Digging Up Danger
by Mike Rogers
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
“Once upon a time, there was a nice young boy, well-behaved, clever. Then he started stealing and trying things on with girls and stopped doing his homework, so his parents broke into his bedroom and found one of those things. I’ve got it in the box, the one they found. It’s like the others — not the same, but similar.
“Of course, his parents had expected to find drugs. But they didn’t. They took it away from him and asked him where he’d got it, and he told them. That’s what comes of taking nice healthy bike-rides through the countryside, you see. You find things. It took about six weeks, with quite a lot of crying and two sessions with one of your people, to get him more or less back to where he had been before.
“And his parents wanted to get rid of the... object. Naturally. So they took it to the local museum, who didn’t like the feel of it or know what it was because, as you’ve seen, it doesn’t fit easily into any categories, and it gave the volunteer cleaning-lady the shivers and, as they couldn’t afford to lose her, they took it to the district museum, who decided to dump it on me, especially as I live nearby and I’d been on the telly recently, and I — since I quite fancied a summer dig near home — was hubristic enough to follow things up.”
My glass had become mysteriously empty. I did the logical thing. This time, Jan covered hers and sat down.
“You said you’d found out something else?” I’ve practised that rising intonation for many years. It’s a question I can always pretend is a statement or vice-versa. We psychiatrists have to learn to be as crafty as our patients just so we can tell the difference between them and us, when it comes to it.
Jan didn’t speak. She just put her hand into a cardboard box under the table and pulled out a small bundle, about the size of a paperback, which she put carefully on the table between us, where the light would illuminate it best. Then she deftly unwrapped it, with four simple movements, so it lay exposed on a star of greyish-white cloth. I didn’t go for the guessing-game. That’s always what the patients want. They want to be told what’s wrong with them, so they don’t have to take any personal responsibility for it: “It’s only what the doctors say, you know.”
“It’s lead,” said Jan. “A lot of it in Britain, once upon a time. ‘There’s lead in them thar hills,’ they used to say in Mendip, in the Peak. And where there was lead, there was silver, sometimes. And even if there wasn’t, lead had its uses: water-pipes, roofs... and votive tablets. That’s what this little baby is: a thank-you for being cured. A testimonial displayed outside the location where the cure took place, to encourage others to ‘take the plunge’, as it were. They’ve found plenty in Bath and other places with hot springs.”
“Nothing like that near here,” I said.
“No,” she said, “and the illness isn’t described as a physical one. A morbo mentis is what it says. Look.”
“From a disease of the mind,” I said, with flat intonation. “Does it say anything about the... methodology?”
“‘With fire and earth,’ it says. And it was a woman who did it.”
“With fire and earth?” I queried.
“Ah. Yes. Jo and Millie fessed up this evening, when the wine arrived. Said they’d forgotten to tell me, because of all the fuss over Billy. Seems that in the farther trench they’d found what they thought were the footings of a kiln, tell-tale traces of carbon from charcoal, split stones, pottery sherds; nothing as pretty as the whole stuff that the others had found. Only when they said that, they had the grace to realise what they’d said, because they understood, like everybody else, what those things did. Do. Even now.”
I looked up at the light. There was the flame, dancing just above the wick, not actually burning it, heating it just enough so that the oil was vapourised, so that the vapour could be turned into heat and light and combustion products of various kinds, to be dispersed in essentially harmless quantities and concentrations. One hoped.
“So,” I said, spectacles on the table, eyes closed, hand rubbing them so Jan couldn’t see, “we think that this woman somehow extracted people’s mental problems and turned them into clay objects?”
“And fired them,” said Jan, “a first, biscuit firing, then she put on those coloured glazes and fired them a second time.”
“And then,” I said, “she buried them.”
“And then,” said Jan, “they were cured. Of course, the afflicted may have buried them themselves.”
“With rites and chants and drugs,” I said.
“Of which no signs are likely to remain,” said Jan. “No mention on the votive tablet. Given the effects that those objects still have, I think it most likely that everything which disturbed the minds of the people who came here for help went into them and is still in them. That’s why they’re still here. They weren’t meant to be taken away.
“These people talked to the woman, who put their distress into a physical shape and fixed it, and then she talked to them again and added colours and patterns, to reflect something else about what troubled them. At each stage, they acknowledged the justice of her representation of what they were suffering from. Finally, there it was, taken from them.”
“I understand the symbolic value of all that,” I said, “we have psycho-drama and so on. But once it’s done, and you say, ‘Yes, that’s what’s troubling me,’ why don’t you break it to smithereens?”
Jan leant close to me, terrifyingly close to me. The sense of her presence forced me to open my eyes, but I couldn’t reach past her to put on my glasses, so she remained a looming blur.
“If you break it,” she said, with the effect of shouting but speaking with the softest of voices, “you let it all loose again.” Then she moved away from me, and I was able to put on my glasses and see clearly.
“So,” I said, noticing that the bottle was empty and feeling both glad and disappointed, “what are you going to do about these discoveries?”
“I’m going to stop the dig,” she said. “Tomorrow. I’ll make phone calls. See how many of the team I can pass on to other digs. There are always people who drop out. Worst case: they can come and dig my garden for microliths. I’ll tell them the money’s been pulled. Accountancy error. It’s always happening. I’ll see what building sites there are, that could do with some rescue archaeology before the winter rains make building conditions impossible.”
“And the finds?” I nodded towards the aluminium box, which had more and more the air of a bomb waiting to be planted.
“They can go into a museum basement, mislabelled. And I’ll get a note into the files, about how dangerous they might be. I wouldn’t mind an official letter from you to back me up.”
“But I haven’t seen any of the people affected—” I began.
“You held it in your hand,” she said. “You know, as well as I do. Besides, by the time anybody looks at what you’ve written, it’ll only be your posthumous reputation that’s at stake. You know what museum basements are like!”
“And the site?” I asked.
“Fill it in. Tell the MOD we found phosphorus grenades there. They won’t want to know; just block it all off. Let everyone forget about it. Best thing to do.”
“And afterwards?” I said. I wasn’t mentally with her in the tent any more. I was working out in my head how long it would take me to get back, whether I needed a sleep before I set off, how much I’d drunk, how much had worn off.
“Afterwards,” she said, “I’ll give up digging burial sites. Absolutely. Completely. Irrevocably. What about you?”
I hadn’t been prepared for that. I should have been, but I hadn’t been. I thought about answering, but decided that silence was better than a stutter.
“You know it’s the same thing, don’t you?” she said. “You know that there was somebody here, a woman — though that shouldn’t make any difference — who’d worked out, how long ago? Between sixteen and eighteen hundred years ago, I’d say — worked out how to get the mess out of people’s heads and deal with it, the same way we deal with nuclear waste, safe till somebody digs it up and starts messing with it. Is that not going to make the slightest difference to you?”
It was just like my first marriage. Whatever I said was going to be wrong, and saying nothing was probably worst of all.
“I have to... consider my position,” I said.
Jan laughed. It probably wasn’t as loud as I thought it was, because I expected her diggers to come running and surround the tent, thinking she was being attacked.
“You sound like a minister who knows he ought to resign but hasn’t the courage!” she said.
“What do you think happened here?” I asked.
“You mean, why did it stop?”
“Yes. Did the woman not train an apprentice, to carry on?” I suggested.
“Why should she?” Jan asked
“She just did this for money?”
Jan laughed again. There was an edge to it, like a knife being sharpened.
“Don’t you?” she said.
“No,” I said, quiet and calm and collected and almost entirely truthful.
She took in a deep breath. “Who knows?” she said. “Who knows anything? Maybe the locals resented all these rich crazies coming to their patch — we’ve found some pretty good jewellery and some coins, there might even be a hoard around here under the tree roots, the detectorists have left this place alone, for some reason, so we haven’t found any more.
“Maybe she was foreign. Maybe she was a trained shaman from somewhere. Maybe she moved to a city that had richer clients or more of them. Maybe one of her clients didn’t fit the paradigm and beat her head in, and she’s in a ditch we haven’t dug yet. I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out any more. Sometimes, what’s buried should just stay buried.”
* * *
Jan left the tent. I watched the flap swinging and made my decision. Well, one of my decisions. She wasn’t in view; she must have been around the back of the tent, looking at the little encampment and the trenches, her family.
I got into my car and set off. After five miles or so — I remembered the way — I pulled off the road, ran the car up a byway under some trees and had a sleep. The wine helped.
When it was light, I carried on. I filled up on the motorway; I had to, the tank was almost empty. I had breakfast, enjoyed having the sun behind me, thought about sea and sand and kids laughing and how good it would be to tell my wife that I was concentrating on writing from now on and how I’d be giving up the practice and have more time for her and the kids.
And it was good. We hugged and cried and played and splashed, and sand got everywhere, and we helped each other get rid of it in the shower, and put the kids to bed, and Marty quietened them down and sat and read, while I wrote the letter I knew I needed to write.
Then I wrote down everything you’ve just read, so that at some time someone would be able to know and understand, because it might be important, and I wanted to get it out of my head. And while I wrote, I watched Marty slowly fall asleep on the sofa. And then it was all finished.
But you know the way it is, when you’ve driven a long way: somehow, you can still see the landscape unfolding and flowing past you and, somewhere inside me, I still had a vision of all those anonymous fields I’d driven past, woods and copses and clumps of trees whose names I didn’t know, and I couldn’t help thinking and wondering about what might be buried under them and needed to stay there.
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
