perhaps four inches high, holding up its own bowels in offering. Blood was spilling upon the ground, and a flower sprang from the earth.
'Richard?'
'Oh, I have names for all my children,' de l'Orme said.
Richard became one of many such creatures. The column was so densely crowded with deformity and torment that an unsophisticated eye would have had trouble separating one from the other.
'Suzanne, here, she's lost her children.' De l'Orme introduced a female dangling an infant in each hand. 'And these three gentlemen, the Musketeers I call them.' He pointed at a gruesome trio cannibalizing one another. 'All for one, one for all.'
It went much deeper than perversion. Every manner of suffering showed here. The creatures were bipedal and had opposing thumbs and, here and there, wore animal skins or horns. Otherwise they could have been baboons.
'Your hunch may be right,' de l'Orme said. 'At first I thought these creatures were either depictions of mutation or birth defects. But now I wonder if they are not a window upon hominids now extinct.'
'Could it be a display of psychosexual imagination?' Thomas asked. 'Perhaps the nightmare of that face you mentioned?'
'One almost wishes it were so,' de l'Orme said. 'But I think not. Let us suppose our master sculptor here somehow tapped into his subconscious. That might inform some of these figures. But this isn't the work of a single hand. It would have taken an entire school of artisans generations to carve this and other columns. Other sculptors would have added their own realities or even their own subconscious. There should be scenes of farming or hunting or court life or the gods, don't you think? But all we have here is a picture of the damned.'
'But surely you don't think it's a picture of reality.'
'In fact I do. It's all too realistic and unredemptive not to be reality.' De l'Orme found a place near the center of the stone. 'And then there's the face itself,' he said.
'It's not sleeping or dreaming or meditating. It's wide awake.'
'Yes, the face,' Thomas encouraged.
'See for yourself.' With a flourish, de l'Orme placed the flat of his hand on the center of the column at head level.
But even as his palm lighted upon the stone, de l'Orme's expression changed. He looked imbalanced, like a man who had leaned too far forward.
'What is it?' asked Thomas.
De l'Orme lifted his hand, and there was nothing beneath it. 'How can this be?' he cried.
'What?' said Thomas.
'The face. This is it. Where it was. Someone's destroyed the face!'
At de l'Orme's fingertip, there was a crude circle gouged into the carvings. At the edges, one could still make out some carved hair and beneath that a neck. 'This was the face?' Thomas asked.
'Someone's vandalized it.'
Thomas scanned the surrounding carvings. 'And left the rest untouched. But why?'
'This is abominable,' howled de l'Orme. 'And us without any record of the image. How could this happen? Santos was here all day yesterday. And Pram was on duty until... until he abandoned his post, curse him.'
'Could it have been Pram?'
'Pram? Why?'
'Who else even knows of this?'
'That's the question.'
'Bernard,' said Thomas. 'This is very serious. It's almost as if someone were trying to keep the face from my view.'
The notion jolted de l'Orme. 'Oh, that's too much. Why would anyone destroy an artifact simply to –'
'My Church sees through my eyes,' Thomas said. 'And now they'll never see what there was to see here.'
As if distracted, de l'Orme brought his nose to the stone. 'The defacing is no more than a few hours old,' he announced. 'You can still smell the fresh rock.'
Thomas studied the mark. 'Curious. There are no chisel marks. In fact, these furrows look more like the marks of animal claws.'
'Absurd. What kind of animal would do this?'
'I agree. It must have been a knife used to tear it away. Or an awl.'
'This is a crime,' de l'Orme seethed.
From high above, a light fell upon the two old men deep in the pit. 'You're still down there,' said Santos.
Thomas held his hand up to shade the beam from his eyes. Santos kept his light trained directly upon them. Thomas felt strangely trapped and vulnerable. Challenged. It made him angry, the man's disrespect. De l'Orme, of course, had no
inkling of the silent provocation. 'What are you doing?' Thomas demanded.
'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'While you go wandering about, we've made a terrible discovery.'
Santos moved his light. 'I heard noises and thought it might be Pram.'
'Forget Pram. The dig's been sabotaged, the face mutilated.'
Santos descended in powerful, looping steps. The ladder shook under his weight. Thomas stepped to the rear of the pit to make room.
'Thieves,' shouted Santos. 'Temple thieves. The black market.'
'Control yourself,' de l'Orme said. 'This has nothing to do with theft.'
'Oh, I knew we shouldn't trust Pram,' Santos raged.
'It wasn't Pram,' Thomas said.
'No? How do you know that?'
Thomas was shining his light into a corner behind the column. 'I'm presuming, mind you. It could be someone else. Hard to recognize who this is. And of course I've never met the man.'
Santos surged into the corner and stabbed his light into the crack and upon the remains. 'Pram.' He gagged, then was sick into the mud.
It looked like an industrial accident involving heavy machinery. The body had been rammed into a six-inch-wide crevice between one column and another. The dynamic force necessary to break the bones and squeeze the skull and pack all the flesh and meat and clothing into that narrow space was beyond comprehension.
Thomas made the sign of the cross.
We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth.
– HOMER, The Odyssey
5
BREAKING NEWS
Fort Riley, Kansas
1999
On these wide plains, seared in summer, harrowed by December winds, they had conceived Elias Branch as a warrior. To here he was returned, dead yet not dead, a riddle. Locked from sight, the man in Ward G turned to legend.
Seasons turned. Christmas came. Two-hundred-pound Rangers at the officers' club toasted the major's unearthly tenacity. The hammer of God, that man. One of us. Word of his wild story leaked out:
