The Bog

by Talbot, Michael

  “Hello, Brad,” Melanie said.

  “Hello,” Katy burbled at the same time as she quickly took off her glasses and concealed them in her lap.

  David smiled. “Have a seat, Brad,” he invited, gesturing at the table. He put Tuck down and then sat down himself.

  “Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes,” Melanie said as she placed the first hamburger patty into the waiting skillet and it started to sizzle.

  “In that case, you better wash your hands, Tuckaroo,” David said.

  Tuck became deeply concerned. “Dad, I can’t reach the sink.”

  “Maybe Katy will help you.” He looked at his daughter proddingly.

  “Oh, jeez,” she groused, closing her book, as she reluctantly took Tuck into tow and accompanied him upstairs.

  “So how did it go today?” Melanie asked.

  David related the day’s events to her, and when he got to their somewhat unnerving discovery late that afternoon, he paused. On one hand, with all of the talk they had been having about little animals and Ben’s odd behavior, he knew that it would alarm Melanie. But on the other hand, it had never been part of his nature to be anything but totally honest with his wife, and he saw no reason to go back on that policy now. He took a deep breath and related the entire incident. When he had finished he looked up at her and saw that she had taken it about as well as he had expected she would.

  “Do you think whatever killed that poor girl is still wandering about now?” she asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “When’s the last time you read about some sort of wild animal mauling a person to death in England?”

  Melanie accepted the information and seemed to relax slightly.

  “And besides,” David went on, “one thing you’ve got to remember is that this event occurred nearly two thousand years ago. The native fauna has changed a lot since then.”

  “How so?” she questioned.

  “For one thing, there were wolves.”

  “But we don’t think she was killed by a wolf,” Brad added quickly, and David cast him a sharp glance.

  “Why not?” Melanie asked.

  Brad looked at David awkwardly, realizing that he had made an error.

  David sighed and, comprehending that the cat was out of the bag, related to Melanie the unusual and rasping nature of the wounds.

  “Oh, my God,” Melanie murmured, appalled. “Why on earth would an animal behave in such a peculiar manner?”

  An uneasy silence filled the room. She looked at the two men, once again wielding her spatula in a subtle but threatening way. “I’m an adult. I can be told,” she urged.

  Still, both men remained silent, until finally Brad shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, I’ve been thinking about this, and I know it sounds a little far-fetched, but it’s almost as if the animal, whatever it was, wanted the girl to die slowly, had enjoyed her anguish and had lingered and caressed her with its bites in a way that seems less animal-like and more... well, almost more passionate.”

  Thank you, Brad, David thought to himself as he rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. To his extreme relief, however, the children came running back into the room, and he knew that this would keep Melanie from asking any more ghoulish questions. He knew that his best approach now was to try to change the subject and get her mind off of this.

  “Have any luck finding a housekeeper today?” he asked.

  Melanie placed another hamburger in the skillet as she related her own experiences that day. When she reached the part about the murder of the woman in Leeming she tried to be as low-keyed as possible, spelling pertinent words here and there so as to avoid frightening Tuck. It was an unsuccessful ploy.

  “Did a bad man shoot the lady?” Tuck asked almost immediately after she had finished.

  Melanie looked at her husband.

  “Yes, a very bad man,” David assured him.

  “Is the bad man around here?” Tuck continued with thoughtful alarm.

  “No, he’s very far away from here,” David answered as he smiled at his son and patted him comfortingly on the back of the head.

  For several seconds everyone remained silent, busy in their respective thoughts, and then finally Melanie spoke again. “How many hamburgers do you want, Brad?”

  Brad looked up sheepishly. “I’m afraid I don’t eat hamburger. I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Well then what are you going to eat?” Katy asked worriedly.

  “What are you having with it?”

  “Green beans and mashed potatoes,” Melanie replied.

  “I’ll eat that.”

  “But that won’t be enough,” Melanie said.

  “Sure it will. Did you know that the Roman army conquered the world on a vegetarian diet? Caesar’s troops actually complained when grain stores ran out and they were forced to eat meat.”

  She looked skeptically at her husband for confirmation. “He’s right,” David agreed, pleased that the conversation was at last taking a more innocuous turn. “Roman troops lived primarily on vegetables, bread, and porridge. They disdained eating flesh.”

  The conversation proceeded on about several other aspects of Roman history until at last Melanie said, “That comb you found was Roman, wasn’t it.”

  David nodded.

  “What did you say the inscription said?”

  “Bringing you this last gift for the dead, accept this offering wet with tears,” David replied.

  “And what did you interpret that to mean?”

  “Since the evidence suggests that the girl is Celtic and the comb is Roman and a considerably more costly object than we would expect a girl of this region and time period to possess, we believe her sacrifice might have been witnessed by a Roman woman, and that she presented the girl with the comb as a sort of offering.”

  “What would a Roman woman have been doing here?” Melanie asked.

  “There were Romans all over the country during that time period. The woman was probably the wife of an official who was sent here on some political mission.”

  “And she gave the girl the comb as some sort of votive?”

  “Exactly,” David returned.

  Melanie looked puzzled. “But why was the comb wet with the Roman woman’s tears?”

  “That’s the fifty-dollar question,” Brad broke in. “But it could be any number of reasons,” David added. “We know that Caesar first conquered Britain in about 55 B.C. This comb is an expensive enough object that the woman it belonged to had to be the wife of a Roman official reasonably high up in Caesar’s political hierarchy. If she had accompanied her husband to England it means that they must have arrived here at least several years after the skirmish, when things had settled down enough that it would have been safe for a wife to accompany her officiary husband to a conquered land. They were here, most likely, to set about the more mundane task of the political and social reorganization of the Celtic people. A woman separated from her native soil and forced to travel with her husband to a totally foreign environment might have any number of reasons to be unhappy.”

  Melanie was caught off guard by this and stood blinking at her husband for several moments, but soon saw that he did not realize that an analogy might be drawn between what he had just said and their own situation. She started to take the hamburgers out of the skillet and lay them on a plate with paper towels to drain. As the chat continued on behind her, it once again returned to the subject of sacrifice, and she looked at each of her children anxiously, wondering if the talk was having any adverse affect on them. To her great relief it did not seem to be. Now that no attempt was being made to conceal the conversation from Tuck, he was paying not the slightest bit of attention, and instead, was moving his fork around the table like a tractor-trailer with several sugar cubes on the back of it as cargo. And Katy, Melanie quickly observed, had something entirely different on her mind. Her daughter seemed to be paying an unusual amount of attention to
Brad. She was gazing at him attentively and virtually hanging on his every word. And whenever he said anything even remotely resembling a joke, she laughed heartily. It suddenly hit Melanie that her daughter was developing a crush on her husband’s graduate student, and for some reason this surprised her.

  Perhaps it was simply that she was not yet used to her daughter becoming a sexual being. As she considered the matter she realized her surprise was equally due to the fact that she had never really viewed Brad as a sexual being either. True, he had once mentioned a brief liaison with a woman named Jean, but it had been a comment made in passing, with no other details added, and she had long ago accustomed herself to the fact that Brad was far less interested in relationships with women, or for that matter anyone, than he was in his work.

  Now as she looked at him, however, she realized that he really was very attractive. Beneath his plain but tightly fitting clothing he was lean and muscular, and a whorl of dark hair showed through his loosely buttoned shirt. He was also, she realized in her sudden reassessment, very handsome, and his hair and beard were a shiny and lustrous black. Equally striking were his eyes, which, in spite of their furtive modesty, had a sort of smoldering sensuality about them. She realized that if she didn’t know him so well, and had come upon him suddenly in an appropriate setting, she might easily view him as a satyr or some god of the forest, a Bacchus or a Pan.

  “Honey, should that be doing that?” she heard David’s voice in the background.

  “What?”

  “That pot on the stove,” he said, pointing, and she noticed that the potatoes were furiously boiling over the sides of their pan.

  She looked at him, annoyed that he had called it to her attention instead of simply getting up and turning it off himself.

  After they ate they had coffee in the living room. Finally the evening grew late, and it was time for Brad to leave.

  “Are you sure you won’t stay?” Melanie offered politely, once again aghast at the idea of anyone spending a night all alone in a tent out on the moors. “We have clean sheets and plenty of room.”

  “Oh, stay!” Katy piped in brightly.

  Brad considered the matter for a moment. “It’s a tempting invitation, but I just don’t like the idea of leaving the camp unattended for that long. We’ve made an important discovery and I wouldn’t want anyone to go in and mess it up.”

  Melanie looked at her husband, wondering if he too was at all discomfited by the notion of Brad returning to the camp at so late an hour, especially considering the dismaying revelations of the day. But David scarcely even seemed to register Brad’s leaving and was in the process of taking Tuck upstairs to bed.

  Brad said good-bye and left.

  Melanie noticed also that since they had come into the living room, Ben had at long last moved out of his corner in the kitchen and followed them in. He still had not eaten anything, and ever since nightfall he had once again grown increasingly agitated. Now, with Brad’s departure, he padded cautiously over to the door and was sniffing deeply at the air coming in through the crack above the threshold. Suddenly he once again let out a low and plaintive howl.

  “I’m going to let him out,” David said when he came back downstairs.

  Melanie looked at her husband incredulously. “After what you discovered today?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if something gets him?”

  “Mel, I thought we went through this. There’s nothing out there that’s going to hurt him.”

  “Then why is he behaving this way?”

  “I told you, there are so many new smells about that it’s just going to take him awhile to get his bearings.” David approached the door.

  “—but,” Melanie argued, but her husband looked at her so sternly that she quieted.

  He reached for Ben’s collar, but the retriever instantly backed away. “Come on,” David coaxed. “Don’t be a big chicken.” He grabbed Ben around the middle and propelled him outside. “Now go get ’em,” he said as he shut the door.

  Melanie felt a sinking feeling. She was sure this was not the thing to do, but she knew her husband well enough to know that this was not a point on which she should challenge him. Outside, Ben just continued to yowl.

  While they were undressing for bed upstairs, they could still hear Ben’s barking, and for the first time David himself grew a little worried. He went to the window in his underwear and peered out. The evening sky was still overcast and the night was an impenetrable black. He could see nothing. For lack of knowing what else to do he went back to bed.

  It was about half an hour later that Ben’s barking became unusually vigorous, and David once again jumped out of bed and ran to the window. He threw it open. Even he could tell now that something was seriously wrong. Ben’s barking was no longer just the slow saraband of warning, but had accelerated in tempo and taken on a desperate and frenzied tone. “Ben! What is it?” David called, but the dog just kept up his feverish cries. From the sound of his barking it appeared that he was only a short distance out in the yard. Occasionally the barking moved, as Ben apparently raced from one side of the yard to the other in his impassioned attempt to ward off the unseen danger, but for several minutes he maintained the same distance from the house.

  Finally, even Ben’s already feverish barking crescendoed into a rapid series of staccato yelps, as if whatever the menace was that he was trying to keep at bay had drawn even closer, and from the sound of his barking David could tell that he had once again broken into a run. And then suddenly his barking was cut short in an abrupt and strangely truncated yelp.

  “Ben!” David called again. For several moments he listened carefully, but he heard nothing. No barking. Not even the rattle of the retriever’s collar as he padded across the lawn. “Ben!” he repeated, but still the only response he got was silence.

  Behind him Melanie had turned the light on and was sitting up in bed, her face creased with worry. “David, what is it? What’s happened to him?”

  For the moment David hushed her with a finger placed to his lips as he continued to listen. He did not know what had happened. He had only heard Ben make a sound like that once before, when they had still lived in the States. Melanie had allowed her clothesline to hang too close to the ground and one evening, not seeing it, Ben had run into it headlong and had had the wind knocked out of him in midbark.

  This reminded him of that incident, for as he continued to listen he could still hear absolutely nothing, no sign of growling or a struggle that might indicate that Ben’s silence was due to a confrontation with another animal. Finally he slipped on a robe.

  “David, what are you doing?”

  “I’m going out to check on him.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Honey, don’t worry. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  She looked at her husband beseechingly. “Please, David, don’t go. I have a terrible feeling about all of this.”

  “Melanie, it will be all right,” he repeated as he grabbed a flashlight from the dresser drawer. She too got out of bed and slipped on a robe, but before she could stop him he had gone downstairs.

  Outside, he still heard nothing, and as he stood there listening carefully it occurred to him that even the night itself had gone oddly silent. Normally, after darkness had fallen, around the cottage could be heard the cadence of crickets and other night insects, and even the call of an occasional night bird, but as he stood there now it seemed that everything had been enveloped in an unearthly hush. Only the rustle of the wind through the willows gave any indication that he had not entered a tomb. He called Ben again and again, his bare feet clammy in the dewy evening grass, but there was still not a sound, not even a whimper. He shone the beam of the flashlight across the lawn and through the trees, hoping at least to see Ben’s eyes glowing comfortingly in the clear white light, but the retriever was nowhere to be seen.

  Melanie appeared at the door behind him and called out. “Please
, David, come back in.”

  “Go inside,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.” And then, as an afterthought, he yelled back to her. “And lock the door until I get back.”

  He heard Melanie let out a little cry of distress as she did as she was bid, and he walked farther into the darkness. He passed through the creaky rusted gate in the stone fence and went out into the lane that ran by the house. He pointed the flashlight down the road in one direction, and then the other, but still saw nothing. He walked a little farther in the direction of the moor, and then suddenly he thought he heard something. He stopped.

  “Ben?” he repeated. But still there was only silence. He waited a few moments, and then he heard the sound of a twig snap somewhere in the thicket behind him. He turned and directed the beam into the tangle of wisteria and blackthorn. He still saw nothing, but he suddenly got the distinct and eerie feeling that something was gazing back at him. He continued to move the beam of light around, still seeing nothing, and as he did so it began to flicker and then went out.

  He heard another sound, as if whatever was concealed in the underbrush had taken the disappearance of the light as a signal to advance, and had taken another step forward. He shook the flashlight and it flickered weakly once or twice, but it did not come back on. He got a terrible feeling that whatever it was that was watching him from the thicket would be even more encouraged by this, and he heard another twig snap.

  And then he got a most peculiar feeling. It started in the back of his jaw, a low, dull throbbing. Something rustled in the brush again, apparently taking another step forward, and the throbbing spread throughout his entire jaw and into his teeth and gums. It was as if someone had embedded little rods of steel in the center of the bones in his mouth, and was moving a powerful electromagnet all around him. Little spasms of pain shot up through his molars and into his skull as the unseen force tingled and tugged at him from all directions.

  Suddenly his unseen assailant crashed full force through the brush, and David screamed, turning and tripping headfirst over a fallen log. He quickly clambered to his feet as whatever it was continued to close in on him. Without his flashlight it was too dark for him to see anything. His only thought became to make it to the house before it got him.