Short Fiction/Free Read/Horror/Paranormal/Literary
This short story is available for free, and will be released in an ebook edition by Alpheratz Press in early 2010 under their free read Alpherbites banner. Coming soon!
Excerpt:
We began to excavate there almost exactly two years ago.
Today, I am the only one left.
At first, nothing about the dig seemed unusual. We were a small team largely augmented by students from the university. Only Ash, Nat and I had any real archaeological experience of major sites, and none of us could possibly have predicted what we would find.
It started as a simple exercise; in an area already known to have rich deposits of Celtic and Iron Age artefacts, our task was to scour the thick, fractured mud and swell the ranks of existing samples. Our bosses expected mainly small items-the kind of thing ancient people might have tossed into sacred pools or brooks, the gateways between worlds, in the hope of benediction, salvation or intercession. I can still see Ash, at the time writing a paper on the role of sacrifice in Celtic religious practice, crouching in the dirt with the breeze tousling his dark brown hair. The sun had brought out the freckles on his nose and he had discarded his shirt, bare-chested and khaki-kneed as he sifted through one particular patch of darkened earth at the end of the trench.
“Hey,” he said, “this is interesting. Looks like pollen.”
We all gathered around, agreed that yes, it did, and wasn’t it strange to see a deposit like that there? We dug further. Nat-her henna-orange hair piled up on top of her head and bound with a tie-dyed bandana-suggested maybe we could be looking at bunches of flowers, or garlands of offering. The three of us discussed it, an earnest and protracted huddle in the silt-rich sunshine. A smell of old woodland and the dankness of recently turned earth threaded through the air. Then one of the students cried out, a shriek of glee, surprise and excitement.
It was a finger.
Old, worn almost past recognition-more like a chicken bone wrapped in leather than any fleshy human digit-but it was there. We spent ages debating what to do, how to proceed. Urgent phone calls streaked to and from department heads and private mentors. Old friends and colleagues were dragged from their desks to give advice. It took hours to plan every move. Late into the night we worked, painstakingly slicing away at the earth, marking out the area to be dug, preparing the ground to yield its secrets.
He came to us slowly over the following days. Inch by inch, suggestions and hints, though nothing prepared us for the moment we were actually able to look into his face, a bridge of years across forgotten times. Millennia had passed since light last touched him, but now here he was, revealed in the eerie glow of our halogen lanterns. We hardly dared breathe. The thick clay had preserved him beautifully-a miracle when so much of this area had been broken under bulldozer or plough. A major A road ran not half a mile from the field, heavy with traffic and the assaults of modern life. He seemed to stare out at us from his earthen tomb, though his eyes stayed firmly shut, his face crumpled into a perpetual sleep, mouth a tautened death grin and knotted rags of hair clinging to his head. His skin, tanned to the consistency of goat hide and stretched tight over his bones, still bore the tattoos, the marks and etching that had covered him in life, the majority of his body burnished to a deep, warm ochre colour with some kind of powdery pigment. From that, we drew his name.
The Red Man.
Coming soon from Alpheratz Press
