Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  “Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.”

  “Is this what cops do in lieu of sex, recite dead poets?”

  “License my roving hands, and let them go behind, before, above, between, below.”

  “Lie still, Morgan. Count sheep.”

  Before long they drifted into a luxuriant sleep in which they both might have dreamed of exquisite and exploding orgasms in endless profusion and when they woke up they were entangled below in ways that made Morgan wonder if they had been lovers during the long warmth of the night.

  “Morgan, what time is it? Can you get your arm out?” Their muscles had relaxed so completely they were almost atrophied; their bodies seemed to flow into each other. He wriggled his fingers and tried to snake his wrist up between them, but there was no room. With his right hand he reached over and delicately lifted her breasts to the side and unstrapped his watch, then slipped it upwards into her grasp so she could pass it hand over hand into the open.

  “Four in the morning. Time to get up. Let’s see if this plan of yours worked, King Canute. And by the way, I prefer Leonard Cohen.”

  “To what?”

  “Not to you, Morgan. To John Donne.”

  He started to shimmy upwards, then realized there was an impediment. He had a morning erection nestled tightly between her legs. As he tried to move, she responded by squeezing her thighs around the protrusion. Slowly, she began to grind against him. He exhaled with a drawn-out sigh as he realized what was happening. Her warm breath on his neck became more urgent as she swivelled her hips, searching for an unreachable position, it seemed, to accommodate their desire.

  There was a ripping sound as the sleeping bag burst open, a shard of cold air, a shared shudder. She stopped abruptly. For a moment neither of them moved. Then she whispered: “Give it up, Morgan. There’s not enough room. We’d better get going before the waters rise.” Whether intentionally dismissive or merely an expression of her frustration, her words threatened to end their curious intimacy, but their renewed gyrations slithering free of the torn sleeping bag nearly brought them back to the edge until, suddenly, being exposed inside a giant refrigerator, their passion expired and they separately leaped for their clothes.

  “Good,” said Morgan, acknowledging the alacrity with which they cocooned themselves in every bit of clothing at hand. “However.” He smiled and tousled his own hair into a semblance of order. Her hair was perfect. “Before we put on our damp boots, I suggest we strip off our pants and socks again.”

  “Morgan, you’re insatiable.”

  “Just getting started,” he said, stepping first on the toes of one sock, then the other, tugging them off without bending down, to avoid touching the icy inside layer of his clothing. Then he unbuckled his pants and dropped them, finally leaning over to scoop them up. “Give me yours,” he said. “We’ll need these dry when we get to solid ground. But put on your boots. That water will turn our feet into frozen stumps in seconds, so we’ll need to protect them.”

  Gloria Simmons followed his directives as he packed up their dry clothes in the backpack and swung it over his shoulders before drawing the thick door open and lowering himself into the slurry. He turned, reached up, and lifted her down close beside him. She clearly felt assured that he knew exactly what he was doing, although Morgan was not comfortable with the role of hero — it felt like wearing a bearskin coat that was morally offensive, much too big, and very warm. He nodded his head in encouragement when she looked directly into his eyes, and, holding one of her hands in a tight grasp, he leaned away to draw first one foot and then the other through the sucking gravel.

  Together, as an awkward quadruped, they manoeuvered the short distance to swift-moving water. Although flowing vigorously enough to make their footing uncertain, it was somewhat subdued from the roiling surge of twelve hours earlier, and it was crystal clear. Looking downstream, Morgan could see that the water flowing past the far side of their esker was as murky as curdled milk. Lucky, he thought, seeing his boots shimmer below him, we chose the right side.

  As they sat on the rocky shore to empty their boots and get dressed again, they discussed the geological anomaly of clear water and murky water flowing from the same glacial face that filled the western horizon like a great bank of clouds in the clearing sky. They could feel waves of cold emanating from the ice and sweeping down in the early morning breeze.

  “Okay,” said Gloria Simmons, resuming command. “We walk in that direction.” She pointed. “Just over that rise, there’s open water. Let’s see what we see.”

  With uncanny precision, she led them to the edge of the sea through boulders and clumps of moss and lichen up to their knees and over tiny blossoms of brilliant yellow and vibrant purple that seemed in valiant denial of the freezing temperatures and austere conditions. They walked along the smooth rock plane of the shore for a few minutes and then she turned away and he followed her over a rocky outcropping, where they came upon a cairn of boulders in the shape of a man, almost as if she expected it to be there.

  “He’ll be inside,” she murmured, getting down on her knees to peer through crevasses among the rocks.

  To Morgan, it was obviously an old grave, perhaps ancient. He lowered himself to his knees beside her and examined the minute strands of dried lichen particles on boulders that had been pushed askew. This grave had been dismantled perhaps only a day or two previously. Inside, there would be old bones, he had no doubt. But she was right, there would be a fresh body, as well.

  Carefully, they lifted the rocks away, working slowly with a shared reverence understood between them for the skeletal remains of the original occupant. When the bones lay revealed in the open, they moved them gently aside, laying them out on a rock shelf in the proper configuration. There was a thin layer of frozen gravel draped over the body beneath where the bones had been, but there was no question from its contours about what lay concealed. They agreed it had been buried below to protect the flesh from foraging animals.

  “This was not Pauloosie Avaluktuk who did this,” said Gloria Simmons. “He would not violate the grave of his ancestor.”

  “His ancestor?”

  “The dead are our family. We are human beings, Inuit; we are the People. He would not do this.”

  This would be the same man, Morgan thought, who might murder but wouldn’t lie. He stood beside Gloria Simmons and watched as the first glints of sun spun waves in her hair. She was a denizen of Bay and Bloor, and a native of the North in her blood and her bones and her strange and strong set of mind. He was glad they had not made love. They might, he desired her with a fierceness that surprised him, but not now, this was not their time. Perhaps it never would be. But he doubted the desire would ever leave him, a desire inseparable from the solemn and breathtaking landscape, from the profound fear of crashing into it from above, and his perfect acceptance that whatever was to happen would happen. He was not a fatalist, but in this, his visceral passion for this woman, he felt at the moment completely resigned to forces he had no wish to rebuke.

  A hushed whisper from the grave startled them both. They stared in wonder as the gravel shroud that was beginning to melt in the warming day began slowly to slide from the dead man’s face, making quiet sounds like a human voice from far away. Without realizing it, Morgan and the woman had grasped hands as they gazed at the slowly revealing features, squeezing so hard their bodies trembled. Then, at last, Gloria Simmons spoke. “He’s certainly dead. But it isn’t Harrington D’Arcy.”

  “My goodness,” Morgan declared, the inherent irony of his favourite expletive in this case being especially appropriate.

  They stood in solemn silence, each trying to assimilate the implications of finding the wrong corpse in the right place. They had been so focused on D’Arcy that they had virtually forgotten the other two men who had gone missing. And as Morgan stared at the corpse, his bewilderment increased when he realized that under the gravel shroud that was disintegrating in the warmth of the sun the man was
dressed in nothing more than briefs and a singlet.

  “This gets curiouser and curiouser,” he said.

  She flashed him a look of annoyance that would have made the Queen of Hearts quaver.

  “This doesn’t mean D’Arcy’s alive,” he observed with a rueful smile. She seemed not to hear. He glanced over at the skeleton laid out on its stony bier and back at the frozen corpse that lay partially fused with the upper layer of permafrost, then let his eyes rest on his companion’s face as he tried to fathom her emotional response. Wherever they were, he thought, here on the desolate coastline of Baffin Island, they were a long way off.

  From what, he wasn’t sure, but the rest of the world seemed exceedingly remote.

  8

  Guardians of the Cave

  Miranda had shoved Matteo away with such force that he sprawled backward and his flashlight went clattering across the stony floor, flickered briefly, and expired. She scrambled off the mattress to the side and then crouched perfectly still. She could hear him moving about in the absolute blackness, searching for the light. He didn’t seem to be getting closer. “If you’re here to kill me again, you’re in for a hell of a fight.” She projected her voice in a low register and her words were fierce as they resonated against the enclosing walls.

  There was a long pause, then he spoke, “I did not try to kill you in the first instance, or you would be dead. In fact, I made myself sure of your safety before torching the house where my grandparents lived their whole lives. You were hidden safely under the fallen moai with the bones of my great-uncle who disappeared when my father put his life to an end for betraying my wife. After a few years my father exhumed him and dismantled his skull and broke his bones. I told Te Ave Teao you were safe as I walked past him — he was going to stop me from starting the fire. When I went inside I saw the book was gone. I knew it was with you. You are all right, now.”

  “For a man who didn’t speak any English until yesterday, you are surprisingly talkative,” she said into the darkness.

  “I am aware of how to distract you.”

  “From what?”

  “Terror, perhaps.”

  “I was startled.”

  “You thumped me in the chest with astonishing force. There is no reason to be ashamed of that; you were terrified.”

  “I am not the least bit ashamed. Or terrified. I didn’t thump you, I pushed you.”

  “Thumped.” He was moving closer.

  She stood tall, her equilibrium restored in the darkness by her will to survive, and edged silently away from the sounds of his breathing. He seemed to have stopped moving, listening perhaps, waiting. She reached out until her fingertips brushed against the tabletop. She slid them along the table then over to where the back of the chair should be and they closed around her damp but clean bra and panties, which she proceeded to put on, something that proved surprisingly difficult in the dark. The shuffling rustling sounds must be baffling to him, she thought. “There. Nothing at all to be ashamed about,” she declared, as if the matter might still be in doubt and somehow linked to wearing no underwear.

  “In the confusion I seem to have misplaced my flashlight,” Matteo observed.

  “You’re very gracious, but I believe it smashed when I thumped you.”

  “There will be matches. You don’t have a lantern without matches and I believe I noticed a lantern before the lights went out.”

  “You’ve never been here before?”

  “Not in years. Our friend Mr. Ross seems to have set up housekeeping in a most unlikely place. Ah, here they are.” He struck a match and a blast of light sputtered briefly and expired. He struck another more carefully and directed Miranda to bring him the red kerosene can sitting among the packing cases. Perhaps in the difference between darkness and light, they both seemed to have forgotten that only moments before they were adversaries.

  “Now, this will be interesting,” he said. “We will need illumination if I am to fill the lamp, but it would be better if we did not set fire to ourselves. You take the matches, but stand back a little.”

  “It’s kerosene,” she said as she lit a match and held it to the side while he filled the lamp. “It won’t explode.” She had worked at summer camps in Northern Ontario. She knew about kerosene lamps. They used to call it coal oil. It wasn’t volatile, but the smell was evocative. Ontario loomed in her mind, like phantom sensations of an atrophied limb, and was quickly displaced by a more recent vision of the lamp at the farmhouse shattering into a blazing inferno.

  “So,” he said, standing back to look at her in the flickering lamplight. “You have now put on your undergarments.”

  Miranda instinctively clutched her breasts and then her crotch as if somehow she had been caught naked in public. She grimaced and dropped her arms to her sides with what she immediately recognized was a girlish gesture.

  “I saw with my flashlight your little things on the chair and now they are gone,” he explained.

  “My little things. How long were you in the States?”

  “Ah, one remembers the infinite rules of grammar, but one forgets quickly the proper names of unfamiliarities. Kai i te au. Some things slip from the mind.”

  “Your English is superb, Matteo. Now explain what is happening, how long have I been here, where is Ross, who is Ross?”

  “You have been here two days.”

  “My God! No wonder I’m starving.” She realized her appetite had been held in check by the tightness in her gut from suppressing panic. “And what about Ross?”

  “Who knows? Mr. Ross is an enigma, that’s what he is by profession.”

  “That’s a profession?”

  “In his case it is. The less we understand him, the better he is at his job.”

  “Which is what?”

  “For us he is a delivery system and an agent of change.”

  “And what does he deliver that is so important?”

  “Over the years, many things. Most recently, yourself.”

  “I am not a parcel to be handed about.”

  “This is not about you, personally.”

  “Apparently it is.”

  “I’m sorry you cannot understand your role in our affairs. Perhaps only Maria understood. But you were dispatched to serve the cause for which she died. We are not asking you to die, merely to co-operate.”

  For the moment her need for clarification was trumped by a desire to connect. Ross was an agent of chaos; he had left her in darkness. Matteo had brought back the light. They sat on opposite sides of the table, squinting as the lamp flickered in their eyes “I’d like to get out of here,” she said in a firm, but conciliatory tone. “Preferably now, although God knows, where to?”

  “The world outside this cave is still there, I assure you, and no less dangerous than when you departed it two days ago.”

  She gazed across the table at his beautiful features washed in the shimmering glow of the lamplight. They had nearly been lovers. She smiled a secret smile to herself. She felt a strong attraction to this cheerful, brooding man. The Englishman excited and repulsed her at the same time. Matteo seemed to connect with something deep inside that was constant and powerful, despite the bewildering circumstances. He caught her smile and smiled back.

  She wished Morgan were there; he would understand. She had slipped into the role of romantic heroine in the novel of her own life, she had become the woman she suspected most women have a fear of becoming and dream they will become, her destiny darkly shaped not by will, but desire, fated to give herself, flesh, mind, and soul, to the man, exotic, or to the man, mysterious and impossibly urbane, either of whom would transform her ordinary life into something dangerously unfamiliar and important. The hell with Morgan, she thought, angry at him for intruding in her reverie.

  “Matteo,” she said, “this cave, it is a sacred place, tapu except for the ariki. Yet you are here. So taboo, or tapu, is no longer a factor?”

  “Ah, but it is. Perhaps the sacred and forbidden are now cu
ltural imperatives, not religious, but believe me, they count.”

  “Then you are an ariki?”

  “My sister and I are of the blood. I am what we call tiaki ana, a guardian of the cave.”

  Miranda scanned the almost delicate and yet commanding features of this man across from her. She could not bear to use the past tense when she asked him: “Your sister? Is Maria your sister?”

  “Yes. She was to marry Te Ave Teao, my brother.”

  “Your brother!”

  “No, no, not my brother like that, not like you think. It is how in Spanish we say it, my age-mate, the friend of my life.”

  “But she married Harrington D’Arcy.”

  “Yes, she did. And Te Ave Teao, he did not marry another. Sometimes it happens like that.”

  Neither of them said anything for a few minutes.

  “Let’s backtrack a bit.” Her tone was flat and rational. “You and your sister are descended from priests of the ancient times. Would this go back to the bird-man culture, the moai culture, to the culture of central Polynesia — didn’t Hoto Matua bring your people from the Marquesas Islands, or was it Raiatea?”

  “You have been reading, Detective Quin. No, we probably came from Mangareva. It is open to question. The anthropological subsets are still arguing. My sister and I are not holy people. But we are direct descendents of the final ariki.”

  “The final ariki?”

  “The last. He was a man named Humberto Rapu Haoa who returned when the slave traders were persuaded by the Bishop of Tahiti to bring back survivors of the raids to the island. Over a thousand men had been taken away. Many died of smallpox while they were being transported home; they were stored in transit with the belongings of diseased American sailors. Fifteen made it back. My grandfather was the only ariki to return. He was the last human being in the world who could read Rongorongo.”

  “Rongorongo,” said Miranda. A rare piece of wood incised with Rongorongo had turned up in Toronto, peripheral to a case she and Morgan had been involved in that was so horrific it had changed who she was — in some ways, for the better.