by Tim Lebbon
He stood, looked around, saw the buzzards still circling high overhead, then carried on digging.
Around the remains of the stranger called Gareth Morgan the soil suddenly became loose, and Tom stumbled as the dirt fell into a hollow with a rush. His foot sank in, he dropped the shovel and spread his arms, falling onto his rump beside the skull. Mass grave, he thought, and then the smell hit him. Wet rot, decay, age, not the smell of the recently dead but the stench of time. He leaned back and pulled his foot free, rolling across the disturbed ground away from the new hole and the smell drifting up from it. He closed his eyes and buried his face in heather, breathing in the muddy freshness of it, trying to clear the smell of his son’s death from his lungs.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Tom said, suddenly sobbing into the ground. He had no idea what he was doing. His hands clawed, fingers dug in, as if afraid that he would fall off the world if he loosened his grip. And wasn’t he doing that already? So much had changed in the last hour that he would not be surprised to open his eyes and find the world spinning the opposite way. Smelling the honest peaty smell of the ground beneath him, he wished that he had never overheard those two men in the pub.
But he had. And King had given him the map, and now here he was. Looking for his dead son.
Tom crawled back to the skeleton – revealed to its ribcage now that the soil around it had tumbled into a hollow – and stared down at what he had done. There were other bones visible down there, touched by sunlight for the first time in years. The corpses must have been piled in together, covered over with a layer of soil and heathers, and as their flesh rotted away beneath the ground it left hollows behind, dark wet spaces filled with nothing but the gas of decay and the undying echoes of their violent deaths. The skeleton called Gareth Morgan still wore the remnants of a uniform and shreds of leathery skin clung to its bones, moist and browned by the damp soil. Beneath it a tangle of bones and clothing, skin and hair, marked where other bodies had found their final resting place.
“Oh God,” Tom muttered, reaching down into the dark, “oh God, oh God . . .” He could taste decay on his tongue, sweet yet vile. He wondered whether each body smelled different in decomposition, and if so which smell was his son.
But death was the great equaliser. Personality had no part in rot. Humour or seriousness held no truck with the processes of bacteria and decay. Steven was long gone from here, yet Tom had never felt so close.
He slid forward on the wet soil, his outstretched arm sinking deeper into the void. He cried out in alarm but came to a stop, his hand closing around a clammy bone. He pushed gently but there was no give. The shovel was under his stomach, and he eased it out and used the blade to shift more of the soil above the grave. It took little effort now, and by kneeling up he found he could simply push the heather to one side like a carpet, revealing the horrors of what lay beneath.
Sunlight struck the bones and revealed their wetness. Subtle autumn heat ate away the coolness of their decade-long rest. The buzzards cried out and drifted away, perhaps sensing death even from such a height. Tom knelt among the rotted corpses of so many men and looked up, welcoming the sun on his face and the sense of his skin stretching and burning. “Jo,” he said, but she did not answer him. “Steven.” Still no answer. Tears dripped from his chin and disappeared among the bodies, perhaps cleaning small spots on his son’s bones.
Shaking his head, his whole body shivering, fear and shock and rage combining to draw his mind back from what he was doing, Tom bent over and reached back into the grave.
* * *
Richard Parker. That was not his son. He dropped the dog tags and stared at the skull of the body he had uncovered, its crew-cut of auburn hair so colourful against the stretched grey skin of its face. Here lay a million stories Tom would never know, other than the lie of Richard Parker’s violent death.
He shoved the skeleton aside and delved deeper. He encountered tangles of bones and clothing, and mud-caked hair brushed his hand as he quickly withdrew.
There were too many. He would have to start moving the bodies, them, until he found Steven.sorting
He’s not here.
Tom shook his head. Where had that idea come from?
He crawled back and prepared to grab hold of the first skeleton, Gareth Morgan, Mr and Mrs Morgan’s son, another soldier whose family had buried a coffin filled with rocks or earth. He wondered whether this boy’s family had doubts about the story as well, and whether they too had entertained the idea of travelling to Salisbury Plain to honour their son on the tenth anniversary of his death.
Tom looked back toward the fence, half expecting to see other fathers coming at him with shovels at the ready. But he was still alone.
Gareth Morgan grinned at him. His skull was almost bare of skin, but there was a hint of a moustache still clinging beneath the hollow of his nose. Tom reached out and grasped the skeleton’s ribs, heaved, and cried out in surprise as it sprang from the ground with a brief sucking noise. He tumbled forward and threw it ahead of him. It landed with a thump and its arms spread above its head, as if relishing the sudden feel of sunlight on its wet bones. So light, Tom thought, and he realised he had been thinking of it as a man.
Its spine was snapped, several ribs were broken off, and one thigh bone was splintered and holed. Another violent death.
Tom moved back into the hole and dragged out Richard Parker, hands beneath the skeleton’s armpits, its legs dragging, heavy with wet clothing and the mummified remnants of muscle and skin. He pulled it across to lay next to Gareth Morgan, and the skeletons’ arms seemed to entwine, friends together again.
Back at the hole, Tom went deeper. He pulled out more bodies – some of them rotted down to the bone, some still hanging on to a leathery layer of skin or dried brown flesh – investigated the dog tags, moved the bodies to one side, going deeper still, breathing hard and trying not to pay any attention to his heart as it pummelled at his chest, demanding that he rest, cease, stop this insanity.
It was hot. He could blame his madness on the heat, perhaps.
Tom looked at his muddied hands, felt his forehead, spat in his hand and checked his saliva for blood. No disease had taken him. No chemical warfare agent had turned his insides to mush. Perhaps whatever had killed these men had been released to the air, only to bide its time before striking again. Perhaps it would wipe out the world. Right then, the only thing that mattered for Tom was the image he had built in his mind: Steven’s dog tags, muddied and cold, resting in his hands.
Leigh Joslin, Anthony Williams, Stuart Cook . . . none of these were his son. Jason Collins, Kenny Godden, Adrian Herbert . . . all strangers, all the dead sons of other families. Eight now, and there were more down there, he could see the mess of their bones and skulls and clothing, muddy and damp, he could smell their sweet smell of decay, taste the of this in the air.wrongness
Tom caught sight of the dead men laid out in a row and looked away, unable to believe what he had done. Joslin’s head had slumped from its mounting atop its spine. Herbert was missing an arm. Godden’s ribs had been smashed, as if something had tried to get inside. Such violence, such death.
The next body he grabbed still wore hair, and dried flesh sunk in between its bones, and its eyes were pale yellow orbs nestling in its skull. Its strange, misshapen skull. Tom frowned and leaned in closer, edging to one side to allow more sunlight to enter the depression in the ground. The soldier’s skull seemed elongated, jaw distended, and his teeth must have risen from their roots because they looked too large for the head. His brow was heavy, nose cavity bulging out over the mouth in a canine aspect.
“What the hell . . . ?” Tom whispered. There was a bullet hole in the back of the skull. Perhaps that accounted for the distortion.
He reached out and grabbed the body’s legs, trying to ignore the feel of cold leathery flesh beneath his hands, clammy with moisture. He pulled. The body shifted a few inches toward him then stopped, held fast by something he could not see
.
The skull had remained exactly where it was.
“Fuck!” Tom moved sideways to another skeleton, dragging it up the small slope to the expanding pile laid out on the heather above. He checked the dog tag, discarded it – another stranger – and went back for more.
Jo grabbed his hand again. She squeezed tighter and Tom cried out, a wretched exhalation of despair. He looked up at the sky and it was pure, clean, unsullied by death. But though he saw blue, and heard Jo whispering her love for him, he could still feel the slickness of the grave between his fingers.
Have I changed? he thought. Have I changed so much?
He rubbed his fingers together and let his wife go.
“It’s all for you,” Tom said, and he looked down again. The strange skull stared at him with its shrunken eyes. The unnatural distance between it and its departed body gave the whole tableau a surreal aspect, and Tom almost pushed the body back close to the head . . . but its limbs were too long, the ribs too narrow, and why was he doing this? Why was he playing games with himself?
“Steven!” he shouted, and as he dug down again—
He’s not here.
—he wondered when that sensation of being watched had amplified without him really noticing. The buzzards were gone, but the skin of his neck was tingling, set in motion by a gaze he could not pin down.
The weird skull grinned at him through lips shrunken back from the jaws.
“You’re dead,” he said, pulling at another skeleton, not Steven, then another, also not Steven.
And that was it. Eleven bodies excavated and spread across the heather, eleven sets of dog tags, and none of them were his son. There had supposedly been fifteen killed; perhaps Steven and the other three missing had been buried elsewhere, or incinerated, or—
Why leave the dog tags? Too dangerous? Too much risk of infection?
Down in the pit, though . . . there were more. Behind the body he could not move he saw the glint of more bones. He reached underneath and his hands touched something cold, heavy. He tugged the corpse again and heard the chink of metal on metal. He pulled harder and another body slipped from the mud, this one also headless and as deformed as the other. Its skull – left behind – also had a bullet hole behind one ear.
I’m not seeing this, he thought, I’ve been digging up fucking corpses and now it’s getting to me, it’s hot, Jo is worried, I’m crying and my tears are distorting everything, I’m just not seeing this!
The dead thing slithered toward him as he pulled, connected to the first headless body by the thick metal chain, and then another, smaller corpse followed it up. Tom stood and backed away, only partially realising that he still had a hold of the first body’s mummified legs. He brought the dead things with him, two headless adults and what could have only been a child, also headless, its skull lost somewhere in that rank pit.
He was about to drop the legs, back away, away, when he saw that the chain was wrapped around another bundle, another corpse. This one still seemed to have its head attached. He pulled again and it popped free of the ground, wet and filthy and yet obviously whole. It was chained to the three headless corpses, the metal wrapped around its chest, under its armpits and between its legs, thoroughly entangled, and Tom wondered why anyone would need to bury a dead person like this.run
He faltered only for a second before moving slowly down into the pit again. These bodies were more whole than any of the others he had brought out, mummified rather than rotted, perhaps because they had been buried deeper in the peaty ground. The first skull stared at him as he reached over the two adult bodies, grabbed the headless child’s skeleton and pulled it across to himself. He was crying, and moaning, and there was a strange keening sound that took him many seconds to realise actually came from him. The child was as light as a pillow, its body seemingly whole and yet dried out and desiccated. The only thing that gave it weight was the chain. Tom placed the corpse gently between the headless adults, clasped the chain and pulled. He lifted, grunting with the effort, tears and sweat blurring his vision as he tried to make out what was wrong with this thing’s head, why it was shaped like that, why it was turning . . .
And then the tiny corpse reached out and grabbed Tom’s arm.
CHAPTER THREE
“What did you tell him?”
“I’ve already told!”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then why bother asking me again, Cole?”
Cole stared down at Nathan King, who was tied onto a chair with his own torn-up clothes. The idiot was still trying to play with him, string him along, and Cole did not have time for that. Not now. His purpose, stalled for a decade, was moving again. The last thing he wanted to be doing was beating information out of his friend, this useless ex-grunt. “You’re wasting my time,” he said.
King shook his head. “For God’s sake, I told—” Cole’s fist connected with his chin and flipped his head back and to the side.
King gasped, spat blood, and Cole stepped back so that he did not get splashed. “Think about what you’re going to say to me next,” Cole said. “Daz told me you went back to the pub to meet Tom Roberts. There’s only one reason you’d have done that, and we both know what that is. So, for the last time . . . what did you tell him?” He massaged his knuckles and turned away.
King’s flat was small and untidy. There were grubby hand marks around the light switches, cobwebs in the ceiling corners, and used fast food containers piled up beside the only armchair. Food was trodden into the carpet. Beer cans were crushed and thrown into one corner of the kitchen. He lived like an animal. Cole did not want to be here – he felt dirtied just breathing the same air – but he needed more from King. More than just, I told him it wasn’t like the Army said. In one way he was glad that King had spilled the beans at last, but he needed to know which beans and what flavour. It would do Cole no good at all storming blindly into the countryside in search of phantoms he had lost a decade ago.
“Cole . . .” King spat several times and a tooth tumbled from his mouth. “Fuck’s sake, Cole, you knocked my tooth out! I don’t see you for ten years, then you turn up and knock out my tooth? What’s the point of that, eh?” Shaking his head, he stared at the bloodied molar stuck on his thigh, and his whole body shivered.
Cole looked at the pathetic man strapped into the timber kitchen chair, and shame bled into his anger. “Sorry, Nath,” he said. “Really mate, I’m sorry. But more than being sorry, I need to know exactly what you said to the old guy about his son. Exactly. Everything. He’s left his house with his wife and I need to know why he’s suddenly gone. I can guess where he’s gone, that’s no problem, because it’s ten years ago this weekend. But Nath . . . I don’t want to go down there blind and deaf, mate. I need to know how much you told him. I need to know everything he knows. And I’ll hit you again if you continue to piss me around.”
King hung his head, blood dripping into his lap. Tears followed, and the big man sucked back a sob. “Cole, it just came out,” he said. “Steven Roberts was his son – remember Steve? – and the guy looked so sad, you know? So desperate for the truth. I thought it might help him to know. And I told him where to look.”
“The grave?” Cole went cold. We left her chained up, wanting her to suffer, wanting her to be alive down there forever . . . “I’ll meet you again,” she had said . . . “Holy shit, Nath.”
“I didn’t tell him anything about—”
Cole hit him again, and there was real anger behind this one. “You twat! Why the hell would you do something like that? Does he know? Does he know about her?”
King shook his head, blood and saliva swaying from his chin. “Of course not,” he said, tired and sad and scared. “You think I’d have told him about them? I don’t even know all about them, or understand what I know. And I don’t want to think about them but I do, every night, I dream and scream and sometimes I think sharing the fear will reduce it, you know? But if you think I told him all that, you’re mad.”do
“I am mad,” Cole said. “Mad that they got away.”
“The ones that got away.” King shook his head. “They’re long, long gone, mate.”
Cole sat on the armchair and stared at King. He had been a good soldier ten years ago, and someone Cole could have trusted with his life. Now he was a fat shit, living like a pig, sitting in the chair and spilling his guts after a couple of punches. He stank. He had no respect for himself any more, and no sense of responsibility about the secrets he knew.
“Did you tell him his son isn’t buried there?”
King raised his head and stared at Cole, and Cole thought, Oh shit, he doesn’t know, he really doesn’t know.
“What are you on about?”
“They didn’t all die, Nath. Some of them were taken away.”
King stared over his shoulder at a past he had been trying to forget forever. “Poor bastards.”
“Now you realise why I want to know what you told him.” But the words suddenly felt hollow in Cole’s mouth, because really there was little point in going on. He knew as much as King could reveal – Tom Roberts had gone down to the Plain to look for the grave of his son – and the most important thing he had to do now was to follow Roberts, stop him, and if necessary silence him. Roberts knew too much already. The slightest risk of him opening the grave . . . that could not be allowed to happen. Not now. Not after so long, when most of the people who knew about the berserkers were dead, or mad.exactly
“I showed him where to find the grave, and that’s all. But Cole, you mean they took some of the guys with them? Who? Where? Why?”