Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

He looked down to the end of the trench at Nora. Her job was once again sifting through the rubble with a large sieve, looking for artifacts: pottery shards, glassware, bits of slag, or the telltale green of corroded bronze. As far as artifacts were concerned, early Christian sites like this one usually yielded little more than the bones of slaughtered animals, and a few bits of broken crockery. Much of what would have been used in this sort of community was organic material that would have decayed long ago. Still, one never knew what one would find. Though no ruin existed at all aboveground, there was bound to be evidence beneath the surface, some clues to the methods of construction or the industrial activity that took place here. And there were always the middens, of course, rubbish heaps where each layer contained a valuable cache of information. That was the beauty and mystery of archaeology to him. Each site had to be treated as a potential treasure, each step in the excavation undertaken with the same scrupulous care, in case valuable artifacts—or even more important, valuable details—might be lost or overlooked. He was not just undertaking this work for the present, but also for future generations, who might come to see some larger pattern in the discoveries that he and his contemporaries were now making that wouldn’t reveal itself for another fifty or a hundred or two hundred years, and perhaps then only if the previous research was thorough and meticulous. The soil samples he took today would be sieved back at the lab for microfossils, insect remains, seeds, plant matter. They still used many of the same techniques when excavating by hand, looking with the naked eye for layers and horizons, but so many new microscopic and chemical analysis techniques had been developed in the last few years, not to mention new types of sampling and scanning technologies, things Gabriel had never even dreamed of when he picked up the trowel.

Cormac looked down to the other end of the trench, where Nora was working, kneeling in the dirt with her sleeves rolled up. Gray dust clung like mist to her dark eyebrows. She was about four feet away from him, concentrated on her work, searching through the damp soil with a trowel, then dumping the gravel into her growing pile of debris. Cormac decided he quite liked being here, the only sounds the scraping of the spade, the thump of each panful of soil, the occasional distant croak of a disgruntled crow.

“Do you ever get tired of turning up nothing?” Nora asked. “All this work, to find nothing but four solid feet of sand and gravel? What keeps you going, inch after bloody inch?” Strange how she seemed to know exactly what he’d been thinking.

“The potential, I suppose, the hope that something might turn up. Your work must have a good bit of drudgery as well, all those thousands of straightforward textbook cases before you get to the one really interesting anomaly. Isn’t it this part, the sifting through the ordinary, that makes breakthrough moments all the more memorable?”

“You’re right, of course,” Nora said, “but remind me again what we’re looking for.”

“Artifacts from any period, of course, but also evidence of any structures, layers of ash or charcoal that might give us dates or horizons for the occupation of the site. Refuse pits, slag heaps, any specific waste from human activity. Communities like this often served secular needs as well as spiritual ones. We’re looking to see what this spot can tell us about the events that took place here, and in what order.” He continued talking as he pulled a slip of paper from his clipboard and wrote a number on it, then impaled the paper on a three-inch nail in the wall of the bank. “I will admit it’s frustrating, trying to get clues about a whole culture from what you can see through a couple of what are essentially peepholes. But put our peepholes together with the peepholes from all over the country, and a larger picture begins to emerge. And who says we’re turning up nothing?” He gestured toward the bank of clay in front of him. “See how the coloration of the soil changes here? And see this thin layer of black between? That’s charcoal. Evidence of human habitation. With a little more work, we can even tell what kind of wood they burned. You have to learn how to look at it.” He put down his spade and came to sit beside Nora.

“Look over there,” he said, gesturing toward the landscape across the road, “and tell me what you see.” Nora lifted her head, and gazed toward the horizon of hay fields and pastureland.

“Cattle, grass. Lots of yellow flowers. Why, what do you see?”

“Look again,” Cormac said. “Straight ahead.”

“I see a hill. Is this some sort of a trick?” Cormac said nothing, but watched her face as the rounded knoll that rose out of the canary-colored sea of dandelions, the shape she had no doubt first seen as a natural feature of the landscape, took on an altogether different profile. He knew that all at once she could see that it was too round, too regular to be an ordinary hill, and one end was cut out, almost like the entrance to a mine shaft. He watched appreciatively as her mouth dropped slowly open, and she turned to face him once more.

“What is it?”

“Could be the remains of a ringfort, or a burial mound.” He was pleased that the discovery had made such a profound impression.

“You’re giving me goose bumps,” she said.

“I swear that wasn’t my intention.”

They worked for a while in silence. “You know, Raftery said it might be a couple of days before he can get his aunt to speak to us,” Nora said. “There must be something else we can do in the meantime.”

“What do you propose?”

“Well, we could go to the heritage center you mentioned, see what kinds of records they keep. We could try bribing Robbie with biscuits to dig up all he can about Cathal Mor O’Flaherty.” She paused, but he sensed there was more.

“And…”

“Well, what I’d really love is a look inside that tower house. Are you any good at picking locks?”

“Hang on. I’m not going to go breaking in somewhere.”

“How else are we supposed to get in?” Nora asked, dumping out the sieve and banging it on the ground to dislodge the last bits of pebble and clay. “There isn’t exactly a welcome mat at the door. I suppose you’re waiting for an invitation.”

“You realize that if you insist, I’ll have no other choice but to go along, if only to keep you out of trouble.”

“I’m perfectly happy to go on my own,” Nora said. “I might have to, if you’re going to be squeamish about—”

Cormac raised a finger to his lips to signal silence, and Nora clamped her mouth shut and listened. She heard nothing but the harsh aic-aic of a corncrake.

“There’s somebody here,” Cormac said under his breath. “Up in the cloister walk. Keep working. Maybe we can get whoever it is to come out.” They busied themselves at their work again, stealing an occasional glance toward the cloister wall.

“Let’s walk back to the jeep,” Cormac said quietly. “Slowly. You go first. Create a distraction. Cut through the cloister at the near end, here, and I’ll go to the far end. Unless whoever it is wants to climb out a window, he’ll be stuck in the middle.” As he spoke, Cormac wondered if he was a physical match for Brendan McGann, if it came down to that.

Nora nodded and stood up, brushed the knees of her jeans, and spoke loudly enough that the eavesdropper could hear. “Well, I can’t wait any longer for lunch, I’m ravenous.” She walked a diagonal to the corner nearest where the jeep was parked. “I believe our choices today are plain cheese or cheese and tomato.” She had reached the end of the cloister, and turned to find Jeremy Osborne pressed against the wall at the far end of the corridor. He looked at her, and turned to retreat, but by then Cormac had come up behind Jeremy and received the tackle solidly, catching the boy by the shoulders.