Tim Lebbon: 30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

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…