Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (20 page)

Dreams that had made him who he was today.

But it had been years since the last one, and this time … this time was different.

Never before had there been a summons from Ataulphus!

Hastings yearned to go back to sleep, to pursue further revelations, but the phone rang again. He reached for the annoying object.

Soon, he would have his proof. It wouldn’t be as good as being there, standing on that dry river bed, but the live satellite images and the new computer enhancement software would find traces of the tomb.

He’d be vindicated. His life’s work complete. His dreams realized in every sense of the word.

Expecting it to be Rob, calling from the computer lab with an update, he answered the phone. At this ungodly hour, it had better be one hell of a good –

“Dad! About fucking time you picked up!”

The hour was even ungodlier by the time he had finished dealing with the bail bondsman and the police, and climbed back behind the wheel with Niccolò sulking in the passenger seat.

“The shriveled old cunt deserved it,” he said. “Sassing me at
my
reading? Hah! She asked for what she got!”

“It was an open-mic night, not a ‘reading’,” Hastings said.

“She said I had a dirty mouth, and when I told her I’d make her mouth dirty, she called me no kind of Christian! Can you believe that? Who does she think she is, calling me –”

“She was a nun. A seventy-year-old nun in a wheelchair, and you slapped her.”

“Fucking bitch.”

Hastings sat for a moment, trying to compose his thoughts. Here he was, pissed off and tired, on what was supposed to be the eve of his greatest triumph. And his son was a fucking idiot. A fucking nun-slapping idiot.

Now he was faced with either driving Niccolò all the way across town to his tacky basement studio apartment, or take him home to the condo, which he did
not
want to do.

O Fortuna
sounded again. On the other end of the line was a grouchy campus security guard, wanting to know if Hastings really needed to keep the computer lab open and empty all damn night.

“Empty?” he cried, panic surging through him. “What do you mean, empty? Rob’s not there?”

“Nobody’s been here,” said the guard. “I could have gone home by now otherwise.”

Rob and his hot date! Rob and his hormone-befuddled priorities! All their work, down the drain? Hastings’ mind whirled like Hero’s aeolipile.

“Don’t close the lab,” he told the guard. “I’ll be there as soon as I can!”

The guard did not seem thrilled by this, but Hastings was beyond caring. He snapped shut the phone and roared out of the precinct parking lot faster than was advisable.

“The fuck crawled up your sour ass?” Niccolò asked as they sped toward the university.

“Rob … the computers … damn it, damn him, and damn me for not knowing anything about them!” Hastings hammered the heel of his hand on the steering wheel.

“Chill your shit already. I use computers all the fucking time. I edited
Fossil Lake
on five different word processors. Anything that fag-boy Rob can do, I can do better.”

“Nicco –”

“And I told you, don’t call me Nicco!”

What choice did he have? What else was there? Maybe miracles did happen, and Niccolò could get the programs to work.

He soon found out that wasn’t the case.

What followed was an ordeal of anger, frustration and profanities. Niccolò ended up on the phone with the JPL technicians, screaming at them, calling them ‘curry-fucking imbeciles’ among other things, demanding they fix what he’d only made worse. Hastings had lost the last of his own temper in turn and told him to get the fuck out before he threw him out.

“Yeah, well, you know what?! Fuck you, Dad! Fuck you and your fucking university! You care more for your fucking dead people than you do for your own son anyway! You think you’re so fucking superior to me, don’t you?! We’re no different, you and me! You hate all these pathetic sacks of fuck as much as I do. You’re just too fucking chicken to say it. You hear that?! I’m the brave one! You’re the pussy!”

He stomped out, still ranting, and Hastings sank into a chair wondering how much it would take to bribe his way back into the goodwill of anybody at JPL. Not that it mattered, if he’d missed the satellite flyover window. He might never have another chance.

The door to the computer lab banged open and Rob rushed in, babbling frantic apologies. He looked terrible, clothes torn, face bloodied, an eye swollen nearly shut.

“My God, what happened?” Hastings asked.

As it turned out, Rob had not forgotten. Neither had he blown it off in favor of his hot date. He’d had every intention of being at the lab on time, until his hot date’s jealous ex showed up. Rob had defended the girl at the cost of getting the shit beat out of him.

“Would have called you but my phone got broken in the fight,” he said, “and I didn’t have your private number anywhere else.”

He had then discharged himself from the emergency room against medical advice to make it over here in hopes of still salvaging some of the project.

Miracles, it seemed, did happen after all.

Working together, Rob at the computer and Hastings on the phone, they were able to smooth things over with the technicians. Their optimal flyover window had passed by then, but by incredible good fortune they found another satellite that could get some images of their desired coordinates a day or so later.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was much better than nothing.

By Monday morning, Maximillian Hastings would either have his long-awaited discovery, or he’d know that his search had to continue.

*     *     *

The pavilion was enormous and grand, a palace, no mere tent. Inside, hanging white linen divided the immense space into smaller sections. The laughing of women filtered in from the back, the piercing, horse-like laugh of Galla Placidia rising above the others.

Bright Persian-style rugs covered the ground, overlapping and caked with dust, tracing a path to the room where Ataulphus held court. This large, airy space could not help but impress visitors with its splendor. Slaves, ironically wearing senatorial togas, waited on the many guests and on the king himself. He dwarfed all, seated as he was in his huge golden throne of Sassinid design. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but imposing, glittering with darts of light.

Gaius Maximius Herenus approached and dropped to one knee. It didn’t bother him that his master was not a citizen, not a Roman, not even a Greek or an Etruscan. He was an architect, after all. His goal was building, and for that he needed to follow the power and the money. Ataulphus being a German didn’t matter; what mattered was that the king had the resources to have a mausoleum constructed – an ambitious one at that! – and he had chosen Herenus to do it.

Well, chosen was perhaps the wrong word. The architect had been taken by the Goths during the sack of Rome, and, while he had since been able to earn himself a better position, he was still a slave.

“Tell me, builder, how progresses my sister’s husband’s tomb?” The king spoke terrible Latin.

“
It will be completed tomorrow, as you have wished, Your Majesty. Downstream has already been prepared. Once the entombment is done, the earth may be filled back in around it. If the workers are as quick with their shovels in the burying as they were in the excavating, a day more should suffice for the dams to be torn down and the river let flow again around and over it.”

“
If all is in readiness as you say, Priscus Attalus will lead the burial procession tomorrow at sunset, and you will be among the guests of honor.”

He bowed his head. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“You have done well, Herenus. Very well.”

*     *     *

Between disrupted sleep patterns and the excitement of the weekend, it wasn’t until he stepped into the lecture hall on Monday that Professor Hastings realized he’d entirely forgotten about the assigned quiz.

It hardly meant he would break character and let his students off the hook. No amount of tiredness or distraction could do that. He’d dragged himself away from the computer lab just as the images were beginning to come in, being able to only glance at the first few. If
he
had to suffer, why should
they
have it any easier?

He told them to get out sheets of paper as he made up questions from memory and wrote them on the board. Naturally, most of the laptop brigade didn’t even have paper, which resulted in an eternity of shuffling around as they borrowed from their lower-tech, but better-prepared classmates. 

The fast-food egg sandwich he’d eaten for breakfast seemed to be doing loops in his stomach, spreading discomfort through his midsection. He wished he’d thought to grab some antacids from his desk drawer.

An irate call from Nicco – same shit, different day – hadn’t helped either. Nicco ranting and raving and blaming his father for him having to take the bus across town at four in the morning; as best as Hastings could decipher, a homeless person at the bus stop had either puked on Nicco, picked on Nicco, or tried to pick up on Nicco, or possibly some combination thereof.

Hastings, overwhelming tiredness finally making him snap, had told the obnoxious child to fuck off and get a life. Then he’d hung up, feeling a pang of guilt suffused by a much greater relief.

The matter of paper sorted out at last, the class went to work. He noticed Jasmine in her usual spot, brow furrowed and chewing her lip. So much for his efforts to help her find time in her plans for the reading. Good God, was even flipping through the Cliff’s Notes too much to ask?

After collecting the finished quizzes, he set them aside to grade later. Partly so the students could stew in suspense, and partly because those that failed would then figure they had no reason to stay for the rest of the class, when he wasn’t done with them yet.

He began lecturing on the barbarian sack of Rome and the resultant shock to the collective psyche of the entire Mediterranean world, then moved on to Augustine’s interpretation of those events. In the middle of that, the side door burst open.

Dread and fury swelled in Hastings. His breath went short and his chest tight, constriction seizing his ribs. It would be Nicco, he knew. Damnable Nicco, spewing a torrent of vile abuse, making a spectacle –

It was Rob, clutching his laptop computer. “Professor Hastings! You’ve got to see this!”

Had he been thinking no distraction could make him let his students off the hook? Screw that. He stopped mid-sentence, mouth dry, heart thrumming.

Rob rushed forward. He was grinning like a madman despite his bruises. Hastings peripherally noticed a curious buzz among the students – the first time the wretches had shown any interest all semester – but his eyes were only for the screen.

It showed a computer-enhanced, satellite image of a river reduced by drought to a trickle. A slightly-curved line showed where an ancient dam must have been … a dam perhaps built to slow the water’s course and collect washed-away soil, countering erosion that might otherwise have exposed a large buried object.

And there, in the center of a wide spot, were the outlines of angles too straight and even to be anything made by nature. Suggestions of corners, a square sunk into the riverbed …

His legs went weak. He wore his own madman’s grin, filled with such joy and triumph he could barely think straight.

Then his knees buckled. He felt himself drop to the floor. Though he saw his students, their reaction now one of alarm, he heard only the rapid-fire tattoo of his pulse thundering in his head.

People crowded around him. Kneeled over him. There was a sensation of lift.

Something about a hospital? Nonsense; he was just giddy with the thrill of the moment! So giddy that a warbling siren-sound replaced the staccato filling his ears.

Something about tests? What tests? The quizzes? Forget the quizzes; right now he’d gladly give each of them an A for the entire course!

It occurred to him that he was moving. Flat on his back, but moving. With an effort of concentration, he focused and discerned that he was in an ambulance.

“Professor? Max? Max!”

Rob’s voice. Rob’s battered face, wrenched with worry. Rob talking to him, random words of reassurance.

But never mind that. Never mind any of that.

“Did … did we … did we really find it?” Hastings gasped.

Emotion flooded Rob’s eyes. He squeezed Hastings’ hand. “Yes. Yes, Professor. We did.
You
did. You found Alaric’s tomb.”

A tear ran down his cheek, the last sight Hastings saw before his own eyes drifted closed.

*     *     *

In the dry riverbed, the marble tomb sat sunken belowground, a narrow ramped causeway leading down to its entrance. The plain and unadorned stonework seemed stark and too modest for its purpose, though a vital detail had not been overlooked –
Alaricus Rex Gothorum
read the simple inscription above the door
.