The Lost Goddess

1

The cave was cold. And dark. Bitter dark. Even though the last autumn sun of the Cévennes was shining outside, as soon as Julia made that descent, down the metal ladder, into the Cavern of the Swelling, the chilling blackness grasped at her — and sucked her in. Swallowing.

Why was she always unnerved by the initial descent? Surely she should have become accustomed to it by now? All summer she had been doing this: doing her job, digging and scraping in the dank limestone cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Yet the first moment of the working day never got any easier.

Reaching a hand up, she switched on the torch of her headband and crouched through the gloom to her tool roll, left there on the damp cave floor, from yesterday.

She knelt and unwrapped the plastic and laid it all out, exposing the trowels and eyeglass, the brushes and plumb lines. The tool roll was a gift from her devoted yet sighing parents. The tiny family she had left behind in Michigan.

The wind whistled outside, fluting across the cave opening like a child blowing air over a bottleneck. The sound was plangent and sad. Julia picked up her tool roll and crawled farther, painfully barking her shin against rock despite the protection of her soft neoprene kneepads. A few minutes later she halted under a limestone ceiling barely a meter high. Here was her patch. It looked forlorn.

She was used to working down here in the Cave of the Swelling, with her colleagues Kanya and Alex and Annika. But in recent days the little platoon had dwindled: Kanya had left for California, finishing the digging season a week early. Alex was elsewhere, working in a cave along the plateau, with the rest of the team. And Annika, her good friend Annika, she was nursing a cold, in her little cottage in the deserted village of Vayssière, high on the Cham.

But at least, thought Julia, adjusting the beam of her LED headlamp, at least she was still doing proper archaeology. And she had only one more week to make the most of this disappointing season. One more week to find something, to justify her sabbatical, to justify all the time and money spent here, in the most remote and isolated part of southern France: the departement of Lozère.

They had a week left; the final slice of the digging season.

And then what?

The vision of a winter in London, and many winters after that, teaching yawning eighteen-year-olds, was a drag. Julia cursed her meandering mind and concentrated on her work. Just do it. Even if she knew she wasn’t going to find anything more than a broken bone pin, she also knew she was lucky to be here at all. And the sheer metronomic rhythm of her archaeology was, as always, rather soothing: brush and trowel and sieve, trowel and tweezer and sieve.

The tinkle of her metal tools echoed down the empty cavern.

Julia tried not to think of her loneliness. What if some mad shepherd came down here and raped her? In speleology, no one can hear you scream. She smiled inwardly, at her own fears. She’d gut the guy with her six-inch survey peg. Just let him try it.

The hour passed. She bent to her task; sorting through the drier dust, at the end of the cave. Troweling and sifting. Troweling and sifting.

She brushed and troweled. And paused. Feeling her own heart. Beating.

An eye stared back at her.

Julia nearly dropped her brush.

A distinctive white circlet of bone was visible through the black soil, like a crescent moon on a very dark night.

An eye socket. In a human skull?

Julia squinted, closely, at the orbital bones and the fine nasal cavity. She felt the pulse of her professional excitement accelerate. An actual human skull.

How old was the cranium? Maybe it was some medieval goatherd, who fell down the hole after a night of rough wine. Maybe it was the corpse of some eighteenth-century Protestant, fleeing the war of the Camisards, but more likely it was Neolithic. The real thing.

The debris of the cave floor was largely Stone Age. They knew that. The other day she had found her tiny fragment of antelope bone pin — dated from 5000 B. C. This skull had to be of the same epoch.

Julia’s hand trembled, for a moment, with excitement. This was the best find of a desultory season in the cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Hell, this was the best find of her entire and desultory career.

She brushed, and scraped, then used the most delicate trowel, her precious four-inch silvery leaf-trowel, to wholly disinter the cranium. As she pushed the grit away, she realized — there was something odd about this skull.

It had a hole, high in the forehead.

Slipping on her working gloves, Julia lifted the cranium into the white and weakening light of her headlamp. Her batteries were on the fade, but she didn’t care. This was too good.

The ancient teeth gleamed in the shivering light, white and yellow. And smiling.

The hole in the bone was, in itself, no revelation. Julia had seen enough damaged bones to know that splinters and fractures were only to be expected in ancient remains: Homo sapiens emerging from the Ice Age had to fight savagely for food and survival, with cave bears and wolverines, with leopards and hyenas. Accidents were also common: from cliff falls and rock falls, and hunting wounds.

But this hole in the head had been made precisely. Carved. Sculpted. Not intended to be lethal, yet drilled into the bone.

She put the cranium on the cave floor and made some notes. Her grimy gloves soiled the white pages as she scribbled. She had discovered, surely, a skull deliberately pierced, or “trepanned,” in a form of early surgery: this was a Stone Age lobotomy, someone diligently excising a disk-shaped hole in the high forehead of the cranium.

Trepanning was well attested in the literature. It was the earliest form of surgery ever discovered; there were several examples of it in museums dating from the probable age of this skull: 5000 B. C.

But no one had any proper sense why Stone Age men did it. So this discovery was still quite something.

A noise disturbed her excited thoughts. Julia set down her notebook and stared into the murk, beyond the faint cone of light cast by her headlamp; the shadows of the cave danced around her. She spoke into the gloom.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello? Ghislaine? Annika?” Silence. “Alex?”

The silence was almost absolute. Only the vague whistle of the distant wind, up there on the Cham, answered her question.

No one was down here. No one but Julia Kerrigan, thirty-four years old, single, childless, with her degree from Montreal and her antistatic tweezers — her and this unnamed human skull. And maybe a rat.

Julia returned to her inviting task. She had two hours left before the day was done. And she was truly looking forward to supper now: when the archaeologists got together, as always, in the little Brasserie Stevenson in Pont de Montvert, to discuss the day’s finds — tonight of all nights would be fun. She would nonchalantly say to the oleaginous team leader: Oh, Ghislaine, I found a skull. Trepanned. I think it is Neolithic.

Her boss would beam and glow and congratulate her, and her friends would smile and laugh and toast her success with Côtes du Rhône, and then she would call Mom and Dad in the little house in Marysville and she would make them understand why she had left them to go to Europe. Why she still wasn’t coming home. Because her willful ambition had been justified, at last….

But wait. As she turned her head from her notebook to her bone brushes, she noticed a second whiteness, another gleam in the corner.

Another skull?

Julia brushed, very delicately, for a moment, and confirmed. It was a second skull. And this, here: in the farthest corner. What was this? A third?

What was all this?

Now she was working — and working hard. She knew that as soon as she told everyone, they would come and take over her cave, but this marvelous cache, this trove of bones, this was her find, she had spent all summer waiting for something like this — she had spent fifteen years waiting for something like this — so she was damned if she was going to surrender it without giving it every wallop of energy, this one last day.

Away down the passage, rain was falling, spattering on the metal ladder — no doubt blackening the sober old monoliths of the Cham des Bondons — but she didn’t care: now she could see that the cave floor was barely concealing, quite astonishingly, entire human skeletons.

All of them wounded.

She stared. Appalled. The light in her headlamp was almost gone, but it was still strong enough to illuminate what she had found.

Three skulls had holes in them. Bored holes. Trepanations. The four other skeletons, a man, woman, and two children, did not have holes in the head, but they exhibited another, deeply disturbing feature.

Julia rubbed some grit from her eyes, as if she could wipe away the unlikeliness of what she was seeing. But it was incontestable. The creamy-gray ribs and neck bones of these skeletons rammed with flint arrowheads. At all angles. The flesh that these arrows had once pierced had rotted away, thousands of years ago, but the stone arrowheads remained, lying between ribs, jammed between vertebrae.

These four Stone Age people had been brutally murdered, or even executed. Shot with arrows from all sides. Overkilled. Ritually. Julia couldn’t help feeling this had something to do with the other skulls, the trepanning, the holes in the head. But what?

Her thoughts were halted. Abruptly.

That noise again.

This time it was utterly unmistakable. Someone, something, someone, was descending the metal ladder. The rusty steel rattle seemed overloud in the darkness, darkness intensified by the fading glimmer of Julia’s dying headlamp.

She lifted a hand to the lamp and tapped. No good. The light was all gone. The batteries were dead; she could see almost nothing. But she could still hear. And the noise of someone approaching, in the somber darkness, made her back away, reflexively.

“Hello? Who is it? Who’s there?”

The darkness did not reply. A black shape was just visible in the gray sketch of light admitted by the cave entrance. The dark shape stopped. Big. Imposing. Julia strained to see a face but all she could discern was an ominous silhouette. Now the dark shape was hurrying down the passageway, straight toward her. Coming close, and closer.

Julia screamed.