The ancient teeth gleamed in the shivering light, white and yellow. And smiling.
The hole in the bone was, in itself, no revelation. Julia had seen enough damaged bones to know that splinters and fractures were only to be expected in ancient remains: Homo sapiens emerging from the Ice Age had to fight savagely for food and survival, with cave bears and wolverines, with leopards and hyenas. Accidents were also common: from cliff falls and rock falls, and hunting wounds.
But this hole in the head had been made precisely. Carved. Sculpted. Not intended to be lethal, yet drilled into the bone.
She put the cranium on the cave floor and made some notes. Her grimy gloves soiled the white pages as she scribbled. She had discovered, surely, a skull deliberately pierced, or “trepanned,” in a form of early surgery: this was a Stone Age lobotomy, someone diligently excising a disk-shaped hole in the high forehead of the cranium.
Trepanning was well attested in the literature. It was the earliest form of surgery ever discovered; there were several examples of it in museums dating from the probable age of this skulclass="underline" 5000 B. C.
But no one had any proper sense why Stone Age men did it. So this discovery was still quite something.
A noise disturbed her excited thoughts. Julia set down her notebook and stared into the murk, beyond the faint cone of light cast by her headlamp; the shadows of the cave danced around her. She spoke into the gloom.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Hello? Ghislaine? Annika?” Silence. “Alex?”
The silence was almost absolute. Only the vague whistle of the distant wind, up there on the Cham, answered her question.
No one was down here. No one but Julia Kerrigan, thirty-four years old, single, childless, with her degree from Montreal and her antistatic tweezers — her and this unnamed human skull. And maybe a rat.
Julia returned to her inviting task. She had two hours left before the day was done. And she was truly looking forward to supper now: when the archaeologists got together, as always, in the little Brasserie Stevenson in Pont de Montvert, to discuss the day’s finds — tonight of all nights would be fun. She would nonchalantly say to the oleaginous team leader: Oh, Ghislaine, I found a skull. Trepanned. I think it is Neolithic.
Her boss would beam and glow and congratulate her, and her friends would smile and laugh and toast her success with Côtes du Rhône, and then she would call Mom and Dad in the little house in Marysville and she would make them understand why she had left them to go to Europe. Why she still wasn’t coming home. Because her willful ambition had been justified, at last….
But wait. As she turned her head from her notebook to her bone brushes, she noticed a second whiteness, another gleam in the corner.
Another skull?
Julia brushed, very delicately, for a moment, and confirmed. It was a second skull. And this, here: in the farthest corner. What was this? A third?
What was all this?
Now she was working — and working hard. She knew that as soon as she told everyone, they would come and take over her cave, but this marvelous cache, this trove of bones, this was her find, she had spent all summer waiting for something like this — she had spent fifteen years waiting for something like this — so she was damned if she was going to surrender it without giving it every wallop of energy, this one last day.
Away down the passage, rain was falling, spattering on the metal ladder — no doubt blackening the sober old monoliths of the Cham des Bondons — but she didn’t care: now she could see that the cave floor was barely concealing, quite astonishingly, entire human skeletons.
All of them wounded.
She stared. Appalled. The light in her headlamp was almost gone, but it was still strong enough to illuminate what she had found.
Three skulls had holes in them. Bored holes. Trepanations. The four other skeletons, a man, woman, and two children, did not have holes in the head, but they exhibited another, deeply disturbing feature.
Julia rubbed some grit from her eyes, as if she could wipe away the unlikeliness of what she was seeing. But it was incontestable. The creamy-gray ribs and neck bones of these skeletons rammed with flint arrowheads. At all angles. The flesh that these arrows had once pierced had rotted away, thousands of years ago, but the stone arrowheads remained, lying between ribs, jammed between vertebrae.
These four Stone Age people had been brutally murdered, or even executed. Shot with arrows from all sides. Overkilled. Ritually. Julia couldn’t help feeling this had something to do with the other skulls, the trepanning, the holes in the head. But what?
Her thoughts were halted. Abruptly.
That noise again.
This time it was utterly unmistakable. Someone, something, someone, was descending the metal ladder. The rusty steel rattle seemed overloud in the darkness, darkness intensified by the fading glimmer of Julia’s dying headlamp.
She lifted a hand to the lamp and tapped. No good. The light was all gone. The batteries were dead; she could see almost nothing. But she could still hear. And the noise of someone approaching, in the somber darkness, made her back away, reflexively.
“Hello? Who is it? Who’s there?”
The darkness did not reply. A black shape was just visible in the gray sketch of light admitted by the cave entrance. The dark shape stopped. Big. Imposing. Julia strained to see a face but all she could discern was an ominous silhouette. Now the dark shape was hurrying down the passageway, straight toward her. Coming close, and closer.
Julia screamed.
2
Vang Vieng was the strangest place Jake had ever been. Two years working as a photographer in Southeast Asia — from the full-moon parties of Ko Phangan, where thousands of drugged up young Western backpackers danced all night on coralline beaches next to raggle-taggle Sea Gypsies, to the restaurants of Hanoi where Chinese businessmen ate the beating hearts of cobras ripped from living snakes while making deals for nuclear power stations — had inured him, he thought, to the contrasts and oddness of tropical eastern Asia.
But Vang Vieng, on a tributary of the Mekong River halfway up the long, obscure, serpentine little country of Laos (and as he had to keep reminding himself, Laos was pronounced to rhyme with how, not house), had shown him that the eccentric contrariness of Indochina was almost inexhaustible. Here was an ugly concrete town in a ravishing ancient valley — where hedonism, communism, capitalism, and Buddhism collided, simultaneously.
He’d been here in Vang Vieng three days, taking photos for a coffee-table book on Southeast Asian beauty spots. It had been quite a long assignment, and it was nearly over. They’d finished the tour of Thailand, spent two weeks in Vietnam, and already had Halong Bay in the can.
The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would go by cab to Vientiane, the Laotian capital — and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.
That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.
It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then, there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker; in fact, it was dwindling. All those people with camera phones, all that easy to use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop, they made it all so simple: anyone could take a decent snap. Literally anyone. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Robert Capa.