Stephen poured two brandies, one with a generous splash of the Napoleon. The other he filled halfway.  He handed Cynthia the splash.

“I was so fucking young,” he started, bringing the snifter to his lips, but not drinking any of the amber liquid. He lowered the glass.  “Elyssium…”

“It’s real?” Cynthia asked, cradling the snifter in her hands. She didn’t drink either, a tickle of fear keeping the glass from her lips.  The dream still hung in misty shards in her head, and she looked at Stephen with a mix of wariness and desire.  He had answers, and even in her muddled state, she needed them.

“I’d been an afterthought, like a kid brother shackled to an older one by the command of a parent.  I was green as ivy when the call came to the History Department. The city of Merriton decided to add a fountain to their city park and some artifacts had been uncovered...”  Stephen rebelliously drank from the snifter.  “Fucking fountain…”

“What happened?”

“We did what archeologists and historians do.  We spouted federal protection statutes, got the area cordoned off, made some union workers happy by sending them home with pay while we poked at the dirt, sifted soil, and found bits of metal, utensils, broken bottles and crockery, then bones.”

“Bones?”

“Yeah. We stopped digging then.  Historians and archaeologists have been looking for the site of Elyssium for decades. There are letters and bits of old maps that have given clues to where the settlement might have been, but nothing really solid. Some experts thought it might be near Merriton, but others placed it much farther north. Danny, the oldest grad student on the dig, remembered a passage in one of the Puritan’s journals about a massive oak in Elyssium that had been riven by lightning …the split oak. There was a big tree near where we found the bones. Way up on its trunk, we found old lightning scars. As you can imagine, we became very excited. And by the bones of course.”

“Was the park over a graveyard?”

“Not exactly.  It was over a massacre.”

Cynthia’s gut tightened and she brought the snifter to her lips, tasting the brandy this time, letting the aromatic burning soothe her fear.

Stephen nudged an ottoman in front of her and sat on it, taking a long draw from his drink.  He shook his head, then stiffened and shivered a little.  “We found ribs and pelvises with deep chips, marks left by axes or who knows what.  What we didn’t find were skulls. Maybe that should have warned us.

“We meticulously worked the soil.  It was Helen March who found the stone.” Stephen paused, his face for a moment a mask of pleasant memory.  “She was the most uptight professor you’d ever want to know.  I honestly think she would have been perfectly happy to live in the Victorian age, clad in twenty layers of cotton with barely her face showing.”  Stephen took a more measured sip from the brandy.

“She wasn’t so restrained after our third night in Merriton.”

Cynthia pulled her feet up onto the seat, wrapping her arms around her knees.  She thought she heard a hiss and imagined the book making the sound, a spider web of whispered desire that kindled heat in her veins, and made her clit tingle. The book called to her.

“The stone wasn’t much really.  It might merely have been a piece of a wall or a chiney, but Helen found an etching, a partial symbol along the sharp broken edge of the rock. She saw half an ankh carved there.  By the end of the day, we’d uncovered more pieces of stone with symbols on them. “ 

She looked at the table where the stone ankh lay. Where had he hidden the book?

“It was a map, Cynthia, a cryptic arrow pointing to where this was waiting for us.  We found this on our third day there.” He lifted the ankh from the table and when his hand wrapped its base, she grew wet.

“In Juliette’s hands?”

Stephen rolled the ankh over in his palm, his gaze fixed on the carved stone, memory etching lines into his face.

“We played with those rocks like puzzle pieces until something clicked for me.  I saw the symbols in the landscape – the lightning-struck oak, a patch where we had found silverware, the pit where we found charred wood and bones.  It was  past where the pit had been, and I just walked to that spot like… like I was drawn there.”

“You were, weren’t you? Drawn there?”

“Yeah,” he sipped more brandy.  “Yeah, I was, and when I started digging, the dirt was hot – it was October, but the earth was warm as if it was heated by a summer sun.  It wasn’t long before I found the rotted remains of a cloth sack.  I called the others and we dug, but we had to be careful because the old cloth was fragile and the dirt was hard. It was late when we finally had it out of the ground.  By then we were working under floodlights. I remember our breath fogging the air in the blue light, the temperature somewhere near freezing. Not one of us wanted to wait to find out what was in the sack, though we all had a pretty good idea from what we had felt and from the dry rattle when we lifted it free of the hole.”

“Juliette?”

“What was left of her.  She’d been thrown away like garbage.  Her legs had been broken, one arm was fractured, her ribs showed blade wounds, and it looked like her skull had been hit with what was probably an ax, but in her right hand, clutched against her chest,” he held up the ankh, “this.  How she managed to keep it hidden from her attackers, I don’t have a clue.”

Stephen fell silent and Cynthia waited, her heart racing.  She needed him to continue, but he only looked at the ankh in his hand.

“Stephen?”

“Yeah,” he said again, his voice sounding dreamy and distant.

“So, you took it?” Cynthia prompted, her patience evaporating in the face of his reticence.

He looked up at her, his face suddenly hollow, washed out and paper thin.  “No,” he said before he drained the snifter.