The Lost Goddess

23

Julia pressed herself into a corner, a kind of vestibule between the office and the main doors of the archives. Perhaps the killer would walk straight past, not see her, walk on.

Then she could run for it. If the killer walked straight down the lobby into the study room or the main archives, she would have a few seconds to flee, without even being spotted.

The door swung open.

The Asian woman stood there, looking left and right. Julia was hidden behind some coats and a stack of boxes, crushing herself backward against the wall. She could feel her heart beating in her lungs and her spine, so hard was she pressed to the rough brickwork.

Again, the Asian woman glanced left, and then right. The face of this woman was pale to the point of unearthliness. There was something wrong with it, something strange.

Now she was staring directly into the gloom of the vestibule. Squinting. Surely she had seen Julia. Surely this was it.

But then the woman walked on into the hallway, and she tapped on the glass. She wanted to speak to the curator. The grouchy old Frenchman.

This was another vortex of anxiety. Assuredly, the French curator would say, “Oh, there is someone here looking for you, she is in the building, she was here a minute ago,” and then — then the killer would turn and narrow those dark eyes and she would see Julia and the knives would come out, or worse.

The curator appeared to be asleep, or to have disappeared. There was no response to the woman’s persistent tapping.

Tap, tock, tap.

“Bonjour? Hello? Anyone there?”

No reply. The small, lithe woman had a soft, deep voice. Maybe an American or Canadian accent. Yet the face was not European, and was bewilderingly pale.

The murderer leaned close to the glass, cupping a hand to her eyes to see better, to see through. Where was the curator?

Tap, tock, tap.

“Bonjour?”

Julia assessed her chances. She could just run now, run right past, out the main door; it might take seconds for the murderer to realize what had happened; to turn and see the door swinging, see Julia sprinting away. Would the killer even come running after? Would she take the risk? Attack Julia in bright daylight?

It was the best option. Do it now. Before the curator returned and pointed and the woman turned.

Sweat trickled. She was sticky and hot and terrified and immobile but she had to do it. She was about to do it, to run, when she heard a voice, the curator’s, heard him sliding back the glass partition.

“Ah, Mademoiselle, pardon, bonjour.”

“Vous êtes occupé?”

“Non, j’étais en train de parachuter un Sénégalais!”

The Asian woman nodded, unsmiling.

“OK, I am going to continue my research. You understand? Je vais poursuivre mes recherches. OK?”

“Oui, oui!” The curator was grinning, feebly, submissively, like a supplicant; Julia realized with a shiver that even this big and grumpy man was frightened by this small, menacing woman, this thing, this killer, the presence she carried with her was so mesmerising, so unsettling.

The killer turned away. This was it. The danger was passing. Julia was going to survive. To make it through. The curator had said nothing. The killer was unaware of Julia’s presence five meters away—

“Un moment,” said the curator, leaning out through the glass partition. “Il y avait deux personnes qui vous cherchaient!”

There were two people looking for you.

The woman swiveled, lithe and tautened, in sneakers and jeans and a dark T-shirt under a fashionably scarred leather jacket.

“When?”

The curator mumbled.

“Ce matin…?” The reaction was instant. The rest of the curator’s sentence was truncated by a brash clattering of glass. Then a grunting noise. Then a fearsome groan. Julia could not see what exactly was happening. The killer was in the way, muscling and tugging. The grunting was horrible, pursued by a pissing noise, a hissing, and another low groan, then silence.

The killer then turned. And ran. Julia could hear running feet, the killer fleeing, surely. A door slammed open; cold wind blew in from outside, from the parking lot and the drizzle and the concrete Algerian slums.

For five minutes Julia remained crouching, half sobbing, half panting in relief and fear. She texted Alex. Go home. Now. Please trust me.

Then she called Rouvier.

The policeman picked up the phone at once and listened to her whispered story in brisk silence. Firmly, steadily, he instructed her: telling her to go to the apartment immediately, where he would send men to interview her. He likewise told her to lock herself in the apartment and answer to no one but him or the Paris police. In the meantime, he was sending cars to the archives of the Musee de l’Homme.

Shudders of relief rippled through Julia. Here again, in her soul, was her father, hugging her in the lobby of the ragged old casino in Sarnia.

Tentatively, Julia stood and turned to leave — but she couldn’t leave. Because she had seen what the killer did. The young “Oriental woman” had punched a hole in the glass partition; then she had evidently pulled the curator’s head through the hole, and slammed his neck down, onto the jagged shark teeth of the glass, severing arteries and veins, almost slicing off the entire head. Impaled on the shards of glass, it looked, grotesquely, like a severed pig’s head on a butcher’s counter.

The man was clearly dead, absurdly dead: his blood spooled across the floor, a luxurious shellacking of tacky red varnish. Julia gawked at the blood. She was almost paralyzed by the sight, this astonishing violence.

And then: a noise. The distinct squeak of rubber shoes on polished floor, returning. The sickly vertigo of fear made Julia sway, at the cliff edge of death. The killer hadn’t left the building: the young woman had gone the other way, slamming through doors, making the other doors swing, inhaling cold air; and now she was back in the lobby with her blank, beautiful, slightly distorted face, leering with fierce and logical intent. Julia screamed — she half screamed — and she ran. She ran or else she would die.

Her mind worked at a panicked speed. The parking lot was wrong, the wrong choice. A vast open space: three hundred meters of nothing. The murderer would catch her — the athletic body, the immense strength—Julia needed somewhere to hide, somehow, somewhere, until the police reached the museum. She had to buy herself time.

She stayed in the building and ran left, down a corridor, heard the killer running after her. Julia dared not look behind — not out of fear, but at the time it would take: a few seconds delay would mean her death. She sprinted as fast as she had ever run, to the end of the corridor, which darkened and turned and turned again, past doors, and boxes of old leather cloaks, reeking with neglect, then a pile of battered bronze drums, gloomy in the dark. She knocked them over as she hurled herself, the drums falling with enormous ancient thumps, resonant booms like beer kegs. Tumbling into the corridor.

This wouldn’t stop her pursuer, she knew. She could hear the loud but easy breathing of this remorseless woman, an athlete’s breathing, relaxed, confident, jumping over the Dong Sang drums, vaulting them, almost, like a graceful animal, a predatory feline. Julia threw herself at a door that terminated the corridor; she twisted and yanked it open and slammed it shut behind her. Four seconds. She had maybe four seconds to barricade the door.

With what? She was back in the archives, the vast echoing hangarlike spaces, racked with endless open corridors and a shadowed infinity of shelves.

A totem pole. A British Columbian totem pole, maybe two meters high, carved with eagle heads, vicious beaks of pine and cedar, was tilted against the door, directly to her left. Julia had just enough time to topple it over; it fell as the door was kicked open, blocking the door — but it wasn’t enough, she knew that at once. This had gained her another five seconds.

She needed more than that, much more than that — she needed five minutes, ten minutes, before the police got here, or she was going to die. She ran. Hard. Burning up the energy inside her, burning the will to live, running on the fuel of life. Straight into the vast darkened labyrinth of steel shelving and lofty racks of boxes and sarcophagi.

It was a true maze — a labyrinth of ancient anthropology. It was like being lost in a dream, a bad dream of her own teenage studies: anthropology and ethnology and archaeology — the sinister and beautiful cultures of ancient man, now her own death trap. Julia fled past grimy camel palanquins, slowly desiccating in the dryness. A rack of death masks, Senegalese or Cameroonian, smirked in the semidark. One of them fell to the floor as she brushed past, a mask of real human skin, a ghastly wig of real human hair, smiling at the roof.

Then more drums. Running. Perfume bottles of the Maghreb. Running. Moroccan rugs, knotted and ancient. Running. Okuyi helmets from Gabon. Running. All the lessons she’d ever had in ethnology were here — condensed into a nightmare. She ran.

A Soto lyre stone, carved in rock, nearly tripped her over. More bronze drums, dinted and somber, knocked at her heels.

And the killer was still coming, stalking the passages and open-ended corridors, seeking her, hunting her down. Julia felt like a small fish in coral, hiding, pathetically, from a shark, shirking the effortless and superior species, the top of the food chain.

No. She wouldn’t let it happen. She needed to fight back. If she was going to die, she was going to fight back first — but how? A sword. There was nothing here like that. No metal. A club? Yes. A club. A cudgel. Pausing in her heart-straining sprint, she grasped at a human sacrificial club, Tupinamba, Brazilian, a wooden killing club, decorated with scarlet feathers and white jaguar teeth. She could swing that around and maybe — yet even as she practiced she knew it was pointless — one swing and she would miss and then the killer would be on her, the long steel knife gutting her open, like the bison at Lascaux. Abject, despairing, she hurled down the club.

What else?

Carpets. Tunisian carpets. A shamanic cloak, musty, made of reindeer, still more drums, then dusty boxes, then another corner to run around and more miles of shelving. At last she began to slow down, her energy was sapping. The sad and angry despair flushed her with fury, but she was running out of life, out of that desire to resist. She grasped at herself — no, she couldn’t die like this, not here. Not like this. Not here. But how?

Seconds left. The killer was in the next steel corridor. Those yellow eyes, white in the darkness, glanced through the grille and the cardboard boxing — and narrowed on Julia. Got you.

She’d been spotted. Julia was trapped in one of the very last racks of shelves, which ended in a wall, the exterior wall — she was cornered. There was a door, probably an exterior door, beyond the next steel rack, but she was trapped. Entirely trapped. Dragging the last ingenuity from her brain, Julia stopped. This was it. Think of something.

If she couldn’t fight back, what could she do? If she couldn’t run away, how could she escape?

Hide. Protect. Defend? She needed to conceal herself. Now. Flailing and desperate, she reached for some wooden armor. A breastplate, from Japan, made for a samurai. But this was futile, the killer would tear it away. So what? What could she possibly do? The killer was fifty yards away, rounding the corner. A raptor descending.

There. A coffin, long and black and lacquered with dragons, loomed at the end of the steel corridor. A Chinese coffin, Ming dynasty, from Jiangxi province. She recognized the type: made of nunma wood, fire-tempered, incredibly hard. Sprinting to the coffin, she pulled at the heavy lid; even as she stooped, she could hear the rubber squeak of footsteps behind her, running, approaching, attacking. Julia strained to lift the great coffin lid, which rose slowly.

Three seconds. She bent herself double—two seconds — and tried to squeeze inside—one second — but the killer was here. It was surely too late. The killer was on her. But Julia was in. The lid collapsed shut, sealing her inside, with a great booming thud. Now she was encased in this ancient long box. Would it hold?

The knife slammed straight through the crack between the lid and the casket, but it didn’t reach her eye. The killer kicked at the coffin, frustrated, then the knife came again, trying to pry the box open. Julia pulled the lid down, tighter, desperately. The crack was widening. The lid was being lifted. Julia kicked, furiously, at the murdering fingers, the hands trying to get at her, to open the wooden sarcophagus.

Again the blade plunged, phallically, through the gap — but the point jarred and halted, and juddered, a centimeter from Julia’s pulsing neck. Now the blows were frenzied. The killer was stabbing and hacking, trying to kick the lid off, to expose Julia’s face, her body. Another crazy swoop of the blade came lunging through. How long could she resist this assault? More hacking swipes of steel blade slashed at the gap. Julia felt the first cut. A tiny nick of her flesh, and the first blood drawn.

With a rush of terminal horror, she realized that the wood was strong, but the hinges were bending and giving way — the lid was going to be shunted hard aside, leaving space for the killer; the next blow through the widening crack would go deeper, the next plunging blade swoop would reach her, stab her deep in the kidneys. She would be a corpse, floating in blood. Julia screamed.

A siren.

Outside, way out there, but quite distinct, Julia heard the caterwaul of police sirens.

The killer seemed to think, and to pause. The kicks and the stabbings stopped.

Julia crouched, fetally, inside her wooden box, tasting the sour and ferric spit of primeval emotion, of instinctive fear and will to live. She listened, tensed and coiled.

Then she heard that distinct, repetitive squeak. The rubber shoes of the killer. Running away? Could it be? The pounding of the shoes faded and was instantly replaced by voices, loud voices, and flashlights, real lights, proper lights. Doors were flung open. The police were in the building.

The killer had gone—she had fled, somewhere else, somewhere not here, leaving Julia encased inside her nunma wooden box.

A petite American archaeologist in a 2, 500-year-old Ming dynasty coffin allowed herself two sad, angry, urgent tears. Then she turned and strained, threw the lid open, and rose from the casket.