The paper, which was entitled 'The Krüniger Plot and Mittel-Baxter Society', detailed an archaeological investigation that had recently taken place in an area of Germany with which the man was unfamiliar. He had found it in his atlas, and established it was too distant from any of his contacts for them to be able to provide any on-the-spot observations, and so he was restricted to the information in the paper.
A graveyard had been discovered not far from the remains of a Neolithic settlement. Carbon dating of the skeletons, together with corollary evidence from personal items found within some of the graves, had allowed the site to be dated to the latter part of the eighth millennium B.C. Ten thousand years ago. The man sat for a while, savouring the thought, summoning up an image of this cross-section of time. Before any now-recognizable language had been spoken, long before even the Pyramids had been built — unless one believed the claims of the New Age archaeologists with their selective evidence-gathering and flimsy projections — these people had lived and died and been laid in the earth, had made love and eaten and shat their waste on the ground. The man sipped a little of his coffee, being careful to replace the cup on the side table so that it was only just balanced. Then he read on.
There were twenty-five sets of remains. Women of up to young middle age, children, a few men in their late teens or early twenties, and one man of more advanced years. Thorough appendices detailed the condition of each of the skeletons, and outlined the techniques that had been used both to age them and establish the dietary and environmental conditions within which they had lived. The authors of the paper remarked how the skeletons had been laid in a grid, an organized system of burial observed in no other sites in that part of Europe at the time. They provided diagrams demonstrating how the orientation of the grid was in accordance with what was understood of the period's interest in the summer and winter solstices, thankfully avoiding a digression into primitive astronomy. They instead produced a series of arguments to show that this arrangement provided further evidence for a proposition to which they had been committed for some years: that this particular area of Germany had been host to a hybridized form of social organization that they termed Mittel-Baxter Society (for such were the authors' names), a sporadic and localized culture of very minor academic interest and negligible long-term significance.
The man read the paper carefully to the end, and then worked steadily through the appendices. After reading the reports on the skeletons of the other deceased, nodding occasionally at what he regarded as perfectly well-argued conclusions, he came to the section regarding the older man who had been found at the site. The position of his skeleton — at the exact centre of a five-by-five grid — suggested that he had been the first to be buried in this plot, and the authors argued compellingly that this implied that the man had been a person of importance within the nearby village. It was also deduced that he had been born in a different part of the country, as bilateral pitting in the interior of his eye sockets — a condition known as cribra orbitalia — suggested that his diet had been deficient in iron for much of his life. The amount of iron in vegetation is determined by the geological qualities of the soil in which it grows, and its absorption affected by the amount of lead present: people from different areas will therefore show marked variations in the condition. Cross sections taken from the man's teeth, and subsequent analysis of the levels of lead and strontium isotopes, had enabled them to link him to an area over two hundred and fifty miles away. In an aside it was observed that a lesion on his skull bore witness to a blow to the head that had not proved fatal — as the damage it had caused to the bone tissue was long-healed prior to the man's eventual demise. They speculated that this might have been a result of a battle or struggle for power, and that this proved he had lived a long and vibrant life. A man who, the authors provokingly speculated, might even have been personally responsible for bringing Mittel-Baxter culture into a previously uncivilized and backwoods area, and whose local significance had been enshrined in the manner of his burial. The man read this section for a second time, and then closed the paper on his lap. He was very pleased. This was the best yet, much better and far, far older than even the seven ancient burials discovered together high on the Nazca plain at Cahuachi, each with fossilized excrement in their mouths. He felt pity for Mittel and Baxter, though he supposed it unlikely that the full stupidity of their conclusions would ever be brought to light. Perhaps the paper might even help maintain their tenure at the godforsaken midwestern university for which they toiled. He could, he supposed, get in touch with them and put them in the picture. He doubted that he would be believed, however, even though the truth of the matter was there for those who had eyes to see. Archaeologists were worse than most when it came to judging evidence on the basis of their pre-existing suppositions. It didn't matter whether they were flair players like Hancock and Baigent, or journeymen like Klaus Mittel and George Baxter: they all saw what they wanted to see. The traditionalists could only ever see ceremonial walkways, the New Agers their alien landing strips — however absurd each idea was in individual circumstances. Some of the time each was correct, but they'd never know when — because in their minds they were right all the time. Only if you were prepared to examine the evidence dispassionately could you reliably divine the truth.
The skull lesion most certainly denoted a head injury, though one that had been far more significant than Mittel and Baxter realized — a childhood injury profound enough to wake a portion of the brain that in most men remained regrettably dormant. The evidence of cribra orbitalia was likewise not merely of import with regard to geographical positioning. It was indeed often related to iron deficiency, and sometimes anaemia of a congenital or haemolytic type, but it could also have a far more interesting genesis. Excessive exposure to lead could cause the condition. This, the man knew, wasn't 'poisoning' at all, but a gift that could combine with other factors and lead to alterations on a genetic level, changes that woke suppressed parts of the human genome and allowed them to become manifest.
It was not Mittel and Baxter's misinterpretation of the forensic evidence that was most at fault, however, but their inability to judge the true nature of the site. The man in the centre of the cemetery grid had not died first. Of course not. He had died last. In his own time, and by his own hand.
At the centre of his creation.
14
The realtor leaned forward on his elbows, opened his little mouth, and spoke. 'And what kind of bracket would you be looking to purchase into? Please be frank. I appreciate that
these are early days in our relationship, Mr, uh, Lautner, the dawn of our search for a potential home — but I'm going to come right out and say it'll promote our settling into a mutually beneficial mode if I know exactly how much you're hoping to realize into real estate at this time.'
He sat back in his chair and squinted knowingly at me, evidently pleased to have laid his cards on the table. There was to be no pulling the wool over this guy's eyes, I gathered wearily. If I only had eight dollars and change to spend, or was maybe hoping to barter with shiny stones, he intended to know right away. He was middle-aged and skinny with red hair, and his name — scarcely credibly — appeared to be Chip Farling. I'd already talked to several very similar people, and my tolerance was getting lower and lower.
'I'd like to cap it around six,' I said, briskly. 'For the time being. Something special, I may go higher.'
He beamed. 'That would be cash in full?'
'Yes it would.' I smiled back.
Chip's head bobbed, and his neat little hands moved a couple of pieces of paper around on his desk.
'Good,' he said, still nodding. 'Excellent. That gives us something to play with.'
Then he pointed a finger at me. I frowned, but soon realized this was merely a prelude to his next action, which involved putting his hand up to his chin and rubbing it while staring shrewdly into the middle
distance. This I understood to mean he was thinking.
After nearly half a minute of this, he refocused. 'Okay. Let's get to work.'
He bounced up from the desk and walked briskly to the other end of the office, clicking his fingers. I sighed into my coffee, and prepared to wait.
I'd gone to UnRealty first, of course. It was shut. A notice on the door thanked people for their patronage and explained that the business was being wound up on account of the death of its owner. It stopped short of adding that his heir being an asshole had been an additional factor. I leaned close to the window and peered in. It doesn't matter if the desks and filing cabinets remain, if the computers sit in place and a year planner from the local print shop still hangs on the wall, vacation time firmly plotted by the office anal retentive — you can tell at a glance whether the business has air in its lungs. UnRealty didn't. I'd known it would be that way, but the sight still stopped me short. I realized I hadn't tried to work out whether the discoveries of the last forty-eight hours made my father's actions over UnRealty any more explicable. I couldn't make the thought go anywhere.
So I moved my body instead, and took myself around all the realtors I could find on foot. A rough index of a small community's status can be taken from the number of real-estate businesses on its streets. In Cowlick, Kansas, you're going to have to look real hard. Everyone wants to get out, not in, their only proviso being that it not be through the medium of their death. Preferably. Somewhere of moderate wealth you'll find one or maybe two offices, mixed in amongst the other businesses by the process of commercial Brownian motion. In a place like Dyersburg you can't move for realtors. Even more than the scarves and the galleries and little restaurants, what that kind of town is selling is an idea: the notion that you could live this way all year round, that you could be one of the people who carve off a piece of the good stuff and put a sturdy fence round it; that you, too, could sit in a custom-built log home with cathedral ceilings and feel at one with God and his angels. All over America, the rich are carving out their hidey-holes. Ranches that used to support cattle or simply beauty are being bought up and subdivided into twenty-acre home sites where you can rejoice in stunning views and neighbours who are absolutely just like you. I'm not dissing this. I want one of these views, I want one of those lives, held in the palm of the mountains in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. I just don't want what comes with it. The golf. The part-share in a Lear jet. The cigar humidors. The bland, screamingly serene androids who live in these country clubs and lodges: bluff men with leather tans and firm handshakes, women with their steely eyes and surgery-tight cheeks; conversations that are one part greed, two parts self-satisfaction, and three parts eerie silence. I think it would drive me insane.
After a little while Chip reappeared, clutching a handful of prospectuses and two videotapes. 'Mr Lautner?' he breathed. 'It's time to find the dream.'
I dutifully watched the tapes, taking care to make occasional grunts or moues of interest. Neither had anything that resembled what I was looking for. Then I leafed through the brochures, which featured faux wooden lodges interior-decorated by some cowboy on drugs, or gleaming white boxes of such Modernist sterility they looked like they'd been discovered on the moon. The only thing that varied, and that not by much, was the hilariousness of the prices. It had been this way with each of the previous realtors. I was on the verge of dutifully asking for Chip's card and leaving, maybe calling Bobby to check how he was getting on with his task, when hidden amongst the glossies I found a single piece of paper.
'The Halls,' it said, in an attractive typeface. 'For people who want more than a home.'
It went on, in three paragraphs of curious restraint, to describe a small development up in the Gallatin range. Ski-in, ski-out convenience, naturally. End-of-the-road seclusion, of course. A two-hundred-acre tract of highlands, fashioned into a community of such ineffable perfection that Zeus himself probably bought a town house off plan — and yet the copy wasn't trying very hard to sell. There weren't even any
pictures, or a price, which piqued my interest further.
I picked up one of the other brochures more or less at random, just making sure it was expensive.
'Like to take a look at this one,' I said.
Chip checked, nodded delightedly. 'It's a peach,' he said.
'And while we're in the area,' I added, as if an afterthought, 'let's check this place out too.'
I shoved the single piece of paper across the desk at him. He glanced at it, then folded his hands
together and looked at me.
'With The Halls, Mr Lautner,' he said, judiciously, 'exclusivity is very much the name of the game. We would be looking at very high-end, in monetary terms. Six million would no longer suffice. By quite some
margin.'
I gave him my best and richest smile.
'Like I said. Show me something special.'
An hour later I was listening to Chip talk about golf. Listening again. Still listening. Would, I was beginning to fear, always be listening. Early in the drive, before we were even out of Dyersburg, he'd quizzed me on my own commitment to the game. I'd rashly admitted I didn't play, though luckily stopped short of adding, 'Why on earth would I, for the love of God?' He stared at me for so long, with a look of such stunned incomprehension, that I said I was intending to take the sport up just as soon as I was settled — that this ambition was, in fact, foremost among my reasons for seeking a property of this type. He'd nodded slowly at this, and then taken it upon himself to give me a crash course on everything there was to know about the game. I reckoned I could bear about another fifteen minutes, and then I'd just have to kill him stone dead.
I'd already endured being shown the house in Big Sky, with its Sub-Zero appliances and Honduran maple flooring and fireplace handcrafted by some moron out of big pebbles. In the end I simply shook my head. Chip clapped me encouragingly on the shoulder — we were well on the way to best buddies by now — and we trooped back to the car. We drove back down to the main road and followed it further into the mountains, Chip giving me the lowdown on what he perceived to be two tiny flaws in Tiger Woods's game — both of which he considered to be related to racial temperament. The sky, which had been clear in the early morning, was now the same colour as the road. The Gallatin River, cold and fast, ran along the left. On the other side was a narrow band of valley, filled with trees. The mountains rose steeply on either side, a notch up into the Rockies. You travel far enough down this way you come up out onto a high plain and then swing east into Yellowstone Park, the caldera of a dormant supervolcano that last erupted six hundred thousand years ago. Molten rock has been gathering in the hollows underneath it since then, and my father told me one time that local legend speaks of a faint buzzing noise on the shores of Yellowstone Lake — the sound of pressure slowly building deep in the rock. Apparently the whole lot could go off again any day, plunging us right back into the Stone Age, which would be a bummer. The way I felt after an hour with Chip, I believed I was capable of triggering it just with the crackling coming from my head.
Twenty miles down the road, Chip pulled over to the right, apropos of nothing as far as I could tell. He hopped out of the car and hurried over to the fence, where I realized there was a small and unassuming gate. This surprised me. Big Sky, in common with most such places, had a huge great entrance, fashioned from trees that had already been sizeable when the Farlings were as yet unheard-of in the area. This gate looked like it led to nothing more than a service road. Chip leaned close to the right-hand side, and I saw his lips move. I realized that an intercom had been built into the post. He straightened and waited for a moment, peering into the sky. A few drops of rain had begun to fall. Then he turned back, listened to something, and walked back to the car.
By the time he was strapped back in, the gate had opened. Chip drove through, and it shut again immediately behind us. He steered us along a track beyond, two patchy lines where the grass had been flattened. He drove carefully, but I was still bounced around. I winced. 'Kind of a rustic thing, is it?'
He smiled. 'You'll see.'
The track continued for maybe a quarter of a mile, cutting at an angle away from the main road and toward a dense stand of trees. As we rounded them, the surface abruptly changed. From two worn lines in the scrub it switched to narrow but immaculate blacktop. I turned quickly in my seat, and saw that the
main road was now invisible, obscured behind the trees.
'Cunning,' I said.
'Nothing is left to chance at The Halls,' Chip intoned. 'Those who choose to make their homes there
can count on the very highest standards of privacy.'
The path turned back away from the river, winding behind an outcrop to follow a steep course up a gully, curving further and further around to remain obscured from the main road. Within a few minutes it was hard to believe that the highway had ever existed. Somebody had put genuine thought into The Halls. I was mildly impressed. 'How long has this place been here?'
'Development started seven years ago,' Chip said, peering through the windshield against the rain. 'Just a shame you're not going to see it in better weather. You get a good snowfall up here, you're going