Free The Language of the Dead by Stephen Kelly Page B

floor. The stench of something dead assailed Lamb.
    He peered at the back of the shed and saw what he thought might be another crate. He moved toward it, catching a dangling strand of derelict cobweb on his fedora. The crate—or whatever it was—was flush against the back wall of the shed and appeared to be shrouded with a white handkerchief. He fished a box of matches from the pocket of his jacket, lit one, and squatted before the box. The flame illuminated what appeared to be a kind of small altar—an upturned apple crate with the stubs of a pair of red candles stuck to it; the white object that he took to have been a handkerchief was a sheet of paper.
    The match went out, and he lit another. He saw now that a dead chicken—the source of the smell—lay at the base of the altar, its throat cut, its blood coagulating in the dirt. He retrieved the paper from the altar and took it outside so that he could examine it in the light.
    He found on it a pencil drawing that fascinated and troubled him at once—that of a small bird snared in a spider’s web. The bird’s wings were spread wide and bent unnaturally due to the way in which the web ensnared it. Its head lolled, lifeless, and its eyes were slits. But what struck Lamb most about the drawing was its excellence. The drawing was no mere scribble or approximation of its subject; it was highly detailed and, in its way, beautiful, even touching. The way in which the artist had depicted the bird’s face pierced him; he could feel the creature’s life spark having gone out. He thought of Peter, the mute boy, whom Abbott and Lydia Blackwell both had described as spending much of his time sketching insects. He put the drawing in the rear seat of his car and headed up Manscome Hill along the well-worn trail that paralleled the wood.
    He crossed Mills Run on the wooden footbridge. To his left, he saw Wallace, Cashen, and the constables beginning to walk their patches near the hedge where Blackwell’s body had been found, beating the meadow grass with sticks.
    He walked to the top of the hill, where he stood for a moment gazing down at Quimby; he thought of how it resembled the kind of bucolic hamlet that inevitably featured in paintings of a pastoral England that was quickly disappearing, along with the pastoral ways.
    He took from his jacket pocket the copy of
Myths and Legends of the Supernatural in Hampshire
, sat in the lush grass, and opened the book to the chapters that Harris’s wife had marked with blotting paper.
    The first, entitled “A Milkmaid’s Murder,” related the tale of Agnes Clemmons, an elderly spinster who had lived in the nearby village of Moresham. On a cold March afternoon in 1882, she’d been walking near her home when a local farmhand, John Pilson, had attacked and killed her. After knocking Clemmons unconscious with a hefty branch he’d taken from the ground, Pilson had run the tines of his pitchfork through her neck. He’d then carved a crucifix into her forehead with the blade of his scythe before burying the scythe in her chest. Pilson had believed Clemmons to be a witch. When the previous fall’s wheat harvest had gone inexplicably bad, he’d fingered her as the source of the failure. He freely admitted to police that he’d killed Clemmons because she had ruined the wheat harvest by running toads over the fields in the dead of night. He believed he’d done the village a favor in dispatching her and genuinely expected to be rewarded for it. Instead, he was hanged.
    The chapter entitled “A Black Dog on Manscome Hill” told the story of Will Blackwell’s alleged encounter with a demon dog. The incident was said to have occurred in 1880, when Will was ten. At the time, Will lived with his mother and four older sisters on the other side of Manscome Hill. Will was said to have possessed a talent with animals; he seemed able to communicate with most creatures