Carved in Bone

I had no way of estimating, glistening walls began closing in upon us, and we entered the bed of a subterranean stream. It was a foot deep, perhaps six feet wide, and straight as an arrow, following some precise crease in the layers of bedrock. When the passage widened again, Kitchings and Williams turned the vehicles up out of the streambed and stopped. They killed their engines and cut the lights, so I did the same, and we sat in utter darkness.
    No one said a word. The water gurgled softly past. My ears adjusted to the quiet, as my eyes might have adjusted to dim light, had there been a single photon to latch on to. Gradually I began to hear another sound underneath the stream’s noise, a sound that was musical, haunting, and human: unmistakably, I heard the laughter of small children.
    “Do you hear…?” I began, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the question.
    “The kids. Yeah.” It was Kitchings. “Spooky, huh? I’ve been told two different things by people who know this cave. One is that it’s just some weird echo from the stream. The other is that it’s the spirits of Indian children.”
    He must have sensed my confusion, because he continued, “This cave is on land that was sacred to five separate tribes. Even when they were at war, they could mingle here in peace. Powerful magic, they say. When I’m out in the daylight, I believe in the science. When I’m in here in the dark, I believe in the spirits.”
    He flipped on a flashlight, and when he did, the laughter died in midnote. Opening a cargo box bolted to the rear of the ATV, he fished out three powerful lanterns and a jacket that read “D.E.A.” in big letters across the back. “Here, you better put on this heirloom drug-bust jacket, Doc; you’re liable to catch pneumonia in here.” I waved it off, but he handed it to me anyhow. “I’d hate to be remembered as the sheriff who killed Dr. Brockton,” he said. As I put it on, I realized I was already shivering.
    We trudged up the side of a sloping basin, ducked into a side tunnel, and soon emerged into another chamber. The rest of the cavern had been a dull grayish-brown, but these walls sparkled—practically blazed—with the fire of millions of crystals. Quartz, I guessed, though they seemed as brilliant as diamonds. A mammoth stalagmite, also sheathed in crystals, filled one side of the chamber.
    A narrow cleft separated the stalagmite from the wall. Kitchings nodded toward the crevice and played his light over the opening in a go-here sort of way. I edged my way in. It was a tight fit—I wondered how the sheriff had wrangled his beer belly through it—but then it opened up into a small, glittering grotto. Laid out on a rock shelf along one side was a body—the most remarkable human corpse I’d ever seen. I stared, and blinked, and stared again.
    The sheriff had been right. A day—or a month, or even a year—would have wrought little change in the striking corpse laid out on a rock shelf in that glittering grotto.
    I had seen adipocere many times before. The term is Latin; it translates literally as “grave wax,” and that pretty much sums up what it is and where it’s found: a greasy, tallowlike material that forms when fatty flesh decomposes in a damp environment. Bodies buried in damp basements or crawl spaces under houses often have adipocere on them; so do floaters—bodies found in Tennessee’s abundant lakes and rivers—with most of the adipocere centered along the floater’s waterline. But the dozens of basement bodies and floaters I’d seen bore scant resemblance to the specimen laid out on the stone ledge before me. At first glance the corpse had appeared shrouded in adipocere, but as I studied it, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a surface coating, but something much rarer. The body’s soft tissues had been completely transformed into adipocere—almost as if Madame Tussaud had placed a waxen mummy here as a private exhibit for me alone. The clothing had apparently crumbled away, its residue incorporated into a dark layer that began at the corpse’s neck and continued all the way down to the rotting leather at the soles of the feet.
    The Smithsonian possessed a similar corpse, that of Wilhelm von Ellenbogen, who had been dug up in the course of moving a cemetery more than a century ago. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia—home to some of the most bizarre medical and forensic oddities on the planet—had his female counterpart, whom