*
It all started on my second day on the dig. I was excavating in a layer of the late Neolithic when I found something – something weird. I was one of a bunch of sixth formers who had won a place on the dig. I don’t suppose we were expected to find anything. We were there on sufferance. I think I got picked because my dad died. Maybe – I don't know if that's it, but why else? I'm not good at stuff – not anything really.
I’m American, well half - my mom is English. The Brits still treat me like a tourist even though I’ve lived here six years. My parents married in Florida. My dad was a Navy pilot. Then he got a job in the UK and we moved over here. He was an engineer at British Aerospace. A year ago some crazy woman in a sports car ran him off the road. My mom has been sort-of quiet ever since. She was real pleased when I got the Stonehenge gig.
Anyway, there were ten of us scratching around in the dirt, trying to look like archaeologists. The real ones were from Bristol University. Some had T-shirts older than us. Apparently, they got extra funding by having us on the dig. I guess that's why they put up with us. They just left us to scrabble about in useless trenches, or gave us crap jobs like carrying stuff, cleaning mud off tools and fetching ices and drinks for them.
That didn’t bother me. Just being there was great. I like history and stuff, and to be on a proper archaeological dig at Stonehenge – cool. Of course, I read up on it first. Well, I didn’t want to look a complete idiot, did I? I'd seen Stonehenge before. My parents took me when we first arrived from the States. We did the tour with the audio commentary sticks stuck to our ears. It’s a spooky looking place. It gives me the shivers no matter how often I see it. Just being there was terrific.
An organisation called English Heritage looks after it. They were allowing several trenches to be cut near the stone circle in a vee of land formed by the junction of two highways; the A303 and the A360. Some big multinational outfit - the Mackenzie Trust or some such, was stumping up the funding.
Professor Baldwin, he’s the dig’s director, showed us round. He’s Welsh and has this great accent. He talks to everybody like they're his most favourite person in all the world. He's even nice when he's pissed at you because you've messed up something in the Finds-Register. Hey - I mean, who the hell spells Neolithic right first go? I know it now. He spelled it for me about ten times - like I'm a loony or something.
Anyway, he said we’d be looking for evidence of a Neolithic builders' yard. He kept stopping to complain that although Stonehenge has far more exciting prospects for excavation, he had to ignore them because the funding was "ring fenced". He kept saying “ring fenced”. I don’t know what it means. I think it’s like when you get money – you know, like some sort of a grant or something, but you can only use for just this one certain thing.
We’d all brought tents and stuff for the week. Our camp site was a field across the road next to the Visitor Centre car park and toilet block. I know that sounds gross, but it was cool really. We could get fresh water and a hot shower. The professor had his camper van, that’s what they call RVs over here, plugged into the mains; we could recharge our cell phones.
My first job was scraping mud off duckboards. They get slippery because of the chalky earth. That stuff is as greasy as a trucker’s brunch. In places, you could be on your ass just for thinking of taking a step. It was fun watching the bearded T-shirts zizzing about like Cinderella on ice, but when you see your own two feet silhouetted against the sky the novelty soon wears off.
At the start of the dig a bunch of techy-nerds had done a geophysical sweep of the whole area. This measures the physical properties of rock formations under the surface, typically: magnetism, specific gravity, electrical conductivity and radioactivity. The professor showed us a print of all the anomalies they’d found: walls, postholes, cess pits, and even actual artefacts, like spears and stuff. It was all just lying around buried for thousands of years. Once you get the hang of reading it, things show up crystal clear.
The Mackenzie Foundation had an expert on site. I suppose she was sort of in charge. Professor Baldwin was too nice to show it, but it was obvious that his Bristol crew didn’t like her. When I arrived, the dig was in its third week. By then all the trenches she had pegged out at the start were well defined. That didn't stop the professor moaning about wanting to dig somewhere else. He must have told us a million times about his ring-fenced money, and I saw him pull a sniffy face at two of the trenches. He called them, ‘The Mackenzie bean patches.’ He said nothing would come out of them but vegetables. Then he kept apologising for having said it – like it was a big deal.
I was surprised there was anything left to find. You'd think a place like Stonehenge would have been scoured like an Amish milk pail. Well no way. The geophysical survey showed loads of archaeology all over the place. It got me buzzing. I really wanted to find something neat. The professor waved his hands over the computer print, like Marvo-the-magician. He said it showed us the main commuter route to and from Stonehenge and its building workers’ settlement, now lost under Durrington - that's a village nearby.
On day two they set me to work in one of the bean patch trenches. The Mackenzie woman, Imelda something-or-other, eyed me like poison. She insisted that one of the professionals worked alongside me. It was this really heavy guy - Graham. He had an ass-crack you could park a bus in, but he turned out to be a top man, a good laugh. I liked him. Anyway, the professor and the Mackenzie woman must have thought I did OK, because the next day they let me work in the trench on my own.
That’s when I found it – the thing.
What was it doing there? It was impossible. How could it be there? I was sure it was a wind-up. Some sniggering loony was trying to set me up. It was creepy. I felt as if they were all watching me, pointing at me and stuff.
I found the thing in the Neolithic layer, but it looked like something from a Star Wars movie. It was just there, sticking out of an undisturbed layer of chalky earth. I know it was the Neolithic layer. Professor Baldwin had already verified my first find and showed me it was. He’d gone into raptures about a scruffy little flint arrow head I’d found. A beautiful microlith, according to him. It was hardly bigger than a thumbnail and had a sort of pigeon’s eye stain on it. You’d have thought it was King Solomon’s mines the way he went on. Still, it made me feel good to get on the score sheet. Anyway, the point is this, anything in this lower layer would have to be even older. That would make the weird gizmo thing at least five thousand years old. So you tell me, how the hell could it be in there?
I felt weird, you know, suspicious. I looked around, but all was quiet as usual, just the buzz of the summer traffic on the A303 and the occasional scrape of a trowel on flint. The archaeologists were all busily working, stooping over their excavations like nothing else mattered. In their gaudy T-shirts and sunhats, they looked like graffiti covered woolly mammoths grazing the trenches. Beyond them at the ancient stones, the usual snake of visitors, commentary sticks glued to their ears like cell-phones, pointed and gaped as they coiled around the monument. Nobody was looking at me. Nobody cared that I’d found something in a five thousand year old layer of earth that looked like it was made of stainless steel, a material not invented until the twentieth century.
I ploughed my trowel along its cylindrical shape, testing the feel of the earth around it. I was looking for changes of texture or density in the earth that might prove it was recently buried. My heart sank. The chalky soil felt solid and undisturbed. Whoever was setting me up was doing a damn good job. Impossibly, the thing - whatever it was – showed all the signs of thousands of years of entombment.
What should I do? I was sure it was a wind-up, but I daren’t tell the professor. Nice as he was, he took his work seriously. I was sure he’d accuse me of messing about and wasting his time. I’d be chucked off the site and sent home in disgrace. My mom would kill me and weep all over the place. She’s been over the moon ever since I’d got the gig.
I thought about burying the
damn thing again and saying nothing. But what if it turned out to be really important? How would I explain burying archaeology instead of digging it up? My mom would kill me again.
Eventually I decided the only thing to do was to try to find out what it was, and then I might be able to work out who was trying to drop me in the deep-and-smelly-stuff, and why.
Again, I tried to free it from the ground. It was stuck fast, as if in concrete. And who knew how much of it remained under the ground? It was anybody's guess. For all I knew it could have been as big as a truck – you know, like icebergs? The bit I could see looked like a light sabre – you know, switched off. Well I mean it would do if there were such things in the real world. It was shiny, like stainless steel. Some of its parts were made of a grey ceramic, a bit like an LCD screen.
Again I sneaked a quick peek around at the others. One of them was my enemy – big time, but which one? They were all bent over their trowels, silently working, totally engrossed.
Twenty metres away, Professor Baldwin straightened up from his laptop computer and threw his arms behind his head in deep, oblivious concentration. His nimbus of white hair and shaggy beard floated around his face like a giant dandelion seed head. He gazed wistfully around the site before peering again at his computer screen. He seemed to be wondering what it was, or how he came to be sitting before it on a canvas stool under a grubby parasol. At that precise moment, as if to torment me, the sun had moved far enough along its daily flight path to cast brilliant reflections from the silvery object in my trench. It bounced a sunbeam across the site to illuminate the legend printed on the professor’s faded T-shirt. Archaeologists do it in the dust. I dived to smother the reflection with handfuls of earth. Seeing me rolling about in the trench, the professor gave me a pitying look and returned to his laptop. I desperately wanted to call him over and show him my strange find, but it was too bizarre. He’d flip and I would quickly find myself doing it in the dust no more.
In the next trench, Tori Morris saw me brushing myself down and shot me a sour glare of disapproval. Let me tell you something really important now. By any scale or measure, Tori Morris is gorgeous. Now I’m not sure why the school picked me, but Tori Morris won her place on the dig because she made this really cool website about Stonehenge and Avebury. I saw her at school every day, mainly because I secretly looked out for her. OK yes, I admit it, I'm a creep. I was like her stalker, but she never noticed me. In Tori's world creeps like me don't even exist.
That day she had on minuscule denim cut offs and a pink vest. A warm breeze was playing with her brown curly hair. Don’t ask me for more details. She was gorgeous and that’s all I can say, except that for the first time ever, she was actually looking straight at me – as if I did exist. And what did I do? I grinned back at her like a wet loony bear.
‘Get lost, Dobbin, you pervie kid!’
Those were her first words to me, and guess what, she knew my name, well my nickname anyway. My real name is Jack Shire, so the Brits call me Dobbin. They think it’s funny. Yeah, I know, it’s pathetic, but so what?
Anyway, I beckoned her over. She started towards me, a frown like an unpaid taxi driver on her lovely face. ‘Tori, look what I’ve found.’ I was whispering like a dope.
‘Get lost!’
‘I think it’s silver.’
Jewellery interested Tori. She had a brain the size of a truck and legs that went on forever, but she loved bling like a rapper with an oil well. ‘If you’re being pervie, Dobbin, I’ll eviscerate you,’ she said, her eyes sparkling as she did a mark-of-Zorro in the air with her trowel.
‘Eviscerate? Wow, I hope that’s a sex thing.’ I loved her voice. ‘That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me,’ I told her.
She smothered a coy smile. ‘Really? I must be slipping.’
Peering into my trench, she spotted the silvery thing. Her expression chilled. ‘Oh very clever,’ she said. ‘You know what, Dobbin, there are hundreds of kids who’d love to be here but all you can do is mess about. They wasted a place when they picked you.’
‘It’s not me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do this. Some jerk-off planted it here. I think somebody’s trying to get me dumped.’
She eyed me doubtfully and shrugged. ‘Why would they bother?’
‘Good question.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’ Her scolding gaze softened a little.
‘I daren’t tell Baldwin. He’ll flip and I’ll be kicked off the dig,’ I said. ‘The only plan I can think of is to smuggle it off site and take a good look at it. Then we might be able to work out who the joker is and why they picked on me.’
‘We? Whaddayer mean we? I’m not involved.’
‘I know, I know, but I need you to help me. I need my rucksack from my tent. Can you fetch it while I stay here and keep an eye on the thing? I daren’t leave it. Somebody might see it.’
Tori chewed it over, frowning at me as if I was about to lay an egg. ‘OK, but that’s all I’m doing,’ she said. ‘I’m not jeopardising my place here over some stupid joke.’
I watched her stomp off towards the campsite. She had not asked me which tent, or rucksack was mine. I realised that maybe she had noticed me after all.
Shaving away the last bit of earth covering the thing, I blew on it and brushed it clean. I poked my trowel beneath it and tried to lever it out gently. It was cylindrical and about as big as my forearm. It had the robust, heavy appearance of some sort of industrial tool. A strange ceramic mechanism lay along one side. I wiped away the chalk with my thumb and exposed a dim LED flashing a slow pulse of green light. At last the thing came free. I lifted it out of the earth. Its lightness surprised me. It almost floated up on its own.
Tori returned, scowling and breathless. ‘Here’s your bag, pervie boy. I didn’t empty it out. You never said, and I didn’t want to touch your dodgy underpants.’ She handed it to me like it was road kill. ‘Take it. It stinks like a bear’s wotsit.’
I spotted my shorts in the bag, nestling up to my secret stash of Toblerones. I blushed, but tried to be cool as I checked the other contents. Even with my binoculars, maps, some torch batteries, clothes and other junk, there was still plenty of room in the bag to hide the thing. And I could cover it with my shorts. They’d be sure to ward off intruders.
Stepping into the trench, Tori aimed her phone camera lens at me and clicked off a few shots. ‘If those underpants touch it, it’ll melt clean away,’ she joked.
I could see that romantically Tori might be a bit of a challenge, but not one I would shy from. I even saw her smile as I shoved the thing into the rucksack and covered it with my shorts.
It was done, and a quick glance around confirmed that nobody was watching us. Tori shrugged. ‘Well that’s that then,’ she said, viewing the photographs on her phone. ‘It was almost interesting, in a nerdy sort of way.’ She stepped out of the trench and swung away on her long legs. I hoped she might look back. She did. I tried not to gawp like a loony bear.
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