'What?'
Christine was gesturing into the darkness.
'Here. This is from Gobekli.'
Rob paused. He was getting the bad signals again. The suicide bomber in Iraq. He could never forget the bomber's face, staring over; just before the explosion.
Rob felt the urgent need to exit-to get out of here. Now.
Christine said: 'Shut the door.'
Reluctantly, Rob closed the door behind him. They were alone in the furthest vault, with whatever Franz had found. Whatever he felt should be compared with the horror of the Cayonu Skulls.
'Rob, come and look.'
Her torchlight was shining down on an extraordinary statue. A woman, with her legs open: the vagina heavily engraved, and obscenely large. Like the open wound in the fur of that goat.
Next to the woman stood a trio of animals: wild boars, perhaps. All of them had pronounced, erect penises; they were surrounding the splayed woman-like it was a gang-rape.
'This is from Gobekli.' Christine whispered.
'Is this what we were looking for?'
'No. I remember when we found this. Franz put it here. He must have been hoarding the…stranger discoveries in one place. So whatever it is he found should be here. Somewhere.'
Rob flicked his flashlight left and right and left. The dust whirled in the gloom. Faces of sombre gods and leering demons greeted him, then faded to black as he moved along. He couldn't see anything; he didn't even know what he was looking for. It was hopeless. Then his torchlight illuminated a large polystyrene box with the word Gobekli written on it in marker pen. Rob felt his heart thump. 'Christine,' he hissed.
The box was lodged at the back of the steel shelf, by the cave wall. It was obviously big and heavy; Christine struggled with it. Lying his torch on the shelf behind, Rob reached in and assisted her. Together they dragged the box out and set it on the floor.
Rob picked up his flashlight, his heart racing, and kept the beam high as Christine opened the box. Inside there were four old-fashioned olive jars about half a metre long, packed in bubblewrap. Rob felt a thudding pang of disappointment. Half of him had wanted to find something obscene and horrifying. The journalist half; the juvenile half of him, maybe.
Christine took one of the jars out.
'Is it from Gobekli?'
'For sure. And if it is, then it must be ten thousand years old. So they did have pottery…'
'Amazingly well preserved.'
'Yes.' Handling the jar with great care, Christine turned it over. There was a curious design on one side. A sort of stick with a bird at the top. 'I've seen that somewhere,' she said. Quietly.
Rob took his mobile out and took a brisk set of pictures. The flash from the phone-camera felt like an intrusion, in the sombre darkness of the vault. Djinns and emperors scowled in the brief and vulgar dazzle.
Pocketing the phone, Rob reached into the box and took out one of the long jars himself. It was surprisingly heavy. He wanted to know what was inside. Some kind of liquid? Grains? Honey? He tilted it and looked at the top. It was stoppered and sealed. 'Shall we open it?'
'Careful…'
Her warning came too late. Rob felt the jar suddenly sag in his hand: he had tilted it too brusquely. The neck of the jar seemed to sigh, and it fell onto the floor: then the crack in the neck opened further, ripping into the body of the ancient, rotting pottery. The jar was crumbling in Rob's hand. Just crumbling. The shards scattered on the floor, some of them shivering immediately into dust.
'Oh my God!' The smell was hideous. Rob put a sleeve to his nose.
Christine shone a torch on the contents of the jar. 'Fucking hell.'
A tiny body lay on the floor. A human body: a baby, forced into a foetal position. The corpse was half mummified, half viscous liquid. Still decomposing after all the centuries. The stench drilled into Rob's face till he gagged. Gurgles of liquid were pouring from the skull.
'Look at the face!' cried Christine. 'Look at the face!'
Rob shone his flashlight in the baby's face. It was locked in a silent scream. A scream of a dying child, echoing across twelve thousand years.
Suddenly lights filled the room. Lights, noises, voices. Rob spun and saw: a group of men standing in the back of the vault. Men with guns and knives, coming for them.
26
Hugo De Savary was very elegant for a professor. Forrester had expected someone dowdy: leather patches on the elbow, excess dandruff on his shoulders. But the Cambridge don was animated, cheerful, youngish, positively svelte, exuding an air of confident prosperity.
Presumably this was because his books-popular treatments of Satanism, cults, cannibalism, a whole roster of Gothic themes-had been so commercially successful. This had led him to be shunned by crustier members of the academic community, or so Forrester had guessed, judging by the reviews he had read.
It was De Savary who had suggested they lunch in this very fashionable Japanese restaurant near Soho. Forrester had requested they meet up, in an email, when the professor was next in town. De Savary had happily acceded, and even offered to pay, which was good, since the restaurant he had nominated was certainly not the sort of place Forrester normally used when soliciting information, being maybe five times too expensive.
De Savary was consuming his little dish of miso black cod with great enthusiasm. They were sitting on a bench of oak wood in front of a counter that surrounded a central kitchen space with a vast black grill, tended by frowning and ferocious Japanese chefs slicing obscure vegetables with frighteningly large knives. He turned to Forrester. 'How did your forensic people know the elixir was damu?'
The professor was talking about the liquid in the bottle from Castlerigg. Forrester tried to pick up some raw squid with his chopsticks and failed. 'We've had several muti murders in London. African child sacrifice. So the lab boys had come across damu before.'
'The headless torso of that poor child found in the Thames?'
'Yep.' Forrester sipped some of his warm sake. 'This damu stuff is apparently the concentrated blood of sacrificial victims. That's what Pathology tells me.'
'Well they're right.' Before them a large Japanese chef was gutting a lividly pink fish with great speed. 'Muti really is quite disgusting. Hundreds of children die every year in black Africa. You know exactly what they do to the children?'
'I know they chop off the limbs…'
'Yes. But they do it when the children are alive. And they cut off the genitals too.' De Savary sipped beer. 'The screams of the living victims are supposed to add to the potency of the muti. Shall we have some of that yellowfin tuna steak?'
'Sorry?'
The idea of this ultra-fashionable restaurant, it seemed, was that you kept ordering tiny bits of food. You didn't order everything at the start: you kept going until you were full. It was fun. Forrester had never been anywhere like it. He wondered who could afford the prices. Soft shell crab sushi, flown in from Alaska. Toro with asparagus and sevruga caviar. What was toro?
'The rock shrimp tempura is amazing,' said De Savary.
'Tell you what,' Forrester said, 'you order. Then tell me what you think about the gang…'
De Savary smiled gravely. 'Yes of course. My lecture is at three. Let's crack on.'
'So what do you think?'
'Your gang seems obsessed with human sacrifice.'
'That much we know.'
'But it's an eccentric congeries of praxes.'
