The Skull by Christian Darkin Page A

adjust to the light. One wall was stone, crumbling, dusted with ancient ash. The opposite wall was rock and earth. He was sitting on a rough stone floor, at the foot of a set of deep steps leading up to a solid stone doorway. But there was no door. Just a block of stone which had once sealed the entrance, but which was now leaning open, propped against a tree, leaving the hole through which he must have entered in his sleep.
    This doorway was familiar to Henry. It was covered in moss. Strands of ivy hung on the outside like a curtain. The frame of the door was carved from long, thin solid blocks and decorated with carvings of strange creatures. Some were rough. Others were more intricate and detailed. It was as though many builders from different eras had been competing, carving over and around each other’s work.
    Henry knew this place well, at least the outside of it. It was the old tomb deep in the woods above the village. He and his school friends told stories about it. They had studied its odd patchwork of different types of stone and carvings, but it had always been sealed.The stone in the doorway had rocked tantalisingly when they had pushed on it, but it had never tipped open. They had always been too frightened of what might lie inside to try any harder to break in.
    But now the great stone was leaning outwards. And here was Henry. Inside.
    There was something else, too.
    Where the sun glanced across the wall of rock and earth, it cast long shadows, bringing every indentation and detail of the stone into sharp relief. Henry stared at it, unable to move.
    The huge eye. The massive skull. The curved serrated teeth. It was hypnotic and terrible.
    The tiny spiral of the fossilised shell had been enough to make him ask questions in his mind. It had cracked open a door and filled him with doubt. But this… This was too big. It left no room for doubt. What Henry felt now, surging under the fear and dread, was pure, confident certainty. And it changed everything.
    His father was wrong, completely and utterly wrong. And the woman in the grey dress was right.
    Henry climbed out of the tomb with his head spinning. Using all his strength, he tipped the stoneback into place. It wobbled and rocked as it always had. Perhaps it had only ever needed a push in the right direction to topple it out of position.
    Henry reverently draped the ivy back over the entrance and set off home in his nightclothes.
    It was only just dawn and luckily there was nobody else about. As he made his way down towards the vicarage, he could see no lights on in the house. The back door was ajar – obviously that was how he had left it during his sleepwalk. He ran out of the trees, across the empty cart-track and into the garden.
    Good. All the curtains were still tightly shut. But he knew his father sometimes rose early to sit and work in the dining room on the other side of the house. If he was up, Henry knew he would be in deep trouble. He slipped in through the door and closed it as quietly as he could. The hinge creaked and the latch clicked loudly.
    Henry held his breath and listened, but the house was silent. Eventually he dared to move again, tiptoeing across the kitchen and peering around the hall door. His eyes went immediately to the dining room. The door was open, but the room was in darkness. The curtains were still closed. That meant his father was not yet up. He breathed again.
    There were two ways back up to his room: the main stairs, which would take him right past his parents’ bedroom door; or the back stairs, which would take him closer to his own door, but which were old, loose and noisy.
    Henry decided on the back stairs. He closed his eyes for a second and tried to remember which steps were the troublemakers. The first was fine, the second and third creaked if you trod on the left-hand side. He stepped cautiously upwards. The next three steps were good and solid, but then, on the seventh, there was a creak on the right