The Red Man Read online

the university and claimed to be busy writing. Nat was apparently still off on board the boat somewhere, or so her supervisor at the museum said. I had yet to see The Red Man again; there was a considerable degree of complexity to the political alliances and embargoes of the facilities holding and studying him. It would have been easier to arrange a poker game with the Queen.

  Ash was the one to call me.

  Nat’s body had been found, washed up on a beach in Scotland. The fiancé and the boat were both missing. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he would later re-emerge in Panama, claiming amnesia and some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, and saying nothing about the accident except that he couldn’t save her. It was devastating news. Someone so young, so bright, so talented, and so full of life… all the usual, inadequate tributes swept in. I made my speeches to the press when they called me. Nat, being female and pretty, had been so much the face of The Red Man’s discovery. A few of the tabloids, making that connection, muttered darkly at hints of a curse, but all that was quashed and considered very poor taste. Besides, the absent fiancé and the suggestion of murder sold just as many papers.

  Speaking of which, Ash brought out his paper, almost a year to the day since we had exhumed the Red Man. Or, I should say, he brought out his book. It had grown vastly in size and complexity; no longer destined for an academic journal, but rather the shelves of every local store, chemist, grocery and train station newsagent. It now boasted a fashionable publisher, a ‘ground-breaking’ theory and a new title:

  The Red Man:

  Druid Victim?

  The embossed gold print on the cover, the ghost-writer’s standard of prose, and the copious photos of the dig site used out of context to promote his ridiculous hypothesis all shocked me, but not as much as the fact that—judging by the information he provided—Ash had been allowed recent access to The Red Man. When I questioned him, he didn’t lie. Yes, he admitted. He had leaned on an old professor of his, twisted a few arms and struck a few deals. He didn’t see why I should be so concerned. All was fair in love, war and archaeology, wasn’t it?

  He said it with a glassy, greasy smile on his face and he tossed me a shallow laugh. I didn’t buy any of it, but I was too damn furious to argue. I walked out without a word and—less than nine weeks later—Ash was dead.

  There remains a great deal of mystery over how it happened, even now. They say, that great and nebulous ‘they’, that questions will be answered at the inquest, but what those questions actually are, no one seems keen to state.

  The police only spoke to me out of politeness, I think. I hadn’t seen him since we argued and—had I planned to poison him out of spite—I would surely have done it with rather more alacrity. I didn’t say as much to them, of course. They tend to disapprove of comments like that. It was drugs, though. An overdose of sleeping pills washed down with single malt. Odd, I thought, because Ash had never been a spirit drinker. Neither had he ever had trouble sleeping. I wondered what would cause such a sudden change and—I can’t deny it—did perhaps uncharitably ascribe it to guilt over that awful book he’d cobbled together and thrown out so fast.

  I have never read such a loosely collated pack of assumptions, idiocies and outright lies. We had no evidence to suggest that The Red Man had been a direct religious sacrifice… though initial examinations of the body showed he had been stabbed, strangled and possibly drugged with a draught of something not unlike mistletoe. Still, we had no way of knowing it wasn’t a judicial execution, or a completely secular murder.

  Yet, Ash had determined and boldly claimed The Red Man had been killed by druids, part of a chain of human sacrifices that had littered that order’s dying days in Romano-British history.

  He wove tales of ritual cannibalism, fountaining blood and sacred flesh that—in my opinion—owed more to Hammer Horror than any scientific fact, but he shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists. The book made people who’d never nursed an interest in the past think about it in new ways, and stoked up interest in the case that generated more documentaries and column inches than I would have thought possible. His own death caused an equal sensation, and people began to chatter widely of The Red Man’s curse.

  Nonetheless, a lingering unease clung to me, and it wasn’t quelled when I learned Ash had bequeathed me his notes and photographs. I went to his lawyer’s office to pick them up, pacing through the grimy London streets. The pale façades of Portland stone, rising up on each side of St. James Street and riven through with the tiny traces of fossils, the death masks of ammonites and trilobites set into the very bricks of these grand buildings, reminded me that the past never dies. It is always around us.

  The Ancient Greeks believed that. They thought that, rather than standing on a narrow line of time, facing bravely forwards as the future hurtles towards us, we are in fact facing the other way and looking into the past. It made sense, to their logic. The past, until it recedes to the vanishing point on the horizon, we can see, while the future—to which we are blind—comes at us from behind, slipping stealthily over our shoulders and enveloping us before we have a chance to run. And, all the while, we stand there and gaze back at the past, even as it changes before our eyes, a constantly flowing ribbon ebbing away from our grasp.

  It seemed so very odd to see his face again. Odd, too, to see the faces of friends so recently lost—Ash and Nat, grinning in the trench photos, with all the glee and joy of a new discovery—but strangest of all to once again confront The Red Man. In black-and-white and in colour, he captivated me from the still frames. His stretched, hardened skin, his arms outflung and yet his body curled like a foetus, protecting itself… or perhaps protected? Had he been carefully laid out, as Ash’s book suggested, by killers for whom his death was sacred? Had his last visions been of a world pushed to the brink of collapse, a taboo ritual enacted in a desperate attempt to save the only order his people had ever known? By the time I was allowed my own audience with The Red Man, my curiosity was at fever pitch.

  He looked weirdly peaceful, resting on the stark white of his examination bed. The climate was strictly controlled, my hands encased in double layers of gloves, lest the acid or moisture of my skin should damage him. The university, the museum and the institute—that holy triad behind the funding of our excavation—were all fighting over the best way to preserve him for posterity and future study. They seemed to be coming down on the side of freeze-drying, blasting him like supermarket coffee or mixed herbs in a foil packet.

  I tried not to think of it, tried to focus on what I was there to see. Years of my work on Iron Age communities, how they lived and how they died, could be validated or exploded by what he had to tell me. My fingers traced the outline of his broken, wounded body. He had suffered horribly before he died, struck in several places by something blunt—a club, perhaps a fist—and pierced by blades to his chest, arms and thighs. His neck had been tied tight with a cord of deerskin, still embedded in the mummified flesh all these centuries later.

  Presumably at some opportune point—at some climactic part of the ceremony, if Ash’s so-called theories were to be believed—his throat was slashed, and maybe that had finally killed him.

  Yet the clothes he wore, the fine cloth preserved in dribs and drabs, stained and frayed almost beyond recognition, did not seem to have been sullied by the blood of his death. Had his killers redressed him after the act? Or was it simply that we modern onlookers had so little left to go on, our understanding so patchy, that we were missing something obvious?

  The frustration of having this tangible monolith of ancient culture right before me, yet his secrets remaining so hard to unravel, threatened to overwhelm my sanity.

  At least, when I heard the whispers, I blamed it on that.

  Day after day, The Red Man taunted me with his silence. Every study, every test, every isotopic analysis revealed ambiguous or mixed results. Yet when I went home, shut my door behind me and let the world drown itself out, an ancient tongue seemed to whisper my name.
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  The dreams came soon after. I remembered what Nat had said that evening on the village green: flames, running, and unseen eyes among the trees. The knotted boughs of a primordial wildwood snatched at me, bracken whipping my bare legs as I ran. Drums beat ceaselessly somewhere, howls of a faceless agony against the sky. I knew I was dreaming, yet I could not wake.

  And all the while a voice whispered to me in a language I didn’t understand.

  My nights became a battleground, my mornings a trial to be endured. Work—supposedly teaching undergraduate classes four days a week at the university, as I usually did between bouts of fieldwork—quickly became pointless, and my department head called me into her office to find out what had gone wrong. Pleading illness was easy enough as I already looked half-dead, and she sent me home on the spot, demanding I see a consultant or find some way of staving off imminent collapse. My commitments for the rest of the semester removed, I found myself remanded to the prison of my home, with nothing to occupy me but my books… and my dreams.

  It’s been this way for weeks now, and I can see no way out. Anyone in whom I could confide would just think me mad—perhaps not without cause—and I can’t