Relics (3 page)

Behind her, Swanson was muttering to himself, struggling to retain a hand-hold on earth that was crumbling beneath his frantic fingers.

A spade was lowered to him and someone shouted to him to grab the handle but he was afraid to release his hold on the ledge. His heart was hammering against his ribs, the perspiration running in great salty rivulets down his face. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, screwing them up until pain began to gnaw at his forehead.

A lump of earth the size of a fist came loose and hit him on the top of the head.

He lost his grip.

A woman standing on the side of the trench screamed as the archaeologist flailed with one hand, trying desperately to regain his hold.

Kim heard his shout of terror as he sensed he was slipping away. She tightened her grip on Cooper’s hand as he slowly dragged her upper body clear of the hole, aware that the trench wall would not hold out much longer.

His foot slipped and he almost overbalanced, but strong arms held him upright and he continued to drag Kim out.

Her legs finally cleared the hole and with one last surge of strength, Cooper pulled her completely clear. Both of them fell back onto the earth, which was still crumbling beneath them. They rolled away, seeking firmer footing. Kim could hardly get her breath but she clambered to her feet and looked round.

‘Help me!’ shrieked Swanson, now clutching at the spade which was offered to him. He closed one desperate hand over the wooden shaft and clung on, knowing that his life depended on it.

His would-be rescuers kept trying to drag him up but his full weight, now dangling helplessly over the pit, was too much for them.

‘Where’s that bloody rope?’ shouted Cooper, running to get it from one of his colleagues. He fashioned it into a makeshift loop, then lowered it towards Swanson.

‘Put your arm through the loop,’ he bellowed as the other end was secured to a tree stump.

Swanson did as he was told, though he hardly needed prompting. He grabbed the rope and tried to haul himself up.

Kim watched helplessly as three of the archaeologists pulled on the rope. Slowly, inch by inch, they started dragging Swanson clear.

Picking up a torch, Kim shone it into the pit and saw that the hole was cylindrical, a tube of earth with smooth sides. She daren’t guess how deep it was.

Swanson was more than half clear of the pit when the rope began to fray.

At first a handful of strands sprang from the hemp, then more.

Swanson heard a creak as it unravelled quickly.

‘No!’ he shrieked as the final strands came undone.

The men holding the rope tried to pull him up faster and flailing hands tried to catch him, but it was too late.

With a scream of fear he plummetted from sight into the pit, his shout reverberating inside the shaft.

Kim closed her eyes, waiting for the thud as he hit the bottom.

It never came.

Instead, everyone near the pit froze as Swanson’s shout suddenly changed into a bellow of unimaginable agony. The sound, amplified by the shaft, was like a slap in the face.

‘Oh, God murmured Kim, peering down into the darkness. But she could see nothing.

The darkness of the pit hid his body from sight.

Had he broken his back? Shattered his legs? Perhaps his skull had been pulped by the fall?

Stunned by that roar of agony, the other archaeologists, too, stood gazing helplessly into the enveloping blackness.

Now they all felt an icy breeze which seemed to rise from the pit. With it came a choking smell, a pungent odour of decay which made Kim cover her nose and mouth. She looked at Cooper, but he could only shake his head, wondering, like the others, what fate had befallen Swanson.

Had he known the truth he would have been glad that he could not see the body.

The lights on the two police cars and the ambulance turned silently, casting red and blue splashes of colour onto the faces of the people gathered around the deadly pit.

No one spoke, and the whole scene reminded Kim of an extract from a silent film. She stood close to Cooper, a mug of tea cradled in her hands, but the warm fluid was doing little to drive the chill from her bones. What she was feeling was not induced by the cold wind. It was the icy embrace of fear and shock, and it gripped her tighter every time she looked at the hole into which Swanson had fallen.

A couple of policemen were busy constructing a winch beside the pit, watched by the crowd of onlookers. Kim brushed a strand of blonde hair from her face, noticing that her hand was still shaking.

Cooper placed an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close in a gesture which suggested concern rather than affection.

She took another sip of her tea and glanced across the open ground towards a grey Sierra which was bouncing awkwardly over the dips and gulleys in the earth as it approached the other vehicles. Kim watched as it came to a halt and the driver climbed out.

He was tall, dressed in a suit which was stretched almost too tightly across his broad chest and back. His dark hair was uncombed and he ran a hand through it as he slammed the car door. A uniformed man approached the car and said something which Kim couldn’t hear, but he motioned in her direction and the newcomer nodded and headed towards her, casting a momentary glance past her towards the pit where the winch had been all but secured.

Inspector Stephen Wallace; said the man in the suit, flipping open a slim leather wallet which he took from his inside pocket.

Kim looked at the photo on the I.D. card, thinking it did the policeman scant justice. He was powerfully built, and his shirt collar looked painfully tight around his thick neck. As if reading her mind, he reached up and undid the top button, relaxing slightly as he did so. He smiled reassuringly at Kim, who despite her condition found herself returning the gesture.

‘I already know what happened,’ he told Cooper. ‘One of my men informed me over the radio. I’m sorry about Mr Swanson.’

Cooper nodded.

Wallace moved as close to the edge of the pit as he felt prudent, staring down into a seemingly bottomless maw.

‘Did you know this site was unstable?’ he asked.

‘Certainly not,’ Cooper snapped, ‘or we wouldn’t have started work here.’

‘Just asking,’ Wallace murmured quietly.

The uniformed man beside the winch gave a thumbs-up and the inspector walked around the shaft, guessing that the hole must be at least twelve feet in diameter. He pulled off his jacket, handing it to another of the waiting constables, then turned to the ambulanceman.

‘I’ll go down first,’ he said. ‘Check it out.’ He took a torch from one of his constables and held out his hand again. ‘Let me have that two-way.’

The harness which dangled from the winch was a piece of rope tied into a loop at the bottom. Wallace put one foot into it, gripping the hemp securely with his free hand, and lowered himself the first few feet into the darkness. He flicked on the torch, playing the powerful beam around the walls of the shaft. The rope creaked ominously as he was lowered.

A foul stench filled his nostrils. A fusty, cloying odour which made him gasp for air. It was cold too, and the policeman shivered involuntarily, pointing the torch down every now and then in the hope of illuminating the bottom of the shaft. The beam was quickly swallowed by the gloom.

He was lowered further. Slowly, evenly.

The smell was growing worse and Wallace coughed, trying to breathe through his mouth to minimize its effects. The stench was making him light-headed.

Fifty feet and still no sign of the bottom of the shaft.

‘Anything yet, guv?’

The voice on the two-way belonged to sergeant Bill Dayton and Wallace recognized it immediately.

‘Nothing,’ he said and coughed again.

Seventy feet.

Wallace was beginning to wonder if his men had enough rope. Just how deep
was
this bloody hole? The cold, like the smell, seemed to be intensifying, so much so that the inspector was now shivering uncontrollably. And yet there was no breeze. The air was unmoving, like stagnant water in a blocked well.

Eighty feet.

He shone the torch beneath him once more and, this time, it picked something out.

A few feet below, something was glistening.

‘Nearly there,’ Wallace said into the two-way.

‘Can you see Swanson?’ asked Cooper.

‘Not yet . . .’ He snapped his jaws together, cutting off the sentence.

There were sounds of movement from below.

Faint rustling sounds, almost imperceptible but nevertheless present. Like . . .

Like what, Wallace thought?

He swallowed hard and shone the torch down once more.

‘Oh, Jesus’ he exclaimed.

Another couple of feet and he’d reached the bottom of the shaft. Wallace stepped out of the harness and shone his torch forward, waving a hand in front of his nose to waft away the nauseating stench that filled his nostrils. He wished he could wipe away what he saw, too.

There was a wooden spike in the centre of the pit, placed with almost mathematical precision so it was in the very middle. The stake was fully fifteen feet tall, tipped by a razor-sharp point unblunted by the passage of time.

Impaled on this spike, like an insect on a board, was Phillip Swanson.

The spike had penetrated his back just above the left scapula, tearing through his body before erupting from it at the junction of his right thigh and torso. He had landed on the spike with such momentum that his body was almost touching the ground. Blood had sprayed everywhere. It had run in thick rivulets from his nose and mouth, gushed freely from his shattered groin and pumped in huge gouts from his stomach which was torn open to reveal a tangle of internal organs which looked on the point of breaking loose. Thick spurts of odorous green bile from the pulverized gall bladder had mingled with the blood which was now caked thickly all over the corpse and the base of the sharpened pole. There were fragments of broken bone scattered about, and Swanson’s arms dangled limply on either side of him, one of them attached only by the merest thread of skin and ligament. Smashed bone glistened whitely amidst the pulped mess of flesh and blood.

Wallace knelt close to the dangling head, hearing that strange rustling once more. It took him a second to realize that it was wind hissing through Swanson’s punctured lungs. Wallace frowned. For that to be happening the man had to be alive but surely that was impossible.

He lifted the head gently, looking at the bloodied face.

Swanson’s eyes snapped open.

In that split second Wallace fell back, dropping the torch, stumbling in the darkness.

He heard a thick, throaty gurgle and realized that it was Swanson’s death rattle.

‘Shit,’ muttered the policeman, his heart thudding madly against his ribs. He wiped his face with one shaking hand, gradually regaining his composure.

Somehow Swanson had clung to life for over an hour while skewered on the stake.

Wallace didn’t even attempt to imagine the suffering he’d gone through. The inspector regained his torch and shone it on the archaeologist’s face once more, seeing that the eyes were now staring wide, the pupils hugely dilated. The soft rustling sound had stopped.

‘Wallace, are you all right?’

He recognized Cooper’s voice and found his radio.

‘Terrific,’ he said, wearily. ‘Dayton, can you hear me? Clear everybody away from the pit, then get a stretcher down here.’

‘On its way, guv,’ the sergeant told him.

Wallace shone his torch around the base of the shaft, looking at the objects which were scattered in all directions. Coins, weapons, jewellery.

And bones. So many bones.

As the beam fell on Swanson again he quickly moved it away, playing it over the walls. He reached for the two-way, his eyes fixed ahead.

‘Cooper, you still there?’ he said.

A crackle of static, then the archaeologist answered.

‘What is it?’

‘When the body’s removed you’d better come down here,’ the policeman said, the torch wavering slightly as he shone it ahead. The beam flickered for a second.

‘There’s something I think you should see.’

He didn’t time it, but Wallace guessed that it took him and the ambulanceman almost twenty minutes to remove Phillip Swanson’s body from the wooden stake. As the body was finally pulled free, the left arm came loose and fell with a dull thud. The ambulanceman laid it alongside the body, then carefully wrapped the remains in a thick blanket and secured the whole grisly package to a stretcher with rope. On Wallace’s order the corpse was winched up, along with the ambulanceman.

The two of them had spoken little during their vile task. The ambulanceman in particular seemed glad to be away from the cloying blackness of the pit and, as he was winched up towards the light again, he did not look down.

Now the policeman stood alone wishing he had a cigarette, partly to calm his nerves, but also to mask the rancid stench which filled the shaft. He rummaged in his trouser pockets and found half a stick of chewing gum. It would have to do for now. He shone the torch over the floor of the pit, realizing at last how many strange objects lay around him. To his untrained eye it reminded him of some ancient rubbish tip. Articles of all shapes and sizes were scattered in all directions around the base of the stake.

The roving beam illuminated a skull, the jaws open in a soundless scream. There was a large hole in it just above the crown. Another lay beside it. And another. All bore jagged cracks or hollows.

But it was beyond the mounds of bones and relics that Wallace finally allowed the torch beam to rest.

What would Cooper and the others make of this?

He chewed his gum thoughtfully and glanced up. The pit’s depth prevented any natural light from reaching the bottom and it also cut out any sounds from above. The combination of deathly silence and unyielding darkness was a formidable one. And there was the ever-present smell, too. An odour of decay which clutched at Wallace’s throat like an invisible spectre.