The Dark Place

Chapter 8

"Hmm," Gideon said, almost as soon as he had sat down and looked at the ivory-colored skull on the worktable. "Huh."

John had his chair tipped back against the wall, and his hands were clasped lazily at his belt line. "I don’t like that ‘hmm, huh’ stuff," he said. "It always means you’re about to screw up my case. Not that I have a case."

"He wasn’t shot, John," Gideon said quietly.

The front legs of John’s chair came down on the linoleum tile. "Not shot…!" He gestured expressively at the circular hole in the left side of the skull.

"Not shot. In the first place, look at the placement. High up on the coronal suture, almost at bregma. Isn’t it pretty unusual for someone to be shot so high up on the head?"

"No, as a matter of fact."

"Really?"

"Sure," John said, obviously relishing the unaccustomed role of instructor. "It’s a fairly common placement in suicides."

"And what would he have used to leave a hole that big? An elephant gun?"

"Doc," John said easily, "no offense, but aren’t you a little out of your league with this forensic pathology stuff? Little bullets can make big holes."

"Maybe," Gideon said, "but when they make big holes they make big sloppy holes, not neat round ones like that. And consider this: To drill a hole that cleanly, a bullet would have to be traveling at a heck of a velocity, wouldn’t it?"

"So? That’s what bullets do. Say fifteen hundred feet a second-three thousand if you assume it was a rifle. Muzzle velocity, of course." John was still teaching and enjoying it.

"Then where’s the exit hole?"

John chewed the inside of his cheek. He was beginning to waver. "Lodged in the brain, probably, then fell out later."

"A projectile that big, going that fast? It would have plowed through the brain like so much vanilla pudding and exploded the forward right side of the skull on the way out-here at the temporal or the sphenoid; both very fragile, thin bones."

"Unless," John said, "it had a soft tip. Then it could have stayed inside."

"But-"

"I know. It wouldn’t have made such a neat hole." John leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, looking glum. "Okay, Doc, I give up. You’re right. Let’s hear your theory, but try to keep it to words I can understand, okay?"

"This was a trephining, not a shooting."

"Oh, one of those."

"It’s also called trepanning. The cutting out of a disc of bone from the vault of the skull. A lot of primitive peoples have practiced it, including American Indians. For that matter, it’s still a common surgical technique."

John took the skull carefully in both hands and peered at the hole. "And that’s what this is? Trephining?"

Gideon nodded. "See those annular grooves encircling the aperture?"

John shook his head in exasperation. "These scratches around the hole?"

"Yes, they scraped round and round with something sharp until they got to the inner table and the disc of bone separated."

"Ugh." He looked suddenly at Gideon. "Did they do it when he was alive or dead?"

"Could be either. Sometimes it was done as a treatment for headaches or insanity, sometimes to get a piece of a dead enemy to wear as an amulet. There’s a twentieth-century group in New Ireland that did it just for fashion. They-"

"For Christ’s sake, Doc, I mean this guy."

"I don’t know." He took the skull from John and moved his fingertips slowly over the area surrounding the clean-rimmed hole. "Or maybe I do know. The differential healing of this fracture and the absence of septic osteitis suggest-"

"Wait a minute," John said and sighed, rising and going to the coffeepot at the back of the room. "If you’re going to give a lecture, I’m going to need some fortification. You want some coffee?"

"I’ll have some coffee," Gideon said, "but I’m not going to give a lecture. I’m simply going to demonstrate the art of scientific detection in a simple manner-simple enough," he said, looking loftily at John, "for even the most unformed of minds to comprehend."

"Oh, brother," John said, "I better have two sugars." He returned to the table with two mugs cupped easily in one big hand, placed one of the mugs in front of Gideon, and sat down.

"In the first place," Gideon said, "do you see this crack coming out of the upper part of the hole?"

"This squiggly line?"

"No, that’s the coronal suture, the division between the frontal and parietal bones. No…this thin crack here, that runs up to the top, just behind the suture."

"Yeah," John said, fingering the almost-invisible fissure. "I noticed that before. I figured either it cracked when the hole was made, or after it was in the ground. Pressure from the earth or something. That happens, doesn’t it?"

"All the time, but I don’t think it did in this case. In fact, I know it didn’t." He sipped his coffee, choosing his words. "Now: That barely visible fracture is more significant than this big round hole. There are three things to be learned from it. First, that it-and the blow that caused it-occurred not after he was dead, but while he was still alive. Second, that the blow didn’t kill him outright, and possibly not at all, but that he lived a week or so afterward. And third, that the fracture definitely preceded the trephining-and the trephining probably did cause his death."

He paused, well launched in his best professorial style. In response, John’s mild truculence had evaporated, as it usually did, into a respectful, only slightly skeptical attentiveness.

"Run your finger over the crack, from side to side, near the edge of the round hole," Gideon said.

John did so and frowned. "The bone feels kind of concave-dented. How can you dent bone?"

"Easily. Living bone is relatively soft. It bends, splits, dents. But dead bone quickly loses its elasticity and becomes brittle. Therefore-"

"He probably got cracked on the head when he was alive."

"Right." Gideon said. "By something heavy enough to cause the fracture and blunt enough to cause the concavity. The exact locus of the blow was undoubtedly a little lower down, at the site of the trephining."

John took a notebook from the pocket of his denim shirt and jotted something down. "Okay, that’s point one," he said. "The fracture occurred while he was alive. Now, how can you tell he didn’t die on the spot?"

"If you look at the crack closely-here, use the magnifying glass-you’ll see that the edges aren’t really sharp. They’re slightly rounded because there’s been some resorption of the bone. And at the very top of it there’s a thin, very slightly raised bead of bone that joins the two edges together. See it? It’s a little lighter than the rest of the skull."

"I see it," said John with interest. "That shows it’s started to heal, right? Which wouldn’t have happened if he died right away."

"Righto. That’s point two."

"All right," John said approvingly, "but you said you could also tell that he didn’t live more than a week longer. How can you…? Ah," he said, tapping his forehead, "if he’d lived very long, it would be all healed, right?"

"Right. Stick with me; I’ll make a detective out of you yet. All right, here comes the third conclusion-that the trephining came after the blow on the head and probably killed him immediately." Gideon slid the skull a little closer to John. "Now, this is going to take a small leap of faith, you understand."

"No, it won’t. I’m ahead of you. The crack has started to close up, but the hole shows no sign of healing at all. So he must have died as soon as it was made." John beamed. "How’m I doing, Doc?"

"’A’ on logic, ‘F’ on conclusions. A narrow fracture begins to show healing within a few days, but a larger perforation, like this hole, takes longer. In fact, it never actually heals in the sense of closing up; it just rounds the edges. But even that wouldn’t begin to show for a while. So even with the lack of visible healing, he could easily have lived another few weeks."

"So how do you know he didn’t?"

"I mentioned septic osteitis a few minutes ago." Gideon waved his hand as John began to write again. "Don’t worry, I’ll write it up for you. Septic osteitis is simply inflammation of the bone due to infection. If it had occurred, you’d see a roughening, a pitting of the bone all around the hole. But it’s smooth. So, no infection."

"Okay," John said dubiously, "but I don’t see-"

"As a matter of fact, primitive trephining-with a sharpened mussel shell, say, or a piece of flint-almost always did cause a severe, often fatal infection of the bone. But not here. Therefore, I think we can assume it caused Hartman’s death."

John opened his mouth to speak, looked confused, and closed it again. "Come again?" he finally blurted. "It didn’t infect, and so therefore it did cause his death?"

"Right," Gideon said, smiling at John’s expression.

"This must be the place where we make the leap of faith," John said.

Gideon laughed. "Look, if Hartman had lived, we can assume-say, with ninety percent probability-that the bone would have become infected within a few days. But once bone is dead, it doesn’t infect. This bone didn’t infect. Ergo; the operation killed him right then, or a day or two later at most."

Gideon sat back in his chair and drank some coffee, but John leaned forward. "Wait a minute, not so fast. I’ll go along with you up to a point: Hartman couldn’t have lived long after the trephining, okay-that is, okay with a ninety percent probability. But that doesn’t mean the trephining killed him. That’s just a guess. There’s a big difference between correlation and cause-and-effect." He grinned. "Want to know who I learned that from?"

"It’s a guess, all right," Gideon said, "but when all you have is dry bones, some educated guesswork is part of the game." He patted the skull. "Here you have a guy who’s dead. Obviously. You examine his remains and you see that, probably on the same day he died, he had a big hole gouged out of his head in an appallingly primitive manner. I’d say you’re on reasonably firm ground proposing something more than a chance relationship between the hole and the death."

"Yeah, but it’s still guesswork. It’s not proof."

"Pardon me," Gideon said with some asperity. "I’m simply trying to make reasoned inferences from extremely limited data. If that isn’t good enough-"

"Take it easy, take it easy. God, you’re as bad as Fenster." He laughed suddenly, a childlike peal that crinkled the skin around his eyes into a thousand good-humored folds. "I’m not as used to these leaps of faith as you are. Can I ask a question without getting thrown out of class?"

Gideon smiled. "What?"

"If there’s no healing and no septic whatever-it-is, how do you know he wasn’t already dead when the hole was made? Didn’t you say people used to make amulets out of the piece of bone?"

Gideon tilted the skull so the light slanted across the parietal. "Do you see that hairline crack coming out of the bottom of the hole?"

"I think so," said John, leaning over the skull. "And isn’t this another one, a healed one?" he said, fingering a slender white line that ran an inch into the frontal bone from the anterior border of the hole.

"It is. Three cracks altogether, radiating from the center of the piece of bone that was removed. Doesn’t that suggest that the original blow to the head pretty well splintered the bone there? It would have made a pretty lousy amulet."

"Whew," said John. "So what does it all add up to?"

"My guess-"

"Your reasoned inference?"

"That’s what I said…is that Hartman was hit on the head with something blunt, something like a hammer or the back of a hatchet, resulting in a depressed fracture of the left parietal. When he didn’t mend properly-perhaps he never regained consciousness-they tried to relieve the pressure by trephining to remove the sunken fragments of bone. That didn’t work and probably set him back, and he died."

"Who’s ‘they’?"

"The Indians. I can’t see anyone else doing that kind of surgery."

"I don’t know," John said. "I’m still not used to this Indians idea. I mean, you were telling me just a few days ago-you and Julie both-it couldn’t be Indians, it’s ridiculous to think it’s Indians, it’s anybody but Indians."

"Well, you get fresh data, you change your hypothesis."

John looked doubtful. "So the new hypothesis is that these phantom Indians that nobody but you believes in hit Hartman on the head with a war club or something and then changed their minds and nursed him for a week and then tried to cure him by cutting a piece out of his head, and that finally did him in?"

Gideon shrugged. "That’s what it looks like to me."

"Well, what the hell kind of dumb theory is that?" John shouted, his hands outspread.

"Inferential reasoning," Gideon said with a smile, "will only get you so far." He began to gather his tools and put them in his attache case. "Now, having given you the better part of my morning, only to be shouted at and abused, I am going to drag Julie away from whatever administrative trivia she’s performing, and we are going to go engage in some richly deserved recreation."

John slumped back into his chair. "Why do I keep calling you in?" he said, shaking his head. "Things are always nice and simple until you stick your finger into them."

"Ah, but they come clear in the end, don’t they?"

"Yeah," John said, smiling, "they do. Usually. Up to now. Have fun, Doc. I’ll just slave away on this while you’re out playing in the sunshine."

"Excellent idea," said Gideon.

Julie was at Fall Creek campground, a quarter of a mile away. The camp was packed with people, and Gideon was concerned about finding her in the crowd. Every site seemed to be taken, and the paths bustled with people heading off to the woods. There were plenty of serious hikers: sturdy, chunky girls and lean, hard boys with clumpy, ankle-height shoes and towering, bedroll-topped backpacks on metal frames. These Gideon might have expected to find, had he thought about it, at a small campground on the edge of Mount Olympus’s low, western flank. But there were others: fat, pasty city men in Bermuda shorts, youngsters on skates and skateboards, and cross mothers with pouty children.

And there were still others, not many, but a distinctly recognizable breed all the same: sinewy, grim men in their forties and fifties, loners with lank hair and creased cowboy’s faces, eyes narrowed against the smoke from cigarettes dangling at the corners of their mouths.

"Gideon!"

Julie was behind him and looked competent and pretty in her ranger uniform. She laughed with obvious pleasure as soon as he turned, and he laughed, too. "Hi," he said. "How’s business?"

"Booming," she said, holding out both hands.

Gideon clasped her hands and held them a moment. "It certainly is. It’s mobbed here."

"Oh, yes, the campgrounds are crawling with people, and you practically have to wait in line to get on a hiking trail."

"Why? What’s going on?"

Julie looked at him oddly, her head tilted to one side. "’What’s going on?’ he says. A good question."

"That means something, apparently, but I’m afraid the significance eludes me."

"Well, Dr. Oliver, I believe that every thrill-seeker from the seven western states is here." She smiled at him. "It seems they read a certain professor’s article about Bigfoot being-"

Gideon laughed uncertainly. "You’re not serious…"

"The story got picked up-and considerably elaborated upon-by a bunch of other newspapers. It was even in the Sunday magazines. You really didn’t know?"

"They elaborated on the story?" For the first time, Gideon was becoming genuinely concerned about his reputation. He stepped aside for a fat woman in a housedress who was pushing a grumbling, dyspeptic baby in a stroller.

"Oh, yes," Julie said sweetly. "The only thing they all got right was the spelling of your name. One of the magazines even got a picture of you from somewhere. You looked awful. You had a beard."

"That was five years ago at least. I always thought I looked rather good in it." His tone was playfully cross, but, absurdly, he was hurt. Nora had always liked his beard. He had shaved it off to go for a job interview with UNESCO, only to find that two of the three members of the interview panel had beards of their own. He hadn’t gotten the position and somehow had never found the fortitude to go through that first scraggly month of beard-growing again.

"No," Julie said. "I like you the way you are now." She reached out and gently touched the side of his jaw. At once his petulance vanished.

Julie must have seen the change in his eyes. "Boy," she said softly, "you really are a pushover, aren’t you?"

Before he could think of anything to say, something bumped into him from behind, and a little girl’s voice, shrill with mock terror, cried, "Watch out! Everybody watch out! Here comes Bigfoot Kevin!"

Behind her, stomping down the campground’s one-way-only circular road, came a giggling boy of eight, swaying from side to side with a stiff-legged, clumping gait, arms outstretched-every child’s image of a monster since the first horror movie.

"Why don’t we get out of the traffic lanes?" Gideon said.

They threaded their way among campsites cluttered with clotheslines strung between majestic pines, and around TV-antennaed recreational vehicles and dusty pickup trucks with racked rifles in the backs of the cabs-those would belong to the lean, grim men, Gideon thought. At the lakefront there were few people and no commotion. They sat on a log a few feet from the water, enjoying the minute, silky sound of the tiny waves. Gideon picked up a handful of gravel and began flipping pebbles into the water. Julie watched him quietly for a while.

"It isn’t," she said, "just your article-"

"I wish you’d stop calling it my article. I was framed, as you know only too well."

Julie laughed. "Led on, perhaps. Taken advantage of, maybe, but not framed. You did it unto yourself, I’m afraid. But aside from the Bigfoot hubbub, the Quinault Valley is back in the news as Disappearance Valley again, and it’s brought a lot of people out of the woodwork. We’ve had reports of two flying saucer landings, one of them complete with-don’t laugh-little green men. We’ve had ten Bigfoot sightings, including a group of five hundred of them on the lawn at Lake Quinault Lodge at dawn…all this in addition to seven broken limbs and thousands of cuts and bruises. We’re practically out of Band-Aids."

"Sounds awful," Gideon said.

"That isn’t the worst of it. The Hornick family-that’s the girl who disappeared last week-has offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for finding her, or her abductors, or her killers. And there’s some Texas millionaire who’s gone on national TV and renewed an offer of a hundred thousand dollars for a Bigfoot, dead or alive."

"Whew," said Gideon. "That accounts for the people with the guns. What a mess."

"Indeed it is. And if someone actually finds a Bigfoot, it’ll be even worse. Not that there are any," she added quickly.

"Of course there aren’t," Gideon said. "And we don’t, thank God, need to hypothesize anymore about superhuman strength." He told her about Abe’s deduction concerning the atlatl and about their conclusions.

"An Indian group," she mused, "hiding in there. Just like the Yahi. Ishi all over again. Wouldn’t that be fascinating?"

"It would be fascinating if we had some concrete proof, but it’s little more than speculation at this point."

Julie poked at the gravel with the toe of her boot. "Well, as it happens, I just might be of help there. I think one of the reports of a so-called Bigfoot campsite might interest you."

"You jest. I’d be happy if I never heard of Bigfoot again."

"But they found a bone spear there. They brought it back. I’ve seen it."

"A bone spear?" Gideon paused in the act of tossing a pebble. "Like the one that was in Eckert?"

Julie nodded. "I think so. The people who found it are in Site 32. I told them who you are, and they’d be glad to show it to you."

Marcia Zander was one of the sturdy, chunky girls, an experienced hiker. Louis Zander was softer and chubbier, with a downy moustache, a blank, slightly sullen expression, and a cloudlet of marijuana fumes about him. The two sat on the wooden bench on one side of the table, while Julie and Gideon sat on the other. The long, bone-pointed spear lay down the center of the table, looking disconcertingly crude in the bright morning sun. Gideon stared at it, and the others looked at him, waiting for him to speak.

"Let’s see what we have here," Gideon said to start his observational processes going. "It’s a little under six feet, I’d say."

Louis Zander nodded vacantly. "Right, man."

"It’s five feet, ten inches," Marcia Zander said earnestly. "I measured it against my shoe." Her short, straight blond hair fell over her eyes as she leaned forward. She brushed it impatiently away, only to have it come down again. "Does anyone have a bobby pin?" she asked. No one did.

The shaft of the spear was obviously made from a tree limb that had been painstakingly smoothed and straightened. One end had been carefully thinned and split, and between the two prongs of the resulting fork, in the manner of prehistoric peoples everywhere, a rough bone blade, much like the one in the vertebra, but whole, had been lashed.

"You’re the local ethnology expert," Gideon said to Julie. "Does it look like anything from around here?"

She shook her head. "It’s a little like some of the old Makah points, but they live way up north and always have, around Cape Flattery. What it looks most like," she said doubtfully, "is…well, one of those Middle Paleolithic points you see in the textbooks, from Germany or France." She looked quickly at Gideon, as if expecting correction.

"It does, doesn’t it?" he said mildly.

"But those are forty thousand years old!"

"Curiouser and curiouser," Gideon said. He peered more closely at the head. "The binding is nearly rotted through. Look at it, will you? No one bought that in a store. It’s sinew; deer or elk, scraped thin and smooth. Between someone’s teeth, probably."

Louis Zander seemed to shake himself awake. "Well, so, is that a Bigfoot spear or not?"

Gideon looked at him closely, but the boy seemed to be in what must have passed in him for a state of earnestness. "I don’t think so. I wouldn’t give much credence," he added gratuitously, "to any of the tales going around about Bigfoot."

"Huh?" said Louis Zander, letting his mouth hang unpleasantly open for considerably longer than was required, while his dull eyes blinked twice. "I thought you were the Bigfoot expert." He turned to Julie with a look of stolid accusation. "I thought he was the big-deal Bigfoot expert."

"All right, kids," Julie said brightly, "do you suppose you could show us where you found this, on a topo map?"

"Bigfoot expert," Gideon muttered as they walked back along the road to the ranger station. "Thanks very much."

"Well, I had to tell them something to get them to stick around long enough to show you the spear."

"What were they doing way out there, anyway?"

"Actually, it isn’t way out there. They found it on Pyrites Creek, not even a mile from the trail-as the crow flies, that is. For people, it’s well over a thousand-foot climb. More like mountain climbing than hiking."

"Then how did the Zanders get there? He didn’t seem like the mountain-climbing type."

"They’d gotten lost coming back from Chimney Peak and were following Pyrites Creek downstream. They hoped it would get them to the trail eventually, which it did."

They stepped to the side of the road, out of the way of one of the dusty pickup trucks, complete with rifle and grim, lean driver.

"Bigfoot hunter," Gideon said.

"Or bounty hunter. Either way, they make me nervous." As they continued to walk again, Julie went on: "They smelled smoke from somewhere, and one of them spotted a path leading up from the creek."

"A path?"

"They said it was like an animal path, just a wearing away of the brush. They barely noticed it themselves. They went up it, hoping to get directions from somebody. They climbed way up-almost gave it up-but finally found a big ledge near the top. They found their smoke, too, just a dead campfire, with a few warm coals. But no people. They waited around for an hour and left."

"And that was where they found the spear?"

"Yes, in some bushes near the ledge."

Gideon walked along pensively for a while, his hands thrust into his back pockets. "Julie," he said, "would you take a rain check on Kalaloch? I’d really like to see that ledge."

"I thought you might. You think it’s where your Indians live?"

He looked at her, smiling. "You mean you think there are Indians now? Notwithstanding Ethnography of the Northwest Coast?"

"I’m beginning to think so. But you have almost ten miles of trail to get there, and a rough climb at the end of it. You can’t get in and out in a day, especially when you start this late."

"I’ll camp out overnight, then. It’d be fun; like spending a night in a haunted forest. No. I can’t do that; no sleeping bag."

"That’s not the problem. We have all kinds of gear you can borrow."

"What’s the problem, then?"

"The problem is, you’d get lost."

He stopped walking and drew himself up. "Miss Tendler, I have managed to survive very well in the trackless sands of the Sonoran Desert, the Arctic wastelands of Baffin Island, even the Boston subways-all without getting lost, or hardly. I’m sure I can make it in a national park."

"Yeah, you’d get lost," she said soberly. "You’d need a guide."

"Julie," he said, standing in the middle of the road with his hands on his hips, "with a topographic map and a river to follow, I assure you I’m competent… You wouldn’t care to go along with me, would you?"

"I’d love it," she said happily.