Guy Smith - Snakes

PC Aylott made a slow tour of the cemetery, shone his torch from one moss-covered tombstone to the next. Christ, some bugger even had a serpent engraved on his stone, a depiction of the Garden of Eden. That's all I bloody well need. He shivered, the night air had turned very cold.

Well, the reptiles certainly weren't lying out in this jungle of an unkempt cemetery. The constable reached the furthest boundary, saw a dilapidated wicket gate that leaned over into an adjoining section of rough ground—the original graveyard.

It was no more than a couple of acres at the most, triangular, bounded by a tall straggling hawthorn hedge that had last been pleached in 1963 and had not been touched since. Most of the graves went back to the last century, their indecipherable headstones having either been laid flat or fallen over and left that way because in the days when Stainforth Parochial Church Council was able to afford a full-time verger it made mowing easier. Then came drastic economic cut-backs in the 1970s and both verger and mower were made redundant. Emsworth took it upon himself to let the old graveyard revert to nature; the hedge, untidy as it was, screened the worst of the wilderness and as the majority of those buried in there had no living relatives left few were likely to complain. If you can't clear up a mess, hide it, was one of the clergyman's many mottoes.

Aylott did not fancy going in there. He stood by the remains of the old gate, swinging his torch beam in a wide arc, noted the flattened, tangled growth where the police and army searchers had trodden it down. There really was not much point in going in there for a second look, now was there? Not really, but if you're going to check out the sandpit at the far end you'll have to; unless you're going to go back and all the way round by road. You don't really want to go and shine your torch in those open graves again, do you?—because if you walk by them you'll be compelled to. The first one's for Elsie Harrison, the second for ...

He negotiated the leaning broken gate, snapped another rotten strut with a loud crack. If those snakes are around they will have heard that for sure. But they surely aren't because they would have been found by now if they were. That was the best piece of logic he had come up with all night and it made him feel an awful lot easier in his disturbed mind.

Through this wilderness that used to be a cemetery, out into the sandpit and back along the road to the station; sorry, operational HQ. I went out on my own and looked, sir, but I'm certain the snakes aren't in Stainforth. They've moved on unseen and we'll just have to wait until they turn up somewhere. And somebody else gets killed.

It was not easy walking in there, the trampled-down grass and weeds screening large stones that you only found when you either stubbed your toe against them or trod on them and wrenched your ankle. A hidden indentation in the ground threw PC Aylott headlong. He cursed, picked himself up, had to retrieve his torch which had rolled away. Now this is bloody stupid, you're not proving anything either to yourself or to anybody else. You're pandering to guilt, trying to convince yourself that you're not the bloody coward you thought you were. And all the time you're shit-scared.

The sandpit could not be far now, the hedges were beginning to angle towards the apex of the graveyard triangle and where they met there would be a broken-down stile and a slope beyond which he would have to negotiate very carefully. Then it was but a hundred yards or so back to the road. And safety.

His foot rested on something flat and smooth beneath the grass; one of those old tombstones lying horizontally, no doubt. He rested his full weight on it and felt it tilt like a paving slab that had been placed on uneven ground. Well, it was hardly likely to have been laid with a spirit-level, was it? It .. .

Ken Aylott's brain could not cope with what happened next. A feeling like vertigo, a loss of balance and coordination, a sensation akin to stepping on to a hinged trapdoor, aware of it tilting downwards beneath his feet. His logic screamed at him to jump sideways before it was too late but his body refused to heed the warning.

Falling. A rush of stale cold air came up out of the ground to meet him, and he gave a strangled cry of terror, clinging on to his torch. Instinctively he hunched his body, anticipated the bone-jarring fall, a kaleidoscope of terrors jamming his crazed mind; a childhood fear of the dark was instantly released from that corner of his brain where it had slumbered for three decades, had him screaming in infantile terror.

A cloying stench filled his nostrils, the putrid suffocating smell of an airless place. And then came impact and pain, the agony of breaking bones, gasping for air that was putrid, lying in a crumpled heap on sharp stones and doubting whether he would ever be able to move again. Crying, gasping with sheer terror because he could not manage a second scream.

He lay there, his body crunched up into a tight ball, racked with pain. Subconsciously he knew what had happened; an old crypt, the kind that were popular in the last century when entire families were interred in the same grave—a broken or loose stone that had acted as a trapdoor to catapult him down into its depths. Oh, merciful God, this was a place of the dead, hideous skeletal remains . . .

Somehow he was still clutching his torch but he did not want to look; it was still on, miraculously, but he closed his eyes in case he saw. He tasted blood, not a lot so perhaps he had just bitten his lip or tongue in the fall. But his leg was broken for sure, possibly both of them because he could not move them. He gasped for breath and it hurt like hell. Broken ribs; if he tried to get up he might puncture a lung.

I've got to get out of here! A haze of pain, a red curtain before his eyes. I mustn't faint, if I pass out I could lie here until I die. Somebody will surely come looking for me when the day shift takes over. But they won't know where to look, will they?

He tried to move his head, attempted to look upwards, desperately searching for a glimpse of those glittering stars, or that sliver of moon, anything that meant that there was open sky up above. Please .. .just one star. .. but there were only streaks of shimmering red to be seen in the total blackness where there should have been an open square directly above.

You mustn't panic. Rest a bit, try to think. He felt at his legs, bare bleeding skin where his trousers had been ripped and torn asunder. There's broken bones definitely. Oh God!

Suddenly he got an awful feeling that he was not alone, beginning with a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. Don't be bloody stupid, if there's anybody else in here they've been dead a very long time. A heap of old bones but they can't move or hurt you.

Something definitely moved, dislodged a trickle of small stones close by. He jumped, wanted to shine his torch in the direction of the noise but he did not dare. If there's anything there then I don't want to see it. Rats, that's what it is, rodents are bound to use these old crypts. Repulsive but not dangerous.

His arms seemed to be virtually unscathed. Perhaps if he could secure a grip on something then he could pull himself up, reach the slab above, open it enough to give him air, a gap through which his shouts for help might be heard.

New hope, desperation breeding determination, groping behind him, feeling with Ms fingers. And that was when he touched something; it should have been cold rough stone, hard and inanimate. Instead it was rough and soft . . . breathing and moving,'

He snatched his hand away with an inarticulate cry, could not help himself from swinging his torch round, a dazzling white beam that reflected a pair of tiny glittering eyes, a long thick body that ended over in the shadows some yards away. Eyes watching him from every corner, pinpoints of unwavering evil.