Bible of the Dead

Chapter 1

The cave was dark. And cold. Always cold. Even though the last hot autumn sun of the Cevennes was blazing outside, as soon as Julia made that descent, down the metal ladder, into the Cavern of the Swelling, the cold grasped at her: like she was entering a neglected orphanage, full of clammy and demanding hands.

Why was she always unnerved by the initial descent? Surely she should have become accustomed to it by now? All summer she had been doing this: doing her job, digging and scraping in the dank limestone cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Yet the first moment of the working day never got any easier.

As Julia reached the bottom of the ladder she paused. Thinking of that ceaseless cold. Maybe the cave itself was not to blame, maybe it was the entire region: the frigid Lozère.

This remote departement in the forgotten heart of France was beautiful enough. Yet this beauty was married to a chilling emptiness. The departement had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Mejean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone. There were no railways in Lozère, they’d closed years ago. The nearest airport was way north, or way south. As for the autoroute, that swept past the entire region with imperial disdain: escaping altogether, at the great Millau viaduct, with a brave and enormous vault.

Like it couldn’t wait to get away.

Was there any reason to linger? The only attraction to detain tourists was the legend of a werewolf on the Margeride – the Bête de Gevaudan; that, and the Cham des Bondons itself.

And the ancient standing stones, that comprised the Cham des Bondons, were truly extraordinary, dozens of grey monoliths, standing alone and apart, on every cliff and promontory, like frozen warriors frowning down in judgement: at the dark pineforests of the Cevennes.

Yet even the stones were deserted. Untouristed. Neglected. And now only the winds remained, the winds and the wild horses, feeding on the feather-grass.

Julia reached up, switched on the torch of her headband, and crouched, reaching through the crowding gloom to her tool-roll, left there on the cave floor, from yesterday.

She knelt and unvelcro’d the plastic and laid it all out, exposing the trowels and eyeglass, the brushes and plumb-lines. The tool-roll was a gift from her devoted yet sighing parents in Ontario. The tiny family she had left behind.

The wind whistled outside, fluting across the cave opening: like a child blowing air over a bottleneck. The sound was plangent and sad. Julia picked up her tool-roll and crawled further, painfully barking her shin against rock – despite the protection of her soft neoprene kneepads. A few minutes later she halted under a limestone ceiling barely a metre high. Here was her patch. It looked forlorn.

She was used to working down here in the Cave of the Swelling, with her colleagues Kanya and Alex and Annika. But in recent days the little platoon had dwindled: Kanya had gone home to California, finishing the digging season a week early. Alex was elsewhere, working in a cave along the plateau, with the rest of the team. And Annika, her good friend Annika, she was nursing a cold, in her little cottage in the deserted village of Vayssiere, high on the Cham.

But at least, thought Julia, adjusting the beam of her LED headlamp, at least she was still doing proper archaeology. And she only had one more week to make the most of this disappointing season. One more week to find something, to justify her sabbatical, to justify all the time and money spent here. They had a week left. One last week of the season. And then, then what?

The vision of a winter in London, and many winters after that, teaching yawning eighteen-year-olds, was a drag. Julia cursed her meandering mind, and concentrated on her work. Just do it. Even if she knew she wasn’t going to find anything more than a broken bonepin, she also knew she was lucky to be here at all. And the sheer metronomic rhythm of her archaeology was, as always, rather soothing: brush and trowel and sieve, trowel and tweezer and sieve.

The tinkle of her metal tools echoed down the empty cavern.

Julia tried not to think of her loneliness. What if some mad shepherd came down here and raped her? In speleology, no one can hear you scream. She smiled inwardly, at her own fears. She’d gut the guy with her six inch survey peg. Just let him try it.

The hour passed. She bent to her task. Trowel and sift. Trowel and sift and scrape.

She brushed, and troweled. And paused. Feeling her own heart. Beating.

An eye stared back at her.

Julia nearly dropped her brush.

A distinctive white circlet of bone was visible through the black soil, like a crescent moon on a very dark night.

An eyesocket. In a human skull?

Julia squinted, closely, at the orbital bones, and the fine nasal cavity. She felt the pulse of her professional excitement accelerate. An actual human skull.

How old was the cranium? Maybe it was some medieval goatherd, who fell down the hole after a night of rough wine. Maybe it was the corpse of some eighteenth century protestant, fleeing the war of the camisards, but more likely it was Neolithic. The real thing.

The debris of the cave floor was largely Stone Age. They knew that. The other day she had found her tiny fragment of antelope bone pin – dated from 5000 B.C. This skull had to be of the same epoch.

Julia’s hand trembled, for a moment, with excitement. This was the best find of a desultory season in the cave systems beneath the Cham des Bondons. Hell, this was the best find of her entire and desultory career.

She brushed and scraped, then used the most delicate trowel, her precious four-inch silvery leaf-trowel, to wholly disinter the cranium. As she pushed the grit away, she realized – there was something odd about this skull.

It had a hole, high in the forehead.

Slipping on her working gloves, Julia lifted the cranium into the white weakening light of her headlamp. The ancient teeth gleamed in the shivering light, white and yellow. And smiling.

The hole in the bone was, in itself, no revelation. Julia had seen enough damaged bones to know that splinters and fractures were only to be expected in ancient remains: homo sapiens emerging from the ice age had to fight savagely for food and survival, with cave bears, and wolverines, with leopards and hyenas. Accidents were also common: from cliff falls and rock falls, likewise hunting wounds.

But this hole in the head had been made precisely. Carved. Sculpted. Not intended to be lethal; yet drilled into the bone.

She put the cranium on the cave floor, and made some notes. Her dirty gloves smeared the white pages, but she didn’t care. She had discovered, surely, a skull deliberately pierced, or ‘trepanned’, by a form of early surgery: this was a stone age lobotomy, someone diligently excising a disc-shaped hole in the high forehead of the cranium.

Trepanning was well attested in the literature. It was the earliest form of surgery ever discovered; there were several examples of it in museums dating from the probable age of this skull: 5000 B.C.

But no one had any proper sense why stone age men did this. So this discovery was still quite something.

A noise disturbed her triumphant thoughts. Julia dropped her notebook and stared into the murk, beyond the cone of light cast by her headlamp; the shadows of the cave danced around her. She spoke into the gloom.

‘Hello?’

Silence.

‘Hello? Ghislaine? Annika?’ Silence. ‘Alex??’

The silence was almost absolute. Only the vague whistle of the distant wind, up there on the Cham, answered her question.

No one was down here. No one but Julia Kerrigan, thirty-three years old, Canadian, single, childless, with her degree from Toronto and her anti-static tweezers – her and this unnamed human skull. And maybe a rat.

Julia returned to her inviting task. She had two hours left before the day was done. And she was truly looking forward to supper now: when the archaeologists got together, as always, in the little Brasserie Stevenson in Pont de Montvert, to discuss the day’s finds – tonight of all nights would be fun. She would nonchalantly say to the oleaginous team leader: Oh Ghislaine I found a skull. Trepanned. I think it is Neolithic.

Her boss would beam and glisten and congratulate her, and her friends would smile and laugh and toast her success with Côtes du Rhône, and then she would call Mum and Dad in Canada and she would make them understand why she had left them to go to Europe. Why she still wasn’t coming home. Because her wilful ambition had been justified, at last…

But wait. As she turned her head from her notebook to her bone-brushes, she noticed a second whiteness, another gleam in the corner.

Another skull?

Julia brushed, very delicately, for a moment, and confirmed. It was a second skull. And this, here: in the furthest corner. What was this? A third?

What was all this?

Now she was working – and working hard. Her hands were wet with excited sweat; she knew that as soon as she told everyone, they would come and take over her cave, but this marvellous cache, this trove of bones, this was her find, she had spent all summer waiting for something like this, she had spent fifteen years waiting for something like this, so she was damned if she was going to give it up without giving it every wallop of energy, this day, this one last day.

Away down the passage, rain was falling, spattering disdainfully on the metal ladder – no doubt blackening the funereal menhirs of the Bondons, up there on the surface; but she didn’t care; now she could see that the cave floor was barely concealing, quite astonishingly, entire human skeletons.

It would need weeks to extract them all properly, but in two hours she could brush away enough dust to get a sense of the age and skull size and maybe the gender. And the wounds.

She stared. Appalled. The light in her headlamp was giving out, but it was still strong enough to illuminate what she had found.

Three skulls had holes in them. Bored holes. Trepanations. The four other skeletons: a man, woman and two children, did not have holes in the head, but they exhibited another, deeply disturbing feature.

Julia rubbed the dirt from her eyes, as if she could wipe away the unlikeliness of what she was seeing. But it was incontestable. The creamy-grey ribs and neckbones of these skeletons were lodged with flint arrowheads. At all angles. The flesh that these arrows had once pierced had rotted away, thousands of years ago, but the stone arrowheads remained, lying between ribs, jammed between vertebrae.

These four Stone Age people had been brutally murdered, or even executed. Shot with arrows from all sides. Overkilled. Ritually. Julia couldn’t help feeling this had something to do with the other skulls, the trepanning, the holes in the head. But what?

Something like revulsion overcame her. An instinctive reaction. She had an urge to flee, to run to the metal ladder and the excised hole of light; to get the hell out. She felt like she had crawled into a modern murder scene: with blood pissed up the walls and a father lying dead with a shotgun muzzle in the mouth – surrounded by the plaintive corpses of his children.

Who would stand in a circle, carefully and thoroughly firing arrows at women and kids? What had driven others to do this? Why did the men with the holes in their heads have no arrows in them at all? Were they the killers?

Grasping her emotions tight, she crawled away down the passage. Julia’s last action, as she left the cave, before she shinned up the metal ladder, was to turn and look at the wholly unearthed skull.

Sitting on the mud, it didn’t appear to be smiling any more. It looked like it was trying to speak, across the distance of the ages. Trying to articulate. Trying to warn.