by Tom Knox
Julia stared down the gigantic aisles of steel shelving in the great cold warehouse. It was pointless. They were defeated. Her determination of the morning had already reached a dead-end.
They retreated to the study room. It was a bleak space like a classroom in a fairly poor school: a scattering of tables, a drinks machine. There were two other people there. Two more willing scholars sent to les banlieues of anthropology. They had boxes open, or files to study – obviously they had made their finds.
Julia approached one of the scholars, a young thin man in black jeans hunched over a dirty and apparently African tribal mask.
She asked him, in her best French, how he had made his find: how he had located the tribal mask amongst the millions of boxes.
The man answered in cheerful English. He was American.
‘It’s a total nightmare. That’s why no one comes here. They say they will have properly archived everything by the end of the decade. I would give it two decades. I was lucky, I was told by someone else exactly where to find this. What do you think? A death mask of the Cameroonian Fang, eighteenth century, real human hair!’
The death mask with human hair was thrust in Julia’s face. She smiled, and backed away slightly.
Returning to his work, the man said:
‘If you haven’t got a location, a shelfmark, you’re kinda screwed. Sorry. Your only hope is chance. You might luck out.’
They weren’t going to get lucky. Julia knew it. She gazed at Alex and shrugged and they both walked, defeated, to the door. As she reached the door she realized she was passing another vast pile of boxes. She paused.
‘What? Julia? What is it?’
She said nothing. She was staring at the large piles of boxes, dozens of them, stacked roughly, unordered. Alex said again:
‘What?’
Julia had been in enough libraries and archives to recognize what this pile implied.
‘These are boxes waiting to be reshelved. Stuff that’s been examined or added to, very recently.’
‘Rrright . . .’ Alex drawled. ‘And?’
‘Think about it! We’re presuming the Prunieres collection must be here, somewhere in these archives, because we’ve searched everywhere else. If the collection exists, it must be dumped in this warehouse.’
Her lover sighed. With a hint of impatience.
‘Fine. Yes. So?’
‘Remember what Ghislaine said about the skulls I found. “They will be put in the Prunieres collection”. If Ghislaine meant that, and we have no reason to doubt him, the skulls would have been brought here recently. And added to the collection!’
Alex’s frown turned into a bright and flashing smile.
‘Get it! Clever girl! So our boxes could be . . .’
‘Just in this pile! In fact they should be here. Waiting to be reshelved –’
Julia was already wading into the stacks and columns of boxes.
The boxes were arranged in piles of ten and fifteen; it took them twenty minutes to sift through a quarter of the columns. Then forty minutes. Then fifty. It seemed they would have no luck; until Alex said, very slowly and rather portentously:
‘Julia, look. There.’ He was pointing, ‘Third box down. By the door.’
Looking across, she counted down the column of boxes. Her eyes rested on a box with a large and discernible label, handwritten and florid and visible from a distance.
Prunieres de Marvejols, 1872
There were, in fact, three boxes, all labelled the same way, sitting one on top of the other. Stifling her intense and scholastic excitement, Julia fought through the mess to the column of boxes, then they briskly carried the boxes from the stack to a table. Alex was smiling at Julia’s glee. She didn’t care; she ripped opened the first carton – like it was a take-out Indian meal and she was very hungry.
They peered inside.
The boxes contained several human skulls, obviously Neolithic. All had been trepanned. They were not the skulls that she had found. Why not?
Yet they were trepanned skulls. Besides the skulls, the boxes also yielded several flint arrowheads, in a soft cotton bag, and a file of slender documents, written in exquisitely mannered old handwriting, tiny, but entirely legible.
The notebooks of a layman Victorian scientist. They were but a few pages long. Ten minutes later she sat back. Her friend-with-benefits looked up from the wounded skulls he was examining and gave her a sly smile. He said:
‘C’mon, don’t tease. What did he say? Prunieres?’
‘He found exactly what I found, on the Cham. Skeletons with wounds, lots of them; and skulls with trepanations. Little rondelles cut from the cranium. He was hunting in the caves of Lozère, to the west, near the Tarn.’
‘I see. And?’
‘He made notes for a lecture, summing it up. Here, I’ll read it out.’ She picked up one notebook, and stolidly translated, ‘“In the Baumes-Chaudes caves, situated in that part of the valley of the Tarn which belongs to the department of Lozère, I picked up numerous bones bearing scars, characteristic of wounds produced by stone weapons. Some fifteen of these bones, such as the right and left hip bones, tibiæ, and verte-brae, still contain flint points flung with sufficient force to penetrate deeply the bony tissue. I have also presented to the Congress at Clermont many bones bearing traces of . . .”’ she paused, ‘I’m not sure of this word . . . no hold on. Ah, it’s cicatrized. “many bones bearing cicatrized wounds, from the cave of the l’Homme Mort, and beneath the Aumède dolmen . . .”’ She turned the page, and looked at Alex. ‘There’s lots more like this, he found thousands of wounded bones, and dozens of trepanations, across Lozère.’
Alex whistled, low, appreciatively.
‘Something else. And the upshot, does he speculate a link?’
She said:
‘Yes! It’s vague, and he admits it is kinda theoretical. But he wonders if . . .’ she quoted again. ‘“If we may posit the existence of a relatively advanced society, in upper Languedoc, many thousands of years before the birth of Christ, prone to severe violence. In this regard, perhaps the trepanations can be seen as a reaction to the violence. We know from the estimable Doctor Mantegazza, of Peru, who did such prodigious research in the Sanja Huara cave, in the Anta province of that distant land –”’
‘He’s a bit wordy.’
Her smile was excited. ‘He is. But he gets there! Listen. “We know from Mantegazza blah blah . . . that certain civilizations in pre-Colombian antiquity, practised the same cranial surgeries, probably as a way of exorcizing evil spirits, allowing demons to escape. It is surely” . . .’ she leaned closer to the page, squinting at a word, ‘. . . “plausible, that our ancestors on the wild Causses of the Lozère attempted similar interventions: they tried to excise the violence in their culture by freeing the demons in their brains. By drilling holes in their skulls.”’
Alex said:
‘Intriguing. Very intriguing. He thinks they were all killing each other, so they tried to save their culture with some primitive brain surgery – to get rid of violent urges. Not entirely impossible. It helps to explain Stone Age trepanation.’
She lifted a hand.
‘This last paragraph is even more curious.’
She quoted the conclusion: ‘“If I am permitted the lib erties of a veteran, in our war on scientific ignorance, I might add one more thought. Could there be a connection between my modest discoveries with the strange objects recently reported by Garnier, in his gallant explorations of the River Mekong in upper Cochinchina?”’
Alex sat forward.
‘Cochinchina. That’s the old name for French Indochina?’
Her nod was vigorous. ‘“The valiant French imperialist, so recently returned from the terrors of the Khone Falls and the delights of Louanghprabangh, tells us that he unearthed several large jars, on a plateau near Ponsabanh, which contained very similar remains as to those discovered in our very own Lozère: many dozens of skulls, trepanned, and evidence of disturbing and co
eval social violence. The connection is piquant and intriguing, and of course quite fantastical. It is for younger and better scholars to discover if there is any truth in my fantasies.”’
The notebook was closed. Alex was uncharacteristically silent. Then he spoke:
‘A link with Indochina. Laos, Cambodia. Wow.’
‘It’s time we told Rouvier some of this, there are too many links. Too many. We need to go.’
Alex agreed; he stood and stretched, and said he was impatient for a coffee, a proper grand crème. A nice bar where they could talk all this over. Quick and efficient they put lids on the cartons, replaced them on the shelf; then made swiftly for the exit and the rain.
But something nagged Julia as they went towards the big swing doors with the big grimy windows. Something had been nagging her for a while. She turned to Alex.
‘Meet me at that brasserie on the corner?’
‘Sure. But why?’
‘There’s something I want to ask that asshole at the office. You go and have your coffee. Three minutes.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed him; slung her arms around his neck; she liked the fact he was taller.
He smiled.
‘You’re getting gay on me, Julia.’ But he was still smiling, as he turned and quit the building. Julia watched him for a moment, happy amidst the terrors that she had sweet masculine Alex. But now she had a more difficult duty than kissing Alex Carmichael.
Walking to the office of the dour Frenchman she tapped on the glass partition. Sighing, tetchily, the curator put down his sports paper and slid back the glass.
Julia asked him about the pile of boxes in the study room. Obviously whoever had used the boxes had not used them to archive the discoveries that Julia had made: the new skulls had not been added. So who had been in to look at this specific collection? What had been their exact purpose in using the Prunieres boxes?
She phrased the question directly: Did the archivist remember anyone who had come in searching for the archives of Prunieres de Marvejols?
The Frenchman nodded, and wearily explained that a scholar had been in for the last three days, frantically hunting down the very same boxes, finally locating them yesterday afternoon. This frantic scholar had been quite annoying in several ways – the archivist yawned theatrically to underline the point – because the scholar had also demanded an obscure back issue of an obscure magazine of French anthropology: so that a specific article could be photocopied.
Julia asked if the archivist remembered the name of the writer of the article.
A petulant sigh.
‘Non mais je me souviens bien du titre. Nous n’arrivons pas à trouver l’article. Il a disparu. Voulez-vous connaître le titre?’
No, but I remember the title. We could not find the article. It is missing. Do you want to know the title?
‘Oui!’
The archivist sighed and turned, and sorted through a pile of documents on his desk; then he handed a piece of paper through the window. The paper had one line written in capitals: it was the title and the author of this missing article.
The author’s name might have been underlined in blood, it was so conspicuous and alarming.
Ghislaine Quoinelles.
Her anxiety and her speculations were cut short, the archivist spoke.
Is that it? We are finished?
‘Non . . . une autre question.’
Julia asked her final question. She wanted a description of the scholar. Picking up his copy of L’Equipe, the archivist yawned, and answered without looking up:
The woman is about thirty. She is a little strange. She has long dark hair, and a very white face. Perhaps she is Oriental.
Julia swallowed a surge of true and wild anxiety, she felt like she was about to throw up. The link was proved. They hadn’t just got ‘lucky’ with the box. Their find was no co incidence. Someone had been in to use this box just a day before them. But it wasn’t some friend or colleague of Ghislaine’s.
It was the murderer.
Her doomy speculations were once more interrupted. The official had slid back the glass once more: he was pointing through the glass windows of the main door:
Look! The same woman is coming again, you can ask her yourself.
Iced along her spine by the terror, Julia turned, and squinted, and saw.
Approaching the building was a strange, menacing figure, a short, lithe young woman, with the palest face, and long dark hair. The face was somehow odd, inexpressive; yet the eyes were demonic. Slant and brightly dark, and luxuriously intense.
Julia shrank back in reflex. The murderer would reach the door and discover Julia in a few moments. Three seconds. Two. One.
Chapter 20
Ponlok pressed the knife cruelly to Chemda’s pulsing neck. She was screaming and writhing but if she writhed any harder she would slash her own throat. The blood would geyser. Her legs were being slowly forced open.
Jake had a fraction of a second to decide.
He stepped back as if turning away, then he swivelled in an instant and ran two steps and flashed out a boot, as hard as he could manage. At school he’d learned to do the drop kick fast, very fast, invisibly fast. Before he got crushed in the rugby maul.
It worked. A sickeningly direct hit. The thudding sound of his steelcapped boot hitting Ponlok’s head was queasy, and cracking; but his kick did the task. The janitor went sprawling into the grit of the rancid laboratory. The knife spun silver in the sunlight, twirling into shadows.
Ponlok gave a low and ugly moan. The Khmer man was prone, bleeding, half conscious. Jake grabbed Chemda’s hands and helped her to her feet and she said:
‘Aw kohn, Quick!’
He didn’t need thankyous; he understood quick; hand in hand they skeltered down the alley, down the next alley, up the fire-escape past the jackfruit trees and into the apartment. Two minutes. Chemda bandaged his head with some torn up cotton tee shirt; he wiped himself down in the bathroom, then stuffed his few items in a bag. Chemda was in the living room, ringing someone on a phone, rattling questions in Khmer. Then she looked Jake’s way.
‘Now!’
As one, they sprinted down the stoop to the yard and then the boulevard; they were two pitiable fugitives with a couple of bags standing alongside the rumbling drag race of National Highway 6 – where anyone and everyone could drive by and see them – but then a black and white old Citroën taxi squealed to the kerbside and the driver grinned his six teeth and Chemda jumped in and said,
‘Siem Reap.’
The man lifted a hand to say whoah – Siem Reap?
Jake knew this was a long way – two hundred kilometres west, into the jungle, close to Angkor, way out west. A day’s drive. Yet the taxi driver’s sceptical eyes narrowed into shrewd acceptance – when he saw Chemda flourish a clutch of dollars from her bag: tens, twenties, hundreds.
‘Siem Reap, baat!’
The taxi dodged through the traffic, which was thinning anyway as they swiftly exited the brash peripheries of the city.
Sweating and trembling, Jake checked behind them. Nothing. Nothing but traffic. They passed Caltex stations, Happy Cellphone shops, grungy garages, then more Caltex stations, more Happy Cellphone outlets, more tyre shops; it was like the backdrop to a cheap cartoon repeating itself; then they passed an old French shop with depot de pharmacie on the side, then a Sukisoup outlet, a patch of wasteland, and then the skeletal bamboo scaffold of a half finished apartment block – and then at last the water buffalo and the paddies and the sugarpalms inclining their heads, like chancellors bowing to a despotic lord.
The royal sun.
They had made it out of the city. They were in rural Cambodia, the land of two seasons and two harvests and two million dead, the land of the killing fields.
‘The money is my mom’s,’ said Chemda. ‘I just took it.’
Jake shrugged, and didn’t reply. He wasn’t even sure if he cared, or if he was meant to reply. If he answered her that meant a dialogue and a dialogue m
eant conversation and a conversation meant they might have to talk about what just happened: Chemda had nearly been raped by an old man with a terrible scar. An old man who had been, what, altered? An old man who had endured the same terrors as Chemda’s grandmother, and who else?
It was too much. The grief in Chemda’s life was mounting like the pyramids of bashed-in skulls at Cheung Ek. And this was just Chemda’s family. There were a million more Khmer families in Cambodia, out there, each one with their little pyramid of skulls. No wonder there were so many neak ta: so many cages for the unquiet dead.
‘I was wondering if anyone else was . . . experimented on. So many of my cousins did not survive.’
Her eyes were staring ahead, lustrous, in profile. They were roaring through a little village, where women loosely turbaned by the elegant khmer scarves – the striped or chequerboard cotton krama – used as slings or turbans or babycarriers or lunchpacks or ponchos – looked up at the car. The women frowned under their kramas. Children played in the dust, quite naked.
They were going too fast. Jake didn’t care, he wanted to go fast. Faster than the police. Faster than light. Faster than life. He was hot and dehydrated. Again. And he couldn’t keep saying nothing:
‘Do you remember anyone in your family being aggressive? Demented? Like the janitor?’
‘Why?’
‘Because, Chemda –’ he hesitated, and his gaze failed to meet hers, ‘because, I reckon I have an idea why Ponlok did what he did. He wrote me this note. Just before he attacked you.’
‘What?’
‘He said What they did to me made me this way. He was trying to warn me before he did it –’
‘How long before?’
‘Moments. Just a moment.’
‘So he knew what he was going to do? Attack me?’ She exhaled. ‘And he tried to warn you and yet –’ Her face whitened with understanding. ‘He is aware of the problem but he just couldn’t help himself, an uncontrollable urge.’