Pike was staring in quiet contemplation at the charismatic head of her dig, but inside she was bouncing around in disbelief and crowing with amusement. She and Nik had just finished having dinner together in a quiet corner of the main hall. She usually ate alone, or at her desk, hunched over a paper she had to review or a stack of conference abstracts that needed to be sorted. She had a reputation for being brutally honest, and somehow she always found herself holding up the spineless committees she inevitably joined.
This evening, she’d been forced to scavenge for rations in the community kitchens because most of the food in her cabin had somehow gotten spoiled, maybe when the power went out during a summer brownout. She was thinking about how lucky it was that Nik employed a cook three nights a week to make hot dinners and cold lunches when he had walked into the kitchens for the same reason. The two of them had been sitting quietly and chatting about work over their meal of re-heated lasagna for the last hour or so.
The conversation had just taken a turn, however.
“I have a confession to make,” Nik said slowly, “I never really noticed how brilliant you were until Collarey started on his smear campaign.”
“Oh please,” she said sarcastically, “Why did you hire me then?”
“I thought we needed a metallurgist, and you were available,” he answered matter-of-factly, “But I hadn’t realized that I had the best on my team. You truly are sensational."
"It’s a pretty small pool of candidates,” she countered. Are we really having a conversation about me? What does he want? And why? Pike was not easily fooled by flattery, and his dramatic language was making her even more suspicious.
“That may be so, but I’m the envy of the archaeology world for having you on my team. I can’t decide if Collarey is secretly your ally for continuing to publicly highlight all your excellent work in his smarmy way, or just an absolute idiot on a constantly back-firing crusade.”
Pike laughed. “When you put it that way, he sounds like a cartoon villain.”
“I confess again, that’s exactly how I think of him,” Nik chuckled in response, “He and Vanessa, skulking through the world looking for sites to steal, baring their shiny teeth for documentary cameras, eternal youth via botox and the blood of students.”
Pike was laughing along, but she began to get uncomfortable. His description of Bernard Collarey’s wife, Vanessa Jones, did not sound so far-fetched. The room suddenly seemed too large, too dark, too echoing.
“Look, Pike, I just want you to succeed and to be unencumbered by the pains of the world so that you can pursue your own path. Pain is it’s own path, but strength is the destination.”
Pike’s senses prickled. She had heard almost that exact phrase before. She tried to keep her body language open and comfortable, despite buzzing with interest.
“No one’s ever summarized it quite like that, but I suppose you’re right. Academia is pain, right? And my brand of archaeology is academia on steroids- more math, heavy lifting, and even a blow torch here and there” she said, chuckling.
Nik, obviously encouraged by this, also laughed. “That’s right! I love the way you see things. It’s another reason I hired you. Listen, let’s go do something more fun than sitting around intimidating the undergrads. Would you like to continue this discussion over a glass of wine in my rooms?”
OK, he definitely wants something, Pike thought to herself, Elliott is going to FREAK.
Something about Nik had always reminded Pike of one of her earliest fears. Pike was not often given to reminiscence and despised herself when she fell into one. Her therapist would have reminded her at this point that formative experiences are worth revisiting occasionally to see how much we’ve grown.
Pike had grown up in an immense American Gilded Age-era mansion, with gilded wealth to go with it, under constant scrutiny, and carrying an inexplicable guilt her entire life. Even as a small child, Pike knew that her parents and their staff were disappointed in her. Where her mother was lithe and toned, Pike was geometric and thick. Where her father was diplomatic and courteous, Pike was blunt and sarcastic.
She thought if perhaps her mother could just have another baby, then her parents would have someone else to focus on. But alas, her mother continued to flit weightlessly through her sparkling social life, dragging Pike along like a dead weight until eventually she just gave up all maternal pretense and Pike was sent to a damp, stuffy boarding school in Wales, somewhere near her mother’s relatives.
Pike had had some luck connecting with her homeschooling instructors at an early age, but the move to boarding school had come at a bad time. She was in the hellish throes of puberty and felt that some unknown force was awkwardly pinching and stretched everything about her into new and unknown dimensions. Naturally, she’d become even more unmanageable and sullen.
One night when she was very young, Pike had been laying in bed and fighting sleep in only the nonsensical way that children do. There just always seemed to be so much to think about. She’d been on the edge of sleep for a while and was about to surrender when a soft sound made her eyes fly open. The door to her bedroom had been left open, as she preferred, and a thin stream of light made a small pattern on the floor. Coming from behind the door was the soft, uncertain sound of a cricket.
For some reason, the sound had sent Pike into an immediate panic. She wasn’t afraid of bugs normally, but this was nighttime. In the day time, she might have jumped out of her seat to catch it in her school room. She would have shown it to her disgusted instructor and then eked out a few minutes of happiness chasing it around her mother’s garden.
But this was nighttime, and she was frozen with fear.
She couldn’t see the bug, but she knew it was there. She knew it was only a cricket, but then again it might not be. It could be something scary that only came out at night. She knew it was all the way across the room behind the door, but what if it decided to come over to her bed?
As the cricket became more bold in his song, Pike began to cry silently and angrily in her bed. This would not do at all. Her little hands balled into fists and she swiftly gathered up her blankets and fled further into her room, toward her closet. She rushed inside, closed the door, and stuffed the gap under the door with her blankets, blotting out the last sliver of light.
Facing the door, with her back to the rest of the darkened closet, the foolishness of her decision suddenly came crashing onto her. She’d run from the somewhat unknown into the entirely unknown.
A cricket may be scary, but a darkened closet is certainly much more dangerous for a little girl at night. It seemed that the darkness was already taking shape behind her. She could practically feel the monsters reaching toward her.
With a yelp, she scrambled back towards the door, but she’d stuffed the blankets too tightly and could only get it open a fraction. Nevertheless, she scraped herself through the small opening, scrambling to get free of the dark. When she finally tumbled completely out onto her bedroom floor, she was even angrier. She marched her little self over to the cricket, picked it up in a quick motion, stalked out into the hallway, and threw the little bug down the stairs.
Satisfied, but still angry (and not at all brave enough to return to the closet for her blankets), she got back into bed and slept, slightly cold, the rest of the night.
When she told this story to her therapist as a young woman, he’d said that what she was truly afraid of and angered by was the lack of trustworthy adults in her life.
“You were just a child,” he’d said, “but you already felt that you had no one to turn to.”
Pike agreed with his logic but never forgot that cold feeling of running from a known fear into an unknown one.
Sitting across from Nik all these years later, she couldn’t help being reminded of that moment in the closet. With those few words, he’d transformed from somewhat unknown to completely unknown, and she was frightened.
Nevertheless, she smiled and allowed him to lead her into the back halls of the compound. All her self-preservation alarms were ringing in tandem, but she just couldn’t suppress her curiosity.