TWENTY-THREE

‘Strange. Real strange, fella,’ Hutch said to Luke, who walked so close to him in the scrub, he felt like a child behind an older boy, seeking guidance.

‘What?’

Hutch stopped by a pile of rocks tumbled about a slight rise in the tangled earth of the cemetery; the rocks were engulfed in waist-deep foliage, right up to the flattish but tilting stone at the top. ‘It’s a cromlech. Bronze Age.’

Luke squinted at Hutch, pulling aggressively on the filter of his cigarette with lips he could only half feel.

‘This was the roof.’ Hutch tapped the flat tilting rock on top of the stone pile. ‘All these stones are on a mound. A burial mound. That’s why the stones are raised like this. The rocks underneath this big flat one were the sides, but they’ve fallen in. And back over there’ – Hutch pointed his stick at another small hill behind the mound – ‘another one. Cromlech. Or dolmen. Old, old graves, mate.’

He turned suddenly and pointed his stick at the tangle of white-trunked silver birch trees and brambles that engulfed an outcrop of large rounded stones, grey with reindeer moss, at the far side of the clearing. They had walked around it earlier trying to find more of the rune stones. ‘And that’s a partially collapsed passage grave. Big one. Sure of it. Would have been about twenty feet long. You can see the two upright stones where the entrance would have been. It’s the giveaway that it’s a passage grave. They’re all over Sweden. Dolmens too. But not usually in the same place. Passage graves are Iron Age.’

He turned about, his face intense. ‘And if you look around, the long flat stones we keep tripping over are bits of upright stone coffins. Built much later still. I reckon we can only see a few of the rune stones too. Rest are hidden out there in the trees. But I’ll bet they form a circle. A perimeter around a much older site holding the cromlechs and passage grave.

‘Look at the trees too. There’s a chestnut. Oaks. Mountain ash, as well as the birch. Like an enclosure. A boundary to create repose inside. Christian cemeteries have them. So these trees were planted even later. Probably when this church was built in the last few centuries. It’s amazing. What a find.’

Luke stayed quiet; just watching Hutch’s tense, committed face.

‘The Stone Age graves must have been built, I reckon, about three thousand years BC. They’re so old they just look like piles of rocks now. I’d have walked right past them if we hadn’t seen the rune stones and the church. The cromlechs and passage grave should all be completely covered over by now. Or had the boulders removed. Only bits of it still visible, you know? But this has all been preserved at some point. Not recently, but at some time in the past few centuries. They’re not this intact unless they are cared for. Someone has been looking after this site for about four thousand years. Must have been, until that church was abandoned and the stone graves toppled over out here.’

Luke looked at him closely, awaiting a final summation that would shed some light on how this would lead to them escaping from the forest. Because he didn’t want Hutch’s enthusiasm ending on the refrain that they were currently lost inside a forest that contained an undiscovered 4,000-year-old burial site. And that they had spent six hours that day following an old path to it; a trail grooved with cart wheels from the terrible houses abandoned amongst the trees.

Hutch winked at him, his eyes wide. ‘Come on, let’s get into that chapel.’

The tier of stone at the foundations had slumped into the black soil, and the next tier had slipped down to pull the entire structure gradually earthwards. Its right angles and straight lines had become concave; it sagged. The roof was gone. Some beams with slate tiles attached remained, exposed like the bones of a blackened rib cage. The three window casements on either side were empty of glass. Vestiges of a rotten wooden shutter hung from an iron fitting on one side. Any other visible metal was either black with rust or had corroded to a stain on the dark stone.

Twenty feet from the ruined porch of the chapel, Phil and Dom were sitting down on their rucksacks in a demoralized and exhausted silence. Dom had his trouser leg pulled up again and was pressing at the sides of the grubby bandage Hutch had fastened around his swollen knee for support. His mouth was bruised and his bottom lip was split and still bleeding into the dirt on his chin. The top of his nose was purple and fat, his top lip stained crimson. Two pieces of white toilet paper hung from each nostril.

As Luke stood before the porch of the chapel he realized with discomfort that it was the first time he and Dom had been this close, and fully in sight of each other, since the fight. Something he could hardly believe had happened now. An event that made him restless with shame and anxious about his sanity. He was exhausted, his blood sugar was low, he’d hardly had any sleep in three days … but still. It was Dom he had attacked. Dom: his friend.

Luke had stayed so far down the track on his way back to the cemetery; making sure he turned and walked ahead the moment the others broke through the foliage and saw enough of him to know they were heading in the right direction. Occasionally, Hutch would shout, ‘Chief! Where are you?’ or ‘Chief, show yourself!’

But now they were all gathered in one place and he and Hutch had completed their tramp around the accessible cemetery grounds and had turned their attention to the ruined church, it was harder for Luke to keep his distance from Dom.

The sight of what he had done to Dom’s face made him feel sick. Guilt replayed the shock and fear on Dom’s face the second time he attacked him, over and over again in his imagination, and he could think of little else now. It was throttling him. He would have to see someone; get help, when he got home. Because he knew only too well that this was not the first time this blinding suspension of self-control had occurred, and recently too.

He desperately wanted to apologize, but couldn’t face another confrontation. It would come. Dom had to vent at some point. The best thing he could do, he kept telling himself, was to atone by getting them all out of this mess. By finding an escape route. Water first. Then a path out. He would do this for these men he had once loved like brothers, even if they weren’t his friends any more.

Hutch peered at the weathered stone arch around the doorway. He bent in close and gently scraped his penknife against the stone. Luke stood behind him. If Dom hadn’t been mute with smouldering anger, he would have been shouting right now, and demanding Hutch explain what he was doing looking at old bits of stone when he was hungry and wet and lost. At least it was good not to hear that voice encroaching again on the stillness and limited space they had managed to find here amongst the endless thickets.

Hutch slapped his hand against the arch, as if to indicate that when the rest of the building collapsed to rubble the arch would still be standing.

Upon the two stone pillars of the arch, markings depicted what could have been figures of men or animals, but they were so spongy with the lichen that Hutch scraped at with his penknife, it was hard to be certain what they had once represented. Runic inscriptions and other indecipherable carvings framed the characters and leaping figures in the centre of each pillar. Wheels with angular markings were carved into the worn limestone arch above the granite pillars. Above it, a wooden apex must once have completed the doorway, but it had rotted down to dark wet stumps.

Inside, the walls had once been covered in plaster; almost all of it had fallen away to reveal rough granite blocks beneath. The exposed stone was speckled with a milky green lichen. Rotten with damp and spored with black fungus, the remains of two rows of sagging wooden benches, or pews, still faced forward to a pulpit that looked like a lump of stone hewn roughly from a quarry. The top of the altar was covered with dead bits of forest. The floor was knee-deep with leaf mulch and dead branches that had fallen through the holed roof.

‘A small congregation,’ Hutch said. ‘Probably held about twenty.’

Luke could not bring himself to speak. He was too uncomfortable with Dom’s presence somewhere behind him; it glared against his back, all molten with rage and salted by grief.

‘Odd though. Really odd.’ Hutch stepped through the arch and onto the floor of the church. Luke followed him. The floor felt spongy, almost mobile, beneath his feet, like he was walking on a mattress. The floor sloped.

And then Hutch was suddenly down on his side, his legs buried to mid-thigh in the leaves behind the first row of pews. ‘Shit.’ Hutch didn’t move. ‘I’ve gone right through the floor.’

Luke looked down at his own feet. ‘You OK?’

Hutch didn’t answer and didn’t move anything but his head. He looked down at what his legs had disappeared into, then propped himself up on one arm, which he had to bury to the elbow in fallen leaves to find something solid enough to support his upper body.

‘Hutch. You all right?’

‘Think so. But I’m scared to look.’

‘Here. Let me give you a hand.’

‘Careful,’ Hutch said. ‘It’s rotten through.’

Luke stopped, then inched towards the interior wall on his left, instinctively feeling that the floor at the base of the walls would be a safer option.

Hutch stood up fully inside the hole he had made. ‘Just as well the wood is soft. Imagine what splinters could have done.’

‘Or a rusty nail.’

Hutch leaned his head back between his shoulders and shouted ‘Fuck off!’ at the remnants of roof. Then raised a foot from the hole and tried to find an adjacent piece of board sturdy enough to take his weight near the bench on his right side.

‘I’m on my way over,’ Luke said

‘Nah. We don’t both want to end up in the crypt.’

Luke let out a strangled laugh that sounded aggressive to his own ears. He shut it off and stopped smiling.

The floor was firmer at the side, and Luke carefully worked his way to the last row of the pews. Then he stepped over the first little black bench and into the space between the two end rows. He could barely get the width of one leg between them. ‘People must have been tiny. Like children.’

His own observation unnerved him in the faint but perceptible way the interiors of historical buildings always did when he ducked through tiny doorways and saw the little beds and chairs that once serviced the long-dead. Perhaps it was this sudden and unwelcome reminder of his own mortality that made him feel, so acutely, a sense of a frightening loss that was like vertigo. That all things must pass. That anyone who had lived there and used the furniture before it became antique was now dust. The dank oppressive atmosphere of the enclosed and rotten space he was inside added a sense of desolation. Despite the rain, he was glad it had no roof. Even the dull mackerel light was welcome. He felt suddenly grateful for the company of the others. ‘The last thing this place feels is holy.’ He could not stop himself from just blurting it out.

‘I know what you mean.’ Hutch had regained his feet and was standing in the narrow aisle between the pews, testing the floor in front of him, before taking careful steps forward as if he was walking on ice.

Luke stepped over the next row of pews but the section of floor he placed his foot upon was soft and gave way. He withdrew the leg and tried further down until he found a firmer spot. Hutch reached the altar.

‘You reckon where you are can take our combined weight?’ Luke asked Hutch.

‘I reckon.’ Hutch wiped the thick mulch of dead leaf mould from the top of the altar, until his bare hand reached stone.

Luke gingerly approached the altar from the side, rubbing his back against the dark wall that was down to stone in most places, the plaster having been dissolved by the rain falling through the roof for … for how long he had no idea. But for a long time.

‘Anything on it?’ he asked.

‘Like what, a virgin sacrifice?’ Hutch replied without smiling.

‘Runes and shit.’

‘Nope. Just a weird hollow. See, right in the centre. It’s been hollowed out.’

‘Baptism font.’

Hutch nodded. ‘You could be right, Chief.’

‘What did you mean before?’

‘Eh?’

‘Before. You said it was odd.’

Hutch frowned at Luke, then his grimy forehead smoothed out. He tapped a finger against the top of the stone he stood behind. ‘No crucifixes on the stone arch. All the carvings on the stone face are pagan.’

‘Really?’

‘Old too. And those runes. You know those circular markings on Viking carvings? Serpents? With those long snaky bodies, all swallowing each other at one end?’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

‘Well, I think there was once a pair of those on it, with what looks like carvings of’ – he wafted his hand towards the door and the wood outside – ‘all of this around them. Vines and leaves. The rain has corroded most of it.’

‘Cool. I’ll take a look.’

‘I chipped away a little bit of the dirt with my penknife on the pillars. It’s quite intricate, which is odd because the actual building is very basic. Like a shed or croft. But it must have been a Christian church once. Probably the last time it was used. It’s weird because there are no Christian symbols in here. No Christian headstones outside either. So no one was interned here in the last … millennia. How does that work?’

‘The church has just been built over an earlier site?’

‘Exactly. A sacred site, I think. And the church must have once been the centre of that … settlement we found. Which can’t be more than a century old, like this building. So people still came to worship, but stopped burying their dead here. Weird.’

The mention of which did something unpleasant to Luke’s empty stomach. In the maelstrom of his confusion and his disorderly thoughts, he wanted to start peppering Hutch with questions but held his tongue. And felt anxious to get moving again; to get away from the place, and quickly.

‘And the other crazy thing is,’ Hutch said, raising both hands into the air, ‘it’s still here.’

Luke frowned.

Hutch pointed at the stone plinth. ‘No one has carted any of this off to a museum. I don’t think there are that many good examples left of the Norse carvings in the wild. They’re all uprooted and preserved. Protected from acid rain in display cases in museums down in Lund or Stockholm. That’s where I’ve seen them before.’ Hutch lowered his voice. ‘So, between me and you, I’d guess that no one knows this is here.’

Luke could not hide his shock at hearing this fact voiced, even though he had privately arrived at the same disconcerting conclusion.

‘No one has been through here since this place was abandoned. I’d put money on it, Chief.’

Luke shook his head in disbelief and with a disquiet he hoped did not show.

Hutch’s voice lowered even further. ‘And if we weren’t lost and soaked and hungry, it would be pretty cool to discover it. We’d make the papers.’

‘But now it’s just freaky and scary.’

‘Exactly. And we still might make the papers for another reason.’

They looked at each other and were both beginning to crack mad grins when Phil started shouting outside.and sifted his foot through the wet dark detritus.