We bury our past, building each era on the remains of the last, each generation drawing succour from the bones of those who came before. Our ancestors give up their places in the world to make space for us, and we in turn allow them to rest—in the depths of the earth, in ashy fragments in polished urns, scattered to ride the currents of the winds undisturbed. 

I was twelve when we moved to the newly created suburb of Lychpit, on the outskirts of a cookie-cutter commuter town, an hour south of London. Six identical houses formed a cul-de-sac on the crest of a hill, encircled by an ancient bluebell wood. The houses had bones of red brick, their upper storeys clad in green timber with brown tiled roofs. Viewed from the shallow basin of the valley, they played hide and seek among the trees whose branches towered over them. 

We were the first family to take up residence in the burgeoning development. The large family home was a significant step up from the shoebox terrace we had previously inhabited. Below us, the steel maws of the diggers tore into the earth.  Brick and timber houses sprang from the earth and marched down the hillside in orderly terraces carved from the dense woodland. 

One bright, cloudless July day, everything went silent. The diggers halted, their buckets raised in the air like a sea of yellow arms waving for attention. Construction workers clustered in groups of inactivity, passing cigarettes between them as they waited. 

My mother came home late from work that evening in a state of great excitement, clutching a slim archive box. We had already started eating dinner, and she placed the box on the table between our plates. 

“A team of us from the museum got called out to the construction site today. Look what we found,” she said, carefully opening the box to reveal two long, rusty metal spikes. 

“What are they?” 

“Weapons! The builders dug up a whole cache today, English Civil War era—probably mid 17^th Century. These would have been used on the end of pikes.”

She held out one of the metal points to me. 

“Just think,” she said as I took it in my hand, “this could have killed dozens of Cavaliers or Roundheads in its day.” 

The metal felt blisteringly cold and I dropped it hastily into a pile of vegetables I had been pushing around my plate. My father picked it out and held it up to the light, running his finger gently over the dulled edges. 

“A real piece of history. Shouldn’t this be in the museum, Alice?”

“We found so many, we’ll never be able to display them all—they’ll just end up in a box in the archive room.”

My father frowned. “Surely there are rules.” 

“No one will notice James, it’s not a big deal.”

“Why did they find all those weapons here?” I interjected.

My father leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “That’s not the only thing the builders found. This place certainly earns its name!”

“What name?” I asked.

“Lychpit. In Old English it means corpse pit.”

“How do you even know that?”

“If you listened to your mother when she’s giving us one of her history lectures, you’d know too.” 

He smiled fondly at my mother and reached across the table to stroke her hand, which was still holding the pike point. 

“They actually unearthed quite a lot of old bones when they were building the houses in our street.”

I stared at him aghast. “They dug up someone’s bones?”

“It wasn’t on purpose, Issy. There was a long siege here during the Civil War. They were bound to stumble across some old skeletons once they started digging the foundations.” 

My fork made a loud clink as it fell from my hand and hit my plate. 

“So, our house is basically built on a graveyard!”

My mother cut in with a sigh, “Isabelle, you’re always so melodramatic. No one would even have known the bones were there if they hadn’t built these houses. Now eat your vegetables.” 

My father took in my horrified face and quickly changed the subject.  

Soon, the final paving stone was laid, and the builders packed up their tools for the last time. The percussion of power tools was replaced with the low cooing of wood pigeons and the wind carried the scent of honeysuckle and grasses where previously had been the must of cement and wet sand.

To my dismay, the most recent archaeological find had become the topic of a school history project. 

“It’s your fault,” I told my mother, “I have to write a diary as though I was a soldier in the Civil War.”

She thought it was a most fitting project and gave me a heavy, boring-looking book from her study to “get me started.” I opened it to a random page so it would appear that I’d been studying, then I took up my favourite perch at the window of my room. Unlike the rapidly filling streets that populated the rest of the development, our small cul-de-sac had slipped into a torpor. A cheery parade of estate agents trooped through with potential purchasers each weekend, but we remained neighbourless. I enjoyed the peace of being alone on the hilltop, just the three of us. 

A network of footpaths had been carved through the woods allowing easy passage from the hilltop to the main road, which ran through the valley into the town. The woods became a secret world for me. I would stop on a bench to read or scribble a few paragraphs of homework while eating the penny sweets that my mother always tried to confiscate and dole out in ridiculously small quantities. It was there that I stopped to write the first entry of my Civil War diary, trying to mimic the flourishes and curls of the text in the old documents I saw at Mum’s museum.

September 1643. Our village is sending a regiment to fight in the war. We have pikes and muskets, as well as some archers in our company. The drummers beat time to help us march quickly. I’m excited to help win this war, but sad to leave my home behind.

I paused, realising I had reached the end of my knowledge and would have to read my mother’s boring book after all. A fat drop of water exploded on the page, and then I was being pelted with rain. Schoolbag over my head, I raced through the woods, finally reaching my house soaked through and shivering. 

I put the exercise book on my desk to dry out and took my mother’s heavy history tome to the window seat. I tried to read, but I soon found myself peering out into the dusk instead, trying to spot foxes in the gathering gloom at the woodland’s edge. For a moment, I thought I saw a person hovering in the tree line, but as I peered closer, they dissolved into the shadows. 

The next morning, as I packed up my books for school, I was happily surprised to see that my mum had added to the entry in my exercise book. She had even matched my faux-historical handwriting. 

I have trained as a pikeman. The pole is some 18 feet and it sorely taxes me to carry it as we march. The cavalrymen ride ahead but I must trudge for miles each day. It is worst on those wet days when fields turn to mud and the water seeps through every seam in my tunic. I hope this war is over before the winter comes.

My parents’ shared love of history had been the foundation of their relationship, but since my mother had brought home the pike points, they seemed only to talk about the Civil War. My father had mounted one of the pike points and hung it on the wall of the dining room, directly behind my mother’s chair. He said it was only fitting that it pointed at the person who had liberated it from a life in the museum archives. I found myself frequently checking the mount to make sure the pike was firmly held in place.  

My mother brought home an old map of the area, which took up half our dining table. A large red X marked our house. With a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other, she plotted the locations of the archaeological finds while we ate the greasy pizza she had picked up on her way. 

“James, look at this!”

My father leant over, his head close to hers as they studied the little green circles my mother had added to the map. For once, I too was interested and tried my best to interpret the markings. 

“Are those all on our street?” I asked, looking at the tight cluster of green circles that seemed to ring the red X. 

“It is! I believe this was the heart of the site. How exciting!”

“I wonder what else they might have found if they had excavated further,” said my father.

He and my mother both looked out of the window to the undisturbed woodland that marked the edge of our garden just a few metres away. 

“Finds from that period could be quite valuable.”

“It’s not right,” I broke in, “how would you like to be dug up and have everyone messing with your bones?”

My mother continued to look at my father. He barely turned his head in my direction, “Don’t you have homework to do?”

I accepted my dismissal, stomped up the stairs to my room where I sat on the window seat, and made another entry in my soldier’s journal. As I wrote, the evening rolled in and little squares of yellow light began to dot the hillside. Only our street remained dark and empty.

October 1643. We cannot penetrate the fortifications of the great house. We must attempt a siege and starve the enemy until they surrender. It is boring to remain in one place with little to do but watch stone walls. We have little food and tire easily. I feel sorry for the people in the fortress—it must be even more boring for them, but at least they are warm. It grows colder each day.

Autumn was brief that year. The chill shook the leaves from the trees and sent the birds southward. My journeys through the woods each morning and evening took place in hazy twilight. Creeping tendrils of fog lingered in the valley, twisting the trees into contorted, looming figures. My footsteps echoed back to me on the lonely paths, as though other feet were marching along behind me. Where once there had been bird song, now I fancied I heard a low whispering, like sentries were listening to my passage and passing news of my intrusion from tree to tree. 

With each day, the fog grew denser, the air grew colder and the ephemeral grey shapes took on greater substance. They were stiff and upright, always staying just on the periphery of my gaze and out of reach of the puddles of light cast by the streetlamps that dotted the path at long, uneven intervals. Soldierly, my subconscious whispered. My journeys became breathless jogs, twisting my head every few seconds to see what was behind me until I was safely behind the closed door of our home with bright lights banishing the very idea of shadows. 

I woke late one Sunday morning to the grumbling of my stomach. The clock on my wall showed it was almost midday and the house was still and quiet. As I made my way toward the kitchen in search of sustenance, I heard the distant sounds of my parents’ voices coming from the garden of the empty house next door. 

My father saw me watching through the window and waved at me to come out and join them. They had shovels in hand and a growing pile of earth off to the side of a large hole they had clearly been digging all morning. 

“Why are you digging up their garden?” I asked the question even though I was sure I already knew the answer. 

“This area was never excavated,” my mother replied, slightly breathless. She continued to shovel earth as she spoke.

They were digging steadily, sweaters discarded despite the chill of the November air, which froze in my lungs as I breathed in the loamy scent of the freshly turned earth. 

“Given the location of the other finds, it’s highly likely that we’ll uncover something in this area,” my father chimed in. “In fact, I think we already found some bones—hard to say if they’re human, of course.”

He pointed to a small pile of yellowed, pitted fragments that I had initially taken to be stones. 

My breath seized in my throat and my words came out as a hoarse whisper. “You shouldn’t do this—leave them in peace.”

“Leave who in peace? What are you talking about?”

“The soldiers. I see them in the woods,” I said, before I could think better of it. 

My father stopped digging and looked up at me from the hole where he stood, surrounded waist-deep by the dark, red-brown soil. 

“What soldiers? What do they look like?”

I tried to describe the shadowy grey figures who played hide and seek in the mist as I traversed the footpaths each day, always silent, but watching. But I could see from the looks on the faces of my parents that the more I spoke, the less they believed me.

“There are no soldiers round here,” my mother said, barely looking up. 

“Sometimes I see footprints,” I blurted, putting into words a thought that I had been too scared to allow to crystallise even in my own head. “In the mud on the side of the path, like someone else has been there.”

My father climbed out of the hole to wrap me in a hug. “My darling girl, it’s not your personal footpath, of course other people have been there.”

“Why would they come up here? No one else even lives here!” 

He grimaced. “Come on, let’s go inside and make a cup of tea. Alice?” He turned to my mother, but she shook her head dismissively and continued to dig.  

They stayed out there all day, only stopping when I ventured back out into the garden to complain that I was hungry. They heaved themselves out of the pit and trudged back into the house, kicking the clods of clay from their boots. 

I followed behind them, pausing on the doorstep to look across to the edge of the woods. The darkness had a different quality there, somehow deeper and colder; the shadows moved to a different rhythm than those cast by the wind-blown branches, more regular and deliberate. As I watched, a touch, ice-cold and feather-light trailed down the back of my neck and I whipped around to see who stood behind me. But there was no one there and I hastened through the back door, slamming it quickly shut.  

That night I fell asleep with my head against the cold window of my bedroom and woke in the early hours of the morning, stiff and disoriented. Too tired to continue the vigil, I felt my way across the room and fell into my bed.

My mother woke me the next morning, bursting into my room, radiating fury. 

“Isabelle, what on earth have you been doing?” 

It was freezing and instinctively, I burrowed into the covers, but as I did so, I was surrounded by a papery, whispering sound and a deep, loamy scent. I pulled back the covers to find my bed full of dry, dead oak leaves, so desiccated I could see the skeleton web of veins that crossed their surfaces. They were knotted into my hair and tucked into the hems of my pyjamas. As I brushed them away, they disintegrated into brown, grey ash that stained my hands. 

Mum marched across the room to where the wide open window and pulled it closed. 

“Do you think this is funny?”

She pulled me out of bed and marched me down the hallway to their room. The whole house was freezing. My parents’ bed was covered in a blanket of dead leaves and trails of red brown dirt stained the carpet. 

“What were you thinking, leaving all the windows open in the middle of November? And these leaves—is this supposed to be some kind of joke?”

I protested in vain that I had no idea what had happened, but my mother wouldn’t listen. She pulled the leaves roughly from my hair, stripped both beds and disappeared to bundle the sheets into the washing machine. I could hear my father going round the house closing windows and vacuuming up leaves as I rushed to get ready for school. As I collected my books, I realised that a new diary entry had appeared. 

November 1643. The harshest of winters lies upon the land and the garrison is close to starvation. We forage in the woods and set snares for game but our efforts go unrewarded. We must sleep under the hedgerows, though the ground is hard and bitterly cold. We gather up the dead leaves in the woods to soften our bedrolls and stuff them into our clothes to gain what little warmth we can. We take it in turns to stand sentry at the outer reaches of camp each night. Any watchman found asleep on duty can measure the remainder of his life in hours, with no allowance made for the deprivations we suffer. I pray to see my own home again soon. 

I read the passage, confused. Had my mother done this? Had she also filled my bed with leaves for some kind of historical verisimilitude? I discarded that thought immediately; her fury was genuine. Had I somehow opened the window by accident? Could the leaves have blown in? I went out onto the landing and leaned over the banister.

“Mum?” I called. 

My father’s head appeared from the kitchen doorway. 

“Not a good time, Issy,” he said looking up at me. “Best just to get to school, she’ll have calmed down by tonight.”

But she was still furious that evening and I didn’t dare ask about the diary. She had borrowed some large outdoor lights from the museum and set them up in the garden so that she and my father could continue their excavations in the evenings. 

December blew in with an icy snap. Forecasters claimed it was the coldest winter in over a century. Our heating was struggling to keep up and we all wore several layers of clothing as we moved around the house. 

The days were short and the darkness surrounded the house. It crept up and pressed against the windows as though testing for cracks through which it could enter. I began religiously checking the door locks and window catches. I sat up each night to watch the woods, only daring to close my eyes once the grey light of dawn began to streak the horizon. 

My mother also wasn’t sleeping. When she wasn’t at the museum or turning the gardens into her own archaeological dig, she sat at the dining table, poring over stacks of old books and records and marking up the map. She would take the pike point down from the wall and turn it over in her hands, stroking the ridges as if it was something precious.

I was leaning against my bedroom window in the early hours of the morning, in a kind of frozen stupor, when I heard a crash and a muffled cry from the other side of the house. I ran down the dark hallway and pushed my way into my parents’ room to find my mother flinging herself across the room in a panic, hands scratching at her face and throat, eyes wild and bulging. My father was trying to calm her, but each time he approached she pulled out of his reach. 

I pushed past him and grabbed onto her arm. Looking up into her face I saw that her mouth was contorted and her panicked cries were blocked by something dark that protruded from between her lips. I fought to reach her face, batting away her clawing hands to pull the wet, cloying mass from her mouth. She heaved and spat as I pushed my fingers between her lips again and again, pulling out bits of mulch, rotting leaves bound up in soil and tiny twigs until there was nothing left. Tears, dirt, and mucus ran down her face as she retched and gasped for breath. I grabbed a glass of water from her bedside table, and she swilled it round her mouth, spitting murky water into a pool on the floor.   

My father looked on helplessly. As she calmed, she reached out a hand to him, and he came across the room and held her tightly. 

“Alice, what happened?” he asked, rubbing her back.

“I don’t know. I was so tired, I decided to take a break from researching and come to bed. Next thing I knew, I couldn’t breathe and I woke up like this.”

She looked from me to my father, confusion and fear writ large upon her features. 

“You need to stop!” I said, “It’s not safe to keep digging everything up.”

“Issy’s right,” my father said. “You’re exhausting yourself, it’s not good for you. I know you used to sleepwalk when you were a child—maybe that’s what’s happened here. We should call the doctor when they open.”

“That’s not what I meant! It’s the soldiers—”

“Issy,” my father cut me off sharply. “Your mother doesn’t need to hear your nonsense right now. Why don’t you go downstairs and make her a cup of tea?”

The next morning, my mother pretended as though the whole incident had never happened. My father said she wanted to put it behind her and cautioned me against mentioning it. 

On Christmas Day it snowed, and the whole world glittered bright white. My father coaxed me out into the garden to build a snowman. The reflection of the sunlight on the snow chased away the shadows and I briefly considered that perhaps I was just scaring myself with my overactive imagination. My parents gifted me a camera and a stack of brightly wrapped books and CDs. My mother gave my father a pair of socks adorned with cranes and diggers which made him laugh, and a bottle of aftershave that smelled like the sea. 

My mother opened a long, slim package from my father to reveal a sharp, silver object that gleamed in the light.  

“It’s the other pike point,” my father explained, “I borrowed it from your desk and had it polished up and turned into a brooch. I thought you might enjoy wearing a little piece of history. Merry Christmas, Alice.” 

My mother was delighted and pinned the brooch to her sweater at once.

Lunch was filled with laughter as my father entertained us with the terrible jokes in the Christmas crackers and my mother attempted to see how many paper crowns she could balance on her head at once. I took pictures with my new camera and snuck tiny sips of champagne from my father’s glass when I thought Mum wasn’t looking. 

After lunch, I curled up next to my father on the sofa, the fire roaring in the grate, a new book in my hand. I awoke hours later to a dark, empty room, and a fireplace full of smouldering ash. 

I flew through the house in a panic, switching on every light, and checking that each window and door was firmly shut. When the house was lit like a beacon and I was sure I was sealed in tight, I returned to the living room and there, amid the crumpled chocolate wrappers and empty wine glasses, I found a note from my father on the coffee table. 

Issy, we’ve gone for a stroll in the woods to walk off some of that Christmas pudding. You were so sound asleep we didn’t want to wake you. Won’t be long. Love Dad.

As I reached to put the note back on the table, I realised there was writing on the other side. I turned the paper over and saw the handwriting from my soldier’s diary, but I didn’t recognise the words. 

This war bleeds the humanity from every man who takes up a pike or a musket and I grow afeared of my brothers-in-arms. All of us have blood upon our hands but I begin to believe that some among my fellows welcome it. I saw my old camerade near beat a man to death, stuffing his mouth full of dead leaves to stop him crying out. Whether by God’s hand or theirs, I suspect this woodland will be the last place my bones lay down to rest. I can pray only for a peaceful end. December 25, Year of our Lord, 1643.

My hands shook as I reread the passage. A sweeping sense of dread rose up inside me. Finally, I flung the paper in the fire, stoking the embers violently until the page caught.     

I watched the hands of the clock on the mantlepiece turn, hour by hour, but still my parents did not return. The weight of the darkness grew so great I felt that the windows would shatter under the pressure and the night would come pouring in. From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw shadows moving in the garden but each time I turned my head, they dissolved into nothingness. When the clock hands reached 10 o’clock, I picked up the phone to call the police. 

The operator laughed and told me that my parents had probably gone to the pub and lost track of time. “Call again if they’re not back by midnight, but I’m sure they’ll be through the door as soon as closing time comes around,” she said cheerfully and hung up the call. 

“It’s up to you,” I told myself as I ran to the hall closet and pulled on my coat and hat. I grabbed the torch that hung inside the door and rammed my feet into the stiff rubber boots that I’d worn earlier that day playing in the garden with my dad. I paused at the front door, my hand on the catch, arrested by the depth of the blackness I saw through the glass panes. Somewhere above me the house creaked and a cold breeze stirred my hair. 

I raced out of the door and down the footpath into the woods, swinging the torch wildly back and forth as I plunged from streetlamp to streetlamp, trying to spend as little time as possible outside of the pools of light. The trees had shielded the path from the worst of the snow, but it was black and icy and my feet slid underneath me in the dark. 

Desperation warred with my fear but ultimately unsealed my lips and I cried out into the darkness, “Mum? Dad? Where are you!”

I heard a muffled cry from deeper into the woods and raced toward it, angling the torch toward the forest floor to avoid tripping on the tree roots that broke through the frozen leaf-litter like gnarled fingers. The cry came again, from a different direction, and then a third until it felt like the woods themselves were crying out. I plunged dizzily into the blackness, the bare limbs of the oaks stretching endlessly above me until I had no sense of where I was.  

In the distance I saw the glow of a streetlight and sprinted toward it. My footsteps crunched on the frozen leaf litter and echoed into a regiment of following crunches. I broke through the tree line onto the road on the valley floor. I stopped on the white line that bisected the tarmac and looked back at the shadows that seemed to swarm at the edge of the woodland, alive and seething. 

There was a phone box next to the bus stop, and I dialled 999 again with shaking fingers.

The woods were soon lit up with torches and I could hear the barking of dogs echoing across the valley. It took them several hours, but eventually they found my parents. They were deep in the woods, buried in a shallow pit, their bodies covered with clods of clay and rotting leaf mulch. I heard later that their fingers were bloodied and mud-covered, as though they had dug the pit themselves with their bare hands, sacrificing their nails to the frozen ground. The official cause of death was asphyxiation. Both of them had suffocated after their mouths and throats were filled with the mulch of rotting leaves and debris from the forest floor. 

I escaped from the Lych Pit that night, in the back of a police car. They took me to an aunt who lived several hours away in a modern inner-city apartment building, and there I stayed until I was old enough to find a home of my own. They returned my parents’ personal effects to me several weeks after the inquest—their wedding rings, my mother’s earrings. Of the pike point broach, there was no sign. 

In pride of place on my mantelpiece is a picture of my parents as I last saw them: laughing at the dinner table, wearing paper crowns that had exploded out of the Christmas crackers moments earlier. On each side of the frame is a light that burns brightly, all day and night. My husband jokes about the size of our electricity bill, but he knows better than to switch them off.

---

N. King is a Sydney-based writer, originally from the UK. Their work has previously been published in Midnight Echo, the magazine of the Australasian Horror Writers Association.