voice faded away, and the touch of her hand seemed more remote than at any time in his life, Tom turned back to his work.
Richard Parker. That was not his son. He dropped the dog tags and stared at the skull of the body he had uncovered, its crew cut of auburn hair so colourful against the stretched grey skin of its face. Here lay a million stories Tom would never know, other than the lie of Richard Parker's violent death.
He shoved the skeleton aside and delved deeper. He encountered tangles of bones and clothing, and mud- caked hair brushed his hand as he quickly withdrew.
There were too many. He would have to start moving the bodies, sorting them, until he found Steven.
He's not here.
Tom shook his head. Where had that idea come from?
He crawled back and prepared to grab hold of the first skeleton, Gareth Morgan, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan's son, another soldier whose family had buried a coffin filled with rocks or earth or something else they would never know. He wondered whether this boy's family had doubts about the story as well, and whether they had entertained the idea of travelling to Salisbury Plain to honour their son on the tenth anniversary of his death.
Tom looked back toward the fence, half-expecting to see other fathers coming at him with shovels at the ready. But he was still alone.
Gareth Morgan grinned at him. His skull was almost bare of skin, but there was a hint of a moustache still clinging beneath the hollow of his nose. Tom reached out and grasped the skeleton's ribs, heaved, and cried out in surprise as it sprang from the ground with a brief sucking noise. He tumbled forward and threw it ahead of him. It landed with a thump and its arms spread above its head, as if relishing the sudden feel of sunlight on its wet bones. So light, Tom thought, and he realised he had been thinking of it as a man.
Its spine was snapped, several ribs broken off, and one thigh bone was splintered and holed. Another violent death.
Tom moved back into the hole and dragged out Richard Parker, hands beneath the skeleton's armpits, its legs dragging, heavy with wet clothing and the mummified remnants of muscle and skin. He pulled it across to lay next to Gareth Morgan, and the skeletons' arms seemed to entwine, friends together again.
Back at the hole, Tom went deeper. He pulled out more bodies—some of them rotted down to the bone, some still hanging on to a leathery layer of skin or dried brown flesh—investigated the dog tags, moved the bodies to one side, going deeper still, breathing hard and trying not to pay any attention to his heart as it pummelled at his chest, demanding that he rest, cease, stop this insanity.
It was hot. He could blame his madness on the heat, perhaps.
Tom looked at his muddied hands, felt his forehead, spat in his hand and checked his saliva for blood. No disease had taken him. No chemical warfare agent had turned his insides to mush. Perhaps whatever had killed these men had been released to the air, only to bide its time before striking again. Perhaps it would wipe out the world. Right then, the only thing that mattered for Tom was the image he had built in his mind: Steven's dog tags, muddied and cold, resting in his hands.
Leigh Joslin, Anthony Williams, Stuart Cook … none of these were his son. Jason Collins, Kenny Godden, Adrian Herbert… all strangers, all the dead sons of other families. Eight now, and there were more down there, he could see the mess of their bones and skulls and clothing, muddy and damp, he could smell their sweet smell of decay, taste the wrongness of this in the air.
Tom caught sight of the dead men laid out in a row and looked away, unable to believe what he had done. Joslin's head had slumped from its mounting atop its spine. Herbert was missing an arm. Godden's ribs had been smashed, as if something had tried to get inside. Such violence, such death.
The next body he grabbed still wore hair, and dried flesh sunk in between its bones, and its eyes were pale yellow orbs nesting in its skull. Its strange, misshapen skull. Tom frowned and leaned in closer, edging to one side to allow more sunlight to enter the depression in the ground. The soldier's skull seemed elongated, jaw distended, and his teeth must have risen from their roots because they looked too large for the head. His brow was heavy, nose cavity bulging out over the mouth in a canine aspect.
'What the hell … ?' Tom whispered. There was a bullet hole in the back of the skull. Perhaps that accounted for the distortion.
He reached out and grabbed the body's legs, trying to ignore the feel of cold leathery flesh beneath his hands, clammy with moisture. He pulled. The body shifted a few inches toward him then stopped, held fast by something he could not see.
The skull had remained exactly where it was.
'Fuck!' Tom moved sideways to another skeleton, dragging it up the small slope to the expanding pile laid out on the heather above. He checked the dog tag, discarded it—another stranger—and went back for more.
Jo grabbed his hand again. She squeezed tighter and Tom cried out, a wretched exhalation of despair. He looked up at the sky and it was pure, clean, unsullied by death. But though he saw blue, and heard Jo whispering her love for him, he could still feel the slickness of the grave between his fingers.
Have I changed? he thought. Have I changed so much?
He rubbed his fingers together and let Jo go.
'It's all for you,' Tom said, and he looked down again. The strange skull stared at him with its shrunken eyes. The unnatural distance between it and its departed body gave the whole tableau a surreal aspect, and Tom almost pushed the body back close to the head … but its limbs were too long, the ribs too narrow, and why was he doing this? Why was he playing games with himself?
'Steven!' he shouted, and as he dug down again …
He's not here.
Tom wondered when that sensation of being watched had amplified without him really noticing. The buzzards were gone, but the skin of his neck was tingling, set in motion by a gaze he could not pin down.
The weird skull grinned at him through lips shrunken back from the jaws.
'You're dead,' he said, pulling at another skeleton, not Steven, then another, also not Steven.
And that was it. Eleven bodies excavated and spread across the heather, eleven sets of dog tags, and none of them were his son. There had supposedly been fifteen killed; perhaps Steven and the other three missing had been buried elsewhere, or incinerated, or …
Why leave the dog tags? Too dangerous? Too much risk of infection?
Down in the pit, though, there were more. Behind the body he could not move he saw the glint of more bones. He reached underneath and his hands touched something cold, heavy. He tugged the corpse again and heard the chink of metal on metal. He pulled harder and another body slipped from the mud, this one also headless and as deformed as the first. Its skull—left behind—also had a bullet hole behind one ear.
I'm not seeing this, he thought, I've been digging up fucking corpses and now it's getting to me, it's hot, Jo is worried, I'm crying and my tears are distorting everything, I'm just not seeing this!
The dead thing slithered toward him as he pulled, connected to the first headless body by the thick metal chain, and then another, smaller corpse followed it up. Tom stood and backed away, only partially realising that he still had a hold of the first body's mummified legs. He brought the dead things with him, two headless adults and what could only have been a child, also headless, its skull lost somewhere in that rank pit.
He was about to drop the legs, back away, run away, when he saw that the chain was wrapped around another bundle, another corpse. This one still seemed to have its head attached. He pulled again and it popped free of the ground, wet and filthy and yet obviously whole. It was chained to the three headless corpses, the metal wrapped around its chest, under its armpits and between its legs, thoroughly entangled, and Tom wondered why anyone would need to bury a dead person like this.
He faltered only for a second before moving slowly down into the pit again. These bodies were more whole than any of the others he had brought out, mummified rather than rotted, perhaps because they had been buried deeper in the peaty ground. The first skull stared at him as he reached over the two adult bodies, grabbed the headless child's skeleton and pulled it across to himself. He was crying, and moaning, and there was a strange keening sound that took him many seconds to realise actually came from him. The child was as light as a pillow, its body seemingly whole and yet dried out, desiccated. The only thing that gave it weight was the chain. Tom placed the corpse gently between the headless adults, clasped the chain and pulled. He lifted, grunting with the effort, tears and sweat blurring his vision as he tried to make out what was wrong with this thing's head, why it was shaped like that, why it was turning…
