Hellsborough Exposed

Field work is the job, so at the invitation of the tenants I went down into the catacombs beneath the old crossroads pub, red-brick tunnels oozing river silt and wet sulphur a thousand years deep, murk clogging the lungs with every step. Behind a lifetime's rubble I found a small sarcophagus lodged in a hole that might have been carved to hold it, and inside, an anti-climax: a few blocks of pumice I nearly threw down as worthless rock. It was the shape that stopped me, too uniform, carved rather than formed, the smallest scratches catching under my fingertips. All those inebriated years rubbing shoulders with linguists and anthropologists and folklorists paid out in a single moment of recognition. Those scratches were semagrams, laid to rest by the milting who guard The Hinge, and without them the liminal weight of that junction, and Hellsborough itself, would never have been found.