Mortuary Remains

The skull was the colour of a tea stain. Elsa cupped it, in the palm of her hands and peered into the sunken eye orbits which leered unseeingly back at her. Behind her Hattie giggled, ‘She has better teeth than I do!’

Elsa couldn’t help but agree, the five-thousand-year-old skull had surprisingly good teeth. No stains, very little wear and a complete set to boot. And it wasn’t just the teeth, the rest of the skull was very well preserved.

‘She isn’t using them now, maybe you could borrow them,’ she replied as she passed the skull to the teenage boy standing next to her who was clearly a little too excited to be handling such precious remains.

Their tour guide had overheard their conversation. ‘Yes, we believe this individual was someone of high social status, which is why her teeth are so strikingly pristine.’

‘I thought the Neolithic diet meant that most people had poor teeth. Something to do with how they ground their grains,’ Elsa replied trying to sound casual and not to curious about the teeth. She knew this to be a fact, she was after all an archaeologist, but she didn’t want to make their tour guide feel uncomfortable – he was clearly doing his best.

He frowned at her and there was a cool glint in his eyes as he reassessed her from under his wild eyebrows.

‘Well, we believe that several of the individuals buried here come from the upper echelons of society. As we have a fair few skeletons in near pristine condition. Their bones tell us that they did no hard labour and that they enjoyed a good diet.’

Elsa wanted to push him on this. The Tomb of the Seals was a remote and desolate place and five thousand years ago it would have been much the same. Unfavourable farming conditions, poor climate and wild weather stirred up by the surrounding North Sea. Most people here would have lived hard and short lives. Indeed, that was still the case, their tour guide, a local farmer who had uncovered the tomb was evidence of that. He was roughly worn and stunted as if perpetually shrinking from a strong wind.

‘How many bodies did you say there were?’ asked the teenage lad. His voice quivered as he spoke, and Elsa rolled her eyes at the emotion in his voice. He was clutching the skull tightly in one hand whilst running the fingers of the other up and down the nasal bone, like he was petting a dog.   

‘During initial excavations we uncovered three hundred and twenty-four individuals. They were interred here over a period of eight hundred years. After Storm Quint we found various other remains, though not the cairn they came from. It was swept out to sea, but the bones, they found their way back to shore.’ Their guide nodded at the skull with the fine set of pearly whites. ‘She was among those. We only have her skull; it was found by a dog walker last summer.’

The tour ended with their guides wife bringing them cups of instant coffee and stale custard creams. As the other visitors milled around the car park, Elsa, under the pretence of needing to relieve herself snuck away. She wanted another look at the skeletons, her professional interest had been piqued. Something just wasn’t right.

She slipped into the old stone byer from which their guide had brought out the boxed remains. It reeked, the smell was so pungent she half expected to trip over a cow or a pig. This wasn’t a sterile environment suitable for storing human remains.

At the back of the byer, several heat lamps hung over some large stone troughs. A strange clicking sound, like thousands of tiny teeth or feet scuttling emanated from the troughs. Covering her nose, she approached, her nerves tingled, her skin crept, every instinct told Elsa to flee, but she didn’t. Instead, she peered into the nearest trough.

Thousands of shiny beetles scuttled and scurried, rived and swarmed under the lamps. What were they? She leant closer, staring at them, her stomach twisting in revulsion. She gagged and cheap instant coffee surged up her throat, which she swallowed down. The mass of insects separated for a second, like peeling skin, revealing the puckered and ruined face of the teenage boy who had asked about the skeletons. They were making quick work of his flesh, stripping it from his bones, his eyes were already gone, and his nose was just gristle.

Behind her the byer door opened. She spun round and there framed upon the threshold stood the tour guide. He smiled at her sadly.

‘Shouldn’t be putting our noses where they don’t belong,’ he sighed. Then he closed the door and turned the key in the latch locking them in the gloom together.

© Juliet Robinson 2023, all rights reserved