Set on the night of 15 October 1987, Hilderbrand Ash and Mortimer Cropper are digging up a grave of one of Ashe's relatives to retrieve a box buried with the relative.
They dug. They threw up an increasing mound, a mixture of clay and
flints, chopped ends of roots, small bones of vole and bird, stones, sifted
pebbles. Hildebrand grunted as he worked, his bald head glinting in the
moonlight. Cropper swung his spade with a kind of joy. He felt he was over some
border of the permissible and everything was just fine. He was not a grey old
scholar, smelling of the lamp, sitting on his fundament. He was doing, he would
find, it was his destiny. He poised his sharp spade above the earth and struck
and struck with a terrible glee, slicing, penetrating the sloppy and the
resistant. He took off his jacket and felt the rain on his back with pleasure,
and his own sweat trickling between his shoulder blades and down his breast,
with joy. He struck, he struck, he struck.
"Steady on," said Hildebrand, and "Keep
going," hissed Cropper, pulling with his bare hands at a long snake of the
yew's root system, getting out his heavy knife to cut it.
"It is here. I know it is here."
"Go steady. We don't want to disturb the—disturb—if we can help it."
"No. We shouldn't have to. Keep at it."
A wind was getting up. It flapped a little: one or two of
the churchyard trees creaked and groaned. A sudden gust lifted Cropper's
discarded jacket briefly from the stone where it hung, and dropped it to the
earth. ... Cropper snuffed the air. Something seemed to move and
swing and sway in it, as if ready to slap at him. He felt for a moment, very
purely, a presence, not of someone, but of some mobile thing, and for a moment
rested dully on his spade, forbidden. In that moment, the great storm hit
Sussex. A long tongue of wind howled past, a wall of air banged at Hildebrand,
who sat down suddenly in the clay, winded. Cropper began to dig again. A kind of
dull howling and whistling began, and then a chorus of groans, and creaking
sighs, the trees, protesting. A tile spun off the church roof. Cropper opened
his mouth and shut it again. The wind moved in the graveyard like a creature
from another dimension, trapped and screaming. The branches of the yew and
cedar gesticulated desperately.
Cropper went on digging. "I will," he said.
"I will."
He told Hildebrand to go on, but Hildebrand couldn't hear
and wasn't looking; he was sitting in the mud next to a gravestone, clutching
the neck of his jacket, fighting the air that had worked its way inside. Cropper
dug. Hildebrand began to crawl slowly round the rim of Cropper's excavation.
The very bases of the yew and the cedar began to shift, to move laterally and
to complain. Hildebrand pulled at Cropper's sleeve.
"Stop. Go in. This is—beyond the limit. Not safe.
Shelter."
Horizontal rain whipped and sliced the flesh of his cheeks.
"Not now," said Cropper, poising his spade like a
divining rod, and struck again.
He hit metal. He got down to the earth and scrabbled with
his hands. It came up—an oblong thing, covered with corrosion, a nugget
recognisably shaped. He sat down, on the adjacent stone, clutching it.
He set out across the churchyard. The air was full of
noises. There was a whining, ripping noise, which he saw was the sound of the
trees along the track and in the hedgerow whipping to and fro, tossing their
crowns of trailing twigs from earth to sky to earth.
Click here to buy a copy of Possession by A. S. Byatt
Some questions
