Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

Gideon glowered at him, to no effect.

"And I keep wondering about the anthropologist’s usage of ‘man’ and ‘mankind.’ Shouldn’t it be ‘people’ and ‘personkind’? Were there only cavemen? Weren’t there any cavewomen?" He looked quickly around the circle for approval but got only bleak stares.

Gideon was half-heartedly putting together his response when one of the women, a uniformed lieutenant down on her knees in the dirt, saved him.

"Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dennis, I don’t want to deal with that crap now."

There were several muttered "Right on’s." Mentally, Gideon applauded. He couldn’t have said it better. Dennis opened his mouth to speak, but the lieutenant cut him off.

"Dr. Oliver, what kinds of things would we have seen in the museum if we’d gotten in?"

"I’m not really sure, Donna," Gideon said. "Possibly, some of the elephant bones in situ. There wouldn’t be any human bones, because none were found. Probably some of the stone tools from the site. Maybe some spear fragments; the oldest known weapons in the world were found here, you know."

"Now, you see, that’s my point," said Dennis, warming up for a speech. Again he was interrupted, this time by a shout from a student who had wandered over to the squat building.

"Hey, the museum’s unlocked!"

With the others, Gideon walked over to the structure. When they had first arrived, several of the men had stood on each other’s shoulders to peer through the high windows into the dark interior, but no one had thought of trying the door. Now Gideon could see that there was no padlock on the rusty hasp. The student who had called out had pushed the green metal door open an inch or two and was looking at Gideon for approval to open it all the way.

Instinctively law-abiding, Gideon hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. This was Torralba, and he might never come this way again. Besides, the incident with the old caretaker had brought out his refractory side. He nodded, and the student pushed the door farther open.

"Something’s blocking it," the student said, leaning his body against it. Suddenly, he stiffened and jumped back. "Hey, there’s a guy in there!"

The door remained about three-quarters open. Spotlighted in the shaft of soft sunlight that streamed through it, a body lay on its left side on the earthen floor, its back toward the doorway. Its legs were bent at the knees so that the feet prevented the door from opening completely. It was a dark-haired man wearing a tan windbreaker. Where his right ear should have been was a hideous mess of torn flesh and sinew. A great, red-brown stain glistened dully on the jacket’s back and had discolored the pale earth around the man’s shoulders and head.

Two of the students, a man and a woman, dropped to the ground and put their heads between their knees. The others stared in dumb, greedy shock. Gideon’s courage failed him. He felt an overpowering sense of onrushing doom, an urge to turn and run, to leave undisturbed whatever lay within.

"Well, let’s see what this is about," he heard himself saying quietly.

The students wordlessly parted for him. At the entrance he was caught by a terrific smell of blood, a slaughterhouse stench. He steadied himself momentarily with a hand on each side of the doorway, closed his eyes, and willed himself not to be sick. The warm perspiration on his body had turned cold; an icy globule ran freezing from his armpit down his side. He forced himself to breathe in the fetid atmosphere. Then he stepped over the body, carefully avoiding the blood, and turned firmly to look at the man’s face.

It wasn’t John.

Until then, he hadn’t even realized what the irrational fear had been, but now the flood of relief dropped him to his knees, heedless of the blood and the gaping students.

He closed his eyes again and thanked the ancient primitive gods that had hovered there since mankind’s dawn.

But behind his lowered eyelids a flicker of recognition sprang up, an uneasy memory…

To his mind came a long-forgotten anecdote of Sartre’s in Being and Nothingness: You are late for an appointment with your friend Pierre in a cafe. You are not sure if he has waited for you. As you come in, you quickly scan all the customers in the crowded room, and you see that he is not there. But what exactly have you seen? Would you know any of the hundred customers if you were to see them again? No. You have not really seen them. You know they are not-Pierres, that is all. Only when you have given up the search for Pierre will they become recognizable entities in their own right, foreground rather than background…

So it was with the maimed thing by which he kneeled. At first he knew only that it wasn’t John. Now he knew who it was. He opened his eyes and looked.

Ferret-face. With pity and revulsion, but also with the sense of a great load lifting from his shoulders, he studied the dead man. There was little remaining of the right side of his face. Through shreds of red muscle and gleaming ligament, Gideon could see the round yellow condyle of the shattered mandible. One eye was half-open, one was closed, and the lower part of the face was queerly askew because of the broken jaw. Even so, and even with the drying blood that covered the features, it was unmistakably Ferret-face.

The hunter had himself been hunted down. But by whom? Almost indifferently, Gideon turned the question over in his mind, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was more absorbed by a glow of triumph-vicious, but undeniably satisfying. I am still here, alive, his thoughts ran, and you are dead. I’ve won; you’ve lost. With an effort, he put aside the ugly thoughts and looked up at the students clustered around the door.

"Well, he’s certainly dead," Gideon said, his voice echoing in the cool concrete structure. His words jogged a young, crew-cut student out of his stupefaction.

"You better not touch anything, Professor." When Gideon looked up at him, he blushed and added self-consciously, "I’m in the military police. We’ll have to inform the Guardia Civil." Again, a self-important, embarrassed pause. "This looks like homicide."

Gideon resisted a strange urge to laugh. Looks like homicide. What did he think-that a heart attack had blown away half the man’s head? He rose to a standing position, conscious of the bloody stains on the knees of his beige trousers.

"You’re right, of course," he said. "Maybe there’s a telephone in the village."

The MP came forward and offered Gideon his hand to assist him in stepping over the corpse and the blood-soaked ground. As Gideon took it and came back through the door, the boy stiffened and froze, eyes wide with dismay.

"Jesus Christ, there’s another one!"

Gideon spun and looked within. At the far end of the narrow twenty-foot-long aisle that bisected the building lay what could have been a discarded, life-sized puppet. It was on its back in the gloom, its arms akimbo, its legs outflung, and its head and shoulders propped against the base of the concrete wall.

It was the man from the Prado: the man with the umbrella.

Gideon took another long swallow, and the warmth and relaxation finally began to spread outwards from his stomach. It was his second bourbon, and he was drinking it in the dim cocktail-lounge atmosphere of the Officers’ Club bar on the base. A dull ache at the back of his neck reminded him that he had been sitting rigidly erect since he came in, and he let himself sink back with a sigh against the booth’s black plastic upholstery.

Since he had found the second dead man, his mind had been working in a kind of otherworldly fervor, agitated and darting, turning in upon itself, questioning, testing, doubting-yet it had produced nothing of consequence, and little in the way of logical thinking. Gideon had given up trying to direct his racing thoughts hours ago and now sat there like an observer, watching his own mind go where it would. The bourbon seemed to be helping, however. He signaled the waitress for another.