“Just one cheek!”
“Good night,” I said sternly, ending the call.
I glanced at the second bed. Dillon thumped his tail lazily at me. Sighing, I finished the last sips of beer, tossed the bottle, and got undressed. I put on pajamas, brushed my teeth, and took out my contacts before turning off the lights and television. I blindly stumbled to the bed and crawled under the blankets.
The room was so quiet. Sonotour apartment. And I had a sudden pang in my chest for all those gentle sounds of life that I’d come to associate with home and heart. The ticktock of the wall clock downstairs that echoed all the way up to the loft. The hiss and ping of the old radiators coming on at night. The muffled laughter of 4A, who talked way too loud on his phone.
I missed the domestic calm Calvin and I had finally obtained in our lives. I could admit that,even now, mysteries were more captivating than the contentment of nine to five, but if it were a choice between Calvin or a good mental exercise? I’d take my big redheaded fellow any day. And that said a thing or two, considering I’d nearly died more than once simply to prove I was intelligent.
Should have told him I loved him before he left.
I rolled onto my back. I closed my eyes and thought about Frank Newell’s second message.
Hope you’re satisfied.
I thought about my own notes.
Recover a most unusual article lost to time and neglect.
A most peculiar war of intellect began and ended with a skull.
The clues were all there, waiting for me to piece them together. And based on both mine and Frank’s circumstances, the Collector believed this was enough to figure it out.
Spencerian script told me post-1850s and pre-1920s. The attempt at antiquated verbiage suggested this person was zeroed in on the nineteenth century. An unusual…skull… that both began and ended a war. There were plenty of battles, skirmishes, and all-out actual wars the Collector could have been referencing in the given time period. There was the Civil War, for starters. The Spanish-American War. And countless atrocities against indigenous people.
Except none of those seemed to fit this particular description.
Because they weren’tpeculiarwars. Peculiar implied not a literal, but a figurative war. A legitimate battle of the minds. A dispute over a dinosaur skull….
I HADa strange dream that night.Real strange.
I’d been at the Museum of Natural History, in the hall of permanent dinosaur exhibits. One of the skeletons on display was… there was something wrong with it. There were people, just out of the corner of my eye, arguing about the fossil, but I couldn’t pick out their individual comments. It was only after what felt like hours in the dream that I’d come to a simple conclusion: the dinosaur’s skull had been placed on the wrong end of the body.
I also determined I could fix it myself.
Walking forward, unrestricted by the usual barriers that didn’t appear to exist in the dream, I reached up and plucked the head off the tail. But when I turned it around in my hands to study the details, it was the decapitated head from the Emporium.
The one milky eye rolled around before focusing on me. The mouth moved, showing the gaping holes where several teeth had been yanked out. The bloated tongue licked at chapped lips.
“Dixon. Dixon. Dixon. Hope you’re satisfied!” it said.
“DIXON!” Ishouted, jolting awake like you do from a falling dream, and scaring the ever-loving shit out of myself. The sudden jump startled the body draped across my chest, and before I realized what was happening, I fell off the edge of the mattress I’d been teetering on. “Son of a fuck!” I cried, hitting the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” Calvin said from above me, breathless.
The lamp on the bedside table was switched on.
I slowly pulled my legs out from the tangle of sheets, finished my ungraceful landing onto the carpeted floor, and then buried my face into the bend of my arm.
“Seb?” Calvin asked after a beat, his voice shaky.
“Present,” I muttered. I slowly sat up on my knees, turned, and squinted.
Calvin was sitting up in bed, a hand pressed against his bare chest as he struggled to calm his breathing. Waking him suddenly or making loud noises were still triggers of his PTSD that we’d been diligently working on. But Calvin was beginning to make progress on taking control of those fight-or-flight responses. Consistent therapy and the presence of Dillon were finally producing positive headway in his life. In fact, said dog must have moved to my bed during the night and was currently sitting beside Calvin, licking his free hand.
The anchoring action kept Calvinhere. In New York. In our hotel. He looked at the dog and pulled Dillon closer.
I cleared my throat. “I had a bad dream. What time is it? When did you get here?”
