The Find of a Lifetime

‘Meet me at the base of Dig Site C. Tell no one’

You consider the scrawled note a moment, shuffling the sheaf of papers awaiting your perusal with your other hand. It’s a familiar sight. Most geniuses are every ounce as eccentric as they are brilliant, sporting a host of quirks that can run anywhere from amusing to mildly inconvenient. Professor Charles is far from an exception to this rule, with his penchant for written forms of communication above all being one and his steadfast paranoia being the other. Where each landed on your spectrum from annoying to amusing depended largely upon your preexisting mood, and the amount of caffeine humming through your veins. Given how long it had taken to earn that trust— the entirety of your undergraduate degree, and the better half of grad school— notes like these had become a part of your daily life. So you disregard its urgency rather easily as you fold the paper and tuck it into your pocket, sip from your mug of watery instant coffee, and drop the rest of your mailbox’s contents onto your desk.

It’s been eight months since you’d first set foot on this dusty wasteland, eight months of cryptic notes, poor results and bad coffee. Not that you’d consider yourself defeated. It’s plenty typical for archaeological dig sites to encounter dry spells; digging is difficult, meticulous work reliant far more on educated guesswork and a healthy dosage of luck than you’d like to admit. You’re fully aware of this, you’d signed away the past year of your life quite freely with this knowledge in mind. No, the trouble was convincing your investors of this. With the site rapidly approaching its first anniversary they were beginning to grow understandably antsy. A year of slim pickings is difficult to explain in any profession, but the longer things continued without a miraculous find, the more insistent the letters grew. 

Of course, you think to yourself, it wouldn’t kill them to remember they’ve asked us to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. 

“Haven’t seen the Professor, have you?” 

You blink, startle yourself from your thoughts to see the head of tousled blonde curls poking through the door. Jake— he’d been in a few classes with you, primarily the ones taught by Charles. That’s unsurprising considering most of the people working here had been the Professor’s students at some point or another, it was simply how things went. It’s both amusing and a little frightening to see that the cult of Charles is still as vibrant today as it had been when you were in school. “No,” you say, ignoring the guilty note in your pocket. 

“We’re thinking of doing a search if he’s not back by lunch, Katia says she never saw him come back to the bunks last night. Probably just Charles being Charles, but I don’t like the thought of him down in the caves on his own. Not at his age.”

He’s got a point. “I’ll join you once I’m done with these,” you say, holding up the top page of your mailbox haul. He smiles, ducks out and you stare vacant at the page still in your hand. Your mind buzzes blank. This is pointless. You open the top left drawer, push in the pile and stand.

Dig Site C is easily the furthest from Base Camp, a distance you inwardly curse as clouds of red dust choke your breath. You might have remembered a bandana. No one’s been near the place in months, not since an unfortunate cave-in had sent two diggers to the hospital and one to turn in his letter of resignation. The site had been placed on hold until requests for preventative equipment were answered, the Committee’s stony silence creating for you all a vicious circle of bruised and empty hands. It sits abandoned now, as it’ll likely be until the funding is pulled. You might have known the Professor would be here.

“Charles?” You drop down to the first level, thick boots absorbing the fall as you look up at the maw of the cave and shiver. Privately, if it was a choice between the dust-soaked winds and the caves you’d take the open air, suffocating or no. There’s just something about the stone that unnerves you, something about the way the red-streaked strata crosses around and over your head like living veins to a beast about to swallow you whole. You can never shake the feel that there are eyes in the walls, watching intently. 

With any luck there are, you remind yourself, a little annoyed. You, like all the others are here searching for Homo Musicorum, an early species of man thought to have been the first to move past crude tools in favor of complex contraptions. Their discovery would bridge the gap between creativity for survival’s sake versus for pleasure’s, indicating vital developments to the evolution of the human brain. It would also bring the Professor the degree of academic respect he so covets, considering he’s staked his career on the discovery of the elusive fossils. Thirteen of his students had been coaxed into taking the leap of faith with him, a number which has dwindled to the single digits with each passing month of fruitless efforts. Losing the Professor however would be the final crack in the hull of your rapidly sinking ship. 

“Who’s there?” The familiar voice bounces around the caverns, warping with every passing second. You quicken your pace, stopping abruptly at the sight of three diverging caverns. 

“Professor, it’s me. You left a note?”

Hesitation. “What did it say?”

“Um,” you fumble for the square of paper, squint to read his messy scrawl in the dim lighting. “Meet me at the base of Dig Site C, tell—”

“Yes, yes, fine, hurry along, down to the left, we haven't the time to dawdle.”

You elect not to comment on who’s the primary hold up to this process, knowing full well it’ll fall on deaf ears. Instead you head off down the path, thinking grimly that this had better be worth it. Training forbids you from getting too excited. In the eight months you’d been here, the biggest find had been the remains of a toe— crushed almost to pieces, but it had elicited a flurry of excitement from the Committee which had magically pushed through the past six requests for replaced equipment. 

“Professor?” It’s dark. You feel a chill prickle across the back of your neck as you take another wavering step forwards and squint. “How far in are you?”

A footstep crunches the stone near you. There’s a huffed breath. You spin on your heel, searching for the source when a wet rag is clapped over your nose and mouth smelling strongly of something sickly sweet. Floundering, you elbow the attacker hard in the gut but stumble as you duck away. Spots pinwheel before your eyes as you stagger, head lighter than air and drop. All you can feel is sharp stone digging into your cheek as the sound of footsteps crunch closer and closer. 

You awake to blinding pain splitting your head in half from temple to temple. An attempt to raise your hand and check sends you into a full flurry of panic. You can’t move. Are you paralyzed? No— your fingers flutter against your palm, flex out and then curl into a fist. There’s something wrapped around your wrists, something leathery and thick. “Calm down.”

You’re so frightened that the familiar voice nearly makes you cry with relief. Managing to open one streaming eye, you see Professor Charles standing above you, the part of his face unobscured from the dark looking drawn and a little sad. “Professor,” you choke out. Your throat feels like sandpaper. “What—”

“Hush, now.” He passes a hand over your eyes, dropping you back to darkness. You smell blood on his palm. “You weren’t meant to be awake for this.” With your eyes again sightless, you can better hear the regret in his voice. 

“Professor, what’s going on.” You hate the hitch in your throat that betrays your fear.

“It’s all right, you needn’t worry.” His hand removes from your eyes and you blink, vision now somewhat adjusted to the dark. The room is small, lit by a lamp in the corner atop a table crowded by various jars and bottles. You watch as he shuffles over to this table, slowed by the same limp which had plagued him for the past few months. “It comes as little consolation I’m sure, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry to do this to you.”

“Do what.” You twist in your restraints, struggling to keep him in view as your panic reaches a crest. “What’s happening? Why am I here, Charles, what have you done?”

“Only what I’ve had to,” His voice is mournful, it would have been disarming had you not been strapped to what you’re quickly realizing to be a table. He unscrews one of the bottles and you catch a whiff of that same sickly sweet smell. Your head pounds. 

“No!” You flail, struggling to find even the slightest slack in your restraints. He shakes his head as he soaks a rag, shuffling back to your side. 

“Don’t be difficult now, this is a far kinder choice than the alternative— Agh!”

He’d restrained your arms but he hadn’t bound your legs. You swing your knee to connect with his side, watching as he stumbles and drops the bottle. It bursts on the floor. 

“Idiot!” He staggers upright, face looming over you and you can see for the first time the dark skin patterning below his eyes, the angry red rimming his whites. “You want to do this awake? Fine. But remember I tried to be kind.” 

“Do what!” You’re nearly sobbing as you spit out the words because you’ve just caught sight of what’s on the very end of the Professor’s table of bottles. A silver saw— the thin surgical ones you see in hospitals aside a series of knives. “Do what, Professor, why are you doing this?!”

“You think I want to do this?” He looks crazed as he pins your leg down, grabs for the saw. “It’s not my fault, there’s nothing left for me to do, we need more time!” There are real tears running down his face as he grips the handle. “We’re on to something, I know we are but if we don’t produce results in the next week—” He shakes his head, tears spattering your forehead like rain. “There’s no more I can give, I haven’t a penny to my name anymore, this grant money is our only lifeline and they’ll pull it by Friday if we can’t show them something good.”

“We have something good! We found that—”

“It’s not enough.” You look up to him and see that his face has gone from anguished to fully, terrifyingly blank. He stares down at you, and then raises his leg to the table, cuffs his pants and unlaces his boot. “I’ve given everything to this project.” The boot clunks to the floor. “Everything.” The smell that assaults your nose is so rancid, so foul that bile rises in your throat. He wrenches off his sock and all you can do is stare at the severed nub at the end of his foot where a pinky toe should have been. His flesh is mottled and grey. It looks as though it had been poorly wrapped and then shoved against a wall, again and again until the infection set in and put it out of its misery. 

“Why,” You whimper. You both stare down at the foot.

“You know, I’ve studied this field a long time.” He watches it with a dazed, dreamy look in his eyes. “I’ve examined time and again the effects of a few centuries upon a human body, how we can measure its progression, project estimates upon the way things looked when they were alive. And you know what I’ve learned?” He plunks his foot back down, doesn’t even flinch when it connects hard with the floor. “Nothing. We can measure nothing, project nothing, all we can do is take notes on the effects of time and make shoddy estimates at the rates of progression. Destruction is what it comes down to. How much, in which places first. You cannot fabricate time, but why would you ever need to? It’s an illusion. And illusions are something you can master.

“Look at this one here.” He seizes one of the bottles excitedly.” This one burns away everything fleshy and fading, everything but the bone. And this one softens your calcium like clay. Lets me shape the bones however I wish. Thicker femurs, longer skulls, whatever I wish to imitate. And this one—” He shakes a vial of bright green. “It’s a special kind of acid of my own invention. It doesn’t eat away at just the bone, no. It consumes its structure. It makes it weak, fragile, delicate enough to mimic the ravages of time. It isn’t perfect.” He frowns at the vial, then smiles. “But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to buy us some time. A few more months. A year at most. We’re close, I can feel it.” His eyes slide from the vial to you. “I wonder what parts of you would be enough to convince them. A hand? A hip?” His fingers trail along your cheek. “A jaw, perhaps?”

You twist your head and bite, catching his hand hard with your front teeth. He screams in pain, reeling back as you spit the taste of copper from your mouth and bring your feet down hard on the table. Once— it cracks. Twice— it splinters. Three times— it splits down the center, crashing you to the floor in the midst of dust and debris. You rip your arm free, tearing a chunk from the table that clings to the back of your wrist as you fumble with the other strap. It’s only just sprung free when he comes at you again, saw glinting in his raised hand. You don’t think. You strike him across the head with the chunk of table still strapped to you, and again when he still stands. He stares at you, eyes glazed over as he tips backwards. You’d pay anything in the world to erase the sound of skull against stone and metal. Backpedalling as far away as you can manage, you stare as the pool of blood beneath him grows. “Oh, no.” You curl your knees to your chest, hold them tight. “No, no, no.”

His chest isn’t moving. You stare a moment longer and then crawl close, weight shifted to the back of your heels, ready to run. Your finger presses against the side of his neck. There’s nothing.

This is a nightmare, you tell yourself. Just a terrible dream, you’ll wake up soon in your creaky cot, ready for another day of cryptic notes and bootstrapping. Your eyes alight on the dark tunnel leading out. Escape. Surely when you run this will be over.

Right. And to do that you’ll need a light. You force yourself up, rummage around the room while determinedly not looking at the crumpled form in the center. You instead find a sheet of paper. The letter from the Committee, you realize a moment later. You scan over the contents, despair pooling in the pit of your stomach. This really would be it for you all, you may as well be packing your bags. Especially in light of recent events. You glance unwittingly back at the body, and as you do your foot nudges something. The green vial. You stoop to pick it up, and as you do the paper seems to burn in your hand. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair, to end things now with nothing to show, when you’d worked so hard— the paper crumples in your hand. If only he’d just waited. Believed in you all a little more, the way you did. You just needed a little more time.

What a difference the span of a few days make. Prior to the discovery, Professor Charles’s name had been vilified to the Committee, largely resented as a smooth-talking drain upon their resources. But with the body in sight they couldn’t stop cooing over him— the lengthened fingers, the peculiarly shaped skull, he even matched the previously found toe. 

But it can’t be denied that his missing presence made the victory hollow. Teams had been sent out to scour the grounds, frantic days passing quick until the banks began to call and pieces of a fuller picture began to fall into place. “He’ll be alright,” you’d consoled one of the disheartened diggers. “If we’re lucky, we might never find him. He has the mind for a runaway, he may as well have been made for it.”

Still, time trickles by and life returns to some semblance of normal. You graciously accept the newly-emptied position of site manager and with the newly approved requests you open new dig sites, hire more workers. Nothing’s been found as of yet, but your confidence is undaunted. The next find is just around the corner, you can feel it. You just need a little more time.