There was a deafening bellow as his mother broke cover behind the two camptosaurs. Immediately, they lumbered around to face the new attacker standing between them and their young. On the other side of the clearing, the two youngsters leapt back in surprise and fled into the woods.
The camptosaur adults squared up to Henry’s mother. Although she could easily bring down either of them alone, together they formed a fearsome wall of muscle and bone, four spiked thumbs swinging dangerously and unpredictably in front of them.
Behind them, Henry kept his distance from the swinging tails, watching his mother between the giants’ flanks. He saw her snap her jaws at one, then the other, then draw back, studying their movements for a sign of weakness, or a gap between the flailing limbs.
He watched her rear up and take a step forwards, jabbing with her own front claw. As the male swung his body to fend off the blow she flung out the razor-sharp talons of her other arm, carving a deep gash into his shoulder. The male recoiled, while the female camptosaur brought her own claw up, slicing through the air a whisker away from his mother’s soft throat.
Henry scanned the perimeter of the clearing for a spot where the trees were thinner, and edged sideways. The camptosaurs didn’t seem to notice. The male was fighting one-handed now, but had turned slightly, so that his great tail was ready to swing. Henry’s mother eyed it warily. One blow could knock her over or break her leg. She followed its movement, waiting for the right moment to attack, mouth wide open, ready to strike.
Henry saw his chance and broke for the edge of the clearing. The whip-like end of the female’s tail caught him across the side of the head as he ducked underneath it, but he kept running and she didn’t seem to notice. He heard a loud roar and a crash from behind him, but he didn’t stop or turn. He simply dodged between the trees and kept running until the sounds of the fight disappeared into the background noise of buzzing and chirping insects.
Finally, he stopped. The trees were dark, but the smells were heavy and deep. Instinctively, his mind began to untangle them, separating one from another, sorting plant from animal, water from rock, building himself a picture of the jungle he could not see. He stood motionless, his tail rigid, balancing his body, his head low but alert. His claws clenched and unclenched slowly. Underneath the forest’s smell was another scent. It drifted through the trees towards him.
It was the smell of prey.
He listened, trying to isolate his target among the forest’s sounds and smells, tuning out the insects and rotting plants and the rustling of the leaves in the high branches. Suddenly, there it was – a low baleful moan, the unmistakable sound of distress. A young camptosaur. It must be one of the youngsters that had fled into the forest. And now it was alone, lost and vulnerable. It was calling for its mother, but its mother would not be coming.
He ran silently towards the sound, his feet deftly picking their way between fallen branches. Soon he saw it through the trees. The young camptosaur was tired and slowing down, wailing out its long, low cries. He knew he would have to act fast or he would not be the only predator determined to make this kill. His heart surged and he felt his body fill with a strange fury.
Without pausing, he ran straight at the camptosaur and leapt. The claws of both arms sunk deep into its back and he brought down his open mouth hard on the back of the creature’s fleshy neck. It was over in seconds. The camptosaur gave a strangled cry and dropped to the ground as though its legs had suddenly lost all their strength. He held on tightly until there was no movement left and his prey’s heavy chest sank for the last time as its final breath rattled from its lungs.
He fed quickly and greedily, swallowing chunks of raw meat. The smell of the kill would soon attract scavengers and many would be larger than him. After every mouthful, he raised his head to listen and sniff the air before sinking his head back into the carcass to tear off another chunk of flesh.
By the time the first light of the sun began to show through the trees, dappling the ground with orange streaks of light, he had eaten his fill. He left the dead camptosaur to be picked clean by ants, flying scavengers and the tiny feathered dinosaurs that roamed the forest floor. He crept into a thicket to rest, but his ears remained sharply tuned to the sounds of the jungle. Slowly, he became aware that below the humming and squawking of the Jurassic dawn chorus, something else was coming his way. Heavy feet were being placed one in front of the other with the practised care of a predator.
He shifted his position slightly and raised his head so that he could look out over the tops of the ferns without being seen. Between the trees he could see a large, dark shape: a great head, sharp claws and a long, solid tail. It moved slowly closer, the head swinging slowly left and right.
It was his mother. She was searching for him.
His first thought was to run to her side. He took a step, then paused. From deep within him, another instinct was rising. He had watched her hunt, and shared her kills, but now that time had passed. Today he had killed. Now he was a predator too.
He watched from the ferns as her huge bulk moved past, her teeth still glistening with blood. Her sharp eyes scanned the forest but did not see him. Her tail swung slowly from side to side as she passed on into the darkness.
Chapter 7
Henry Marchant 1898
The sharp rays of the rising sun pierced through Henry’s eyelids and into his dream, waking him suddenly. He felt cold. Cold and uncomfortable.
He opened his eyes. A vertical strip of sunlight framed solid blackness and he blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Waiting to see the outline of the heavy curtains, the window. His bedroom.
His feet were freezing. He reached down to touch them and his hand recoiled. They were caked with mud.
A sick feeling grew in his stomach. His heart began to pound. He had walked in his sleep before, but he had never left the house. What had he done? Where had he been?
His hand dropped to the mattress of his bed. It was as hard as stone. No, it was stone. He sat upright. He was not in his bedroom.
His eyes began to adjust to the light. One wall was stone, crumbling, dusted with ancient ash. The opposite wall was rock and earth. He was sitting on a rough stone floor, at the foot of a set of deep steps leading up to a solid stone doorway. But there was no door. Just a block of stone which had once sealed the entrance, but which was now leaning open, propped against a tree, leaving the hole through which he must have entered in his sleep.
This doorway was familiar to Henry. It was covered in moss. Strands of ivy hung on the outside like a curtain. The frame of the door was carved from long, thin solid blocks and decorated with carvings of strange creatures. Some were rough. Others were more intricate and detailed. It was as though many builders from different eras had been competing, carving over and around each other’s work.
Henry knew this place well, at least the outside of it. It was the old tomb deep in the woods above the village. He and his school friends told stories about it. They had studied its odd patchwork of different types of stone and carvings, but it had always been sealed. The stone in the doorway had rocked tantalisingly when they had pushed on it, but it had never tipped open. They had always been too frightened of what might lie inside to try any harder to break in.
But now the great stone was leaning outwards. And here was Henry. Inside.
There was something else, too.
Where the sun glanced across the wall of rock and earth, it cast long shadows, bringing every indentation and detail of the stone into sharp relief. Henry stared at it, unable to move.
The huge eye. The massive skull. The curved serrated teeth. It was hypnotic and terrible.
The tiny spiral of the fossilised shell had been enough to make him ask questions in his mind. It had cracked open a door and filled him with doubt. But this… This was too big. It left no room for doubt. What Henry felt now, surging under the fear and dread, was pure, confident certainty. And it changed everything.
His father was w
rong, completely and utterly wrong. And the woman in the grey dress was right.
Henry climbed out of the tomb with his head spinning. Using all his strength, he tipped the stone back into place. It wobbled and rocked as it always had. Perhaps it had only ever needed a push in the right direction to topple it out of position.
Henry reverently draped the ivy back over the entrance and set off home in his nightclothes.
It was only just dawn and luckily there was nobody else about. As he made his way down towards the vicarage, he could see no lights on in the house. The back door was ajar – obviously that was how he had left it during his sleepwalk. He ran out of the trees, across the empty cart-track and into the garden.
Good. All the curtains were still tightly shut. But he knew his father sometimes rose early to sit and work in the dining room on the other side of the house. If he was up, Henry knew he would be in deep trouble. He slipped in through the door and closed it as quietly as he could. The hinge creaked and the latch clicked loudly.
Henry held his breath and listened, but the house was silent. Eventually he dared to move again, tiptoeing across the kitchen and peering around the hall door. His eyes went immediately to the dining room. The door was open, but the room was in darkness. The curtains were still closed. That meant his father was not yet up. He breathed again.
There were two ways back up to his room: the main stairs, which would take him right past his parents’ bedroom door; or the back stairs, which would take him closer to his own door, but which were old, loose and noisy.
Henry decided on the back stairs. He closed his eyes for a second and tried to remember which steps were the troublemakers. The first was fine, the second and third creaked if you trod on the left-hand side. He stepped cautiously upwards. The next three steps were good and solid, but then, on the seventh, there was a creak on the right followed by a creak on the left of the next step… or was it the other way around?
Gently, he lowered his foot onto the left of the seventh step. No sound. He put his full weight on it and suddenly the stair let out a loud groan. He jumped back and waited for the sound of a door opening.
There was a long silence.
Henry tried again, this time stepping on the other side, and crept upwards. The final two steps were both completely loose. He would have to jump. He grasped the carved wooden pineapple at the top of the banister and pulled hard on it as he leapt, clearing both steps and landing with a muffled thud at the top of the stairs. He smiled to himself in satisfaction, but when he let go of the banister, it gave a loud crack as it shifted back into place.
Again, he waited, his eyes fixed on his parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall. Just as he was about to move again, he heard the sound he had been dreading. The sound of bedsprings pinging, followed by a creak of floorboards. Then came footsteps padding across the room.
His bedroom door was only three paces away and it was wide open. He leapt towards it, landing in the middle of the hallway. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his parents’ door handle turning. Skidding across the polished floor, he raced through his own door. He almost closed it behind him, then spun around to grab the handle and twist, pushing the door silently into place and releasing the handle carefully so that the latch let out only the tiniest click.
In the moment before the door shut, Henry saw his father framed in the doorway at the far end of the corridor. But he was looking back into his own room, not out into the hall. Henry had made it.
Henry was dressed for school and at the breakfast table exactly on time. In fact, he had been awake and watching the clock ever since getting home. His father slowly buttered his toast, scraping the knife back and forth until the butter vanished into the bread. A plate of cold meat sat at the centre of the table on a decorated china plate. Henry and his mother were careful to refrain from taking any until Father had selected his slices of choice.
Henry just wanted the meal to end so that he could leave for school. His father paused and looked at him. Perhaps he sensed that something was wrong. Henry did his best to hold his father’s gaze, but in the end he looked away. He was still afraid of him. Yet something had changed. Yesterday, he had believed everything his father said because he knew more than Henry about the nature of the world.
Today, Henry knew more. Nothing his father said could be taken as the only interpretation of truth again.
‘The more I hear,’ his father’s voice floated across the table towards him, ‘about that school of yours, the less I like it.’ Henry felt an accusation in his tone, as if he were solely responsible for the school, its teaching methods and its attitude towards discipline. ‘The government has done children no good with its meddling,’ his father went on. ‘You should know I am considering other options.’
Henry knew what that meant. It meant being sent away to St Mary’s. The mere thought made him shiver. St Mary’s was more terrifying than any dinosaur. His own school was strict enough, but he knew it was nothing compared to St Mary’s. His friends’ parents used St Mary’s as a threat. One whisper of the name was enough to make a naughty child behave.
The children of St Mary’s were silent, humourless and blank. He’d seen them in town, walking in rows, heads bowed. Every spark of character erased from them. It was said that on their way between lessons they marched in time, and even at meals, they sat in silence. St Mary’s had only one purpose for its students. Every graduate, or at least every graduate that anyone talked about, had a single calling. Every pupil that served his full term joined the church.
Henry felt a strange fury rising in his stomach. He knew it would be pointless, but he had to speak. He opened his mouth with no idea what he was going to say, but something stopped him.
His father was looking straight past him, his expression changing. His eyes widened, and his mouth was agape in horror or anger. He slowly rose to his feet.
Henry turned and followed his father’s gaze. He was staring out into the back hallway, and there, clearly outlined on the polished wooden floor, were muddy prints of Henry’s bare feet. Between them, fallen leaves and sticks were scattered.
‘What is this?’ Henry’s father leapt up from the table, and strode over to the offending marks. Henry stammered, unable to speak.
His father’s eyes traced the footprints on to the stairs and upwards. He threw an accusing glance back at Henry and then followed the trail up the stairs, meticulously picking up leaves and sticks as he went. He said nothing, but Henry felt as though his throat was being squeezed hard. He swallowed.
Behind him, he could hear the slosh of water. His mother was already silently scrubbing the floor.
Henry watched his father follow his footprints to the top of the stairs and across the hall into his bedroom. By the time Henry got to the door, his father was already bending over the bed. He cursed himself for leaving the muddy trail on his way in. With all the curtains closed and the house in darkness, he hadn’t noticed the trail of muck behind him. But at least he knew the bed itself was clean. He hadn’t got into it since he returned from the forest. He had the worst of it now.
Suddenly, his father bent forward, reaching down and into the bed. Henry’s heart sank as his father took two objects from under the pillow and stood up, staring at them, his face reddening. Henry had been wrong: things were now a lot worse.
His father’s hand shook as he held out the printed pamphlet and the tiny fossilised shell in front of Henry’s face. He said nothing.
‘I…’ started Henry, but his father grabbed his arm and dragged him out of the room. His wrist hurt as he was hauled down the stairs and out through the kitchen into the garden. It was an effort to stop himself falling over as he stumbled across the garden to the woodshed.
Henry’s father stopped abruptly at the door to the shed. Outside, logs for the fire were piled in neat stacks. In front of them, a wide flat stone lay on the ground. Henry used it to hold logs while he chopped them for the fire. Sometimes his father made him chop wood as a
punishment, but not today. This was far more serious. His father released his arm, leaving him standing bewildered in front of the stone block, and stepped into the shed. He didn’t dare move.
When his father emerged, he was holding a large, heavy hammer. Its handle was as long as Henry’s arm. He stood in front of him for a long time, hefting the iron head in both hands. Henry waited, shaking.
After a long pause, his father held the sledgehammer out to him. Henry took it. It was so heavy he nearly dropped it on his foot. It was an effort to stand up straight, but he did, looking his father directly in the eye for the first time. He was as furious as Henry had ever seen him, but still he said nothing.
Henry’s forearm ached under the weight of the hammer, but he refused to let his arm drop. The muscles began to burn with the strain. Eventually, his father bent down and placed something on the flat stone, then stood up again, holding Henry’s eye with his own.
Slowly, Henry looked down. There, on the flat stone, lay the fossil shell. Its coiled ridges stood out in creamy white against the slate surrounding it. Henry lifted his eyes back to his father’s. Again, he said nothing, instead nodding from the hammer to the fossil, and back to Henry. Then he stepped back, expectantly.
His meaning was clear enough and Henry knew there was nothing he could do but obey. He looked down at the delicate shape, took a deep breath and raised the hammer above his head. It was all he could do to lift it.
He paused, his arms shaking, swallowing back tears, then brought the hammer down hard. The fossil jumped on the stone slab, but it didn’t break. He hauled the hammer up again and smashed it down.
This time, the stone cracked from end to end and the slate fell away in pieces. The tiny shell lay completely exposed for the first time in three hundred million years. A perfect geometric spiral. So detailed and beautiful it could have been alive. Henry almost expected to see the hair-thin tentacles of the ammonite within, curling out of the shell to haul it away.
The Skull Page 8
