Around the remains of the stranger called Gareth Morgan the soil suddenly became loose, and Tom stumbled as it fell into a hollow with a rush. As his foot sank in, he dropped the shovel and spread his arms, falling onto his rump beside the skull. Mass grave, he thought, and then the smell hit him. Wet rot, decay, age, not the smell of the recently dead but the stench of time. He leaned back and pulled his foot free, rolling across the disturbed ground away from the new hole and the smell drifting up from it. He closed his eyes and buried his face in heather, breathing in the muddy freshness of it, trying to clear the smell of his son's death from his lungs.
"Oh for fuck's sake," Tom said, suddenly sobbing into the ground. He had no idea what he was doing. His hands clawed, fingers dug in, as if afraid that he would fall off the world if he loosened his grip. And wasn't he doing that already? So much had changed in the last hour that he would not be surprised to open his eyes and find the world spinning the opposite way. Smelling the honest peaty smell of the ground beneath him, he wished that he had never overheard those two men in the pub.
But he had. And King had given him the map, and now here he was. Looking for his dead son.
Tom crawled back to the skeleton—revealed to its chest now that the soil around it had tumbled into a hollow—and stared down at what he had done. There were other bones visible down there, touched by sunlight for the first time in years. The corpses must have been piled in together, covered over with a layer of soil and heathers, and as their flesh rotted away beneath the ground it left hollows behind, dark wet spaces filled with nothing but the gas of decay and the undying echoes of their violent deaths. The skeleton called Gareth Morgan still wore the remnants of a uniform, and shreds of leathery skin clung to its bones, moist and browned by the damp soil. Beneath it a tangle of bones and clothing, skin and hair, marked where other bodies had found their final resting place.
"Oh God," Tom muttered, reaching down into the dark. "Oh God, oh God …" He could taste decay on his tongue, sweet yet vile. He wondered whether each body smelled different in decomposition, and if so which smell was his son.
But death was the great equaliser. Personality had no part in rot. Humour or seriousness held no truck with the processes of bacteria and decay. Steven was long gone from here, yet Tom had never felt so close.
He slid on the wet soil and moved forward, his outstretched arm sinking deeper into the void. He cried out in alarm but came to a stop, his hand closing around a clammy bone. He pulled gently but there was no give. The shovel was under his stomach, and he eased it out and used the blade to shift more of the soil above the grave. It took little effort now, and by kneeling up he found he could simply push the heather to one side like a carpet, revealing the horrors of what lay beneath.
Sunlight struck the bones. Subtle autumn heat ate away the coolness of their decade-long rest. The buzzards cried out and drifted away, perhaps sensing death even from such a height. Tom knelt among the rotted corpses of so many men and looked up, welcoming the sun on his face and the sense of his skin stretching and burning. "Jo," he said, but she did not answer him. "Steven." Still no answer. Tears dripped from his chin and disappeared among the bodies, perhaps cleaning small spots on his son's bones.
Shaking his head, his whole body shivering, fear and shock and rage combining to draw his mind back from what he was doing, Tom bent over and reached back into the grave.
For just a few seconds the madness of this reached down and clasped Tom's hand. It was his wife holding him, whispering into his ear, telling him to let go because they still had each other, and no matter how Steven had died it was only the living that really mattered now. But Tom let go of her hand and held onto what he was doing. His belief that perhaps he and Jo had too much of each other reared up again, a selfish justification. And as Jo's 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.