Closed Oh the pits we dig Shark Tent

Jack was agitated as one would be if a bright light was flashed into his eyes at the dead of light. What does a man have to do to be allowed to dig holes in damned peace?

Well, the bones he was digging were an impediment. People liked to keep theirs under the ground. And while Jack Warren had been irritable as of late, one might not be in the brightest of spirits if they spent their nights digging into the hard, stony earth. His hands, unnoticed or perhaps unbeknownst to him had grown hard and calloused. Blisters forgotten or ignored, he had the hands of a gravedigger rather than a scholar. They were hands meant to rend the earth, his bruised and broken knuckles were that of a fighter not a learner of potions or a rider of brooms.

What Jack did not know, he did not remember, was that this night was not unlike so many other nights. That he would dig, sometimes shallow troughs and sometimes deep pits. That there was always something uncovered, bones. Bones that he was driven to uncover, to collect. These pits would pockmark the pitch and the fields and lots surrounding. There were evenings that there was no progress, a stone or rather concrete that blocked his path, His spade with spark and clank against an unyielding earth he was dazed to consider willfully to circumvent.

Gideon's first and only instinct was to create a barrier between himself and Jack Warren. Gideon Athanatos was not by any stretch of the imagination "brave," he was a sadist unlike the mad teens that were housed in these tents. He whimpered and he carried on, unlike the brave and the foolish who spent these summer months in the same tent. He had seen Jack wander out night before, he never intervened. He had peered from the slit that made the doorway of the tent on occasion, he never saw precisely what went on in the dark of night. What drove him with the shovel over his shoulder into the nocturne, called by a voice only he could hear. How the bones would come, he knew about the bones. Not the details but the prizes Jack would deliver before dawn that he would squirrel away into the mattress that he and George slept on. It was a compulsion, unlike Jacks in that his was natural. This want to collect those little (and sometimes large) baubles. The teeth and ivory bits, come broken and some whole. He collected them, he collected them all.

George had rightly identified the jaw bone that Jack had excavated. One would have hoped that it was that of a beast, a dog perhaps and that he had dug into a forgotten pet cemetery. He had not, the jaw was most assuredly human. Not a fresh kill unless the subject had been de-fleshed. A macabre piece of knowledge that offered limited assurance to the boy who did as he was told by George Henry as he ducked beneath the covers of their bed. The mattress too heavy, burdened by those rattling bones between the springs. The mattress would have made a sturdier barrier than the flesh shields that George and Meenauh made.

Until sunrise, Jack would remain under this strange spell. A bloodhound that sought bones. Old bones.