Hard Light (29 page)

“I think so.”

I jumped as something crunched beneath my foot. “What the hell?”

“It's just winkles.” Sam pointed her flashlight. “Dog whelks. See? They'd bring them up from the beach and eat them here.”

I took a step back, looked down to see several bushels' worth of small shells heaped across the packed earth. Each shell was no more than an inch long. Their colors shaded from indigo to gray, with here and there a swath of pale violet that glistened in the faint light.

Most of the shells had been crushed. I prodded at the pile with my boot, then bent to fill my hand with dark fragments.

“That's a lot of work for not much food.” I sniffed, caught a whiff of the sea. “How long ago was this?”

“Thousands of years. There were no farms then, they had to eat whatever they could find.”

“Yeah, but gathering all these tiny shells, then carrying them all the way up here from the shore? There had to be an easier way to get dinner. Aren't there any fish?”

“Sure. Gurnards and pilchards, lots of those. But they might not have had boats. There's even more of them in the fogou—great heaps that come up to here.” She held a hand to her waist. “Maybe they just liked winkles. Like cockles—people still eat cockles.”

I let the shells fall between my fingers. “Maybe.”

“Come over here.” Sam turned to shine her flashlight into an alcove. She sounded somber. “There they are. Poor babies.”

The wan light fell across several white stones. I stepped closer and saw that they weren't stones but skulls—three of them—so small I could have cupped one in my hand, and arranged so that their crowns touched. Carefully placed beside each was what appeared to be an intact, tiny skeleton.

I looked at Sam. “Jesus. What the hell is that?”

“It's an Iron Age burial. Maybe Bronze Age. But I think probably Iron Age. They used to think everything in Penwith was Neolithic, but now they think they're maybe not so old.” Her tone grew slightly smug.

I knelt beside the remains. “Who thinks that?”

“Archaeologists. I read a book about it. And online, I read a lot when I go into Penzance. Julian Cope has this whole website about ancient ruins, it's brilliant. They're everywhere—not intact graves like this one, but longbarrows and burials. If anyone found out about the babies, they'd take it all away and sell it to a museum.”

The words echoed in the passage as she tilted her head to stare at me. Her eyes seemed to have been gouged from her face: When the flashlight caught her pupils they blazed green, like a feral dog's in the night, then receded into shadow.

“They don't belong in a museum,” she said. “They could be my ancestors. They belong here.”

Gingerly I reached to touch one of the skulls. It felt so fragile I was afraid my fingers might pierce it, like a sheet of paper.

But when I picked it up, it had a surprising weight. As I turned to the light, something fell from the skull, jingling as it struck the floor.

“Don't drop it!” cried Sam.

I set the skull back down and scanned the shadows until I saw a glitter beside my boot. I stooped to pick up a delicate, badly tarnished chain of beads. When I held it up, the chain broke. The beads scattered. Sam hurriedly knelt beside me.

“Be careful,” I warned.

I set down the broken chain and swept the gritty floor with one hand. Sam did the same, moving the flashlight back and forth as we searched.

“Here's one,” she said after a moment. “And another…”

I found one of the beads, no larger than a peppercorn, and in a few minutes found three more. Sam searched for several minutes before she gave up and looked at me. “How many do you have?”

“Three.”

“I found four.”

The beads were grimy, black with dirt. I licked my fingertip and rubbed one between thumb and forefinger.

“Bring the flashlight close,” I said.

I held the bead to the light, tightening my fist around the other six, and squinted. “I can't make it out,” I said at last. “Can you see anything?”

Sam bent over my hand. “It's an
A,
” she said. “The letter
A.
”

We looked at each other. Quickly I set the beads on the ground between us and we began to clean the rest.

“This is an
S
!” She held up a second one.

“This is
E.
”

“And
D.
”

Sam set her beads on the ground and trained the flashlight on them. I lined up my beads with the other four. Sam began to read off each letter.

“
S, I, R, E.
” Her voice grew excited. “
Sire
—it says
sire!
Like a king.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. I took a bead and rolled it between my fingers. Like a white peppercorn, or a pearl embossed with the letter
D.
I brought it to my mouth and gently bit down on it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sam snatched at my hand. “Stop!”

“Calm down.” I pushed her away and set the bead back on the ground. “They're plastic.”

“What?”

“They're plastic. It's a name bracelet. A baby's name bracelet.”

I rearranged the letters, and sat back.

“
RESSIDA
?” Sam read the word aloud with a scowl. “That's not even a name.”

“
Cressida.
The
C
is missing.”

I picked up the broken silver chain. It barely circled my thumb, but the letters would have made it long enough to fit around a very tiny wrist. The baby must have been a newborn.

“The links are there somewhere.” I gestured at the surrounding shadows. “And the
C.
The links are so small, they'd be hard to find.”

Sam gazed at the beads, as though waiting for the letters to move into another configuration. Finally she said, “What are they doing here?”

“You tell me.”

I stood, walked over to the three skeletons, and stared down at them for a long time. Whoever had put them there had done so with care: The bones formed a disturbingly beautiful pattern, moon-white against the black floor. The image reminded me of the triskele I'd seen in Iceland, the ancient pagan symbol known as the Gripping Beast.

I removed the lens cap from my camera and glanced back at Sam. “Shine that flashlight on them. Get as close as you can.”

She did. I shot half a dozen pictures before reaching the end of the roll.

“Shit.” I shook my head wearily and wound the film back onto the reel. “I'll tell you one thing: This is not a Neolithic burial.”

“Someone killed them?”

“Unless they crawled in here and fell asleep like that. Yeah, somebody killed them. They might have died of natural causes, but then why bury them in a hidden grave?”

“Poor little babies.” Sam blinked. For an instant I thought she might cry. “How could somebody kill a baby?”

“It happens. Infanticide—some poor girl gets knocked up, she doesn't know what to do, so she keeps the pregnancy secret then kills the baby once it's born. How long has abortion been legal here?”

“I don't know. When do you think it happened?”

“No clue.” I bent to scoop up the beads, put them and the bit of silver chain into my jeans pocket. “My guess would be back when they were making
Thanatrope.
So, forty-something years ago. There were a bunch of teenagers living here, not much older than you are now. I know some of them had kids. One of those kids was your father. He told me that Tamsin and your grandfather had a baby who died in the fire.” I nodded at the skeletal triskele. “Maybe he's one of those.”

Sam crouched to run a hand over a doll-size skull. “Wouldn't it have burned up?”

“Not if it died of smoke inhalation. But I dunno.”

I stepped beside her and felt the two thaumatropes brush against my skin. Almost without thinking I drew one out, pulled the rawhide string over my head, and let it dangle from my hand. The disc turned slowly, displaying first the sparely etched features of an old woman, and then a young girl.

“Have you ever seen something like this?”

Sam stepped to me, her eyes widening. “Sweet! Did you find that?”

“In a manner of speaking. Do you know what it is?” She shook her head. “Okay, I'll show you. It's called a thaumatrope. Watch.”

I wound the disc tightly as Sam held the flashlight a few inches away, snapped it taut so that the disc became a bright blur, the face morphing from old to young. Sam stared, mesmerized.

“I saw it! A face.” She waited for the disc to grow still, then reached for it. “That's fucking brilliant. Can I do it?”

I smiled wryly. “It was probably made in a place like this. Yeah, okay, but be careful.”

She handed me the flashlight, and I observed as she imitated what I'd done, repeatedly winding the string then yanking at each end so that the thaumatrope worked its magic.

“It changes!” she exclaimed. “That's so brilliant.”

Seeing the play of wonder and delight on her face, I felt the hairs on my neck rise: Thousands of years ago, someone had done exactly the same thing, with exactly the same reaction. I thought of Quinn and me in an earlier century on the first day we met, lying on his bed and listening to “Sweet Jane,” the way we'd laughed for pure joy at the opening guitar cords, and how nothing since then had ever recaptured that exultation.

Yet I felt a flicker of it now, watching Sam: mingled joy and anguish at what I'd lost irrevocably. Quinn was gone, and with him whatever scant chance I might have had for a different life.

I looked at the three tiny skeletons on the floor of the barrow. That was all that survived the millennia. Nameless bones and darkness.

“Stop,” I said.

I grasped Sam's arm and held it until she relaxed her hold on the string. I expected her to protest as I took it from her hand and looped it back over my head. She just stared at me with the same obdurate hostility as when I'd first met her in the barn.

I pointed to the central passage. “We need to get back. And I don't think you should bring these dead babies up to anyone, okay? Not unless you want cops crawling over this place like flies on shit.”

“Like I fucking would.”

“Good. Now go—I'll follow you.”

She turned and left the chamber.

 

35

It was full dark when we reached to the house. We hadn't spoken the whole way. If Sam had been a normal teenager, she would have had a mobile clamped to her face, which might have dispersed some of the bad vibes she emanated like static electricity. But if she'd been a normal teenager, she wouldn't have led me across the moor to view three infant skeletons in a Neolithic grave mound. She made a detour by the Highland cow's pen, loping into the shadows.

I had no intention of following her, but I was reluctant to go back into the house alone. I slowed my pace and looked around the yard.

The Land Rover was gone. Besides the dead Alfa, there were no other cars. I walked over to the house and stood in front of the kitchen window, waiting to see if Adrian would appear, or Krishna. After several minutes I went inside.

“Hey,” I called in a low voice, then louder. “Hey, anyone here? Adrian?”

There was no reply. I stomped my boots on the mat, trying to dislodge clumps of mud, and stepped cautiously into the kitchen. “Krishna? Adrian? Anybody home?”

My voice echoed through the cold room.

I dumped my bag on the table and turned on the space heater, opened the ancient fridge, and immediately slammed it shut—it smelled like something had died in there. I glanced around, looking for food or booze, and saw a bottle of Scotch—Talisker—on a high shelf above the fridge. I couldn't reach it, so I started to climb onto the daybed, and noticed Adrian's backpack sitting on the neatly folded blankets.

I glanced outside to make sure the Land Rover hadn't returned, settled quickly onto the daybed, drew the backpack toward me, and opened it. I thrust my hand through socks, underwear, and T-shirts, until I found the oversized book Adrian had shoved in there. I drew it out and set it carefully on the mattress.

As I'd thought, it was a journal, its covers starting to detach because so much stuff had been crammed between them. The pages at the front of the book were dated to the early nineties. I couldn't make much of the sloppy handwriting—some adolescent shorthand that seemed mostly to record the names of DJs and gigs, a few longer notations that involved girls and sex.

At the back of the volume it was much the same, minus the girls and sex, though here the DJs and gigs were ones that Adrian had arranged for various venues throughout London. Scores of newsclippings, postcards, and gig flyers had been crammed between the pages.

Most had to do with music and music festivals. A great many had to do with Poppy Teasel.

Newspaper articles dating to the late 1980s; interviews and reviews and ads clipped from
NME, The Face, SFX;
zines with titles like
Noskirts
and
All Fall Down.
All of these were associated with the release of Poppy's single album,
Best Eaten Cold,
and the tours she did to promote it over the next two years. After that there was the occasional review of a comeback tour. After that, nothing except for a handful of brief “Whatever Happened To?” features, one from the
Telegraph
and another from
Filament.
There were also a lot of grainy pictures of Poppy, cut from newspapers and magazines.

More surprisingly, there was a small clipping from an issue of
Tell Star!
magazine, part of a feature called “Lovestruck.” I remembered the feature—brief, breathless interviews with girls who'd stepped onto the first rung of the rickety ladder of groupiedom—but not this image of Poppy. She couldn't have been older than fourteen, wearing smudged blue eyeshadow, a glittery scarf tied pirate-style over her dark curls, and a deep-cut negligee with purple platform boots.