Relics Read Online Free PDF Page B

tunnel was curving to the right. Less than four feet wide in places, its narrowness forced the archaeologists to walk in single file. Kim touched the wall closest to her and found that in places droplets of moisture were forming and running like dirty tears down the wall.
    Cooper stopped.
    There was another tunnel leading off to the left.
    ‘Which one do we take?’ asked Perry.
    ‘We could split up,’ Russell suggested.
    ‘No,’ Cooper said. ‘There’s no telling how deep these networks go or how complex they become. We’ll stay together for the time being.’
    They moved on.
    Kim saw her breath clouding in the air and she shuddered as the numbing cold seemed to penetrate her bones, freezing the marrow until her whole body felt as if it were stiffening. She found it an effort to lift her feet. Ahead of her, she saw that Cooper too was slowing his pace. It was as if they were walking into a high wind, battling against the force of some powerful blast of air. But there was no movement in the air. The atmosphere remained still and as stagnant as filthy pond water. The stench and the cold closed around them like a reeking glove, squeezing more tightly until each of them was gasping for breath.
    Cooper stopped and pulled a box of matches from his pocket. He lit one and held it up.
    The flame did not move.
    Not a flicker either way:
    In seconds the match burned out, as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the foul atmosphere to sustain it.
    ‘Shouldn’t one of us go back and tell the others what’s happening?’ Russell suggested.
    Cooper agreed.
    ‘We’ll push on and see if we can find the end of the tunnel,’ he said. ‘You go back.’
    Russell nodded, flicked on his torch and retreated down the narrow tunnel. Within seconds the light was enveloped by the blackness and he became invisible to his three colleagues.
    ‘Come on,’ Cooper said, noticing that the tunnel turned to the right again, more sharply this time. Kim sensed that it was also getting narrower. She put out her hands and touched both sides with ease, recoiling slightly from the clammy, moist feel of the walls.
    ‘How much further?’ Perry murmured wearily. ‘We must have come five or six hundred yards already.’
    ‘The Celts didn’t usually build labyrinths like this, did they?’ said Kim, not sure whether it was a question or a statement.
    ‘Their hill-forts are very complex but I’ve never seen anything like this under the ground,’ Cooper confessed.
    The tunnel widened slightly, turning an almost ninety degree bend. The three archaeologists came around the corner virtually together.
    The sight which met them stopped them in their tracks.

 
     
     
     
Nine
     
    The skeletons were piled six deep in places.
    The bones, blackened by the ages, lay lengthways across the tunnel like a mouldering barrier, preventing the archaeologists from moving any further.
    Cooper shone his torch over the macabre find, overawed by the sheer number of ancient forms. Kim took a faltering step forward, kneeling beside the closest one. Cooper joined her, muttering to himself as the torch beam flickered once more.
    ‘This kind of mass burial wasn’t normal Celtic practice,’ Kim said, quietly, as if reluctant to disturb the unnatural silence around them. Even as she spoke her voice seemed muffled. Stifled by the choking smell and the almost palpable darkness. ‘There must be hundreds of them.’
    ‘They look like children’s bones,’ said George Perry, noticing, like his companions, that not one of the skeletons was more than about three feet in height.
    Kim prodded one with the end of a pencil, hearing the lead scrape along the bare bone like fingernails on a blackboard.
    Perry looked down at the skeletons, then past them, the beam of his torch catching a larger object.
    It was another barrier, this time stone covered with rancid moss, its surface mottled by the few lichens that had managed to survive in such a fetid atmosphere. Perry was about to say