The Bog (3 page)

Hollister shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’m not criticizing,” David interjected quickly, recalling how self-effacing the younger man was. “Actually, I kind of like it. Lends an air of mystery to everything. Just tell me where to go.”

Hollister nodded and motioned for David to take the left turn in the fork.

As they drove on, David noticed that a slight tension had developed momentarily between them. This was not because there was any animosity between the two men. On the contrary, when the two of them were heavily into a project they worked as if they shared a single soul. The tension was due instead to the fact that Brad was the archetype of the shy and reclusive intellectual. He was brilliant and fanatically dedicated to his work, but a very quiet and private person, and always a little ill at ease in the company of other people. Consequently, whenever the two of them had been apart for any length of time it always seemed to take awhile before the younger man relaxed and settled back into the routine of their working together.

Eventually the landscape started to look more familiar to David, and he recalled the thoughts that he had had when he first passed through these parts. He looked out his window and remembered that first and foremost he had been struck by the beauty and seclusion of the place. Through the ever-clearing mists, rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of the road and scrub oaks lined the distant horizon. Farther on, the land got hillier, and he shifted gears as they headed up through a lane worn deep by centuries of wheels and surrounded by high banks dripping with moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Here the vegetation became unusually lush and verdant and David thought again, as he had thought the first time he drove through here, that it was almost as if he had entered a more primeval England, an England as it might have looked when giant herbivorous reptiles still roamed the landscape. In the distance, bronzing bracken and mottled bramble rose out of the veil of the fog, and through the trees one could see only a dreamlike pall of gray.

Still rising steadily, they passed over a narrow granite bridge surmounting a noisy stream, foaming and roaring amidst a concourse of great boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a countryside dense with hemlock and fir until at last they rounded a curve, the vegetation cleared, and before them lay an outlying spur of the moor.

It was a beautiful and peaceful region, but, David thought, tinged with a strange melancholy. It occurred to him that part of the desolate quality of the region was due to the fact that it seemed so untouched by human hands. It was true that the granite bridge was an artifact of human origin, but it could easily have been there for centuries, perhaps longer. Even the wind seemed momentarily absent, and it struck him anew that the entire place was pervaded by an unearthly calm, an almost palpable timelessness, as if the valley were more than just geologically separate from the outlying countryside, as if there were some actual quality to the air itself that set it apart.

At last, in the far distance, there appeared the misty spike of a church steeple. “Thank God!” David said. “At least where there is a church there is civilization.”

Brad looked at him curiously. “That’s the church in the village Fenchurch St. Jude. Didn’t you see it the first time you came here?”

“No, I approached the bog from a different direction,” David replied.

At length the road narrowed, and the Volvo slowed down. Finally there rose beyond the gloomy curve of the moor a dense wall of foliage and the almost endless sweep of peat land and blackthorn that was Hovern Bog. Also visible and set off from the road was Brad’s own rusted Volkswagen, on high ground the tent where he had made his camp, and a little farther into the bog several gaping wounds in the peat where he had made his excavations. David pulled the Volvo up onto the high ground near the tent and got out. Then, before he did anything else, he paused and looked around.

On the hills to their left and rising up out of the last remaining fingers of the mist were half a dozen or so piles of stone rubble. To the untrained eye they might have looked as if they had been placed there by farmers clearing their fields, but to David, their distinctive arrangements revealed that they were all that remained of an ancient Neolithic settlement, no doubt the first version of Fenchurch St. Jude, or whatever it had been called up until Roman times. It was these ruins and their proximity to the bog that first told him they should dig here. However, even if the ruins had not been so readily apparent, he would have been drawn to excavating in this region. Like most archaeologists, David had developed his powers of observation to a level of almost superhuman acuity, and he could often see details in the landscape that to other people were quite invisible. In a barren patch of ground he noticed a tiny fragment of bitumen and knew that it was quite possibly the remains of an ancient campfire. And on a nearby hill he observed an angular embankment that, in spite of the fact that it was now covered with vegetation, his discerning eye detected had once been a path and been well trodden by human feet. It was only after he had assessed these features and once again recemented them in his mind that he turned and faced the great Hovern Bog.

Although he had scrutinized it before, now that he knew an important archaeological find had been made there he looked at it with new eyes, his mind greedily reassessing its every detail. The first thing he noticed about it was its size. It was vast, and it broke out of the great plain of the moors like a mysterious continent unto itself. Later he was to learn that it was a full thirty-five square miles in area. It was also a brighter green than the olive and russet slopes of the moors—the vegetation in the bog able to wrench more nutrients out of the black water than the heather could out of the barren plain. To many, the bog might have seemed a frightening and foreboding place, but not to David. He knew the subtleties of the bog too well for them to frighten him, and thus for him it was a place of fascination.

He knew that the many hills scattered throughout the bog were not hills at all, but really islands cut off on all sides by the impassable mire. He knew there was a good chance that somewhere in the bog was a bog lake. This was the nexus of the bog, and over the centuries, even the millennia, the mire had slowly crept outward from it, had wound through the countryside, engulfing some portions of the landscape and making islands of others. Here and there in saucerlike depressions in the land it would have settled into so-called bog caldrons, seemingly bottomless pits filled with a waterlogged and spongy soup of peat and rotting vegetation. In a way, these were the most dangerous parts of the bog, for they could easily swallow an unwitting creature alive. However, there were other dangers as well. During the rainy seasons, like the spring rains they were in the middle of, the endless mire would have expanded and formed numerous other inky pools and rivulets, and these in turn would have become covered with semifloating mats of sphagnum and entangled with water lilies. Thus, sometimes the land itself was not even land, and if one tried to jump from grass clump to grass clump in attempts to avoid the caldrons, one could just as easily be swallowed up by the land itself and drown, hopelessly ensnared in the sinewy tendrils of the lilies.

In fact, the sinister beauty of the entangling lilies was only one of many contradictions that flourished in the bog. As David continued to ponder the vast and marshy expanse, he thought of others. On one hand, the bog was a haunting and eerie place, with the wind perpetually rustling through its many sedges of bulrushes and the forlorn silhouettes of the numerous dead trees whose roots had drowned but not yet rotted that dotted its banks. But on the other hand, it was teeming with life. What hilly ground had survived within the perimeter of the mire stood tall with a scrub of birch, willow, mountain ash, and alder buckthorn. Bog whortleberry flourished on the dry banks around the mire and every square inch of available ground space was covered with marsh cinquefoil and cranberry, and in the driest areas, anemones and dog’s mercury.

Similarly, just as the bog was a taker of life, it was also a preserver of life, for in isolating the many islands of green that dotted its expanse it had also protected them, and often they harbored many rare species of plants and butterflies. In fact, it was not unheard of for a brave amateur naturalist to discover a totally unknown species of plant or animal that had been cut off for centuries by one of the impassable arms of the bog. And even what life was not exclusive to the bog was often, nonetheless, at least uncommon, like the carnivorous pitcher plant and even an occasional orchid, trapped but given sanctuary in this Galapagos of the moors.

Everywhere he looked there were such juxtapositions, the beautiful contrasted with the deadly, the mist mingled with the thorns. In short, he realized that like all great things, like the ocean, the night, and even life itself, the bog was a paradox. The greatest bulk of its substance was dead vegetation, and yet it behaved as if it were curiously alive. It expanded and contracted. It reached out with sinewy tentacles and took and entangled and digested. And it even stirred occasionally in its slumber, groaning and emitting the most mournful and unearthly sounds, presumably from the peat settling, but to many who had heard them, including David himself, it seemed more like the ruminations of some great beast, the restless rumblings of the living bog.

From far overhead came the plaintive cry of a bittern, a rare and heronlike bird that also inhabited the protective confines of the bog, and David looked up to see it flying in the direction of the hills to their left. He watched it for a moment, transfixed by its beauty, when suddenly it squawked and tumbled at a ninety-degree angle, almost as if it had collided with an invisible wall. For a second he thought that it was going to crash, but then it regained its balance and flew frantically off in another direction.

“Did you see that?” he shouted as he ran up the steep and rocky hill to get a better vantage. Brad had apparently not seen it, but followed him curiously.

“See what?”

“That bird. It was flying along when suddenly it veered off almost as if it hit something.”

Brad looked up into the air, squinting to see the allegedly invisible obstruction. “I don’t see anything.”

“Not now,” David said. “But I swear it looked like it hit something.” He surveyed the landscape beneath where the incident had happened. The first thing he noticed was the picturesque outline of Fenchurch St. Jude in the valley below. The now-bright sun gleamed refulgently off the whitewashed walls of the sprawling cluster of cottages, and here and there an automobile or a pickup truck provided the only clue that the village was indeed a part of the twentieth century. David observed that the church he had spied before was set off some distance from the village and was actually nearer to the bog. Here and there in the far distance other moorland cottages dotted the hills, but these too were few and far between, and their infrequency only added to the sense of isolation that hung over the place.

David’s gaze moved to the portion of the valley nearer where the bittern had nearly fallen from its flight, and here another sight met his eyes. Some distance from the village and at least partially encircled by the black waters of the bog was a manor house. Like many English manor houses, the huge and rambling edifice was an eclectic hodgepodge of styles from different eras. David recognized part of the facade as late Elizabethan, but the main block of the structure was much older. A huge tower projected from the central core, ancient and crenellated, and heavy, mullioned windows dotted the walls. From the steep roofs set at different angles to one another sprouted innumerable chimneys, and the entire structure was encrusted with ivy and surrounded by great oaks and firs twisted into fantastic shapes by untold years of storms.

Sc here was the bog lake, David thought to himself. And moreover, there was a house built upon its edge. How strange, he thought, that someone long ago should have chosen such a bleak location on which to build his home. He knew from the high acidity of the peat that the waters of the lake would be still and black and almost completely devoid of life. He knew also that the lake most assuredly had a false bottom, and the only thing that punctuated its dark and impenetrable surface would be again the semifloating mats of sphagnum and decaying vegetation.

But he discerned nothing that explained why the bittern had behaved so strangely when its course had taken it over the perimeter of the grounds.

“What’s that place?” he asked.

“It’s known as Wythen Hall,” Brad replied. “It’s the home of the local gentry, the Marquis de L’Isle.”

A small breeze rustled by them, and as David started back down he was struck once again by the oddness of someone building so stately a manse on a location so dominated by the bog. In fact, it occurred to him that in a way Fenchurch St. Jude and, indeed, the entire valley were dominated by the bog.

The thought had lingered in his mind for but a moment when his attention returned to the matter at hand. “Now why don’t you show me that body?” he said.

“Let me get you some boots to put on first,” Brad replied. He ran into his tent, then returned with a large pair of wading rubbers. David put them on and they strolled toward the excavation. As the land sloped downward it became wet and gushed beneath their feet. David looked at Brad worriedly.

“It’s okay. I’ve checked the area out thoroughly. There are no sinks.”

David nodded, grateful for the information, but he still walked carefully.

Finally they reached the side of the excavation, and David looked down. The hole itself was about six feet square and maybe five feet deep. The first several feet of strata on the sides of the pit were composed of a dark-colored peat David recognized as wood-peat, and below this a reddish peat stratum of decomposed sphagnum known to peat cutters as “dog’s flesh.” A foot and a half into the dog’s flesh and resting peacefully on the reddish and muddy bottom of the pit was the body of a young girl.