‘These stone tablets,’ Kim said, ‘I’d like to take them back to the museum with me, see if I can decipher what’s written on them. I’ll get a box and load them up.’
‘Are you sure you feel OK, Kim?’ Perry wanted to know.
She smiled, appreciating his concern.
‘I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘Maybe all this excitement is getting to me.’ She laughed humourlessly, rubbing a hand through her blonde hair.
As she did, she noticed that her hand was shaking.
‘Charles, could you get someone to load up those tablets so I can get going?’ she asked.
Cooper seemed not to hear her. He was gazing at the writing on the wall of the chamber.
‘Charles,’ Kim called again.
He finally managed to tear his attention from what he was reading, but as he looked at her she saw that his face was pale.
He looked vague for a moment, his thoughts elsewhere.
‘Charles, the stone tablets.’
‘I’ll see to it. You leave now,’ Cooper told her, a newly found urgency in his voice.
Kim looked puzzled as, once more, he turned his back on her, his eyes scanning the ancient words before him.
She shuddered involuntarily, feeling as if the horde of skulls were watching her with those gaping eye sockets. A wave of nausea, powerful and unexpected, hit her and she shot out a hand to support herself, her head spinning. She felt her legs weaken, and for a moment wondered if she was going to fall again. Perry put out a hand to steady her, feeling the perspiration that covered her skin. She closed her eyes tightly, fighting back the stomach contractions, gritting her teeth against this new onslaught.
Kim sucked in several shallow breaths and the feeling began to pass. Perry released his supporting hand, alarmed by the ghostly pallor her skin had taken on, but she waved him away.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Really.’
Cooper looked on impassively as she turned and made her way back down the tunnel, the light from her torch gradually disappearing.
As she reached the base of the rope ladder she paused again, listening.
Like a long-forgotten memory dredged up from the back of her mind, she heard again that high pitched wail of agony gradually dying away until it sounded like soft, menacing laughter.
There was little traffic on the road leading into Longfield. It was never a busy route, and at this early hour Kim found that she had the road virtually to herself. The clock on the dashboard showed 7:46 a.m.
Rain, which had begun as drizzle, was now pelting down in large droplets which exploded with such force on the windscreen that the wipers had difficulty keeping it clear.
Kim shivered as she drove, telling herself it was the inclement weather that was making her feel so cold. The heater was turned up high and still the chill persisted. She slowed down, reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled on a pair of woollen gloves.
In the back of the Land Rover the wooden crates were securely tied down. Each one held a precious cargo of relics. She glanced into the rear-view mirror and looked at the two on top of the pile, one carrying some of the bones they’d found in the tunnel, the other filled with the stone tablets. Perry had indeed found twelve of them and each had been carefully packed in the box so that Kim could get them back to the museum in Longfield undamaged.
She drove past a sign which told her that the town was now less than a mile away.
Kim swung the Land Rover around a corner, stepping on the brake when she saw a tractor lumbering towards her, towing a seed distributor. The Massey-Ferguson was about a hundred yards from her, but on such a slippery road, Kim was taking no chances. She pressed down harder on the brake.
Nothing happened.
The Land Rover continued speeding along in top gear, the needle on the speedometer nudging forty-five.
Kim pumped the brake pedal repeatedly, the breath catching in her throat.
Still the vehicle did not slow down.
She was less than seventy yards away from the tractor now.
Kim looked frantically through the misted windscreen, trying to catch a glimpse of the tractor driver, trying to warn him that she was unable to stop. He was just a blur in the rain.
She drove her foot down as hard as she could, feeling the pedal touch the floor.
The Land Rover sped on.
Fifty yards away.
She banged her hooter, trying to warn the farmer to pull off the road, at the same time motioning madly with one hand.
The tractor kept coming.
Forty yards.
She reached for the gear-stick, trying to change down into first, to stop the vehicle that way, but it was useless.
Twenty yards.
If only she could guide the runaway vehicle into one of the banks on either side of the road, she thought, perhaps she could bring it to a halt. But she was travelling too fast and the banks were steep. If she didn’t plough straight into one, then the momentum might well send the Land Rover flying into the air, or overturn it. Or . . .
Ten yards, and now the tractor driver was turning his own bulky vehicle, finally aware that a collision was inevitable.
Kim grabbed the handbrake and wrenched it up. Even that did nothing to halt the breakneck progress of the Land Rover. She thought about jumping, but travelling at over forty-five she stood a pretty fair chance of killing herself.
She heard the tractor’s hooter blaring out a warning and she crossed her arms on the wheel, waiting for the impact, thrusting her foot one last time down on the brake.
The Land Rover skidded to a halt, its rear end spinning round and coming to rest gently against the radiator grille of the tractor.
For long seconds Kim remained hunched over the wheel, her head bowed. Slowly she straightened up, her heart thudding in her chest.
The driver of the tractor was already out of his cab, scuttling across the rain-lashed road towards her.
She opened her door and stumbled out, her face drained of colour.
‘What the hell happened?’ he said to her. His anger and fear largely dissipated, when he saw how haggard Kim looked.
‘My brakes . . .’ she murmured, leaning against the bonnet of the Land Rover. A wave of nausea swept over her and her legs almost buckled under her. The tractor driver watched as she gulped down several deep lungfuls of air. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, quietly.
‘We’d both have been sorry if you hadn’t stopped in time,’ the driver said.
Kim nodded slowly and wiped some rain from her face.
‘How much further have you got to go?’ the driver asked. She told him.
‘Will you be all right?’
She was already climbing back into the Land Rover, starting the engine. There was a roar as she stepped on the accelerator.
‘I’ll be OK,’ Kim assured him. She let the vehicle roll forward a few yards and then stepped on the brake.
The vehicle stopped immediately.
She pulled at her bottom lip with one thumb and forefinger, looking first at the speedometer, then at the brake pedal.
‘Are the brakes working new?’ the farmer asked, his hair plastered to his face by the rain.
Kim nodded abstractedly.
‘Yes,’ she said in surprise. ‘They’re working.’
As the farmer watched, the Land Rover pulled away and a moment later it had disappeared around the next bend.
He looked at the dark skid marks on the road before him and shook his head. He found that he too was shaking.
Longfield Museum was a large, modem building that looked more like an office complex than a storehouse for ancient artifacts.
The smoked-glass exterior reflected a mirror-image of the Land Rover as Kim parked close to the main entrance. She switched off the engine and sat silently for a moment, breathing deeply. The rain had eased off somewhat and she had wound down both front windows to let in some fresh air. This had helped to dispel the unpleasant fusty odour inside the vehicle which irritated her throat and nose.
The chill remained.
After a moment or two she climbed out of the Land Rover and strode towards the main entrance. There was a pushbike chained to the bicycle rack with a sticker on it that read SPEED MACHINE.
Kim pushed open the double doors and walked into the almost unnatural silence of the main hall. A large plan of the museum faced her, and on each wall blue signs pointed to various galleries. She turned to the left, heading for the door marked STAFF ONLY. Her heels beat out a loud tattoo on the lino as she walked but the sound was muffled by carpet as she stepped inside the room.
It was a large room with cupboards and filing cabinets covering the walls on three sides. At the far end was a stainless steel worktop and sink and another door.
The room was empty as Kim walked through it to the door at the other end. She turned the handle, expecting it to be locked, but it opened easily.
It led to a second, smaller room which contained three or four work benches and, in one corner, the pride of the museum, an electron microscope.
On one of the worktops Kim caught sight of a steaming mug of coffee. She’d seen Roger Kelly’s bike outside, so the coffee probably belonged to him. Kelly had to be around somewhere. Kim turned and headed back through the staff room, pulling open the door which led out into the main hall.
The figure loomed before her with such suddenness that she jumped back a foot or two, her heart thumping.
‘I didn’t know I looked that bad first thing in the morning,’ Roger Kelly said, grinning.
‘I wondered where the hell you were,’ Kim told him, sucking in deep breaths, trying to regain her composure.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ he told her, noticing how pale she was. ‘Are you all right?’
She thought about mentioning the incident with the Land Rover but decided against it.
‘I’ve got some material in the back of the Land Rover,’ Kim told him. ‘Help me get it inside, will you, Roger?’
He nodded and followed her out to the parked vehicle, watching as she unlocked the back and motioned to the box which contained the stone tablets.
Kelly got a firm grip on the box and lifted, surprised at the weight.
‘What have you got in here?’ he grunted. ‘Gold bars?’ Roger Kelly was a powerfully built, muscular young man yet to reach his twenty-third birthday, but the effort of carrying the box appeared to be too much for him. Kim watched anxiously as he stumbled toward the main entrance of the museum, straining under the weight. For a second it looked as though he would drop the box, but after a moment he regained his handhold and struggled on. Kim collected the box containing the skeleton and followed him.
Once inside, they placed both boxes on the worktop. Kelly stood to one side gasping for breath. Kim looked at him, noticing how pale his own face was now, as if all the colour had been sucked from it. After a few moments, she and Kelly returned to the Land Rover to retrieve the remaining boxes, which contained some other relics from the dig.
‘We’ve got to run nitrogen tests on these,’ she told him when they were back inside, motioning to the first two boxes. Crossing to the one containing the skeleton, she carefully removed the lid and peered inside.
‘Where’s the skull?’ asked Kelly, puzzled.
Kim explained briefly about the chamber full of skulls, then set about freeing the lid on the other box. Kelly helped, pulling the nails free with a claw hammer. Kim lifted it clear and pulled back the gauze in which the stone tablets had been wrapped.
‘We found these with the skulls,’ she told him. ‘They’ve got to be dated before we start to decipher this writing.’ She indicated the Celtic script which covered each slab of stone.
Kelly nodded and helped her carefully remove each one, laying it on a sheet of plastic which Kim had spread out on the worktop. As he removed the last one Kelly looked down into the box, and once more Kim saw the colour drain from his face. She glanced at him, then down into the box.
The wood on the bottom and sides was scorched almost black.
As if it had been subjected to a powerful source of heat.
Kim sat back on the stool and glanced down at her notepad. Page after page was covered by her neat jottings, some of the phrases underlined.
She sighed and reached up to massage the back of her neck. A dull ache had settled there and threatened to develop into a painful stiffness. She got to her feet and walked up and down for a few minutes, her eyes every so often drawn back to the electron microscope as if by powerful magnets.
The tests were complete. At least those she intended finishing before leaving for home. For nearly nine hours since-returning to the museum that morning, she had been working on the relics. Examining the bones, the stone tablets, the coins, the weapons and God knew how many more of the finds. The carbon-14 test had been completed, as had the nitrogen test. The bones were over 2,000 years old, and as far as she could ascertain, they came from the same period as the rest of the relics.
Then there were the tablets.
She’d chipped a tiny fragment of one of them away and ground it up with a pestle and mortar, examining the minute fragments beneath the electron microscope in a test more commonly used on fossils. The petrological microscopy had revealed something which Kim had not expected and it had been nagging at her ever since.
The tablets were much older than the rest of the relics.
All twelve were at least five hundred to a thousand years older than the other artifacts she had examined. It was as if they had been buried by another tribe generations before.
Buried or hidden?
She went to the worktop where the tablets were laid out and prodded one with a small tracer. The chisel-like implement followed a path through the groove which had been fashioned into a letter. She wondered how long it would take her to decipher the writing on the small slabs.
Why the time difference between the tablets and the other relics? she wondered.
As she sat gazing at them there was a knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ called Kim, turning to see who her visitor was.