“It was a lot more than just one Halloween,” he grumbled. “Really, Jake, you were closer to him than I ever was. I don’t know—there was just something unspoken between the two of you.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Was he jealous of me?
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re my son, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hurt how?”
He paused. Outside the clouds shifted, the last rays of daylight throwing our shadows against the wall. I got a sick feeling in my stomach, like when your parents are about to tell you they’re splitting up, but you know it before they even open their mouths.
“I never dug too deep with your grandpa because I was afraid of what I’d find,” he said finally.
“You mean about the war?”
“No. Your grandpa kept those secrets because they were painful. I understood that. I mean about the traveling, him being gone all the time. What he was really doing. I think—your aunt and I both thought—that there was another woman. Maybe more than one.”
I let it hang between us for a moment. My face tingled strangely. “That’s crazy, Dad.”
“We found a letter once. It was from a woman whose name we didn’t know, addressed to your grandfather. I love you, I miss you, when are you coming back, that kind of thing. Seedy, lipstick-on-the-collar type stuff. I’ll never forget it.”
I felt a hot stab of shame, like somehow it was my own crime he was describing. And yet I couldn’t quite believe it.
“We tore up the letter and flushed it down the toilet. Never found another one, either. Guess he was more careful after that.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t look at my father.
“I’m sorry, Jake. This must be hard to hear. I know how much you worshipped him.” He reached out to squeeze my shoulder but I shrugged him off, then scraped back my chair and stood up.
“I don’t worship anyone.”
“Okay. I just ... I didn’t want you to be surprised, that’s all.”
I grabbed my jacket and slung it over my shoulder.
“What are you doing? Dinner’s on the way.”
“You’re wrong about him,” I said. “And I’m going to prove it.”
He sighed. It was a letting-go kind of sigh. “Okay. I hope you do.”
I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.
It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—that was magical. So I couldn’t believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.
* * *
The museum’s doors were open and its lights were on, but no one seemed to be inside. I’d gone there to find the curator, hoping he knew a thing or two about the island’s history and people, and could shed some light on the empty house and the whereabouts of its former inhabitants. Figuring he’d just stepped out for a minute—the crowds weren’t exactly kicking down his door—I wandered into the sanctuary to kill time checking out museum displays.
The exhibits, such as they were, were arranged in big open-fronted cabinets that lined the walls and stood where pews had once been. For the most part they were unspeakably boring, all about life in a traditional fishing village and the enduring mysteries of animal husbandry, but one exhibit stood out from the rest. It was in a place of honor at the front of the room, in a fancy case that rested atop what had been the altar. It lived behind a rope I stepped over and a little warning sign I didn’t bother to read, and its case had polished wooden sides and a Plexiglas top so that you could only see into it from above.
When I looked inside, I think I actually gasped—and for one panicky second thought monster!—because I had suddenly and unexpectedly come face-to-face with a blackened corpse. Its shrunken body bore an uncanny resemblance to the creatures that had haunted my dreams, as did the color of its flesh, which was like something that had been spit-roasted over a flame. But when the body failed to come alive and scar my mind forever by breaking the glass and going for my jugular, my initial panic subsided. It was just a museum display, albeit an excessively morbid one.
“I see you’ve met the old man!” called a voice from behind me, and I turned to see the curator striding in my direction. “You handled it pretty well. I’ve seen grown men faint dead away!” He grinned and reached out to shake my hand. “Martin Pagett. Don’t believe I caught your name the other day.”
“Jacob Portman,” I said. “Who’s this, Wales’s most famous murder victim?”
“Ha! Well, he might be that, too, though I never thought of him that way. He’s our island’s senior-most resident, better known in archaeological circles as Cairnholm Man—though to us he’s just the Old Man. More than twenty-seven hundred years old, to be exact, though he was only sixteen when he died. So he’s rather a young old man, really.”
“Twenty-seven hundred?” I said, glancing at the dead boy’s face, his delicate features somehow perfectly preserved. “But he looks so ...”
“That’s what happens when you spend your golden years in a place where oxygen and bacteria can’t exist, like the underside of our bog. It’s a regular fountain of youth down there—provided you’re already dead, that is.”
“That’s where you found him? The bog?”
He laughed. “Not me! Turf cutters did, digging for peat by the big stone cairn out there, back in the seventies. He looked so fresh they thought there might be a killer loose on Cairnholm—till the cops had a look at the Stone Age bow in his hand and the noose of human hair round his neck. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
I shuddered. “Sounds like a human sacrifice or something.”
“Exactly. He was done in by a combination of strangulation, drowning, disembowelment, and a blow to the head. Seems rather like overkill, don’t you think?”
“I guess so.”
Martin roared with laughter. “He guesses so!”
“Okay, yeah, it does.”
“Sure it does. But the really fascinating thing, to us modern folk, anyway, is that in all likelihood the boy went to his death willingly. Eagerly, even. His people believed that bogs—and our bog in particular—were entrances to the world of the gods, and so the perfect place to offer up their most precious gift: themselves.”
“That’s insane.”