articles that had appeared in a journal just months before. Editors “admired” her work, but tended to feel “this was not the right time.” If one scientist reasoned that a jaw found in the Calico Mountains was that of an early Indian based on C-fourteen and location of the find, Margaret would write an article proving that the Calico Mountains were so acid that no bone would last ten thousand years, no matter what the carbon test indicated.

She loved parties, the kind of party that finds its place in the society pages, parties that required dresses as expensive as automobiles, and involved a pre-party drink at Donatello's and champagne and cocktails and after-party drinks, and sometimes Davis would not know where she was for days. Yet no one seemed to perceive that Davis and Margaret were not a loving, happy couple. Davis was always flying back from New York as Margaret was leaving for a party on a yacht in Tiburon, or flying to give a paper in Houston.

He had left her once, and rented an apartment in Sausalito. He had reasoned with her, and fought with her, but it had done no good. She begged him tearfully to come back to her, and he had.

He loved her, and her absences made him see her as, unavoidably, a fantasy figure as well as an actual woman. He was always planning that perfect weekend, in their own apartment beside San Francisco Bay, or in a cabin at Lake Tahoe, or on a spur-of-the-moment fling in Rome. These weekends never occurred. There were only fights, embraces, and passion, and afterward the cycle would begin again. If I could only win her completely, he thought.

Archaeologists who are also celebrities do not necessarily have strongboxes of Spanish gold. Margaret loved cars, and what she could not buy she leased, and, from time to time, borrowed. There was a series of accidents, often in a distant city. Davis knew he was losing her, but he could not guess to what.