Maurice’s frayed patience stretched and snapped. He ran out and kicked the man on the upper arm. He felt and heard something break inside the shirt sleeve. Turning an anguished face toward him, looking totally lost and confused, the man reached up and seemed to be trying to protect his whole body with a single, upraised, skinny hand. Feeling furiously disgusted with himself and the pathetic being in front of him, Maurice kicked out again. The heel of his shoe hit the man in the breast bone, and his chest gave way! Maurice felt his foot sink in, and he was reminded of the sun-dried crust he had broached with every step he had taken at the tip.
Evidently, unsurprisingly, the man had had enough. He lurched away, clutching his bag in front of him with both arms. He sounded as though he were choking. He didn’t look back.
Maurice bent down to see what he had been carving on the post. Underneath a deeply scored, slightly wavy line was a matchstick figure with over-long legs, rudimentary arms, and a tiny head, in a breaststroke posture. He seemed to be swimming downward.
Some sort of Hex, thought Maurice, contemptuously. A tinker’s curse! He spat on the crude drawing, and went indoors.
He was horrified at what he had just done. He was still experiencing the sensation of the second kick; of feeling the man’s chest caving in under his foot.
He went into his office, sat in the armchair he kept there for visiting business associates, and pulled out from his pocket the little parcel that had been pushed into it. He unknotted some thin string tied around it and removed a layer of charred newspaper. Underneath was a grubby pale-pink plastic box such as a child might keep cheap jewelry in. He pressed it open with his thumbs. Inside, in a bed of more crumbled half-burned paper, was a purple-brown egg like the one he had burst. He placed it carefully on his desk. He spread his hands out in front of him and studied them. The blotchy stains had almost gone, but the skin still looked chapped and raw.
After a while, he got up and turned on all the machines in his high-tech office. He had the latest of everything a computer could do to assist him with his work. He was continuously updating his equipment. To stay ahead in his field, he had invested a fortune, and what he produced was acknowledged to be the most advanced work of its kind in the country.
Even so, he had gone bust; he was ruined!
When everything was on and running, the room was full of a soft humming sound that sometimes soothed him. But not this time! He went around the house in search of strong drink.
Before he had located a bottle, phone bells rang all over the house. He went to the nearest receiver, a black, Bakelite antique, hesitated for seconds, obscurely reluctant to answer at all, then snatched it up.
It was Neville Gale, one of the partners in his firm calling, ostensibly, to commiserate with Maurice on the departure of his wife. He soon got round to the real subject on his mind, however; the failure of their business. Maurice was aware that Gale blamed him for much that had gone wrong, and could tell by his tone that the man wanted to scream and swear down the phone at him like a drunken football fan. But he wouldn’t ever do that. Old Nev was far too civilized.
Maurice listened to Gale’s reasonable despair for some time, then shouted, “It’s too late, Nev; I’m sunk, and you’re sinking. We’re all going under, and there’s not a thing we can do to stop it. We’re in very deep shit, so get used to the idea, and get off my back!”
He slammed the phone down.
Then, feeling the need to make one more gesture of finality, he picked the instrument up and hurled it at the wall.
Maurice went into his back garden. He poured a heap of charcoal into the middle of the barbecue, placed the egg-like thing on top, and pressed it down a little so it couldn’t roll off. He sprayed the pyre with “Betterburn” lighting fluid from a dispenser, and set a match to the lot. He stood well back, half expecting a small explosion, or even a big one. The egg burned slowly, and made a lot of smoke. It hissed and spluttered like breakfast in a pan, emitting tiny crimson flames. When it had almost gone, he poked the ashes and returned to the house for an hour. When he came back, there was no trace of the egg.
He swallowed another mouthful of medicaments, got in his battered car, and drove to Dove Holes the way he had come back last time, along the side lanes.
As he approached the entry to the tip, he saw a huge black van—the one that had forced him off the road, he was sure—gliding out through the gates. It turned into the road and moved away from him very fast. Thinking about his insurance again, like a drowning man clutching at the proverbial straw, he pushed down the accelerator. He was determined to overtake and stop the van.
He made some progress; got a bit closer.
The van was as large as any he had ever seen. It was quite smooth, with no visible panel joins, and was completely unmarked. He couldn’t even see a number plate. It was a miracle the driver was able to steer anything that size round the sharp bends in the narrow lane. He had trouble keeping his own vehicle on the road, and had to slow down. He was astonished to see the van draw away from him until it was almost out of sight. In seconds he was at a crossroads on the A6 in the center of Dove Holes, and there was no sign of the van in any direction. He gave the steering wheel a characteristic, ineffectual thump with the heel of his hand, and swore. Then he turned round and drove back to the tip.
He sensed he was being watched as he walked past the line of trees, but did not go to investigate what might be observing him. Half-formed shapes moved stealthily among the shrubs behind the trees, that he tried not to see.
He made his way through the mud to the porta-cabin. Inside, the old man was alone, spread out on his multimattress bed. He jumped when Maurice banged on the open door, and sat up.
“What you got?” he said automatically, like a talking machine. Then he recognized Maurice, and got to his feet. A deeply uneasy expression appeared on his face, that he tried to conceal by turning away.
Maurice, not quite sure what he was doing there, felt slightly foolish. At last he said, “I wonder if you can help me? I want some information about the scavengers on the tip. I met some people out there, and one of them must have followed me home. At least, I think he was one of them. Turned up on my door step and started pestering me.”
“That’s nothing to do with me,” the man said sullenly.
“I realize that,” Maurice said, “but I thought you might know who they are. They don’t seem like locals, the ones I met. They spoke differently, they act differently; do you know what I mean?”
“Perhaps,” the man said. “I don’t talk to them. I keep away. I’d do the same, if I were you. Let them get on with it.”
“Get on with what?”
The man shrugged. He filled an electric kettle from a plastic bottle and plugged it in a socket close to the floor. Slowly, and somewhat clumsily, he went through the motions of setting up a brew of tea. Maurice noticed he only washed out one mug. “Where’s your friend?” he asked, “the lad who was with you before?”
“Jed? He went out to scare them off, the scavengers. Hours ago.” The old man squinted up at Maurice from under his creased, dirt-smeared brows. “He’s not come back. I think he’s jacked in the job. He said he was pissed off working here. The place gave him the creeps; got on his nerves. It gets on mine, too, but I can’t just bugger off. He can get another job, at his age, if he’s lucky, but I can’t.” He spooned sugar angrily into his mug, spilling a trail of white crystals along the newspaper that served as a cloth on the ancient ironing board that was his table. “I’m stuck here,” he concluded.
Lost for words, Maurice gazed around the interior of the cabin. It was stacked with rescued furniture and other junk. An artificial Christmas tree, its branches bent and draped with fragments of faded tinsel, lay on the ground at his feet. Rolls of worn carpet were lined up along one wall, and bursting suitcases and boxes, packed with god-knows-what rubbish, were piled everywhere. An old tin bath was full of bones! Maurice was startled to see, among them, two skulls. He must have gaspe
d, because the old man looked up from pouring his tea.
“Christ!” Maurice said, stepping towards the tub. “Where did they come from?”
A concatenation of expressions passed over the man’s face; annoyance, anxiety, confusion, fear, and others indefinable. He lifted his mug in both hands and sipped his drink. “They were dug up,” he said, reluctantly at last. “Out there.” He pointed beyond the line of trees opposite the cabin.
“But they’re human remains, surely?” said Maurice.
“Some of them are,” the man admitted, “and some of them aren’t.”
Maurice squatted down next to the tub. “I see what you mean,” he said. Many of the bones were undoubtedly human, but others were far too long and thin, like the leg bones of an ostrich, or some huge bird. He picked one up. It was extraordinarily light, as though it was made of paper.
“Never mind them,” the old man said irritably, and threw a blanket over the bath tub. “That’s all going to be taken care of. They’re all going back.”
“But have you notified the relevant authorities?” Maurice said, awkwardly aware of the foolish pomposity of the phrase. “I mean, people may have been murdered and their bodies concealed there.”
“Look,” the man said sharply. “Mind your own business, if you know what’s good for you! Keep your nose out. I know what I’m doing. No one’s been murdered; at least, not recently.”
“Then you know whose bones they are?”
“I’ve been told.”
“I still think you should tell the police.”
“And have the bloody place closed down? And lose my job? That’s what would happen! That’s a graveyard out there, and a very old one. The place would be crawling with bloody priests and what-you-call-its? ... archy ...?”
“Archaeologists?”
“Those are the buggers. They’d love this place, if they got to know about it, but they’re not going to. When the lads started digging up those bones with the J.C.B., Mr. Mycock, our gaffer, said to keep it quiet, if we wanted to stay in work, and we have done. There’s only a few of us knows about it, and it’s going to stay that way. You start blabbing about it, and it’s your fault if we lose our jobs! You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“No,” said Maurice, thinking about the imminent loss of his own livelihood, “perhaps not.”
“Never mind perhaps,” the man growled.
“At least you can tell me about it,” Maurice added, “if I promise to keep the information to myself.”
“I don’t know much,” the man admitted, “just what old Mr. Snape told me. He knows all the history of this area. Got loads of books about it. Goes about with a metal detector all the time. He’s found a lot of stuff. There was a thing about him in the paper not long ago. He found the remains of a village or something, up on Combs Moss. Well, I told him about it, because he’s done me favors, bought bits from me that have turned up at the tip, and given me a good price. He’ll keep his mouth shut, I know.”
The old man scratched his chin anxiously, as though he wasn’t quite as confident as he sounded, or perhaps he had lice in his stubble of beard.
“So whose graveyard is it?” Maurice asked, wanting to get to the nub of the matter.
“Some miners. Hundreds of years ago. It’s a local legend, according to Mr. Snape. He’s read about it in one of his old books. They were digging, and they found something they weren’t looking for, deep underground, not far from where we are now. Some sort of cave, I suppose it was, though they thought they’d dug their way down into hell. They had a name for it; they called it ‘The Devil’s Spawning Ground.’ They found things there, and saw things that scared the daylights out of them, but I’m not sure what. They brought out some objects that looked like eggs and, would you believe it? they started eating them. It was a bad year, the crops must have failed, Mr. Snape thinks, so they were all starving. They’d eat anything, in those days, of course.”
“They were poisoned?” Maurice ventured, thinking he could foresee the end of the tale.
“Not exactly. It wasn’t like that. Something dreadful did seem to happen to some of them at once; though old Snape says he thinks that part of the story was probably just invention. Something to do with the ‘folk imagination.’ He says when one strange thing happens, people add an extra half dozen other things in the telling to spice it up. And you can’t believe tales of men and women turning into something else, can you?; into tall, thin, spidery things, overnight?”
Maurice shook his head, but peered uneasily out towards the line of trees.
The old man slung the dregs of his tea out the door and wiped his shirt front round the rim of his mug. “As for the others,” he continued, “for a while, nothing happened to them. Then they started changing, behaving different. They developed nasty habits, and people roundabout didn’t like them.”
“What sort of habits?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Snape didn’t want to go into that side of things. He’s like that, he doesn’t talk about anything unpleasant. He just said that people started avoiding them, and for good reasons.”
“They became isolated.”
“That’s it. Formed their own little community. That got a name, too. They called it Devil’s Hole. Old Snape thinks, over the years, it got shortened to Dev’s Hole, then the locals forgot the original name, and it got twisted to Dove Holes, but I don’t know about that. Anyway, things went on without too much trouble, until some of the miner’s wives started having babies. The kids weren’t right at all, and the women tried to hide them. There was something unpleasant about them.”
“You don’t know what?”
The old man shook his head. “Snape wouldn’t say. But they were bad enough to force the miners and their families up onto Combs Moss, out of the way, where they couldn’t be seen. They built a little village of sorts, the one Mr. Snape found the remains of.” The old man took a step towards the door and pointed a grubby hand at the lines of rock that marked Black Edge and Hob Tor. “Just there, I think.”
“It seems they made a deal with the other villages hereabouts to keep out of their way, in exchange for food and other things they needed to survive. They used to send a few people down from the Moss with hand carts, to collect stuff. That went on for years, then those children I mentioned started to get loose, started roaming about the countryside. It seems they looked very strange. People didn’t like the look of them at all. And bad things happened.”
Once again, Maurice would have liked more details, but the old man was plainly unable to provide them, so he didn’t interrupt. The story, odd, even outlandish as it was, had the ring of truth, and was exacerbating a feeling of unease that had dominated Maurice’s mind and body since just before the accident, prior to his visit to the tip. He was still feeling wretchedly ill, and the medicine wasn’t working.
“Things got so bad,” the old man continued, “that one day, people for miles around got together, went up onto Combs Moss, and slaughtered everyone there, kids and all. They brought the bodies down and buried them in a pit they dug here, near the cave they’d found. They sealed off the cave and filled in the diggings that led to it.”
“And those were the people whose remains you’ve found?”
“So Mr. Snape says. If anyone knows about these things, it’s him. It seems right, as though there may be some truth in it, when you looked at some of those bones.”
Maurice glanced down at the blanketed bath tub, and imagined the peculiar things hidden there. “You should put them back,” he said. “I’ll help you. They should be reburied, right now, at once.” Suddenly, he was convinced that such action was urgent and necessary.
At first, perhaps from simple laziness, the old caretaker was reluctant to cooperate. He shook his head and made a woofing noise, as though he was being intolerably harassed. “Never mind that now—” he said, but Maurice decided to act.
He pushed his way deeper into the cabin and lifted the tub of bones up to his chest. He was a
big man; the sort few people would chose to argue with, and the old man decided not to even try.
“Come with me,” Maurice ordered. “There’s a spade over there. Bring it with you. And show me where they found these bones.”
The old man trudged ahead, slithering from time to time, as did Maurice, on the mud under the dried earth crust. He stopped at a spot quite undistinguished by any obvious mark, apparently at random, and pointed down at the ground. “Here,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Maurice asked, suspiciously.
The old man nodded emphatically, and repeated, “Here, or hereabouts.”
Maurice took the spade and began to dig. It was hard work. He had to cut through a mesh of impacted household waste that lay deep under the thick, heavy mud. He was sweating in streams, probably from fever as much as from his exertions. He paused from time to time to wipe his brow, and noticed small groups of people standing immobile in the distance. They seemed to be observing him, though he could not be sure.
“Are those men who work with you?” he asked his companion.
The old man glanced around, obviously not liking what he saw. “No, that’s them,” he said. “The scavengers.”
“And who are they?” Maurice asked, as he resumed digging.
After a while, after quite a long pause, the old man said, “I think you know as well as I bloody do,” and shuffled off toward the cabin. Maurice did not try to stop him.
When he had dug a shapeless hole about three feet deep, and about twice the volume of the tin bath, he poured the bones carefully into it, and spread the blanket over them. He shoveled the mix of garbage and earth back on top of them quickly.
When he had finished, he slung the shovel over his shoulder and traipsed back toward the cabin. The groups of people appeared to have moved nearer, but were still not close enough to be seen clearly. Their faces were pale, featureless blobs. Some of them, he noticed, had very long arms and legs, but tiny bodies. The harder he stared, the stranger some of them became.
He thought he must be hallucinating; his fever was raging; he needed more medication.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 22 Page 36