The mountain felt heavy above him, as if it wanted nothing more than to close the cave down like a monstrous mouth, and swallow them whole. He couldn’t shake off that bit of claustrophobia because it was all too rational. Not that Ararat might be some sentient rock monster, but there had been a small earthquake and a landslide here just a couple of months ago. Another one could trap them here, kill them all.
Softly, he laughed at himself. So cheerful.
He stuffed his hand into his pocket and plucked out a small white plastic prescription bottle. His throat felt dry and his head muzzy. A spot on his left temple throbbed with the weird neuropathy that had troubled him for years. The pain in his spine and across his abdomen reminded him that he desperately needed to make time to stretch. He wetted his lips with his tongue and opened the pill bottle, tapped out a couple of dusty gray tablets, and recapped it.
As he tossed the pills back and dry-swallowed them, he caught motion in his peripheral vision. Kim froze when he turned toward her. Had she just started to emerge from her own stall and seen him, or had she been watching for a while and decided to withdraw when she saw him take his meds?
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked.
“I’d been wanting to ask you the same question.”
Walker felt the mountain close in even tighter. A flush went through him, an almost feverish moment of warmth that forced the chill of the cave to abate. Kim still looked tired and pale, but her eyes were focused and alert, nothing like the woman who had briefly shattered yesterday. How could she seem so confident now when she might run off, screaming and spouting gibberish at any moment?
“That really the question you want to ask?” he replied.
Her lips thinned into a dark smile. “I’m not feeling my best, Walker. My diplomacy is malfunctioning at the moment. You accepted the presence of a UN observer because you had no choice. I accepted the assignment because someone had to do it and it seemed like an opportunity to impress my superiors. Something happened to me yesterday that I don’t understand and it’s broken down my ability to be polite.”
“You were polite before yesterday?”
Kim’s expression flickered with anger, but then the mask broke and she gave a tired laugh. “All right. Perhaps I confuse courtesy and politeness.”
Walker did not laugh. He clutched the prescription bottle in his hand, then tossed it to her. She caught it with one hand. “Go on, Kim. Do your job. Ask the question you wanted to ask.”
She studied the label. “Zohydro?”
“Painkiller. Banned in parts of the United States, but not where I got them. Incredibly powerful. Incredibly addictive. Makes Oxycontin look like breath mints in comparison.”
Kim shook the bottle, listened to the rattle of the thirty or so pills remaining. “Incredibly addictive. So are you addicted?”
Walker held out a hand for the bottle. “Oh, absolutely. So I’ll need those back.”
Blinking in surprise at his frankness, she gave him the pills. Then it was her turn to surprise him.
“Do you take them for pain stemming from the injuries you sustained in Guatemala, or do you take them to stop thinking about your wife?”
Even the wind went silent. Walker drew in a deep breath and smelled the age of the timbers. The suffocation he’d felt earlier wrapped more tightly around him.
He’d met Amanda Nemeth at a National Science Foundation conference, where she’d been presenting a paper on unknown species discovered in cave ecosystems. He’d approached her after the lecture, discovered she was a professor at Columbia, and surprised himself by asking her out for coffee. Such an ordinary thing, so casual, but not typical behavior for Walker. Since college, he’d been strictly the set-up-by-well-meaning-matchmaking-friends type. But Amanda had both a dry wit and a passion for her work. He’d thought they truly understood each other, but three years after they were married, she’d forced him to sit and listen and focus on her words, and she’d told him that she had been serious all of the times she had said she couldn’t have a husband who refused to make their relationship a priority. Who couldn’t even tell her the truth about what he did for work, where his journeys took him, what kind of danger he was putting himself in.
Where he’d gotten his scars. The injuries that had almost killed him.
She didn’t want her son growing up in the shadows cast by his father’s secrets and his mother’s fears.
In the midst of this, his phone had rung and he’d been instructed to head to northern Canada, where retreating Arctic ice had revealed a system of subterranean catacombs full of artifacts and human remains that did not belong there. They had danced around it for weeks, known things between them were coming unraveled, but the moment she realized that he intended to go and couldn’t tell her where he was headed, Amanda had taken his hand, brought him into their living room, and sat him down.
“If you go,” she’d said, leaning toward him for emphasis, studying his eyes, “I will know I’ve chosen the wrong partner.”
He had come home from the Arctic to find her gone. She had left a note that was uncharacteristically succinct for a college professor: For Charlie’s sake, I wish someone else had been his father.
Now she had George, her artist boyfriend. Walker would stay in his son’s life, but if George could be the right kind of father—be there for Charlie—he wouldn’t deny his son that bit of happiness.
The mountain began to breathe around them again. The wind slid inside the stall and made the tents shudder and flap. Walker stared at the pill bottle, then clutched it in his hand and looked at Kim again. The chill cut into his flesh as if his thick layers of clothing meant nothing.
“If you’d seen the things that came after us in Guatemala, you’d want as many drugs as your body could handle,” he said quietly. He shook the pill bottle again and then stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “I’ve got a couple of fused vertebrae in my back. The scars on my abdomen where they tore me open still pull and tug when I move, and there’s pain inside where the surgeons knitted things back together. And when it’s cold like this, the pins in my right leg feel like they’re stabbing me. I’m in a hell of a lot of pain on a good day. Up here, right now … well, we both know it’s not a good day.”
Kim had paled even further. He saw the judgment and aloofness melt from her gaze. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how—”
“Really, though,” he interrupted. “It hurts like hell, even with the drugs, but probably half of the addiction is about my ex-wife. Some days that’s worse because my spine and my other injuries … monsters did that. How badly I messed up my marriage, that pain is self-inflicted.”
This time when she smiled, he smiled in return. They weren’t happy people, but they understood each other now. Or at least they’d begun to.
“What about you?” Walker asked. “You doing all right? Any signs of you going mental again?”
Now she laughed. “The anxiety’s still there,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “And I had some terrible nightmares about the cadaver—”
“The horns are pretty unsettling.”
“—but I’m all right.”
He heard the hesitation in her voice and felt himself soften. They were all haunted in this cave, both by whatever ghosts they’d brought with them and by the fear they’d found when they arrived. The talk of nightmares also disturbed him, for he’d been having some fairly dreadful dreams of his own.
“Our horned friend is dead,” he said. “I’m standing firm on it being human. There was a time someone born with physical defects would have been considered tainted or unclean, an abomination.”
Kim shuddered and hugged herself against the cold. “Do you really believe that’s what we’ve found? Some human abomination?”
“It’s what I want to believe,” Walker said, and suddenly the space vanished between them, leaving a quiet intimacy that made him hold his breath a moment.
“But?” she asked.
“The way people have
been behaving—both of us included—is abnormal, even in a heightened situation like this one. We’re all supposed to be professionals. Even the students had to have at least a bit of experience to be chosen for this. And the workers are Kurds who’ve lived on this mountain their whole lives.”
“Don’t underestimate the religious factor,” Kim said, glancing over her shoulder as if afraid to be overheard. “If everyone’s on edge, is that so surprising?”
Walker studied her face, the curve of her cheek, the glint in her eyes, and realized that they had become allies. They were in this together.
“It feels like more than that,” he said. “Sometimes you run across a person you just know doesn’t wish you well. You can feel it. And sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or get some water, and it’s dark in the house and you get that feeling, the sense of a quiet presence there with you. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve had that feeling, alone in the middle of the night, of something filling up the darkness in a room like air inflating a balloon. You ask me about this tomorrow, where people can hear me, and I’ll deny it, but I’ve been feeling that since the second we got here. Both things. The weird closeness in the air that maybe is just claustrophobia talking but maybe isn’t, along with that other thing, that—”
“Malice,” Kim said.
Walker nodded slowly, staring at her, appreciating the surprising knowledge that he was not alone here.
“Yes, exactly. Malice.”
* * *
Adam rubbed grit from his eyes and realized he had watched the same two minutes of footage five times. He’d hit PLAY, let the argument at dinner start to run, and then his mind would drift. Swearing quietly, frustrated with himself, he hit PAUSE and stared at the frozen image on his laptop. Meryam, angry and snapping at Hakan. Adam knew her better than anyone, but to him, the woman in that frozen image didn’t look like Meryam at all. She had a gift for sarcasm and her temper could flare from time to time, but this wasn’t her. More than that—she looked unwell. Her features were drawn and there were hollows under her eyes. Her pallor, normally a soft coffee, seemed almost jaundiced.
Enough, he thought, shutting the laptop. He left the tent, immediately wishing he’d put on his gloves and hat. Instead of turning back, he flipped up his collar and zipped his coat, rubbing his hands together as he moved through the walls and tents and plastic sheeting that made up the camp on level two. A lot of the sleeping quarters were here, but the crew had developed the habit of not hanging around unless they were sleeping, so he knew Meryam had to be elsewhere. More often than not, she could be found in a stall on level one, not far from where Helen’s team had done their very first work on the project. There had been latticed remnants of what Helen believed were birdcages in the stall, but nothing else. Those remnants had been packed away with other artifacts and already removed from the site and Meryam had turned the stall into a sort of home base. Her office. As project manager, she’d claimed the space for herself. Meryam had embraced the KHAP with such ferocity that it left him feeling like an observer … an outsider on his own project. In the process, she had been running herself ragged, and every time he had tried to talk to her about it, she would change the subject.
With every passing day he felt more and more frozen out, until he had begun to feel like it wasn’t his project at all anymore. Officially it was the Karga-Holzer Ark Project, but when people said KHAP out loud, the H was silent. As if Holzer contributed nothing at all.
The cold cut through him as he climbed down the ladder. Just touching the frozen wood seared his skin.
When he reached the bottom, he blew into his hands and rubbed them together. Her tenure as project manager had been taking a bad turn. Someone had to tell her, and it would have to be him, but he knew Meryam. She would never accept that she had been screwing up. They both knew that she loved the work more than she would ever love him, and she would assume that his criticism was rooted in resentment.
The blissful days immediately after their engagement seemed so distant now, and a joyful wedding day seemed almost impossible.
Adam took one more step and came to a halt as that thought took hold. Almost impossible. Was that what he really thought?
A hundred feet to his left, the mouth of the cave opened into the darkness. Snow had drifted in, several inches deep. Voices came to him on the wind and he turned to see several figures out at the edge of the cave, too near the drop-off for his tastes. They were smoking, bright orange cigarette tips glinting in the dark, but given the snow he was not going to rat them out to Meryam. No fire was going to start in the middle of this. Beyond them, he could see only the dark, as if those three burning cigarette tips were the last signs of life in the world, and nothing remained of humanity beyond them. Up here, in the storm, they might as well have been on another planet.
Freezing, his fingers numb, he hunched over and hurried toward the passage that led along the left side wall of the ark. Already he could see a warm golden light back there, and he knew he’d chosen correctly, that Meryam was in her “office” after all. He dropped his head again, staring at the footsteps in the snow as he tried to protect himself from the cold. When he lifted his gaze, he could see the open face of the stall twenty feet ahead.
Adam came to a stop. Standing in the darkness, his footfalls silenced by the wind, he stared at the two people bathed in that warm light inside the office stall. Meryam and Feyiz. Nothing unusual in their being together. They stood a few feet apart, perhaps a bit close—a bit intimate—but it wasn’t as if they were in some kind of lover’s embrace. They were colleagues. Friends. Meryam trusted Feyiz, and Adam had never been jealous of that because he felt the same way.
Yet though he could hear only the urgent tones of their voices and not the words being spoken, he saw the open, plaintive look on Feyiz’s face and Meryam’s broken, vulnerable expression—a piece of herself, a revelation of the real Meryam after weeks behind a hard mask—and he could not help but wonder. Breathless, face chafed by the wind, he watched them and asked himself if Feyiz might be the reason for the distance that had been growing between them.
Fists clenched, he turned and moved silently back through the passage, reversing his steps in the snow. He worked his way to the front of the cave and started for the ladder, barely noticing the figure that appeared beside him, as if from nowhere. A silhouette, one layer of darkness against another.
It loomed toward him and he jerked away, heart thumping.
“Jesus,” he hissed. “Don’t do that!”
In the soft glow of the work light that shone down from the top of the ladder, he saw Calliope smile.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to spook you.”
“Sneak up on a guy in the dark, that’s gonna happen.”
Calliope put a hand on the ladder. “Especially here. What are you doing awake, anyway? Everything all right?”
Adam thought about lying. She stood close and he could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes and knew she’d been one of the three people out there on the ledge, breaking the rules. Right then he liked her all the more for that. Some rules needed to be broken.
“Nothing’s even close to all right,” he said. “It’s all going to shit, isn’t it?”
Her face creased with compassion and then just the flicker of a new smile. The face of a friend. She reached out and took his hand. His fingers were so numb he barely felt her touch.
“It doesn’t have to,” she said.
Adam almost believed her.
* * *
Helen woke with a start, inhaling sharply, as if in the midst of sleep she had forgotten to breathe. Her eyes went wide for a moment and then fluttered closed again. She blinked, drifting in that twilight space between dream and wakefulness, content to be cradled in the thickly lined warmth of her sleeping bag. Her breathing slowed and she felt her muscles easing, body melting. The whistle of the wind created a comforting white noise. Her head lolled to one side.
She surf
aced again. Her brows knitted and she lay listening for whatever had disturbed her. Well over a dozen people slept in the makeshift camp around her. Some were inside tents, while others buried themselves in all-weather sleeping bags. A few small stoves gave off warmth, but not enough to make a real difference with people spread out in stalls and a large room whose purpose they still hadn’t determined. Just some kind of cargo hold, Helen felt sure, but wouldn’t state without reservation. Not yet.
With a long sigh, she nestled deeper into her sleeping bag and just listened. In the middle of the night she had sometimes heard people making love, or engaged in quiet conversation, taking comfort from whatever they had to offer one another. She never begrudged them that comfort, although she herself would have found any kind of sexual or romantic entanglement far too much of a distraction. Though the paleopathologist, Dev Patil, did make that part of her sit up and take notice, prick her ears, and purr.
A smile touched her lips as salacious thoughts filled her head. That familiar pressure—her sister, Kristen, always called it “the original itch”—made her squirm a bit and she grew dismayed. No point in letting herself get hot and bothered when her only options would be breaking her personal rules about fraternization on the job or finding some dark corner to get herself off and hope nobody came along to spoil it.
Her heart skipped a bit quicker than normal. Lying there, she listened to people breathing and wondered if any of them were awake. Would they hear her if she just went for it, right here? Wrong question, Helen, she thought. Question is, how quiet can you be? The answer, she thought, was not quiet enough.
Sighing, amused, she turned onto her side, relished the original itch a moment, and then tried to drift off again. Helen had spent much of her adult life at one archaeological dig or another, some of them in remote environments where this kind of communal living was unavoidable. For the most part, she didn’t mind it, even took a kind of comfort from it.
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