Aaron Elkins - Curses!

Terrified, he held himself perfectly still. He stopped breathing. He shut his eyes.

But they saw him all the same. One of the tall, slender figures approached, holding a scalpel in a rubber-gloved hand. The figure mumbled something. As he spoke the mask fell away and Gideon could see that there was no human mouth beneath it; no human flesh at all, but the curved, bony jaws of a fish.

The figure towered over him. The scalpel had changed to a flint knife. He lay the point against Gideon's collarbone and pressed. Screaming, Gideon kicked out at him.

"Ow!” the monster cried.

Ow?

His eyes flipped open. Julie was sitting on the side of the bed, her hand gently touching his shoulder, fingertips on his collarbone. “Are you okay? I think you were dreaming. Here's your aspirin."

He took the two tablets, swallowed some water, and fell back onto the bed, trying to hold onto the dream's fragmenting images.

"Julie,” he said slowly, “it was an American."

"You were having a dream, Gideon,” she said soothingly.

"No, last night. The guy that jumped me. He was an American."

"Last night? But how could you tell? I thought he didn't say anything."

"He grunted. He said ‘ow.’ I just remembered. Damn, how could I be so stupid?"

There was a brief pause while she frowned down at him. “And Mexicans don't say ‘ow'?"

"No, they don't."

"What do they say?"

"I'm not sure, but even if they said it, it wouldn't come out the same. The initial vowel-the ah sound-would be farther back in the palate, and the glide to the second one wouldn't be as marked. It would sound more like two separate vowels, not our kind of diphthong."

"It would?"

"Sure.” He demonstrated.

"Come again? They wouldn't say ‘ow,’ they'd say ‘ow'?” She was far from convinced.

"They'd say ‘ah-oo,'” he repeated patiently, “if they said it at all. But they don't."

"I don't know about this, Gideon,” she said doubtfully. “It sounds pretty subtle to me. He was grunting from a punch in the stomach, after all, not reciting a speech, and I doubt if you were listening too carefully to his diphthongs at the time. Besides, are you sure your Spanish is that good?"

"My Spanish is pitiful, but that doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm talking about the general tendency of Romance-language speakers to-” He laughed. “The hell with it. Just trust me."

Tentatively, he rotated his upper arms. “I think the aspirin's beginning to work. How about some breakfast?"

Gideon had continued to improve through a breakfast of huevos rancheros with Abe and Julie, but he knew it would be a mistake to try to work on the skeleton just yet; not in the cramped, kneeling position that was required. Instead, he sent a reluctant Julie off to the site with a concerned Abe and decided to spend the day working on his monograph. But it was hard getting his mind off that “ow” and what it meant. Because if it had been an American who had attacked him, it was just about settled: It had to be one of the crew. There just wasn't anybody else. Well, there was Stan Ard, but that was it.

Or was he imagining that “ow,” inventing it after the fact as a result of a garbled, childish nightmare? The episode on the wall seemed as if it had been a long time ago. He sighed, forcing himself back to work. The much-amended monograph was on the writing table in front of him, a nearly depleted pot of coffee at his elbow, and a welter of notes and references scattered over the table, the bed, and the carved bureau. And a few piles of paper were on the floor in a semicircle around his feet. Just like home. It was as good as being in his office.

But things were not going well. He stared dejectedly at the depressing sentence in front of him:

Albeit the precocious sapience of H. sapiens swanscombensis is now considered discredited by most scholars as a result of recent distance function analysis, the question of this interesting population's origin is yet to be resolved, as is its taxonomic niche, particularly vis-a-vis the Quinzano and Ehringsdorf populations, which are, of course, generally classified as proto-Western-Neanderthal.

He drained his cup, shook his head, and sighed. Why did his academic papers always come out like this? Christ. “albeit"! And “vis-a-vis” in the same sentence. And three passive constructions-no, four. Was that a single-sentence record? Was this what fifteen years of immersion in the professional journals had brought him to? If he didn't watch out he would start talking this way.

He substituted an “although” for the “albeit” and an “as compared to” for the “vis-a-vis,” but it didn't help much. He poured himself the last of the coffee and mused. Now, how would Stan Ard write this up for Flak? “From what misty, savage dawn of antiquity did these robust, heavy-browed humans, the first of their kind, come stumbling…” He smiled. If you asked him, it had something going for it, but he'd never get it by the editorial board of Pleistocene Anthropology.

He stretched gingerly and pushed his tepid coffee away. The weather had turned sultry as the morning wore on, with the threat of rain now hanging heavily in the air, and the humidity had pasted his shirt to his back. No matter how often he washed his hands his palms stayed gummy. Even the sheets of paper he was working with were limp with moisture. He had turned off the languorous ceiling fan. Looking at it had made him feel hotter, not cooler. For the first time since he'd come, he was starting to think with longing of the cool, gray, cleansing rains of Washington.

At eleven-thirty someone knocked at his door. Grateful for the interruption, he shoved the paper aside and went to answer it.

"Emma,” he said, surprised. “I thought you were at the site."

"I was. I took my lunch hour early. There's something I have to share with you. It explains everything."

She was already flushing, which in Emma was usually a sign of dogged resolution. That did not bode well. Gideon steeled himself.

"I know you're just going to laugh, Dr. Oliver, but I felt I had an obligation to tell you. I understand the significance of what happened to you last night."

"How do you know what happened to me last night?"

"Everybody knows,” she said carelessly. “The whole hotel's talking about it. But I understand why it happened. I centered on it during my amethyst meditation.” She hesitated and stuck out her broad chin. “I've established a first-level interface with a personage who calls himself Huluc-Canab."

There was no escape. She was standing in the doorway, blocking the only route to freedom unless he wanted to jump from the balcony. He managed a smile, “Would you like to come in?"

She shook her head brusquely. Social amenities were not Emma's forte. “Huluc-Canab explained it to me. Do you remember what the curse said? ‘Second, the darkness will be sundered and the terrible voices of the gods will be heard in the air, and there will be a mighty pounding of the soul so that the-’”

"Pummeling,” said Gideon.

"'-a mighty pummeling of the soul,'” Emma continued, unfazed, “'so that the spirit languishes and faints.'” She looked meaningfully at him.

"Ah,” he said.

"You don't see what it means?"

"No.” He knew that he was eroding her already slipping estimation of him.

"Darkness turning to light? Voices of the gods? It means the sound-and-light show! and the ‘pummeling'-it's talking about what happened to you. How could it be any more specific than that?"

Many years before, when he had nervously turned in the first draft of his dissertation to his doctoral committee members, Abe had penciled in some comments across the title page: “Very inventive. Considering the lack of data, the inconclusive results, and the ambiguous statistical analysis, you did a wonderful job. Not everyone can make two hundred pages from nothing. I predict you'll go far."