by Nick Brown
“Oh come on, Rose, you must have found all that ‘Zombie Hills Have Eyes’ stuff pretty funny. It was like an audition for Scary Movie.”
“Perhaps, but it’s been a long day and I’m tired, please let’s go home.”
By the time they’d packed up the minibus it was cold and dark with the moon fully risen. So cold that Steve had to scrape frost off the windscreen and they huddled inside their coats against the failure of the minibus’s heating system to provide any warmth. Rose sat in the back as Steve drove and chatted with Jan in the front.
The evening hadn’t gone the way Rose hoped; Steve, the selfish bastard, hadn’t given her due credit for her discovery in his talk: typical. If life was fair she’d be dig director not Giles, a poor archaeologist, pathetic weak man with a failed marriage and no ambition. Just like her husband had been. Steve may be a good digger but he was like a little boy with no sense of responsibility, chasing after young girls then running away. She knew that if it wasn’t for the glass ceiling in archaeology she’d be leading the Unit and they’d better watch out as she’d have them out of their jobs in no time. Looking at Jan laughing with Steve in the front seats she thought: look at the silly little tart throwing herself at the letchy waster. Leonie will be interested when I tell her tomorrow.
Thinking of Leonie brought her back to the mound; her mound. She’d called it ‘my mound’ once by mistake and Steve and Giles had made fun of her. Steve had called her Gollum and they spent the rest of the day calling out ‘my precious’ when she tried to talk to them and Leonie had giggled like those bitches at school used to. Well it was her mound, even the village idiot in the pub had known that and what’s more she knew there was something in it, almost as if it had told her.
This last bit she’d rather not have remembered. It brought back the mysterious voice. She’d began to wonder who it was that Leonie thought was watching them when she saw they were passing Devil’s Mound. Looking out of the window she tried to pick out the shape through the trees as the minibus drove past. Although most of the site was obscured by the fringe of trees, through a gap she thought she saw a flickering light moving around the mound. Then the bus was round the corner of the lane and the mound was gone.
***
Wednesday was the last golden day of that peculiarly elongated summer. Rose established the mound had been surrounded by a cordon of deep ditch when the chamber was built, and the entire feature had been covered by a heap of the earth taken from the ditch. She was sure that the entrance to the chamber, which she’d found further to the left, had faced a breach or causeway in the ditch. Whilst Leonie and Jan investigated the area between the causeway and the ditch she made the preliminary preparations for the opening of the chamber. All the team hoped they’d found a, possibly unique, Neolithic chambered tomb. Steve, as the established Neolithic expert, switched his attention full time from the village to the mound and Rose suspected that he would take over the excavation and relegate her to a supporting role. Leonie, who had become increasingly disenchanted with all aspects of the excavations and particularly with Steve, encouraged her in this.
“So unfair on you Rose, without you this crappy dig would have been wound up by now with nothing to show for it, just like all Giles’s digs. And it’s just typical of that selfish wanker Steve, takes what he wants and moves on. Thinks he can do what he likes on site; Giles would never dare challenge him on anything to do with excavation. If he ever does Steve just name checks all the high profile digs he’s worked on and all the leading academics who consult him. If I hear one more mention of Khiroktia, Çatalhöyük or bloody Makriyalos I’ll throw up.”
She ran out of steam giving Jan the opportunity to interject,
“OK, but it must have been exciting to have worked at those places when you look at the way those excavations moved our ideas on. Anyway I think Steve’s stories are really quite interesting, last night when we went to the pub he was telling me about…”
***
Rose wasn’t listening, it was like they’d disappeared and she was in a different universe. She wasn’t going to have Steve find the opening to her discovery, she knew exactly where it was; she’d seen it last night in a dream, if it had been a dream, she couldn’t be sure these days.
But it was hers and she was now going to excavate it herself. Something had led her step by step to this discovery and she didn’t want anyone stealing the moment. She’d told Jan and Leonie to investigate the pit at the other end of the trench. When they’d gone she clambered up onto the mound.
On the mound it felt good, where she was meant to be. At first the work went even more easily than she’d hoped, it felt almost like somebody else was directing her movements. Once she excavated down to the stone she switched to using a small trowel to try to expose a little of its surface. The feel of the ancient stone scraping against the steel of her trowel blade vibrated through her fingers and ran right up her arm. It gave her a luxurious sense of power.
But then suddenly, as the trowel found an edge to the stone, there came a terrible feeling out of nowhere that the ancient rock was trying to repel her efforts to expose it, that the stone itself didn’t want her here.
She must have lost all sense of time because it had grown darker and there was stillness in the air like before an electrical storm. The conversation between Jan and Leonie in the trench sounded fuzzy and distorted, seemed to be reaching her across a long distance. She was dizzy now, maybe she should stop. Something was wrong: she didn’t want to be up here alone any more. She’d go and join the others, but when she turned to look she couldn’t see them any more. And there was something else here. Something urging her to keep going, the voice in her dreams: only now it wasn’t like the best friend she’d always imagined and never had, it was harsh and threatening. Like the policeman who’d cautioned her when she’d accidently cut her ex-husband with that kitchen knife: cut him quite badly it turned out.
She thought maybe she was suffering from the heat, but when she tried to stop she could feel something deep inside under the stone pulling at the blade of the trowel, something stronger than stone forcing her to continue, just like the kitchen knife had forced its way into her husband’s stomach. As her hand was pulled back into action it finally dawned on her that all her passion and intuition about the mound had maybe come from within it. Something in there had been using her; it wanted her to find it. It had guided her. She tried to call out but her voice, like in a nightmare, made no sound.
Then, through this confusion of dreaming horror she detected movement at the edge of the tree line by the estate wall: something was coming. Coming to stop her. She managed to turn her head to look. Yes there: there was something approaching: it had crossed over the wall. Funeral black like a rotting grave winding, distorted and elongated and above it the hideous mockery of a corpse white face that she couldn’t bear to look at.
And then it hit her; this was what Leonie had seen, but it hadn’t been stalking Leonie. It had been watching her, no, not just watching, it had been trying to warn her, to make her leave the mound alone.
The thing in the mound was more urgent now, pulling harder, frantic as it directed the trowel in her hand. Compelling her to release it, to release something she now dimly understood must never be set free. But she was beyond fearing that as she watched the thing from the tree line come capering across the ground towards her. Its perambulation was awful, disarticulated as if it was a thing of many pieces, only loosely jointed. But worse than that was the way it covered the distance, jerkily, at great speed and yet so horribly imprecise she could never tell exactly where it was.
She stood up to run but as she moved she felt the grass clutching at her legs as the earth pulled her down so that as she turned her upper body her legs stayed fixed. She heard cartilage tear and bone snap in her left ankle and she fell to her knees.
She shut her eyes, petrified, so she saw nothing. But she knew it had reached her, that it was on the mound. Beneath her under the earth, trappe
d in the chamber she heard something begin to howl. She didn’t listen because the horror on the mound was so close.
Then it touched her and the feeling of that touch was so dreadful, so beyond description that death itself would have been better. So it was almost a relief when she felt herself tossed into the air to land broken and bleeding in the bottom of the trench.
CHAPTER 4
SEEPING THROUGH
Jan was labelling a finds bag in the trench and Leonie was having a ciggy break when they heard something squealing like a terrified child, followed by the sound of a body hitting the ground from a great height.
They turned and saw Rose lying splayed out, a smashed doll on the trench floor. Jan heard Leonie scream but made herself rush to where Rose was lying. How was it possible to suffer such injuries just from falling so short a distance? She was twisted and broken, sprawled across the trench, her right leg bent backwards beneath her and the left, a blood soaked mess sticking out at a right angle to the hip. Her fingers were bleeding and her fair hair matted from the blood streaming down her ashen face. She was whimpering with pain and her left hand was jerkily scrabbling at the base of her spine.
“Leonie run get help! Go on move now it’s urgent.”
Leonie ran and Jan tried to examine and comfort Rose, although unsure if she was fully conscious.
“Don’t move, Rose, Leonie’s gone for help. Please stay still, Steve will get an ambulance, you’ll be OK I promise you.”
But she didn’t look OK and Jan was wondering how a simple slip down no more than five feet into a shallow trench could produce these injuries. She could see white splintered bone puncturing the skin through the blood covering Rose’s right leg. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the left leg protruding at such an unnatural angle so occupied herself looking for the source of the blood in her hair and speaking soothing words of comfort. She felt Rose reach for her hand and try to speak.
“Jan, don’t leave me, mustn’t leave me, get me away from here, it wants me, feeds off me.”
Her voice faltered and she seemed to be drifting into a state of semi-consciousness.
“Rose, just hang on in there, love, help will be here soon and we’ll get you taken care of in hospital.”
She tried to speak again and Jan thought she caught the words
“Pushed me, warn Steve, warn him there’s two things.”
“Shush, quiet, love, stay still.”
“Jan two things, not one two…my fault… tricked me, stop it, don’t let it ou…”
Then Rose blacked out and a panicky Jan felt for a pulse.
It took the startled paramedics some time to decide it was safe to move Rose onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. Leonie went with her. Once the ambulance had receded from the site along the rough track that led to the road, Steve decided to close down work on the excavation for the day. As the diggers packed up he made the shocked Jan a cup of tea.
“What happened Jan, how did she manage to do that to herself?”
“I don’t know, hardly seems possible. Steve, those injuries were awful, how could it happen? She must have twisted badly as she fell. I’m most bothered by the blow to the head; she wasn’t making any sense when she blacked out.”
“OK, once we’ve finished here I’ll drive us to the hospital and see what’s what, first I’d better share the good news with Giles.
***
In the scruffy gloom of the Unit, Giles was on the phone to Tim Thompson the historian and archivist they shared with the history department. He was preparing the documentary evidence on the area that would provide context and tenurial history for the site report.
“Yes, I’ll have a pretty fair report ready for you next week. It’s quite a tricky one this, you know there’s no record of any settlement at all on any of those fields at the site. It would seem that since they abandoned the village almost two and a half thousand years ago no one’s gone near it, very strange – it’s good quality land. By the way, did you know there’s rumours in the council offices of a dodgy scheme to develop it?”
“Yeah, get on with it please, Tim.”
“Very well then, I’m going to conflate all the documentary and literary references into a brief report. There’s a local legend about the mound that goes back a long way. It’s meant to be a place to keep well away from. It’s linked in with the history of Skendleby Hall and the Davenport family. The parish church even had a haunted vicar going mad and disappearing in the eighteenth century. The Davenports still live in Skendleby; not in the Hall, they sold that quite recently to a merchant banker or such like and were apparently quite glad to do so. Now that’s strange behaviour from an ancient landed family don’t you think?”
Giles was beginning to lose attention. Thompson’s long rambling discourses had this effect on him. Then he realised Thompson’s tone had changed.
“Still, the Hall’s an interesting place, Giles, there’s a small chapel with a most peculiar motto that translates as ‘we guard that which watches’. It dates back to the fifteenth century. No one knows what it means and apart from this one carving in the stone in the chapel there’s no other mention of it. The family, apparently, don’t like to talk about it.”
“Yeah Tim, very clever, it sounds like an academic fifteenth century joke.”
“Sorry, I’m not with you.”
“The quote, you know: it’s a take on the roman satirist Juvenal’s comment on Plato’s Republic. Quis Custodiet and all that, you know, ‘Who guards the guardians themselves.’ Quite amusing. Anyway I’ll look forward to your report. Bye.”
Giles put down the phone with relief, a little of Thompson could go a long way. It rang immediately, this time it was Steve from the hospital.
When Giles arrived on site early Thursday morning the weather was showing signs of change, the sky was a paler blue and the sunshine hazy. The warmth of the previous weeks had been replaced by chill, the harbinger of winter. Giles found the change of atmosphere on site unsettling and it was not just his arrival that had dampened it this time. The previous Thursday the dig had been alive with the discovery of an ancient site within Devil’s Mound. The post work visits to the pub by the whole work force, professional and volunteer, following brilliant sunny days had produced an atmosphere of holiday and bonhomie. The good humour on the site had been infectious. Now it was not only the weather that was chill but also the atmosphere. He’d expected the accident to Rose would have had an effect, but not this depressing. After all, the reports from the hospital were more positive than they’d feared initially; she would recover and maybe be up and about in a few months, although her mind might take longer to heal. And anyway, no one liked or trusted her.
He hadn’t even had time to see for himself where the accident happened for his health and safety report when Jan asked if she could have a word. She led him away from the hearing of the other diggers.
“Giles, there’s some things I need to tell you.”
“OK, go on.”
“What happened to Rose, well, that wasn’t normal. No, don’t look at me like that. For a start you can’t hurt yourself like that falling a few feet. You should have heard what the paramedics said about it.”
“Look Jan, people can get hurt by the strangest things. Listen, I knew a guy who got killed by an orange.”
He hoped she’d laugh as he didn’t really have time for all this, but she just got more agitated.
“Also, Giles, she said someone had done it to her, she wanted me to warn Steve and to tell him there were two of something.”
“Well, if she was trying to warn Steve about two of something it must have been women. You can count yourself lucky he’s not turned his charm on you yet.”
He realised as soon as he said this it was a mistake, and for more reasons than just making light of Rose’s injury. Her eyes filled with tears and she snapped, “she was lucky not to die. Have you seen how Leonie is? She thinks we’re being stalked and all you can do is make silly fucking jokes. Yo
u’re meant to be in charge, Giles. Try to act responsibly or at least have the decency to look like you care.”
She fumbled for a handkerchief and, to stop things deteriorating further he said as if convinced,
“OK, OK, I hear what you say, I’ll go and visit her in hospital, see if she’s well enough to talk.”
He walked off wishing he thought more about what he said before he said it. Why could he never get it right? He wasn’t quite as insensitive as people thought and had already clocked the frozen atmosphere between Steve and Leonie. So he wasn’t looking forward to the on site planning meeting that the four of them had scheduled for the afternoon.
In the event, to his surprise, the meeting started well, although it began to feel very cold in the draughty shabby site hut. He took great pains to handle the meeting with tact, steering away from any sensitive areas and after about half an hour they were behaving almost like they were a week ago. He wondered if this was partly out of respect for Rose, but by three thirty they’d managed to reschedule the last phases of the excavation and agreed to ahead with preparing to open the chamber sometime next week. He’d be able to put on some sort of show for Jim and his paper. He should have ended the meeting then but Steve had started.
“I know this sounds a bit weird but I did think of it before this happened to Rose. You know the way this thing was built. Well it’s like it was never meant to be found, you get what I’m saying. These things were usually built to be seen, you know, they were a focus for the community. Spot the difference with this one?”
Giles was late for his next meeting and didn’t want to discuss this now and especially not on site.
“OK Steve, but we won’t know if that’s true or not until we excavate it.”
“But listen: there is evidence in the design, look I can show you, I’ve drawn it on a plan. Leonie just reach into the map draw and pass me the third drawing down?”