Alison nosed the Discovery into the mist very slowly. Visibility was zero. Absolutely nothing. All she could see, as the windscreen wipers snaked across the large windscreen, was swirling grey mist. She frowned. Glancing in the rear view mirror she saw the road slanting upwards towards the crossroads. Thompson's car was still there, but moving off, to the right, towards the coast. As she inched forward little by little, she saw the waters of the river filling in the valley behind her, until all she could see was a sea of murky grey water, and in front of her, the murky grey mist. At last the Discovery started to pull up the hill to the Manor House. Although the village nestled in the valley, it was built on high ground, and the flood waters should not pose too much of a threat.

She frowned again. Something had happened. Something to do with the earth tremor at the ruined graveyard. She recalled the day she had been invited to investigate the tangible effects of the tremor, because she was a respected expert on archaeology at the University of East Anglia. Invited to attend the site in Sharringford where a copse of trees provided a natural screen for something rather interesting.

Interesting was the word Richard had used.

Interesting was something that grabbed your attention in the daily press or a magazine. This was not interesting, not to Alison. This was shattering. Everyone knew that North Norfolk had more ruined churches than any other area of the United Kingdom. That there was a ruined church in the trees, about which little was known and of which few people were aware, was of little interest to her at all. Her interest in archaeology lay in uncovering facts about civilisations far older than anything to be found here in the East Anglian clay.

At the age of twenty-seven she was possibly the youngest person ever to take a seat in antiquities at the UEA, following important discoveries in the valley of the Kings in Egypt. Her lectures were good, solid, exciting, based on personal experiences. Yet she longed to be back out there on field trips, only too aware that to stay forever in front of a class of ragged students keeping her interests alive only by reading and watching videos would uttimately result in stagnation.

Archaeology was about digging, about the adrenalin pumping through you when you found something, some artifact, some evidence of a tomb. Something to shock the academic world into realising that thousands of years ago men and women were achieving things that the men and women of today's civilisations could never hope to compete with. Alison was first and foremost a field operative, and lecturing was something she did well. Digging and discovering were two things she did far better.

One day, in her audience of ragged second-year students, now decimated to two-thirds the size of the first year class because of the financial burdens placed upon students, there was a face she did not recognise. He had come in with the other students, not speaking to them but studying papers he took from his briefcase. He sat at the back of the theatre, smiling occasionally when she looked in his direction, and made copious notes. He was dark-haired, with tinges of grey at the temples. One of his eyes appeared to be lazy, unmoving.

At the end of her lecture he held up his hand. As he stood up she saw that he was not as tall as she was, and that he favoured his right leg.

'Professor Farmer. My name is Hobson. Your husband has the engine running. Will you come with me, please?'

Just like that.

No explanation of who he was, where he was from, what he wanted.

Mystified, Alison had accompanied him to the car park where Richard had indeed got the car started. He smiled briefly at her as she opened the back door and slid in. In the cool February mist they pulled out onto the main road and headed north on the ring road.

'Would someone please explain what is going on? I have a lecture in an hour's time — '

'I've taken the liberty of cancelling your engagements for the rest of the morning,' Hobson said, quite calmly.

'You've done what?' Alison asked, leaning forward. Richard half-turned his head, though his eyes were still on the road.

'It's all right, Alison, this is important. There's been an earth tremor.'

Neither would tell her anything more until they reached the site. Turning off the main road at the signpost for Sharringford, they drove along an unmade road for perhaps a mile until they reached a wooded area. Richard stopped the car and turned off the engine. Hobson got out of the car and held open the back  door for Alison. He reminded her of someone from an earlier era. She could not quite make him out.

'Over here,' Hobson said, and they followed him through the trees to the bank of the river. 'I'm afraid we're all going to get our feet wet, there's nothing else for it, I'm sorry.'

Without hesitation, he waded into the freezing water and across to the other side. Richard took Alison's hand and followed him, dragging her with him.

'Sorry, I didn't know about this.'    

'What did you know about, then? More than you've told me, presumably.' They followed him along a poorly-marked trail but one which appeared to have been used in recent days. The undergrowth was wet, clinging, and uncomfortable. Occasionally the brambles caught their clothing. They received constant reassurance from the little man that they would be reimbursed for anything that was ruined. At last they came in sight of the ruined church. Only three quarters of the tower walls remained, rising to a height of just twenty or so feet, and there was a low wall going off at right angles.

The proliferation of trees around the site would have kept it hidden.

'It is recorded, but it has never been properly investigated, not in recent times,' Hobson explained. 'There would have been a small gathering of houses around here. It is very old, probably dark ages, and would certainly have been under the auspices of the cathedral at North Elmham in more recent times, around the eleventh century.'

'I agree with the first part,' Alison said. 'The fabric of the walls is quite unlike anything built by the Normans.'

'However,' Hobson carried on, 'it is not the church in which we are interested, fascinating though it is. You will no doubt be aware that there was a small but significant earth tremor in the region earlier this year?'

'What of it?'

'The tremor centred near here. The shock, the principal shock was right here, at this site.'

'Here?'

'There has been considerable earth movement here,' Hobson said. He started off to the right, following the line of the church wall, now no more than a couple of stones high. 'Follow me, please.'

He led them into the overgrown graveyard to a tomb that had a stone erection above ground. The door was open to reveal a flight of stone steps down into the mausoleum. On the chequered floor stood just the one sarcophagus. The enormous stone slab that covered it had been moved aside.

Aside from the ruined church, there was one other building near the barrow, the Manor House. In the distance Alison could just make out a "FOR SALE" sign with a city number which she quickly noted in her diary.

'How was this discovered so quickly?' Richard asked, and Hobson told them that a light aircraft had been chartered to take aerial photographs of old and interesting archaeological sites for the Eastern Daily Press. The photographer had spotted the ruined church and the open tomb and had contacted him.

It was a large family vault. Apart from the stone sarcophagus in the centre of the floor, there were a number of coffins on shelves either side. The lid of the sarcophagus had been slid aside, probably by graverobbers. Richard's first instinct was to call his colleagues, for he had little doubt that the grave had been recently desecrated. But Alison persuaded him not to, and he acquiesced.

Nobody could read the name on the stone, which was worn away by time and the elements. The tremor had opened up a fissure in the wall of the tomb and a small tunnel had been discovered which led to an older tomb in which seven skeletons had been found, very old, probably prehistoric. And on the wall of the tomb they had found paintings and symbols quite unlike anything they had seen before. Although some of the letters were Roman in origin, many of them were more like hieroglyphics, symbols, artistic representations. At first they thought that they had uncovered some pagan civilisation's burial chamber, but Richard eventually decided that what they had was probably the tomb of a family union between Romans and the indigenous population, possibly Iceni. The occupants had simply used runic symbols rather than just write their inscriptions out in Latin. Then dark and middle age villagers had taken over the mausoleum for their own purposes, culminating in the latest burials in Victorian and Edwardian times. Richard made a mental note to try and find out who the most recent occupants had been.

For several days in his spare time, Richard struggled to decipher the writing, finally acknowledging that they were similar, but not identical to their Egyptian hieroglyphic counterparts. Having determined that they may have a common origin with the various bands of marauding invaders that had come across the north sea in the Dark Ages, he settled down to work out their meaning. Four weeks later, in the first week of April, he was dead.

Night after night she watched him as he pored over ancient manuscripts borrowed from the University in an attempt to find some reasoning, some pattern to the devices they had found in the cavern. His determination to solve the writing on the wall took precedence over his police work, and he phoned in sick several days, complaining of headaches and aches and pains to his back and legs.

Bad weather precluded further expeditions to the site during April, and in any case, there was simply no time, with Alison’s other teaching commitments which could not be postponed. What she did do was to purchase the Manor House, so that she could eventually be near the site and within easy commuting distance of her work.

Though she did not notice it at the time, Richard had more or less stopped eating as he worked on the inscription. He drank coffee, gallons and gallons of strong black coffee, and nibbled at the occasional biscuit. But he was not eating properly, and she should have noticed it.

Eventually, one weekend in April, he announced his intention of going to Holland to visit a friend who might have the answer to his puzzle, the string of runic hieroglyphs copied with precise accuracy from the walls of the cavern.

'I believe it may be some sort of curse,' he said, his face gaunt and thin, his hands shaking a little as he held a mug of coffee to his lips. He was a slight man, around five feet seven inches tall, with a receding hairline and a painfully thin torso. It did not register with Alison that he had lost so much weight in such a short time, he had always looked ill, not desperately so, but never looked particularly healthy.

'Like Tut's, you mean?' Alison asked, not really looking at him, not seeing him nod his affirmation to her casual question, not even looking up from her own work.

Looking back, it had been the pressure of her work that had prevented her from foreseeing his death. The night before he left for Amsterdam he had shown signs of a fever and she had given him aspirin and hot lemon drinks, but in the morning he had declared himself fit enough for the trip. With her own pressing schedule for the day already looming ahead of her, she had waved him off. He had collapsed at the airport in Amsterdam, and a doctor decided that he had died of pneumonia.

As soon as news reached her of his death, his words about the writing in the cavern being a curse echoed back into her head. Alone in her campus apartment, and later in the Manor House, she went over his work, searching for the answer he had failed to bring back from Holland with him.

She was not a superstitious woman. It was not in her nature. She had an enquiring, scientific, methodical mind. She buried her grief in her studies of his work, going over the strange writing letter by letter. The day of his funeral came and went, and she emerged briefly to join in the bizarre celebration of his death in a mood so uncompromisingly dark that relatives and friends departed swiftly from the wake, leaving her to brood alone. Hobson had come, spoken quietly to her about Richard's devotion to her and to his work, but he, too, had gone quietly away with the others.

'I believe I have some of it,' Richard had said, two nights before his fatal trip to Holland. 'It seems to me that what we have here is a written warning that should this burial place ever be disturbed, a great terror will befall anyone within the vicinity. That's it. I can't get any further. There are signs here that I just can't make out. They've been worn away too much.'

She had stood at his side, reading his words, and later, days after his death, she had made sense of what he had been unable to, piecing together the final part of the message. Brushing her hair out of the way, she looked through her tear-stained eyes at the paper on the desk, and read what she had written.

'— A GREAT TERROR WILL BEFALL ANY WHO HAVE CAUSED HARM TO BEFALL OTHERS — PASSING OF THREE MOONS — OPENING OF THE TOMB —'

But there was nothing to explain why Richard should have died. As far as she was aware he had never in his life done anything to harm anyone else, and she had reluctantly come to accept the coroner's verdict that he had died from pneumonia brought on by sheer exhaustion, lack of nutrition and neglect of his own body. Two things were certain. He had not died because he had harmed somebody else, and he had not died from a great terror. That dubious pleasure possibly awaited others.

Richard had known he was going to die, and he had gone through it all so carefully with her in the few days he had left to live after he made that startling, terrifying discovery, that he was expendable in the scheme of things that was unfolding in Sharringford.

He had found out that there was a coven of devil worshippers in the village. He knew some of their names, and had copious notes on each of them on his personal computer. Using his contacts with other police forces, he had started to make enquiries about them. There was in the village a woman who had procured and killed babies as sacrifices and a man who had murdered most of his family for financial gain. The worrying thing was, he had written on the computer diary, he thought they now knew about him.

At first she had refused to believe it. At first she had sat on the floor, resting her back against his legs, sobbing gently, shaking her head and murmuring, over and over, 'no!' But it had happened.