Excerpt: Infinite Monkeys

Out of his skull

The pickaxe gave out an eerie and muted ‘pop’ as it went through the skull.

“Oh God,” thought Dog, the eternal atheist, “what have I done now?”

His brain raced. Could he cover it up, and move, and maybe no-one would know? Perhaps the next person to find it would get the blame. Could he really have just done what he thought he had done?

Did it matter?

He took a deep breath, carefully put down the pickaxe, with the smooth, efficiently shaped wooden handle which he had felt so proficient using up until this moment.

The smooth swing, letting the weight of the head do the work, the controlled aim.

And now he had put it straight through someone’s skull.

Of course, they didn’t care (unless he was feeling superstitious, and a wave of doubt had certainly flooded through his system, however briefly). They were long gone.

“What’s up, Dog?” shouted his foreman, aware that he had stopped working.

“Uh, nothing.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I thought I hit something...”

“And did you?”

“I don’t know for sure...”

The truth was he didn’t know for sure, he just had a horrible feeling. He bent down, and brushed some of the dirt aside with his fingers. The shattered fragments lay both on the surface, and crushed inside the brain cavity, but it certainly did look like someone’s head.

“I think it’s a skull!” he said.

Heads turned. Other workers on the site, busy (until then) with something boring, liked the sound of this.

“OK, OK, everyone” shouted Brian, “get on with your own jobs for a bit”. He looked pleased.

“Hang on, Dog,” he said, “don’t do anything else until I get there.”

He had been on the far side of the site, somewhere in a series of trenches cut deep into the ground, square cut, vertical faces, carefully made – pegged out with strings, and accurately measured to form a grid.

“Just don’t do anything.”

Dog stood, leaning on his pickaxe, half proud at finding something, rather sheepish at having broken it.

Brian eased himself up from the position he had found himself in, cautiously stepped across a worked area, climbed up to the surface level (without damaging the vertical face of the trench) and walked a labyrinthine dance along the ‘safe’ areas between the worked areas.

He was a slightly daunting figure as he approached. Tall, bearded, with a scruffy country style hat, a professional looking all-weather jacket, odd tweedy trousers with leather patches at the knee, an intense gleam in the eye (behind the glasses held together with a sticking plaster), and big (but light) boots. In his hand he carried the archaeologist’s badge of office, the diamond-shaped trowel, with the ground down edge, from hours of carefully scraping a level surface down, centimetre by centimetre. Not some tinny plaster trowel which would bend of break in a minute of serious scraping – but the real deal.

New boys like Dog had learned enough (from jeering laughter, if nothing else) to not buy some cheap and nasty trowel. They had all invested hard-earned cash in a decent tool that could last them for years. Even so, the years of service could almost be measured by the angle of wear on that trowel. No quick way to get that honed curve, that bevelled edge, as elegant (in its way) as the stone axe that it might even uncover and discover on a suitable site.

This wasn’t a Stone Age site, though, or Iron Age, not even Saxon.

As far as they knew, the building and surrounding area that they were excavating was from something like the 12th Century, and (as far as they knew) probably a Templar Farm.

So they had found plenty of chicken bones, and bones from mammals of the farm, mostly in waste pits - and of course they had spent days carefully cleaning dirt of stone foundations, to reveal how the walls fitted together – but nothing really spectacular had occurred for days. It could get really monotonous, and that’s when a good foreman came into his own.

He might buy the first round in the evening, at The Saracen’s Head, down in the village, he might suggest a bonfire, and get everyone to bake potatoes and have a sing-song. Creating a team out of a motley crew was never easy, and some people didn’t have the knack. Brian was good at it.

So although Dog felt slightly apprehensive about smashing vital clues, trashing the evidence, and perhaps having done something really clumsy, he waited patiently.
Brian strolled up. He looked down. He waved Dog back a step, and lowered himself gently onto the work surface. Lowering himself to his leather-patched knees, he delicately manoeuvred the trowel over the surface that Dog had disturbed.

“Oh yes,” he said without turning his head, “it’s human, all right. Well done!”

Dog relaxed about an inch – he stammered “uh, sorry I broke it, but I didn’t see it until too late!”

“Oh don’t worry about that,” said Brian kindly, “it often happens. Of course, it’s nice if we get a whole skull, but as they tend to stick up higher than the other bones, they often get it in the neck,” he chuckled, and Dog joined him nervously.

“The interesting bit,” he continued, “is whether the whole body is still there, or if (he chuckled) it’s just a skull, which is much more sinister!”

As he was talking he was gently working around the entrance wound, and carefully lifting skull fragments aside.

“We are going to need a tray for the bits, we need the camera, we will have to slow down now and put the picks an shovels away, and work this area with trowels, very gently. By the end we will be down to penknives and camel hair brushes. Oh, and we should let Phil know – he’ll be pleased!”

This brusque approach reassured Dog that his accidentally putting a pick through someone’s skull was not going to lose him his job. It appeared it might even get him a medal (even though he been allocated that area to clear). There seemed a curious relationship between luck, chance, fate and destiny in digging holes in the ground, looking for the past.

“OK guys and gals,” shouted Brian, “Take Five!”

The other workers, whose concentration on their own tasks had lapsed anyway, quietly put down tools (shoving treasured trowels in back pockets) climbed out of the work spaces, and began to wander towards Dog’s patch.

“It was horrible,” he began, “there I was hacking away at the earth when suddenly I heard this odd noise, like a pop, and the earth gave in too easily, and I found my pick embedded in someone’s skull! It was a bit spooky. Thank God I’m an atheist,” he said, using one of his mum’s favourite jokes.

“I know how you feel,” said Ian, “disturbing the dead after centuries of rest, and all that.”

One of the crew, sheepishly Christian, hurriedly crossed themselves.

“I know,” said Dog, “I felt like quickly covering it up, and leaving it in peace, for a minute, there.”

“Still, touch wood,” he said, rapping his knuckles on his own skull, “it’s not bad luck.”

The group looked up towards the site hut, where they could see Brian and Phil deep in conversation.

Brian looked their way, and waved them over.

They weaved their way in single file, through the string-lined safe paths between the cleaned and cleared areas.

“Well done, Dog, “ said Phil, “ I know it’s a bit of a shock the first time that happens to you, but it gives us something to work with, and it’s the kind of stuff the local papers love.” He grinned. “They don’t find walls, and mason tool marks, and building layouts that interesting. They always ask if we have found anything valuable, or any bodies. Things and people, that’s all they want to hear about. They really don’t care too much about ‘how people lived’ or ‘what can we learn from the past’.”

“You guys,” he waved a vague hand at the crew, including the women, “take an early lunch while we work on a strategy” and then, putting his arm around Dog’s shoulder he steered him towards his own caravan, parked beside the site hut. Looking over his shoulder, he nodded to Brian to follow.

The three of them, fairly muddy and scruffy, waterproofs rustling, squeezed in around the caravan fold-down table.

“Well, I think this calls for a celebration,” said Phil, reaching behind himself to retrieve a bottle.

Brian lunged to his feet, wobbling the whole caravan, lurched to the sink, and returned with an odd assortment of glasses, muddy hands and all.

“I think you’ll like this,” said Phil, “it’s kind of an odd liqueur my wife found, but it suits the moment.” He poured a glinting golden nectar out, first into the small cut glass whiskey glass, then into the straight sided tumbler, and finally (not too much!) into the half pint glass from the pub.

He handed Dog the cut glass, indicated the tumbler to Brian, and took the half-pint handle for himself.

“Slainte!”
“Mud in yer eye!”
“Cheers!”

They all sipped, beamed, held their glasses up to let the sun shine through the amber liquid, and then sipped again.

“So,” said Phil, “I guess you’d like to clean it up, and look for the rest of the skeleton yourself?”

“Well, y-yes,” stammered Dog, who had assumed the job would taken away from him, and handled by someone more expert (or senior to him, anyway).

“This is your first dead body, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll put Graciela on with you, as she has a steady hand, a delicate touch and the patience that women seem to excel at – and she’s done it before,” he said, with what seemed like a leer.

Brian and Phil exchanged glances and chuckled.

Dog felt too grateful to think about it too much, although the idea of spending the day head to head with Graciela seemed pretty OK to him. Up till now he had only stood in a crowded and muddy site hut, hugging a mug of steaming tea, and wondering what she looked like under all that all-weather gear. They had hardly exchanged more than a few words, before going off to opposite ends of the site.

Of course, they had also nodded to each other in the food queue (when lunch got brought to the site) and he had once been squeezed into a pub pew right next to her, but surrounded by men with pints, singing loud choruses of vaguely lewd folk songs, which didn’t seem to upset her at all (although she didn’t join in), in fact, they had seemed to amuse her.

“One tip,” said Phil, when Brian went off to rearrange the crew, shaking and tipping the caravan as he climbed out. “When you get to the smaller bones, which may be in position, or may have got displaced – work out what they are, where the fit, how many you are looking for, etc, by feeling your own skeleton. You don’t have to know that much physiology, we have pictures, and we have experts who will do the jigsaw puzzle later, but while you are working, take your time, and feel your own bones as you go. And if some of them get awkward, feel Graciela’s bones, or get her to feel yours...”

Again, he seemed to leer at Dog.

“It works,” he said, honestly.”

And he downed his drink, and closed the meeting by standing up.

“Oh,” he said, turning back like Columbo, “I forgot. You’re not religious or anything are you?”

“Not at all,” said Dog.

“OK, because some people worry about disturbing the dead, and spirits, and all that. After all, we don’t yet know if it’s really old. It could be some murder victim from a decade ago...”

Dog felt a slight chill. Somehow, skeletons from a thousand years ago didn’t seem too sinister, but someone who might have died in his lifetime was something else.

Phil looked at shrewdly. “Don’t worry! It’s very unlikely. I just wasn’t expecting a burial so close to the buildings. It might even predate them. Who knows? First of all, let’s find out if the rest of the body is there. Secondly, see if any other clues come with it, like jewellery. And thirdly, by the time we get to the hips, we might be able to figure out if it is a man or a woman. Women’s pelvic girdle is different, so you might find that Graciela comes in handy at that point.”

Dog began to feel uneasy. He never had felt comfortable with male banter, especially about women, and even more about women he felt attracted to – who he almost immediately put on a pedestal, and out of reach. He gulped.

As he climbed out of the caravan he saw Graciela walking towards him, smiling, obviously pleased to get given the interesting job, and he noticed Phil slide around the caravan, pulling out his mobile phone.