Black Harvest by Ann Pilling Page A

fell away, and with it the layer of filthy rags underneath. Then she could see properly.
    The smell coming out of the bundle was like very bad meat. But what Prill saw, lying on the counter, was a human child. The tiny body was naked, the face blotched and swollen, the eyes glazed in a white, expressionless stare like a fish on a slab. It looked like Alison.
    She remembered the shopkeeper coming back with the bacon and staring at her open-mouthed as she stood clutching the countertop, staring down at the dead baby, screaming the one word “No!” over and over again. She remembered him scuttling into the back shouting for his wife, “Maraid! Maraid! Come here, for God’s sake!” Then a sick darkness wrapped itself round her as she plunged about on the shop floor, knocking into displays of pans and glasses when she crashed to the ground.
    She remembered getting outside and being sick against a mossy, white-washed wall, and Father Hagan peering down at her anxiously as the blood from a cut on her head streamed down her face, like warm rain.

Chapter Eleven
    “W ELL , YOU WERE wrong about the weather,” Colin said, climbing out of the hole. “It’s hotter than ever, I think. Oh, get off, Jessie!”
    “Mmm,” Kevin mumbled, looking up at the sky. “But there’s a lot of rain up there. It’s got to come down sooner or later. Anyway, I’m going now. I’ve got to help my dad.”
    Colin felt disappointed. He really liked Kevin O’Malley, and he was a much better companion than his cousin. Oliver was so slow, so pernickety, always stopping to inspect what he’d dug up and shouting bossily, “Hey! Don’t touch that! We’re not up to there yet.” He could be so babyish. Kevin had just grinned to himself and humoured him. After all, it was his hole.
    “Do you want to come with us? We’ve got some land on the high ground, the other side of Ballimagliesh. We’re cutting peat for the winter. You can give us a hand if you like.”
    Colin didn’t need to think twice. “OK. I’ll just check with my mother. Should I bring this?”
    “No. We’ve got special spades for that job. Do you want to come, Oliver?” Kevin called down the hole.
    “Oh, no ,” Colin was thinking. But Oliver didn’t even look up.
    “No, thank you,” he said politely. “I’ve got some more work to do on this.”
    “It’s surely deep enough now?” Kevin said. “When I bring you the sacking, and that piece of corrugated iron, it’ll be a grand little den.”
    “Oh, let him get on with it,” Colin whispered, impatient to get away. “The rate he digs there’s not much danger of him shaking anybody’s foundations. We did most of the work this morning. Are you ready? I can come. My mother’s waiting in for the doctor.”
    Kevin shrugged. “All right. Goodbye now, Oliver.” He was thinking that the Blakeman boy hadn’t got much patience with his small cousin. He’d liked dens himself when he was little, especially when his father let him play in the bales and make one there after harvest. But he’d never actually dug himself a hole. It was a great idea that was, it took brains.
    Oliver may well be fussing over his hole like an old woman, but if you approached everything at top speed, like Colin, like a bull at a gate, you could miss a lot. You had to stop now and then, to work out what you’d done so far. That’s what his father always said.
    Take a den for example. Colin obviously hadn’t noticed something that Oliver thought was very important, something he’d only spotted in the last half hour. You could only see it properly if you looked into the hole from above, at a certain angle.
    Right in the middle, where he’d just been digging, someone must have dug once before. The soil was different, crumblier and lighter in colour, and there was a definite shape to it. It was a rough oval, about a metre across.
    It was a hole within a hole and it was directly above this that Oliver had unearthed the dog. Now he was uncovering