The Bog

by Talbot, Michael

  “What were you doing?” he demanded.

  They all looked at him silently. The little girl straightened her ancient-looking frock and gave indications that she was going to run off, but then stopped and looked up at him shyly. By no stretch of the imagination could she be considered anything but plain, but there was something strangely appealing about her. Her hair was tangled and badly in need of brushing, but her round eyes were wide and beckoning, and her expression so innocent and so ineffably sad that he had to use all of his will to suppress his urge to strike out and pull her attackers to the ground.

  David could overlook many things, but one thing he could not tolerate was the mistreatment of children. He had never thought about it, but perhaps it had something to do with his own childhood and all of the inequities he had suffered. Even under normal circumstances he would have run to the little girl’s aid, but tonight, because of Tuck’s tearful session earlier, he was especially sensitive, and he glowered at the older boys. Then he knelt and looked the little girl in the eye. “What were they doing to you?” he asked.

  She was obviously extraordinarily withdrawn, and once again she almost turned and ran, but then she paused and seemed to detect something that she could trust in his eyes. “They was goin’ ta throw me in the bog,” she said timidly.

  “Aw, it was just a lark, mister,” the oldest boy broke in. “We wasn’t really goin’ ta throw ’er in the bog. We was just havin’ a bit ’o fun.”

  David looked at them angrily. “But she’s just a child, just a little girl. How could you pick on someone so much smaller than yourselves?”

  The logic of the question seemed beyond them, but they at least appeared cognizant of the fact that he was rebuking them. “I told you it was just a lark,” the oldest boy repeated.

  “Well, I don’t ever want to see anything like this happening again,” David continued. “It’s getting dark now. You should all be home.” He gestured with his hand for them to leave. The little girl looked at him one last time, meekly but appreciatively, and then ran off in the direction of the ramshackle cottage, and the boys reluctantly dispersed. As they backed off they continued to stare at him, puzzled and annoyed.

  “Aw, it’s only Amanda,” another one of them interjected one last time before they turned and were swallowed up by the darkness and the distance.

  David returned to the car.

  “What was going on?” Melanie asked.

  He explained to them what had happened.

  “Shades of The Woman in White,” Brad commented. David glanced slightly in his direction, but kept his eye on the road. “Come again?”

  “The Woman in White. The nineteenth-century gothic novel about the woman in the tattered white dress who wanders the lonely moor.”

  “I don’t think it was the moor,” Melanie pointed out. “Just some desolate part of the English countryside.”

  “Well, whatever. In any case, she was a sad, haunted creature, a portrait of innocence victimized by the evil forces swirling around her.”

  “Evil forces! Really, Brad,” David reproved.

  “I don’t know, there seems to be evil in this valley.” David mentally rolled his eyes to the ceiling as Melanie looked back in astonishment at the younger man. “What makes you say that?”

  “Don’t forget, these are the people who staked out that young girl and allowed some animal to feed upon her while she was still alive.”

  “Not the people,” David hastened to add.

  “No, not the people, but the descendants of those people. And certainly some of their blood still courses through these people’s veins. And besides, even if they did not share their blood, an evil like that lives on in some way. Takes some other form.”

  “What sort of form?” Melanie asked.

  “Who knows? Over the centuries it would permute, change many times, and become something entirely different. Perhaps the strangeness of these people, or even the cruelty of those boys out there, is nothing more than the last remaining resonance of that evil.”

  “Or perhaps it has taken another form entirely,” Melanie said darkly.

  David grunted. “Brad, will you please tell her that you are speaking in sociological terms and not supernatural ones.”

  Brad looked at Melanie, surprised. “Oh, purely sociological ones. I’m talking about the habits and customs of these people, you know, units of cultural transmission.”

  “But couldn’t the evil committed here, if it was powerful enough, manifest itself as something physical, an animal or something?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Brad said quickly.

  David sighed. He had intended this outing as a recreation, something to get their minds off of Ben’s disappearance, and he did not at all like the direction the conversation was taking. He tried desperately to think of some way to reroute it. “Who did you say wrote that novel?” he asked.

  “What novel?” Melanie replied.

  “The Woman in White.”

  “Wilkie Collins,” Brad responded, and David was grateful when he saw that this piqued Melanie’s interest.

  “Are you interested in nineteenth-century literature?” she asked.

  “Very much so,” Brad returned, and the conversation went on from there.

  David smiled at the fact that his ploy had worked so well. He himself was not interested in nineteenth-century literature, perhaps because it had so little bearing on his archaeological endeavors, but he was pleased that Melanie and Brad were having a rousing discussion about it. He knew that not only would it improve Melanie’s mood greatly to enjoy some intellectual stimulation, but it also would allow him the luxury to lapse into his own thoughts.

  As for Melanie, the conversation did lift her spirits. It took her mind off the troubling events of the past several days, but it also called her attention to something else. As she continued talking animatedly about nineteenth-century literature with Brad, the first notion that crossed her mind was that she had not enjoyed herself so much in months. However, as they continued with their conversation, she slowly experienced a sort of epiphany. There was something distantly familiar about the exchange she was having with Brad. It took her some time to realize that it made her recall the way that she and David used to talk before they were married. With this realization came a second thought, even more jarring One of the reasons she had fallen in love with David was those discussions. Before they were married, when they were merely fellow graduate students, their friendship was vibrant and he treated her as an intellectual equal. As the years passed, however, their ability to converse in this manner had slowly atrophied. David treated her less and less as an intellectual comrade, and more as a wife. And she too had allowed herself to become a silly creature more concerned with whether there were mice in the house than with the challenge of interesting ideas. In a flash of painful and yet liberating light, she realized that this had a great deal to do with the unhappiness that had been brewing in her for months. A part of her was dying and she had not even realized it.

  Suddenly the car came to a halt, and she saw that they had pulled up outside the Swan with Two Necks. They all got out.

  As they approached the pub, David noticed that Melanie had grown temporarily silent, but he assumed she was thinking about some issue that she had just raked over with Brad. They entered the pub.

  It was unusually crowded inside, the bar lined with people. In a corner several men played darts and behind the counter Winnifred Blundell scurried back and forth, her garish blond hair glowing like a neon sign through the haze of smoke. The buzz of conversation ceased instantly when they entered, and all eyes turned in their direction. David motioned to an empty table near the back.

  As they approached it, Melanie, in her heightened state, also noticed something else that had never really penetrated her consciousness. David sat down before she did. Normally such behavior wouldn’t have concerned her, but again, as she thought back, she remembered the time when he would never have dreamed of sittin
g down before her, or at the very least would have asked her which chair she would prefer. She lingered but a moment in the thought, and was about to sit down when Brad suddenly held one of the chairs out for her. She blushed, startled.

  “Thank you,” she said. As she went to sit down, out cf habit she reached out to take a hold of the chair herself, and her hand accidentally closed over one of Brad’s fingers. She half expected him to pull his hand away, but he did not. For a second or two, their fingers continued to touch, and she thought that she should do something about it, but she too found herself strangely immobile. She looked up into Brad’s eyes, and for a few seconds longer they just gazed at each other until finally, uneasily, Brad moved his hand, and she took her seat.

  For a moment Melanie was filled with disbelief. It had never occurred to her that she was even remotely sexually attracted to Brad. Furthermore, she had never even fantasized about being unfaithful to David. She loved David. They had their problems, but she was nowhere near being ready to throw in the towel.

  She did not remain lost in thought for long.

  After they sat down, the conversation in the pub resumed slightly, but they remained the object of intense scrutiny. At length, Winnifred Blundell approached their table.

  “Get you anything?” she barked.

  They each ordered a beer, and when she returned with them she slammed them down vigorously on the table.

  “What is wrong with these people?” Brad asked under his breath after she had left.

  David tried to think of something to say that would make light of Winnifred Blundell’s surly behavior, but given that most of the patrons were still staring at them as if they were naked and had expletives tattooed on their foreheads, it seemed a lost cause. He took a sip of his beer, and from the pain he felt when it washed down his throat, he realized that the inside of his mouth had become as dry as the Sahara.

  They sat there for several minutes, desperately trying to act as if nothing were amiss, but it was to no avail. They continued to remain the object of almost searing attention. Only a fraction of the patrons even continued to talk with one another, and one of these, an incredibly filthy old man sitting at a table in the corner, suddenly cackled loudly at some secret joke.

  It did not seem possible, but as David looked at him he realized that he was even more misshapen and unwholesome than most of the other natives of Fenchurch St. Jude. His clothing was grimy and hung like dirty sacks over his stooped and bony body, and he possessed virtually no chin at all. When he tilted his head back he revealed an almost toothless jack-o’-lantern mouth, brown with venomous spittle, and his eyes were vacant and crazed. A thick but blotchy stubble covered what passed for his face, and in the cracks and creases of his leathery neck, hairlines of dirt had collected. It was clear that he was roaring drunk, but it was also equally obvious that he fit into the general look of the place. He was simply the extreme.

  Brad leaned over to David. “That’s Old Flory,” he said, “the father of the little girl you just saved from those kids.”

  David suddenly felt even more compassion for the sad little waif.

  He looked back at the crowd and saw that even more of the patrons were watching them. The men who had been playing darts had stopped. Even Old Flory began to glower in their direction. And most discomfited of all was Winnifred Blundell. She continued to slam pints of ale down in front of regular denizens of the Swan with Two Necks, all the while her gaze remaining fixed on David and his troop. On occasion he could hear her clucking loudly and he caught fragments of what seemed to be a disgruntled diatribe about their presence. At length, her antics became so overblown that several other of the patrons actually made efforts to calm her down. But it was no use.

  A miasma of tension spread through the pub, like ozone after a lightning strike, and it became apparent that a confrontation of some sort was imminent. The same man who had spoken with David when he had first visited the pub reached out and tried to pull Winnifred Blundell back, but she stormed forward and looked the three of them in the face.

  “You shouldn’t be here, you know!” she shrilled.

  “Why not?” David asked angrily.

  This irritated her even further, but through her ire another emotion rippled briefly, an emotion disturbingly like pity or great concern. “You haven’t been here very long. It isn’t too late. If you went home and packed up your things and left right away, it might be all right. But you must not stay another night. Because if you do—”

  “Winnifred!” shouted the man behind her, and the entire pub fidgeted nervously. David couldn’t be sure, but the little blond woman’s words seemed to stir some terrible fear in the other people in the pub.

  “Because if we do, what?” David asked.

  The emaciated little blond woman started to completely lose her composure as if she were torn between telling him and her growing fear of something else, of some powerful but unseen enemy. Suddenly her eyes fixed on something behind them, something over their heads, and her gaze widened with terror. In an instant she went white and screamed, a gurgling, mindless scream, and like a crack of thunder, a blind panic ensued in the pub as grown men gasped like whimpering animals and fell over one another in a mad attempt to get out.

  Not knowing what to think, David, Melanie, and Brad also leaped up from their chairs and stumbled frantically toward the door. Melanie fell and David nearly pulled her arm out of its socket as he yanked her up, and they scrambled on toward the exit. It was only when they were nearly out and every one else had fled into the night, that he turned, perversely, wondering whether he would be faced with a roaring ball of fire or a maniac wielding an ax. And then he saw.

  Brad too turned and became transfixed by the sight, and then Melanie. For several stupefied seconds they just stood there, mesmerized, and the only movement that was anywhere near them was the shadow that passed over their faces and then flickered lambently over the overturned chairs and tables. For the unspeakable sight that had sent Winnifred Blundell into a blind panic, the terrible menace that had caused grown men to whimper and run, was a small white moth that lazily circled the single bare bulb in the ceiling in the back of the pub.

  FIVE

  After they got over their initial shock at the behavior of the people in the pub, their reaction became one of confused amusement, so much so that they laughed convulsively all the way home. It was only after they had dropped Brad off and returned to the cottage that, for David, the event once again took on an unutterably ominous quality. He could tell that Melanie was also mystified and troubled, but as usual he continued to downplay the matter to keep her from becoming completely unhinged. Nonetheless, as he drifted off to sleep that night he found himself haunted by questions. Why should the inhabitants of Fenchurch St. Jude have reacted so bizarrely to the presence of such an innocuous creature? What had Winnifred Blundell meant by her warning? And why had the man in the pub silenced her so brusquely when she had attempted to speak?

  The next morning when he got up he found Melanie and the kids sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Comfrey doing dishes at the sink behind them. Tuck still looked down in the dumps as he twirled his fork in what looked like a plate of completely untouched scrambled eggs. Melanie looked up at David with concern.

  “What’s the matter, Tuckaroo?” David asked.

  “Ben,” Tuck said simply.

  David sat down beside him and Tuck looked up. “You said he’d come back. But he hasn’t.”

  “It’s only been a short time. He may still come back.” Tuck’s eyes went back down to his cold scrambled eggs. “What if he doesn’t?”

  David looked sadly at Melanie. “If he doesn’t, we’ll figure out something else to do. Maybe we’ll get another dog.”

  “But I want Ben,” Tuck said.

  “Well hopefully we’ll get Ben back,” David reassured. “Daddy’s looking for him. I’m looking for him every day. But I can’t keep looking for him if you’re going to be sad and not eat because that�
��ll make me sad too, and then I won’t eat and then where will that leave us?” This seemed to make sense to Tuck.

  “So won’t you please eat something?”

  Tuck looked his eggs over and then looked entreatingly up at his father. “These are cold,” he pouted shyly.

  “Well, maybe just this once Mrs. Comfrey will warm them up for you. But in the future you’ve got to learn to eat them when they’re warm so that you don’t make extra work for Mrs. Comfrey. Now ask her nicely.” Tuck glanced over at the woman at the sink and she looked back at him with what seemed to be her expression of compassion. “Just this once,” she said in her usual clipped manner. “But little boys must learn to be men about things. That’s the way of the world.”

  It annoyed David slightly that Mrs. Comfrey had injected a bit of her own philosophy into the matter, but he decided to overlook her remark.

  Mrs. Comfrey rewarmed Tuck’s eggs and served David his breakfast, and then several minutes later Tuck said, “Maybe I should go to work with you today, Dad.”

  “Why’s that, Tuck?” David asked guilelessly.

  Tuck took another mouthful of egg. “Because it would be good for me to get out of the house,” he returned.

  David looked at Melanie, smiling, but the expression on his wife’s face made it clear that she did not think it would help Tuck’s state of mind any to see them pulling dead bodies out of the bog.

  “Not today, Tuck. Maybe sometime.”

  “But that’s what you said last time.”

  “And it’s what I’m saying this time also. Maybe someday, when you’re a little older, Daddy will take you to see his work, but you’ve just got to be patient.”