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the motion was carried unanimously with one abstention from a B Eliot. There was and is no Eliot on the council so I don’t know why his name is on the documentation.
    The move from the old library to the new buildings was carried out with no problems. KHS were subsequently employed to control the new computer filing system for the library. Again, no apparent problems. At least none I could find out about. I’ll see if I can do some more on this tomorrow.
    Well, Martin. This all seems a little odd to me. I want to know how bad things are to make you want my help. Maybe I can help you some more. But I think you need to sleep. You really do look terrible. Call me in the morning.
    K.
    I glanced at my reflection in the rain-streaked window and knew that I needed more than a couple hours sleep to make me look any better. I needed a month of unconsciousness. Perhaps a couple of decades of cryogenic suspension would help. But somehow I doubted it. And anyway, it
was
the morning. Yeah, well. But too early to call Colin Kafka. Too early to call anyone who had any sense at all. But not too early to walk over to Charlcombe to see what might be what. To examine the work of Kelley Historical Services. Not too early. Not for me. I lit another cigarette, shoved the half-bottle of whiskey in my overcoat pocket, and slammed the door behind me.

Chapter 7
Things Could Only Get Worse
    It was beginning to be what you might have called a beautiful summer morning. If it hadn’t been raining. Mist shrouded the world, and maybe there was some kind of promise that the sun would be around later on. But maybe not. I walked up through a suburb, and as I left the city behind everything started getting beautiful on me, but I wasn’t in the mood.
    The grass was soaking wet and my breath hung in the air like a dead man. I’d fallen asleep in wet clothes and woken up to a horror story. I’d had almost no sleep and now I was in a sodden field at dawn. And I had a yawning suspicion that things could only get worse.
    The Kelley Historical Services dig was at the top of the footpath, just below the church that lurked in a fold of the valley. Most of the excavations were under big blue tarpaulins stretched over a wooden framework of some kind. There was no one about, so I parted the strands of barbed wire and stepped through. I remembered what Colin had written about ScryTech’s CCTV covering KHS digs.
    I scanned the area under the tarp. There seemed to be three cameras, strategically placed for maximum coverage. I worked out a route that should keep me out of view. There was enough room to walk upright under the tarps, but only just. Under the tarp the mud looked blue, and my eyes took a while to adjust to the strange monochrome. There didn’t seem to be much going on at the edges of the dig, so I walked on further. There were a lot of planks around, which I guessed were for walking on. None of the various trenches and holes held much interest for me. What did intrigue me was a very, very deep hole under the centre of the tarpaulin. Oh no. I was intrigued again. A bad sign.
    It was bone dry under the centre of the tarp. The hole was what, seven or eight feet in diameter. And it was deep. It disappeared into inky darkness. I didn’t care to think how deep it might be. Because I knew there was only one way that I could find out. There were props holding the sides steady. There was a winch built over the hole. There was a ladder. This was not an average archaeological dig that I was looking at. I remembered my watch and gave it a cursory inspection. 6 A.M .
    On a regular archaeological dig no one should be here before 8:30. Especially on a Saturday. But, like I said, it was obvious that this wasn’t a regular dig. It wasn’t a regular anything. Hell, it wasn’t a regular morning. I should have been in bed. So I had a drink of my whiskey. And I started climbing down the ladder.
    It was colder as I went deeper, and there was a peculiar smell rising from