Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [7]
He shone the torch in both directions. Nothing but stone.
He was in a chamber, and not a particularly large chamber – six or seven metres across and almost circular. The floor, he noticed, was covered in clean, dry sand.
At first he felt disappointment. A smugglers’ passage should have led to a hidden panel in an ancient inn or to a trap door in the crypt of the village church.
But, of course, there were no villages for miles.
He began to explore the walls. Perhaps there was a cleverly pivoted rock that would swing aside when pushed.
Working his way around the walls, searching for cracks, he failed to notice the rock platform that jutted out below knee level until he caught his shin, hard, on the jagged corner. The shock made him let go of his torch, which fell on to the platform, and rolled a short distance before coming to rest against something white.
Zaki reached for the torch, but snatched his hand back in horror. The white object was a bone. He stumbled back never taking his eyes off the object in the torchlight. Laid out on the stone ledge was a complete, human skeleton. His heart slamming against his ribs, Zaki struggled for breath. What else lurked in the darkness that now seemed to press in around him?
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Chapter 3
The torch, lying on the stone ledge, caught the side of the skull in its beam, accentuating the dark hollows of the eye sockets. As he watched, something moved in one of the sockets and Zaki opened his mouth as the scream leapt into the back of his throat. A black, glistening beetle dropped from the socket and scuttled into the darkness.
Zaki tore his gaze away from the skull’s unblinking stare and forced himself to take in the rest of the skeleton. It wasn’t very big. This was a child!
Clammy, chilling fear flooded through him. Someone had killed a child. His age, maybe younger . . . or the child had died here. Abduction. Murder. He was always hearing those words in the local news. On the radio, on television.
Get out! He had to get out! He made a lurching dash for the place where the passage should begin, but in the moment of panic all sense of direction had been erased and he yelled with sudden pain as he collided with unyielding rock.
He sat up in the sand, his back against the cave wall, nursing his left shoulder, which had taken the full force of his fall. ‘It’s just a skeleton,’ he told himself. ‘Bones can’t hurt. Probably been there for centuries.’ This could be an ancient burial chamber. He’d read about those. The body carried here from somewhere else. Perhaps the child of an important family. This explanation made Zaki feel better. The thought that whatever had happened here had happened a long time ago made the darkness seem less threatening. Slowly, he got to his feet and crossed the chamber to stand by the stone platform. The pain in his left shoulder was intense, but he found he could reduce it by putting his hand in his fleece pocket so that his fleece, and not his shoulder, took the weight of his arm.
Gingerly, he leant forward and picked up the torch, taking care not to touch the bones, and then he forced himself to examine the skeleton. The ribs and pelvic bones poked out through the threadbare remains of a simple dress.
The dress suggested a girl, but didn’t boys wear tunics in the really old days? The fabric looked fairly modern so he supposed it couldn’t be all that old. Who was she? If it was a she. But . . . was there an arm missing? Zaki took a step back and swung the torch beam on to the floor. There were the missing bones; three large bones and the little bones of the fingers and wrist scattered and pressed into the sand where he had, unknowingly, stepped on them. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered – but what was he saying? She was dead! Still, it seemed wrong to have trodden on the bones – sacrilegious, a desecration, and now he was somehow involved, he had changed something, disturbed her rest.
The body must have lain with one arm hanging over the edge of the platform. Not a formal burial, then. Whoever it was most likely died here.
Among the little bones in the