The Mammoth Book of Terror (31 page)

“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 brow. “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 gasped, 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 favours, 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 the stubble of his 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 reason.”

“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 country side. 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 first 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 all 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 look 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 choose to argue with, and the old man decided.

“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 towards the cabin. Maurice did not try to stop him.

When he had finished he slung the shovel over his shoulder and traipsed back towards 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.

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 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 whisky. 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 weakness.

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.