Seduction

Twenty-five

It was low tide. In the strong afternoon light, the crevices and cracks in the rock formations seemed to reveal human features and expressions.

Jac and Theo had come down to the beach near Hugo’s home in search of a rock configuration like the one he was standing on in the photo that had fallen off the wall. His feet were positioned at such an awkward angle, he might be pointing to something specific. It was a possible clue, and since they had no others, Theo had been willing to give it a try.

He’d run off two copies of the photo at his gallery and now gave one to Jac. Hugo, in his formal suit, stood on the rock. His gaze and his body were turned away from the photographer, looking to the left. The stones he stood on were treacherous. The photo was similar to a famous one Jac had seen in several shops and restaurants on the island. The writer apparently enjoyed being perched up high. But it was hard to imagine the fifty-year-old climbing up on the rocks in his heavy clothes.

“Which direction is he looking?” Jac asked. “Off to sea or toward the land? North or south?”

“There’s no way to tell,” Theo said.

“That’s going to make it all the more difficult,” she said.

For the next thirty-five minutes they walked down the beach, stopping often, holding the photo up against the rocks. Finally they came to a grouping that actually did resemble those in the photo.

When they’d gotten closer, Jac said, “It doesn’t look like there’s a cave here; there’s no opening.” She studied the photo again. “But it really does seem to be the same spot.”

Theo climbed up a small rock. Then up another. “When we were kids, my brother and I used to spend hours exploring caves.”

Jac felt a jolt of something like embarrassment. Hearing Theo refer to his brother, she thought of the two unexpected but not unwelcome kisses and what they might suggest. No time for that now. Theo was saying something else.

“All up and down the coast. We must have covered over half of them.” He was on the fourth rock now. “One thing I learned is not all the cave openings are eye level.” On the fifth rock. “There’s a shelf back here. Hold on…”

He disappeared from view for a moment. Jac waited. When he came back, his voice was more animated than she was used to.

“Come see. I think we might have found something.”

Jac climbed up, reached Theo and followed him through the crevice to the ledge. They were standing so close to each other that she could feel heat waving off him. She peered in. He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her protectively. The sensation was chilling and bracing. She had a sudden flash from a few hours earlier. Ash’s hands had felt so different. His had been warming.

“We need to go down there,” Theo said.

Below them was an enclosure, stone all around, sand in the middle. On the rock face to the right was an opening.

“Let me go first. I’m taller, it’s less of a leap for me,” Theo said.

He jumped and landed, splashed onto the beach.

“There’s an inch of water here,” he said. “Before you come down, let me just make sure this really is an opening.”

She watched him walk over and then disappear. After ten or fifteen seconds he emerged and looked up at her with a solemn smile. “This might be what you’re looking for, Jac.”

Jac looked at the edge in panic. She couldn’t stand to be this close to it. But he’d said this could be the cave. She concentrated on that, sucked in her breath and jumped.

He caught her. Put her down.

She was on the sand, enclosed by the rocks all around her, the water soaking through her shoes and socks. It was freezing.

She followed Theo up a slight incline to dry beach and toward the niche. He went in first, turning on his lantern, holding it out and back a little, to light her way.

Animal and bird bones, bleached smooth from years of water rushing over their surfaces. The smells right here were intense. Salt from the channel. Minerals from the rock.

For the second time in a few hours, she felt the rush of excitement that accompanied a new discovery. Until today the feeling was only triggered by moments such as this, finds connected to her research. But earlier she’d felt this same heady anticipation in Ash’s house, when she sat down at Fantine’s perfumer’s organ.

As Theo took his first step inside and she followed, the light from his lantern illuminated the interior space.

“How amazing this is,” she said in wonder, to herself as much as Theo.

They were in a long corridor, completely covered-walls and ceiling-with paintings done in blacks, browns and ochres. In this riot of imagery she could make out men, women, horses, cows, birds, dogs, cats… and then she began to notice details. None of them was all human or all animal. Each creature was an amalgam of both. A man who was half fawn, standing on hooves. A bull with a man’s eyes and devil’s horns standing on two human legs. A bird with a woman’s face. A woman with a bird’s head and wings.

“These are fantastic,” she said in a voice laced with emotion. “I can’t tell for sure, there have been hoaxes that have fooled scholars, but these feel authentic. Some of these creatures are Celtic gods and goddesses. Have you seen anything like them elsewhere on the island?”

“There are quite a few examples of cave paintings around, yes. I’ve seen them in the museum and in two caves that are occasionally open to the public. But none of them depicted these creatures.”

Examining the wall closely, Jac peered at the paintings. “I’d only need the smallest sample to test these, but I don’t want to disturb them myself. We should call in an expert when the time comes and-” She broke off and walked back to the opening of the cave. “I think…” she said, as she came down the corridor again very slowly. “There are threads of legendary myths I recognize here. But there’s also a very specific story playing out I haven’t seen anywhere else. Look at this man-cat.” She pointed. “If you follow him you can catch it. He’s in a processional with these other creatures. They’re marching in a parade formation. It’s a celebration, you can tell from the garlands around their heads.” She gestured to another drawing. “You can recognize that same group of half-men, half-animals here. In this section it appears as if the man-cat is being chosen for something. Now if you follow him…” She walked a few feet down. “And look here, he’s being bathed…” Another few feet. “Here he’s being fed.” She skipped over a group of other drawings done in slightly different style. It was getting easier to figure out which belonged to the specific sequence she was following. “He’s here again. Walking into the cave, the same way we are. Leading us, taking us deeper and deeper inside.”

Jac used her cell phone to take pictures. There was no reception here, but the flash on the camera worked perfectly. “Do you see these horned centaurs? They’re the only ones not engaging with the man-cat or any of the people around him. They seem to be watching over the proceedings.”

Jac noticed that the bottoms of the drawings weren’t always finished. She stared at the feathery workmanship. It was an uneven line of demarcation on the walls, below which there were no paintings. And then she realized what it was.

Pointing it out to Theo, she asked, “Why would they have painted on the walls knowing the sea was going to wash the drawings away?”

“Maybe back then, when they were drawn, the cave didn’t fill up with as much water. Or any. Serious erosion in the last two thousand years has changed all kinds of elevations.”

They’d come to the end of the corridor and a small archway.

Theo went through first and Jac followed. The stones underfoot were uneven and slippery. Water clearly came this far into the cave at high tide.

It was icy cold and quiet here except for the sound of bones and shells crunching beneath their feet and water dripping, slowly, evenly, in the distance.

Theo’s lamp revealed a room about ten feet square, with a low ceiling, barely six feet tall at its highest. Theo had to hunch over, but Jac was fine with more than half a foot of headroom.

There was only one drawing here of the man-cat: he knelt by a depression in the ground, and a larger creature, half-man, half-buck, poured water over him. “It looks like a cleansing bath,” Jac said.

She turned and walked to the center of the room, where, in fact, there was a hollowed-out depression in the ground, lined with pale yellow, iridescent shells and bordered by flat oval stones, not unlike the stone circle that had brought Jac and Theo together at Blixer Rath. “It’s the same ritual bath that’s in the drawing,” she said.

There was nothing else to inspect, so they proceeded to the threshold of the next chamber. The sound of splashing water echoed more loudly now. As Jac stepped inside, she felt as if she were entering a cathedral. The ceilings were at least twenty feet tall, with stalactites. A double row of monolithic stones, each eight to ten feet tall, marched shoulder to shoulder down the center, creating an aisle leading to another circle of stones. In its middle was a stone slab resting on two square rocks. The configuration reminded Jac of Stonehenge and the ancient mystery that had never been solved.

A waterfall splashed down the back wall, its scent a combination of salt with a hint of sulfur. Were they walking in a circle? Coming to an exit? Or was the water coming from a source inside the rocks?

Theo’s lantern cast light in the immediate vicinity, but the space was so deep it was impossible to illuminate all at once. The crevices and corners remained in unfathomable shadow.

Jac focused on what she could see well-more black, brown and ochre paintings on the right wall.

“The same figure is here too,” she said. “Half-cat, half-man.”

Theo looked over her shoulder. He stood so close she could smell his cologne over the damp scents of the tomb-like cave.

“It looks like he’s being dried off here, then clothed here, and here they are festooning him with beads and feathers.”

Following the creature, they journeyed farther into the room, reading the story the paintings told. In the next section women were bringing him platters of food. In the next, feeding him.

They’d reached the back wall now, where the water fell from cracks in the high rocks, sluicing down and into a deep gorge in the floor. A fine mist coated Jac’s face. She could taste the water. It wasn’t seawater at all but lake or river water.

“Where is this coming from?”

“I don’t know what’s above us. I’m not sure how deep in we’ve gone,” Theo said.

The water dripped down the rock wall into the rut that cut across the room and then, following a slight decline, disappeared into a second rut that surrounded the largest monolithic stone of those they’d already seen.

She knelt. The centuries of flowing water had worn down the gulley’s sides and it was as smooth as a porcelain tub. Plunging her fingers into the pool, she had a sudden sense memory. Somewhere, some other time, she had done this. The flashback was distinct, but she couldn’t place it. She felt instead as if someone had told her they had done this, and their description was so real it seemed as if it had happened to her.

While she had been inspecting that side of the stone, Theo had walked around to the other side.

“Jac… Come look, I think I found something.”

Theo’s lamp illuminated a deep niche in the stone. Inside was a second stone, darker, blacker and about five feet tall. During high school, Jac had studied the meteorites in the Museum of Natural History. She couldn’t be certain, but this resembled those melted rocks that had fallen from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The boulder was rounded and pitted and felt like glass. Its matte-black shiny rind curved around its depressions, or thumbprints, she remembered they were called. Some went so deep they created cubbyholes. And all those little alcoves appeared to be filled with small objects.

Theo reached in and extracted a small carving of one of the centaurs from the wall paintings. It was rustic and awkward. But also strange and beautiful.

The way Theo was holding the statuette and the lantern sent the light upward, and for a second Jac could see inside the now empty slot. “Wait. There’s still something in there,” Jac said as she reached deeper inside and pulled out a pale white object.

“It’s a bone,” she said. “Very old.”

“A human bone, isn’t it?”

She nodded. Jac was thinking too about the catacombs in Paris where the bones of more than six million people had been deposited and decorated the caves with macabre beauty. “Human… yes, I think so.”

“Look. There are more of those figurines.” He pointed his torch toward one niche after another. Then he gave her the lantern and pulled out more carvings. “Behind every one of these is another bone. What does it mean?”

“Each of these little gods or warriors is standing guard, I think,” Jac said.

“Are all the bones from the same person?” Theo asked.

She looked down at what he’d pulled out. “No, these are all sacrum bones. It’s at the base of the spine, where the autonomic nervous system ends. We each have only one and it’s very special in ancient cultures. The Romans called it the os sacrum, which translates to the “holy bone.” The Greek name for it was hieron osteon, which means the same thing. There are people who believe that enlightenment can be achieved by awakening the spiritual energy in the sacrum. Holy yogis say that awakening would be a resurrection.”

“So it’s tied to reincarnation?”

Jac almost didn’t want to answer. The concept of being reborn, of soul migration, of a soul returning again and again to complete its karmic path seemed to be following her everywhere since she’d gone to Paris at the beginning of the summer.

“Yes. The sacrum is the last bone in the body to rot, and ancients believed that it was the nucleus around which the whole body would be rebuilt in the afterlife.”

“You’ve been on a lot of digs, haven’t you?”

“Yes, why?”

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked. “Anything to explain exactly what we’re looking at?”

She shook her head. “Never…” She thought. “Well, one thing is slightly similar. In Egypt the dead were buried with small shabti sculptures about this size. Their job was to protect the deceased on their journey to the afterlife.”

Theo had emptied eight niches. He reached into a ninth.

“This isn’t a bone,” he said as he extracted something else.

Jac shone the light on it. It was as slender as a bone but dark and polished. She touched it. “It’s wood…”

“It’s a pipe,” Theo said. “Not as old as the rest of these things. Probably a hundred years or so. We have a few in the house that belonged to some ancestor or other.”

Jac was still sniffing. She laughed. “It’s hashish.”

“Really?”

“I think they smoked hashish in the eighteen fifties. So this was someone’s den of iniquity-”

“Jac, there’s more here.” His voice was tense with excitement.

Theo was holding a leather-bound book, somewhat worn. It smelled slightly of mold. A leather strip wrapped around its middle kept it closed. Embossed on the front were two gold letters, still shining.

V. H.

Theo was trying to untie the knot.

Jac stopped him with her hand. “Be careful. It could be fragile.”

He gave it to her. “I’m too nervous. You do it.”

Holding the book gingerly, she walked around the stone and placed the journal on the slab table.

Theo put the lantern next to it and peered down, watching as, very carefully, Jac unknotted the binding and opened the book.

There was no title on the first page, no salutation, just line after line of script, slanting heavily to the right, almost as if a wind were blowing them in that direction.

“The ink isn’t at all faded. It’s possible this hasn’t been opened in years. Maybe even since it was placed here.” Jac whispered as if paying homage to the book.

“It’s in French,” Theo said. “Can you read it?”

Jac read the first few lines out loud, translating as she went.

Every story begins with a tremble of anticipation. At the start we may have an idea of our point of arrival, but what lies before us and makes us shudder is the journey, for that is all discovery. This strange and curious story begins for me at the sea.

She stopped and turned to Theo. “You found it! This is Hugo’s story about what happened to him here on the island.”

“I almost can’t believe it’s real.”

For the first time since she’d come to Jersey she saw an actual expression of happiness on his face.

“It’s real. Can you smell it?”

He bent over and sniffed. “Yes, what is it?”

“Mold, leather, the particular scent of paper decaying-it’s like a combination of grassy notes with an acidic tang and a hint of vanilla.”

But there was something else Jac smelled. A rich and spicy perfume that combined roses, ylang-ylang and oakmoss. Trapped in the pages for how many years, a fine French perfume was escaping. It was the kind of scent she had grown up with. Nothing like most modern mass-produced fragrances, but beautifully articulated and rounded. She sniffed at it. There was one note that she couldn’t quite figure out, and that note was similar to the mysterious note in Ash’s cologne. No, not similar, it was the same note. It was that curious amber she’d found in Fantine’s studio.

Was this another of Fantine’s scents? Was the amber note her signature? The way vanilla was Jean Guerlain’s? The way tuberose was her grandfather’s?

Theo was trying to read more of what was on the page. “I wish my French was better. You’re going to have to read it to me. Do you mind?”

“Mind? It would be an honor to read this.”

She started to translate the next line and realized she was talking over the sound of rushing water. “Do you hear that?” she asked.

“The water?”

“Yes, doesn’t it seem louder than it did even a minute ago?”

“It does.” Theo turned around. “Damn it,” he said. “The waterfall’s stream has swelled.”

Jac inhaled and said, “The scent of the minerals is stronger too. I never thought of that before, but primitive men must have learned to smell certain dangers. Rising waters. Rain storms.”

“We should go. The tide must be surging.” As Theo reached for the journal, he knocked over one of the little creatures and it fell to the ground.

Jac reached down, found the totem and picked it up. It had landed on a wet patch of ground, and now the figurine was sticky and gave off a more pronounced sweet and earthy smell. It was the same note of amber from Fantine’s studio. From Ash’s cologne. From the perfume in the book. She didn’t know of any resin that came alive when it was wet. She rubbed the effigy and its dirt and grime came off on her finger, revealing a semitranslucent golden creature. Glowing.

She thought about the beautifully carved amber owl Malachai had shown her the night she’d found the letter from Theo. If this wasn’t the same material, it was close. Malachai would note the synchronicity of that event and this. Not a coincidence, he’d argue, but events coming full circle. The infinite possibilities of energy and spirit. The more she rubbed, the stronger the aroma. Even without burning it, it had a scent? How was that possible? The small sculpture in Malachai’s study didn’t have an odor. This amber was different and it was familiar. From a long time ago. But that wasn’t possible either. She’d been sure in Fantine’s laboratory she’d never smelled it before coming to the island. So how could she be remembering it now?