30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

Prologue

WHEN THEY BURIED the King of Stonehenge, they thought it would be forever. But even forever has limits; time is ambiguous, intended, so a scientist once said, simply to prevent everything from happening at once. So event follows event, and death follows life. For this king, time had served its purpose and now he was gone, his mummified remains excavated and transported back to the British Museum in London for closer scrutiny, preservation, and eventual display.

He left behind the buried trappings of his life.

Ashleigh Richards had been working on the site for several weeks. She was the de facto leader of the dig, even though Professor Erikson had been here on the first day and for several days in between. She slept in a caravan on the site, was the first to start work each morning, and was often the last to leave each night. She barely had a social life, unless whispering to herself as she examined trinkets and pottery shards beneath a harsh light in her caravan counted. But Ashleigh had entered middle age with the calm, contented knowledge that she had become married to her work. And if questioned about it, she would smile, and say with some satisfaction that their honeymoon period was still taking place.

She loved the past, and regarded digging it up as moving back time.

“We’ve not brought anything out for three days now,” Max said. Young and lively, the boy had surprised Ashleigh with his depth of knowledge.

“Doesn’t mean there’s nothing still there,” Ashleigh said. “There’s always something we miss. Grains of pottery or gold can slip through the sieve.”

“You’ve said that before,” Max said. “Doesn’t it piss you off?”

“Not really,” she said. “It means there’s always something more to find.” Max was looking at her with an expression she had long grown used to. Most people on this dig deferred to her knowledge and experience, and usually she liked and accepted that. But sometimes it grated. “Don’t you have a bloody home to go to?” she asked.

“Er, yeah,” Max said. He collected his tools and left the covered site, glancing back once before he let the flap of the polythene tent fall back into place. She smiled softly, knowing that he’d see.

Alone beneath the awning, she listened to the soft patter of rain, and watched the gentle breathing of the flimsy structure as an evening wind blew across the plain. The smell of exposed soil was a comforting scent, as familiar as her own breath. She sighed softly, adding to the breeze, and listened for the sound of Max’s motorbike.

Once he left, she knew where she must go.

The storage tent was a more rigid structure, protecting the treasures they had pulled from the soil and those who spent many hours over the days and weeks examining them. There were three examination tables where samples were cleaned, categorized, and labeled, along with several large containers for waste, and on the other side of the enclosure sat an assortment of boxes for transportation. Some were cardboard and already filled with padding and packaging. Others were made of wood, more solid constructs for more delicate samples. And in one of the largest wooden containers were several smaller metal boxes, double-layered to prevent any risk of damage to their contents.

The examination tables were all but empty now, their mud-streaked surfaces barren of anything interesting. A water tank stood at the end of each table, and hung on hooks along the tables’ edges were spray nozzles. They dripped onto the timber floor, most of them not used for several days. The boxes were piled, not stacked, and several cardboard containers were damp and torn.

Ashleigh hated this point in a dig’s life. The beginning was excitement and potential, the possibilities of the next few days and weeks literally endless. Usually what they uncovered in a dig was mostly expected—pottery shards or larger pieces, some coins, weapons. But sometimes there was something so much more beneath the ground, just waiting to be found. When she was a young girl, her father took her to one side, showed her a banana, and told her to watch him peel it. He closed his eyes as he did so, and said, You’re the very first person in the history of the universe to ever see the fruit I’m uncovering now. That had planted the seed. Archaeology was the natural end result of that seed’s blooming, and she relished the idea that it continued to grow.

But the end of the dig held a certain sadness. Much of what was hidden had been uncovered, breathed over by excited people, cleaned, examined, cataloged, and shipped away from the site where it had lain for countless centuries or even millennia. Torn from the womb of its intended eternal resting place, an artifact was unhomed as the sunlight touched it, and she was not the only archaeologist who believed that most of what they uncovered looked out of place in a sterile, artificially lit museum case. The scent of turned soil drying was the smell of the place having lost much of its mystery.

“There’s always something more to find,” she said to the silence, and it whispered back at her.

And then she walked past the examination tables, approaching the small unit in the corner of the compound where she knew the thing still lay.

It was put there because none of them had wanted to touch it, and remained there because she had not wished to examine it.

They had already started calling him the King of Stonehenge. Interred in a burial chamber dating to around 2300 B.C., alongside his remains, they had found around one hundred personal items, ranging from gold earrings, rings, and copper knives to pots, frescoes, and some remarkably well-preserved clothing. He’d lived during the early days of metalworking in Britain—a talent that had been brought from Europe—and Ashleigh believed that this incredibly tall man was in reality an archer who had come from France or, more likely, Spain.

And oh, what he had brought with him.

Ashleigh remembered the first time she saw it. One of the young students spotted the shape buried beneath the archer’s final resting place. He called her over, and at first she thought it was because he was unsure of how to expose the rest of the object. But then she saw the look on his face—as if he’d just smelled shit, or swallowed someone else’s vomit—and her skin started to crawl.

Even before she laid eyes on it, she felt its attention upon her.

No one wanted to touch it. Nothing was said, but the object found its way somehow into the corner of the enclosure, where it was buried quickly beneath cardboard, scraps of wrapping materials, and clumsily thrown groundsheets. The dig was quiet for a while, with those who had seen it brooding, and those who had not picking up on the atmosphere. Nobody said outright that there was something wrong with the thing they had just dug up, because to mention it would be to confirm its existence and, perhaps, invite further analysis. But for the rest of that day those on the dig labored beneath a cloud; not a shadow of possible revelation, but one of potential doom.

Next day everyone was bright and cheery and so damn false that Ashleigh retired for the afternoon, sitting in her caravan and cataloging a handful of coins they had found alongside the archer’s body. The coins passed through her hand, but she always saw something…

Larger. The size of a dinner plate, perhaps, thickened in the center, tapering to a narrow edge all around. Much like the shape a child might draw when sketching a flying saucer. On one side a slightly raised bar passed across a central dip—probably a handle. Heavy, pitted across its surface close to the handle—placings for splayed fingers, most likely—and its edge, she knew, had once been razor-sharp. The keenness was rusted to nothing now, a dulled edge that might hurt through impact but certainly not through cutting. It was not the weight of the thing that disturbed her, or its shape, or the purpose she suspected it had once possessed. It was not even the wet rot that seemed to cover its surface in a slick of rusty red fluid.

It was how the thing felt in her hand.

Now, shifting aside those soggy cardboard boxes and torn sheets, her heart thundered in her chest. What if someone has taken it? she thought, but a moment later she knew that would not be the case. Everyone had wanted to leave it, not take it. Likely some of those here were even now worrying about what would happen to the artifact—

—weapon—

—when the time came to close the dig once and for all. They could not stay here indefinitely. The public enjoyed the spectacle of exploring history, but they liked even more the absence of tents and caravans and the mud of open wounds.

She moved one more sheet and several more slid off in a pile, heavy with water, slumping to the ground as if they wrapped something dead.

Ashleigh caught her breath and stepped back, berating herself in the same instant.

“Stupid bitch.”

She breathed deeply and stared at what had been uncovered. A rusted old artifact. It sat there like something forgotten at the bottom of the garden, not an old thing that had been buried away for perhaps four thousand years. It looked sad and useless, not chilling, and for a moment she could hardly recall why any of them had been so troubled by it.

Maybe it was just me, she thought. It was possible. The student had found it and thrown it into a corner, identified it as part of some broken farming machinery from thirty years ago, and for some reason Ashleigh had attached much more dread significance…

But no, that was untrue. This dig was her dig, and she had not just imagined the reaction to this thing. Strange that no one had spoken of it.

She took a step closer and reached out. This won’t be finished until everything is packed away, she thought. However distasteful, she could not leave something like this lying around. Treasure hunters weren’t only a thing of fiction, and projects like this often attracted professional thieves as well as casual opportunists. They employed minor security measures—her caravan on-site being one of them—but they had yet to suffer any losses. She could not leave that to chance now that the dig was almost over.

“Well, if they steal it, they steal it,” she muttered, but on the back of that came the sudden unbidden thought: They can’t!

She took one last step forward and picked the thing up. It was heavier than it looked, and as she lifted it in one hand its weight shifted strangely, as if it were full of liquid. She shook but heard nothing. It felt solid, but it contained a potential for strange movement. Ashleigh hefted it in both hands.

A breath of wind whispered between the heavy polythene curtains and lifted dust, carrying a cloudy veil and forcing her to blink it from her eyes.

The artifact was cool and heavy and damp, and Ashleigh hurried across to one of the examination tables. On the way she thought, Give it a look over, try and find out just what it is… ceremonial wine holder, ornament, weapon… But by the time she’d reached the table, she was already glancing across at the pile of storage and shipping containers, trying to work out which one would be best.

A metal one, of course. Stronger.

She packed the artifact away, breathing heavily, concentrating on this one task, so focused that she did not notice the blood dripping from her left hand. Into the metal container, soft cloth surrounding the object, tied around with masking tape, then the container itself packed with polystyrene beads, surrounding the packed artifact so that no part of it came into contact with the metal box’s walls. She saw the red smears but did not acknowledge them, because now it was almost away and out of sight.

Ashleigh paused and looked around. The hairs on her forearms and the back of her neck stood on end, and her nipples grew hard. It was as if a cold breeze had passed around and through her, and she felt sweat beading and running down her sides.

“Fucking ridiculous,” she said, uttering a short barked laugh that was meant to be softer than it was. She had never spooked herself before. There was a first time for everything, she supposed, but that still didn’t diminish the anger. How stupid she was.

She clipped and screwed the metal lid on the box with the fittings provided, then addressed the tag on the outside. She was sending it to her own flat a couple of miles away from her place of work, the British Museum in London. She should have been sending it directly to the museum, she knew—this could have been regarded as theft by some—but when this was over and she returned home for a few days’ rest…

Well, there were books she needed to consult. Books that few archaeologists would really take seriously. She’d been collecting them for years as something of a distraction, a creative outlet for a mind so used to analyzing fact and recording intricate detail.

With the box sealed and addressed, she turned off the lights strung beneath the canvas ceiling and exited into the dusky light. As she walked to her caravan, she noticed that her hand was wet, and then she acknowledged the blood she had felt and seen there, the warm blood she had smelled.

Inside, she flicked the light switch and turned on the gas fire. It would take an age for the caravan to warm up. Sometimes she wished she had more creature comforts, but this was the life she had chosen for herself. A life looking for mystery in buried history.

She wiped blood from her left hand and ran it beneath the warm tap for some time, turning her hand this way and that, splaying her fingers, examining her fingernails, looking for a cut that was not there.

Later she sat at the small table, a glass of gin before her as she looked at her left hand and waited for fresh blood that did not come, and which perhaps had never been there at all.