The Bog (34 page)

The next morning when he looked in on Melanie, to his great distress he found that she had taken a turn for the worse. She was vomiting again and her breathing was faint and raspy. It was as if the events of the night before had taken whatever last small scrap of pluck and stamina she possessed. She also drifted in and out of unconsciousness, and her face was growing increasingly thin. As David sat with her, holding her enfeebled hand, slowly, painfully, he realized with growing disquiet that she was dying. It might take a week, or a month, but he realized that she would not be able to survive for long in the condition that she was in.

He sat with her all morning and most of the afternoon, and finally, not knowing what else to do, he decided to pay one more visit to the campsite. He hoped that if he examined the bodies of the Roman couple once again he might find something that he had overlooked, some tiny fragment of information that could help him save the lives of his wife and children.

It was just as he was about to leave that Tuck came running up to him fearfully.

“Daddy, where are you going?” he asked, his face filled with dread.

“I’m going to the campsite. I’ll be back in a little bit,” David returned.

“Can I go with you?” he begged.

David looked down sadly at his son’s forlorn expression. “I don’t think so, Tuck.”

Tuck looked devastated. “Oh, please, Daddy. Why not?”

“Because you’ve got to stay here and take care of your mother.”

Tuck started to cry. “But Mom has Mrs. Comfrey to take care of her, and I’m scared to be left here alone. I want to come with you.”

David was about to say something else when Katy also appeared, looking anxious.

“You’re leaving again? Can I come too?”

David sighed. He did not think it was wise to take his children to the site of the excavations, but he could not turn down their desperate and pleading faces.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “Come along.”

“No!” a voice suddenly shouted from behind, and he looked up to see that Melanie had dragged herself out of bed and had come down the top several flights of stairs.

Seeing what had happened, Mrs. Comfrey rushed up behind her and tried to assist her back to bed, but Melanie fought her. She seemed almost delirious.

“Melanie,” David said softly, “it will be all right.”

“But it’s almost dark!” she exclaimed.

“No it isn’t. The sun won’t set for another hour or so. I’ll get them back before then.”

She remained adamant. “No! You mustn’t take them, it’s too near the bog!”

Irritated that she was coming dangerously close to saying things in front of Mrs. Comfrey that she shouldn’t, and realizing that at least part of her anxiety was rooted in her debilitated mental state, David sent the children on out to the car.

“Melanie, they’re upset and frightened. They just don’t want to be left alone. They’ll be all right.”

He turned around to leave.

“But they’ll be even more frightened if you take them to the campsite!” she called behind him. “You expect too much of them. They’re not little adults. They’re just children!” Her voice trailed off as he shut the door behind him.

He resented her apparent assumption that he was going to subject the children to anything at the excavations that would frighten them. Given their already fragile state of mind, he had no intention of letting them anywhere near the bog bodies.

At the camp he herded the children out of the car and led them toward the main tent. About fifteen feet outside it he stopped them.

“Now listen to me,” he said, looking at them sternly. “I want you both to play right here where I can keep an eye on you.”

Katy looked appalled. “You’re not letting us come in?”

“No,” he said in a tone of voice that stifled further argument.

“Well what are we supposed to do to pass the time?” she asked.

“You might try telling your little brother a story. But whatever you do, I don’t want you to come into the tent, and I don’t want you to wander off. We’re very near the bog here and it would be very dangerous for you to just go strolling around.”

Tuck looked off into the thicket nervously.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Katy said begrudgingly.

“Now, remember, stay where I can keep an eye on both of you.”

David walked off toward the tent. Inside he found everything as they had left it. The first two bodies they had unearthed were now completely preserved and laid out on dry tables with sheets draped over them, but the bodies of the Roman couple were in separate tubs and were still soaking in the first of their chemical baths. David walked over to the woman. For some reason the pressure of the peat above her had been irregular and left her corpse both slightly elongated and slightly concave. It was almost as if a wax model of a human being had been sat upon by a giant while it was still in the formative stages of hardening. Nonetheless, he started to drain off the chemical bath so that he could proceed with his examination.

Outside, the wind began to blow and caused the grass on the hills to rustle and move.

“Dad, the grass is moving!” Tuck called, suddenly panicky.

David looked up from his work. “Tuck, it’s only the wind.” Tuck seemed slightly reassured.

David finished draining the liquid off, and with a towel he began to pat the body dry. For the moment they had left all of the woman’s clothing on, and even the fateful knife clutched firmly in her hands. From the activity of the chemicals in the peat she had also been left absolutely rigid, and she had been preserved lo these nineteen-odd centuries almost exactly as she had fallen just seconds after she had plunged the knife into her abdomen.

David looked at her face and felt a pang as he saw the sadness and desolation there. What had driven her to this act? he wondered. Was it really the witnessing of her husband’s ghoulish murder, or was there some other secret that her ancient brain concealed?

Outside, the wind rustled once again, and Tuck became agitated. “Dad, I’m scared.”

David looked up and saw that his son was looking around, anxiously. “Katy, aren’t you telling him a story?”

“I’m trying to, but he won’t listen,” she whined back.

“Well, try harder.”

He returned his attention to the body. Her flesh, once soft and supple, was now dry and leathery as an old shoe. He scrutinized her posture, the way she held her hands, but still he discerned nothing that piqued his attention. He tried carefully to shift her, to get a better view of the knife she held, when suddenly there was a snap and her hand broke neatly off at the wrist.

For some reason the mishap affected him almost as adversely as if the woman were still living flesh and blood instead of some strange permutation of something once alive, and he was filled with horror and anger over what he had done. He cursed as he looked at the cross section of her severed wrist, as brittle and ragged as an old tree limb. Perhaps it was the pressure he was under, or his exhaustion because of lack of sleep. Perhaps it was his concern and irritation with his wife, his loss of patience with his whiny children, or the total and agonizing frustration he felt over suspecting that he was close to something, but not able to pin down exactly what it was. But as he looked down at the shriveled body, as he pondered what secret the ancient skull contained that still eluded him, he wondered suddenly why he was doing it all. Grenville was right. He did grovel around in the mud and try desperately to wrest secrets out of fragments. Why was he struggling so hard? Why was he pushing his mettle to the very limit when still, no matter what he did, the world just continued to slowly collapse around him? Why didn’t he just give up and go over to Grenville’s side?

For several moments he remained lost in this thought, thinking of the worlds that would be opened up to him if he just accepted Grenville’s offer, when, only half consciously, he noticed something peculiar about the concavity of the woman’s body.

He barely had time to register the thought when outside the wind suddenly surged up powerfully and captured a piece of black vinyl plastic that had gotten wrapped around one of the tent’s supporting ropes, sending it whipping through the air like some strange winged creature.

As fate would have it, it sailed right toward where Tuck and Katy were standing, and when Tuck saw it coming he screamed and suddenly broke into a run.

Horrified, David took off after him. “Tuck!” he cried, but Tuck just continued to run, heading straight toward the thicket that marked the edge of the bog.

Gripped by panic, David pounded after him. “Tuck, no! It’s just the wind!”

But Tuck was apparently so overcome with terror that he was no longer cognizant of his father’s cries. A wave of icy fear engulfed David as he saw Tuck vanish into the thicket.

“Tuck, please stop, Daddy will protect you!” David screamed, but when he reached the edge of the thicket he saw no sign of his son. He stopped, listening carefully, until he once again heard the crash of the underbrush, and then he took off in the direction of the sounds.

He caught a glimpse of Tuck only once more, just a flash of the color of his jacket in the far distance, before he heard the splash.

“Tuck!” he screamed with such agony that it felt as if his vocal cords would rip from his throat. “Tuck, please!” He crashed frenziedly through the brambles, caring not at all that the thorns were ripping his skin, his clothes.

At last he reached the spot where he had last seen his son, but Tuck was nowhere to be found. As David looked frantically around only silence met his ears, silence and the ominous rocking of a tangle of lilies in one of the bog pools where only moments before something had apparently crashed through the floating mat of peat.

Without regard to his own safety, David dove madly in. Once submerged he struggled to open his eyes, but the icy water had become so clouded with peat from his thrashing around that he could see nothing. He quickly discerned that the bog pool appeared to be quite large, for as he swam farther downward he found no sign of bottom. He also, in his mad flailings, found no trace of Tuck.

Finally, his lungs on the verge of bursting, he started back up for air. When he reached the surface he came up under a matted tangle of vines and rotted debris and with superhuman strength he tore through them, gasping frantically when he once again saw daylight. In the distance he also heard Katy calling for him.

“Dad! Dad, where are you?”

“Katy!” he bellowed. “Don’t come in! Run home and call for an ambulance!”

“Why?”

“Just do it!” he shrieked, angered that he was wasting precious time. He looked at his watch and realized that Tuck had now been under for almost a minute.

Taking several large gulps of air, he dove back down into the pitchy water. This time, more prepared for the descent, he reached bottom, or as he had expected, false bottom, and his hands plunged deep into the thick black ooze. He prayed that Tuck had not managed to submerge himself in this for if he had, David knew that he would never find him. Feeling his way carefully along the slimy bottom he penetrated another fifteen feet or so into the darkness. It was difficult going, for the bottom of the bog pool was littered with debris, old tree stumps and fallen branches, and David was forced to meticulously grope around them to make sure that Tuck had not gotten wedged underneath any of them. The water at the bottom of the pond was also icy cold and his fingers grew numb as he continued. Time and again he surfaced, ripping his way through the floating tangle of the lilies and gasping for air, only to dive down again to continue in his search. Finally, numbed from cold and exhaustion and in danger of drowning himself, he was forced to temporarily latch onto a floating log. He looked at his watch. To his great despair he saw that if Tuck was in the pond he had now been underwater for almost twenty minutes. David realized torturedly that already his hope of ever recovering his son alive was slim, but he realized that it was nonexistent if he did not continue. Filling his lungs he once again dove down into the murk.

It was a little while later, as he was fumbling wildly through the ooze of the false bottom, that his hand collided with the rubber sole of a child’s shoe. Reaching out eagerly, he felt the solidity of a leg and he realized that he had found him. Calling upon his last flicker of strength, he carried the body to the surface. This time, with only one hand free, it was even more difficult for him to tear through to the open air, but finally he broke through and managed to reach the shore. Tears flooding his eyes, he laid Tuck’s limp little form on a bed of ferns. Feeling for a pulse, he found none.

David’s first urge was to wail, to let out all his grief and pain in one terrible cry of misery, but something inside him would not allow him to give up, to accept that Tuck was dead. Frenziedly, he collapsed beside his son and started to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a minute or two of this, a slight stream of water came pouring out of Tuck’s mouth, but it was not accompanied by any sound or movement to indicate that it was more than a phenomenon of physics, just an emptying of water from a dead body. David felt once again for a pulse, but still found none. Placing one hand on Tuck’s diminutive chest, he pounded firmly on it with the other, and then again. He continued with his attempts at revival, alternately breathing into Tuck’s mouth and then pounding on his chest, until suddenly a great flood of water poured forth out of him. David tilted Tuck slightly to one side, slapping him on the back to assist in the purge. And then he watched.

For several seconds Tuck remained motionless, the water continuing to stream from his mouth, and then suddenly he seemed to move. David ripped open his little shirt and placed his ear against his chest. To his uncontrolled elation he heard a faint beat. On Tuck’s left hand a finger twitched, as weakly his body forced a cough and another flood of water came issuing out of his lungs. His heartbeat remained feeble and erratic and his eyes closed, as he desperately struggled to hold on to life.

David looked at his watch and realized to his horror that as near as he could determine Tuck had been underwater for almost thirty-five minutes. Now that his frenzied state of mind had diminished slightly, he wondered how it was that Tuck had survived at all, but his puzzlement quickly faded as he clung only to the hope that the ambulance would arrive in time. As he continued to rock his son gently in his arms he remembered also Winnifred Blundell’s warning that sooner or later the bog always took, and he prayed that this time at least she had been wrong.