by Amy Cross
"Come on," Kate said. "I know a bar just a few streets away. They don't play the music too loud, so we should be able to hear each other."
Glancing at Wade, and seeing the amused look on his face, Marlowe hurried over to the hatstand and grabbed his coat.
"Seeya in the morning," Wade muttered as he pulled some equipment out from one of the crates. It looked as if he was more than capable of getting on with things.
"Don't forget to add some extra iodine to the rinsing solution," Marlowe reminded him as Kate stepped through the door, "and don't forget to record glucose levels every three hours, there's a -"
"I won't forget," Wade replied. "Go on. I'll be fine, honestly. I'm looking forward to getting some proper work done."
Marlowe opened his mouth to remind Wade about a few other things, but finally he realized that he was fussing too much. Turning, he saw that Kate was holding the door open, waiting for him. With a cautious, slightly nervous and embarrassed smile, Marlowe followed and they headed toward the elevators.
Chapter Six
"Hydrogen diglyceride," Marlowe said, staring down at his glass of wine for a moment. "Could that have somehow got into the groundwater and then seeped into the coffin? If it had pooled in sufficient quantities, it might have absorbed any moisture within the coffin itself."
"Maybe," Kate replied. "Do you have a water table report for the region where the bodies were found?"
Marlowe shook his head.
"It's definitely possible," Kate continued, "but unless you've got a full analysis of the soil, it's just guesswork. If you've got contacts out there, you need to get a sample here as soon as possible. I'd be happy to help take a look, if you like. I mean, I don't want to impose on your work, but I think it could be useful for my own research."
Marlowe stared at her for a moment. The last thing he wanted was to have someone else hovering around while he was working. Then again, Kate might be different. He felt that they were on the same wavelength, and that they might actually work rather well together.
"Or not," she said, seeing the shocked look on his face. "It's fine -"
"No, I'd be happy to have you help out," Marlowe stammered.
Kate smiled.
There was an awkward silence. Sitting in the corner of a quiet little basement bar, Marlowe and Kate were sharing a bottle of wine, although neither of them had actually touched a drop since their brief, slightly forced toast after the bottle was opened. Instead, they'd been engaged in rapt conversation, discussing the details of Marlowe's corpses.
It had already occurred to Marlowe that this wasn't how dates normally went. Most dates involved stilted conversations about simple topics, whereas they'd been talking almost exclusively about water tables and methods of scanning the interiors of dead bodies without disturbing the skin. Then again, Marlowe couldn't be certain that this was a date, and he didn't even know if he wanted it to be a date. He'd never been very good at understanding women, and Kate seemed particularly inscrutable. Despite his skepticism, however, he couldn't deny that they'd been bumping into one another with increasing frequency over the past few days, and there was a chance that she was interested in more than just a set of old bones.
"You know something that's just occurred to me?" Kate said eventually. "Fungus. There are types of fungus that form very plain, very smooth joins with one another. Don't be insulted by this suggestion, but the skin you think you've found on this 2B specimen... Could it actually be a fungal growth that just looks like skin? Have you actually tested it yet? Sometimes it's the simplest explanations that we ended up overlooking, and you wouldn't be the first person to get fooled like that."
"It's not fungus," Marlowe replied. "I've already removed a sample. Besides, there's also hair, as well as the fact that some of the skin around the neck wound seemed to have started to heal. How can a body even begin to heal a severed head? It's..." He paused, lost in thought. "There's an explanation somewhere. There's an explanation for everything, but right now..."
"This is when a lesser man would start thinking the unthinkable," Kate said.
"Such as?"
She shrugged. "Vampires. Werewolves. Monsters in the night."
"Too easy," Marlowe said. "I'd rather keep digging and find the real answer. All the other bodies are explicable. I can show you what happened to them, how it occurred, and what happened next. 2B, though, is infuriating. It doesn't make any sense. In fact, it flies in the face of reason completely. But that doesn't mean there's something supernatural going on. It just means I haven't seen the problem from the right angle yet."
"Have you thought about doing the most obvious thing?"
Marlowe stared at her.
"Remove the head," she continued with a faint smile. "See what the joins are really like from the inside. I know you can take images and create 3D models, but maybe you should just pull the damn thing off and take a look? Really poke around in there. Get your hands dirty."
"We can't," Marlowe replied. "The Bulgarian government only let us have the bodies if we promised to keep them intact. We're barely even allowed to breathe around them."
"They won't know," she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial hush. "If you do things by the book, you might miss something. You'll end up sending the bodies back at the end of the month, and you won't have got to the bottom of the whole thing. Can you really do that? After all this work, are you really prepared to send the bodies home when you know there are other things you could try?"
"I can't willingly break the terms of the agreement," Marlowe said. "Besides, I wouldn't learn much by doing something so drastic." He paused for a moment, wondering whether he should mention the other thing that had been bothering him. "There's something else," he said eventually. "This might sound crazy, but you have to remember that I'm certain there's a rational explanation for everything. Still..." His voice trailed off for a moment. "No, forget it. It's ridiculous."
"You can't leave me hanging," Kate replied. "What's wrong?"
"It's just... I swear, when specimen 2B arrived, its jaw was closed. And then yesterday, I noticed it was open slightly, just a millimeter or two. And today, it seemed to have opened a little more."
"Like it's opening its mouth."
Marlowe smiled awkwardly. "How about that for something out of the ordinary, huh? Obviously there's an explanation. Chemical reactions in the ligaments, maybe, or..." Again, his voice trailed off. "You see how easy it is to let this kind of thing get to you?" he said eventually. "The mind fills in the gap between all sorts of basic observations."
"Either that," Kate replied with a mischievous grin, "or your specimen 2B is waking up."
Marlowe nodded wearily. Checking his watch, he saw that it was close to midnight. They'd been sat here for an hour and a half, and all they'd done was take a circular route back to the basic facts. So much for any hope of a big breakthrough. On a professional level, the evening had been something of a washout, although he was still enjoying this time alone with Kate. He always considered himself to be a bit of a loner, but now he was starting to realize that he just needed the right type of people around him.
"So tell me about yourself," Kate said suddenly.
"About me?" Marlowe asked, shocked by the question.
Staring at him, Kate bit her lower lip.
"Well," Marlowe replied, "I... You know what I do, right? You know about my background and my -"
"What about away from work?" she continued. "I mean, you do have time away from the museum, don't you? Please, don't tell me you live in the basement."
Marlowe paused, feeling as if his mind had suddenly been wiped. "Well," he stammered, "I mean, I, well..."
"I'll tell you what I do," Kate replied, clearly hoping to guide him through the conversational minefield. "I like going to the cinema. Sometimes with friends, but also by myself. I know it's supposed to be weird to go alone, but fuck it, I don't care. It's almost obsessive. I have to go several times a week, even if the only films that are sho
wing are total crap. I mean, I never go and see anything twice, but..." She laughed nervously, before taking another, bigger sip from her glass of wine. "Do I sound like a total sad-sack?" she asked eventually.
"Not at all," Marlowe said. "If you want to see a film, why should you wait until -"
"But it's not even like I want to see the individual films," she replied. "I just want to go out. I want to go to the cinema. I want to smell the popcorn." She paused, as a set of sirens roared past the door to the bar, obviously heading to some far-off emergency. "Of course, I suppose it'd be fun to have someone there with me, and the ushers wouldn't give me such withering stares of condescension."
"Don't you have any friends?" Marlowe asked, before realizing that he could have phrased that better. "What I mean is -"
"Not really," she said suddenly. "There. I admitted it. I've never been very good at shallow connections. I look for real, strong friendships. I'd rather have two or three really close friends, instead of -" She stopped speaking for a moment as another siren blasted past. "Sounds like there's a party somewhere," she said nervously. "I'm sorry, this is veering toward some kind of confessional thing, and that's really not what I wanted." She paused, keeping her eyes fixed on him. "I don't know why I mentioned anything," she said eventually. "I just thought, if you wanted to go with me some time..."
"To the cinema?" Marlowe asked, shocked at such a suggestion.
"It was just..." She smiled nervously. "I mean, it was -"
Suddenly there was a muffled buzzing sound, and Kate reached into her bag for her cellphone. "Sorry," she said, "I've got to take this. It's my research assistant." She raised the phone to her ear. "Hey, Deborah, what's - " There was a pause, and after a moment the color seemed to drain from her face. "What?" she asked, almost knocking her wine glass over as she got up from her chair. "Say that again."
"What's wrong?" Marlowe mouthed.
"I'll be right there," Kate said, before ending the call. She stood in stunned silence for a moment, before turning to Marlowe as another siren blared in the distance. "There's a fire at the museum. The whole place is going up in flames."
Chapter Seven
By the time they reached the museum, it was too late to do anything but stand and watch as flames engulfed the building.
Fire crews were already on the scene, but they were being beaten back by the heat as flames billowed from the doors and windows of the grand old building. High above in the night sky, a helicopter approached the scene and, moments later, dropped its payload of fire-retardant chemicals onto the top of the conflagration; nothing seemed to work, however, and the museum continued to burn with startling intensity. Even though the building housed its fair share of chemicals and flammable materials, this seemed like something different, something more intense: a white hot heat that showed no signs of abating any time soon. It was as if the mouth of Hell had opened up deep inside.
"Was anyone inside?" Kate asked a passing fireman, who simply shrugged. "Was anyone in there?" she asked another, who ignored her completely.
Marlowe, meanwhile, was trying Wade's cellphone, which went straight to voice-mail every time. His eyes fixed on the flames, he couldn't help but think of those fifteen invaluable corpses being destroyed, and he wanted to know whether Wade had managed to rescue any of their specimens before the flames took hold. After all, those bodies could never be replaced.
"Come on, Wade," he muttered, before realizing that the Bulgarian bodies weren't the only things that might have been lost in the flames. After all, there was no sign of Wade either.
"This is insane," Kate said, standing next to him. "I can't even begin to calculate the losses. Didn't we have fire safety measures? There were sprinklers and alarms all through the building. How the hell did this get so big? It's like someone just doused the whole place in petrol and lit a match."
Marlowe had no answer. Turning to look across the crowd that was gathering to gawp at the scene, he spotted an ambulance, and after a moment he saw a familiar figure being given treatment.
"Jerry!" he shouted, running over and finding the security guard wrapped in a blanket, taking regular breaths from an oxygen machine. "What happened in there?"
Jerry shook his head. He looked old and tired, and it was clear he'd been badly shaken by the whole experience. His uniform was scuffed, and one of his hands had been wrapped in a gel pack, the contents of which were supposed to be cooling a series of burns.
"Come on!" Marlowe continued, shaking Jerry's shoulder. "Talk to me! What happened?"
"He's in shock," said a paramedic, gently easing Marlowe back.
"I don't give a fuck," Marlowe shouted, "I need to know what happened in there!"
"I'm not letting you talk to him," the paramedic said firmly.
"It's okay," Jerry said, his voice barely audible above the chaos. "Let him."
"Let me talk to him," Kate said, pushing past and crouching next to Jerry. "Was anyone in there?" she asked, her tone sounding a lot calmer and more caring than Marlowe's. "Do you know if everyone got out? Did you see anyone left in the building as you were leaving?"
"There wasn't supposed to be anyone in there at all," he replied, his voice filled with shock. "It was supposed to be empty."
"It wasn't empty," Marlowe snapped at him. "There were priceless artifacts in there!"
"There were people, too," Jerry continued. "I let Dr. Marlowe's assistant stay late. I know I shouldn't have done it. It was stupid, but I never thought... It's my fault he was in there."
"Did he get out?" Kate asked.
"No-one's seen him," Jerry replied. "No-one's seen anyone, except -"
Before Kate could ask another question, there was a loud crashing sound as a section of the building collapsed, sending a plume of dust and smoke into the air. The force of the tumbling masonry was strong enough to make the ground tremble.
"What caused this?" Marlowe asked.
"Something in your lab," Jerry said, looking over at him.
"My lab?" Marlowe paused for a moment. "There was nothing in my lab that could possibly have started this. We had safety precautions and set procedures, we had a full series of fire safety protocols. We didn't even have anything particularly flammable, we..." His voice trailed off as he thought once again of those precious bodies being consumed by the flames, taking their secrets with them. There was still a chance that the bones might survive, but the flesh would be lost forever.
"I heard a noise from up there," Jerry continued. "I was down in the main hall and I heard... I don't know, it sounded like a struggle, and there were things being smashed. It sounded like bedlam. I grabbed my radio and started going to take a look, but before I'd got to the stairs I heard a kind of whooshing sound, like something igniting. I swear to God, as soon as I saw the flames, I called for help, but the whole place just went up in a couple of minutes. The sprinklers had no chance."
Marlowe turned to Kate. "Someone did this deliberately."
"Why would anyone want to burn down a museum?" Kate replied sceptically.
"God knows, but it's the only thing that makes sense. Maybe they wanted to cover something up. Maybe they stole something and they didn't want anyone to know. There are collectors out there who'd pay enough to make a stunt like this happen. I don't know who's being it all, but this has to have been deliberate."
"It's my fault," Jerry continued. "I knew I wasn't supposed to let people work late, but I just wanted to be helpful. I figured it didn't matter. I never thought there'd be a problem. He seemed like such a nice guy. I mean, I let you work late so many times, Dr. Marlowe, and there were never any problems."
"When you said you heard a noise," Marlowe said, "what exactly do you mean? Did it sound as if someone was fighting?"
Jerry nodded.
"There was a man earlier," Marlowe continued, turning to Kate. "He was angry about the work we were doing. I mean, it never occurred to me that he might be dangerous, but what if he came back late at night and tried to stop our work b
y burning the place down?"
"That's a pretty big leap," Kate pointed out.
"It explains everything," Marlowe said, looking over at the burning building. "He probably brought petrol, which explains why the fire took hold so quickly. He was probably waiting outside, and then he probably saw us leave and thought there'd be no-one in the lab."
"We have motion sensors on the doors and windows at night," Jerry replied. "I'd have known if someone got inside."
"Clearly you weren't paying attention," Marlowe snapped back at him.
"There's something else," Jerry said, before taking another deep breath from his oxygen mask. "You're gonna think I've lost my mind, but..." He glanced over his shoulder, as if he was checking to make sure that no-one could hear them. "Maybe I have lost my mind, but I swear, just after I called for help, I came out here to wait and..." He paused again. "The flames were really strong, you know? Like, nothing could even get close to the place. I went around to the side, to see if there was anything I could do. And that's when I saw the figure."
"A figure?" Marlowe replied. "A man? Running away? Burning?"
"Not running," Jerry continued. "Walking. Not burning, either. All I saw was his silhouette, and he was limping a little. He didn't look quite right, like his body was kinda twisted and stuff, and he was moving awkwardly. He was right in the middle of the flames, and he was just making his way slowly through them, like he didn't give a damn. He stopped for a moment, and I think he looked at me, and then he just walked away. The flames were so bright, I lost sight of him eventually, but I swear to God, he was real."
"Someone might be hurt -" Kate started to say.
"I told the police," Jerry continued. "They looked, but there was no sign of anyone. I could see it in their eyes. They thought I was some kind of idiot, but I swear he was real."
"Who was real?" Marlowe asked, trying to untie the knot of Jerry's ramblings. Glancing over at Kate, he saw that she was busy talking to a police officer. "You can't have seen anyone come out of there," Marlowe continued, turning back to Jerry. "Look at the place. It's an inferno. What you're describing is literally impossible. You don't seriously expect any of us to believe such a ridiculous claim, do you?"
