like themselves, but they were made of some new and alien material; the world looked unchanged, and yet somehow I was standing in an entirely different place.
Five
Susanna swooped Sallie onto her hip, grabbed Zach’s arm in the same movement and hustled the pair of them back up the garden, talking firm reassuring bullshit all the way. Sallie was still screaming, the sound jolting with Susanna’s footsteps; Zach had switched to yelling wildly, lunging at the end of Susanna’s arm to get back to us. When the kitchen door slammed behind them, the silence came down over the garden thick as volcanic ash.
The skull lay on its side in the grass, between the camomile patch and the shadow of the wych elm. One of the eyeholes was plugged with a clot of dark dirt and small pale curling roots; the lower jaw gaped in a skewed, impossible howl. Clumps of something brown and matted, hair or moss, clung to the bone.
The four of us stood there in a semicircle, as if we were gathered for some incomprehensible initiation ceremony, waiting for a signal to tell us how to begin. Around our feet the grass was long and wet, bowed under the weight of the morning’s rain.
“That’s,” I said, “that looks human.”
“It’s fake,” Tom said. “Some Halloween thing—”
Melissa said, “I don’t think it’s fake.” I put my arm around her. She brought up a hand to take mine, but absently: all her focus was on the thing.
“Our neighbors put a skeleton out,” Tom said. “Last year. It looked totally real.”
“I don’t think it’s fake.”
None of us moved closer.
“How would a fake skull get in here?” I asked.
“Teenagers messing around,” Tom said. “Throwing it over the wall, or out of a window. How would a real skull get in here?”
“It could be old,” Melissa said. “Hundreds of years, even thousands. And Zach and Sallie dug it up. Or a fox did.”
“It’s fake as fuck,” Leon said. His voice was high and tight and angry; the thing had scared the shit out of him. “And it’s not funny. It could have given someone a heart attack. Stick it in the bin, before Hugo sees it. Get a shovel out of the shed; I’m not touching it.”
Tom took three swift paces forwards, went down on one knee by the thing and leaned in close. He straightened up fast, with a sharp hiss of in-breath.
“OK,” he said. “I think it’s real.”
“Fuck’s sake,” Leon said, jerking his head upwards. “There’s no way, like literally no possible—”
“Take a look.”
Leon didn’t move. Tom stepped back, wiping his hands on his trousers as if he had touched it.
The run down the garden had left my scar throbbing, a tiny pointed hammer knocking my vision off-kilter with every blow. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do was stay perfectly still, all of us, wait till something came flapping down to carry this back to whatever seething otherworld had discharged it at our feet; that if any of us shifted a foot, took a breath, that chance would be lost and some dreadful and unstoppable train of events would be set in motion.
“Let me see,” Hugo said quietly, behind us. All of us jumped.
He moved between us, his stick crunching rhythmically into the grass, and leaned over to look. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Zach was right.”
“Hugo,” I said. He seemed like salvation, the one person in the world who would know how to undo this so we could all go back inside and talk about the house some more. “What do we do?”
He turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, pushing up his glasses with a knuckle. “We call the Guards, of course,” he said gently. “I’ll do it in a moment. I just wanted to see for myself.”
“But,” Leon said, and stopped. Hugo’s eyes rested on him for a moment, mild and expressionless, before he bent again over the skull.
* * *
I was expecting detectives, but they were uniformed Guards: two big thick-necked blank-faced guys about my age, alike enough that they could have been brothers, both of them with Midlands accents and yellow hi-vis vests and the kind of meticulous politeness that everyone understands is conditional. They arrived fast, but once they were there they didn’t seem particularly excited about the whole thing. “Could be an animal skull,” said the bigger one, following Melissa and me down the hall. “Or old remains, maybe. Archaeology, like.”