Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

The halls were dark, empty. The few other researchers and students who shared the facility had long since gone to bed. The lab was hers for as long as it took the director to climb down from his fancy chalet.

The browned bones of the face appeared through the gauze as if surfacing through a sheet of melting snow. She leaned over it as she worked, the muscles in her back and neck knotted and angry. The soft brush feathered over the skull, sweeping away the dirt and fine white threads into the nest of packing gauze.

She studied the protrusions that lined the brow. Under the bright lights of the lab, she saw that they were a part of the bone itself—not cave deposits or applied funerary decorations, but some sort of cancer or deformity. Her heart pinched for the people of the cave. The spurs must have hurt.

She ran a gloved fingertip around the perimeter of an eye socket. They were like toothy hills crowned with needles that snagged at the latex of her glove as she pulled back.

Her fingertip trailed to the jaw and the jar wedged inside the mouth. She could see, then, that it was stone—carved from a solid piece. The walls eggshell-thin. Ashley brushed away all traces of debris and slid her fingers past the long teeth, deep into the mouth, and cupped the bottom of the jar with her fingertips. She lifted gently and felt it give, the stone scraping against the ancient teeth like squeaking chalk. An uncomfortable shudder moved down her body. The jar worked free, intact, and she set it on a pillow of foam on a tray. The skull, its mouth unnaturally stretched, appeared as if it screamed, or laughed. Its empty eyes seemed accusatory in their darkness. She covered the face with a fold of gauze. The empty eyes reminded her of the eyes on the cave monster.

The walls of the jar were thin enough that she could see the glow of light behind it, and the silhouette of a lumpy shadow inside. She photographed every angle, every detail, and made sure the pictures were uploaded and saved before grabbing her scalpel and tweezers. She both hated and wanted this part. Her pulse grew distracting, a pounding in her sore joints, and it would continue to rise until the beautiful thing in front of her was destroyed. And destroying the sample would destroy her career, or make it. Her hair stuck to her sweaty brow.

She cut away the cord that secured the flap over the opening and gathered the flakes of leather as they fell, dropping them into a jar of her own—bright glass, sterile, but otherwise little had changed in twenty-five thousand years.

The leather scrap was thin and fine like the tender skin of a rodent. It had dried to something almost like vellum. It shouldn’t exist at all .

Once the seal was pulled away, odor overwhelmed her. Sweet and rancid like cherries and old cheese. She clutched her wrist to her nose until the wave passed. She hadn’t dealt with fresh remains in years. This specimen shouldn’t be fresh. Shining more light inside revealed dark clumps clinging to the illuminated walls. She dipped her scalpel inside and scooped out a trace of the substance, sending a fresh wave of odor down her throat. It stuck to the blade as she tapped it onto a glass slide. It was crumbly and clumpy like wet, purple sand. She took more photographs, brightened them, and saw purple, red, gold, brown. Perhaps a desiccated organ. Or maybe the tongue, considering the placement of the jar.

Magnified under the microscope, it was a brilliant lattice of blood cells— platelets, red and white cells, stem cells, and fatty deposits. Myelorytes. Fragments of vessel. Bone marrow.

Ashley turned back to the crate with the skull and peeled back the gauze. She ran her fingers over the blossoms of bone again, ignoring the sharp snags, searching for a perforation in the bone. Then she remembered the arms and legs, each broken on every body. Not from the brittleness of millennia, perhaps, but as part of this strange funerary ritual. She wanted to get the rest of the bones—make a full layout of the body and examine the breaks. Look for manmade trauma. But she needed to finish her work with the jar. She grabbed the jar and held it directly above the light, peering into its mouth, trying to gauge the quantity of marrow collected, presumably from the man whose mouth it had filled. Though it was astoundingly preserved under its ancient seal, some evaporation had to have occurred. A slow concentration. She couldn’t tell how much marrow was there, but she didn’t want to disturb the whole sample.

There needed to be something left intact for her report—and some evidence that she’d be dedicated to the proper handling of these artifacts, despite her hasty removal of the sample.

She was beginning to like the smell. She breathed it in and felt certain, then, that the gaping skull smiled.

The tightness in her neck made it difficult to lift the crate onto the high shelf in the storage fridge. Her hands shook and fresh blood had slicked the inside of her gloves. She felt the altitude again like a punch in the gut.

The ache in her body had deepened by morning, but she couldn’t stop pacing. She limped from one end of the conference room to the other, her eyes sweeping over the board that she’d papered with her sketches. She paused, pulled a pencil from her hair, and fixed a sketch. Deepened a shadow. Added texture to the rough fracture of the bones.

She ran her fingers through her hair and pulled another sliver of shale from the dark curls. She hadn’t managed a bath, yet. With any luck, she’d be coated in dirt again by the afternoon, anyway.

The meeting wouldn’t start for an hour, but she needed time to prepare. They’d be looking for the first excuse to kick her out, contract be damned. But she wouldn’t let it go without a fight. This was the find of a lifetime, and it was her discovery. She wasn’t likely to ever see anything like this again—but if she got her name on this study, it could change the trajectory of her whole career.

Her knees gave and pain shot up her legs. Her body contorted on the floor, folding over as the cramps arced across her body. Pain twisted through her hips and up her back before it faded, leaving her sweating and panting on the floor.

She had been distracted and preoccupied on the way down the mountain. She must have pulled a tendon. Pinched a nerve. Her breath evened, and she pulled herself up into one of the rolling desk chairs. Black spots receded from her vision. She poured herself a drink of water from the pitcher on the table, spilling as she did, her hands unsteady—her fingers weak and trembling. She choked on the water, coughing splashes down her front.

Dr. Knochdieb burst into the room, Henri behind him.

She wiped her dripping chin on her sleeve.

Dr. Knochdieb stormed past her to the board covered with her sketches and photographs. His tie was slightly off-center. He must have rushed .

“Quite the find,” he said, pausing to look at the sketch of the shadow monster. “We were of course aware of Stone Age human settlements near the lake, but we hadn’t yet found any in the high hills. Not in any of the dozens of caves. So tell me, scholar, why they are there?” He pulled her sketch of the cave paintings from the board and sat in the chair to her right. From this angle, she could see that he had also failed to press down his silver cowlick. The spike of hair at his crown was usually plastered with gel—a feature Henri had nicknamed The Oberaletsch Glacier.

Ashley’s voice caught deep in her chest. She’d had a speech prepared, but it didn’t account for this sort of question. She’d been expecting more “who do you think you are,” not “what do you think.” Hope made it hard to think at all.