The Skull

by Christian Darkin

  The icy water was numbing his skin. The oars burned in his hands as he hauled the boat around again to face another wave. He gritted his teeth and forced the muscles in his thighs and arms to pull again. He was gasping for air but he could only taste salt water splashing into his lungs, choking him.

  A wave caught him side on, tipping the boat further and further over. The Lady’s outstretched arm with its bundle of wheat scraped the water as the next wave pounded in. He was going over. He was certain of it.

  A wall of water crashed down on him, and everything was chaos. He was spinning. He could feel the boat against his legs, the oars in his hands, and he held on because if he let go of either he was dead. The water covered him. For a moment he thought he’d capsized, but no, suddenly there was air again, and the Lady was above him, white and ghost-like in a burst of blue-white lightning as she rocked and pitched.

  He was still upright, but water slopped around his ankles, and the boat was lower in the water than ever. All his strength was draining from him. One more wave like that and it would be over. This was it. Now or never.

  He felt the sacks of seed by his feet. They were soaked in salt water. Even if he got them home they might well be ruined. Above him, the Lady hovered, waving her bursting sheaf of wheat.

  He felt the next wave building, sucking the water out from under the boat. It was a big one. The boat tipped backwards as William forced his aching arms to paddle hard up what felt like its sheer side.

  They crested the wave, and already he could see the next one coming. It rushed at him, a huge dark monster rearing out of the darkness, foam tracing the shapes of scales across its wide arched back. In the second it took the boat to tip forward, he saw everything clearly, as if for the first time. He knew that monster would devour him when he reached the bottom, and as the boat pivoted, he made his choice. The seeds could be useless, but the Lady was definitely useless. He knew that. He had proved it. No arguments. No gaps. It was the truth, and here, now, at the top of this last wave, that was all that mattered.

  He swung in both oars at the same time, and wedged them underneath the wheels of the cart. As he felt the boat start to fall, he jammed the oars against the sacks piled in front of him and pulled down with all his strength, levering them under the wheels.

  The boat was in free-fall now, and gravity, for a split second was in retreat. As the cart started to tip he lifted both feet and braced them against the base of the cart. He pulled down as hard as he could with his arms and at the same time pushed with both legs. The cart shifted. Top-heavy, it tilted, and separated from the floor of the boat.

  As the boat fell, William gave one last shove, and the cart toppled. Suddenly, they were two separate entities, plummeting down the side of the wave. He hit the bottom of the wave a fraction of a second ahead of the cart and brought his oars back into the water, digging them deep and pulling them around to greet the monster wave as it towered in front of him.

  He ploughed into it, but with the cart gone, the little boat seemed to rise like a cork in the water, bobbing high on the back of the wave, rocking a little, but righting itself, almost immediately steady again.

  William looked back. In the darkness, there was a shape. The cart’s heavy wheels had pulled themselves downwards so that the base sunk below the surface, and now all that could be seen was the Lady, bolt upright and pale in the water, holding her wheat. Her veiled face stared out at William as she drifted into the darkness. Above, the wind was less fierce. The waves began to calm. Slowly, the storm was fading.

  It must have looked as though he was dead, lying exhausted in the bottom of the boat, unable to find the strength to lift the oars or turn the sail. As soon as he saw the cove ahead and knew he was home, his body simply gave up, and he let the tide wash him slowly in towards the shore.

  He knew he should wait offshore for the safety of night, but he wasn’t sure he would make it to dusk. In the storm he’d lost all the food and small beer he’d brought for the journey. His legs and arms felt like useless lumps of meat. His throat burned with thirst.

  As he felt the boat’s hull softly nudge the beach, a shadow fell over his face and he opened his eyes to see his mother looking down at him. She pulled him up out of the boat and held him tight, stroking his head. She was almost crying with relief.

  ‘I… I…’ William rasped, barely able to speak. He waved an arm vaguely at the sacks in the bottom of the boat. ‘The cart… I had to… I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said, hugging him closer. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  But it did matter. Even as Elizabeth held him, he could see Juliana over her shoulder, hurrying down the beach towards them. She stopped abruptly and looked down at the boat. Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed with fury. ‘Very well,’ she spat, her voice a hiss. ‘If your family no longer needs the help of my family, so be it.’

  She turned and strode back towards the cliffs. William felt the darkness creep in around his eyes, and passed out.

  ‘Quick! The old tomb!’

  William was lying in his bed when the shout came through the front door and woke him. Beside him were the remains of a meal and an empty cup. His mother must have somehow got him home and given him food, though he had no memory of it. His eyes were hot with tiredness and his arms and legs still ached, but the shout brought him crashing back into consciousness. He rolled out of bed and scrambled to his feet.

  The voice was one of the younger boys from the village, but as he opened the door, he realised it could have been anyone. The boy was already gone, running off towards the woods, and everyone else appeared to be running too, up the hill and towards the old tomb.

  Elizabeth appeared in the doorway behind him.

  ‘Go!’ she cried. They ran together, William forcing his wobbly legs to propel him forwards through the crowd.

  By the time they reached the tomb, most of the villagers were gathered around it. The stones in the doorway had been torn away and thick, dark, oily smoke was churning out of the hole.

  Beside the doorway stood Mathew Allen, holding a burning torch and grinning like an idiot. Close to him stood his mother and a group of uniformed customs officers. One of them held the printing block from the press, its metal letters dark with ink, incriminating words written backwards across its face. Another two officers held Marie, ink-stained and fragile. She didn’t struggle, she just stood, her neck stretched, holding her chin high.

  Her eyes met William’s and she acknowledged him without changing her expression. He started to step forward, but an arm grabbed his from behind. His mother. She silently shook her head. There was nothing William could do for her now.

  He watched helplessly as the officers thrust yet more burning torches into the library, then gathered up the printing block and a few other scraps they’d taken as evidence. A moment later Mathew Allen, still grinning, made a grand gesture to his fellow officers. William’s eyes filled with tears as they led Marie away.

  As the tomb burned, the crowd began to drift off home. Juliana watched the smoke rise, then looked over at Elizabeth. As she turned to walk into the woods, she leaned in and whispered, ‘I told him where. But I didn’t tell him who. I could have, Elizabeth, but I didn’t. You should be thanking me.’

  By the time William could bear to return to the tomb, the shoots of the newly planted beans were bursting out all across the fields. They were strong and green, and for the first time in a long while hope bloomed on the faces of the villagers, though nobody showed any sign of forgiving William for throwing the Lady into the sea.

  Marie was gone, taken to London where the authorities were determined to make some kind of example of her. But she would fight hard, and the courts were not entirely without rigour. There was a chance at least she could make her case heard.

  The fire left nothing of the books or the press. All that remained were pieces of twisted metal and pools of solidified lead. Only the stone was undamaged. The floor, the steps, the hewn bricks and the
old skull staring, blackened, from the wall. William gazed into Her empty eye. It seemed vacant now, as if she was drifting in a deep long sleep.

  He left Her and climbed out for the last time. Slowly, he gathered the bricks from the ground where they had been thrown, and one by one, he fitted them back into place, cleaning each to ensure a tight fit.

  As he sealed the final brick, he packed the cracks with soft clay. In time it would harden, and the bricks would grow together, held by soil and roots. One day, he thought, the tomb would be opened again.

  When She was ready.

  That day seemed a long way off.

  Chapter 6

  Henry Marchant: 1898

  As his father grabbed the long table and flung it over, ammonites, trilobites and fossils Henry Marchant didn’t recognise flew into the air, raining down on to the sand around him. He ducked and dodged, while his father continued to bellow at the woman in the long grey dress.

  The moment he had heard that the fossil lady had set up a makeshift stall on the beach, his father had stormed out of his church, bible in hand, and marched to the seafront to confront her. Charles Darwin and his new ideas about evolution, he had told Henry in no uncertain terms, were like an infection, a plague on mankind. Such Godless ideas were to be fought, wherever they took hold.

  Henry had heard this same sermon hundreds of times. Whether muttered over the dinner table, droned to a pious audience in church or screamed over the seagulls, it was the same message: God created the world in seven days. Only God can create life, and only God can take it away. Fossils are nothing. Darwin is wrong.

  His father was right, of course. Fossils couldn’t be anything more than random marks in the rock. A couple of weeks ago a lecturer had visited Henry’s school. He had brought a model with him, a replica of a creature that had been built in the gardens of the Crystal Palace in London. The man had sounded more like a circus ringmaster than an academic, and his model looked fanciful. The creature appeared to be a cross between a dragon and a cow, the kind of thing you might invent to entertain children. Yet the boys at school all talked about ancient monsters lying buried in the rocks, and now here was this lady in her long grey dress. She looked earnest, with an honest face.

  While his father was distracted, Henry picked up one of the small round stones and slipped it quietly into his pocket. He ran a finger around the spiralling, ridged impression inside the rock. It felt regular and measured. Not at all random.

  Without warning, his father turned on his heel and stormed off along the beach, cassock flapping behind him. Henry turned to follow. A hand caught his; it was the woman with the long grey dress. She smiled at him and pressed a printed pamphlet into his hands. At the top, it read, ‘The Dinosaurs of England’. Henry paused for a moment, then pushed the papers deep into his pocket and hurried off to catch up with his father.

  The leather-bound books lining the dining room walls rarely left their shelves, but they sucked in light and sound. Dinner was dark and quiet, and Henry winced at the sound of his cutlery scraping against the china plate. His mother sat like a mouse at one side of the table, while his father, locked impenetrably in his own thoughts, sat at the other. Henry thought his father was capable of making silence the way other people made noise.

  ‘I would like you to stay away from the beach,’ Father said eventually.

  Henry hated that thought. The beach was the one place he could go to escape the suffocating quiet of the house and the dead echoes of the church. At home, if you made the tiniest noise it would hang in the air forever. You couldn’t tread on a stair or open a book without being heard and judged.

  But the beach was a different place. At the beach, there was always sound. On a stormy day, the waves crashed against the rocks and the wind hammered the cliff and you could shout anything you wanted into it. On a calm day, the waves rattled back and forth over the pebbles, and it was as if the whole world was breathing, each exhalation carrying your secrets further out towards the horizon.

  But there was no arguing with Father. You did what he told you to do, and you thought what he told you to think.

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Henry replied, staring at his plate.

  ‘The world is changing, boy,’ his father went on, sadly. ‘Our nation is too rich and too much driven by engines. Today, it seems the best way to better your position is by publishing scientific papers. A man has to decide whether to look for his answers in the Bible, or to dig for them with his hands in the mud.’ He paused, then said almost to himself, ‘Only one thing lies down there, mark me.’

  Henry didn’t answer. He didn’t really know what to say. He felt the round stone and the pamphlet still in his pocket and he couldn’t look his father in the eye.

  ‘Finish up,’ said his mother after a long pause. ‘It’s time for bed.’

  It was summer, and Henry’s bedroom faced west, so even with the curtains closed there was plenty of light to read. He took out the stone and the papers from his pocket and quietly unfolded the pamphlet.

  The type was small, crowding the page in solid blocks. It began by describing the differences between types of stone. It explained how one type of rock could only be laid down by layer upon layer of sand, and how another was made up entirely of crushed and rotted plant material. It detailed how a solid object – like a bone – might become a kind of mould in the forming stone so that when it finally did decay, it would be replaced by a completely different kind of rock to that which surrounded it.

  Henry held up his tiny fossil in the dying sunlight streaming through the window. The stone itself was dark slate, but the perfectly coiled shell embedded in it was, indeed, entirely different. A smooth, shiny rock almost like crystal.

  Henry turned it over and over in his fingers. The light seemed to glow through it. The pamphlet’s explanation could not possibly be right, yet it seemed so obvious.

  He read on. Now, the text described a few of the most sensational recent finds. A diagram of a bone caught his eye. Clearly it was a bone from an animal’s lower leg – he was learning anatomy at school and the shape was unmistakable. Beside the diagram, an arrow indicated dimensions. The bone was huge. An animal with a leg that long could easily peer into his bedroom window.

  ‘Megalosaurus: a giant predator’, read the caption. Further down the page a curved, serrated tooth was pictured, as large, the text said, as a dagger.

  The pamphlet described a ferocious monster stalking a distant jungle world, but the finds were well documented and their locations were listed. He recognised the names of villages and towns, all within a few miles of his home. One tail-bone had even turned up on his local beach. This distant jungle was his country. His village! Henry folded the leaflet and put it under his pillow along with the so-called fossil. He laid his head down, watching as the sun vanished and the shadows grew across his window, and fell slowly asleep.

  * * *

  Henry walked close behind his mother through the woods. She was usually so quiet and small, but now she seemed huge, purposeful. It was all Henry could do to keep up as he dodged through the ferns, stepping in the deep footprints she left in the mud.

  She stopped suddenly, frozen, facing straight ahead. Henry looked up at her, wondering what she was looking at. He could see nothing in the trees ahead. She seemed to be listening, then she sniffed the air, turned and strode away into the forest. Henry followed, running after her. He felt the mud oozing between his toes, and the ferns scratching at his legs. It didn’t feel cold.

  It was a dark night but he could see well enough, and the trees were alive with noise. He caught up with his mother again as she stopped at the edge of a clearing. He ducked under her huge tail and stepped up beside her.

  Breathing as quietly as he could, he looked out between the tree trunks. On the other side of the clearing, four camptosaurs were feeding. The two smallest were hunched over on all fours, grazing on ferns. The other two, the adults, were leaning back and stretching up to grab the tips of branches in their beakl
ike mouths, grinding them slowly from side to side.

  The male stopped feeding and turned. He swung his elegant head from left to right, searching the edge of the clearing as if he knew he was being watched. His forelimbs rose in a defensive pose, hanging forward like a boxer’s, but in place of gloves, he had long, spiked thumbs ready to stab any attacker. The creature sniffed, listened for a moment, then turned back to grab another mouthful of leaves.

  Henry looked at his mother, but she did not move. She simply turned her heavy, scaly head towards him, and then back to the clearing. The moonlight glinted on her teeth. This was to be his first hunt.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and jerked his head back to focus on the camptosaur group. The adults were too large, and he could not hope to bring them down, but the youngsters were about his size, and with their heads deep in the ferns at ground level they were less alert to danger.

  He took a cautious step forward, poking his head into the clearing. Instantly, the big male swung around to face him. Both adults began to bay wildly and swing their thumb spikes threateningly, and the two youngsters ran and cowered behind them.

  With the element of surprise gone, a more experienced hunter would have known to give up any hope of a kill. But Henry was not an experienced hunter. He launched himself into the clearing, snapping his jaws, then ducked as a thumb spike hooked over his head and had to leap to the side to avoid the male’s massive tail.

  Realising the danger he was in, Henry tried to turn and run back to the safety of the woods. But the two giants stepped forward to block his way, cornering him in an area of the clearing where the thick tree trunks made escape impossible. He backed up and opened his mouth as threateningly as he could, but on their back legs, the adults were twice his height and five times his weight. The male reared up and twisted his body, ready to bring down his spiked thumbs in a crushing blow.