Karl Wagner: The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

He made his way through the mud to the porta-cabin. Inside, the old man was alone, spread out on his multimattress bed. He jumped when Maurice banged on the open door, and sat up.

“What you got?” he said automatically, like a talking machine. Then he recognized Maurice, and got to his feet. A deeply uneasy expression appeared on his face, that he tried to conceal by turning away.

Maurice, not quite sure what he was doing there, felt slightly foolish. At last he said, “I wonder if you can help me? I want some information about the scavengers on the tip. I met some people out there, and one of them must have followed me home. At least, I think he was one of them. Turned up on my door step and started pestering me.”

“That’s nothing to do with me,” the man said sullenly.

“I realize that,” Maurice said, “but I thought you might know who they are. They don’t seem like locals, the ones I met. They spoke differently, they act differently; do you know what I mean?”

“Perhaps,” the man said. “I don’t talk to them. I keep away. I’d do the same, if I were you. Let them get on with it.”

“Get on with what?”

The man shrugged. He filled an electric kettle from a plastic bottle and plugged it in a socket close to the floor. Slowly, and somewhat clumsily, he went through the motions of setting up a brew of tea. Maurice noticed he only washed out one mug. “Where’s your friend?” he asked, “the lad who was with you before?”

“Jed? He went out to scare them off, the scavengers. Hours ago.” The old man squinted up at Maurice from under his creased, dirt-smeared brows. “He’s not come back. I think he’s jacked in the job. He said he was pissed off working here. The place gave him the creeps; got on his nerves. It gets on mine, too, but I can’t just bugger off. He can get another job, at his age, if he’s lucky, but I can’t.” He spooned sugar angrily into his mug, spilling a trail of white crystals along the newspaper that served as a cloth on the ancient ironing board that was his table. “I’m stuck here,” he concluded.

Lost for words, Maurice gazed around the interior of the cabin. It was stacked with rescued furniture and other junk. An artificial Christmas tree, its branches bent and draped with fragments of faded tinsel, lay on the ground at his feet. Rolls of worn carpet were lined up along one wall, and bursting suitcases and boxes, packed with god-knows-what rubbish, were piled everywhere. An old tin bath was full of bones! Maurice was startled to see, among them, two skulls. He must have gasped, because the old man looked up from pouring his tea.

“Christ!” Maurice said, stepping towards the tub. “Where did they come from?”

A concatenation of expressions passed over the man’s face; annoyance, anxiety, confusion, fear, and others indefinable. He lifted his mug in both hands and sipped his drink. “They were dug up,” he said, reluctantly at last. “Out there.” He pointed beyond the line of trees opposite the cabin.

“But they’re human remains, surely?” said Maurice.

“Some of them are,” the man admitted, “and some of them aren’t.”

Maurice squatted down next to the tub. “I see what you mean,” he said. Many of the bones were undoubtedly human, but others were far too long and thin, like the leg bones of an ostrich, or some huge bird. He picked one up. It was extraordinarily light, as though it was made of paper.

“Never mind them,” the old man said irritably, and threw a blanket over the bath tub. “That’s all going to be taken care of. They’re all going back.”

“But have you notified the relevant authorities?” Maurice said, awkwardly aware of the foolish pomposity of the phrase. “I mean, people may have been murdered and their bodies concealed there.”

“Look,” the man said sharply. “Mind your own business, if you know what’s good for you! Keep your nose out. I know what I’m doing. No one’s been murdered; at least, not recently.”

“Then you know whose bones they are?”

“I’ve been told.”

“I still think you should tell the police.”

“And have the bloody place closed down? And lose my job? That’s what would happen! That’s a graveyard out there, and a very old one. The place would be crawling with bloody priests and what-you-call-its?… archy…?”

“Archaeologists?”

“Those are the buggers. They’d love this place, if they got to know about it, but they’re not going to. When the lads started digging up those bones with the J.C.B., Mr. Mycock, our gaffer, said to keep it quiet, if we wanted to stay in work, and we have done. There’s only a few of us knows about it, and it’s going to stay that way. You start blabbing about it, and it’s your fault if we lose our jobs! You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“No,” said Maurice, thinking about the imminent loss of his own livelihood, “perhaps not.”

“Never mind perhaps,” the man growled.

“At least you can tell me about it,” Maurice added, “if I promise to keep the information to myself.”

“I don’t know much,” the man admitted, “just what old Mr. Snape told me. He knows all the history of this area. Got loads of books about it. Goes about with a metal detector all the time. He’s found a lot of stuff. There was a thing about him in the paper not long ago. He found the remains of a village or something, up on Combs Moss. Well, I told him about it, because he’s done me favors, bought bits from me that have turned up at the tip, and given me a good price. He’ll keep his mouth shut, I know.”

The old man scratched his chin anxiously, as though he wasn’t quite as confident as he sounded, or perhaps he had lice in his stubble of beard.

“So whose graveyard is it?” Maurice asked, wanting to get to the nub of the matter.

“Some miners. Hundreds of years ago. It’s a local legend, according to Mr. Snape. He’s read about it in one of his old books. They were digging, and they found something they weren’t looking for, deep underground, not far from where we are now. Some sort of cave, I suppose it was, though they thought they’d dug their way down into hell. They had a name for it; they called it ‘The Devil’s Spawning Ground.’ They found things there, and saw things that scared the daylights out of them, but I’m not sure what. They brought out some objects that looked like eggs and, would you believe it? they started eating them. It was a bad year, the crops must have failed, Mr. Snape thinks, so they were all starving. They’d eat anything, in those days, of course.”

“They were poisoned?” Maurice ventured, thinking he could foresee the end of the tale.

“Not exactly. It wasn’t like that. Something dreadful did seem to happen to some of them at once; though old Snape says he thinks that part of the story was probably just invention. Something to do with the ‘folk imagination.’ He says when one strange thing happens, people add an extra half dozen other things in the telling to spice it up. And you can’t believe tales of men and women turning into something else, can you?; into tall, thin, spidery things, overnight?”

Maurice shook his head, but peered uneasily out towards the line of trees.

The old man slung the dregs of his tea out the door and wiped his shirt front round the rim of his mug. “As for the others,” he continued, “for a while, nothing happened to them. Then they started changing, behaving different. They developed nasty habits, and people roundabout didn’t like them.”

“What sort of habits?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Snape didn’t want to go into that side of things. He’s like that, he doesn’t talk about anything unpleasant. He just said that people started avoiding them, and for good reasons.”