Chapter 2: Getting back to nature

Chapter 2.  Getting back to nature.

I flicked between various classical music stations on the radio during the long drive up the M11, passing by the patchy fields and small towns of Essex and Hertfordshire, then moving into Cambridgeshire and through the old Cathedral city of Peterborough before reaching the great rural expanse of Lincolnshire.  I try to keep up to date with all the different methods of communication that the Information Age offers us but I have never quite forgotten the sheer magic of the early days of radio; the pleasure of sitting cosily at home and listening to a crackling voice giving news of events in far-away places or of drinking scalding tea with the rest of my platoon while Vera Lynn’s songs promised us that one day all the good things we had left behind would be ours once again. 

Bach, Tchaikovsky and other masters of the classical arts soothed me out of my sulk as I drove.  With the right soundtrack driving can be better for the soul than meditation, trust me; I’ve been doing both for a long time.

The countryside of Lincolnshire is old and vast and relatively unspoilt, the kind of landscape that makes city workers daydream about retirement and property developers drool with unrepentant greed.  Most of my selves, from Mei-Hua to the Fox, couldn’t help warming to the place; I would spend all my time in the countryside if it was possible to stop myself from getting bored there.  My senses, which were kept ruthlessly dialled down in packed, noisy and petrol-stinking London, slowly expanded to take in the gentle sights, sounds and smells of rural England.  The musical chirps and trills birds arguing viciously about territory and mating rights in the trees and hedgerows, the elusive fragrance of wildflowers and the earthy scent of damp loam, herds of sheep, ponies and cows enjoying both the young sweet grass of spring and their own blissful ignorance of such places as kebab houses and burger restaurants.  And of course, my nose wrinkled, the rich and redolent reek of huge quantities of manure.  Ah yes, the other reason why I don’t spend much time outside of cities any more.

By the time I arrived at Farrington, a picturesque little village just a mile away from the stretch of farmland that contained Cinder Hill, I was feeling almost cheerful and, in a burst of Mei-Hua inspired thoughtfulness, stopped to pick up provisions for everyone from the local bakery, which did a decent trade in cakes and hot drinks and savoury snacks for hikers and other visitors passing through the area.  While there I played the interested tourist and quizzed the slender and near suicidally bored teenager behind the counter about the history of the local countryside; he was a native and confirmed, with much eye rolling, that ‘nothing ever happened round here’.  He did allow, after a bit of gentle prodding, that some things had happened ‘in history’ somewhere around this stretch of Lincolnshire.  Nothing he remembered suggested supernatural activity in the area during living memory; no hauntings, no unusual murders, no sightings of big cats or troops of ghostly knights riding on mysterious quests through the gathering twilight. 

That wasn’t necessarily a positive sign.  It could just mean that anything out of the ordinary which had made its home in or near Cinder Hill was good at hiding itself from human eyes.  After all, if you’d asked an East Ender about the building where I live they would not have been able to tell you anything that suggested the presence of an immortal shapeshifting Fox Spirit with powers beyond mortal ken.  I decided to take it as a good omen anyway and jauntily loaded my bag of goodies into the car before driving off to Thistley Pike Farm where the rest of the team were surely waiting for me.

The farm lay at the end of a bumpy and winding country road that made me doubly glad I hadn’t been stupid enough to bring my Ferrari.  The farmhouse proper was a narrow, dour building made of grey bricks with a roof of dark blue slate and high rectangular windows.  Smaller, more modern buildings made of red bricks clustered awkwardly around it, like children not wanting to acknowledge an embarrassing older relative.  I parked at the side of the house next to two other cars and strolled up to the front door with my sack of food held against my chest.  I could hear the others talking inside so I didn’t bother to knock; I just crooned to the lock until it let me in, pushed the door open with one shoulder and walked into the hallway calling out brightly.  “Hi everyone.  I brought lunch!”

Kelly and Professor Moss were playing cards at a gorgeously carved oak table which looked like it might be older than the house itself.  Kelly was 30ish, blonde, shorter than me and slightly plump in a way that is unfashionable these days but would have made her pretty irresistible to many men in many lands throughout history.  She wore a green kaftan, a dreamy expression and a beggar’s fortune in gaudy bangles.  Her scent was a blend of clean hair, essential oils and coconut extract enlivened with a heady cocktail of dried herbs, though I couldn’t tell you if she’d been ingesting the herbs, rubbing them into her skin or mixing them with her hair treatments.  The Professor, who looked like someone had decided to make an old lady out of pipe cleaners and thistledown, wore a mannish shirt and an impressively fashionable pair of jeans, no tweed or leather arm-patches for her.  She smelt of violets, strong coffee and a body that, while still hale and healthy, was slowly losing the battle with age. 

They both put down their cards as I bustled in and gave me unwelcoming looks; plaintive from Kelly and chiding from Bronwyn who went so far as to say.  “You’re late.”  In a somewhat accusatory fashion.

Darren was curled up on a well-worn armchair in the corner of the room with his eyes glued to his tablet.  I knew that within a couple of minutes of walking through the door he would have ferreted out the farmer’s Wi-Fi router, if there was one, and re-connected himself to his first love, the great digital wilderness that we call the Internet.  He did not acknowledge me right away; he was probably raiding or pwning noobs or whatever it is gamer-geeks do when real life isn’t getting in the way of their fun.  Darren originally worked in MI13’s IT department, until he wandered into the evidence wing of the Archives and a whole host of supernaturally charged objects woke up and started clamouring for his attention.  He wore his usual out-of-office outfit; scruffy t-shirt, scruffier shorts and scruffiest trainers.  If a record company had given Darren a make-over, an emergency wardrobe upgrade and a decent marketing campaign then his slimly toned body and combination of chiselled features, floppy chestnut-brown hair and soulful blue eyes could have melted teenage hearts from Boston to Beijing, musical talent notwithstanding.  As it was I’d seen people cross the street to avoid him, presumably in case he tried to mug them or introduce them to Jesus.  His odour, on the other hand, was not offensive even by 21st Century standards; an undertone of young male sweat swamped by the sharp chemical notes of a deodorant spray made from 100% artificial ingredients and a pleasant hint of gun-oil from a concealed weapon somewhere about his person. 

I didn’t bother to explain to the good Professor that she and the rest of MI13 were the ones who were wasting my Saturday; I just busied myself finding plates and handing out sandwiches, a ploughman’s for Kelly who thinks she’s a vegetarian and authentic Lincolnshire sausage and mustard doorstops for everyone else.  Also, crisps, slices of overpriced but delectably gooey chocolate cake, paper napkins and cardboard cups of coffee that was surprisingly good for having been bought in an isolated village in Lincolnshire.  By the time I was done Darren had migrated from the armchair to a place by the table without ever seeming to take his attention off his tablet and everyone had forgotten that they were supposed to be annoyed with me.  I, for my part, magnanimously decided not to take my bad mood out on them, particularly since it was more or less gone now.

Instead I focused on making polite conversation and eating my sandwich, which consisted of thick slices of sausage, crunchy English mustard and a few token wisps of salad held precariously between two slices of chewy, crusty ciabatta bread, with delicacy and dignity, a task which took almost as much concentration and manual dexterity as my morning yoga routine.

When the meal was done, Professor Moss, who was technically in charge, unrolled an old-fashioned looking map of Cinder Hill which had been heavily annotated in her beautiful but barely decipherable handwriting.  After squinting at it carefully for a few seconds I worked out that it was a record of an archaeological dig from the 1950s.  The diggers had found Neolithic remains at the site but also some earthworks and Nordic carvings that suggested at least one more recent burial from around the time of the Viking Invasions, possibly 9th Century.  Then they had stopped digging, though I couldn’t see from Bronwyn’s notes whether that was because their funding had run out, the site had yielded up whatever secrets they thought it held or for some other, more sinister, reason.

Bronwyn let us all study the map for a little while before beginning her briefing, first confirming that we had all read the case notes before filling us in with some more background about the history and folklore associated with the barrow.  Cinder Hill was a Neolithic long-barrow, which made it around five to six thousand years old and meant that we knew virtually nothing about the beliefs or meta-natural abilities of its builders or the people they had interred within it. 

Being an expert on folklore and history as well as archaeology Bronwyn had been able to learn more about the area’s past than I had, though it still wasn’t very helpful.  A few old legends suggested that during the medieval period witches had gathered on the hill to cavort lewdly with the devil and dance naked ‘neath the winking stars’ but you could find similar stories about half the hills, woods and oddly shaped rocks in Lincolnshire alone, let alone the rest of the British Isles.  No one knew for certain where the name ‘Cinder Hill’ had come from although there was a story about a one-eyed grey-skinned blacksmith who had lived in the barrow an unspecified number of years ago; most locals seemed to think that the name came from the piles of slag that built up around his forge.  No evidence of iron-working had been found by the archaeologists who visited the barrow in the Fifties but they had been amateurs by modern standards, (here the Professor and I shared a look of disdain for previous generations of archaeologists and their clumsy looting ways).  Faeries were reputed to live in the barrow and lure naughty children into its depths where they were forced to work as slaves and had their hair regularly sheared as though they were sheep; there were no official records of children going permanently missing in the area however, barring the odd runaway escaping an abusive home. 

At this point I interjected that most of the races which humans would call ‘Faeries’ disliked burial grounds and would only visit them for very specific reasons, certainly not to set up home in them.  Nor did I know of any such beings that really needed an endless supply of human hair, although in truth the average human toddler finds it easier to understand the difference between ‘I need’ and ‘I want’ than most Fey do.  (Don’t you understand Inari?  I needed to cut their arms and legs off so their bodies would fit in the decorative vases. And I needed to sew their mouths shut so I could hear the sound of the bone flutes playing as the fawnkin danced merrily around them to celebrate the Winter Solstice). 

Bronwyn gave me a nod, one expert to another, before carrying on with her info dump.  The hill was owned by the farmer whose house we had commandeered and was not open to the public, it had taken quite a lot of shouting and threats of massive fines and prison sentences to convince the farmer and his partner to let the team onto their land at all.  (I didn’t ask what the team had had to do to turf the farmer out of his own house, as long as he wasn’t buried in the cellar or dissolving in an acid bath out back I didn’t have much sympathy for him; his kind and mine are not traditionally on the best of terms).  But a few daring souls had trespassed on the hill in recent memory and lived to tell the tale, several of whom had reported a sort of grinding sound like stone rubbing against stone coming from within the barrow itself.  Most had also felt a thrill of fear while walking along the hill but that could have had something to do with the fact that they were trespassing on the land of a shotgun wielding farmer with a privacy fixation.

For his part Darren laid his tablet in the centre of the table, always keeping and least one hand on it like a slightly paranoid dog with a bone, and showed us various pictures of the barrow’s interior and exterior which he had dug out of the internet.  These pictures were utterly boring, let’s not dwell on them.

“Venus is in the ascendant.” Kelly commented out of nowhere in her lugubriously nasal Birmingham accent.  We all looked at her with varying mixtures of weary patience and genuine interest, waiting to see if she would explain why this was relevant to anything.  For all her enthusiastic acceptance of pseudo-eastern philosophy, astrology, faith healing, the wisdom of flowers and birds, homeopathy and every other kind of mystical nonsense on the market, Kelly genuinely possesses powers which let her sense things that are hidden from ordinary mortals and even some immortals.  So while you will often wish you that you hadn’t listened to Kelly, if you find yourself in a job like ours you can’t afford not to. But our resident psychic had apparently finished her revelations for the moment and met our collective gaze with the bottomless stare of her limpid green eyes, clearly believing that we should all understand the significance of the planet Venus to the task of hunting omens in a Stone Age gravesite.

I had nothing to add at this point and no one wanted to be drawn into a conversation about Venus so we all left the farmhouse and packed into the Professor’s stately old car. Thus began a short and muddy drive across two fields and around one herd of cows who looked as though they resented our intrusion almost as much as their owner did.  In my younger days I might have turned their milk sour to teach them a lesson in good manners, or simply for something to do, but I’ve long since learned how stupid and dangerous acts of casual cruelty are and anyway cows don’t actually care about the quality of their milk unless they have calves to feed.

Instead I sat up front and chatted to Bronwyn about her grandchildren and my archaeology course, we were studying the Mayans at the moment, while Darren listened to hip-hop through an unfeasibly large pair of headphones he had probably borrowed from the office and Kelly peacefully enjoyed her own inner harmony, which I suspect sounds like a mixture of Celtic harp music and Korean teenie-pop.

We reached the foot of Cinder Hill without experiencing any meta-natural incidents or bovine shenanigans, parked and climbed out of the car.

Professor Moss paused before getting out and fiddled with the dashboard until a secret compartment clicked open, revealing a small bottle of high quality Scots whiskey and a pair of little black Sig-Sauer semi-automatic pistols with matching shoulder holsters.  She strapped one of the weapons to her own skinny frame and offered the spare to anyone who was not already armed.  Darren confirmed that he had not left his standard issue military side-arms behind while I refused the offer with my best ‘harmless little Chinese girl’ smile and the words.  “Oh no thank you; I don’t like guns.”  The Professor gave me what humans would call an old-fashioned look but didn’t press the point, instead settling for leaning back into her car and fishing a long metal torch out of a completely unconcealed compartment in one of its doors. 

All MI13 operatives are trained to use handguns in the same way that they are all trained to make a near-perfect circle out of consecrated salt; some MNPs just respond to those methods.  But it was no secret within the department that I could take care of myself, even if this was officially my first field mission for British Intelligence.  Kelly is also excused from carrying any weapon with moving parts as she has been known to manifest uncontrolled bouts of mild telekinesis when under stress; no one wants to carry out a mission with someone who could literally shoot herself in the foot by accidentally pressing a couple of little levers with her mind.

Darren unpacked some technological looking things from the boot of Bronwyn’s car and strapped them to his torso.  I recognised, with a little jolt of annoyance, the combination of body camera, data uplink and satellite phone that MI13 operatives use to record and transmit data back to the departmental headquarters.  That would have been fine except for.

“Good afternoon team.  I trust you are all prepared and ready to carry out your orders.”  Gregory’s rich caramel-and-cream voice crackled out of a speaker which was now positioned beneath the camera strapped onto Darren’s shoulder.

One by one we all had to give our call-sign and reply that, yes; we were quite ready thank you.  I hadn’t bothered to learn my call-sign which led to a brief lecture about the importance of following correct procedure that could have evolved into a longer diatribe about the recent decline in Standards if there hadn’t been some spontaneous and quite inexplicable interference on the line.  I smiled at Kelly when that happened and she replied with a blank expression and the faintest trembling of one eyelid which some people could have interpreted as a wink.  By the time contact had been restored Gregory had lost his train of thought and we were allowed to get on with our investigation without further scolding.

So we walked most of the way up the hill until we found the entrance to the barrow, a narrow rectangular opening framed on three sides by slabs of greyish lime-stone, and stood around it in a loose and wary semi-circle.  All eyes turned once again to Kelly, who frowned deeply and said.  “Dust, dust so old it doesn’t even remember dying.  The stones are more alive than the graves.  The whole thing feels restless and … hungry, like it wants us to go inside.”

The Professor flicked a glance at me.  I maintained a look of calm serenity and slipped a hand into my shoulder bag, fingers flicking over various packets and occult implements until they closed around a short willow switch cut from a tree that had grown in an Otherworldly forest nourished only by moonlight and the bones of giants.  The wood was faintly cool to the touch, despite the slight warmth from the weak spring sun. 

I held the switch out towards the barrow and sang a few words in a dead language from central Africa.  I didn’t need to use mortal magic to learn about the barrow, like all Kitsune my spirit is not as closely tied to my body as those of most humans are, so I could have just reached out a tendril of consciousness and probed the structure that way.  But it’s very difficult to protect yourself or conceal your nature when you are effectively poking something with the very essence of your being.  Think of it like this; a forensic investigator could lick a dirty needle to see what kind of toxins they could taste on its surface, but it would be a lot more sensible for them to just scrape the dirt into a jar and run some chemical tests on it.

Divination is not as straightforward or safe as good forensic science, though I personally find it a lot easier to understand.  The willow rod acted as a kind of metaphysical tuning fork, letting me sort through the magical energies in the area while remaining fairly insulated from them.  Hopefully anything malevolent, or grumpy or bored, inside the barrow that took exception to my intrusion would curse, possess, ignite or banish the willow switch rather than me.  Hope springs eternal but Fate likes to piss in that spring from time to time, so I was still very much on edge as the switch began trembling in my hand.

Nothing horrible reached across the spiritual plane to annihilate me as I listened to the willow’s song.  After concentrating absolutely for about half a minute I replaced the switch in my bag and smiled wanly at the others.  “The barrow is definitely magically active compared to the surrounding landscape.  Though if there is a sentient supernatural being in that hill then it’s either dormant or not something I recognise.  The good news is that the barrow is not currently a portal to an Otherworld.”

There was an awkward silence.  The Otherworlds are a touchy subject for the operatives of MI13 for historical reasons.  For centuries the supernatural scene of the British Isles was policed, or ruled if you prefer, by a sometimes fragile alliance of secret societies that had strong ties to kingdoms and Powers in several of the Otherworlds and extensive knowledge of many others.  Some-time in the early 20th Century one or more of these societies convinced the British government to create MI13 as a liaison between these groups and the British military.  MI13 quickly developed into a useful attack dog that the both societies and the government could set on things they didn’t like when they didn’t want to risk their own people or endanger their delicate relationship with other occult powers.  Things carried on fairly smoothly until the 1960s when every single member of the alliance disappeared off the face of the earth and almost all records and memories of their existence were wiped out, even the names of the societies they belonged to. 

This left MI13 with a sort of institutional shell-shock, a generation of operatives with appalling gaps in their long-term memories and a hastily drawn up mandate to somehow keep a lid on several nations-worth of supernatural weirdness on their own.  All this despite the fact that the department’s knowledge of occult matters and Otherworlds had just been reduced to the point where it could have fitted onto the pages of a tourist guide to the Forbidden Palace, for children. 

To my knowledge the British government does not currently have a relationship with anyone in any of the Otherworlds and MI13’s leading expert on these shadowy realms which cling to the true Earth, yours truly, knows what’s good for her and has managed to reveal remarkably little about their nature and how to reach them, despite many interviews, briefings and a few might-as-well-be-interrogations by Stephen Westlake, who is a vile excuse for a human being.

Oddly, it was Gregory who salvaged the conversation.  He said through the speaker.  “Please proceed with the investigation.”

I beamed at everyone impartially, including the shoulder mounted sat-phone.  “Ok then.  Have we done everything we can for now or did you guys want to go in and have a look round the hungry Neolithic burial ground?”

In some ways I was as out of my depth here as the humans were.  I’ve been around for more than a thousand years but this place was easily four times my age.  Even in my lifetime a number of strange new supernatural species have arisen that did not exist in ages gone by while other, older breeds have been wiped out to the last monster.  I have seen the rise and fall of entire Otherworlds teeming with impossible life in my time.  What kind of alien being might be trapped in a place as ancient as this?  I imagined the vengeful shades of sabretooth tigers and the sleek, primordial shapes of supernatural predators that had once hunted mammoths across the tundra, waiting for us in the darkness below.

Perhaps my colleagues would be similarly imaginative and decide that it wasn’t necessary to explore any further without backup?

No.  Of course they wanted to go in and have a look around; they believed in duty and obligation and patriotism, which are all grander lies than anything I’ve ever told.  Bronwyn led the way as we trooped down into the earth like reluctant school children.  Darren was in front of me and I could see that he held an object in his right hand which I had not encountered before; a large ring or small bracelet seemingly made from amber that warped and shifted as I looked at it, a sure indication of supernatural power.  Outwardly my expression did not change; inwardly I was suddenly a lot more engaged in this pointless little field trip.  I always like to have a new trick up my sleeve and few things are trickier than mystical artefacts.

The air inside the barrow was chilly and oddly devoid of moisture; I could feel minute traces of sweat being leached out of my skin by the thirsty air and I reflected that Kelly had been right about one thing.  The floor was flattened earth of a particularly dusty sort, like crumbling clay; the walls and ceiling were made of piled stones which were so worn, jumbled and tightly packed that I could almost imagine that I was walking through a cave rather than a man-made structure.  Despite this there was room for Darren, the tallest of us, to walk with his head unbowed, although the stones pressed close enough together certain points that we had to move in single file as we followed the harsh beam of Bronwyn’s torch, not that I needed any help to see in the dark.

From the map that the Professor had shown us back in the farmhouse I knew that the barrow was laid out a bit like a flattened out ribcage, with a single central corridor running from the entrance to the far end and long symmetrical chambers branching off from it at irregular intervals.

The Darren-mounted speaker came to life again.  “Proceed with caution.  If you encounter any hostile activity then just get yourselves out.  I’ll call in the extraction team.”  I guess it wasn’t a satellite phone after all, since no satellite on earth could see us now.  I’d have to get Darren to explain to me how MI13’s communications could reach us through solid rock.  Surely a spy agency wouldn’t use radio?

Nothing challenged us or tried to eat us as we slowly checked each chamber in our various ways; Bronwyn looking for significant carvings or any signs of recent disturbance, Kelly opening her mind and waiting for something to fall into it, Darren waving his bracelet in wide, hopeful arcs and me listening to everything with the obsessive care of the born survivor.  I didn’t want to try the willow wand again now that we were inside the barrow; it could cause too much of a disturbance in the supernatural currents around us.  So I drew a cat’s cradle of twine woven from human hair from my bag and twisted it carefully through my fingers as we reached each intersection, hoping to trap any faint wisps of power within its net and identify their source before it manifested and did something horrible to us.  (Don’t worry, no humans were harmed in the creation of that little item, all the donors have to be willing and well for the magic to work).

We came to a largish pair of chambers and Bronwyn led the way into the left hand one, saying.  “Let’s go see Johnny.”

Kelly clearly felt that she was the only one who should be allowed to get away with unexplained announcements because she piped up.  “Who’s Johnny?”

Darren and I exchanged a quick meaningful glance in the half-light of the Professor’s torch, both hoping that our psychic’s almost-reference wasn’t another bad omen.

Professor Moss was unruffled.  “The team that studied this site in the Fifties found what they thought was a Norse burial in this transept.  They decided to call the person who had been interred here ‘Johnny’; it was short for Johnny-come-lately because they believed he was buried at least four thousand years after the original occupants.  I’m quite keen to get a look at him actually; the original team recorded very little about him and I’m not convinced that he, or she, is actually 10th Century at all.  Could be earlier.  Could be an original who just got moved around by grave robbers.”

I felt a little buzz of interest myself.  I took archaeology at Blackfriars because I thought that learning about cultures that were older than me would be soothing after a century of being violently involved in the bleeding edge of human development and conflict.  But I’d found myself becoming genuinely interested in the art of it; so much of what archaeology teaches us comes from the minds of its practitioners as much as it does from the things they dig up.  A team of archaeologists can build a mighty shadow-palace from a couple of broken pillars and some fossilized grain.  So the thought of being involved in a genuine archaeological discovery was just a bit thrilling.  What dreams of bygone ages could I weave from such a discovery for the humans of the future to enjoy?

“Hah!”  The Professor gave a happy little exclamation.  I’d been examining the walls as we passed through the chamber, daring them to do something aggressive.  Now I peered round Darren’s shoulder and saw the end of the chamber; a semi-circular space with an ornate stone sarcophagus in its centre and a man-sized chunk of grey stone on top of that.  The beam of Bronwyn’s torch rested against one side of the coffin, which glowed faintly in the artificial light.  “This is fantastic!  I take it all back.  Those carvings are in the Danish style circa AD 950.  But I’ve never seen them on a burial site before.  The Scandinavian cultures of the time didn’t bury people in stone caskets, not kings nor heroes nor priests, they just didn’t do it.  I’ve heard of one sarcophagus with similar carvings from that period being discovered anywhere in Britain and that was probably a reliquary for a Christian Saint.  Everyone else went into the ground in a wooden box or a cloth sack.”

I thought about one or two of the Scandinavian burial ceremonies I’d attended in ages past but didn’t feel inclined to share my memories of them.  Some things are best left to sleep in the ice.

Bronwyn darted forward, bird quick, the light of her torch shuddering and sending shadows scurrying around the chamber like mice caught raiding the larder.  She knelt by the near side of the coffin and started tracing symbols with her free hand.  “The pictures depict a journey and a battle, that makes sense, I doubt Johnny made such an impression on his contemporaries by moving to Britain to farm or trade with the locals.  I recognise some of these runes; Algiz for protection or opportunity, Hagalaz which refers to natural forces or untamed destructive power, Thurisaz, that’s a trickier one, it could mean chaos or evil or monstrous creatures or it could refer to the god Thor.

The cat’s cradle tightened convulsively around my fingers and I barked out.  “”Bronwyn!  Come back!”

She did not move.  Instead she looked down and said, very quietly.  “Oh dear.  That’s a bother.”

Two dark-hued arms rose out of the stone slab, one caught the Professor by the arm and the other clamped a hand around her throat and began to squeeze.  Silhouetted in the torchlight they appeared to be covered in a patchwork pattern of black and white blotches; not the wholesome tones of living human skin but the putrid and swollen black of grave-dirt and rotting blood spotted with the glistening maggoty white of dead flesh.

The chamber entrance where Kelly, Darren and I were clustered was wide enough for about one and a half people so I had to turn myself to the side and slide through at a fraction of my usual blinding pace to avoid shoving one of them against the unforgiving stone walls.  I called out to the thing we had woken up in an eastern dialect of Old Norse as I went.  “We mean you no harm.  Release my companion and we shall speak together of life and freedom and other good things.”  My eyes stayed on Bronwyn the whole time and I saw the moment when her sparrow-like neck broke under the pressure of the creature’s grip.

‘Johnny’ rose out of the stone that had trapped it as easily as you or I might climb out of a bath.  It had clearly been human once, now it was a bloated, white-eyed corpse with over-long nails and jagged yellow teeth.  Any clothes it had been buried with had not survived its long internment and there was no doubt that it was male.  It, he, stepped onto the stone floor tentatively, studying his feet as he went, as though walking was something new and strange, or old and long forgotten.  When he raised his head and saw us though he let out a long burbling shout that might have been an attempt to communicate or could just have been the triumphant call of a hunter sensing fresh prey.  The Professor’s body was flung casually aside as the dead man took a couple of stumbling steps toward us, hands outstretched.

I hear Gregory say firmly but with awful calmness.  “Get them out of there Inari.”  It was the kind of order I could live with, hopefully.

I’ve had useful conversations with more monstrous beings.  If he hadn’t just murdered a kind and clever colleague of mine I might have been inclined to give the hideous walking dead thing the benefit of the doubt and try talking to him again, maybe speaking in Saxon or a different dialect of old Norse this time.  Instead I slipped the cat’s cradle into a pocket, sprinted forward and threw myself into a flying kick aimed straight at Johnny’s head.

I have spent many lifetimes studying and perfecting the ancient and noble art of kicking people in the face.  Some experts will tell you that it’s all about the angle of the strike or the style of jump you power it with.  If you give them the chance they will argue endlessly about the relative merits of the lotus technique or the butterfly kick.  Others go on about balance or speed of motion and more than a few will focus on the face itself and the various fracture points or vulnerable soft bits you should be aiming for.  All those things are important in their own way.  But I can tell you that the real secret to a truly effective kick in the face is wearing the right shoes for the job.  My shoes were custom made with modern state-of-the-art padding on the inside and wonderfully old fashioned, heavy duty steel toe-caps on the outside.  My armoured right foot hit the dead man under the jaw with enough force to shatter bone and spray teeth across the room like confetti.

Which made it all the more upsetting when that foot rebounded with a soggy thunking noise and the dead man barely rocked back on his heels from the impact.  There was a small dent under his chin that hadn’t been there before but otherwise he appeared unharmed; he was clearly not made from conventional flesh and bone anymore.

I landed lightly on the parched earth floor and snapped a couple of hard jabs into the creature’s distended throat, more out of sheer adrenaline-fuelled optimism than the belief that it would actually help, then ducked to avoid the inevitable riposte.  My unprotected knuckles sparked with pain as though I’d just punched a nest of old tree roots as the dead man’s arms swept over me like the flailing limbs of an over-affectionate drunk.

I stayed low and skittered a few steps back, kicking up puffs of dust in my haste, and pulled a small curved blade from the sleeve of my blouse.

The roar of a handgun going off behind me was appallingly loud in the confined space of the small stone tomb and somehow worse when it sounded again a heartbeat later.  I looked back and froze for a half second while my mental image of Darren as a helpless new-born cub warred with the sight of him standing in a classic firing stance; feet set a shoulder length apart, knees ever so slightly bent, revolver held out towards the target by both hands with one eye peering down the sights. 

My body is sometimes more quick witted than my mind so I had spun myself out of the immediate line of fire and started circling back to the entrance before I’d finished thinking ‘it doesn’t matter who’s holding it, never be in front of a loaded gun, idiot.’

In a moment I’d reached the others and risked a glance towards the creature that had killed Bronwyn, hoping that modern ballistic technology had succeeded where exquisite martial arts techniques had failed.

No such luck.  The bullets had penetrated the walking corpse; I could see two trails of inky blood dribbling sluggishly down his belly and chest, but Johnny was still very definitely standing.

A mottled, sausage-fingered hand reached down to paw at one of the wounds and the dead man let loose a great gargling bellow that was most definitely not an attempt to smooth things over and start this conversation again in a spirit of greater understanding.  Still screaming, Johnny took a shaky step towards us like a young foal that was just getting the hang of its own legs; if foals were undead monstrosities that shook off bullet wounds and strangled archaeology professors.

I flicked the safety back into place on Darren’s gun with one hand and shoved him back with the other.  “Run-away fast now please.”  I said urgently to him and to him and to Kelly who was standing behind him doing unhelpful things like crying and making the walls bleed with her mind.

They turned and ran and I loped after them, consciously slowing my movements to avoid bowling them over.  As we skidded round the corner into the main corridor of the barrow I listened to the irregular rhythm of Johnny’s footsteps behind us and decided that they were getting faster and more confident.  Once you master it you never really forget the art of walking, it’s like riding a bike but easier and not so painful if you fall off; I did not want to be around when the dead man remembered how to do it properly.