The sharp rays of the rising sun pierced through Henry’s eyelids and into his dream, waking him suddenly. He felt cold. Cold and uncomfortable.
He opened his eyes. A vertical strip of sunlight framed solid blackness and he blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Waiting to see the outline of the heavy curtains, the window. His bedroom.
His feet were freezing. He reached down to touch them and his hand recoiled. They were caked with mud.
A sick feeling grew in his stomach. His heart began to pound. He had walked in his sleep before, but he had never left the house. What had he done? Where had he been?
His hand dropped to the mattress of his bed. It was as hard as stone. No, it was stone. He sat upright. He was not in his bedroom.
His eyes began to adjust to the light. One wall was stone, crumbling, dusted with ancient ash. The opposite wall was rock and earth. He was sitting on a rough stone floor, at the foot of a set of deep steps leading up to a solid stone doorway. But there was no door. Just a block of stone which had once sealed the entrance, but which was now leaning open, propped against a tree, leaving the hole through which he must have entered in his sleep.
This doorway was familiar to Henry. It was covered in moss. Strands of ivy hung on the outside like a curtain. The frame of the door was carved from long, thin solid blocks and decorated with carvings of strange creatures. Some were rough. Others were more intricate and detailed. It was as though many builders from different eras had been competing, carving over and around each other’s work.
Henry knew this place well, at least the outside of it. It was the old tomb deep in the woods above the village. He and his school friends told stories about it. They had studied its odd patchwork of different types of stone and carvings, but it had always been sealed. The stone in the doorway had rocked tantalisingly when they had pushed on it, but it had never tipped open. They had always been too frightened of what might lie inside to try any harder to break in.
But now the great stone was leaning outwards. And here was Henry. Inside.
There was something else, too.
Where the sun glanced across the wall of rock and earth, it cast long shadows, bringing every indentation and detail of the stone into sharp relief. Henry stared at it, unable to move.
The huge eye. The massive skull. The curved serrated teeth. It was hypnotic and terrible.
The tiny spiral of the fossilised shell had been enough to make him ask questions in his mind. It had cracked open a door and filled him with doubt. But this… This was too big. It left no room for doubt. What Henry felt now, surging under the fear and dread, was pure, confident certainty. And it changed everything.
His father was wrong, completely and utterly wrong. And the woman in the grey dress was right.
Henry climbed out of the tomb with his head spinning. Using all his strength, he tipped the stone back into place. It wobbled and rocked as it always had. Perhaps it had only ever needed a push in the right direction to topple it out of position.
Henry reverently draped the ivy back over the entrance and set off home in his nightclothes.
It was only just dawn and luckily there was nobody else about. As he made his way down towards the vicarage, he could see no lights on in the house. The back door was ajar – obviously that was how he had left it during his sleepwalk. He ran out of the trees, across the empty cart-track and into the garden.
Good. All the curtains were still tightly shut. But he knew his father sometimes rose early to sit and work in the dining room on the other side of the house. If he was up, Henry knew he would be in deep trouble. He slipped in through the door and closed it as quietly as he could. The hinge creaked and the latch clicked loudly.
Henry held his breath and listened, but the house was silent. Eventually he dared to move again, tiptoeing across the kitchen and peering around the hall door. His eyes went immediately to the dining room. The door was open, but the room was in darkness. The curtains were still closed. That meant his father was not yet up. He breathed again.
There were two ways back up to his room: the main stairs, which would take him right past his parents’ bedroom door; or the back stairs, which would take him closer to his own door, but which were old, loose and noisy.
Henry decided on the back stairs. He closed his eyes for a second and tried to remember which steps were the troublemakers. The first was fine, the second and third creaked if you trod on the left-hand side. He stepped cautiously upwards. The next three steps were good and solid, but then, on the seventh, there was a creak on the right followed by a creak on the left of the next step… or was it the other way around?
Gently, he lowered his foot onto the left of the seventh step. No sound. He put his full weight on it and suddenly the stair let out a loud groan. He jumped back and waited for the sound of a door opening.
There was a long silence.
Henry tried again, this time stepping on the other side, and crept upwards. The final two steps were both completely loose. He would have to jump. He grasped the carved wooden pineapple at the top of the banister and pulled hard on it as he leapt, clearing both steps and landing with a muffled thud at the top of the stairs. He smiled to himself in satisfaction, but when he let go of the banister, it gave a loud crack as it shifted back into place.
Again, he waited, his eyes fixed on his parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall. Just as he was about to move again, he heard the sound he had been dreading. The sound of bedsprings pinging, followed by a creak of floorboards. Then came footsteps padding across the room.
His bedroom door was only three paces away and it was wide open. He leapt towards it, landing in the middle of the hallway. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his parents’ door handle turning. Skidding across the polished floor, he raced through his own door. He almost closed it behind him, then spun around to grab the handle and twist, pushing the door silently into place and releasing the handle carefully so that the latch let out only the tiniest click.
In the moment before the door shut, Henry saw his father framed in the doorway at the far end of the corridor. But he was looking back into his own room, not out into the hall. Henry had made it.
Henry was dressed for school and at the breakfast table exactly on time. In fact, he had been awake and watching the clock ever since getting home. His father slowly buttered his toast, scraping the knife back and forth until the butter vanished into the bread. A plate of cold meat sat at the centre of the table on a decorated china plate. Henry and his mother were careful to refrain from taking any until Father had selected his slices of choice.
Henry just wanted the meal to end so that he could leave for school. His father paused and looked at him. Perhaps he sensed that something was wrong. Henry did his best to hold his father’s gaze, but in the end he looked away. He was still afraid of him. Yet something had changed. Yesterday, he had believed everything his father said because he knew more than Henry about the nature of the world.
Today, Henry knew more. Nothing his father said could be taken as the only interpretation of truth again.
‘The more I hear,’ his father’s voice floated across the table towards him, ‘about that school of yours, the less I like it.’ Henry felt an accusation in his tone, as if he were solely responsible for the school, its teaching methods and its attitude towards discipline. ‘The government has done children no good with its meddling,’ his father went on. ‘You should know I am considering other options.’
Henry knew what that meant. It meant being sent away to St Mary’s. The mere thought made him shiver. St Mary’s was more terrifying than any dinosaur. His own school was strict enough, but he knew it was nothing compared to St Mary’s. His friends’ parents used St Mary’s as a threat. One whisper of the name was enough to make a naughty child behave.
The children of St Mary’s were silent, humourless and blank. He’d seen them in town, walking in rows, heads bowed. Every spark of character erased from them. It was said that on their way between lessons they marched in time, and even at meals, they sat in silence. St Mary’s had only one purpose for its students. Every graduate, or at least every graduate that anyone talked about, had a single calling. Every pupil that served his full term joined the church.
Henry felt a strange fury rising in his stomach. He knew it would be pointless, but he had to speak. He opened his mouth with no idea what he was going to say, but something stopped him.
His father was looking straight past him, his expression changing. His eyes widened, and his mouth was agape in horror or anger. He slowly rose to his feet.
Henry turned and followed his father’s gaze. He was staring out into the back hallway, and there, clearly outlined on the polished wooden floor, were muddy prints of Henry’s bare feet. Between them, fallen leaves and sticks were scattered.
‘What is this?’ Henry’s father leapt up from the table, and strode over to the offending marks. Henry stammered, unable to speak.
His father’s eyes traced the footprints on to the stairs and upwards. He threw an accusing glance back at Henry and then followed the trail up the stairs, meticulously picking up leaves and sticks as he went. He said nothing, but Henry felt as though his throat was being squeezed hard. He swallowed.
Behind him, he could hear the slosh of water. His mother was already silently scrubbing the floor.
Henry watched his father follow his footprints to the top of the stairs and across the hall into his bedroom. By the time Henry got to the door, his father was already bending over the bed. He cursed himself for leaving the muddy trail on his way in. With all the curtains closed and the house in darkness, he hadn’t noticed the trail of muck behind him. But at least he knew the bed itself was clean. He hadn’t got into it since he returned from the forest. He had the worst of it now.
Suddenly, his father bent forward, reaching down and into the bed. Henry’s heart sank as his father took two objects from under the pillow and stood up, staring at them, his face reddening. Henry had been wrong: things were now a lot worse.
His father’s hand shook as he held out the printed pamphlet and the tiny fossilised shell in front of Henry’s face. He said nothing.
‘I…’ started Henry, but his father grabbed his arm and dragged him out of the room. His wrist hurt as he was hauled down the stairs and out through the kitchen into the garden. It was an effort to stop himself falling over as he stumbled across the garden to the woodshed.
Henry’s father stopped abruptly at the door to the shed. Outside, logs for the fire were piled in neat stacks. In front of them, a wide flat stone lay on the ground. Henry used it to hold logs while he chopped them for the fire. Sometimes his father made him chop wood as a punishment, but not today. This was far more serious. His father released his arm, leaving him standing bewildered in front of the stone block, and stepped into the shed. He didn’t dare move.
When his father emerged, he was holding a large, heavy hammer. Its handle was as long as Henry’s arm. He stood in front of him for a long time, hefting the iron head in both hands. Henry waited, shaking.
After a long pause, his father held the sledgehammer out to him. Henry took it. It was so heavy he nearly dropped it on his foot. It was an effort to stand up straight, but he did, looking his father directly in the eye for the first time. He was as furious as Henry had ever seen him, but still he said nothing.
Henry’s forearm ached under the weight of the hammer, but he refused to let his arm drop. The muscles began to burn with the strain. Eventually, his father bent down and placed something on the flat stone, then stood up again, holding Henry’s eye with his own.
Slowly, Henry looked down. There, on the flat stone, lay the fossil shell. Its coiled ridges stood out in creamy white against the slate surrounding it. Henry lifted his eyes back to his father’s. Again, he said nothing, instead nodding from the hammer to the fossil, and back to Henry. Then he stepped back, expectantly.
His meaning was clear enough and Henry knew there was nothing he could do but obey. He looked down at the delicate shape, took a deep breath and raised the hammer above his head. It was all he could do to lift it.
He paused, his arms shaking, swallowing back tears, then brought the hammer down hard. The fossil jumped on the stone slab, but it didn’t break. He hauled the hammer up again and smashed it down.
This time, the stone cracked from end to end and the slate fell away in pieces. The tiny shell lay completely exposed for the first time in three hundred million years. A perfect geometric spiral. So detailed and beautiful it could have been alive. Henry almost expected to see the hair-thin tentacles of the ammonite within, curling out of the shell to haul it away.
He lifted the sledgehammer and put his full weight behind it. The shell splintered into a powder of glittering crystals.
Henry dropped the hammer and stood up, staring defiantly at his father through his tears. Still, his father said nothing. With a look of disdain he turned away, and headed back towards the house.
Henry spent the day at school barely listening to his teachers’ droning repetitions. He thought about the shell and his dream and about the skull in the old tomb. Most of all, he thought about his father. Something told him that his punishment was not over. Something had changed between them. Whatever he now did with his life, he would have to do it alone.
When he got home, his father was at the church and his mother was busy in the kitchen. But as soon as he entered the dining room, he noticed it. The writing desk was always scrupulously tidy, just as everything his father touched was scrupulously tidy. Every object had a proper place and nothing was ever moved unless it was being used. Even the blotting paper was cut into equally sized pieces and arranged in a neat pile, held down by a carved wooden paperweight inlaid with brass leaves.
Anything out of place immediately caught the eye, and today, a long, white envelope sat at an angle in the middle of the desk. It was addressed, in his father’s writing, to the headmaster of St Mary’s.
The letter was sealed, but Henry didn’t need to read it. There was only one reason for his father to write to St Mary’s. Henry was to be sent there. He turned, ran upstairs to his room and threw himself down on his bed, sobbing. This was it. Quite simply, it was the end of his life.
He cried until the sun started to fade, sliding in a golden-red ball towards the treetops. His mind took him out into the woods where his secret lay hidden in the old tomb. He thought of the savage world the dinosaur must have grown up in and wished he could have its nature. Its strength. What, he wondered, could a boy achieve if he had the courage of a dinosaur in this polite, slow-moving world? He would not achieve anything at St Mary’s, that much was certain.
By the time he came down to dinner, his eyes were dry and his face was set in an emotionless mask. His father was still not home and would not be until late. His mother tried to make conversation about the day at school, but Henry responded as little as he could. She smiled at him once or twice. A calm, sympathetic sort of smile that worked for a bruised knee, but would do no good now. His mind was fixed and nothing could be allowed to change it.
When dinner was finished and cleared away, it was time for bed. Before going upstairs, Henry watched his mother gather up a handful of his clothes from the washing basket and pile them in the dining room. With his father out, she could settle to mending and altering them.
As she sat there, darning with an oil lamp beside her, he wanted to go to her. To tell her he wouldn’t be needing his school clothes any more. But he didn’t. Instead, he stood at the door, and said softly, ‘Goodnight.’ Then he turned, closed the dining room door and walked up the stairs.
When he reached the top, he opened his bedroom door, picked up the large leather bag he had already packed with a few of his toughest clothes and most precious belongings, and crept back down the stairs and out of the back door.
He crossed the garden and the road at a run, and then he was into the woods. A little further on, he met the path that led away from the village.
It was that easy.
As he walked, he thought to himself, It was the right decision. I had no choice. At any rate, it was his decision, and his alone. He knew that children younger than him had made their way in England. Besides, he was educated and willing to learn more. And London was just a week’s walk away.
He shifted the weight of his bag to his other shoulder and walked on. He wouldn’t be missed until morning and by then he would be miles away.
He followed the curve of the path up and over the hill. When he reached the top, he could see out over the downs in the blue moonlight. He turned to look back down into the closed valley that had been his life, and for the first time, he felt free.