Burnt Bones [antikvár]

Cold, Cold GroundShipwreck Island, Washington State Sunday, October 12By the light of a harvest moon four days short of full, the Druids of Shipwreck Island fashioned a Wicker Man. Clothed in black robes with pointed cowls, they sat in the Stone Circle hidden in an oak grove above a rocky cove and wove sapling branches into human form. Like black fingers clawing from a premature grave, moonbeams cast long shadows behind the upright monoliths ringed around them. The Wicker Man was large enough to cage a captive inside, with an octagon head on a square body flanked by stubby arms tipped with finger-like sticks. The stiff legs were angled to support the finished figure once it was erected, at which time the earth around would be piled with kindling. Now the earth around was strewn with autumn leaves, and beneath four feet of cold, cold ground, a groggy man drugged with sodium pentothal came out of unconsciousness to find he was buried alive.Fitzroy Campbell freaked.First he feared he was in a trench in the First World War, just after an artillery shell exploded nearby, throwing up a wave of earth that crashed down on him, flattening the hapless soldier supine at the bottom of a filled-in ditch. That's why no coffin encased his flesh and moist, worm-riddled soil packed him down, paralyzing his limbs like a quadriplegic's so he couldn't move a