Sleepwalker (14 page)

Not exactly, unless you can call whatever he had seen an accident. Davis attempted an explanation. “It was as though he had seen something that frightened him.”

“What might that have been?”

Good question, he told himself. What did Dr. Higg see in the room at midnight? Go ahead and tell her what you really think. Go on. She won't believe you, anyway. Davis gave her what he hoped was a sincere smile. “I don't know.”

The nurse dismissed him, plainly dissatisfied.

It was a long morning. At last a slim doctor with a freckled face stepped into the waiting room. He motioned to Davis, seeming to believe that Davis was the man in charge. Irene followed.

“How is he?”

“Very much alive, if that's what you mean,” said the doctor, responding to Davis's question. The doctor wore a baggy shirt and a blue tie and introduced himself as Dr. Hall. He had a pleasant face, but questioning eyes. “Alive, I would say, but hardly well. He's quite ill, and I think he still may not recover.”

Davis could not breathe.

“He may die,” the doctor added. “Of a very unusual cause.”

He led Davis and Irene to Dr. Higg's bedside.

Dr. Higg's eyes were closed, and his breathing seemed slow—too slow, like a man who had been pulled from icy water. His lips were still gray-blue. Dr. Hall nodded as if to say: You see what I mean.

Leading them from the room he continued, “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I wish I knew,” said Davis. Langton had insisted that the theft of the Skeldergate Man be kept secret. The press was to hear nothing. The Skeldergate Man was very popular, and had stimulated the public to donate money. Davis had suggested that publicizing the crime might make it easier to catch the criminals, but Langton was firm. “It might be simple hooligans,” he said, “or it might be international thieves. We don't know, and we shouldn't discuss this with anyone.”

But that wasn't the only reason the matter would be impossible to discuss, Davis realized as he walked down the corridor. How could he explain that possibly, just possibly, if you let your imagination run for a moment, Dr. Higg had seen something more terrifying than a thief?

Something much more terrifying.

It would earn the doctor's disbelief, and it would also be the sort of story impossible to keep out of the
Sun
and the
Star
.

“We think he must have interrupted a crime in the lab,” said Davis at last. “A few things were missing.”

Dr. Hall turned to face him. “Stolen?”

“Apparently.”

“There's something very unsatisfactory about all of this. This man has suffered a profound shock. I have never seen anything like it before. I would like to know what, exactly, the nature of the shock was.”

“So would I,” said Davis, glad that he did not have to lie. “I would very much like to know what Dr. Higg saw. But I don't.”

“I wish you would think about it,” said Dr. Hall. “This man has nearly died of fright.”

Outside, Davis was grateful for the chill. It told him that he was outside, under the sky, and not dying in a hospital bed.

“You will not want to go to see Mr. Foote now,” said Irene. “You will find him too unpleasant.”

Davis gazed about him, feeling dazed and disconnected from reality. The loss of the Skeldergate Man was a disaster in itself, and to see Dr. Higg so stricken made Davis feel that the world was a terrible place. “I'd welcome anything that took my mind off poor Dr. Higg.”

“What do you suppose he saw?” said Irene.

“That's the sort of question I find too hard to answer. What do you think he saw?”

“Do you suppose,” she asked impishly, “he saw the Skeldergate Man dancing around the room?”

“Waltzing. Waltzing around the room.”

“Do you really think that, Davis?”

He shrugged. He didn't know what to think. “The thought occurs.”

“Do things like that happen, Davis?”

“You sound as though you know they do.”

Irene laughed sadly.

“You're trying to goad me into saying something foolish,” said Davis. “Things like that don't happen.”

He repeated it to himself over and over as they walked: Don't happen.

Foote's Book Shop was on High Petergate, nearly in the shadow of the Minster. The door invited them to ring the bell, but the button, when pushed, made no sound that Davis could hear. Irene touched the door, and it opened.

Davis was reluctant to open any doors that seemed at all mysterious. “Are you sure this is all right?”

“I visit this store very often. I buy books.”

The stairs were narrow and steep. At the various landings books were piled, some looking entirely new, and some looking ancient. The carpet on the stair muffled their steps. As they climbed, out the small ripple-glassed windows they could glimpse the gables of the building across the street, and, looming above that, the Minster itself.

Irene paused outside a thick oak door. “You should wait out here, Davis,” she said. “I will go in and I will announce you.”

He could barely hear her voice from the next room. She seemed to be talking to total silence. She laughed, once, and then there was more silence. It was hot here on the stairs. He loosened his muffler.

Irene peeked out. “You may come in, Davis.”

More books. They were arranged neatly, and had none of the dank, mildew smell that Davis associated with some old books. The room was warm, and the carpet a thick gray plush, quite new. The books addressed the general subject of sailing. There were books on clipper ships, and sailmaking, and navigation among the Fiji Islanders. Davis had time to discover a book or two, because Mr. Foote could not be seen.

“You should sit, Davis, in this chair. I will sit here. Be quick.”

“We should wait until we're invited, don't you think?”

“Don't be silly.”

Davis sat. He became aware that a tiny television camera was studying him from a nook. Davis swore quietly to himself. This was not what he needed. The world was disintegrating around him, and he was visiting the Great Recluse of York.

Irene smiled at him, and Davis was immediately cheered. This was as good a place to be as any he could think of. Besides, there were many questions to ask, and just possibly their invisible host was the man to answer them.

A door whispered, and a slim man with a bald head slipped into the room, shook Davis's hand, and found a perch on a stool, so quickly and quietly Davis could not speak for a moment.

“I appreciate the chance to meet you and—” Davis began, but Mr. Foote dashed his words aside with a gesture of contempt. No preliminaries, he seemed to say. No empty courtesy. It bores me.

“Tell me about Skeldergate,” said Davis.

Mr. Foote sniffed.

Davis clasped his hands. He would be patient.

Mr. Foote worked a forefinger into his ear, and extracted it, examining the gleam of wax on his nail. “You want to know about that one particular site which your opportunistic profession has decided to rape.” He smiled, quickly, brightly, and then the smile was gone, and his face blank.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Davis, feeling slow of speech and gesture, dull, American in the most clumsy way. “Tell me, though, why you dislike archaeologists.”

“It's a prejudice really, and I don't want to be unfair to you.”

“I'm interested.”

He was more than interested. He was beginning to feel the first light of anger. A great archaeologist lay near death as they spoke.

“You embarrass me. Irene's been telling tales. I feel, if you will forgive my being blunt, that archaeologists, like doctors and like lawyers, strive to appear harmless, but in fact they love the lurid find, the ancient battlefield, the hoard of treasure, and they love to see their faces in the newspaper.”

Davis felt his anger die. “You accuse us of being human.”

“And now that I hear myself being so terribly opinionated, I feel ashamed of myself. You want to know the secrets of Skeldergate.” He was a much younger man than he had at first appeared. His quirky manner was, Davis thought, the result of youthful arrogance, and not fossilized ego.

Mr. Foote went on. “I could make a good deal of money in your field, or by writing books. I am an expert on haunted places. As to your haunted place: it's always been considered a place of haunting. Before the nineteenth-century warehouses there was a timber mill, and before that in the Elizabethan days, there was, as you know, a slaughterhouse. You will have found bones, horns, that sort of thing. Before that the area was given over to wool merchants, and before that a cooper and other such craftsmen lived and worked there, but all this you know from the work you have done.

“Before all of that, at about the time of the Norse incursions, about the ninth century, something happened there. Something very bad, because the early tax rolls of the sheriff here in York refer to a ‘mordor pyt,' a murder pit, somewhere on this street. It was given as the reason so many men and women were hurt in peculiar accidents there. Priests were consulted, but the place is referred to more than once as a
platea nigromantiae
, vulgar Latin for ‘place of necromancy,' which is, as you know, a way of telling the future through communion with the dead. No other place in York has such a reputation. We have the odd ghost, but nothing like that.

“So what might have happened there? Perhaps nothing. It might be all purest superstition, and without even the most modest basis in fact. But I believe that you have there a very important corpse, a man whose death was well remembered by everyone in the neighborhood. Why was such an important body dumped there; and left to become a scientific curiosity? I don't know. But I do have some further thoughts on who your Skeldergate Man might be. Do you care to go for a bit of a walk?”

Davis agreed heartily. He found himself enjoying this strange, thin man.

The three of them walked across Deangate, and passed before the great doors of the Minster. The wind was icy crossing the Minster green. They entered the Minster Library, and Mr. Foote greeted the men and women there with a wave or a nod, apparently preferring to speak as little as possible.

He whispered to a broad-shouldered, bearded man, and the three of them were let into a long, narrow room. The ancient floorboards were slick with wear, and groaned underfoot.

“There are many secrets here. This is York's equivalent to the secret manuscripts of the Vatican. Our arcana, our scandals, our mysteries are kept here—or, at least, the more ancient ones.”

Mr. Foote climbed a ladder and made a “hmmm” of impatience. He climbed down, and rolled the ladder to a new place. “Ah.” He dragged a large leather tome from a shelf. He gasped and nearly dropped it, and Davis helped.

They found a lectern, and Mr. Foote opened the book very carefully. “This is an eighteenth-century binding of a set of manuscripts collated in the fourteenth century. The texts themselves are very much older. You see the vellum and the gilt on some of the illuminated pages. Oddments, really, not belonging together. Ah, here is the page I want.”

It was a golden brown chart of vellum so coarse it was very much a cured hide. The writing on it was so dim that at first glance the page seemed merely foxed. Looking more closely, Davis made out writing. “Northumbrian script,” said Davis. “A cross between uncial and cursive. And something of a scrawl, too. This isn't very good penmanship.”

“Can you read what it says here?” asked Mr. Foote, challengingly.

Davis read, translating from the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon. “‘In this year Lord Sigan became king, reigned for three months, and was himself killed by his son, Alfwold, who tried to secrete the body to disguise his crime. Alfwold secured the throne after bloody fighting.' (This is an unusual construction—
blood fechten
. I think our scribe might have been German.) ‘King Sigan's body was never discovered, and the Norsemen marched upon us before God's justice could be done.'”

Davis stared at the words before him.

King Sigan's body
.

“An unavenged death,” said Mr. Foote. “An attack from the east by Vikings before the crime could be brought to justice. Alfwold, quite possibly, killed in the subsequent warfare, but the murder itself, an unholy regicide, never resolved.”

“Spirits do not like to be unavenged, Davis,” said Irene. “Or at least, we think they do not.”

The ancient script seemed to fade back into the page as Davis gazed at it. It had always been weak ink, perhaps made of bark. It would have been like writing with weak tea. This script had been scratched onto the page during a time of hardship. There would come a time when this writing would fade completely, and become invisible.

Mr. Foote, as though reading Davis's thoughts, closed the book.

“You have disappointed me, Mr. Foote,” said Irene. “I have told Davis how very grumpy you have always been, and you have been so very friendly.”

“Tell me, do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Lowry?” said Foote, climbing the ladder.

Davis did not answer. He did not believe in ghosts, but it seemed to him that what one believed or did not believe did not matter.

“Nor do I. Do you believe in poltergeists? A phenomenon in which objects seem to have a life of their own. Move about, break, explode.” The volume slipped back into its place on the shelf. Mr. Foote looked down at them. “As though spirits inhabited them.”

“Davis does not believe in spirits,” said Irene. “He is a rational man.”

Mr. Foote leaped lightly from the ladder. “I said ‘as though.' I don't believe in spirits, either. But I do believe that what you have at your dig, among all your microscopes and finds trays, permeating all the artifacts you discover there, is a poltergeist.”

Mr. Foote paused, and brushed his hands together.

“And if it can compel objects,” said Mr. Foote, “it can compel anything. Perhaps even people.”