Divitiacus instructed his wife to put on her best gown. Valeria did as she was bid, and together with her husband, and with a garrison of Roman soldiers following only a diplomatic distance behind, they made their way to the battlement on the lake.
As they approached the escarpment leading to the formidable hulk of granite and stone, she found herself hoping that her husband was right. But she was also worried, and feared that he might not be, for she could not forget the augury and the handful of leaves that she had thrown upon the flame. And the blackness of the smoke.
SEVEN
The events of that evening left David in a state unlike anything that he had ever experienced before. When he lad reached the other side of the lake he had found nothing. When he had returned to Wythen Hall he was informed by one of the servants that the Marquis and Julia had retired. Even when he arrived back at the cottage he found Melanie in a curious state, although mercifully she was not nearly as angry as he had expected her to be. His first urge had been to tell her everything that had happened to him, but given that he himself did not know what he had seen, he refrained. To explain his disappearance he told her only that he and Julia had gotten separated and that he had followed a strange animal through the woods in the hopes that it might be Ben, or at least provide him with some clue about Ben’s disappearance. But even this she greeted without question or argument, and he was left to ponder the night’s occurrences alone.
He thought about it restlessly through a good portion of the night, but by morning he had still come no closer to explaining what he had seen. It was not that he was troubled by enigmas. Throughout his life he had always thrived on puzzles. But what bothered him so much about this was that he had no context in which to tackle it. The only thing that seemed to make sense was that it had been a hallucination of some sort, but assuming that this was the case still brought with it several problems. If it was a hallucination, how had Julia been able to so precisely anticipate its onset? In addition, if it was a product of his own psychology, why had there been no other clues about what was happening to him? No blurring of the vision previous to his sighting the centaur? No flashes of light or other perceptual distortions? The more he thought about it the more convinced he became that he could not explain what he had seen as an aberration of his own mental functioning; but the alternative, that the centaur was somehow real and existed “out there,” was equally untenable to him. He was left only with an unsolvable problem, and the sentence that kept returning to him endlessly in his thoughts was Julia’s strange allusion to Grenville’s power.
When he got up that morning he went for a long walk outside, like a man possessed. It was only when he came back in and found Melanie agitatedly sipping her coffee in the dining room in the dark and with all of the shades unopened that he realized something was bothering her also.
“Honey? What is it?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
“Nothing,” she returned unconvincingly, still gazing off into space.
This irked him, for he hated it when she made him drag it out of her. “Come on, Mel, don’t play this game. Can’t you just tell me?”
She hesitated for another moment and then looked at him frowning. “Do you think there was any chance we were drugged last night?”
This took him by surprise. “What do you mean?” Again she hesitated. “I don’t know. I just felt that that bog-myrtle wine hit me rather hard last night. I just wondered if you thought there was something in it other than alcohol, something that might cause... well, hallucinations, maybe?”
Not knowing what she meant, he assumed that she had to be referring to the experience he had had. “So you know what happened to me last night?” he said.
The look of agitation on her face intensified. “What do you mean?”
This time it was his turn to become flushed as he fidgeted and told her the entire experience. When he had finished the look on her face had escalated from concern to fear.
“David, what do you think it was?” she asked urgently.
He became confused. “I don’t know, but I thought you knew about this already.”
“Of course not. How would I?”
“Then why did you ask if I thought the bog-myrtle wine was drugged and might cause hallucinations?”
“Do you think it was?”
“No... well, I don’t know. I’m not sure.” He told her the reasons that he could not accept that his vision had been the result of a psychoactive experience.
“But, David, that means that the centaur was real.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know!” he snapped, and then grew penitent. “I’m sorry. But I can’t help but think that it was a trick of some sort. I mean, obviously Julia knew about it. She even said that Grenville was an illusionist. I think he perpetrated the event as some sort of practical joke, or mind fuck. I don’t know.”
Melanie clearly remained unconvinced that it had been a trick and stared off into the distance, even more mysteriously tortured than before. Finally, after several minutes and with her eyes still fixed off in space, she said darkly, “David, I don’t think it was a trick.”
Too exasperated to respond, David just allowed the comment to go by.
Melanie spoke again. “Did you see the Volvo outside?”
“No. I’ve been meaning to ask you what happened to it.”
“Are you sure? When you went for your walk did you see it anywhere, hidden or pulled off the road?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Because I thought Brad might have driven it back. He drove me home last night and since it was raining I let him borrow the car.” She paused in thought. “But you know how considerate Brad is. I just thought he might have driven it back already.”
David accepted the information without question, but Melanie’s thoughts raced. It was the final vindication, she thought. Already she suspected that whatever it was that had been in her room had not been Brad. Brad was a human being, a creature made of flesh and blood, and flesh and blood didn’t simply evaporate, fade away into nothing like a vapor or a morning mist. But even if she had been mistaken, had unknowingly fainted from the shock of David arriving home, if it had been Brad, he would not have been able to drive the car away without alerting David. The Volvo should still be hidden somewhere near the house. But it wasn’t.
And yet she was also convinced that she could not simply have imagined the entire experience.
Her thoughts in tumult, another question came into her head, incongruous and inexplicable. “Grenville seems awfully dark-complected for an Englishman. Do you have any idea why that might be?”
David shrugged. “Well, the Romans do mention that when they came to conquer England the Celts were unusually dark-complected. Perhaps his family line just maintains a more pure strain of ancient Celtic blood.” She accepted the answer and both of them continued to brood for a moment. Suddenly David stirred.
“Now I have a question. If you didn’t know about the centaur why did you ask if I thought we had beer drugged?”
She looked down into her lap. “Well, I felt pretty strange last night myself.”
“How so?”
She hesitated for a moment longer and then looked into her husband’s eyes, and when she saw him staring back at her, so compassionate, so trusting, she knew that she would rather walk over burning coals than have to tell him what she had done. But she realized also that, given what he had told her, she had experienced something, something that frightened her more and more. She looked back down into her lap. “Well, to begin, do you remember Julia saying that bog-myrtle wine is an aphrodisiac?” She paused. “Well, last night when I got home I... well, I felt very peculiar, and I’m not trying to blame it on the wine, but I—”
And suddenly he thought he understood. “Honey, I know what you’re going to say.”
“You do?” she said, her eyes widening.
“Yes, I do. I know that you we
ren’t thrilled about the way Julia was coming on to me, and I have to admit the wine made me feel pretty peculiar too.” He shifted nervously. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but Julia made a pass at me, and although it pains me to admit it, I damn near came close to accepting it.”
“David, I—”
“Honey, please let me finish. I came close to accepting it, but then I thought of you and the kids. I thought of how a relationship like ours is built on trust, and then I turned her down, and you know why?”
“Why?” she asked weakly.
“Because I knew you would never do anything like that to me.” He paused. “Honey, I’m sorry.”
After several seconds he realized she was still just looking at him, her eyes glazed and behaving as if all of the life had been drawn out of her. “Honey, do you forgive me?” he asked.
“Forgive you?” she repeated distantly. “Yes... I forgive you.”
“Now, what was it you wanted to say?”
She continued to ruminate over some unknown and mysterious thought. “Nothing,” she returned. “It’s nothing.”
David noticed that his wife continued to brood for the rest of the morning, but it was just before he was about to leave for the digs that he found her looking even more troubled as she stood in the living room and sniffed the air carefully.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Do you smell something?”
He sniffed, and at first detected nothing. But then he took another deep whiff and became aware of a faint and unpleasant odor. The scent was familiar, but as he stood focusing his senses on it, it remained hazy and ill-defined. He took another, even deeper inhalation and at last recognized what he was smelling. He had smelled that stench before in his life. It was the smell of putrefying flesh.
“What do you think it is?” Melanie asked, seemingly on the verge of panic.
“You had Mrs. Comfrey put rat poison around the house, right?”
She nodded.
“Well it’s probably just the poison working. Somewhere in the walls or beneath the floorboards a rat who has eaten some of it has crawled in and died. The smell will go away in a few days.”
To his amazement Melanie seemed almost relieved.
Although he didn’t mention it, David thought of another possible and even more unpleasant explanation for the smell. It occurred to him that it might be Ben. And so after Melanie had gone back into the dining room, he got a flashlight and went beneath the crawl-space of the house. To his relief, however, he found no trace of the retriever’s moldering body, or for that matter, the remains of any small animal that might explain the mysterious odor.
The next several days were less than idyllic. Although he continued to work at the digs, he remained driven to distraction by his inability to understand the events that he had witnessed at Wythen Hall. When Brad asked him what was wrong he declined comment, but more than ever he was haunted by every detail of the evening, and turned every word, smell, and perception over and over again in his mind in attempts to wring some sense out of it. As a result, he existed in a state of agitation equaled only by Melanie’s. Since that evening, she too seemed like a changed person, and she padded listlessly around the house, sulking and brooding almost as if she were in a state of grief or moral breakdown. When Brad came over for dinner she no longer even engaged in animated discussions with him, but behaved instead as if he reminded her of something she wanted to forget. At first David had blamed the change in her on his confession of near infidelity, but as her moods continued, he started to wonder if there was more to it than just that.
He noticed also that Katy was unusually pensive and became especially unsettled when Melanie was around, but he did not know why. And Tuck, although his appetite improved, remained disconsolate over Ben’s disappearance, no longer ran and laughed or even played his video games, a gloomy and spiritless shadow of his former self, in the charge of the equally cheerless Mrs. Comfrey.
What bothered David most about it all was that he was so involved with his own internal struggle that he felt powerless. He knew that he should reach out and try to help his family, try to initiate some communication that would release them from the torpor that had enveloped them, but he seemed trapped behind his eyes and hands. And throughout it all, as the emotional ties that had once bound his family seemed to disintegrate, there remained in the house the subtle but omnipresent odor, the faint miasma of decay.
It was on the morning of the fourth day after their dinner at the Marquis’s that Brad appeared unexpectedly at the front door of the cottage. It was still so early that Melanie and the kids had not even arisen, and David answered his unrestrained knocking still wiping the sleep out of his eyes.
He looked wonderingly at the young man shifting his weight excitedly on the front step.
“Get dressed!” Brad ordered.
“Why, what is it?”
“You’re not going to believe it. Get dressed!”
Still curious about what it was all about, David quickly dressed and they piled into the Volvo. On the way to the digs Brad still refused to divulge the reason for his strange fervor. They reached the campsite, got out, and it was only as Brad ran ahead that David realized it had something to do with the excavation they were doing in the portion of the bog that belonged to Grenville. They reached the edge of the pit and David looked down.
This time in the red strata of the dog’s flesh there was not one, but two of the eerily obsidian bog bodies, curled slightly in fetal position and facing one another, one male and the other female. What had excited Brad so was obviously their dress. Unlike the other bog bodies they had found, the couple in the pit wore tunics and blouses, discolored but preserved by the bog water and of a far more sophisticated weave than the clothing of the Iron Age inhabitants of the valley. In addition, the hairstyle of the woman, her bracelets and the bracelets on the man, the woman’s soft leather shoes, and the fasciae or leg bands of the man, all were not Celtic but unique to quite a different culture. The bodies before them were Roman.
David knelt down slowly in stupefied reverence. Nothing like it had ever been found before. Perhaps no other ancient civilization had inspired as much interest, been the subject of more archaeological endeavors, of more books, films, museum exhibits, essays, and intellectual ponderings than the Roman. And yet no one, no living person, had ever done what they were doing now. They were actually looking at two denizens of that glistening and bygone empire, two ancient Romans in the flesh.
He looked back at Brad and realized why the younger man had been so excited. It was the sort of discovery archaeologists dream of. The bodies before them were perhaps the only two of their kind in the world, and when news of the find got out it was sure to inspire a flurry of media attention.
“It’s amazing,” David murmured, and then realized that such superlatives palled in light of the momentousness of the discovery. He slipped down gingerly into the excavation. As he examined the bodies he tingled all over. This was the moment that drove all archaeologists on, that brief starburst of exhilaration, perhaps akin to the feeling a painter experiences when he puts the master stroke on a great work of art, or a photographer who, after years of work, captures that one ineffable moment on a roll of film. He savored the electricity that now coursed through his body as if it were the finest wine, for he knew that in years to come he would thirst for its memory.
And then he looked at the way that the bodies had met their end. Because these bodies were in a drier section of the peat, and he now knew what he was looking for, he was able to discern more readily what had caused their demise. Like the first two bog bodies they had unearthed, the body of the man displayed the same telltale bite marks around his neck and chest. Strikingly different, however, was the fact that his head had been savagely twisted a full three hundred sixty degrees in its socket and was almost totally severed from the body. In addition, compared to the other bodies, his expression could almost be considered tranquil. His eyes were open and the
look on his face one of surprised horror, but it was not the look of unutterable dread that had been wrought in the faces of the previous two corpses. It was almost as if whatever had twisted his head nearly off had hit him with such force that he had scarcely had time to react. Given that this might be the case, David wondered if perhaps the bite marks had come after the fact, that first the man had been killed and then the beast had been allowed to feed.
He turned his attention to the woman beside the man. Determining the cause of her death was at first more difficult. Her neck and chest showed no traces of having been bitten, and although her expression was desperately sad, her eyes were closed and her head intact. It was only after David knelt down and leaned over her that he saw. In her small clasped hands was the handle of a knife, which she had apparently plunged into her own abdomen.
David straightened. Although dying by one’s own hand seemed a far better mode of demise than being mauled by an animal or having one’s head twisted off, for some reason, seeing how the woman met her end had a strangely disquieting affect on him.
“Do you think it was her comb?” Brad asked behind him.
“What?” he said, still distracted and gazing off into the distance.
“The Roman comb we found buried with the girl. Do you think it belonged to her?”
David looked again at the woman and at the depth of the sadness frozen in her ancient face. “There’s no way of knowing, is there?” he said. “At least not yet.” He climbed back out of the hole.
Brad continued to look down at the bodies. “No, I guess not. But she certainly looks sad enough to have wept the tears of our lady of the comb.” He noticed that David was strolling off in the direction of the hills. “Hey, where are you going?”
“To think,” David called out without looking back. “I have to think.”
As he walked he realized that what had bothered him about the woman’s suicide was the parallel he was drawing between her and Melanie. From the man’s dress it was evident that he was high up in the Roman power structure, and the woman was no doubt his wife. If the man had come here to officiate, as David surmised that he had, his wife would have accompanied him very much as Melanie had accompanied David. In fact, if the man had brought his wife, like David, he would have done so only if he believed she were in absolutely no danger, that she would be completely safe in a strange and foreign land. What, then, could have happened that had caught the man so off guard? And why hadn’t the same fate befallen his wife, instead of allowing her to linger and take her own life? David knew that it was silly to think that the events of over a dozen centuries previous might have something to do with anything happening today, but somehow he could not get the growing sense of gloom and despair that was encompassing his own family out of his mind.
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