Read Online Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher - Free Book Online Page A

careers come across something as amazing as this. This time no one’s going to get in my way.”
    She gave him a hard look and stepped back down into the central area. “Go and put the kettle on.”
    In the dingy trailer, he filled the kettle and banged it on the stove in fury. She couldn’t speak to him like that! He didn’t need her stupid job and he couldn’t care less about her stupid career. Unable to find the matches, he slammed the drawer in disgust and leaned on the drain board, glaring out of the tiny window. Then he turned around.
    First he closed the trailer door and slipped the catch. Next he went into the office. There was a desk with papers all over it, a finds tray with pieces of bone, a scatter of tools. Invoices and bills were pinned to notice boards. Near them was a hook and on it were keys.
    Rob glanced out the window. No one had come through the metal fence. It struck him for a moment that the metal fence was doing the same job as the wooden timbers had done centuries ago: keeping the unwanted people from seeing the mysteries inside.
    He turned back, and took down the keys.
    The one for the gate was large, easy to find; he’d seen Marcus open up with it in the mornings. But if he took it, they’d know.
    He put the key back with the others and opened a drawer. Papers. Pens. A box of clips, erasers, pencil stubs. A brown manila envelope with THURSTAN’S LOCKSMITHS . That shop was by the bus station in Swindon. He tipped the envelope up, and a key slid out.
    It was the spare.
    â€œRob! Can you bring me some plastic bags?”
    Jimmy had his head around the fence; instantly Rob shoved the key in his pocket, the envelope to the back of the drawer, and slid out into the kitchen. “No problem!” he yelled, grabbing the matches from the table and cracking one into blue flame. “And the tea’s nearly made.”
    All afternoon the key seemed heavy in his pocket. When he managed to forget about it, it stuck in him as he knelt or stretched stiff legs. Clots of peat fell from his sleeves, trouser knees, from the silver foil Maria had put around his packet of sandwiches, from the handle of the chipped tea mug. His hands were black, his nails clogged. As his temper cooled, guilt clogged him too.
    He began to wish he hadn’t taken it. Could he get it back without anyone seeing? Or maybe it would just be easier to tell Vetch he hadn’t been able to get it, he thought. But the poet had an uncanny way of knowing things. About Chloe, for instance.
    Hour by hour, the soil level dropped. By four o’clock the timber fence was a meter deep and still they hadn’t found the bottom. Crouched in the heat, Rob smelled the enclosing rotting smell of peat; he pulled out a lump with his hands and it cracked open.
    A small, gleaming beetle lay within, perfectly preserved.
    He smiled, and touched it, and then almost crushed the thing with a convulsion of shock.
    The beetle moved. It crawled onto his wrist and stood poised.
    It uncreased small wings and flew away.
    Rob looked around.
    There were hundreds of them. He could see them now. They were crawling out of the buried henge, out of the heaps of soil in buckets and barrows. The air was alive with tiny whirrs and flashes of iridescent carapace, bronze, gold, green as shiny foil.
    Like the bird, like whatever had made that hole, they were emerging.
    â€œDo you think,” he said later to Father Mac, sitting in the presbytery garden picking soil off his hands, “that Chloe will ever wake up?”
    The priest’s large sandaled feet crossed at the ankle. Lighting a cigarette, he flicked a glance at Rob. As usual, he showed no surprise. After a while he said, “It’s possible. At least things will change.” He shook the match out. “Chloe’s condition is a mystery. None of them understand it, even that specialist your mum flew in. It’s a freak situation.”
    â€œThat word