His foot struck something. It looked like ivory, but was probably yellow plastic bleached by the sun. Curious, he bent and tried to pick it up. It would not move. He dug his fingers down around its curved surface and pulled hard. It moved up slightly, and he realised he was holding a bone. It looked very much like a human femur! He straightened up and twisted round, studying the surface of the ground about him intensely. Here and there other whitish lumps protruded. He stalked over to the nearest and gave it a prod with his shoe. It was another bone. He quickly identified half a dozen more, within a ten-yard circle of the first he had found. Some of the bones were ... unusual.
A feeling of despair washed over him. He was convinced there were hundreds more of them, scattered out there in the tip. For a reason he could not isolate or understand, the knowledge appalled him. He panicked.
He left the spade on the ground and ran to the porta-cabin. The door and the window were both shut. The door was locked. Maurice was convinced the old man was in there; had deliberately shut himself in. He banged the door with his fist like a fool, and shouted. When he tired of this he trudged bleakly back to his car.
Before leaving, he took one last look round at the tip. There was nobody there. The scavengers had gone.
He wondered where.
He was having a bad night.
He had gone to bed early, at nine thirty, after taking a cocktail of his wife’s pills and potions, washed down with a beaker of whiskey. He had slept like a dead thing for about an hour, then had jerked awake as though someone in the room had shouted. Perhaps he had shouted. His dreams had been that bad.
Once awake, he felt terribly disappointed. He had expected to be knocked out well into the next day, but was aware his mind would permit him no more rest. He longed for sleep. He was stuck instead with a nervous, infuriating wakefulness.
He pitied himself. He felt like a tiny child locked in a cold, dark place as a punishment for something he had not done. He was alone there. He was alone in the world.
His loneliness was something he had been trying to avoid, to bury away deep in his mind. He had been partially successful in doing this, but the knowledge of his solitariness, of his lack of friends, and now, of even a wife, had festered there. Now, under pressure of the strange events of the day, and of his sickness, his isolation had burst out, and bloomed in his brain like a huge and hideous flower.
He needed to talk to someone, needed sympathy, and help of some kind.
But he had no one to turn to, no real friends. Previously, all his social life had involved his business associates. He had been closest to the other partners in the company they had created together, but they were the last people he wanted to talk to now. He had no children, his parents and other relatives were dead or estranged, and he had never joined things. He didn’t play golf, perform in amateur theatricals, or belong to the Rotarians like Neville bloody Gale.
God, he thought, I am pitiable!
Then, No, make that pathetic.
He lay alone with this insight and other thoughts, at times almost dozing, for some hours, until his door bell rang. Someone seemed to have their finger glued to the buzzer. The single ring went on and on. Every nerve in Maurice’s body jangled with it.
He sat up, switched on the bedside light, and grabbed his watch. It was ten past two in the morning.
The ringing stopped at last.
He thought he heard a thump on the door.
His house, in spite of the fact it was secondhand, was one of the most recent of its kind built in Buxton. It was big, pretentious, had been very expensive, but the walls and ceilings were thin. Sound traveled from room to room without hindrance. A radio playing softly in the kitchen could be heard clearly in the bathroom one floor up at the other end of the house. Maurice was sure someone was doing something to the front door; perhaps forcing the lock.
He sneaked downstairs in his dressing gown, shaking with sickness and, yes, he acknowledged, fear, as well!
The street light outside cast enough illumination for him to make out the shape of a figure on the other side of the distorting glass in the front door. Well enough for him to be sure that his visitor earlier in the day, who he had kicked, had returned. The man was bending forward, pushing clumsily at his letter box, trying to get something through. Part of a small package and the tips of two fingers and a thumb protruded through the slot.
Maurice went and picked up the telephone he had flung at the wall in rage after his conversation with good old Neville Gale.
The ancient instrument had survived in one piece. It was satisfyingly heavy. He went to the door, held the phone up high, and brought it down with brute force on the letter box.
There was a sound from beyond the door that made Maurice drop the phone and hide his face in his hands. It was a wall of pain, outrage, and despair, and somehow it expressed, with acute accuracy, the fears, thoughts and emotions that had been haunting him that night, and during the recent past. It gave voice to them exactly. It was as though his own soul stood out there, lost, alone, and in great agony. Maurice felt a sickening mixture of compassion and self-pity.
He was sick. He tried to reach the washing-up bowl in the kitchen, but didn’t make it.
After he had cleaned himself up, he forced himself to inspect the letter box, expecting to see blood. There was none. Fragments of charred newspaper were caught in the flap, nothing else.
No finger tips, he thought, thank God!
On impulse, he turned the locks, shot back the absurd, over-ornate bolts, and opened the door wide. He peered out at his morbidly tidy garden (his one hobby) and found it empty. All was quiet.
His cat ran urgently toward him across the road, then changed its mind, and scampered back. Something behind the privet hedge, near the spot where the cat had changed direction, moved heavily, shaking the bushes. Maurice stared hard, but could see nothing through the darkness under the tight, trimmed leaves.
A shadow passed swiftly across his lawn towards the house, as though a large bird had passed above.
But that was impossible! Nothing had moved below the streetlight, that could cast a shadow!
Then he saw something tall and thin, like the trunk of a narrow tree, in his neighbor’s garden. He was sure it had jerked into brief motion; had scuttled quickly a little closer, then gone still.
It did it again, seeming to cover ten feet of ground in a split second. It was now close enough for Maurice to form some idea about what manner of creature it was.
It had many legs.
Maurice ran inside and slammed the door. He locked and bolted it.
The door bell was operated by batteries. He removed them and put them into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sat on the stairs watching the front door for ten minutes, waiting for the bell to ring. He knew that it couldn’t, but thought perhaps it would.
He ran upstairs and threw himself into bed. He lay facedown, with a cushion over his head, cocooned in his sheets and blankets.
Later, he heard a movement on the roof. Something had climbed up there, and was making its way along the gable above his bedroom. It made harsh, scratching sounds on the tiles, and dislodged some of them. Maurice heard them crashing down into his garden. From the sounds, he judged that whatever it was had clambered out to a position just above his window.
As if to confirm this speculation, there came a loud, spasmodic tapping on the glass.
Maurice half sat up. He was glad that his curtains were pulled shut. As he stared at them, the window behind was shattered and one of them twitched open. A long, gray, scrawny limb, perhaps an arm, but without a proper hand on the end of it, waved a little bundle at him. It dropped the bundle and withdrew.
There were more scampering sounds from above as Maurice fled from the room.
He didn’t go near the packet; he thought he knew what was in it.
Something he didn’t want.
He locked himself in his office, turning all his equipment on, and played the CD his wife had gi
ven him, of soothing natural and artificial sounds, as loud as he could stand it. It had no calming effect, but it drowned out other noises. Maurice sat perfectly still in the one comfortable chair until daybreak.
Then he dressed and went out to his car.
To his surprise, hundreds of birds were singing enthusiastically all round him. It was the dawn chorus. It was just like the sounds on the CD he had been playing, and it scared him stiff.
He got hurriedly into his car and drove towards Dove Holes again.
When he reached the entry to the Victory Quarry he found the tip was closed. A heavy chain, joined at the ends by a fat padlock, was looped through the metal grill on the gates. He remembered then that it was four thirty on a Saturday morning. The tip would be shut for another forty-eight hours at least.
He got out of his car and pushed the gates hard with the heel of his shoe. They hardly moved. He climbed back into the driving seat, backed the car away as far as he could, keeping in line with the gate, then accelerated straight down the centre of the access path.
The chain and lock held when the car hit, but the hinges on the left split from the concrete gatepost, and the gates whipped up over the bonnet. Something smashed the windscreen, which fell in fragments on his lap. The car slew round out of control when he applied the brakes, and tobogganed along on top of the crust of dried mud which opened behind him like a huge wound. The line of trees flashed by as the vehicle spun. The air was full of flying earth, scraps of refuse and noise.
The rear left side of the car smacked against the right front end of the porta-cabin which reared up under the impact. It did not topple over, but jumped some distance out of its original position. The side caved in and the door flew wide open.
Maurice sat stunned in the driving seat. He didn’t seem to have hurt himself in the crash. He felt nothing except numb, possibly from all the pills he had been taking. Too many, maybe! He noticed his reactions were slowed down and movements faltering. His fingers felt wooden as he fumbled with the clip of the seatbelt. The door lock was jammed and he couldn’t open it. He crawled over the passenger seat and let himself out that way, emerging face down and on his hands.
He stood up, shook himself, and climbed onto one of the big skips to take stock of his situation.
Although the sun was hardly up, the landscape was bathed in clear, soft, almost creamy light. There were shreds of thin cloud squatting on the fields that clung to the sides of Combs Moss, and frozen billows of morning mist hovered above the surfaces of the small lakes that had formed, over the years, in the quarry bottoms. Something in motion caught his eye, running away from him along a line of wall, but he realised at once, from its russet coat, that it was only a large fox. There were rabbits, too, munching the tall grass around the edges of the tip. The air smelt clean and dry, as he imagined desert air must.
Except for the regular clanking and glugging of a distant pump engine somewhere down in the old diggings, all was stillness and silence.
Nothing moved or made a sound in the line of dark trees.
He clambered over the broken steps leading up to the cabin, and went inside.
The pile of mattresses had fanned out like a pack of cards. The old caretaker was spreadeagled across them on his back. His face looked raw, and was mottled with dark stains like those that had remained on Maurice’s hands after he had crushed the egglike object he had found. The man looked dead, but wasn’t. A heartbeat was just detectable under his overalls, and he was drawing rasping breath through his mouth. Maurice tried to rouse him, but soon gave up. The man seemed in a trance, or coma.
Many of the piles of cases and boxes scattered along the length of the cabin had toppled over and burst open. Maurice was not surprised to see that some of them had been packed with bones, and that two of them contained dozens of the eggs wrapped in scraps of grubby paper and plastic. Bundles of the long, thin bones, tied like firewood with electric cable, were revealed behind a half-fallen rubber sheet.
Maurice left the cabin and wormed his way back into his car. He tried the engine. It started without trouble and he found he was able to back the vehicle away from the cabin. He drove cautiously down into the tip. Something under the chassis was grating against the wheels, but he didn’t give it a thought.
The cinder path took him past a high wire fence marking no apparent boundary. Twice he stopped to look round, hoping to catch sight of some of the scavengers, but there was no one else about at all, he was soon convinced of that.
In one of the deeper sections of the recent workings he nosed the car out over what appeared to be dried mud when the caked surface broke and the vehicle tipped forward alarmingly. The back wheels spun strands of slime, like black mucus, out behind.
He could not reverse out. The car was sinking. Oily stuff oozed in through the bottoms of the doors around his feet.
He awkwardly hauled himself out of the passenger door again, and abandoned the car. He walked back the way he had come, out of knee deep, liquid filth, then climbed up to the top of one of the highest mounds of builder’s rubble. The position gave him a view over most of the tip. He noticed little clouds of smoke or steam were starting to drift up from the surface in various places, as though fires had been started underground. He went to investigate.
The smoke for that was what it was, was coming up through some of the tunnellike holes he had noticed on his first visit. It was slightly scented, not unpleasantly, and had a greenish tinge. He wandered round for a while, peering down into the openings, then sat down next to a large hole that was not emitting smoke. He could hear a sound deep down in the tunnel, a regular heavy pounding, like the bass line of a musical composition. He leaned out over the hole and cupped his ear with his hand. He thought he could hear other sounds down there, like snatches of a whispered conversation.
He was propped up on one arm with his hand outstretched on the encrusted mud. Suddenly, as he adjusted position, the surface gave under his weight and he dropped into the tunnel clumsily. He lay still for a moment, winded. Then instead of drawing back out again, he tentatively reached down even farther. The tunnel was quite wide enough for him to squirm into. It descended at an angel of about thirty-five degrees to the surface; a comfortable angle to slip down.
And, he judged, not so steep that he could not make his way back out again without too much trouble, if he had to.
It was not absolutely dark down there; there seemed to be some source of dim light ahead of him. Feeling his way carefully and methodically, he lowered himself into the ground. When he felt his feet slip over the lip of the tunnel, he had a momentary doubt about the wisdom of what he was doing, which he forced himself to ignore.
Moving with great caution, he descended perhaps forty or fifty feet down the narrow passage without much trouble.
The tunnel got a little less steep after a while, however, and became narrower, and he found he was having to make more effort to make any progress. Also, the air was getting musty and unpleasant to breathe.
He rested, and began to worry about the sides of the tunnel collapsing on him. He would suffocate. No one knew he was there, or would come looking for him.
Total loneliness stabbed up inside him again, with an accompanying, enervating, surge of self-pity.
Although he was strong, he was not at all fit, and what he was doing, in his condition, seemed suddenly crazy.
He was just about to start wriggling back out when he saw and heard a motion in front of him.
Something reached out of the dark ahead, and clasped his hand. It was a thin, dry, loose-skinned hand, and it took a powerful hold on his. His fingers were crushed painfully together. Whoever was in front of him began to retreat, pulling him further down the tunnel. He tried to resist, but discovered he was at the end of his strength. He plummeted lower very fast, hurting himself against stones and other objects that protruded from the sides of the crudely dug hole.
He tried to keep his free arm bent across his face to protest it, but smashed his e
lbow against something sharp.
He thought whoever was pulling him was whispering something earnestly to him, that he could not catch. After a while he gave up trying to hear and started howling with pain.
Something hit him hard above the right eye. He became unconscious.
There were voices in the air around him. He knew they were conversing together, not trying to communicate with him. The words they used sounded like a distorted jumble of heavily accented English that he was too weak to make the effort to understand. He lay quite still for what could have been a long time, with his eyes shut. He slept, then woke when he felt himself being lifted and moved. He was lowered to the ground with a bump that hurt. He was vaguely aware of forms and figures moving away from him. He slept again.
He woke to absolute silence.
It seemed that he was blind. He passed his fingers over his eyes and felt a sticky crush covering the top half of his face, welding his eyelids shut. He scratched at his eyes with both hands, and was relieved when the substance began to crumble away. He managed to get his eyes open and saw, as he had suspected, that it was dried blood.
He turned over on his side and tried to get to his feet. Sharp pains shot through his body, causing him to yell. From the sound of his voice, he knew he was enclosed in a small space. He collapsed into a sitting position, and looked about him.
The circular, domed compartment had walls of smoothly worked bare rock. A pale illumination, falling from a number of narrow tunnels the led diagonally up and out, from positions about three feet from the ground, showed him he was alone. Except for himself and a number of piles of the egg-like objects that were now familiar to him, resting in nests of rubbish, the room was empty. He crawled about, trying to ignore the pain in his probably broken left arm, and inspected the nests. They were about two feet in diameter, and made of the shredded, entangled remains of the sort of refuse he would have expected to find in a dustbin.
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