took some photos of the site,” Meg said. “If you like, we could send you some.”
“Thanks—do that. Em, any ideas about what that is down at the bottom of the pit? Did either of you touch it?”
“No,” Meg and I answered simultaneously. I added, “It was deeper than ours, maybe arm’s reach. I didn’t dare touch it.”
He nodded. “I’m willing to. I think that after the nails, it would be silly to put the real danger down the bottom of the hole. I mean, who’d be stupid enough to warn you away from it with the nails?”
“I don’t know what this is about,” I said. “I only know that I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
He shrugged. “It isn’t your call.” But he had us stand back and he probed the bottom of the pit with a long stick before he knelt on the safe side of the hole. He reached in. I tensed.
Dave pulled out a crumpled and dirty brown paper lunch bag. Maybe it was the bag that once held the nails, I thought; it looks like the sort you could get from the hardware store. He slowly uncurled the top of it, crumpled and dirty and damp from having spent the night in the bottom of the pit, and looked inside.
“I think we’ve got trouble here,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Bones.” He shrugged. “I’m not an expert, but they look human to me.”
“Human bones?” Meg looked more curious than scared or ill, which is more than I could say for myself. “What sort?”
“Little ones.” Stannard smiled, a little sick, pale under his summer work tan, and shrugged. “I said I wasn’t an expert.”
“Can we—?” I asked.
“Just don’t touch them.” He shook a few of them onto a large plastic artifact bag that Meg whipped out of her backpack and spread out on the ground.
“Shit,” she said. Something like awe was in her voice. “They do look human to me. Emma?”
She knew that osteology wasn’t technically part of my specialty—colonial archaeology—but that I had been reading a lot on human remains lately, with an eye to expanding my professional horizons.
I leaned over the bones. “Sometimes, if they’re in rough shape, the bones can be misidentified as some other carnivore—bear, maybe even a wildcat.” Sure enough, they were about the right size, certainly the right shape for human, but there was something distinctly odd about them, considering what I was expecting to see and where I was seeing them. “Yes, human—but holy cow! They’ve been prepared!”
“Prepared?” Stannard looked queasy.
“You know, someone cleaned them up, boiled or bleached them clean. Like they were being used for a study collection. It was strange; at first, I was just assuming the bones were something found here by whoever dug this hole. But there are no stains and they’re not weathered—they’ve not been in the ground at all, as far as I can see—and there’s no sign that they…” I stopped myself, trying to find the best way to phrase my grisly thought.
“No sign, what?” Meg asked.
“No sign that they…recently came off someone alive. There’s no tissue, no, uh, bloodstains. The thing that tripped me up was that they look exactly like the ones we have back in the faunal lab, the skeletons and bones that are known examples, to be used to compare with what you find in the field. I’m so used to seeing them there, that it didn’t register with me for a moment.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Damn.” Meg sounded like she was disappointed that she hadn’t caught that. At least, I hoped she wasn’t disappointed that the bones were not…recently acquired.
“Jeez, you know—hey, check this out!”
I was using a pen to roll the little bones around—they were short, roughly cylindrical with knobby protuberances on either end—when I saw the markings. Clear, but cryptic, black markings along the short shafts of some of the larger ones. Letters and numbers…
“I’ll be damned,” Meg whispered. “Are those…?”
“Yeah,” I said. I was actually more creeped out now than I had been when I still worried that the bones were fresh. “I think they are. Look here.” I pointed out a particularly good example.
“Will you tell me what’s going on?” Dave said. “What are those marks? Some kind of occult thing? Or is it just ‘cult’?”
“Kinda,” Meg said; I frowned, she wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the time for humor. Everyone needs an outlet for anxiety, I guess.
“Only if you consider accession marks on a study collection an occult practice. Imagine a room full of people dedicatedly