Digging Up Danger
by Mike Rogers
part 1
“What on earth is it?” I said.
“I’ve no idea,” said Jan, “but I’ll tell you what it can do.” She took the strange, misshapen pottery object, with its smeared coloured glazes running into and out of one another, back from my cautious hand and put it on the table, which shuddered slightly. It was only a folding table, after all, and nobody guarantees an even surface in a tent.
The light washed over it and sought out crevices of shadow I had not seen or felt when I held it, briefly and uncomfortably, in my hand. Maybe it was the light itself, I thought and glanced at it. But the hurricane-lamp’s flame burnt steadily, perched above the wick, consuming the vapour from the oil, not the twisted cotton fibres.
Jan liked old things that worked and, if they didn’t, you could see why and fix it. Anyway, she’d told me, the light was gentler. You should look at things in the same light in which they’d been made and used if you wanted to understand them.
She’d said that to me thirty years ago, when we were at university together. Same corridor in the hall of residence, otherwise we’d never have met. How would a psychiatrist and an archaeologist come together, except in a high-class stand-up routine? We’d not been together long — just long enough to realise we weren’t suited to each other in that kind of way — but we stayed friends and discussion partners and remained in touch, postcards, emails, that sort of thing, congratulations on publications, jobs, prizes.
I’d thought she’d be somewhere more prestigious than a muddy field in Essex — if it was Essex and not Suffolk, my satnav hadn’t been sure. But, then, you go where the work is. And this was her work: delving into the past.
So, of course, was mine. We used to argue about it, every time we met. Good-naturedly, on most occasions. I couldn’t understand why she spent all her time finding out about the secrets of the dead, and she always warned me about probing too deeply into the secrets of the living. “Is it what they want?” she used to say. “Are you sure it’s what they really want?”
And I’d answer that I thought it was what they needed, and we’d be off into a discussion.
Sometimes she’d tell me about some society, some cultural group she’d been studying, working out their behaviour and their sense of values from the things they buried with their dead. “That’s when they’re honest,” she said. And I’d said that that wasn’t necessarily so, that burials could be public events, and what you did might be what was expected. And she’d agreed, but explained that there were solitary burials, that not everything took place in urnfields or townships of the dead, and sometimes I gave her an insight, and sometimes she gave me one.
And then, in the middle of the summer, when people are away, using external change to distract themselves from the fact that what’s inside them has remained distressingly the same, I got a call from her, around lunchtime. The signal was atrocious, which I understand now that I’ve had to find the place; it was breaking up all the time, which I interpreted as emotional distress, because that’s my job, like a shark scenting blood. For that reason, I left my newish wife and second young family on a sandy beach in the West and drove off east, into the past, because I felt I was needed.
* * *
Jan stood up from the table and went out through the flap. I followed her. She went behind the tent, up a slight slope and through a line of trees — hazel, I think they were, with the odd birch — and bushes, holly, elder, hawthorn — and then we both stopped, looking at a field which struck me as a tribute-band cover version of the First World War: tents and trenches. No mud, though.
There was still some light in the sky, enough to see the criss-cross pattern of the classic archaeological dig, with narrow paths between the areas being excavated. The tents were on the far edge, where water glinted in an old bath repurposed as a drinking-trough for livestock, filled from a stand-pipe that stood at one end like some withered plant-stem with a strangely-shaped seed-head.
A couple of the tents had lights on inside; the rest were dark. Seven or eight people were sitting in a semi-circle on the ground outside one of them, listening to a hairy young man playing soft guitar and joining in a song when he urged them. It was all very retro and calm but, then, they were young people who cared about the past.
“Marianne,” said Jan, lifting an arm in the direction of the group around the man with the guitar. “She didn’t come out to start digging this morning. Her friends went into her tent. She was sobbing and bleeding. I wasn’t sure whether it was proper wrist-slitting or just your standard self-harm that had got a bit out of hand. That thing we just looked at on the table was tucked inside her sleeping-bag, like a teddy for comfort.”
I couldn’t tell which was Marianne. Too far away. Too dark for my old eyes. I wasn’t sure it mattered.
“Billy,” she said, pointing to the other side of the group. “We have a mid-morning break and a chat. Then he disappeared. After what had happened to Marianne, I was worried, so I sent Jo and Millie off to find him.
“Thank goodness for child-proof pill bottles; that was what had delayed him. That, and having to come back to get some water to take them with. I haven’t shown you the little beauty he had with him. He’d dug it up that very morning. Fred was in the next trench and saw him get it out, just before mid-morning break.”
She fell silent. I looked at her. She was smiling and watching the group. When she saw me looking, she said, “They’re a great bunch. They stick together. They look after each other. That’s why they’ve got Billy and Marianne into the sing-song. There are two permanent couples on this dig, and I told them that they had to keep an eye on one another, so they’re in the tents with the lights on.
“I stopped all the digging, made them all do strict cataloguing in pairs, went over all the paradigms of recording finds and told them every horror story I knew about sloppy archaeologising. That took us up to six o’clock.
“In the meantime, I’d got in touch with the local history people and screwed out of them the number of a pizza firm that would be prepared to deliver up here as well as bring a case of wine I ordered from the local offy. Running a dry dig would be hypocrisy, so I control it. Besides, on a day like today they need it. There’s a bottle for us back in the tent. And bread and cheese from the deli next door to the offy. You were never a plastic ham and tinned pineapple man.”
* * *
We went back to the tent. It was markedly darker. I was glad of the light from the torch that Jan wore at her waist.
“No sense in sprained ankles,” she said, as she turned it on. “Or broken ones. Ten miles to the nearest pub. Goodness knows how far to a hospital.”
The first thing she did was to put a thick canvas bag over the object we’d been looking at. It closed with a draw-string and was opaque. Once it was invisible, she put it into a large, padded aluminium case, like those things photographers carry all their gubbins in. I noticed there were two other canvas bags of a similar kind in there already.
The next thing she did was to get out the wine and the bread and the cheese, all Italian. “Italians,” she said, “get everywhere. I ought to know. I’m an archaeologist. I spend a large part of my life digging up stones that tell me all about them.”
“All about them?” I asked. “Not just where and when they died?”
She chewed for a while before answering. “Some other stuff, too,” she said. “Medical history, mostly.”
“Is that something for me?” I asked. “Because I was wondering why you summoned me here. You’re a capable woman. You seem to have everything under control. Care in the community. Depressant of choice dispensed in regulated dosage. What else is there?”
“I called you,” she said, refilling our glasses, “because I needed a second opinion. And then, when you were already on your way, I found out something else, and by then it was too late to stop you. And I still thought and still think, that I need a second opinion.”
“On what, exactly?” I was disturbed to find that I’d slipped into my consulting pose — not least because it plays hell with my spine afterwards. It’s that leaning back position, with the lumbar area unsupported, chin almost on chest, peering over glasses, a terrifying combination of superiority and indifference. My first wife said that when I did that, I reminded her of the Ancient Egyptians. When I asked her why, she said because, like them, I seemed to have all my inner organs in jars on the far side of the room.
Jan stood up and started pacing. She was always better on the move. “I should have known this dig was going to be trouble. There’s no reason for there to be anything on this site. It’s not associated with anything else. Knowing what little I know now, I suspect that’s completely deliberate, that it’s almost quarantined.”
“Plague?” I asked, with an excuse to sit up properly and lean forward.
She laughed. “You’re not that kind of doctor, are you? Would you really like to be involved in something nice and simple and physical?” She grabbed her glass, drained, refilled. I covered mine.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
