Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

She looked back to her sketch and darkened the space inside of an eye socket, layering the charcoal until there was no hint of cream paper beneath. She leaned farther over the skeletal remains in an alcove. The bones of the legs and arms were broken, but Ashley could tell from the growth plates that he died young. The bones are in bad condition—fragmented and overgrown with mineral deposits that will be difficult or impossible to remove without destroying the specimen…

The skulls, though, were all complete. Each one with its jaw pried apart and a jar shoved between its teeth. The jars are clay or stone, perhaps dug from the cave walls? Smooth and yellowed. They’re undecorated, sealed with fine leather. They are some form of canopic jar perhaps, or an offering to the dead or the afterlife? She reached out a finger to touch the fragile leather, then pulled back. The leather remains intact despite no apparent organic matter left on the bodies themselves. It will need to be tested for ancient preservation techniques .

There wasn’t much known about Paleolithic funerary rites. Because sites like this were never found.

Most of the jars lay in shards—the pieces tumbled toward the back of the skeleton’s throats, the jaws left gaping—only fine dust remained of their contents. But there were five jars whole and tempting. Her hands kept returning to the space above the skull, hovering, as if to stroke its brow. She had never before been tempted to touch a specimen, to violate every rule that she herself had repeated incessantly to students and assistants at her sites.

“We’re taking one back with us,” Ashley said, tucking her book into her pack.

The camera flash paused and Ashley felt Henri’s eyes scolding her through the darkness. There was something in the way he looked at her that made her skin prickle.

“I don’t think we should,” he said.

Ashley pulled another kit from her pack—a small plastic crate filled with chunks of polyethylene foam, and rolls of gauze and tape. She began assembling a nest that would protect the specimen as they hiked back to the research center.

“Dr. Knochdieb won’t like it. You’ll lose your post for sure if you disturb this site.”

“Isn’t that what you all want, anyway?” She was done with their bureaucracy—she’d come here to work. And the thought of leaving without something more to study—without some way to begin answering the thousand questions storming in her brain—was torture.

Henri’s scoff echoed off the walls, the drawings, the bones. “It’ll be dark before we get back as it is. It’ll be dark before we leave if we wait much longer. I can hike that trail in the dark, but you’re going to get hurt if you try.” He mumbled to himself in German as he changed the camera’s memory card. It sounded like a prayer. His hair was the brightest thing in the cave—the sort of blond Californians paid good money for. Perhaps he’d be her beacon in the dark. She imagined she’d disappear in the dark entirely, invisible against the sky, though Henri had earlier said that her height made her impossible to lose. She felt the telltale ache in her shoulders as she’d unconsciously slouched ever since.

He was right, though, about all of it. She could picture the red-faced spluttering of the department head when he learned she had touched an unknown burial site. It would be several shades darker than when he learned she’d be studying there to begin with. The program hadn’t accepted any foreign students since the dawn of digital record keeping. They weren’t keen to break the record. And, of course, they hadn’t known what she would find in the cave. Henri, in particular, was upset to lose what would have been his project—what now would be, at best, a third-author credit, behind her, if she stayed—and her behind the soon-to-be-furious Dr. Knochdieb.

But he’d be mad tomorrow. Tonight was her chance to learn what she could and put together a proposal to convince them to give her the project—this project, instead of the bears—or at least allow her to stay involved. An underling, even. She’d bring them coffee, up the mountain, if she could work on-site. Anything to stay with the bones.

Now gloved, she did risk a touch. Just a fingertip, above the teeth, where the lips would have been stretched back around the bulbous jar.

She draped sheets of gauze over the skull as carefully as if wrapping a newborn. Its face—its gaping jaw and strange jar—vanished behind the layers of soft white. She set the bundle in a ring of foam inside the crate and layered more around it. She scoured the alcove for any small pieces or artifacts she may have missed. Nothing. Not even a bead. All they have is their jars .

The camera flash had returned, throwing her shadow in front of her, up the cave wall and across the skeletal drawings, as if she were another soot monster swallowing the stick-like figures whole.

But Henri wasn’t documenting the remains anymore. He was documenting her. Just as he’d probably been told to do from the beginning. More of a spy than a guide and assistant. But he didn’t have the authority to stop her. And even if he went straight to Dr. Knochdieb, she’d have a few hours to study her sample and make her case. There was little hope either way. But at least she could learn something about the bones.

Ashley’s body ached as they reached the foot of the mountain. Every knuckle was skinned and bleeding, the tendons in her wrists and ankles throbbing from every twist and fall. But the specimen was safe, its crate wrapped in her blanket in the padded compartment of her pack. She’d been careful to pitch her weight forward when she fell. Her palms, elbow, even her face took the brunt of her falls. After the first few, Henri had stopped helping her up, leaving her to the natural consequences of her decision to keep them in the mountains past dark. The mountain dark of the Alps was as black as the inside of its caves, and her dimming lantern hadn’t shown every peril on the path. She’d embarrassed herself. But she tried to focus on her project—the specimen in her pack—her future.

She nearly wept at the sight of the single lamp post that illuminated the door to their isolated research center. It was tucked in a folded valley between steep hills, along the path of an old glacier flow. The scars of its ancient passage could still be seen from the hills above. At least, in the light they could.

She wanted the close space of her drafty clapboard dorm. The antique, Alpine barn conversion had been anything but welcoming, but she’d make a home of anywhere with Tylenol and a hot bath. And a private lab.

Henri flashed his keycard at the sensor and held the door for her as she limped across the threshold. “Do you need first aid? There is ice in the kitchen.”

“No, thanks.” His offer seemed sincere, though she thought he might be mocking her. His accent made it difficult to discern. “I’m going to drop this off at the lab,” she said, holding her pack in front of her like a baby. “We’ll need to meet with Dr. Knochdieb in the morning.”

“I think he’ll come in early for this. I’m going to call him now.”

“There’s no need to wake him. The bodies have been there for thousands of years; they aren’t going anywhere.”

“They aren’t. I suggest you start packing, Miss Alesso. I’m sorry.”

Ashley watched him strut down the hall toward the dorms. His machismo didn’t hide his own limp as well as he doubtless hoped it would. She felt a mixture of shame and wicked glee. She’d forced him to risk his neck on that trail. Her hopes of winning the friendship of her young assistant were in ashes, but at least she could count on him habitually underestimating her.