in the atrium and that was it. But my head nodded almost without me being aware of it moving. ‘Who is it who is coming.’
I don’t know how I knew it but, there, I had said it. Sometimes, I thought to myself, these skills, strengths or talents lie dormant until we need to use them.
I wasn’t wrong.
‘Strange,’ Felix was saying as he got to his feet. I came to the same conclusion. ‘Vicious yet intriguing, don’t you think?’
‘Put it down.’ The sight of it in his fingers made me wince violently. It was an exaggerated reflex that went right through my body and down to the ground.
But he was rapt, spellbound, beyond caution now.
I noticed a vague nausea in my stomach. It started to strengthen, reaching out and up my throat as I watched Felix turn the thing over in his hand. Then, without any warning he lifted it to his lips.
Panic shot through me and I opened my mouth to yell at him to stop. I couldn’t bear the thought of that thing touching his lips, entering his mouth, contaminating his body. But it was too late. A dreadful sound came out of the pipe – high-pitched, faint, and unearthly, like the last rattling breaths of a hundred sacrificed souls. Darkness and earth. Despair, death and sorrow.
A wave of revulsion swept over me. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit.
Felix felt something too, I was sure, for the pipe dropped from his fingers and rolled into the soil. He took a step backwards, shook his head and rubbed his chin. ‘Did you hear that?’ He swallowed.
I got myself together and nodded.
‘Peculiar noise,’ he said. ‘Do you think maybe it was used in rituals? Ceremonies?’ He laughed but it was hollow. For a minute we didn’t speak, just stood there gazing at the thing which had produced that dreadful sound – white bone reddened by blood. A sacrifice. Or a summons.
It felt like the damage had been done.
I edged away from it. ‘I suppose we might as well take it to the castle museum now. As we’re going there.’
Felix shook a hanky out of his jacket and wrapped the pipe, popping it into his breast pocket for safekeeping. I didn’t like the idea of it being so close to his heart. It was like it might infect him. He already looked a little peaky. I think the sound had shocked him.
‘We should definitely let the castle experts deal with it,’ I said.
‘Sure thing,’ he replied and smiled weakly. I tried to return his smile as we headed out of the priory but I couldn’t muster much at all. A terrible feeling of doom had fallen across me. The sun receded behind a cloak of clouds and the daylight had grown dim. A stale mustiness pervaded the air.
Felix swallowed. ‘Come on. It’s exciting isn’t it? Could be the greatest archaeological find of the decade.’
I glowered at the grey flagstones under my feet. I think somehow I knew that now he’d blown on the pipe nothing would be the same.
He called him, you see. And we both felt it. It was cursed. And his blood had whet its appetite.
It had broken the veil.
Though, of course, it didn’t register at the time. It was just a weird thing that had unsettled me. Another weird thing.
We reached the castle and sauntered across the wooden bridge to the vaulted entrance. A young bloke at the till inspected the pipe and called a female colleague down from an office. They were both interested and asked us to come to the office. I gently declined, guilting Felix into accompany-ing the castle staff by pointing out that I’d already been delayed (by him) and really needed to get stuck into my research. Plus I didn’t want to be near that revolting relic.
Felix didn’t need much persuasion. In fact, as he told the staff how we came across it, his eyes kept darting back to the bone pipe. You could see he was quite taken by the thing.
I was more than happy to leave them to it.
I paid at the entrance then passed under the eyes of a stone sphinx depicted perching on the mangled remains of a human head, hands and bones, and then through into the museum proper.
Colchester Castle was a gloomy structure indeed. Mind you, the place had a huge legacy: once the capital of Roman Britain, many of the displays in the cabinets testified to its early importance. There were ancient vases