Three Moments of an Explosion (10 page)

He’d felt as though, if he only kicked a piece of rubbish the right way, he might dislodge something great from beneath him. Remembering made him grow self-conscious. He returned to the shop at last, where Cheevers eventually called him.

“Our boy’s not the most honey-tongued,” he said down the line. “But he did his best and with a little help from myself I think we were convincing enough. It’s obvious that Gilroy’s already been very persuasive, and
I
most certainly want to see what’s down there. I didn’t pretend otherwise.”

His excitement was grating. McCulloch rang off. He tried to remember what flavor of crisps Sophia had bought. In the end he put one of every pack he had in a canvas tote bag printed with the spread-eagled outline of the collaborator protecting two human youths. Below the image were the words
CAN YOU TAKE THE HEAT?? IN ELAM!
He put two flapjacks and some nuts and a drink in with the crisps.

McCulloch drove unusually fast into the falling night, up unkempt roads out of the town. When the weak old Datsun rocked along the runnels toward the dig, by the tents he saw police cars.

At the end of the lane Sophia was shouting, remonstrating furiously with the police, who blocked her passage to the dig and the red tent. McCulloch pulled up quickly and ran out to where five or six officers gathered before her, making calming gestures that were not placating her.

“McCulloch!” she shouted when she saw him. “Will you tell them? I have to go. Gilroy’s escaped.”

“What?” McCulloch said.

He struggled to reach her, shouted at her to repeat what she’d said. A sergeant took him aside.

“Do you know her? Can you calm her down? We can’t let her go. To be honest no one knows what the hell’s going on.”

“What’s happened?” McCulloch said. “What’s she talking about?”

“Look, I don’t know any more than you. Gilroy’s gone. She’s not in the interview room. We just heard. Don’t look at me like that, I don’t know anything else. No one’s supposed to have said anything: for all we know this girl might be aiding and abetting. She has to stay put. Can you calm her down?”

Sophia let McCulloch lead her away. She was quiet—abruptly and coldly calm.

“He’s been asking me if I’ve seen her,” she said. “If I’ve
helped
her. What’s he on about?” She pushed her hair out of her eyes.

She led him onto a spit of rock over which they could watch and be watched by the police.

“Cheevers is pretty hopeful,” McCulloch said. “About letting you do it.”

“It’ll be ready in a bit,” Sophia said. “I told her she should call the resin process Gilroyfication. She laughed but like she didn’t get it. You’ve seen it. The pieces. The light.”

Her face changed and McCulloch looked where she was looking. Led by a police car, two official-looking black cars picked slowly along the track. Two men and two women in suits got out of the front car. From the car behind came three students McCulloch half-recognized, and then Paddick.

He was in overalls—dig clothes. Sophia ran toward him and he glanced at her and away again. He spoke to his government minders and walked quickly toward the dig. The police got in Sophia’s way.

“What the fuck’s he doing here?” she shouted.

McCulloch grabbed one of the civil servants. “What is this?”

“Who are you?” the man said.

“A mate of Gilroy’s. What’s Paddick doing? You need to hold him off, mate. You know Alan Cheevers? He’s Gilroy’s law. He’s talking to Budd. This girl’s going to get permission to dig this up as soon as it’s good to go.”

“Is that so? Well, I’ve just come from Budd’s office and that’s why we’re here. With Gilroy a fugitive there’s a certain urgency, everyone agrees. Including Cheevers.”

“So what you doing? Let her in.”

“Oh it’s coming up, but we’re hardly going to let one of Gilroy’s do it, are we?” the man said. “That’s why Paddick’s here.”

Sophia hollered curses. “Stop him! Fucking intruder! It’s him you should be arresting!”

Deep in the dirt, illuminated by floodlights, Paddick and three of his students dug around a clotted-looking, muddy shape.

“That’s ours! That’s the prof’s! She found it.”

The rough outline of a human body. It was not in the boxer’s pose typical of those who died in heat: it lay fully extended like a diver. Its arms and legs were still hidden in the earth, hands shoved into a piled-up mound where something was yet to be uncovered.

“I’m begging you,” Sophia said. “I know this stuff better than anyone except the prof. Way better than
him
. It’s not
ready
. Don’t you understand? It hasn’t been long enough. You have to wait.”

Paddick cranked the lights up. He dug faster, scooping out ground from around the body quickly enough that his students looked alarmed. He started to brush the shape clean.

“That’s way too hard,” Sophia shouted.

One of the ministry women remonstrated with him but Paddick paid no attention. He picked clots of earth from the body, he wiped it with a cloth, showing the clear resin.

What he was uncovering was a woman.

Paddick rubbed her midriff so hard one of his own students shouted at him. The arc light shone into the uncovered perspex and the whole area around the dig shone. Paddick wrestled with the body, sending scintilla everywhere.

There was too much light. The gemlike flaws, the shards of color in the body-shape glowed. It was thick with them. They were scattered through the figure, with the dead bodies of beetles and mice, little stones, the tips of roots.

Paddick wiped the clear face clean, and gave a scream and stepped back in shock.

“Jesus,” Sophia gasped.

Paddick’s students gazed.

McCulloch’s mouth went dry.

The cast glinted. The moment stretched. The vectors of the find like glass on glass, it was hard to parse the gasping face as a face, let alone a specific one. But still everyone stared at the harsh transparent features between Paddick’s hands. The lined and angled contours, the aquiline jut of a nose.

Light poured from it. The thing shone.

“She’s not
ready,
” Sophia said. Not loud, but McCulloch could hear her.

Paddick gripped the figure. One of the women from the Ministry of Antiquities jumped into the hole and shouted for help, tried to wrestle him away, but he kept yanking hard on what was uncovered.

And the resin was not yet set, and the woman-shape started to bend at the waist as if in pain.

Paddick pressed furiously on the face as if to make sense of it. Those features, so precise, so familiar moments before, began to sink as if at a vacuum within. They distorted into an ugly and incomprehensible mask. Unrecognizable as anyone, and barely as a human.

The figure twisted. Light still shone, the glimmers glowed, but they diminished as the body-shape twisted and contracted like a toy on the fire. Its hands and feet stayed in the earth as if tethered. McCulloch could barely watch.

The glow of colors went out. The thing was not a crystal person any more: it was a horrible nothing full of dead bugs like currants in a bun.

The police went in at last and pulled Paddick away. He was staring, looking as if he had changed his mind. The hole filled with people struggling to rescue the find as it sagged.

McCulloch turned away and came out from under the tarpaulin and did not look back. He stood by his old car and looked up at a night with no moon.

“You fucking
bastard,
” he heard Sophia shout.

He breathed deep and tried to slow his heart and watched the constellations and remembered recognizing Orion’s Belt for the first time, in the sky over a London cemetery, where he, a wistful teenager, had gone to smoke.

For two days after the excavation McCulloch did not answer or make any phone calls.

The police announced an island-wide search. Gilroy was not found. Then or ever.

He spoke to no one. There would be stories of the professor’s disappearance. They would become more and more embellished. McCulloch did not want to hear.

On the second night he went back to the edge of the sea. The quietest and darkest part of the shore he could find. He sat on pebbles with his toes in the waves.

Surely the flow must have pushed the dead into the surf, and cooked them. Set in the cold water while they moldered into ooze. Surely the shallows around the island must be punctuated with hidden hollows, he thought, body-holes full of seawater and ragworms.

McCulloch did not have caller ID, so he picked up his phone at last. It had been three days. It was Cheevers.

“Where’ve you been, man?” Cheevers said. “Have you heard from Will or Sophia?”

“No.”

“I can’t believe we got there after all the confusion. The thing was more or less just a blob by the time Will and I turned up! But you, you saw it. I saw you didn’t have to make a statement, lucky you, I think everyone involved has agreed to draw a line under this particular shitshow. What did it look like?”

“… I can’t. I can’t describe it.”

“They poured some solvent on it which melted it right down to get out whatever was inside. Right now they’re arguing about whether or not Paddick’s fit to stand trial. I don’t think there’s any way he’ll be found not sane.”

“What’ll he get?”

“Destruction of Antiquities … Maybe six months? We know he’s got someone on his side, he won’t go down very long.”

“Yeah, he has. Got people on his side. Just how curious were you to see that thing?”

“Care to expand?” Cheevers said after a moment.

“Ministry bloke said you agreed he should dig the thing out.” McCulloch could hear Cheevers’s breath. “That true?”

“No. All I said was it was urgent it come out.”

“
After
they decided he should do it.”

“That was a
fait accompli
. You should have seen them when they got word Gilroy had disappeared out of her cell—”

McCulloch rang off.

The phone rang every couple of days. If it was Cheevers McCulloch did not know. He did not answer or check his messages, or go to Coney Island or do anything but sit behind his counter half the day and drive in the lowest uplands into the evenings.

Three weeks after the woman was uncovered and ruined, Sophia came into the shop.

She was dressed more formally than he had ever seen. Almost prim. McCulloch felt a wash of care that disarmed him. He controlled his smile, made it cautious. She smiled back.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you,” he said.

“Come to say goodbye,” she said. “I’m going to London tomorrow. Will’s gone already. He went on Friday. Some of the others … Well, Charlotte went a couple of weeks ago.”

“Right,” McCulloch said. “Good luck.” They were both silent, and after a while he grimaced theatrically. “I’m sorry that it’s all been a bit …”

“Yeah. You know they kept the half-bloke and that arm. You should go to the museum. They’re there. I was talking to the curator, and she said they’re going to shine spotlights through them. That could look pretty great if they do. You heard what they decided about the resin in the end—?”

“I heard.”

There was nothing toxic in it. The government had ruled that it could be used again.

“Remember?” she said, and looked at him closely. “I remember what it looked like all the time. Don’t you?”

“Course.” They were silent a while.

“You didn’t see it after,” she said. “I got up close. You were gone.” She shook her head. “People are going to get used to seeing them cast like that. They won’t look like jewels any more.”

“I sort of thought the opposite; that they always would.”

Sophia considered. “That would be nice.” She hesitated. “Thanks. It was nice of you to help. After the first time we came in, anyway.” She even grinned. “If you count extortion as less than nice, then you weren’t that nice that first time.”

“Who is?” he said. “Sorry about Gilroy. I know you liked her. Both of you, I mean.”

Sophia met his eyes and her own eyes narrowed. She looked quizzical, almost amused.

“Really?” Sophia said. “Oh, I think she did OK.

“And ‘liked’ her?” She shrugged. “Will was in a bit of a state afterwards, I suppose that’s true. Me?” She shrugged again. “I respected her. Learned a lot. I don’t know what you’d say I felt about her.”

She bought a key ring, like Will had done. A plastic figure of a dead alien cast in plaster. McCulloch tried to give it to her but she said no and gave him money. Sophia had the door open when he called her back.

“Hey,” he said. “What was the other thing you found? Next to—the woman?” She said nothing, and showed nothing on her face. “Come on, I was right there. That cast Paddick messed up was pointing towards a big mound of mud. Something you hadn’t uncovered yet. Did you?”

“Yes. We hadn’t filled that hole yet.”

“Were they not connected?”

“Good question. That’s not a hundred percent clear. When we did fill it we weren’t allowed to use the resin, obviously, so we did it with plaster. Old school. We dug it out and, yeah, it was right up by where she’d been. The woman you saw. You remember her hands?” She held hers out as if straining to reach something. “In the earth? It was like she wanted to touch what we found. If it was anything.”

“If?”

“Yeah. You can’t always tell. That happens sometimes. The ground moves about, hollows appear just naturally. There are a million weird holes everywhere. You pour stuff in, you never know what shape it’s going to make. What’s going to come up. What we got was big and sprawly and opened out, like with chambers, and a bunch of what might’ve been wings and arms and legs, or might’ve been rat tunnels, or might’ve been nothing. Might’ve been just holes.”

“Did you keep it?” McCulloch said at last.

“Someone did, maybe.”

Fiorelli and his workers must have erred on the side of caution. After their first uncovering, they must have filled all manner of random chasms, made cast after cast of the shapes left between slabs of straining earth. They were doubtless all destroyed, those statues of impossibilities, spindly crevice-spiders, Giacometti burrow-people in plaster.

“Whatever it was, if it was anything, it looked like she was holding on to it, or trying to,” Sophia said. “Holding its hand.”