Frost thickened over everything, over Haxforth, frost so thick it was almost snow.
Finally I knew I had to go and look at him properly. Only a single bag was left in the van then and Daniel must’ve been up there, he wasn’t with me anyhow, it was only me and Haxforth in that moment. His skin, when I went close, made me think of the tectonic plates we’d learned about in geography. These plates of his were tiny, no bigger than thumbnails, but still they seemed to have shifted or cracked apart. And that right then was probably the single saddest thing I ever saw in my life, even including everything that had happened with Mum, because somehow in that moment he wasn’t Haxforth any more but everyone who had ever lived and struggled and died, which was everyone ever and would be me too one day. And what made it ten times worse even than that was the way his body was curled in the long icy grass with his chin down by his chest and arms tucked in tight. Because that shape was exactly the same as my favourite sleeping position every night, the position I always felt safest in.
Chapter 46
A noise over by the grave-mouth told me Daniel’d made it down with that final load. All the rest were in position and ready to go.
‘The bag split,’ he said. ‘The mail went everywhere. I was really careful picking it up though. I don’t think I missed any.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, meaning it.
‘I think my fingers have gone black. I can hardly feel them any more.’
‘Haxforth’s dead.’
Daniel nodded and together we went and stood over the old white body. What do you do in a situation like that? Do you say something, ashes to ashes, put something over his face? If there are rules about that kind of stuff, I don’t know what they are.
A breeze ruffled the frozen grass-tips around his body. The breeze strengthened, turned into a wind. Something else was rising too, through the cracks in his skin, the same thing I’d seen oozing from the shrunken tree back at Annandale Avenue. The death-poison that had stayed away so long.
‘Come on.’ I bent down, ready to heave the body towards the grave-mouth.
‘You’re going to touch him?’ Daniel said. ‘Like that? Are you sure?’
‘No. But we can’t leave him here, can we?’
I grabbed the body around the chest and then Daniel leaned in too and we pulled Haxforth across the sky-pressing landscape, gouging a black line in the whiteness underfoot. Somehow he felt slippery and powdery at the same time, I don’t know why that should’ve been.
‘What are we going to do, just tip him in?’ asked Daniel when we reached the edge of the pit.
‘Try to lower him, I reckon.’
Somehow we got him upright and cantilevered all correct so he’d go down feet first. The hole was deep but not that wide so it was going to be a tricky operation whichever way you looked at it, and then when you thought of what needed to go in afterwards you wondered if it was all going to fit. But with the skeleton down there, you knew this was the only way it could end. The only problem was, we were going to have to drop him at some point. It didn’t matter how delicate we were, that was inevitable. And with the shaft being so narrow, there was a good chance he’d fold or block it up somehow. If that happened, we’d never get everything else in, it’d be impossible.
I let Daniel take the weight for a moment and laid on my front, beside the stone slab buried all those hundreds of years. A white worm crinkled along its earthy underside. How far down exactly was the bottom? I scanned with the torch, made a careful examination, tried with determination to keep my eyes away from the hypnotising skull and surrounding gold. It was deep but not deep enough that if you jumped it’d kill you. There was a place off to the side, I saw now, an unfilled space or second chamber of some kind. If we could get Haxforth in there then everything else’d work out no problem. Maybe, I thought, that second chamber had even been left empty on purpose, back in those brutal times.
What it meant, though, was that to get his cracked-up lightweight body into its final resting place, one of us was going to have to go down there and pull it into position.
I got back on my feet and told Daniel what I was going to do. I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say about it. He’d have objections. What if the walls collapse, what if you can’t get back out, you’ll be buried alive, suffocated, then there’ll be two bodies to deal with, three if you count that old dead king down there, and what if …
Yes, that was all good and sensible. But you can’t always do What If. There are times when What If gets you precisely nowhere.
I jumped.
Chapter 47
The bottom of the chamber came shooting up and I bent my knees ready but still the impact surprised me. Something gave way and for a second I was certain, absolutely certain, that I was plunging down into hell. Then the world steadied and I looked up and saw Daniel’s head silhouetted against a segment of throbbing moon.
I didn’t want to spend too long looking around. The pit smelled exactly how a hole bored deep into the cold earth should smell and that was OK, but the skeleton gave me the creeps now that I was up close to it. I didn’t care if he’d once been Haxforth’s brother, or king even of the whole wide world, I didn’t want anything to do with him. I wasn’t going to examine him in the name of archaeology or anything like that. And the silence down there. There was something terrifying about it, something eternal and not on the side of human beings.
I flicked the torch left and right. The dark patch I’d seen from above wasn’t really what I’d thought, wasn’t much more than a scoop in the chamber wall, but it would do. There was enough space for a human body. No time to lose now. I looked up, waved my arm – tried to shout something – then all at once Haxforth’s body came crashing down the shaft and earth was flying everywhere and I was trying to grab and steady him because it didn’t seem right to just let him fall like a sack of potatoes. For a moment we did a death-dance in the narrow packed shaft, his face against mine like a cold grey flannel, then somehow I got him down below me, got him lying on the ground.
The earthfall stopped. It hadn’t been so much after all. I waved up at Daniel to let him know I was all right. Carefully, carefully, I got Haxforth’s body into the scooped-out part of the chamber, trying not to tread on the coins and armbands and all the other Historically Important bits and pieces that were lying around. Only I saw something then that made me forget Historically Important. Old Beautiful was down there too. It was nestled in behind the skull and its wings were rotten and there were some tiny white bones visible already. Its eyes though, they were still blackly alive and staring right at me. That and the burning tree when I first saw it, they’re the two things I know I’ll never be able to forget, images ripped from a nightmare, a cold knife pressed against my invincible heart.
I got myself back to the foot of the shaft, saw Daniel’s head floating in the moonlight like a reflecting upside-down puddle. That was the way back to the real world. But I couldn’t go up there yet. I waved again, made the beckoning bring-it-on motion with my hands. Daniel disappeared. A moment later the mail started coming down.
I don’t know why, but I’d been expecting the bags, the heavy black bags, to drop. And then for me to have to catch them or something. Daniel surprised me though. He was a surprising person in many ways when you got to know him. The mail came in tumbling handfuls instead, scoopfuls, individual items fluttering down. He must’ve seen the collapsing earth when Haxforth fell, must’ve realised the possibility of the walls caving in and decided to go about things the safe and thoughtful way.
I thought, Maybe I should try doing that myself sometime – in general ongoing life, I mean – if I ever get out of here.
Down it came, cascading over my shoulders and upturned head, piling round my feet. It was the sort of thing that you know if you ever saw it in a film there’d be big emotional music playing, perhaps even the sort of music Daniel played, and everything’d be slowed down and made out like it was some great life-changing moment. All that stuff I’d w
orried about for so long and now for it to be tumbling like snowflakes … truly poetic, you know? But it didn’t feel that way at all. It was terrifying, being trapped in that cold forgotten place where the world and its rules felt distant and impossible.
I made a flat shovel of my two hands, started scooping the mail backwards into the dark spaces of the burial chamber. I threw it over Haxforth and Haxforth’s brother and Old Beautiful, which if it wasn’t dead by now soon would be. Behind me it all went, shovel and scoop, shovel and scoop, burying the old things and the old people. It kept coming. It didn’t stop. For a while it was like I was standing at the bottom of some factory chute. All the recessed places were filled up and packed and after that I was standing on a mountain of paper rising steadily towards the moon. It wasn’t too easy keeping a footing on that lot, it was all slip and slide, a quicksand of envelopes. I stamped it down hard with my boots though. I wasn’t about to be sucked under, not now, no way.
‘How much more?’ I shouted up to Daniel after what seemed like hours.
I saw him put a hand behind his ear and shrug. Then saw an arm reach down into the hole, right up to the shoulder. At the end of the arm there was a leather loop for me to grab onto. Daniel’s belt.
I leaped and felt the loop snap tight in my fist. I scrambled like a madman – found myself face down in a sea of frosted grass.
Chapter 48
A clean-slicing wind had risen up from somewhere. It was time to go. The apple tree was half fallen over now. Nobody would give it a second glance, except maybe to think how the next good storm would topple it, bring it level with the crawling kingdom of insects and toadstools.
‘That was a great idea, using the belt.’
‘I did a life-saver’s course once, at the swimming pool. They teach you stuff like that.’
Daniel was blue-lipped and wide-eyed and great shaking clouds of steam were coming out of his mouth, and I knew it couldn’t all be from the cold.
‘What was it like, down there? When I saw all that earth falling in on top I thought – well, I thought …’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.’ There were still five or six bags lined up next to the mouth of the pit. Quickly we ripped them open, flung the contents in, down on hands and knees because that was faster. We watched the envelopes disappear into the earth. Finally the very last handful. I stood up. Daniel stood also, played his torch over the scene. Again I wondered whether I should say something. Haxforth was down there, after all, and his brother – though his brother’d been there an awful lot longer. Dust to dust, brothers together at last, thief and king. Rest in peace, you know, all that stuff.
I didn’t say anything in the end. The dead can look after themselves, I figured. What I did instead was, as I dropped that final handful of mail, I made a wish for the living.
Don’t ever expect me to tell you what it was though.
We gathered up the black plastic sacks, empty and ripped apart, and we crumpled them and threw those in too. Dropped the spade in on top. Then we heaved the two halves of the broken slab back into position. Neither of us said anything. Hastily we covered the stone with the piled-up mud and lumps of turf and climbed out of the valley. The moon was still big and bright and there was plenty of light to see by. Near the top, hunched in the sheltering edge of woodland, we turned and looked back. Right across the little sunken scar in the landscape, swathing the half-toppled apple tree, there lay a great wilderness of scrub and bramble.
You have never seen a more anonymous corner of the earth.
We turned and started to walk, me and Daniel. Heads down, hands thrust into pockets. Past the wreck of the van and across the farmer’s field, searching for the place where Haxforth had crashed through the hedge. Somewhere an owl called and another called back. Out hunting. How long till seven o’clock? The police would be out hunting too, soon, ready to search our house and arrest Dad. I hoped to god he’d delivered the real-mail-that-mattered. Or at least had tried. Those Mitigating Circumstances needed to be in tip-top condition for the day when he’d have to stand up in court.
Three-quarters of the way across the field the tyre tracks we were following disappeared. New layers of frost were coming down, the air so cold it seemed to sparkle in front of your eyes. Underfoot the soil was hard as diamond, not a single imprint left of Christy’s van’s final wild ride. We doubled back, but now the first set of tracks were vanishing too. Suddenly the field seemed enormous. Before long all remaining energy was going into slogging ahead, trying to find a way out of that sub-zero world.
‘If we keep walking in a straight line, we’re bound to find a road or a house eventually,’ Daniel said through shaking teeth.
You know the funniest thing? We’d opened up a hole in the ground and at the bottom there’d been GOLD. Real-life buried treasure – an Anglo-Saxon hoard. That gold would’ve made us rich and famous. Dad could’ve left Royal Mail, would never have had to work as a postman again. He’d’ve had time to look after Mum properly. And Daniel could’ve – well, I don’t know what, but something, anyway. Yet neither of us even talked about it. Why? Of course we knew if the burial chamber ever came to be excavated all that mail would be found and then there’d be trouble. But it wasn’t just that. Somehow we’d both known, without ever saying a word, that we hadn’t gone there to take anything away. We were there to leave something, to finish a thing that had been going on for a long time, too long. And once that thing was finished Shuttle Hill would be closed up forever, like a fossilised flower bud. You couldn’t ever open it again.
Once or twice as we trudged on I glanced at the figure shivering beside me and I knew he knew and understood all this.
Daniel Cushway was OK, when you came right down to it.
Chapter 49
Barriers had been set up all along the top of Annandale Avenue. From the back of a flatbed lorry fluorescent-jacketed men lifted pickaxes, a hose, a big pneumatic drill. A couple of others were unhitching a grimy generator. Daniel and I stood watching them. The clear skies of the night had given way to grey cloud, the winter covering that’s so familiar it feels like a second skin almost.
The men whistled and joked as they went about their work. One of them, passing close, saw us looking. ‘Gas main’s gone,’ he said cheerily. ‘Went overnight.’
We were back in town and it felt strange. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. For a while there in the darkness it’d felt like being trapped in an Ice Age. Only bit by bit had the twenty-first century seeped back. We found a track, and the track led to a path and the path led to gravel and tarmac and a place eventually where headlights whooshed past. A few minutes later an early-morning bus came cruising along, Out of Service, the sign said but we flagged it down anyway. The driver let us on no problem, took one look, didn’t even ask questions.
One of the fluorescent-jacketed men started up the generator. It coughed, vibrated, spewed oily smoke into the morning air. Another fiddled with the drill hose, a third passed around pairs of sky-blue ear defenders. The residents of Annandale Avenue were about to get an unpleasant surprise. Away we walked, not too fast, down the pavement towards number 79.
‘What’ll your mum say, you being out all night?’ I asked Daniel.
‘She’ll go mental.’ Then he realised what he’d said. ‘I mean, she’ll be really angry.’
‘Tell her to get stuffed.’
‘I can’t do that,’ he said miserably. ‘I’m not brave enough.’
‘You took on Christy, didn’t you?’
‘He got me down on the ground! I’d’ve been dead if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘But you were still there, that’s what counted.’
He waved it away like it wasn’t important at all.
We stood outside his house. 79 Annandale Avenue, with its perfect metal kitchen and all those books left behind by his dad. The driveway was empty and I heard the sigh of relief. Mrs Cushway must’ve been away at her court case again. Another early depar
ture for Winchester. There’d probably be a million messages on Daniel’s phone, whenever he turned it back on.
‘Here,’ Daniel mumbled. ‘I think you’d better have this. It belongs to you, really.’
He dug around in his pocket and held out Haxforth’s clasp. That surprised me. I’d had this fleeting idea that he’d thrown it into the burial chamber back on Shuttle Hill, because somehow it seemed right to leave all the gold together. Now here it was, lying on the palm of his hand. The coiled hinge, the arrowhead catch. In a month, a year’s time, it would be the only real proof that Haxforth ever existed.
Up the road, I saw the workmen pulling down their ear defenders.
I thought about all the things I’d seen and how lucky I was, having Daniel there to see them with me. I pushed his hand away. I’d made a promise about that clasp and people shouldn’t ever break promises, not if they can help it.
‘It’s going to bring you good luck.’ I don’t know why I said that. It sounded like one of those meaningless things adults say when they can’t think of anything real. But somehow I felt it was true.
‘Do you think?’
‘Definitely.’
All of a sudden the pneumatic drill ripped through the morning quiet, its metal point roaring and biting and the first lumps of tarmac lifting from the road’s surface already. Faces appeared in windows up and down the Avenue.
Why I Went Back Page 19