Sleepwalker (13 page)

But the source of his guilt, and the reason the dream kept returning, was in a meeting in a sunny coffee shop on Solano Avenue.

She had looked beautiful, and Davis saw how ironic it was to meet for lunch like this, like lovers who still did not know each other well. She had mentioned that perhaps they should discuss their future, as though seeing her over breakfast, or on her way out the door to a convention, did not give them a chance to talk about their lives. But she was right, of course. Their lives had become a string of brief meetings. They had to meet like this, like near strangers, to discover something resembling a future.

Davis was due to deliver a paper on early navigation in San Diego that weekend. He was awash in concepts of landfall and dead reckoning. It was a convention of archaeologists from around the world, and the chance to deliver a paper there was a genuine prize.

She had ordered espresso, and said she was not hungry, and after a moment Davis saw that her energetic glow was the aura of pure panic.

“Davis,” she said, and she nearly could not speak. “I wake up in the morning, and I can't remember anything after Eyewitness News.”

Davis had heard this before, but never with such feeling. “You should get help,” he said. He added, with what he hoped sounded like sympathy, “I want to help you, Margaret.”

“I'll change,” she said, tugging a Kleenex from her purse. “You don't think I can, do you?”

“I think you can.”

“But listen to how you say it. So tentatively. I'm off to Seattle tonight. Did you forget?”

“I knew you were going somewhere.”

“Come with me. Please, Davis. We can—”

She saw him shake his head and look away.

Her voice was husky, like the voice of a much older person when she said, “It would mean so much to me.”

“I have that paper to give. The one on ship's ballast and how Drake enjoyed his California vacation.”

He had tried to make a joke of it, but Margaret bunched her Kleenex tightly. “You've been working on that paper for months.”

She said this with a smile that troubled him.

If he tasted his coffee now, he knew it would taste like purest acid. “I'll fly back up to see you in Seattle. Right after I give my paper.”

She did not speak for a while. Then, “I don't think I'll go. I can't stand to be alone anymore. It's just the University of Washington. I'll tell them I'm sick.”

“They'll talk, you know.”

“What will they say?”

“You know exactly what they'll say.”

“They'll say that I drink. And I do. Can the truth really hurt me?”

He did not respond to that question, because Davis believed that of all things in the world, it is truth that is most relentless. “Then I'll fly back early. I'll just spend Friday night, just enough time to slaughter a few French vowels and try to dig up my German. I'll give my paper at ten, and be back in time for lunch.”

But he should have canceled. He nearly did. It would have been so easy to make a phone call, and bow out of this convention. There would always be another. But the work he had put into the paper, and his vanity, and perhaps even his exasperation with her, made him feel that he would go for just the one night.

“You promise you'll fly back early?”

Davis promised. And he did fly back early, after giving the paper, a shimmering swimming pool in the distance behind a flock of scholarly heads.

There had been applause, and then offers to have lunch. Davis managed to excuse himself in three languages, and each time added, in English, that he had promised to see his wife for lunch, six hundred miles away.

It was his last morning as an ignorant man. The truth had not broken upon him, and would not until he returned to phone calls from friends as soon as he had stepped into the empty apartment.

No one needed to accuse him. He knew the truth. Margaret had every right to resent him, to hate him, to hold him responsible for her death. He should have been with her.

At two o'clock that morning Margaret had driven a vintage MG the wrong way down the Bay Shore Freeway. He had imagined it so many times he felt that he had seen it happen. Cars avoided her, spinning and squealing. She drove, seemingly oblivious, past the Army Street turnoff. The night was wet. There was a drizzle, fine as flour. She collided with a Chrysler driven by a man wanted in two states for various crimes. To make his trip easier, this man had carried plastic antifreeze containers of gasoline in the back seat.

The two cars burned for three hours, and what was left was, judging from the single agonizing
Chronicle
photograph Davis had seen before he could avoid looking, a pile of white ash.

Maybe she hadn't felt it. Maybe she hadn't known.

Grief had devastated Davis. For weeks he had been unable to focus a single thought except
She's gone
.

He only gradually returned to his lectures, and the lab at the university campus. When the dreams, and the sleepwalking began, after three or four months, he had known he might never recover fully from losing Margaret.

Perhaps he never would. Only now, with Irene beside him, could he imagine a time when, like a normal person, like his old self, he would experience, day after day, a productive life. He was lucky to have called Dr. Higg. Dr. Higg had always believed in the power of work, and Davis had always believed in the magic of travel.

Irene was a wonder. For a moment Davis felt a feeling he could only call gratitude. Toward Dr. Higg. And toward Irene, and the powers, whatever they were, that knitted life.

Davis was up at dawn, and went for a quick run on the rugby field beside the Ouse. It felt cold, but there was no frost, and as the sun leaked over the Minster in the distance, its light was warm.

“Today, we will go visit a very important man,” said Irene. “We will visit a man who knows everything about the history of York. I have mentioned him to you many times. He is called August Foote. You have no doubt seen his bookstore.”

Davis unlaced his Reeboks. “I need to spend as much time with Dr. Higg as possible today.”

“But he returns to London at noon. You will have all afternoon.”

“How can Mr. Foote help us? Or are we simply working on educating me on the rich lore of York? You don't have to convince me. I love this town.”

“There are things you do not know.”

Davis conceded that without a murmur. He knew very little, certainly, about life and death, and most of that was probably wrong.

“Except that Dr. Foote does not like archaeologists, so you will find it a very amusing meeting.”

“He doesn't like what?”

“He hates us.” Irene laughed. “You will be very amused.”

“How could someone dislike archaeologists? Or is it our team in particular he doesn't like?”

“You will see. He will especially hate you when he sees you. I had to beg him. ‘Oh, please, do talk to us.' He is a very grumpy man.”

“I think I'll go back to London with Dr. Higg.”

“It will be very amusing.”

They had planned to meet at Langton's office, but Mrs. Webster, the secretary, was setting forth the cups and spoons unattended by Higg or Mr. Langton. She had not heard from either man, and she was irritated. “They could at least ring me and explain that they had a delay, couldn't they? It wouldn't be too much to ask, would it?”

Jane sat with her arms crossed, looking both prim and sullen. She wished Davis and Irene a good morning in a sweet voice, but did not meet anyone's eyes. Mandy was delighted to see everyone, it seemed, and described a Jimmy Stewart movie she had seen on television the night before as “his best movie, fullstop.” Irene offered that she had not seen it, and Mandy began telling the plot.

Peter arrived, his work boots slashed with dew, looking disheveled, although this was usual for a field-working archaeologist. His fingers trembled as he rolled a cigarette. “I do hate meetings,” he said. “Especially when they are so slow starting.”

This one was remarkably slow starting. The entire tale of the Jimmy Stewart western was unwound by the time Davis suggested a telephone call to Mr. Langton.

Irene and Mandy chatted happily. Jane read articles, which she underlined with a nylon-tipped red pen. Peter smoked, and gazed at his cigarette smoke thoughtfully. Davis gathered that his old colleague did not feel up to conversation. Peter seemed determined to create the world's oddest-looking cigarette. Each one he rolled was more peculiar in shape than the one before it. Davis considered it a miracle of physics that smoke could be drawn through such paper tubes.

“Mr. Langton extends his most earnest apologies. He says,” reported Mrs. Webster, “that he overslept.”

She paused, and repositioned the coffee cups. “The alarm, he said.”

“It didn't go off,” said Mandy.

“It happens, doesn't it?” said Mrs. Webster.

When Langton arrived, pink-cheeked and wispy but otherwise much as he always looked, he gazed quickly around without managing to speak. He apologized, vaguely, but was evidently alarmed.

“Dr. Higg isn't here yet,” Davis volunteered.

Langton blinked. “I don't like this at all,” he said.

Davis and Mandy asked a stream of questions, but Langton hurried to his desk and dialed one number, and then another.

“I don't like it a bit,” he said, replacing the receiver. “No answer at the laboratory. I don't know what to think.”

Davis asked a series of questions which Langton ignored, until at last he answered all of them in a burst. Dr. Higg had gone off to spend the night in the laboratory. Langton was not sure why, but it was no doubt to discover how the Skeldergate Man was moved during the night. “Or some such thing, I don't know. He's a very determined man, you know.”

Davis turned to Peter. “Did you bring your car?” he asked.

“Not today,” said Peter, tapping ash from his cigarette. “I walked.”

Davis excused himself, and ran down the stairs, into the bright, cold morning. It was an easy run up Gillygate. The only pedestrians were people in a hurry to get somewhere, and there were no window-shoppers or tourists.

Davis ran up Lord Mayor's Walk, and sprinted across the street in the heavy traffic. At first he had been only moderately worried. This was only a precaution, to make sure that Dr. Higg was not, for example, trapped in the lab by a door that stuck, or some equally silly accident.

But as he bounded across the glistening green grass, sending a blackbird from its place on the garden wall, he was not so sure. He reasoned with himself that by acting so hastily he was causing himself to worry for no real reason.

The outside door to the lab was unlocked. Davis could not decide whether this was a good sign or not. It meant, he decided, thumping down the dark stairs, that Higg had not left the lab. He surely would have remembered to lock the door.

Unless he had been in a great hurry.

The stairs seemed endless, but each door was unlocked until he stood in the great lab itself, brightly lit and cold, as always.

Everything was exactly as it should be, thought Davis. Every table was straight. The finds trays were all stacked neatly. Everything was in perfect order.

Davis approached the door to the small room at the end very slowly. He called out Dr. Higg's name several times, but there was no sound. The door to the small room was just slightly ajar. This was a good sign, thought Davis.

But it wasn't really. All it meant was that no one had shut the door behind them. And it showed that the light was still on in the small room.

Davis did not want to move.

Hurry. There might be something wrong. Be quick.

Davis warily crept to the door and parted his lips to say Dr. Higg's name, but he did not bother. He put his forefinger on the door handle and pushed.

The door would not open. Davis put his weight against it. The door reluctantly lurched open, slowly and more slowly, with a weight behind it the nature of which Davis guessed, with a knot in his stomach.

Dr. Higg was on the floor, bent sideways where the door had half pushed and half rolled him. His face was a mask of horror—mouth agape, eyes wide. There was a sigh from Dr. Higg as Davis rolled him flat, and warm breath came and went at his nostrils, although his eyes continued to stare.

Only then did Davis register in his mind what he had seen as he squeezed into the room, in his haste to attend to Dr. Higg.

Davis stood slowly, straightening to his full height.

The Skeldergate Man was gone.

17

Dr. Higg nearly died as the stretcher was trundled from the ambulance into the corridor. Davis was trotting alongside the unconscious scientist and the ambulance crew when Dr. Higg went gray, and his head fell to one side.

His eyes stared, but slowly rolled up into his head. His tongue was blue.

The corridors swallowed Dr. Higg, and Davis paced until Irene and the rest of the team arrived. Langton moaned and paced, sat and just as quickly stood again.

Davis put out a hand to comfort the distraught Langton, but the poor man stared distractedly. “What will it be next?” he murmured.

“Surely,” said Jane, “they'll be able to help him here.”

Langton, however, turned away. “A disaster;” he moaned. “Unmitigated disaster.”

A nurse with a hat like a white dove took Davis aside and wrote neatly on a form as Davis answered her questions. He could not tell her about the missing Man, however. He had taken a few seconds to stammer that bit of news to Irene and Langton over the telephone. That news had stunned even Irene.

“He was lying unconscious on the floor?” asked the nurse. She did not seem to believe Davis.

Not exactly unconscious, Davis wanted to say. An unconscious man does not wear a look of horror.

He tried to ignore her question.

“Was there any sign of an accident?” asked the nurse, with a show of patience.