The Dark Place (11 page)

"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.