The Bog (20 page)

Her husband entered the tent behind her. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said, turning to him, her eyes red from crying.

“Praying, but I thought I heard you ask for forgiveness for your sins.”

“We have all sinned, Divitiacus. Is that so strange a request?” she said evasively, and then hated herself for not having the courage to tell him the truth.

“I suppose not,” he said, accepting the explanation. From his expression she could tell that he had his own troubles to think about.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Two more men have vanished,” he said. “I will, of course, have two more of the villagers put to the sword, but I have no hope that it will do any good.” He paced anxiously through the tent, wringing his hands together in exasperation. “I just don’t understand, first the horses and now my men, almost a dozen in all so far.”

“And don’t forget the girl,” she added.

“And the girl,” he conceded begrudgingly, and then laughed a short, scornful laugh. “I don’t know what good they think it does them sacrificing their people to the thing. It still just devours them and waits hungrily for more.”

“But at least they have some control over who dies next.”

He looked at her harshly.

“And it’s only one at a time. Look at you, you’re beginning to lose two and three men a night now.”

“So what do you suggest that I do?” he demanded angrily.

“Perhaps we should start giving it men. Or perhaps we should have slaves brought in for it.”

“We’re Romans!” he cried.

“But Divitiacus,” she argued, “at least then
you
could decide who dies next.” She looked around with a tormented expression. “It’s too hellish going on the way we’ve been doing, not knowing who it’s going to take next; each evening not knowing which face will vanish during the night. It could be one of us next. Or both.”

“But Caesar—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “Caesar has decreed that we reject the local religions.” She looked out over the moors. “Well, Caesar does not know what is going on in this valley.”

“Nor would he ever believe me if I told him,” Divitiacus added bitterly. “But I have another plan.”

Valeria looked at her husband hopefully.

“Their local tribal chieftain, the one who lives in the fortification on the edge of the lake—I think we should go to him.” Divitiacus’s eyes darted hither and thither as he mulled the thought over. “You know, when we first came into this valley I thought that the man was a coward and not worth the fight it would take to draw him out of his battlement. I mean, he just remained in his fasthold and didn’t even come out to challenge us. He doesn’t even have an army.” Divitiacus’s expression became optimistic. “But I’m beginning to think that he holds the key to this thing. At least, he doesn’t seem to fear the creature. And it never seems to harm him. I think we should pay him a visit.”

“The two of us?”

“Yes, the two of us. Not as members of the invading army, but as fellow patricians, as diplomatic emissaries wishing simply to raise a glass or two with him and perhaps negotiate some sort of understanding. I’m beginning to think that he knows more than we may have suspected. I’m beginning to think that he may be the key to this entire thing.”

Divitiacus instructed his wife to put on her best gown. Valeria did as she was bid, and together with her husband, and with a garrison of Roman soldiers following only a diplomatic distance behind, they made their way to the battlement on the lake.

As they approached the escarpment leading to the formidable hulk of granite and stone, she found herself hoping that her husband was right. But she was also worried, and feared that he might not be, for she could not forget the augury and the handful of leaves that she had thrown upon the flame. And the blackness of the smoke.

The events of that evening left David in a state unlike anything that he had ever experienced before. When he lad reached the other side of the lake he had found nothing. When he had returned to Wythen Hall he was informed by one of the servants that the Marquis and Julia had retired. Even when he arrived back at the cottage he found Melanie in a curious state, although mercifully she was not nearly as angry as he had expected her to be. His first urge had been to tell her everything that had happened to him, but given that he himself did not know what he had seen, he refrained. To explain his disappearance he told her only that he and Julia had gotten separated and that he had followed a strange animal through the woods in the hopes that it might be Ben, or at least provide him with some clue about Ben’s disappearance. But even this she greeted without question or argument, and he was left to ponder the night’s occurrences alone.

He thought about it restlessly through a good portion of the night, but by morning he had still come no closer to explaining what he had seen. It was not that he was troubled by enigmas. Throughout his life he had always thrived on puzzles. But what bothered him so much about this was that he had no context in which to tackle it. The only thing that seemed to make sense was that it had been a hallucination of some sort, but assuming that this was the case still brought with it several problems. If it was a hallucination, how had Julia been able to so precisely anticipate its onset? In addition, if it was a product of his own psychology, why had there been no other clues about what was happening to him? No blurring of the vision previous to his sighting the centaur? No flashes of light or other perceptual distortions? The more he thought about it the more convinced he became that he could not explain what he had seen as an aberration of his own mental functioning; but the alternative, that the centaur was somehow real and existed “out there,” was equally untenable to him. He was left only with an unsolvable problem, and the sentence that kept returning to him endlessly in his thoughts was Julia’s strange allusion to Grenville’s power.

When he got up that morning he went for a long walk outside, like a man possessed. It was only when he came back in and found Melanie agitatedly sipping her coffee in the dining room in the dark and with all of the shades unopened that he realized something was bothering her also.

“Honey? What is it?” he asked, sitting down beside her.

“Nothing,” she returned unconvincingly, still gazing off into space.

This irked him, for he hated it when she made him drag it out of her. “Come on, Mel, don’t play this game. Can’t you just tell me?”

She hesitated for another moment and then looked at him frowning. “Do you think there was any chance we were drugged last night?”

This took him by surprise. “What do you mean?” Again she hesitated. “I don’t know. I just felt that that bog-myrtle wine hit me rather hard last night. I just wondered if you thought there was something in it other than alcohol, something that might cause... well, hallucinations, maybe?”

Not knowing what she meant, he assumed that she had to be referring to the experience he had had. “So you know what happened to me last night?” he said.

The look of agitation on her face intensified. “What do you mean?”

This time it was his turn to become flushed as he fidgeted and told her the entire experience. When he had finished the look on her face had escalated from concern to fear.

“David, what do you think it was?” she asked urgently.

He became confused. “I don’t know, but I thought you knew about this already.”

“Of course not. How would I?”

“Then why did you ask if I thought the bog-myrtle wine was drugged and might cause hallucinations?”

“Do you think it was?”

“No... well, I don’t know. I’m not sure.” He told her the reasons that he could not accept that his vision had been the result of a psychoactive experience.

“But, David, that means that the centaur was real.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Then what was it?”

“I don’t know!” he snapped, and then grew penitent. “I’m sorry. But I can’t help but think that it was a trick of some sort. I mean, obviously Julia knew about it. She even said that Grenville was an illusionist. I think he perpetrated the event as some sort of practical joke, or mind fuck. I don’t know.”

Melanie clearly remained unconvinced that it had been a trick and stared off into the distance, even more mysteriously tortured than before. Finally, after several minutes and with her eyes still fixed off in space, she said darkly, “David, I don’t think it was a trick.”

Too exasperated to respond, David just allowed the comment to go by.

Melanie spoke again. “Did you see the Volvo outside?”

“No. I’ve been meaning to ask you what happened to it.”

“Are you sure? When you went for your walk did you see it anywhere, hidden or pulled off the road?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Because I thought Brad might have driven it back. He drove me home last night and since it was raining I let him borrow the car.” She paused in thought. “But you know how considerate Brad is. I just thought he might have driven it back already.”

David accepted the information without question, but Melanie’s thoughts raced. It was the final vindication, she thought. Already she suspected that whatever it was that had been in her room had not been Brad. Brad was a human being, a creature made of flesh and blood, and flesh and blood didn’t simply evaporate, fade away into nothing like a vapor or a morning mist. But even if she had been mistaken, had unknowingly fainted from the shock of David arriving home, if it had been Brad, he would not have been able to drive the car away without alerting David. The Volvo should still be hidden somewhere near the house. But it wasn’t.

And yet she was also convinced that she could not simply have imagined the entire experience.

Her thoughts in tumult, another question came into her head, incongruous and inexplicable. “Grenville seems awfully dark-complected for an Englishman. Do you have any idea why that might be?”

David shrugged. “Well, the Romans do mention that when they came to conquer England the Celts were unusually dark-complected. Perhaps his family line just maintains a more pure strain of ancient Celtic blood.” She accepted the answer and both of them continued to brood for a moment. Suddenly David stirred.

“Now I have a question. If you didn’t know about the centaur why did you ask if I thought we had beer drugged?”

She looked down into her lap. “Well, I felt pretty strange last night myself.”

“How so?”

She hesitated for a moment longer and then looked into her husband’s eyes, and when she saw him staring back at her, so compassionate, so trusting, she knew that she would rather walk over burning coals than have to tell him what she had done. But she realized also that, given what he had told her, she had experienced something, something that frightened her more and more. She looked back down into her lap. “Well, to begin, do you remember Julia saying that bog-myrtle wine is an aphrodisiac?” She paused. “Well, last night when I got home I... well, I felt very peculiar, and I’m not trying to blame it on the wine, but I—”

And suddenly he thought he understood. “Honey, I know what you’re going to say.”

“You do?” she said, her eyes widening.

“Yes, I do. I know that you weren’t thrilled about the way Julia was coming on to me, and I have to admit the wine made me feel pretty peculiar too.” He shifted nervously. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but Julia made a pass at me, and although it pains me to admit it, I damn near came close to accepting it.”

“David, I—”

“Honey, please let me finish. I came close to accepting it, but then I thought of you and the kids. I thought of how a relationship like ours is built on trust, and then I turned her down, and you know why?”

“Why?” she asked weakly.

“Because I knew you would never do anything like that to me.” He paused. “Honey, I’m sorry.”

After several seconds he realized she was still just looking at him, her eyes glazed and behaving as if all of the life had been drawn out of her. “Honey, do you forgive me?” he asked.

“Forgive you?” she repeated distantly. “Yes... I forgive you.”

“Now, what was it you wanted to say?”

She continued to ruminate over some unknown and mysterious thought. “Nothing,” she returned. “It’s nothing.”

David noticed that his wife continued to brood for the rest of the morning, but it was just before he was about to leave for the digs that he found her looking even more troubled as she stood in the living room and sniffed the air carefully.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Do you smell something?”

He sniffed, and at first detected nothing. But then he took another deep whiff and became aware of a faint and unpleasant odor. The scent was familiar, but as he stood focusing his senses on it, it remained hazy and ill-defined. He took another, even deeper inhalation and at last recognized what he was smelling. He had smelled that stench before in his life. It was the smell of putrefying flesh.

“What do you think it is?” Melanie asked, seemingly on the verge of panic.

“You had Mrs. Comfrey put rat poison around the house, right?”

She nodded.

“Well it’s probably just the poison working. Somewhere in the walls or beneath the floorboards a rat who has eaten some of it has crawled in and died. The smell will go away in a few days.”

To his amazement Melanie seemed almost relieved.

Although he didn’t mention it, David thought of another possible and even more unpleasant explanation for the smell. It occurred to him that it might be Ben. And so after Melanie had gone back into the dining room, he got a flashlight and went beneath the crawl-space of the house. To his relief, however, he found no trace of the retriever’s moldering body, or for that matter, the remains of any small animal that might explain the mysterious odor.

The next several days were less than idyllic. Although he continued to work at the digs, he remained driven to distraction by his inability to understand the events that he had witnessed at Wythen Hall. When Brad asked him what was wrong he declined comment, but more than ever he was haunted by every detail of the evening, and turned every word, smell, and perception over and over again in his mind in attempts to wring some sense out of it. As a result, he existed in a state of agitation equaled only by Melanie’s. Since that evening, she too seemed like a changed person, and she padded listlessly around the house, sulking and brooding almost as if she were in a state of grief or moral breakdown. When Brad came over for dinner she no longer even engaged in animated discussions with him, but behaved instead as if he reminded her of something she wanted to forget. At first David had blamed the change in her on his confession of near infidelity, but as her moods continued, he started to wonder if there was more to it than just that.