Henri’s scoff echoed off the walls, the drawings, the bones. “It’ll be dark before we get back as it is. It’ll be dark before we leave if we wait much longer. I can hike that trail in the dark, but you’re going to get hurt if you try.” He mumbled to himself in German as he changed the camera’s memory card. It sounded like a prayer. His hair was the brightest thing in the cave – the sort of blond Californians paid good money for. Perhaps he’d be her beacon in the dark. She imagined she’d disappear in the dark entirely, invisible against the sky, though Henri had earlier said that her height made her impossible to lose. She felt the telltale ache in her shoulders as she’d unconsciously slouched ever since.

  He was right, though, about all of it. She could picture the red-faced spluttering of the department head when he learned she had touched an unknown burial site. It would be several shades darker than when he learned she’d be studying there to begin with. The program hadn’t accepted any foreign students since the dawn of digital record keeping. They weren’t keen to break the record. And, of course, they hadn’t known what she would find in the cave. Henri, in particular, was upset to lose what would have been his project – what now would be, at best, a third-author credit, behind her, if she stayed – and her behind the soon-to-be-furious Dr Knochdieb.

  But he’d be mad tomorrow. Tonight was her chance to learn what she could and put together a proposal to convince them to give her the project – this project, instead of the bears – or at least allow her to stay involved. An underling, even. She’d bring them coffee, up the mountain, if she could work on-site. Anything to stay with the bones.

  Now gloved, she did risk a touch. Just a fingertip, above the teeth, where the lips would have been stretched back around the bulbous jar.

  She draped sheets of gauze over the skull as carefully as if wrapping a newborn. Its face – its gaping jaw and strange jar – vanished behind the layers of soft white. She set the bundle in a ring of foam inside the crate and layered more around it. She scoured the alcove for any small pieces or artifacts she may have missed. Nothing. Not even a bead. All they have is their jars.

  The camera flash had returned, throwing her shadow in front of her, up the cave wall and across the skeletal drawings, as if she were another soot monster swallowing the stick-like figures whole.

  But Henri wasn’t documenting the remains anymore. He was documenting her. Just as he’d probably been told to do from the beginning. More of a spy than a guide and assistant. But he didn’t have the authority to stop her. And even if he went straight to Dr Knochdieb, she’d have a few hours to study her sample and make her case. There was little hope either way. But at least she could learn something about the bones.

  ***

  Ashley’s body ached as they reached the foot of the mountain. Every knuckle was skinned and bleeding, the tendons in her wrists and ankles throbbing from every twist and fall. But the specimen was safe, its crate wrapped in her blanket in the padded compartment of her pack. She’d been careful to pitch her weight forward when she fell. Her palms, elbow, even her face took the brunt of her falls. After the first few, Henri had stopped helping her up, leaving her to the natural consequences of her decision to keep them in the mountains past dark. The mountain dark of the Alps was as black as the inside of its caves, and her dimming lantern hadn’t shown every peril on the path. She’d embarrassed herself. But she tried to focus on her project – the specimen in her pack – her future.

  She nearly wept at the sight of the single lamp post that illuminated the door to their isolated research center. It was tucked in a folded valley between steep hills, along the path of an old glacier flow. The scars of its ancient passage could still be seen from the hills above. At least, in the light they could.

  She wanted the close space of her drafty clapboard dorm. The antique, Alpine barn conversion had been anything but welcoming, but she’d make a home of anywhere with Tylenol and a hot bath. And a private lab.

  Henri flashed his keycard at the sensor and held the door for her as she limped across the threshold. “Do you need first aid? There is ice in the kitchen.”

  “No, thanks.” His offer seemed sincere, though she thought he might be mocking her. His accent made it difficult to discern. “I’m going to drop this off at the lab,” she said, holding her pack in front of her like a baby. “We’ll need to meet with Dr Knochdieb in the morning.”

  “I think he’ll come in early for this. I’m going to call him now.”

  “There’s no need to wake him. The bodies have been there for thousands of years, they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “They aren’t. I suggest you start packing, Miss Alesso. I’m sorry.”

  Ashley watched him strut down the hall toward the dorms. His machismo didn’t hide his own limp as well as he doubtless hoped it would. She felt a mixture of shame and wicked glee. She’d forced him to risk his neck on that trail. Her hopes of winning the friendship of her young assistant were in ashes, but at least she could count on him habitually underestimating her.

  The halls were dark, empty. The few other researchers and students who shared the facility had long since gone to bed. The lab was hers for as long as it took the director to climb down from his fancy chalet.

  ***

  The browned bones of the face appeared through the gauze as if surfacing through a sheet of melting snow. She leaned over it as she worked, the muscles in her back and neck knotted and angry. The soft brush feathered over the skull, sweeping away the dirt and fine white threads into the nest of packing gauze.

  She studied the protrusions that lined the brow. Under the bright lights of the lab, she saw that they were a part of the bone itself – not cave deposits or applied funerary decorations, but some sort of cancer or deformity. Her heart pinched for the people of the cave. The spurs must have hurt.

  She ran a gloved fingertip around the perimeter of an eye socket. They were like toothy hills crowned with needles that snagged at the latex of her glove as she pulled back.

  Her fingertip trailed to the jaw and the jar wedged inside the mouth. She could see, then, that it was stone – carved from a solid piece. The walls eggshell-thin. Ashley brushed away all traces of debris and slid her fingers past the long teeth, deep into the mouth, and cupped the bottom of the jar with her fingertips. She lifted gently and felt it give, the stone scraping against the ancient teeth like squeaking chalk. An uncomfortable shudder moved down her body. The jar worked free, intact, and she set it on a pillow of foam on a tray. The skull, its mouth unnaturally stretched, appeared as if it screamed, or laughed. Its empty eyes seemed accusatory in their darkness. She covered the face with a fold of gauze. The empty eyes reminded her of the eyes on the cave monster.

  The walls of the jar were thin enough that she could see the glow of light behind it, and the silhouette of a lumpy shadow inside. She photographed every angle, every detail, and made sure the pictures were uploaded and saved before grabbing her scalpel and tweezers. She both hated and wanted this part. Her pulse grew distracting, a pounding in her sore joints, and it would continue to rise until the beautiful thing in front of her was destroyed. And destroying the sample would destroy her career, or make it. Her hair stuck to her sweaty brow.

  She cut away the cord that secured the flap over the opening and gathered the flakes of leather as they fell, dropping them into a jar of her own – bright glass, sterile, but otherwise little had changed in twenty-five thousand years.

  The leather scrap was thin and fine like the tender skin of a rodent. It had dried to something almost like vellum. It shouldn’t exist at all.

  Once the seal was pulled away, odor overwhelmed her. Sweet and rancid like cherries and old cheese. She clutched her wrist to her nose until the wave passed. She hadn’t dealt with fresh remains in years. This specimen shouldn’t be fresh. Shining more light inside revealed dark clumps clinging to the illuminated walls. She dipped her scalpel inside and scooped out a trace of the substance, sending a fresh wave of odor down her throat. It stuck to the blade as she tapped it onto a glass slide. It was crumbly and clumpy like wet, purple sand. She took more photographs, brightened them, and saw purple, red, gold, brown. Perhaps a desiccated organ. Or maybe the tongue, considering the placement of the jar.

  Magnified under the microscope, it was a brilliant lattice of blood cells – platelets, red and white cells, stem cells, and fatty deposits. Myelocytes. Fragments of vessel. Bone marrow.

  Ashley turned back to the crate with the skull and peeled back the gauze. She ran her fingers over the blossoms of bone again, ignoring the sharp snags, searching for a perforation in the bone. Then she remembered the arms and legs, each broken on every body. Not from the brittleness of millennia, perhaps, but as part of this strange funerary ritual. She wanted to get the rest of the bones – make a full layout of the body and examine the breaks. Look for man-made trauma. But she needed to finish her work with the jar. She grabbed the jar and held it directly above the light, peering into it, trying to gauge the quantity of marrow collected, presumably from the man whose mouth it had filled. Though it was astoundingly preserved under its ancient seal, some evaporation had to have occurred. A slow concentration. She couldn’t tell how much marrow was there, but she didn’t want to disturb the whole sample.

  There needed to be something left intact for her report – and some evidence that she’d be dedicated to the proper handling of these artifacts, despite her hasty removal of the sample.

  She was beginning to like the smell. She breathed it in and felt certain, then, that the gaping skull smiled.

  The tightness in her neck made it difficult to lift the crate onto the high shelf in the storage fridge. Her hands shook and fresh blood had slicked the inside of her gloves. She felt the altitude again like a punch in the gut.

  ***

  The ache in her body had deepened by morning, but she couldn’t stop pacing. She limped from one end of the conference room to the other, her eyes sweeping over the board that she’d papered with her sketches. She paused, pulled a pencil from her hair, and fixed a sketch. Deepened a shadow. Added texture to the rough fracture of the bones.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and pulled another sliver of shale from the dark curls. She hadn’t managed a bath yet. With any luck, she’d be coated in dirt again by the afternoon anyway.

  The meeting wouldn’t start for an hour, but she needed time to prepare. They’d be looking for the first excuse to kick her out, contract be damned. But she wouldn’t let it go without a fight. This was the find of a lifetime and it was her discovery. She wasn’t likely to ever see anything like this again – but if she got her name on this study, it could change the trajectory of her whole career.

  Her knees gave and pain shot up her legs. Her body contorted on the floor, folding over as the cramps arced across her body. Pain twisted through her hips and up her back before it faded, leaving her sweating and panting on the floor.

  She had been distracted and preoccupied on the way down the mountain. She must have pulled a tendon. Pinched a nerve. Her breath evened, and she pulled herself up into one of the rolling desk chairs. Black spots receded from her vision. She poured herself a drink of water from the pitcher on the table, spilling as she did, her hands unsteady – her fingers weak and trembling. She choked on the water, coughing splashes down her front.

  Dr Knochdieb burst into the room, Henri behind him.

  She wiped her dripping chin on her sleeve.

  Dr Knochdieb stormed past her to the board covered with her sketches and photographs. His tie was slightly off-center. He must have rushed.

  “Quite the find,” he said, pausing to look at the sketch of the shadow monster. “We were of course aware of Stone Age human settlements near the lake, but we hadn’t yet found any in the high hills. Not in any of the dozens of caves. So tell me, scholar, why they are there?” He pulled her sketch of the cave paintings from the board and sat in the chair to her right. From this angle, she could see that he had also failed to press down his silver cowlick. The spike of hair at his crown was usually plastered with gel – a feature Henri had nicknamed The Oberaletsch Glacier.

  Ashley’s voice caught deep in her chest. She’d had a speech prepared, but it didn’t account for this sort of question. She’d been expecting more who do you think you are?, not what do you think? Hope made it hard to think at all.

  “Well, the bones show significant funerary preparations. They’re laid out, and the stone jars are inserted into the mouths. The jars contain bone marrow, which I suspect came from the arms and legs, which have all been broken—”

  “How do you know that?” Dr Knochdieb and Henri both turned to her at that, their faces masked with twin looks of alarm.

  Ashley felt the cold water creeping back up her throat. “I examined the specimen last night. I wanted to provide a full rep—”

  “You tampered with it?”

  Here was the tirade she’d been expecting. His eyes roved over her in a way that made her feel inside-out. As though she was raw to his judgement.

  “I felt it was my responsibility to report my findings in full. To provide enough information to justify a continued excavation and protection of the site.” Her jaw stiffened as she spoke, so that her last words hissed past her teeth, sounding more impertinent than she meant them.

  “Of course it will be excavated. And protected. But it’s not your job to tell us that.” Dr Knochdieb’s hands shook with indignation. The color of his face rose to match his tie.

  “I meant to justify my continued excavation. Just…please. Please, let me work on this with you.” This wasn’t her script – she hadn’t intended to beg. But her head was spinning. She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say – her jaw felt sealed against her words. Something about her past experience under her mentor in Peru. Something about global cooperation. She could only think of the bones – of getting back to them. Remind them why you’re here – why they said yes.

  The black spots were returning to her vision. She held herself firm in her seat, upright, eyes closed.

  She caught the word “dismissed”, then stumbled out of her chair, sending it rolling into the board, knocking sketches into the air. She ran from the room as Dr Knochdieb scolded her rude departure.

  Her legs buckled awkwardly as she raced down the hall to her office. She slammed the door shut behind her and sank to the cold floorboards.

  Her fingers ached as though they’d been jammed. It reminded her of her adolescent growing pains – of soaking, curled, in hot baths and the aftertaste of Advil bitter on her tongue, her mother’s long fingers pulling through her wet, curly hair, reassuring her that the boys would catch up to her height, that she wasn’t a “freak”. She felt the familiar itch of the stretch marks that lashed across her back and around her thighs – a crossed dark lattice. She remembered the eyes on her, everywhere she went – the staring, their gazes tickling up her neck. She remembered waking at slumber parties to find games of tic-tac-toe played in the crosshatch of her scars. Every dry itch of that pull of skin brought fresh humiliation. And now she felt it on her hands, her face, and neck. It felt as though her flesh was a shrinking glove, curling her fingers to her palms and holding them there.

  Panting, she held her hands up to the light. Her knuckles twisted as the skin pulled tighter. The grooves of her knuckles split, the fissures like small gaping mouths from which erupted bone upon bone. She shrieked at the sting of it and tried to close the split flesh by straightening her fingers, felt the pressure grow, pulsing under her nails – saw the white of bone pale like blisters at the tips of her fingers. She stretched her fingers further and the skin burst, springing back along the protruding shafts of bone, curling back like a blooming flower. Her fingernails scattered around her. Each breath, deep and ragged, felt as though it contained less air than the one before.

  There’s something in those jars. Something wrong. She remembered the prick of the bone spurs, the blood in her gloves. Careless.

  She struggled, shaking, to her feet. Blood dripped from her twisting fingers to the dingy floor. She reached long, tender, bone-tipped fingers into her pocket, moaning as the rough fabric scraped against the exposed nerves, and pulled her lab keycard out. This hurts, hurts, this hurts…but not as much as it should. Half her brain was a hum of panic, while half observed, fighting the adrenaline for scraps of logic.

  The hallway was empty. It was still early – no one was in their offices yet. She limped around the door and down the hall, catching herself against the wall as she stumbled, crying out when her bones clacked against the plaster. What is happening to me? The metatarsals of her feet strained against the leather of her shoes.

  She fumbled with the keycard at the lab door, dropping it, scraping it from the tiles with her bone-tips. The bones; I need the bones; I need the marrow. She brought the card to her mouth and used her lips to hold it to the sensor. The light flashed red. The door handle stuck, unmoving.

  They’ve changed the locks. Dread washed over her, almost enough to erase the pain in her hands, her face, her feet and knees. There was only one other place she could study the jars. Only one place that might have an answer about what was happening to her.

  The thought of the cave was like an endorphin balm. She needed the cave.

  ***

  Her knees left damp patches of blood along the trail behind her. She held her lantern clenched in her teeth. Her long fingers slid through spaces between the rocks, gripping them, hauling herself more easily than she had the day before – all her weight pivoting on the levers of her long bones. The pull of the cave was so strong it felt as though it lifted her up the mountain. When she reached the top of the rise where the cave gaped open, her bones had grown so tall that she had to fold herself unnaturally to enter. She rolled inside and lay on the floor, shaking violently, shrieking as more bones popped out of her jaw and hips, spraying blood across the ancient amber bones and ochre drawings. I’m contaminating the samples. She nearly laughed at her impulse to preserve the cave art. Die somewhere else. You’re making a mess.

 

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