Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (32 page)

Suddenly Jac felt the air wavering around her. Familiar shivers ran up and down her arms, pinpricks of cold that alerted her to what was coming. The smells around her intensified. The light dimmed. Shadows descended. Her thoughts threatened to ebb away. She was suffering the first warning signs of an encroaching hallucination.

Something she’d just used in mixing this perfume was an olfactory trigger.

Jac pushed the chair away from the open bottles of essences and absolutes. The ribbon fell to the floor, forgotten. She stepped back. Away from the organ, the sensations she was having were less pronounced than they had been in the past. And not as frightening. She almost wanted to enter into the vision that teased her. It seemed as if part of her had stepped outside her body and was hovering over this room, watching another woman making perfume here many years ago.

Jac wanted to stay, to observe the woman more closely, but she knew she couldn’t allow this to happen. Not again. Not now.

She ran through her sanity commandments.

Open a window. Get fresh air. Take long, concentrated breaths. Stop your mind from spiraling by giving it a task.

Without explaining anything to Ash, she rose up, walked over to the window, pulled it open and stuck her head out. Breathing in the forest air, she focused. Hazel. Grass. Roses. Pine. The sea. Sanity.

“Are you all right?” Ash asked.

“I will be. I’m sorry. Something I inhaled had a strange effect on me.”

“An ingredient?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I think it was having an effect on me too,” he said.

“Yes?”

She turned to him.

Ash was looking at her strangely. As if he wasn’t quite seeing her, but looking at someone else. And then before she realized what was happening, he leaned forward and kissed her again. And the sensations she had been fighting turned into something quite different, and she shuddered with a jolt of almost nothing but pleasure.

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.