Read Online Humpty's Bones by Simon Clark - Free Book Online

has to be lifted above shoulder height before being dumped at arm’s length. Eden’s shoulders ached. Her arms had almost locked solid with exertion. The friction of the bowl against her fingers made the skin sore. Meanwhile, dirt from Humpty’s grave smeared her hands. Her head rose above the lip of the pit before dipping below. At times she felt like a whale coming up for air before submerging again. The earth she shifted was more wet paste than individual grains. Each time her head lifted above ground level she sighed with relief at breathing fresher air. The wet odours of the pit bottom weren’t appealing in the slightest. The outside world beyond the garden seemed uncannily distant now. As if the wall and the gate formed a barrier to a realm that she’d left behind. On the wall, very faded, but just legible, graffiti issued the brutal command: Go To Hell! Under normal circumstances, Eden would have noticed such unsettling vandalism straightaway, especially in this quiet rural garden; however, it was a measure of her anger at not being picked up by her aunt from the station that she missed it entirely when she first arrived. This place had that effect on one’s emotions - it inflamed them. What’s more, she mused, did the graffiti suggest that Heather had fallen out with one of her neighbours?
    ‘I’m going to end up living out my life in this hole,’ she murmured, half inebriated by the intense aroma of Humpty’s grave soil. Maybe it was once a wine cellar in ancient times. So much spilt wine soaked into the ground; amphorae of fermented grape; it’s still here. Making me dizzy. Sending me daft as a loon... She swayed, unsteady on her feet. Now I’m lying in long grass... stalks become vines that threaten to strangle me. There is a river. And in that water are pear-shaped vessels... black liquid fills them... through the membrane I see shapes; they are squirming, all turning and squirming and pulsating... tiny arms... eyes that glare out at me... The way the dream-like sequence oozed through her head induced a swirl of vertigo. Where had those images come from? Is this place sending me crazy? It must be the lack of air in this Godforsaken pit. Oxygen deprivation. Exertion. That, and knowing that Dog Star House is going to burn, too. Just like my apartment burned... Dear God. What had made her think such a terrible thing? Eden reached out both hands to dig her fingertips into the dirt sides of the pit. For an instant it seemed to her that she needed to grip the Earth itself. If she didn’t, she might slip away from reality entirely, never to return. ‘You’re not used to exercise, my girl. You’ve let yourself go. Now, pull yourself together.’ She’d spoken in a jokey way, imagining that it was her old gym mistress, scolding her again for lacking in gusto. Back then Miss Jericho briskly chided all her students for lacking ‘gusto’.
    Eden closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. She pictured Miss Jericho standing there in that white tracksuit she always wore, whistle in hand, and demanding that her girls scale the ropes again: ‘But this time, when you climb, put some ruddy vinegar into it!’
    When Eden continued digging, she put ‘some ruddy vinegar into it’, whatever that meant.
    At the next dip of the bowl she glimpsed a hard object in the goo. ‘No, don’t you escape. You’re my treasure.’ She grabbed the piece of metal before it sank back into the mud. Gratefully, she lifted her head into fresher air. Here it was brighter, too, allowing her to examine her find. Little larger than her fingernail, another Roman coin. One side had become pretty much corroded beyond the point of no return but the reverse was remarkably clean. It revealed the profile of a bull-necked man with bulging eyes. ‘Hail, Caesar.’ She smiled, although it still felt goofy. The pong of the hole took her high as the stars.
    ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’
    The sudden voice gave her a jolt. She spun in