Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

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 favours, 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 the stubble of his 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 reason.”

“They became isolated.”

“That’s it. Formed their own little community. That got a name too. They called it Devil’s Hole. Old Snape thinks, over the years, it got shortened to Dev’s Hole, then the locals forgot the original name, and it got twisted to Dove Holes, but I don’t know about that. Anyway, things went on without too much trouble, until some of the miner’s wives started having babies. The kids weren’t right at all, and the women tried to hide them. There was something unpleasant about them.”

“You don’t know what?”

The old man shook his head. “Snape wouldn’t say. But they were bad enough to force the miners and their families up onto Combs Moss, out of the way, where they couldn’t be seen. They built a little village of sorts, the one Mr Snape found the remains of.” The old man took a step towards the door and pointed a grubby hand at the lines of rock that marked Black Edge and Hob Tor. “Just there, I think.

“It seems they made a deal with the other villages hereabouts to keep out of their way, in exchange for food and other things they needed to survive. They used to send a few people down from the Moss with hand carts, to collect stuff. That went on for years, then those children I mentioned started to get loose, started roaming about the country side. It seems they looked very strange. People didn’t like the look of them at all. And bad things happened.”

Once again, Maurice would have liked more details, but the old man was plainly unable to provide them, so he didn’t interrupt. The story, odd, even outlandish as it was, had the ring of truth, and was exacerbating a feeling of unease that had dominated Maurice’s mind and body since just before the accident, prior to his first visit to the tip. He was still feeling wretchedly ill, and the medicine wasn’t working.

“Things got so bad,” the old man continued, “that one day, people for miles around got together, went up onto Combs Moss, and slaughtered everyone there, kids and all. They brought the bodies down and buried them all in a pit they dug here, near the cave they’d found. They sealed off the cave and filled in the diggings that led to it.”