Author: Rhys Booth, Word Count: 648
Featured in Spooky Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – 2025
By the time Dr. Julian Barkman’s trowel scraped against the blackened soil, the wind had
stopped. The desert around him, moments ago hissing with dust, fell still as a tomb. He told
himself it was nothing—just the night drawing its breath. But the silence pressed against his
eardrums like a held note.
The trench had been quiet all week, the rest of the team having left for Cairo when funding
dried up. Only Barkman remained, obsessed with the irregular stone ring that local shepherds
said grew from the sand each autumn, only to vanish by spring. He’d laughed at the
superstition—until he found the stones warm to the touch at midnight.
Now, alone beneath the whispering stars, his brush revealed what lay between them.
A face.
Carved in basalt, worn smooth by centuries of wind and sand, but unmistakably human. Its
eyes were hollow cups, its mouth stretched wide as if in song—or scream. Hieroglyphs curled
around its edges, unfamiliar even to Barkman’s well-travelled eyes. They seemed to move
when he looked too long.
He leaned closer. A breath escaped the hollow mouth.
“Wind,” he muttered, though the air was still. He pushed the brush into the opening to
measure its depth.
Something moved inside.
The brush twitched. Barkman yanked it back—but the handle resisted, tugged from below by
something with weight, strength, and purpose. He stumbled backward as the ground under the
stone ring began to pulse, faintly at first, then with a rhythm like a heartbeat.
The sand collapsed.
Barkman fell into a cavity no one had charted—a chamber hidden beneath the site. His
flashlight struck stone, flickered, and steadied. The walls were painted with figures: men
kneeling, faces flayed into ribbons of red, while others—taller, faceless—watched from
above. At the centre stood a low altar, crusted with something dark and ancient.
The carved face was there too, larger now, rising from the wall like a tumour. Its mouth gaped
open, leading into blackness.
His radio crackled. A voice whispered through static:
“Barkman… you shouldn’t have uncovered it.”
He froze. It was Nora, his assistant—gone three days now. He’d thought she’d quit.
“Nora? Where are you?”
The radio hissed again, words fading in and out: “Behind the face… it’s hollow… it
remembers.”
Barkman turned back. The air in the chamber had thickened, hot and metallic. He could smell
rust—or blood. Against all sense, he approached the mouth.
He raised the flashlight, and light spilled into the darkness beyond the carving. Something
shone back—a glimmer of wetness, or eyes.
“Who’s there?” His voice cracked, absurd in the stillness. No answer came, but the
hieroglyphs began to shift, their lines curling like worms through the stone.
Then came the voices.
Not one, but hundreds—chanting in a language he couldn’t name. The sound didn’t echo; it
vibrated through the marrow of the rock. Barkman stumbled backward, tripping over the
altar. His flashlight skittered away, its beam catching something in the sand—bones. Tiny
ones. A child’s perhaps.
The chanting grew louder, the pitch rising like the keening of the wind through a narrow
gorge. And with it came a smell of earth freshly turned, as though graves were opening all
around him.
He turned to climb, but the shaft he’d fallen through was gone—sealed over by solid rock.
From the mouth in the wall came a thin, reedy laugh.
The radio crackled again. “Julian,” Nora whispered. “It doesn’t let you leave. It keeps the
diggers. It builds with them.”
He didn’t ask what she meant. The wall began to ripple, stone softening like clay.
Hands—too many hands—pushed outward from within, pressing their outlines against the
surface before sinking back. Barkman screamed and struck at them with his trowel, but the
metal bent as though striking flesh.
The laughter deepened, spreading through the chamber like smoke. Then, all at once, the
sound stopped.
The flashlight died.
Silence returned to the desert.
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