"...I have all the answers." The woman at the bar pulled the strange necklace off of her chest. Helen looked at the hypnotic little thing and asked again, "So what's the story with it?"
Sarah had begun to coax the memory out of the deepest recesses of Helen's mind, Helen sat with her back against the headboard and listened to Sarah's retelling.
"You were out at Rock Bottom -- that bar just down the road from campus -- and you were there with a friend or something. I think he was your friend -- anyhow the two of you were celebrating something.
Helen corrected her, "I was congratulating him on finding a good job at a law firm. Henry was looking for months to find something that would pay him right, and we felt like it merited a celebration."
"Mhmm," Sarah nodded, "but neither of you were really drinking at all -- like you both got something as a trophy, but no more."
Helen confirmed that, "Yeah, I don't drink that much really."
"Regardless, I approached you two and said that I recognized you from a class you two were in. I told you two that I was a T.A."
Helen's eyes widened, "That's right! That's right, that's right! I didn't really remember you, but Henry did, and we started chatting about that, you offered to buy us something, we didn't want that, and then the conversation started to turn to that class."
Sarah continued, "Lucky me, we happened to all three be in the same field. So I kept up a good bit of conversation, and eventually your friend left, but you wanted to stay and chat with me."
Helen looked at the woman by her in bed and asked, "You didn't do anything to me?"
Sarah picked up on the implication, pulled herself back and said, "What?! No! No no no no, babe I would never have done that to anyone. You just wanted to talk to me!"
"I don't know if I can believe that." Helen let her vision lose focus as she tried to remember.
"Helen, please understand, what you've remembered is not the full picture yet. I know that if all you've got is amnesia and a brief memory of our communion... well I wouldn't be surprised if you thought we kidnapped and drugged and assaulted you."
Helen sighed, "I still can't just trust you... and how did you get in here!? How did you get into the bathroom without a key?"
"Oh, she gives us certain blessings." Sarah grinned wide and toothy, "some doors just might as well not be there if she would prefer them not to be." Helen gripped the blankets a little tighter at this alarming display of Sarah's more unhinged side.
"Let's get back to where we were -- Rock Bottom. The bar by campus." Sarah paused and continued, "The subject eventually got to me asking about your minor, and coincidentally you said anthropology, specifically focusing on the anthropology of religion. And that... that was the perfect coincidence, because I happened to have been in my university's anthropology department before all this." Helen opened her mouth to ask a question, but Sarah shushed her with a finger, "Before all this I was a graduate student at Bamford, and I studied anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. We started to share all the fun things we learned. You told me you just finished up your third year of studies, that you'd be graduating in just one more semester. I told you a little about my first field work abroad -- and you started asking me all about it."
Helen looked down the bed at Sarah, noticing the same necklace as she'd been wearing that night at the bar. "Is that where you found that..."
"This little thing?" Sarah interrupted her and held the amulet up, "Yes. I was doing an exchange program in London, and the department asked for help on this excavation and research on a recently unearthed Roman settlement north of Leeds."
She unclipped the necklace and looked closely at the malachite gemstone in its center. The Romans had found a place there, celebrated by the locals as a shrine to one of their deities. The Romans didn't care -- they cut into the mountain and dug deep below it for its rich silver. While the others were concerned with the little settlement around the site, they sent me and two others to start mapping out the tunnels.
She grinned and put the necklace back, "The air was pure. The air there was so pure. We found her at the deepest point. Some Romans were still there with her, writhing amid her pleasures. She had been so alone, locked deep in the Earth. They were all tangled together, locked in a cycle of breeding and birth. That's exactly what the goddess desired from them, nearly two-thousand years of unending pleasure. They were eternally youthful, free from disease, free from pain, coddled in the goddess's embrace forever. That's where I found the amulet, a Celtic woman in the pit gave it to me, with a vial of the goddess's milk, and told me to go with it, go and spread her goodness. Somehow the chamber was lit up -- green crystal lights coming through the walls, along with vines and roots holding little lanterns above. I saw all of it, smelled all of it, felt all of it. I could have left and ran. The others could have too. They joined in the pile of flesh, and they remain there. I stayed for a brief while, then I left. I warned everyone there was a cave in, and left for London. I took the amulet, the vial, and came here, back home. And ever since I have followed the commands of the goddess."
