The Doomsday Key (Sigma Force 6)

“And you found a bog mummy here?” Gray asked.

“Two, actually. A woman and a child. We discovered them as we were excavating the stone ring. They were found in the center, curled together in death.”

Seichan asked her first question. Her eyes flickered to Rachel, then away again. “Were they sacrificed?”

Wallace perked up at her question. “That’s exactly what we wondered. It’s now well accepted that stone rings were solar calendars, but they also served as burial sites. And this site here must have been especially holy. A stone ring within a sacred bog. We had to know if this was a natural burial or a murder.”

This last was said with a twinge of guilt.

“We were under instructions to leave the bodies intact, to send them to the university whole, but we had to know. There was no rope around the necks of the bodies, but there was another way to discover if this was a ritual sacrifice.”

Rachel understood. “Mistletoe in the stomach.”

Wallace nodded. “We performed a small examination. Well documented, I might add.” He moved to his pack, undid the ties, and removed a file. He shrugged as he returned to the table. “I wasn’t supposed to keep a hard copy.”

He sifted through the file and pulled out a set of photos. One showed the woman and child curled in black soil. The woman cradled the child in her arms. They were tucked together as if asleep. The bodies were gaunt and emaciated, but the woman’s black hair still draped her face. The next photo showed the woman naked on the table. A hand was in view, holding a dissecting scalpel.

“Before we sent the body on to the university, we wanted to see if there was any mistletoe pollen in her stomach. It was a minor violation.”

“Did you find any?” Rachel asked, suddenly not feeling so well.

“No. But we found something else rather disturbing. If you have a weak stomach, you might want to turn away.”

Rachel forced herself to keep looking.

The next photo showed a Y-shaped incision across the abdomen. The belly was peeled open, revealing the mass of internal organs. But something was clearly wrong. Wallace flipped to another photo, showing a close-up of a yellow liver. Growths protruded from its surface, covering it like a grisly field.

Wallace explained. “We found them growing throughout her abdominal cavity.”

Rachel covered her mouth. “Is that what I think it is?”

Wallace nodded. “They’re mushrooms.”

Shocked and disgusted, Gray sat back. He struggled to understand what was going on, what had been discovered here. He needed someplace to ground his inquiry, so he returned to where he first started.

“Back to Father Giovanni,” Gray said. “You said the bodies drew him here.”

“Aye.” Wallace returned to his seat and straddled his chair. “Marco heard about our discovery. In a place where Christianity and the pagan ways were still in conflict.”

“Still, that conflict didn’t truly draw him,” Gray said and stared down at the first photo of the woman with the child. There was no mistaking that tableau. Like a Madonna and child. And not just any Madonna. The tannins from the peat had dyed the woman’s skin a deep brownish-black.

“I sent him a photo of the mummies. He came the next day. He was interested in any manifestation or reference to his Black Madonna. To find such a set of bodies in a sacred pagan burial site, in a land where Christianity and ancient ways still mixed, he had to discover for himself if there was any connection to the mythology of his dark goddess.”

“And was there?” Rachel asked.

“That’s what Marco spent the past years investigating. It had him shuffling all over the British Isles. In the last month, though, I could tell that something had him especially agitated. He would never say what it was.”

“And what’s your take on the mummies?” Gray asked.

“Like I said, we didn’t find any mistletoe. I think the bodies were dead when they were buried in the bog. But who buried them and why? And why did Martin Borr mark his book with this pagan symbol? That’s what I wanted to know.”

“And?” Gray pressed the man. He was annoyingly oblique with his answers, teasing them out for greater effect.

“I have my own hypothesis,” Wallace admitted. “It goes back to where I started my investigation. The Domesday Book. Something laid waste to the nearby village or town. Something horrible enough to raze the place to the ground, to wipe all records off the maps. All records, that is, except for the cryptic reference in the great book and the mention in Martin Borr’s diary. So what happened to warrant such a reaction? I would wager it was some sort of plague or disease. Not wanting it to spread, to keep it secret, the place was destroyed.”

“But what about the bodies here?” Rachel nodded down to the photos.

“Just close your eyes and put yourself back in that town. A place isolated and under siege by some great illness. A town mixed between devout Christians and those who practiced the ancient ways in secret, who certainly must have known about this stone ring near their town, who perhaps still worshiped here. Once doom fell upon this valley, each side most likely beseeched their gods for salvation. And some probably hedged their bets, mixing the two faiths. They took a mother and a baby boy, representative of the Madonna and her child, and buried them in this ancient pagan site. I believe these two are the only bodies that escaped the fiery purge, the only two left from that old plague.”

Wallace touched the dissection photo with a finger. “Whatever struck that village was strange indeed. I don’t know of anything like this that has ever been reported in the annals of medicine or forensics. The bodies are still under investigation, and that’s being kept a guarded secret. They won’t even tell me what they found.”

“But shouldn’t you be kept informed?” Gray asked. “Aren’t you a tenured professor at the University of Edinburgh?”

Wallace’s brow crinkled in confusion, then relaxed. “Oh, no, you misunderstood me. When I said the university took the bodies, I didn’t mean Edinburgh. My grant came from abroad. It’s not an uncommon practice. For field studies, you take funds wherever you can find them.”

“So who took the bodies?”

“They were sent to the University of Oslo for initial examination.”

Gray felt kicked in the gut. It took him an extra moment to respond. Oslo. Here was the first solid connection between events here and what Painter Crowe was investigating in Norway.