“I think we should leave.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think we should pack up and move.”
“Oh, that really takes the cake! I make the archaeological discovery of the decade, and just because our dog disappears you tell me that we should gather up all our things and move away.” He threw his hands up in the air in exasperation.
Melanie seemed to see the ridiculousness of this suggestion, but the incidents of the previous evening still had her deeply shaken. “Well I don’t know what else to suggest!” she cried.
“Well neither do I!” he shouted back, and at almost precisely the same instant the air was split by several loud banging sounds. They looked at each other in confusion. Something had pounded on the door.
David approached it and opened it cautiously. Outside, standing on the steps, was a tall, grim fright of a woman with severe features and salt-and-pepper hair tied back in a matronly bun.
“I heard you shouting,” she said dryly. “I knew I had to knock loud to get your attention.”
David blushed, growing slightly embarrassed. Both he and Melanie stared at the woman curiously.
She looked back at them with equal uncertainty. “You did advertise for a housekeeper, did you not?” she said. “If I’ve come at an inopportune moment, I’d be glad to come back some other time.”
This time it was Melanie’s turn to be embarrassed. “Oh, no, please come in. You see, our dog vanished inexplicably last night, and it’s just got us a little rattled.”
“As I can see.”
“Please come in,” Melanie repeated. “What did you say your name was?”
“Mrs. Comfrey,” she said.
“Have a seat, won’t you, and please forgive us.”
Mrs. Comfrey did as she was invited. Both David and Melanie looked at each other sheepishly, not knowing what to say to the other next. Mrs. Comfrey intervened. “Please pardon me my presumption, but if your dog has vanished, I shouldn’t fret too much about it.”
“Why?” David asked.
“Because the brambles around these parts are filled with enough rabbits to lead a dog astray for days.”
“You see,” David said, casting Melanie an I-told-you-so glance. He looked back at Mrs. Comfrey and assessed the features of his new and unexpected ally. To his regret, Mrs. Comfrey was a dour-looking creature with a rather too-small head, and sharp, pale features. Her dowdy, navy-blue cotton dress covered a large and bony body, and on her long, shapeless legs she wore heavy brown nylons. He noticed also that her lilac perfume was just a little too oppressive and marveled once again at the bizarre creatures Fenchurch St. Jude seemed to turn out.
Melanie offered Mrs. Comfrey a cup of tea and when Mrs. Comfrey accepted Melanie vanished momentarily into the kitchen to fetch it. David followed her. After the kitchen door shut behind them he walked up to his wife’s side and gave her a hug. “Honey, I’m sorry for losing my temper.”
Melanie turned around. “Oh, David, I’m sorry too. I know I can’t expect you to abandon your work just because Ben’s disappeared, but I have a terrible feeling that something awful has happened to him.”
David stared affectionately into his wife’s eyes and decided to express his true feelings. “Well, I think something might have happened to him also, but I don’t know what. Let’s give it a few days and see. Maybe he’ll turn up.”
As they continued to embrace, David wondered if he should mention his slightly less than favorable opinion of Mrs. Comfrey, but decided against it. So far Melanie had not expressed any similar criticisms, and he decided it was best to leave well enough alone. He did, however, resolve to stay awhile and see how things went.
They returned to the living room and Melanie proceeded with the interview. David was pleased to see that in spite of her off-putting appearance, at every twist and turn Mrs. Comfrey handled the questions like an old pro, and near the end of their conversation Melanie seemed quite taken with her.
Suddenly Melanie blurted out, “You’re so nice, you can’t be from—” She stopped abruptly, realizing that her remark could be taken as quite offensive.
Mrs. Comfrey smiled knowingly. “—from Fenchurch St. Jude? No, I’m not, and I must say that I’m pleased that you’re not also.” Then she looked from side to side and lowered her voice as if to make sure no one was listening in and said: “Just between you and me, the people of Fenchurch St. Jude have quite a reputation in these parts for being... well, for being a bit queer. I’m from Leeming.”
“Oh, the place where the woman was shot,” Melanie interjected.
Mrs. Comfrey’s features darkened. “What a nasty bit of business that was. Twice in the back. Still haven’t caught the fellow, you know.” She shook her head in concern.
After a few other sundry exchanges Melanie looked across at David and he perceived the meaning of her glance. She wanted to hire Mrs. Comfrey and she was looking for his approval. He nodded favorably.
Melanie turned back to the older woman. “Mrs. Comfrey, if you like, the position is yours.”
“Very good,” Mrs. Comfrey said amiably.
“There’s just one other thing.”
Mrs. Comfrey regarded her quizzically.
“Would you like the position to be live-in, or would you be returning home every evening to... your husband or something?”
“I’m widowed,” Mrs. Comfrey said matter-of-factly. “And I don’t fancy making the long haul back to Leeming every night, especially with the shooting and all. I’d prefer it if the position were live-in.”
“Then live-in it is,” Melanie said, clinching the deal.
David was surprised at the outcome, for given Melanie’s mood earlier in the morning he would have thought it impossible to please her in any matter. But he was delighted that in this one small item, their life seemed to be working out. He decided to test the waters further.
“Would it be all right if I left for the digs now?” he asked cautiously.
Melanie looked at him quickly and for a brief moment her eyes still seemed to be filled with anxiety. But then she smiled. “Will you excuse me for a moment,” she said to Mrs. Comfrey as she stood and accompanied her husband to the door.
She looked at David apologetically. “Darling, I just wanted to say one more time that I’m sorry about this morning. I know things are going to go better now that I have some help around here.” She kissed her husband good-bye and he departed.
Outside, it was another gray day, bright, but with a solid layer of clouds still completely obscuring the sun, and on his walk to the excavations David found himself once again troubled about the episode the night before. He looked at the thicket uneasily as he passed by, and wondered anew what could possibly explain the mysterious pain he had experienced.
When he reached the camp he found Brad, as usual, already deeply immersed in work. David looked down into the pit and saw that the younger man had almost completely excavated the second body. David whistled appreciatively and felt a chill of excitement when he saw the state of preservation of the second fallen form. This time, resting on the murky red mat of dog’s flesh was the body of a man, an old man, again as eerily intact as if he had died only a few days earlier. On his head he wore a pointed skin cap typical of men during the Iron Age, and around his waist there was a smooth hide belt. Other than that he was naked. Whatever excitement David felt, however, was quickly alloyed with fear when he looked at the old man’s visage. Although peat-encrusted, around his neck and chest were the same distinctive marks of deterioration as they had first observed in the young girl, and his face was contorted with the same terrible rictus of death. He too had been a sacrificial victim to the ancient and unknown animal.
“My God, what are we on to here?” David murmured. Brad looked up. “It’s really incredible, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than incredible,” David returned. “It clinches the importance of the find.”
“What do you mean?” Brad asked. “I thought we knew the find was important as soon as we discovered the bite marks on the young girl.”
“True. But if we had only that information to publish, it would have been challenged in the academic literature as a fluke, a one-time occurrence. But with the discovery of this second body we have far more persuasive evidence that it was a regularly practiced ritual. The people who lived in these hills had quite a relationship with the creature responsible for this. I honestly can’t think of any historical precedent for such a thing. I mean, the Aztecs used to feed portions of their sacrificed victims to animals in the royal menagerie, but that was only after they had been killed by human hands. In this instance, however, it seems that the Iron Age tribe to which these two people belonged had developed a regular and consistent relationship with an animal that roamed wild, probably lived in the bog. I really can’t think of another instance of that happening in history.”
“Any idea what the animal was?” Brad asked.
David frowned. “Well, the problem is that it had to be both large enough and aggressive enough to be able to attack and bite a person around the neck while they were standing and tied to a stake, and there just weren’t many fauna in this region at that time capable of such behavior. It’s conceivable that it might have been a wolf, but wolves, we know, tend to nip and bite their victims all over, and both of these individuals seem to have wounds only around their necks and stemums.” David stroked his chin thoughtfully. “There is another possibility, however.”
Brad looked at him quizzically.
“It may have been a badger.”
“A badger? Come on,” Brad challenged.
“Now hear me out. As you may know, badgers belong to a family of carnivores known as
Mustelidae,
and although they’re typically smaller and thus aren’t usually considered in the same league as, say, a panther or a tiger, they’re often fierce flesh eaters. The Arctic wolverine, for example, lives on large herbivores like reindeer and even small elk. In India and parts of Africa the honey badger or ratel can also develop incredibly bloodthirsty habits, especially in its old age. There are reports on record of them killing pigs, sheep, and even cattle, and although there are no documented cases of it, it is generally acknowledged that an aging and ill-tempered ratel could quite easily kill a man.”
Brad fidgeted uneasily.
David continued. “Similarly, the North American badger or wolverine is also acknowledged as a vicious killer and will eat dead animals as well as prey it kills.”
“So, what kind of badger lived here?”
“The European badger.”
“And is it known as a killer?”
David’s expression changed. “Not really. They’re normally considered peaceful animals unless molested, but there are always freak occurrences. It could have been an uncommonly large and mean animal. And...” He paused.
“And?”
“Well, it could have been domesticated in some strange way. Perhaps it had been trained to feed on people tied to stakes, and once it had tasted human flesh, acquired quite a liking for it.”
“Domesticated? Come on,” Brad protested again. “Stranger things have been known to happen,” David retorted. “Did you know that in 1899 the geologist Rudolf Hauthal led an expedition to Ultima Esperanza in Chile and in a cave in the mountains discovered a pen containing the bones and droppings of the now-extinct giant sloth? Keep in mind that the bones of that animal reveal that it averaged fifteen feet in height. In the cave, Hauthal also found the remains of an ancient kitchen, mussel shells, and charred pieces of guanaco and deer bones. It seems that the cave’s inhabitants kept the terrifying beasts as a ready food source.”
Brad just stared at David for several seconds and then shook his head. “You never cease to amaze me. How do you know all of these things?”
David blushed and tried to shift the focus of the question to a more impersonal level. “But that’s exactly my point. To be an archaeologist you have to have a tremendously broad base of knowledge. You never know when you’re going to run into special circumstances, such as this, where you’re going to have to know a lot more about a situation or environment than just the age of the geological strata you’re digging in.”
Brad nodded dutifully, as one duly chastised. “Getting back to this badger theory. From what you know about badgers, do these bite marks look like something they would make?”
This took all of the wind out of David’s sails. In truth, when he had suggested the badger theory it was less because he believed it and more because he was growing increasingly desperate to construct some sort of theoretical framework with which they might begin to understand the puzzles they were continuing to unearth. “I’m afraid not,” he said reluctantly. “Here the badger idea has two counts against it. First, badgers have incredibly sharp claws and somewhere on the bodies we would expect to find someplace where they had scratched or hooked into their victims, but we do not. Secondly, they usually kill by a blow to the top of their victim’s skull and then disemboweling. Obviously, we do not find instances of that here.”
Both men looked again at the newly uncovered body before them.
Brad paused and leaned meditatively against his shovel handle. “Well, when it gets right down to it, neither of these bodies has any claw marks or scratches anywhere on it. Can you think of any animal that could stand and gnaw away at their necks, but not leave any marks where it gripped them?”
“Only one that had been declawed,” David said uneasily.
“Or one that had hands less like an animal’s and more like a human being’s,” Brad countered with equal trepidation.
“Brad, those bite marks are not human.”
“But that’s just it. They’re not anything we can think of. None of this seems to fit in.”
For several moments both of them just stood silently as they nervously studied the frozen terror of the ancient form before them, neither of them able to penetrate any further into the strange regions their thinking was leading them.
Finally Brad spoke. “Now is maybe not the time to bring it up, but I have some slightly unpleasant news for you.”
“What’s that?” David asked.
“Well, obviously we’ve got a pretty rich site here. We’ve dug in six spots and already come up with two bodies, and there’s every reason to believe that we may dig up more.”