Skendleby

by Nick Brown

  Claire woke to late afternoon sunlight streaming through the curtains being drawn back by Gwen. She’d slept soundly and for the first time in days without dark dreams. Gwen put a mug of tea on the bedside table.

  “Don’t worry, this one won’t send you to sleep. Then get into the bath I’ve drawn. I’ve left some of your old clothes out. Choose some you like because when you’re dressed we’re going out.”

  She washed her hair and luxuriated in the bath, feeling the tensions ease from her muscles. From the pile of her old clothes she selected an outfit of black jeans, t-shirt and black wool sweater which she remembered from her Goth period. By the time she got downstairs it was dark. Gwen handed her a coat and ushered her out of the house.

  The night was clear and cold with a full moon rising. They picked their way through the side streets to the town centre. Wyle Cop was decorated for Christmas with lights and Christmas trees suspended between the medieval and Tudor buildings. The streets were crowded and everything was cheerful and reassuringly normal.

  They wandered around for a while then climbed up the steep medieval street under the shadow of St Alkmond’s church, passing a group of kids sitting on the gravestones drinking from cans; this gave her a pang of nostalgia. Gwen stopped at a gap in the passage and descended some steps to a small Italian restaurant in a church crypt. She ordered the set early evening meal and a litre of the red house wine then said,

  “We’re going to meet a man in a pub, not an ordinary man and certainly not an easy one. He was in the papers some years ago in connection with an exorcism he attempted in an old building just a few yards from here. The epicentre of the possession was a young girl; it was too powerful for him and went badly wrong. It broke him, there were allegations of abuse and he left the church. Such a pity, he was a beautiful and charismatic man. Now he’s damaged and lives between a room here and a remote cottage on the Herefordshire/Welsh border. He’s become a twitcher, spends his time bird watching. Oh, and he’s got the disc. I gave it him while you were asleep.”

  Claire started to protest but Gwen held up a warning hand.

  “You have to trust me: I trust him, we were close once but sadly not in the way I needed, he’s not that sort of man.”

  The Jolly Boys pub was down a narrow cobbled lane opposite Bear Steps. It was part of an old seventeenth century terrace occupying an even older site. Inside, apart from a lit-up fruit machine, it looked as if it hadn’t been touched since the 18th century. The walls were timber, wainscoted up to shoulder height, and above that the white painted ceiling was yellowed by past years of smoke. A narrow passage with small rooms off it surrounded the central bar area. Inside the smallest and dingiest of these, in front of an open fire in an otherwise empty room, sat a shabby black suited figure. He had an unhealthily red face, patchy white beard, bitten fingernails and was nursing a pint glass. He glanced up as they entered and Gwen said,

  “Claire, this is Marcus Wolf, I’ll fetch some drinks.”

  For a while, basking in the warmth of the firelight they exchanged stilted small talk. Gwen noticed that Marcus Wolf and Gwen had more of a shared past than she’d imagined; they also had similar accents. When Claire mentioned this Marcus ascribed it to a similar background of public school and an Oxford College. For a man of solitary disposition he seemed perfectly at home chatting in a pub. This and his sense of old fashioned manners, which she found quite touching, made him seem most unlike Gwen’s billing of him as a damaged recluse. But when Gwen asked him about the disc he changed: picked up his glass and drained the last half pint in one slow draught. Claire watched his Adam’s apple bobble with each gulp as if he were having trouble swallowing and saw his hand shaking as he replaced the glass on the table. He sat silent for a moment, turned to Claire and said.

  “I wish you had never brought this abomination to me. You have no idea how foolish you were to accept this disc or how dangerous it is. Someone let it out and you’ve spread it. Didn’t you realise it was looking for you?”

  His voice was now agitated and querulous.

  “Whatever’s on this is in other places too, you can count on that. It’s ancient, evil, and it hates, all it needs is something to carry it, something to possess where it can gestate and grow until it resumes its full power. For all we know it’s already done that and this is just an echo on a disc. What have you unleashed?”

  His voice grew louder and as he finished he brought his hands hard down on the table knocking his glass onto the floor. To Claire’s surprise it didn’t break. Gwen placed a hand on his shoulder and Claire asked,

  “But will you help me?”

  He took a deep breath and reached down to pick up the glass, then in a quiet voice said,

  “Forgive me, I shouldn’t have shouted or called you foolish, it’s just that I had hoped never to encounter anything like this ever again. I’m not sure I can cope.”

  Claire took one of his hands in both of hers.

  “But you will help?”

  “I’m not sure I know how any more.”

  “But you will try to help?”

  “Try to help? Yes, I have no choice, I have to help you now: you’ve dragged me into it, it knows you and now it knows me. I’ve no other choice. But I fear you have implicated me in something that will complete my damnation.”

  He held up his hand as if in a strange blessing then delivered his chilling final words.

  “But mainly I will help as I fear for you, Claire: because for you I think the end will be worse and could stretch beyond this life.”

  CHAPTER 15

  RITUAL, THEORIES AND WARNINGS

  “Oh God, Steve, there’s another come quick.”

  Jan was crouched where they found the body. It was a fairly shallow pit, and over the years the strata had been disturbed by tree roots and animals digging. Inside they’d found the skeleton of a man. All organic material had been broken down but from damage to the bone structure it was obvious he hadn’t died a natural death. It looked like he’d been killed, thrown into the pit and covered in great haste. This was substantiated by the presence of a broken bracelet of jet beads scattered over the body, obviously broken either in the struggle or during the hasty internment. Whoever owned the bracelet hadn’t realised it had been lost or been too frightened to enter the pit to recover it.

  Steve joined Jan as she delved beneath the level that comprised the last resting place of the skeleton.

  “There’s something under this, something much older.”

  Steve climbed into the pit and they filtered and sifted through the dry ancient earth. Before long their cold numb fingers uncovered some fragile scattered bones. Side by side through the sunny winter afternoon they gradually, piece by piece, exposed a ruined young life, the complete skeleton of an adult male whose skull had been severely fractured by a blow from a heavy object. They sat at the pit edge, the smell of dry earth, rotted vegetation and death in their nostrils, staring at the pathetic remains scattered below them in silence. Steve brushed dirt from his hands and said so quietly that she could hardly hear,

  “I suppose this winds up the season’s digging. He must have been one of them, the Neolithic builders. I wonder why they chose to kill and leave him here like this. Christ, Jan, a full Neolithic skeleton in this context and we found it, the type of thing you dream of.”

  He stopped, touched his hair where it was turning white, then stood up feeling the stiffness in his knee joints and held out a hand to help her saying,

  “This should give Giles plenty to oppose the commercial development, it’s a mega find.”

  He looked again at the fragments of fragile bone, pale against the dark earth.

  “All the same I wish we’d never disturbed it, never found it.”

  “But now we can reseal it all and get away from here. Steve, the dig’s over!”

  “Yeah I guess, perhaps.”

  As the red sun sank behind the trees to the west they wearily left the pit and trudged to the site office. Their s
hadows dragging behind them like two giant stains reluctant to leave the pathetic remains.

  During the afternoon’s work they’d spoken only when necessary and then about the minutiae of fine trowelling. They thought of nothing except the next fragment they’d uncover. As the other workers put the site to bed for the night they sat in the hut with a mug of coffee, both thinking of the lonely body buried alongside the stone axe that crushed its skull.

  “We’d better ring Giles and tell him what we’ve found; he’ll probably want to come out in the morning. A good result, but not a particularly cheerful one. You and Leonie were right about the pit, it did offer clues.”

  “Like a warning to the curious? Yeah, we thought it would. Can you imagine what the villagers must have thought when they dug that grave for their own sacrifice and found someone had beaten them to it? I bet they knew then they’d made a big mistake messing around with the chamber. We should have left it alone, Steve. The witchy woman who came to the site to warn us was right, so was Leonie.”

  “Forget Leonie, her hysterical behaviour just about sums up why we’re in this mess. Look, yesterday I felt like that, but today it doesn’t feel so bad, we all let our imaginations run away with us starting with Rose and look where that got her. Like Giles said: we’re professionals. We uncover and explain the past in a rational way. We’re scientists.”

  He faltered as if unsure, then carried on.

  “You know the empiricists who show what the past was really like in all its prosaic and tedious detail. Here we got worked up and made to dance to the demands of a rubbish local paper. We’ve let ourselves be turned into poor archaeologists; tomb raiders. We even tried to open the chamber in the middle of a freak storm. OK, we seem to have dug up some grisly exhibits but we’ve also jumped to some pretty quick conclusions.”

  He accepted the smoke she offered but couldn’t stop talking, the words pouring out, running away with him.

  “One day we’re sifting through the mundane life of a small village, no big deal, next thing we’ve jumped into the script of a horror film. We acted on assumptions; we’ve no concrete evidence that the villagers left when they opened the tomb. We just let ourselves get carried away, all of us. We need to get a grip and just take time to examine the evidence. When Kathleen Kenyon found the infant sacrifices sticking out of that wall at Jericho she didn’t run off screaming and call for a priest to exorcise the bogey man. She painstakingly excavated and then developed some hypotheses on Neolithic rituals in the Middle East that proved the basis for her future work and a benchmark for others. That’s what we should be doing because what we’re faced with here is probably just the same.”

  He’d spoken with feeling borne of uncertainty and frustration, but having finished he realised he’d made sense: they’d let the atmosphere of the excavation cloud their judgment and hype their emotions.

  For a time they sat in silence sipping coffee as the rest of the crew finished tidying up the site and drifted off home. They heard the shouts of goodbye and the rumble of the Unit’s minibus starting up to ferry the workers and skeletal remains back to the Uni. The silence over the site was complete, the sun had sunk and the darkness was gathering. Suddenly Jan grabbed his hand,

  “Listen.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “Exactly, that’s just it, there’s nothing to hear: those bloody birds have gone.”

  All the same Steve didn’t want to hang around but nor did he want to abandon the wall of rationality he’d built. Caught in this halfway house of uncertainty, his parting shot lacked conviction.

  “Things have got so bloody ridiculous that I’d even begun to think that what I saw in the tomb started to make my hair turn white.”

  “But Steve, love, it did.”

  ***

  Driving back to the Unit Steve had plenty to think about. Despite his rational explanation there were aspects of all this that still disturbed him. He’d spent the last forty-eight hours putting events into some type of perspective that fitted his sceptical nature and academic training. He was not only a far more skilled excavator than Giles, but also a better scholar. His published works, limited as they were, reflected the rigour of his mind and the breadth of his experience. He understood the Neolithic fear of the waking dead.

  In their cosmology there was no tangible barrier between this world and the spiritual world. Shamanism and hallucinogenic trance provided their explanations of the universe; their buildings and daily life reflected this. Neolithic belief and reality couldn’t be separated, belief was daily life. This led to a psychology where believing was seeing, not the other way round.

  Working so closely with this particularly gruesome manifestation of Neolithic culture had infected them all. They’d got into the wrong frame of mind by the time they opened the chamber. Their openness to suggestion had been heightened in the way a warm up man will work a studio audience or a religious cult.

  So they failed to recognise the natural phenomena coinciding with the opening of a chamber. In his case he should have remembered that the change in air when opening a long sealed chamber can result in a sudden outgoing draft. That’s what damaged his eyes. He should have remembered Howard Carter noted something similar on opening Tutankhamen’s tomb. He hurriedly parked this remembrance of Carter and the curse at the back of his mind. What he had to remember was to consider only evidence not supposition.

  They hadn’t conducted the excavation rationally and he blamed Giles. Well, Giles and himself, because it was his own fault he had ended up working for a second rater like Giles. He should have been more ambitious, at least that’s what Anna told him as they lay in bed last night unable to sleep. Thinking of Anna reminded him of how supportive Jan was being. Clearly she wanted more than friendship and was hurt by his refusal to go home with her for dinner. Attractive though that was, he couldn’t afford further complications.

  Thinking of Jan brought him back to the site. There had been something different about it today. He and Jan worked well, methodically and undisturbed. As it grew dark they’d wanted to leave but only in a normal way. The site hadn’t been messed about with overnight; there’d been no feeling of being watched or constant anxiety, it was like something had gone.

  He looked up suddenly at red lights and noticed that in his self absorption he’d driven past the university. He decided to pack it in for the day and go home. On the way he’d pick up a bottle of wine and a takeaway and ask Anna to come round. He’d had enough archaeology for the day, he needed an antidote.

  ***

  Bathed by the crepuscular light of the Unit’s main office Giles was preparing notes on the final few days on site. The report of two burials in the pit hadn’t surprised him. The evidence was beginning to add up. The pit was a warning which they’d ignored. He felt jittery. This had been compounded partly by the peculiar phone call from Jim, whom he was due to meet later, but more so by his inability to contact Claire Vanarvi. He decided to try her number again but as usual got only the answering machine. He settled again to the notes when Tim Thompson entered the room carrying a camera.

  “This is the one that your photographer left in the chamber. I thought I’d have a look to see what’s on it. The stills of the opening don’t tell us much; but its facility to take video clips must have been running when she was in the chamber. There’s a few seconds of very strange footage. I’ll connect it to your PC and we can look at it in more detail. I can’t quite make it out on the camera, the screen’s too small.”

  Giles didn’t much like the idea of returning to the tomb at the time of its chaotic opening but something had happened in there, maybe this would explain it. Thompson selected the video clips, clicked the mouse and sat back to watch.

  A strobe lighting effect filled the chamber. The camera jerked its focus towards the fragile skeletal remains under the heavy slabs of rock, which seemed to be the source of the light. Then it shifted. For a tantalising second two figures converging in a brief spasming motion, filled the
screen. Then there was just one: Lisa, shuffling in a type of trance. A few indistinct seconds of footage in a tomb built five thousand years ago and never meant to be opened.

  “Not conclusive but rather interesting don’t you think?”

  Tim tried to sound amused but Giles knew he wasn’t as he fiddled with the controls to replay the scene. They replayed it twice more and eventually managed to freeze the image at the point where the two figures seemed to merge. It was difficult to see where one figure ended and the other started but there was an image of one face turned towards the camera. By the dark shade of the hair alone it was obviously not Lisa. The film moved forwards to end in Lisa’s shuffling dance. After that they weren’t inclined to watch it again.

  “It’s obviously just a trick of the light but for a moment there were definitely two figures, but we know that’s not possible. Most odd.”

  Tim Thompson appeared less confident as he said this; his eyes flicking towards the dimly lit corners of the room as if there was something there. Giles didn’t instantly reply, the face on the screen was familiar and not only from his recent nightmares. Then he said,

  “Yeah, most odd, Tim. She’s out, first on disc then on film, now she’s walked right out of the bloody chamber and we let her. That tomb wasn’t meant to be found. I’ve been thinking about this ever since Steve did his ‘I’ve worked on every important Neolithic dig in the universe’ bit.”

  He paused a moment thinking of the figure on the film.

  “To them the dead were an important part of daily life; they helped maintain order and stability. Their tombs weren’t graves like ours; they were central to life, designed for high visibility as the focus of a redemption mythology and the crowning glory of their society. Notice any difference from the one that we’ve just uncovered?”

  Giles looked at Tim Thompson, who’d, for him, remained silent and attentive for a long spell, then continued impelled by the sudden burst of intuition the film clip had generated.