The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  ‘Maybe you stay at home where it’s safe and warm like the rest of us?’ Gordon said faintly.

  Stella laughed and it came out reckless and foolish and she did not care. ‘As the man who soloed the top pitch of Greasepaint Chimney, you can hardly talk about staying home and being safe, Gordon Fraser.’

  ‘Fair point.’ He chewed the edge of his thumb. ‘So if she’s off the happy juice, can she translate the new cipher?’

  ‘I think so. I sent her an email. We have an invitation to go and visit her tomorrow. There’s a conference at the Institute, but it’ll be over by the afternoon.’

  We. Stella was watching Kit as she spoke; for all the laughter, she could not read him yet. He saw her looking and smiled unevenly. With great care, he reached across to the table and snapped a single bloom off the stem of white lilies.

  She sat very still as he manoeuvred his chair round and slid the flower in behind her ear. With his hand on her shoulder, he said, ‘Follow the path that is herein shewn and be with me at the time and place appointed. We’ve got this far. Do we want to be at the time and place appointed?’

  She wanted to cheer out loud. She said, ‘We have to find them first. That’s why we’re going to Ursula Walker’s.’

  ‘Knowing somebody else will be dogging our every step?’

  ‘We have to be careful; we already know that. And the stone will warn us if there’s real danger. We have to believe that.’

  She had not mentioned the stone in company before. Kit looked at her, surprised. ‘So … can we show Gordon what we’ve got?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ Experimentally, Stella said, ‘Gordon, I think we have something to show you.’

  There passed a short silence, in which Gordon had the good sense to remain silent, and Stella braced herself against the screaming protestations of the skull-stone – which did not come.

  On the contrary, somewhere in the distant blue of a summer’s evening was the first stirring of connection: an awareness, an awakening, and a weak, uncertain love.

  ‘My … that’s a bonny thing.’

  Gordon sat on the floor opposite her, touching knee to knee, but not touching the skull-stone. She held it for him, as she might have held a newborn child, and turned it round so that he could see each part of it. She did not let him touch it; the new connection was too fragile for that. He did not try, but sat on his hands and looked with quiet awe.

  ‘Can you clean it?’ she asked. ‘Can you do something to take off the limescale and make it back to what it was when Cedric Owen held it without hurting the heart-stone underneath?’

  Gordon flicked a glance from under his caterpillar brows. ‘We can give it a shot. It might be harder to hide then, mind you, but it would be a very lovely thing to see.’

  He looked at his watch and the sun and at them both, then just at Stella. ‘You and me could go over to the lab now, maybe, while everyone’s out?’

  12

  Geology Department, Cambridge University, June 2007

  THE GEOLOGY DEPARTMENT late on a summer afternoon was a quiet place. Stella followed Gordon down three flights of stairs into air-conditioned dryness that smelled, like laboratories the world over, of unnamed acids and alkalis and chromatography gel; the odours of man, which had nothing at all to do with the earth.

  In this subterranean aridity, they came at last to a white-tiled laboratory with steel benches on the periphery and a space-age fume cupboard on one wall with an electronic control panel fit for a fighter jet at the front.

  ‘This is Maisie. She’s the real thing.’ Gordon stroked the cabinet’s glass front fondly. His accent, always un-English, broadened into rolling, granular Scots. ‘Before this beastie came along, what we’re planning would have taken six months of slow tedium waiting for the lime to dissolve into an acid bath. Watching paint dry would be exciting by comparison. Now, thanks to the genius of a few of my colleagues, we can put your friend into our shiny new machine here and it’ll all be done in the blink of an eye, more or less. Do you want to put him in?’

  He slid open the glass and let Stella set the skull-stone on a plastic stand on the base of the cabinet. An array of fine tubes angled down from all directions. Flakes of lime peeled off the stone as she withdrew her hands but they were sucked into a vacuum system before they hit the floor. Under the white lights, the skull-stone looked more obviously of another age.

  Gordon was a man in his element. He whistled through his teeth, more of a hiss than a recognizable tune.

  ‘Well now, shall we see what a wee bit of ultrasound and high pressure acid at two hundred degrees can do to get rid of all the crumbling crap on the surface? This is experimental, you understand. We’ve not released it to the public, but I can’t see it’ll do any harm if what’s inside is solid quartz.’

  ‘Do we think it is?’ Stella asked.

  ‘If it’s Cedric Owen’s heart-stone, then there’s nothing else it can be.’

  The front of the cabinet closed with a pneumatic thud. Gordon began moving his hands over pressure-sensitive controls at the front. Lights flickered. The array of pipes moved closer to the skull. A needling whine began to eat at their ears. Under it, Stella felt a faint, singing murmur; the stone was more fully awake now, so that the blue place in her mind was occupied again, watchful and alert. She felt the moment’s panic that was not hers, as the acid began to spray. She promised calm and was heard.

  She said, ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘Maybe a couple of hours.’

  ‘So I could go back to Kit? If there’s a way to get him down here, I’d like him to see the result when you’re finished.’

  ‘I’ll call you. There’s a lift you can use. I just don’t like it much,’ said the man who had led some of the hardest caves in Britain. ‘Too claustrophobic.’

  Kit was asleep again when she returned. She made a salad and cut the tops from some strawberries and set them both to the side for when he woke.

  She was sitting on the bare oak floor by the ash table, drinking green tea and watching the sun gild the trees on Midsummer Common, when Sergeant Ceri Jones, the young radio operator who had talked Kit’s rescue party out of the cave, rang her mobile.

  ‘I’m on Ingleborough Fell again.’ At two hundred miles’ distance, her accent was broader than it had been in person. ‘We finally got a police team together to look inside your killer cave. We just came out. I thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is Kit OK?’

  Stella turned to look at him. His colour was better than it had been and his face was symmetrical in sleep. ‘They let him come home this morning. I think that’s as OK as it gets.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ There was a pause and a breath of moorland wind and the sound of crows and cars in the background. Ceri said, ‘I’ve got a web-cam. Are you on line?’

  ‘I can be,’ Stella said.

  Kit’s laptop had a lens in the lid that let her set up a video link. Ceri came up on the screen, windblown and wiry, with smears of mud on her face and curly dark hair wet-plastered to her head. She looked straight at the lens, sharply, a woman barely contained.

  ‘What have you got?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Two things. The easy bit is the skeleton. You remember there was a body holding a sword lying in the cave with the ice-age art on the wall?’

  ‘The cathedral of the earth. I’ve never seen anywhere as beautiful. I heard the anthropologists are all over the paintings?’

  Ceri grinned. ‘Like a rash. They’re already working out how to clear the rock fall to get in to see them without having to crawl. But we had a forensic pathologist on the team too, which means I can tell you that your skeleton was a man, five foot ten and in his sixties when he died. The important bit is, they think the body’s at least four hundred years old, so he died around Cedric Owen’s time. And the sword he was holding cleaned up enough to see some detail. Have a look …’

  The screen blinked and Ceri was gone. In her place
was a sword, photographed with a flash against whitish rock. The hilt was bronze, or brass, the blade rusted iron. A second picture sent a moment later showed a close-up of the crosspiece. Etched lines showed indistinctly.

  ‘Are those initials on the hilt?’

  Ceri came back on to the screen. ‘It says RM, and then a number: XII.’

  ‘Robert Maplethorpe was the twelfth Master of Bede’s,’ Stella said. ‘But it can’t be him, he was killed defending Cedric Owen at the gates of the college on Christmas Day 1588.’

  ‘OK, so we’ll leave it open until we come up with a better answer. I just thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Thanks. If that’s the easy bit, what’s the rest?’

  Ceri frowned and looked over both shoulders before she spoke. Slowly, picking her words, she said, ‘We’ve just been along the nightmare ledge again. We set up bolts and a rope so it’s safe now, but we went along it twice to get it set. There’s a crawl and then something worse than that, but nowhere for someone to hit their head hard enough to smash their skull open like Kit did.’

  She waited. When Stella said nothing, she said, ‘It proves that you were right; there was someone else there with you.’

  ‘He might have hit it as he fell.’

  ‘No. The wall angles inwards below the ledge where he fell; there’s no way he could have hit himself on the way down. Our forensic pathologist is sure that it wasn’t an accident. In any case, while the others were all taking pictures, I went a little way up the fork to Gaping Ghyll to have a look. I found this …’

  The image switched again. On the screen, briefly, where Ceri’s head had been, her grubby hand held a plastic drinking bottle.

  Ceri reappeared. ‘It was bought at a motorway service station on the M6 and we have a date stamp on the side so we can narrow the time down a bit. If we had the money, we’d run a check to see whether there’s any saliva and then if there’s any DNA to run through the database, but we don’t. At the moment, all it’s good for is to prove that there was someone else in the cave around the same time as you. We’re cracking our heads trying to work out a motive for an attempted murder. If we can find one, we might be able to persuade them to at least run a check on the CCTV at the service station to see who was buying water on the day Kit fell.’

  It was half a question. Stella spread her hands wide. ‘If either of us stumbles across a plausible reason why someone would want to kill Kit in a cave, DI Fleming will be the first to know. You can tell him that, from me.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Thank you. And I’ll mail you with anything we get.’

  They closed the connection. The sun was a red globe deep in the west. The bars and pubs up near Magdalene Bridge were coming to life, spilling multicoloured reflections on the river. The ducks slept, silently. Some time later, into the quiet evening, her phone rang again.

  ‘Your wee stone’s ready,’ said Gordon Fraser unsteadily. ‘I hope you are.’

  Nothing could have made her ready.

  An unusually subdued Gordon met her and Kit at the doors to the elevator and ushered them into the fluorescent hush of his laboratory.

  Kit went ahead, sweeping his electric wheelchair along the corridor and through the door with wild oversteer at each corner. Stella followed behind, losing him at the last turn.

  ‘Dear God …’

  He whispered it, hoarsely, in awe, or fear; Stella could not tell which. She stumbled into the back of his chair, cursing. Then she, too, stopped.

  ‘Christ.’

  Blue. All she could see was crystalline, perfect, unblemished-sky blue: such poverty of language for such heartbreaking beauty. She stepped forward to press her nose against the glass of the cabinet.

  Gordon had not moved the stone from the small plastic plinth where she had left it. The white lights were as harsh as they had been, but were outmatched, now, by what they lit.

  Colour flooded the space, a dense, dazzling, lucent blue that brought the morning sky underground and spread it into the far corners, dispelling dust and technology.

  Stella crouched down, bringing her face level with its eyes. Freed from its limestone carcass, the skull was perfect, a thing of flawless crystal that drew the light inward in curves to make a soft, blurred flame at its heart.

  On the outside, the smooth arc of the cranial vault gave way in front to two tunnelled eye sockets above sharply angled cheekbones. The nose was a clear triangle. The lower jaw looked separate, so that the mouth could open and shut if one chose to play such games with it.

  Stella did not wish to play games of any sort. Softly, she said, ‘Kit, have you got the bag?’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’

  It was Gordon who spoke. He stood at the far side of the room, white and wide-eyed, and had not come near her.

  In the same, shaken voice as he had used on the phone, he said, ‘Myself, I’d want to be sure I could put that thing down before ever I picked it up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Just that it’s a thing to steal the soul and I’m not sure I want mine stolen. It’s too beautiful. It’s just asking to be picked up, and when you do, I don’t think you’ll ever put it down again. To be honest, I think you’d be safer putting it under a pile driver. We have one, if you need it.’

  There was silence. Stella looked at Kit instead of the stone. ‘What do you think?’

  He shrugged his one good shoulder. ‘Tony says it kills anyone who handles it. It all comes to the same thing in the end. Either you believe that it’s lethal, and no stone is worth dying for, or you think it has something to teach us and is worth the risk. We’ve been round this circle before. If you’ve changed your mind, I’ll gladly go with the pile driver.’

  ‘Do you think it has stolen my soul?’

  ‘Honestly?’ He glanced up at her and for a moment she saw the brief battle his eyes could not hide, as he struggled to find the balanced view he had always held so easily before. He made himself smile. ‘I think you’re stronger than that. If you weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

  ‘Are you not afraid of it?’ Gordon asked.

  Kit pursed his lips. ‘Not that I’d noticed. It’s … striking, but I can’t see what’s to be afraid of.’

  ‘You’re a stronger man than me, then. Maybe I’m just a milksop at heart.’ Gordon eased back his shoulders, as Stella had seen him do in a cave at the start of a hard pitch, and came forward to open the cabinet for her.

  More normally, he said, ‘If you want some jargon to keep the bean counters happy, then you should know that your bauble is made of a single piece of blue quartz, better known as sapphire.’

  ‘What?’

  His grin split his beard right across. ‘What you’re looking at is probably the biggest gemstone ever dug out of the northern hemisphere.’

  Kit said, ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘Pass. More than you or I will see on a university salary in a long, long time, but if you’re looking for a motive for murder, I don’t think this is something you steal so you can cut it up and sell it to the footballers’ wives. It’s got the kind of tingle to it that would make a man want to keep it whole for himself. There now, it’s all yours …’

  He slid open the cabinet door. Stella lifted up the stone. Blue light enveloped her. A sense of welcome, of homecoming, of friendship rekindled soaked her soul.

  Distantly, she heard Kit ask, ‘Where exactly is it from?’ and Gordon answered, ‘Scotland. I’ve seen one or two of that colour from the basalt layers at Loch Roag on Lewis, but never one that big without flaws in it. If it matters, we could run a scan and analyse the colour bands. That’d give us more of a clue where it came from, although there’s no saying it was cut there; it could have been taken halfway round the world before anyone touched it. Either way, it’s been cut against the grain of the crystal, which is hard to do without breaking it into a thousand tiny pieces. Certainly it’s not a German fake; they don’t know how to do it w
ithout shattering the stone.’

  Stella was only half listening; all of her attention was on the skull-stone. She cradled it in the crook of her elbow.

  I am your hope at the end of time. Hold me as you would hold your child. Listen to me as you would listen to your lover. Trust me as you would trust your god, whosoever that may be.

  Gordon was right, the stone had hold of her soul; and he was wrong, it was not an unsafe thing to permit. She trusted it and it her. The relationship was more even now, as if the stripping of the chalk shell had opened a channel that let the stone return an equal care.

  In the new parts of her mind was the space of the open sky, offering a peace she had not known possible. Stella stepped into it, as she would have stepped into a cave, with the same need to explore and the same unknowing of what she might find.

  Kit must have asked another question, because Gordon was answering it.

  ‘The Germans are the masters when it comes to cutting quartz.’ He closed his cabinet and switched off the lights. The deep blue flame burned on in the skull’s heart. ‘There’s a village somewhere in the blackest part of the Black Forest where they make crystal skulls and sell them to gullible Yanks. This is not one of those. I’d put my career on that.’

  He pointed a blunt finger at the stone lying on Stella’s arm. ‘See how the zygomatic arches pull in the light? And the eye sockets are lenses, to focus it into the cranium? You don’t get that kind of workmanship from the twenty-first century. There’s nobody left knows how to do it.’

  He took a step across the room and stood at his computer rattling his big fingers across the keys. ‘The provenance makes or breaks this thing, clearly, so I took the liberty of firing off a few photographs before I started. If you look on the big screen at the back there’ – his hands waved to the far wall of the laboratory, where was a wide screen of cinematic proportions – ‘you’ll see the picture of the fissure in the rock.’