The Bog (25 page)

When they arrived at Wythen Hall they were immediately ushered into the massive drawing room
qua
menagerie. They found Grenville sitting in a gigantic thronelike chair of elaborately carved bog oak beside the now-dead fireplace. He wore a deep-purple velvet smoking jacket and gold brocade slippers. The various tropical birds twittered nervously as they entered, and the monkey with the blood-red eyes watched them silently from his golden pagoda.

Grenville stood graciously to greet them. “Come in, come in. I’m so glad you have obliged me yet again in one of my requests. Won’t you please have a seat. Would you like a drink?”

Both of them stiffened, recalling the last time they had had a drink in Grenville’s house. “No thank you,” David said, and Melanie also shook her head in the negative.

“But, of course not,” Grenville said, his eyes flashing but not revealing whether he understood why they had declined or not. “It’s too early in the day for you.” He motioned for them to sit on one of the sofas near him.

“What is this all about?” David asked, sitting down.

Grenville smiled. “It’s simply that I’ve heard you’ve had an encounter with the creature the villagers quaintly call Ol’ Bendy, and I thought that you might have a few questions about it.”

David assumed that the vicar must have called and informed Grenville of the incident, and he marveled at the communications network the older man had in the valley. “Yes, I do have a few questions about it,” he replied. “The first one is what do you know about the creature?”

“Quite a bit, I daresay,” Grenville returned.

David’s eyebrows raised. “All right, I’ll bite. For starters, what is it?”

“It’s a demon,” Grenville returned as he absentmindedly picked a bit of lint off of the sleeve of his smoking jacket.

Under normal circumstances David would not have dignified such a remark with further question, but after his experiences of the night before he was prepared for anything.

“And how do you define
demon?
” he asked cautiously.

“A creature of the night, an inhabitant of the underworld,” Grenville returned.

“You mean hell?”

Grenville pursed his brow. “I so dislike that term. It carries with it so many misleading mythic connotations. Let us just say that demons inhabit another region of reality, a vibration that is normally not available to the human senses.”

David became increasingly uneasy. “How do you know all of this?”

Grenville frowned. “Know what? You mean, know that the creature is a demon?” He paused as a look halfway between a smile and something darker crept into his face. “Because it’s my demon.”

David grew confused.

Grenville stood. “Perhaps things would be easier if I showed you. Won’t you follow me?”

David and Melanie exchanged anxious glances, but stood and followed.

They passed through a large set of Amboina wood doors and into an adjacent parlor. Inside, the room was almost totally dark, but from what dim light there was coming from the open doorway, David could see that it had been converted into a makeshift bedroom. Huge and funereal velvet curtains had been drawn across the windows and kept out all encroaching sunlight, and in the middle of the room, placed haphazardly amidst the pushed-aside furniture, was a large four-poster bed completely draped in gauze.

As they entered, David noticed something else about the room. In addition to being dark, it was hot and stifling, and had the humid and sour smell of a sickroom.

Grenville lifted a candelabrum from a table in the drawing room and strolled forward into the darkness. Hesitantly, David and Melanie followed. As they approached the bed, David became aware of movement within the gauzy enclosure. And as they drew closer still, he could hear the raspy exhalations of troubled breathing. Melanie clenched his arm as Grenville thrust the candelabrum aloft and motioned for them to step up to the very perimeter of the bed. Then, glancing at them briefly, he drew back the bed-curtains.

Melanie gasped and David clasped his own hand over hers when they saw what lay beyond. Lying half naked in the bed was Julia. Her eyes were closed and she was drenched in sweat. But the most striking aspect of her feature, what captured their attention immediately, was the gaping wound in her chest and shoulder. A massive chunk of her torso was missing and clearly visible was half an eviscerated lung and a dangling section of esophagus. Still, remarkably, she was alive. What remained of her breast rose and fell, and the shredded fragments of her windpipe fluttered as she breathed, but David failed to comprehend how anything biological could survive the wounds that she had apparently sustained. Equally astonishing as the fact that she was alive was the color of her internal organs. Unlike human viscera, they were a nacreous and cadaverous gray, and the veins that entwined them a darker and more leaden color still. Most incredible of all was her black heart, which protruded prominently from the bloody splay of her abdomen, and it too pumped and quivered like some creature from the deep stranded on land by a storm.

At first David did not connect Julia’s wound with the creature he had seen in the bog, but as he continued to stare at her, it slowly dawned on him that the bloody cavity was exactly the same as the gunshot wound he had delivered to Ol’ Bendy the night before. He looked at Grenville incredulously.

Grenville returned his stare. “She’s going to be quite angry with you once she’s up and around again.”

David blinked. “You mean Julia is the creature?”

“One and the same.”

“But how?”

Grenville smiled. “Certainly in your encounter last night you gleaned some hint of the fact that Ol’ Bendy possesses somewhat remarkable powers of transformation.”

David still could not believe his eyes. He looked down once more at the reclining form in the bed, at the remaining breast and the distinctly feminine figure. “But the creature I shot was male!”

“Strictly speaking, Julia is a male spirit, but you must understand, she can assume virtually any form that she wants. In addition, her appetites are rather wide ranging, so it becomes somewhat meaningless to speak of her as possessing gender.”

At this last remark David noticed that Melanie went completely white, but he assumed that she was merely reacting to the extraordinariness of what they were witnessing. Still searching madly for some flaw in what he was being told, he said: “But the creature reconstituted itself after I shot it. When it chased me to the church the wound had already healed.”

“It was a temporary measure on Julia’s part. She was furious with you, and just as humans display more than normal abilities in times of trauma, Julia was able to affect some semblance of her normal self. But it will take her a couple of days to recover completely.”

At the very moment Grenville finished saying this, a tremor passed through Julia as she was apparently wracked by an unseen pain, and arching her back like a woman in labor, she let out a wail. As she did this a cloud of acrid and sour air flooded forth from the bed, and at the same time the enigmatic pain that he had first experienced in the thicket shot through David’s jaw. He looked at Grenville questioningly.

True to form, Grenville perceived what was puzzling him instantly. “You must forgive her. Most of the time she can suppress the painful effect she has upon people.”

“Why does she have that effect?” David asked, still stroking his jaw tenderly.

“Julia is no normal physical entity. You see, under normal circumstances she does not belong on this plane of existence. But because she’s here, quite literally she has a foot in two worlds, and when you feel the pain in your jaw you are feeling the tug of her realm. You are feeling the dissonance of the two worlds coming together, a sort of static.”

David was about to ask another question when suddenly Julia’s head lolled to one side and it looked as if she were about to regain consciousness. Her eyes opened and rolled about in her head as her lids fluttered. And then her eyes stopped rolling as her gaze fastened on David and recognition came.

“You!” she hissed, rising up like a serpent about to strike, and shot a long and pitchy tongue at him accompanied by a ferocious snarl. Drawing on some unearthly reservoir of power she lunged at him, but Grenville stepped quickly between them. She looked at him, infuriated.

“
Ip hur ib du ni!
” she cried.

“
Ish ma na ni ia ip!
” Grenville shot back as he glowered at her. For a moment she hesitated, still challenging his authority, but then she fell back into the bed and lapsed once more into her feverish delirium.

Grenville turned to David once again. “She really is very peeved with you.”

Noticing not at all the immensity of Grenville’s understatement, David focused his attention instead on the unknown language that Grenville had just used to address Julia. It sounded to him vaguely Phoenician, although he knew enough of that ancient tongue to know that it was not.

“What language was that?” he asked.

“Its name would mean nothing to you,” Grenville returned. “You would not know it.”

“It’s not Celtic,” David countered.

“No, it’s not,” Grenville replied and seemed unwilling to comment any further on the matter.

Another tremor wracked Julia and Grenville allowed the bed-curtains to flutter shut.

“I think it is time we return to the drawing room,” he said, holding the candelabrum aloft and motioning for them to follow him. He closed the parlor doors as they once again took their seats on the sofa.

“So why are you telling us all of this?” David asked as Grenville sat back down in his chair of bog oak.

“Well, you see, Julia has been in the trust of the de L’Isle family for quite some time, many centuries, in fact.” Grenville paused as if to allow the ramifications of what he was saying to fully sink in.

“So she
is
responsible for the deaths of the bodies we’ve unearthed in the bog,” David filled in as he glanced at the portrait of one of Grenville’s ancestors over the fireplace and noted once more the mysterious veil that was draped across its face.

Grenville nodded. “Indeed, but more important is the fact that it has long been the duty of the de L’Isle family to watch over Julia, to protect her, and in this regard it is most imperative that her existence remain a complete secret. You see, we have learned to control her and understand her ways, but if news of her existence went beyond this valley, and curiosity seekers started to rain down upon us, heaven only knows what the consequences would be.”

“So what do you want out of us?” David asked.

“I would like to make you an offer. I would like to propose that you and your family stay in the hunter’s cottage and you continue with your work, but with the promise that you will say nothing of the events of these past several days to anyone, not even your assistant. And in return I will promise you that I will keep Julia away from you and not allow her to harm you or your family in any way.”

David’s hackles began to raise. “But Julia is a murderer!”

“You mean the bodies in the bog? But that was centuries ago. As you have seen for yourself, we now keep Julia restricted to sheep. Surely you cannot call that murder.”

“What about Winnifred Blundell?”

“That was an accident.”

“But I thought you said you could control Julia?”

A hint of rancor flashed in Grenville’s eyes, but he remained calm. “True, but that was the first such accident in over a hundred years and it was due to an oversight on my part. It will not happen again.”

David remained unappeased. “And what if we don’t agree to your demands? What if, as a scientist, I cannot simply forget what I have seen and heard in the past several days, and I decide that I have no recourse but to tell the world about Julia’s existence?”

Melanie clenched his knee as she sensed that this had somehow been a dangerous remark to make.

Grenville made a church with his rubied fingers. “Then I would be forced to allow Julia to do with you what she will,” he said placidly.

This caused David to completely lose his temper. “How dare you threaten me in this manner!” he said, standing. “Who do you think you are to presume that just because you are the local gentry you have absolute powers of censorship over anything that happens in this valley?”

Following David’s outburst Grenville just continued to stare at him, offering no hint of what he was thinking.

David continued to pace angrily. “And where did this creature come from, anyway? And how is it that you are able to control it whereas others cannot?”

He looked again at the veiled portrait hanging over the fireplace and on impulse he charged over and snatched the drapery away from the canvas. As he did so, Melanie gasped, and he himself stood back and stared mutely at the countenance himself. For the face, the visage done in a style from over a century before, was not of Grenville’s facially deformed ancestor as he had said, but was none other than Grenville himself.

Grenville stared at David icily. “I do wish you hadn’t done that.”

He continued to gaze at them silently for several moments and then he stood. “But now that you have, you certainly deserve to see the others.” He strode briskly in the direction of the dining room. He turned and cast them another sharp glance. “Come along. Come and see, if you are so curious.”

With growing trepidation, they followed. Once in the dining room, Grenville moved from portrait to portrait, removing the little curtain from each, and each was in turn revealed to be another yet more ancient likeness of himself. As the paintings increased in apparent antiquity, his clothing style changed, and the manner of the brushstroke altered according to the fashion and sophistication of the times, but in each, the face, hair, and eyes were undeniably his. Even the ruby ring had been recorded, and the Malacca cane that David had seen him carrying at their first meeting.

David rushed forward to examine the crackle in the varnish.

“They are not fakes,” Grenville informed him. “They are all of me.”

“I don’t understand,” David said.

“It’s really quite simple,” Grenville returned. “You see, there is no de L’Isle family line. I am the only one. I’m as old as Julia is. It was I who first conjured her up.”