The Dinosaur Feather

taller than the male. Clive wasn’t sure he believed it. He carefully held the talus bone in both hands. He found a pad and made some notes. Then he started looking for the rudimentary front limbs, which had to be in the box somewhere. An hour later, he was in an excellent mood. The synapomorphies between this secondary flightless bird and, say,
Caudipteryx
and
Protarchaeopteryx
, which Tybjerg and Helland alleged were dinosaurs, were striking. More than ever, Clive was convinced that many of the animals, which Helland and Tybjerg claimed were dinosaurs, were in fact secondarily flightless birds from the Cretaceous and not dinosaurs at all. As far as he could determine, their skeletons were practically identical.
    A noise made him turn around. The hairs stood up at the back of his neck. It sounded like a suppressed cough and there was some barely audible scraping; he thought he could hear breathing. He rose and sniffed the air like a deer. The building sighed. Someone walked down the corridor outside. Clive relaxed his shoulders. He was in a public place, he reassured himself, yet he suddenly became very conscious of the far end of the Vertebrate Collection which was lost in darkness.
    He thought about how Helland had been killed. It was a revolting death. It was one thing to perish in an instant,another to die slowly as parasites in your tissue grew bigger. Worms, larvae, maggots. Clive shook his head to make the images go away. He hated the little monsters. They should be eliminated from the animal kingdom. He had once had a tick in his groin, which he hadn’t discovered until it was the size of a pea and purple and bloated like a plum. Kay had removed it with heptane.
    The memory distracted him. The darkness seemed to grow more intense; suddenly he thought that the bones stank of old membranes and sweet decomposition. He got up and put the bones he had managed to study back in their box. He opened a couple of cupboards and pulled out some drawers. They were neat and tidy. One drawer contained teeth, another feathers, sorted according to size and colour. Some cupboards contained pelts, others contained specimens floating in spirit in glass jars. For a long time he gazed at a dissected dromedary eye, which stared back at him. He breathed out. He couldn’t shake off his unease. The darkness was mighty and menacing. He gave up and headed for the exit.
    He found a seat in the corridor and stared out of the window. It made no sense to start looking for Fjeldberg, he would only get himself lost. He decided to snooze. When Professor Fjeldberg arrived shortly afterwards, he laughed and said the collection tended to have a soporific effect on everyone. Quiet as a womb and a few degrees too warm. They walked down the corridor and Fjeldberg talked about the weather. After lunch, they discussed a possible joint project and Clive almost forgot the spooky atmosphere in the collection, almost forgot that Helland might have been murderedand that Tybjerg was missing. Fjeldberg proposed an interesting project and when the two men parted, the seed to a future collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and UBC had been sown. Clive even dropped his planned rant about the feather exhibition.
    ‘I’ll see you on Saturday,’ Professor Fjeldberg said, and pressed Clive’s hand warmly.
    Later that evening, Clive and Michael had dinner at a smart restaurant. Clive studied the menu with dismay and was about to object when Michael said, ‘The Department is paying!’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Clive said, surprised.
    ‘The Board told me to treat you to a meal fit for a king. This restaurant has a Michelin star.’ Michael leaned across the table to whisper this information.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because their food is superb.’
    ‘No, I mean why have you been told to treat me to a meal fit for a king?’
    ‘You deserve it,’ Michael laughed and raised his glass in a toast. There was a tiny, insincere glint in the corner of his eye. Clive was suddenly reminded of the evening when he had called Michael, and Michael, according to his daughter, had been at a meeting at the university, though he had told Clive he was baby-sitting. He confronted Michael with this. Michael smiled.
    ‘I don’t really remember. When did you say it was?’
    Clive continued to stare at him.
    ‘It was the day I returned from my sick leave. The day you gave me the result of the cartilage condensation experiment.’
    ‘Ah.’ Michael’s face lit up.