I am an innocent man.

My wife Gudrin has tossed her wedding ring to the ground. In truth she has buried it. Daring me to dig.

We have driven into marshland at her direction. Without opening the passenger door of the car or making any gesture to exit, she has lowered the window and with the same finger that she so authoritatively pressed upon the automating button mounted in the chrome control panel of the car door, she merely pointed through the wave of frigid air invading the otherwise cozy cabin of our luxurious sedan. My gaze fell on a canvas-colored patch of ground that had been recently disturbed.

“There.” She had said all she had to say. Her tight-lipped smile, enameled more brightly than I had ever realized her trademark Rose Metal lipstick could shine, appeared as seamless as the sheen of the car’s flawlessly painted hood.

Gudrin is not attired for a tramp through the marshland. She is quite pointedly shod in spiked heels. The patent leather pumps are bone white. Her unseasonable linen suit, the skirt riding high above her knees, the tightly buttoned jacket proudly sculpting her breasts, nonetheless presents as a shade of mourner’s black.

It is clearly not the death of our marriage that she mourns.

Then why did she purchase the anvil-handled, flat-bladed steel spade that is still gleaming beneath the plastic sheath of its packaging in the trunk of the car and awaiting my effortful grasp? Why does she encourage an exhumation of the six-carat Marquise-cut diamond, its very formation owed to the fateful pressure of eons-impacted earth, that she would now have me break ground for? She wishes me to recoup at least the monetary investment I so incautiously made in my matrimonial vow?

Gudrin insists she is not vindictive. She has only been seduced, by our best friend. His friendliness simply heated to a boiling point, she explains, in a whisper that might be a cooling breath, soothed over a steaming cup of morning tea. Kluge, whom she does not name, is the director of an anthropological museum at the university. He sits in his office among skulls and potshards exhibiting not a trace of romance for anything that is not, in a manner of speaking, already dead.

Thus, for these reasons, if reasons they are, do I find my foot pressing upon the kickplate of the virginal spade, feeling the earth yield to my eager penetration. I sense Gudrin’s gaze upon me like an encouraging hand on my shoulder, though she remains comfortably seated in the warm car, still idling several yards away. She is reclining behind a pane of fogged glass. I put my shoulder into the task, not knowing how deep I can go. The first spade-full lands in a sandy pile in the short-legged prospector’s sifting pan that Gudrin has equipped me with for such a treasure hunt. She wishes me to know that she is considerate even in the knife-thrust of her betrayal.

Well then, I am right to be suspicious of the staging. A man in a long navy blue overcoat, set off by a tricolor cashmere scarf, digging in a nondescript plot of bog land against an empty horizon, I am justified in feeling like I am part of a charade, even if I cannot resist the suspenseful theatricality. Even if I am unsure of my audience. Especially since I have always been a sucker for an audience.

Of course it is only Gudrin who will applaud when I’ve recovered the prize.

I find I can shave the surface of the earth with the leading edge of the spade, imagining as I do that the nugget I am panning for must be close to the surface. Otherwise Gudrin would have been obliged to dig herself. I do not see it. Gudrin in heavy rubber boots, blanketed in a cumbersome flannel parka, laboring over the shaft of the spade, perspiring. But neither do I detect any sparkle of the seed she has planted for my curiosity. The light brown soil is airy and loose as if it has been sifted into this—I suddenly realize—all too neatly squared plot, in the aftermath of a previous excavation. If I sharpen the angle, to go more deeply, if I press more forcefully upon the steel kickplate, the heart of the spade moves so easily that it threatens to escape my grip. When I reinforce my grip on the shaft, the spade feels its own resistance, where I have a bit recklessly, impatiently, penetrated to the greatest depth so far. A ring appears as if it were coughed up by the ground, it is carried so lightly on the air. Where it settles upon the crumbly shovel-full of dug-up earth I judge immediately that it is sized far too large for Gudrin’s finger. Not silver, it is nonetheless now recognizably a curlicue of faintly golden hair. Human hair. At which point I resist the urge to press on. I do not replace my foot on the kickplate of the spade. I let the long wooden handle drop beside me as I stoop to examine the evidence. I understand that something is here which I have not been searching for.

The ring of hair is a perfect fit for the fourth finger of my left hand. My own gold wedding band gives the only resistance to my wearing it.

But I see I have uncovered a profusion of ringlets, sprouting from the ground like a messily shredded cabbage.

A head of hair.

Still on my knees and with my fussily manicured fingers, I am able to dig with merciful delicacy to expose what the steel spade would have massacred. Because it has a face. No eyes. But a forehead, cheeks, a nose, lips and chin. The bone is pronounced with a sharpness that threatens to cut through the dusky skin, though it is more a well-tanned hide. By the time I had excavated to the depth of neck and shoulders—my manicure in ruins, my long navy blue Loden coat soiled as the shroud of Turin with my rubbing hands, my trouser knees caked with their own impressions in the earth—it occurred to me that I had unwittingly discovered a neighbor. Another shoulder, cloaked in military green flannel, shouldered itself into view on the periphery of the at least fourteen-inch-deep matrix already carved out around what is clearly the head of a mature male, gray locks curling to the nape of his neck, staring straight ahead, but now I know, not alone.

I hear the slam of the car door, however muffled by the damp air clouding around it. If I turn my head I will meet Gudrin’s grinning gaze, the one she reserves for the unwrapping of surprise birthday presents, where she leans back self-indulgently against the brilliant onyx sheen of the car door, bringing the smokeless cigarette to her lips for an invisible puff, slightly nodding her head as if to grant an unsolicited consent. She does not approach.

There were three huddled tightly together on the site by the time I had marked out the perimeter of the plot with gingerly exploratory jabs of the spade. Two men and a younger woman, her head unlike the others tilted towards the sky. Albeit dressed for the weather to which I exposed them—high-collared woolen frock coats, a bustier jacket laced over a linen gown—I could plainly see they were not of our time. Staring down at the four heads I wondered what I was doing. I was an unexpected anthropologist to myself. What would the anthropologist do?

I had seen it at the movies. As I stooped again to inspect the now discernibly shocking leather faces, their grimacing smiles still dusted with irritating grains of earth, two sirening squad cars aggressively dug their front tires into the ground where they halted mere feet from where I crouched and with much melodramatic squealing, blocked Gudrin’s view or mine of her.

See the criminal, masked in a black balaclava caught red-handed at his work, crow-barring the lock on the freshly excavated chest of jewels or with his ear twitching to the tumblers of the locked safe. Such is the scene upon which the cinematic police so suddenly intrude. A joke I would have thought if the two starchly uniformed officers hadn’t leapt from their cars to seize me by the shoulders, peremptorily dragging me to my feet and brusquely remanding me to handcuffs.

A crime scene. So did they christen the fruit of my labors with the spade. Smeared as I was with the earthy evidence, the officers pointed at the accused with adamant conviction, as they proceeded to spell out the charges. Breaking into and entering the crypt of an obscurely sainted church in a reputedly tiny village far out of my ken. Grave robbery. Stolen property. Attempted concealment thereof. Suspected necromancy.

Before I could shriek my innocence, my attention was seized by the sight of a man I knew well enough. The assistant director of the university’s anthropological museum stepped from the back seat of one of the squad cars with notable trepidation, as if uncertain of the terra firma he nonetheless clearly intended to walk upon. He was swathed in a long blue Loden coat identical to my own, however soiled mine might be. Though his face was downcast, averting my eyes, his approach was unwavering. For the moment his footsteps tamped down my speech as mufflingly as anyone sealing freshly turned earth with the thumping blows of a shovel blade.

When he was close enough to make a cloud in the air of his speech, I knew that he must be my real accuser. He halted at the edge of the cut I had made marking off the space of my discovery.

“Those are the ones.” Swiveling his gaze from the excavation site to what I hoped was a mask of serenity on my face, he merely nodded. It might have been a nod to the executioner who, resting his axe upon a canted shoulder, was ready to swing. Then the assistant director simply turned away, headed back to the still wide-flung car door, as if he had complied with an official duty to identify the victim’s body for the authorities. Indeed, I was the victim.

*

My Theresa stood beyond the counter upon which my personal possessions—wallet, wristwatch, fountain pen, keys, the soiled Loden coat, now marked with the grimy folds that had permitted it to be fitted into the plastic bag provided by the ministry of jails—had been laid out for me in order to reconstitute my civilian self. Theresa had secured my release from the municipal jail. She had paid the bondsman the amount calculated by the judge to be proportionate to the crimes alleged.

When I was able to pass beyond the hinged panel in the countertop, into the otherwise empty receiving room of the constabulary, Theresa greeted me with extended arms. But she did not embrace me. She did not kiss me. Her gesture was a more impersonal, albeit excited, huzzah. She smiled. Her lips shone a particularly fluorescent red. Her long brown hair was pulled back and sculpted into a tight bun. She wore a tailored black suit, fit for a funeral, until one noticed the red patent stiletto heels. Her loosely fitted silver charm bracelet jingled when she took my hand and led me to the guarded door, whereupon she gave a surprisingly authoritative nod to the uniformed officer standing there at attention. With a wide-armed gesture that suggested a chivalrous heart, he swung the door open for us.

Before I could take a first liberating draught of fresh air, Theresa informed me that we were already awaited in the chambers of a local barrister whom she had generously, as she put it, retained on my behalf.

The Barrister Beckett, as he introduced himself to me, was a tall emaciated figure with a stiff brush of gray hair sprouting brashly atop his narrow skull. His professional raiment, a vested blue pin-striped suit, nevertheless threatened to burst from his frame, it was so snugly tailored.

He rocked back and forth in his reclinable leather chair, like a metronome ticking to the cadence of his speech. He would explain. He had already received photographs of the crime scene taken upon a full exhumation of the mummies, as he called them to my great relief. So I was not mistaken in the conclusion I had drawn myself only breathless moments before I had been taken into custody. I had uncovered bodies from an irrecoverable past. So things were not entirely beyond my ken as I had feared when frantically contemplating my fate, shivering upon the stone bench that was all the furnishing of the frigid holding cell into which I had been so inexplicably thrust, awaiting my appearance before the charging judge.

Theresa took my moist hand in her dry one, the better to arrest its nervous tapping against the metal arm of the chair in which I was so restlessly seated. It had occurred to me that the alleged crime might be more than theft. More than digging things up, I might be accused of burial.

Specimens I knew them to be, the four historical figures so freshly exposed to the air that could not resuscitate them. At once I knew them to be cousins of my own creatures or creations, the taxidermist’s art is so enigmatic. Perhaps the illusion of life is even more alluring than life itself. In any case, who would know better than the taxidermist that burying the mummified corpus only invites decomposition? Who would know better?

“Aren’t I exonerated by my profession?” I put the question to Barrister Beckett. But he was already fast in the flow of his own exposition of the case.

“My boy, they are calling you a grave robber. Not a mummy maker, if I understand your professional vocation well enough. These mummies we speak of were rudely unhoused from their coffins in the crypt of St. Kevin’s Kitchen, Wicklow. Locals they were and descended from the living descendants who care for them still. A miracle of preservation, I’m told.” Barrister Beckett held up a photograph of roughly stacked coffins shrouded with cobwebs and dusted with mineral particulate in the space of a vaulted stone cubicle not high enough for a tall man like himself to stand up in. The caskets were in such a state of dry corruption that here and there a stray hand, a well-shod foot, a full head of hair extruded from the suppurated joinery. A garishly embossed and brightly begemmed ring littered the stone floor amidst debris of straw and splintered wood.

“No. Burial ain’t the crime I’m sayin’. The act of burial is the merest fever symptom of the madness that inspired the theft. So, they will speculate, I’m sure enough. We must only prove yourself not mad, if you understand me well enough, Mr. Viking.”

Barrister Beckett mispronounced my name in the way that I know from experience anyone would, surprised and disappointed as I was nonetheless that Theresa had not already cautioned him to avoid the pitfall of its spelling. My name is Viking, pronounced Viiking. One must add a redundant letter to avoid the mistake. The additive subtracts from the presumption that I am descended from those Nordic hordes who have famously left their large-boned bodies to the curative properties of our native bog lands.

“You are not a madman, are you, my darling?” Theresa unnervingly proffered the question like a sedative compress meant for the madman’s fevered brow.

I calmly plucked the black and white photograph from Barrister Beckett’s pinching fingertips and with the most elegant composure I could summon tore it in half, letting the briefly extended wings flap desultorily to the floor. I wished to assure Barrister Beckett that what the photograph contained, and especially since we both knew the stone crypt was now empty of its mysterious contents, had naught to do with me.

The airlessness of Barrister Beckett’s office suddenly oppressed me. The dryness of my throat forced a choking cough for which I needed to cover my mouth. Unexpectedly, I was tearing up in the pinched corners of my eyes. My tongue filled my mouth. Words could not clear the blockage. I felt an involuntary tremor in my lower lip. So did I haplessly appear to be the guilty man?

*

Now I recall it. One day, Liam Kluge, director of the University Anthropological Museum, beckoned to me from where he stood inside the glass box, as large as a room to be lived in. Awash with reflections from the surrounding windows its emptiness was prescient for the fact that it was meant to house a new exhibit. The closer I came, the more I anticipated the cold hardness of the glass knocking against my forehead, if I were not careful enough. I put my open palm against the glass in a gesture of greeting, all the better to ascertain the invisible barrier between us, and avoid a collision. On all sides and under a tent-like ceiling that resembled the umbrella of an amusement park carousel, I was surrounded by identical exhibition cases. The sun-shining illumination artfully mounted within made of each glass box a lifeless theater of artifacts. Stone Age. Iron Age. Bronze Age. Gold jewelry. Faded garments that once adorned the priests of exotic festivals. Implements of craftsmanship and warfare. Carved stone figurines small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, squat, nude, with a pulchritude that is the opposite of eroticism. The pinched faces expressed the pain of such miniaturization.

Hoffman’s all the more impatient beckoning prompted me to search with scratching fingers for the seams of the door that was so transparently concealed in the glass. I stepped inside and stood beside him. From outside the glass, we might have appeared to be an exhibit unto ourselves, uncannily alive specimens of early 21^st-century urbanity. Was that why my friend had inveigled me to enter? But I saw a more sober concern in his face. He pointed a finger outward through the glass.

“Ye must look out to best imagine what looking in feels like, don’t ye think it?”

The slap of his broad hand on my back felt like an overly jovial coercion.

“That’s my vexation, mind. We don’t see them for what they are, the studious gazers, when they are approaching the exhibition window. Stooping, shielding their eyes from the reflections for a better view, they are I’m bound to say, looking for nothing less than a reflection of themselves behind this glass. Humans.”

He gave the clear pane a hard knock.

“But what do they see? Inanimate objects is all.”

Hoffman’s eyes peered away from me.

“Look at us reflected here,” his yet didactic finger outlined my cloudy image in the glass. “Don’t you find it a solacing thing to see yourself wherever you look? I warrant, a needful thing.”

*

Listen to a conversation between Alan Singer and George Salis on The Collidescope Podcast:

Alan Singer is the author of eight novels, including The Charnel Imp, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, and Play, A Novel (Grand Iota, 2020). He also writes about aesthetics and the visual arts. His most recent work in this area is Attending to the Literary: the Distinctiveness of Literature (Routledge, 2024).