The Bog (33 page)

“That’s funny,” the elder don said, also noticing the fly. “They don’t usually come out much after dark.”

David continued to watch the fly as it buzzed along the door casing and, quickly locating a space between the transom and the door, exited into the hall. David turned to the little man beside him and swiftly bid him goodbye, and as Burton-Russell regarded him with surprise, David placed the periodical under his arm and ran out the door.

Out in the hall he looked around madly and finally spotted the fly about twenty feet down the corridor. He broke into a run to catch up with it. At the end of the hall there was a window and he hoped to see the fly bump repeatedly against the glass, to give some indication that it was just a normal insect that had gotten trapped in the building. But when it reached the end of the corridor it avoided the window altogether and with eerie determination neatly turned the corner and sped on. David also rounded the corner, nearly knocking down two aged dons as he struggled to keep pace with his diminutive quarry.

By now the blowfly had picked up speed and was about forty feet ahead of him. As he continued to run after it, a short distance in front of him two large doors opened and a class of undergrads suddenly started to empty into the hall. Within moments he was engulfed by an ocean of students, and he watched anxiously as far ahead an incoming don opened the front door of the building and the fly vanished into the air beyond.

Had it been Julia? Something told him that it had. He recalled that according to legend, Beelzebub, Satan’s chief emissary on the earth, often took the form of a fly, but there was more to his conclusion than memory of that old myth. What frightened him was not only the fly’s steely determination to get out of the building, but its deft ability to do so, to avoid simple obstacles that normally stymied other flies. He quickly made his way through the flood of students and down the ancient steps of All Souls College.

If the fly had been Julia his worry was now that she would make it back to the valley before he did, that she would warn Grenville of his talk with Burton-Russell, and, angered by David’s indiscretion, Grenville would take some act of revenge against Melanie and the kids before he had a chance to get back to them.

He got into his car and sped off. While he was still within the confines of Oxford he tried desperately to keep the Volvo under the speed limit, but once he was outside on open road he tossed caution to the wind and pressed the accelerator nearly to the floor. When he finally arrived home and pulled into the driveway, to his horror he saw that the front door of the cottage was standing wide open.

He leaped out of the car and ran up to the house. Inside, the living room light was burning brightly, but there was no sign of activity.

“Melanie!” he called. “Tuck, Katy, Mrs. Comfrey?”

There was no response.

In a panic he started to search the house. It did not take him long to see that there were signs of a struggle. In the living room a chair was overturned and in the kitchen, the drawer that contained the knives had been completely pulled out and its contents emptied onto the floor.

“Oh, God!” he cried as he raced back to the front of the house. He was about to ascend the stairs when he felt something wet drip down onto his arm and he quickly wiped it off and noticed it was blood. He looked up.

“Oh, my God!” he cried again when he saw the body of a child, a young girl, garroted and hanging from the banister overhead.

“Katy!” he screamed as he bounded up the stairs, tears filling his eyes.

But it was not Katy. It was Amanda, her lifeless eyes bulging piteously as she dangled like a bag of laundry from a rope tied under her arms and suspended from the stair railing overhead. It appeared that she had been strangled by the rawhide cord on which he had placed the cross he had given her, and, indeed, that crudely hewn but sacred relic still dangled uselessly over her slumped face. The blood, he noticed, came from a small wound in her shoulder, a single bite mark that was distinctly Julia’s signature.

Still terrified over what had happened to his family, he stepped around the body and continued upstairs.

Madly, he searched the children’s bedrooms and found nothing. It was while he was searching the master bedroom that he heard a clunk and realized that it had come from the closet. Cautious, but desperate to find his family, he crept closer and quickly flung open the door.

Inside, Melanie and the children were huddled together, and in her hand Melanie clutched one of the kitchen knives. She screamed and nearly lunged for him.

“Melanie, it’s me!”

Still overcome by fear, she blinked several times before she would allow herself to believe it, and then she rushed forward into his arms. The children followed her, crying uncontrollably.

And then suddenly Melanie drew back, her face once again filled with terror. “How do I know it’s you?” Realizing that she feared he might be the demon, he tried to think of some proof he could offer her. “Ask me something, something only I would know.”

“When is Tuck’s birthday?”

“August twenty-sixth.”

She seemed only slightly calmed. “Where did we go on our honeymoon?”

“We didn’t go on a honeymoon—at least, not until a couple of years after we were married. And then we went to Ibiza.”

“Oh, David!” she cried, collapsing once again into his arms.

He hugged his family for several moments before he finally drew back. “Where’s Mrs. Comfrey?” he asked. “She went into Lemming to visit an ailing friend.”

He sat his wife down on the bed and Tuck and Katy clambered onto it beside him. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

“It was her,” Melanie said, still struggling to keep from sobbing. “The kids were in the living room and I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water. There was a knock on the back door and when I opened it Julia was just standing there, smiling fiendishly. I slammed the door in her face and locked it, but I could tell it wasn’t going to hold her back. So I got a knife out of the kitchen drawer and ran and got the kids and we came up here and hid. I heard her come in and she stomped around the house, but I never heard her leave. So we just stayed in the closet until you got home.”

“So you don’t know what’s out there?” David asked. Melanie’s eyes widened. “No, what?”

He shook his head. “Just keep the kids in here for a while.” He stood up to leave, but Melanie grabbed at him and held him back. “David, my God, you’re not just walking away without telling us.
What’s
out there?”

He looked at her firmly. “Melanie, it’s okay now. Everything is—”

But before he could stop her she had jumped up and run down the hall. He caught up with her just as she happened upon the body.

“Oh, my God!” she gasped as she turned and buried her head in his shoulder. David turned and saw that Tuck and Katy were coming out of the bedroom.

“Stay back there, kids!” he snapped angrily. He took Melanie gruffly by the shoulders. “Now will you please go back into the bedroom and see that the kids don’t come out here?”

Melanie reluctantly went back in and shut the door behind her.

It was as he cut Amanda’s body down that he saw the note. Written on a piece of embossed stationery and pinned to her dress was a message from the Marquis de L’Isle. It read:

My good Professor Macauley:

 

This is only a warning. I do not like what you did today. I will spare Professor Burton-Russell’s life since this is your first offense, but I will not be so tolerant should such an event occur a second time. Next time, this could be one of your children.

Yours most sincerely,
Grenville

He cursed and crumpled the note in his hand. He looked down at the body. The first thing that struck him was that Amanda had been strangled by the cross that he had given her, and he wondered why Eblaite symbols affected Julia, but not Christian ones.

Secure in the knowledge that his own children were safe, he was swept anew with grief and outrage. It wasn’t that he ever doubted that Grenville was evil, but somehow, as he looked at Amanda’s dead body, it was as if he truly saw for the first time the extent of the wickedness he was up against.

Tormentedly, he carried the body outside, and saying a final prayer he placed it in the trunk of the car. It made him heartsick to subject it to this final indignity, but he did not want Tuck or Katy or Mrs. Comfrey to see it before he had a chance to drive it to Fenchurch St. Jude and turn it over to the constable.

Still summoning his every ounce of will power to fight back the nausea, he cleaned up the blood and disposed of the rope, and then he went back upstairs. When he entered the bedroom he found Melanie madly involved in packing. Tuck and Katy were standing to one side and watching with alarm.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Melanie, you know you can’t do that.”

She turned on him with fury in her eyes. “Don’t tell me what I can or cannot do! I’m taking the kids and we’re getting the hell out of here!”

He pulled her harshly to one side of the room and lowered his voice so that the kids could not hear. “Melanie, I tried something today that I thought would help get us out of here, and that’s why that child out there was killed. It was a warning, Melanie. If you try to just drive out of here Grenville will never let you get out of the valley alive.”

She looked up at him torturedly, still half crazed with fear, and then she started to cry. Disheartened and defeated, he helped her back to the bed.

Tuck and Katy also began to cry. Katy looked up at him desperately. “Dad, what’s happening to us? What’s going on?”

He looked at his children, at the panic in their faces, and then he looked at Melanie. She had stopped momentarily in her sobbing and her eyes were wide with fear as she shook her head, trying to signal to him not to tell the children anything.

David looked back at Tuck and Katy, at the confusion and terror in their faces. He sighed. He had to tell them something.

He called them over and put his arms around them. “Kids, we’re in a little bit of trouble,” he said.

“David,
no!
” Melanie interrupted, trying to stop him.

He glanced at her disapprovingly and continued. “You know that man that Mommy and Daddy went to visit, the Marquis de L’Isle?”

They both nodded.

“Well he’s a very bad man, and he’s told us that we can’t leave this valley.”

“But how can he stop us?” Katy questioned.

“We don’t know and that’s what’s frightening us,” David returned. “We know that he has done some very bad things in the past and so we don’t want to attempt to leave until we’re certain that he can’t hurt us.”

“Can’t we just call the police?” Katy continued.

David looked at her sympathetically. “Katy, trust me for the moment. If we could have called the police, we would have, but the Marquis seems to be a very powerful and very clever man, and we don’t want to make a move until we’re absolutely positive that it’s the right one.”

Both Tuck and Katy gravely absorbed what they were being told.

“Is he a gangster?” Katy asked.

“Something like that,” David replied.

“Is he the one who shot the woman from Leeming?” she pressed.

David glanced briefly at his wife before he answered the question. “It doesn’t really seem to be his style of doing things, but with the Marquis, anything is possible.”

Tuck began to cry again. “Daddy, why can’t we just shoot him?”

David hugged his son even tighter. “Because Mommy and Daddy don’t just go around shooting people. That would make us just as bad as the Marquis is.” He pulled Katy closer to him also. “Don’t worry, we’ll get out of this somehow. You’ve both just got to be very brave until we can figure out how.”

He smiled and tried to wipe away his children’s tears. “Oh, and one more thing. Mrs. Comfrey doesn’t know about any of this. If she did it would put her in danger also, so this has to be strictly our secret. Understood?”

They both gazed at him dumbly.

“Understood?” he said even more firmly.

Falteringly, they both nodded.

Later that evening, after Mrs. Comfrey had gotten back, David drove into Fenchurch St. Jude and turned Amanda’s body over to the constable. The constable accepted it solemnly, and although he glared at David as if he harbored the conviction that David was somehow to blame for this most recent act of ruthless savagery from the Marquis de L’Isle, he said nothing. It was an occurrence that the inhabitants of Fenchurch St. Jude had clearly long ago learned to accept without comment. As David drove away he began to more fully understand the lifelessness, the look of bleak despair that he had seen in the faces of the people when he had first arrived in the valley.

He had been under Grenville’s despotic rule for only a comparatively short time, but already it was taking its toll on him. His mind boggled at what it would have been like to grow up knowing nothing but Grenville’s tyranny, to live and die as one’s parents and grandparents had, fearful that one’s every action was watched, that the slightest insurrection might result in sudden and unspeakable death.

He sat up all that night in the living room with a shotgun. He knew that it would provide him with at best only a temporary reprieve if Julia came stalking them again, but somehow it made him feel less helpless. As he sat there, drinking cup after cup of coffee to keep awake, he pondered all of the little mysteries hoping to find some clue that would help them escape the nightmare that they were now trapped in. He wondered again why Grenville did not just kill them and take Tuck and Katy into his own care. He wondered also why Grenville had so pointedly sought to conceal his true age, and why it was so important to him that David not know that he was from Ebla. David did not know why, but time and time again in searching for answers to these questions, his thoughts returned to the Roman couple. He had no substantial reason for why he felt that way, but he could not help thinking that the Roman woman’s suicide, the fact that she had taken her own life instead of being killed by Grenville, was somehow the key to these mysteries.