The Bog Read online

  He looked at the refaced facades of the colleges just beginning to glow palely golden in the advancing sun. He would miss Oxford. It had been good to them for the two and a half years they had been there. And he would miss it, the distinguished features and vague eyes of the various dons whom he had developed rapport with, even the smooth, dull gleam of the academic poplin. Most of all he would miss old Burton-Russell, the silver-haired antiquities scholar whose thoughts were forever riveted on some aspect of ancient Mesopotamian culture. Like David, Burton-Russell shared an almost passionate enchantment with the past, and the two had spent many long hours discussing the intricacies of some ancient Celtic verb tense, or the psychological implications of some long-forgotten Babylonian ritual. He would miss Burton-Russell’s encyclopedic knowledge of history most of all.

  Once again he became aware of Ben’s head pushing up against his hand, and he patted the dog lovingly on the neck. Ben gave a doggish smile in return.

  “Come on, boy,” David said as he turned and walked back into the house.

  On his way back to the bedroom he decided to look in on the children. He quietly opened the door to thirteen-year-old Katy’s room. The first thing he saw were the posters of Michael Jackson and Duran Duran illuminated in the morning light, and then Katy herself, asleep under her frilly French comforter. He smiled when he saw how angelic she looked. Fortunately, she had inherited her mother’s looks, and long, strawberry-blond hair framed a face that was still a little girl’s, but had a cast about it that was clearly on its way to becoming a woman’s. She was the apple of his eye, his firstborn, and although they shared very little of the world and possessed almost totally dissimilar interests, there was a closeness between them, a bond formed out of their great mutual respect and deep but often unstated affection for one another.

  He closed the door and quietly padded on. Next he approached the room of his six-year-old son, Tucker, but when he opened the door he saw to his surprise that Tuck’s bed was empty. He quickly rushed in to see if Tuck had fallen out of bed, but when he got there he still found no sign of his son. Worriedly, he turned and went out into the hall. He looked in the bathroom and then the kitchen, but still no Tuck. Finally he walked toward the living room and felt a wave of relief when he saw the distinctive glow of the television set shimmering on the wall. He looked in to see Tuck sitting about four inches from the set with the sound turned down low, feverishly playing a video game.

  “Tucker, what are you doing?” David demanded sternly.

  Tuck turned around, startled. He had dark-chestnut hair and matching eyes and a gaze that might have seemed disturbingly wise had David not known him to be one-hundred-percent boy, an inexhaustible tornado of arms and legs, unyieldingly curious, and capable of producing a wide range of startling and unexpected sounds.

  “I couldn’t sleep anymore, Dad,” he said guiltily.

  David was angry about not finding Tuck in his bed, but couldn’t stare into his son’s freckled and guileless face long without melting. He had to force himself not to smile. “Well, try hard, Tuck. I want you to go back to bed and I don’t want to see you out here again until after seven o’clock.” He walked over, turned the set off, and lifted his son up in his arms. He allowed himself to smile only when he felt Tuck’s arms close around his neck. Tuck was also very special to him, in some ways even more special than Katy, for he was a boy and in David’s eyes, as with most fathers and their sons, this made him a little homunculus of himself.

  He took Tuck back into his bedroom and once again drew the blanket up over him. “Now get some sleep. I’ll see you in a little bit.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Tuck said amiably.

  David shut the door to Tuck’s room and returned to his own bedroom. He found Melanie looking distant and deep in thought.

  “You know what I found our son doing?” David asked, grinning, as he threw off his robe and got back into bed. Melanie seemed not to hear.

  “He was playing a video game with the sound turned down low so that we couldn’t hear.”

  Melanie turned to him. “Brad said that the body was in good condition?”

  David looked at her sympathetically, realizing that she was still troubled. “Come on, Mel, I told you it doesn’t mean anything yet.”

  This did nothing to assuage her.

  “Are you trying to make me feel guilty about this?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Of course not.”

  “Because we talked all this out long ago and you said—”

  “—and I said that it was all right, that I would go along with your decision.”

  “So I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Acting this way.”

  “Listen, I said that I understood this move was important to your work and that I would go along with it. But, in turn, you’ve got to understand that I’ve got feelings in the matter too. I’m not totally happy about the possibility of pulling both Katy and Tuck out of school and moving to the sticks, but that’s my problem. You at least have to allow me my feelings.”

  “Fair enough,” he said as he snuggled closer to his wife. At that moment, had he paid attention to it, a tiny voice in the back of his mind was telling him that there was more to his wife’s sullen mood than just her unhappiness over the possibility of their moving. But at the time too many other thoughts were crowding for his attention, and he failed to pay it any notice. Instead, he moved closer still and started to kiss his wife on the back of her neck.

  Melanie could think of a thousand different reasons why she didn’t want to move. To begin with, being the wife of an Oxford academic was about as rustic as she wanted to get. Her father was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, and living on a professor’s salary had been a difficult enough situation for her to adapt to. She had been on digs before with David, and the thought of returning to the back woods was almost more than she could bear.

  She had also never told David, but once as a small child she had been separated from her parents while on vacation and had been lost in the Vermont woods for a day and a night. The experience had left her with a deep and irrational fear of any tract of land that did not have pavement or stoplights within twenty feet of it.

  Still, she knew there was more to her unhappiness than just reluctance to leave Oxford. She had successfully overcome such misgivings before, but this time something was different. Something formless had been troubling her for months now. She did not know what. She was only just beginning to realize that it was there, that she also had a tiny voice trying to communicate something to her. But she loved her husband and she still tingled beneath his touch.

  “I think we can do something about your mood,” David said. She looked at him and saw that he had the devil in his eye. Suddenly he began to tickle her, and she thrashed wildly in the sheets, breaking into gales of laughter.

  “Oh, stop it,” she cried. “We’ll wake the kids.”

  “Then we’ll just have to be a little more quiet,” he returned as he kissed her again and drew her into his arms.

  On the following Monday at nine o’clock in the morning David Macauley set out in his Volvo for Fen-church St. Jude. According to his instructions he was to meet Brad Hollister at an intersection of two roads known locally as Nobby Fork. The purpose of this, Brad had explained, was to protect David from getting lost, for although David had chosen the mile-long strip of bog where they were to dig, the precise location of the camp was deep in a labyrinth of country lanes in a valley that held both Fenchurch St. Jude and Hovern Bog and was known to geologists as the greater Devon basin. Although it was almost noon when he reached Nobby Fork, the sun had not yet cut through the cloud cover, and a veil of early morning mist still lay over the land. He found Brad standing beneath a tree, framed by a sheath of fog that made him look very much like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  The younger man spotted the car coming and waved. He was tall, standing over six feet, broad-shouldered, and slim but muscular, wit
h a mane of shiny black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard and mustache. He might have looked Mephistophelian had David not known him to be one of the quietest, most gentle individuals he had ever met.

  “Professor Macauley,” the younger man greeted him as he got into the Volvo.

  “How are you, Brad?” David returned. “Boy, sure is spooky with all this fog about.”

  Hollister shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I’m not criticizing,” David interjected quickly, recalling how self-effacing the younger man was. “Actually, I kind of like it. Lends an air of mystery to everything. Just tell me where to go.”

  Hollister nodded and motioned for David to take the left turn in the fork.

  As they drove on, David noticed that a slight tension had developed momentarily between them. This was not because there was any animosity between the two men. On the contrary, when the two of them were heavily into a project they worked as if they shared a single soul. The tension was due instead to the fact that Brad was the archetype of the shy and reclusive intellectual. He was brilliant and fanatically dedicated to his work, but a very quiet and private person, and always a little ill at ease in the company of other people. Consequently, whenever the two of them had been apart for any length of time it always seemed to take awhile before the younger man relaxed and settled back into the routine of their working together.

  Eventually the landscape started to look more familiar to David, and he recalled the thoughts that he had had when he first passed through these parts. He looked out his window and remembered that first and foremost he had been struck by the beauty and seclusion of the place. Through the ever-clearing mists, rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of the road and scrub oaks lined the distant horizon. Farther on, the land got hillier, and he shifted gears as they headed up through a lane worn deep by centuries of wheels and surrounded by high banks dripping with moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Here the vegetation became unusually lush and verdant and David thought again, as he had thought the first time he drove through here, that it was almost as if he had entered a more primeval England, an England as it might have looked when giant herbivorous reptiles still roamed the landscape. In the distance, bronzing bracken and mottled bramble rose out of the veil of the fog, and through the trees one could see only a dreamlike pall of gray.

  Still rising steadily, they passed over a narrow granite bridge surmounting a noisy stream, foaming and roaring amidst a concourse of great boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a countryside dense with hemlock and fir until at last they rounded a curve, the vegetation cleared, and before them lay an outlying spur of the moor.

  It was a beautiful and peaceful region, but, David thought, tinged with a strange melancholy. It occurred to him that part of the desolate quality of the region was due to the fact that it seemed so untouched by human hands. It was true that the granite bridge was an artifact of human origin, but it could easily have been there for centuries, perhaps longer. Even the wind seemed momentarily absent, and it struck him anew that the entire place was pervaded by an unearthly calm, an almost palpable timelessness, as if the valley were more than just geologically separate from the outlying countryside, as if there were some actual quality to the air itself that set it apart.

  At last, in the far distance, there appeared the misty spike of a church steeple. “Thank God!” David said. “At least where there is a church there is civilization.”

  Brad looked at him curiously. “That’s the church in the village Fenchurch St. Jude. Didn’t you see it the first time you came here?”

  “No, I approached the bog from a different direction,” David replied.

  At length the road narrowed, and the Volvo slowed down. Finally there rose beyond the gloomy curve of the moor a dense wall of foliage and the almost endless sweep of peat land and blackthorn that was Hovern Bog. Also visible and set off from the road was Brad’s own rusted Volkswagen, on high ground the tent where he had made his camp, and a little farther into the bog several gaping wounds in the peat where he had made his excavations. David pulled the Volvo up onto the high ground near the tent and got out. Then, before he did anything else, he paused and looked around.

  On the hills to their left and rising up out of the last remaining fingers of the mist were half a dozen or so piles of stone rubble. To the untrained eye they might have looked as if they had been placed there by farmers clearing their fields, but to David, their distinctive arrangements revealed that they were all that remained of an ancient Neolithic settlement, no doubt the first version of Fenchurch St. Jude, or whatever it had been called up until Roman times. It was these ruins and their proximity to the bog that first told him they should dig here. However, even if the ruins had not been so readily apparent, he would have been drawn to excavating in this region. Like most archaeologists, David had developed his powers of observation to a level of almost superhuman acuity, and he could often see details in the landscape that to other people were quite invisible. In a barren patch of ground he noticed a tiny fragment of bitumen and knew that it was quite possibly the remains of an ancient campfire. And on a nearby hill he observed an angular embankment that, in spite of the fact that it was now covered with vegetation, his discerning eye detected had once been a path and been well trodden by human feet. It was only after he had assessed these features and once again recemented them in his mind that he turned and faced the great Hovern Bog.

  Although he had scrutinized it before, now that he knew an important archaeological find had been made there he looked at it with new eyes, his mind greedily reassessing its every detail. The first thing he noticed about it was its size. It was vast, and it broke out of the great plain of the moors like a mysterious continent unto itself. Later he was to learn that it was a full thirty-five square miles in area. It was also a brighter green than the olive and russet slopes of the moors—the vegetation in the bog able to wrench more nutrients out of the black water than the heather could out of the barren plain. To many, the bog might have seemed a frightening and foreboding place, but not to David. He knew the subtleties of the bog too well for them to frighten him, and thus for him it was a place of fascination.

  He knew that the many hills scattered throughout the bog were not hills at all, but really islands cut off on all sides by the impassable mire. He knew there was a good chance that somewhere in the bog was a bog lake. This was the nexus of the bog, and over the centuries, even the millennia, the mire had slowly crept outward from it, had wound through the countryside, engulfing some portions of the landscape and making islands of others. Here and there in saucerlike depressions in the land it would have settled into so-called bog caldrons, seemingly bottomless pits filled with a waterlogged and spongy soup of peat and rotting vegetation. In a way, these were the most dangerous parts of the bog, for they could easily swallow an unwitting creature alive. However, there were other dangers as well. During the rainy seasons, like the spring rains they were in the middle of, the endless mire would have expanded and formed numerous other inky pools and rivulets, and these in turn would have become covered with semifloating mats of sphagnum and entangled with water lilies. Thus, sometimes the land itself was not even land, and if one tried to jump from grass clump to grass clump in attempts to avoid the caldrons, one could just as easily be swallowed up by the land itself and drown, hopelessly ensnared in the sinewy tendrils of the lilies.

  In fact, the sinister beauty of the entangling lilies was only one of many contradictions that flourished in the bog. As David continued to ponder the vast and marshy expanse, he thought of others. On one hand, the bog was a haunting and eerie place, with the wind perpetually rustling through its many sedges of bulrushes and the forlorn silhouettes of the numerous dead trees whose roots had drowned but not yet rotted that dotted its banks. But on the other hand, it was teeming with life. What hilly ground had survived within the perimeter of the mire stood tall with a scrub of birch, willow, mountain ash, and alder b
uckthorn. Bog whortleberry flourished on the dry banks around the mire and every square inch of available ground space was covered with marsh cinquefoil and cranberry, and in the driest areas, anemones and dog’s mercury.

  Similarly, just as the bog was a taker of life, it was also a preserver of life, for in isolating the many islands of green that dotted its expanse it had also protected them, and often they harbored many rare species of plants and butterflies. In fact, it was not unheard of for a brave amateur naturalist to discover a totally unknown species of plant or animal that had been cut off for centuries by one of the impassable arms of the bog. And even what life was not exclusive to the bog was often, nonetheless, at least uncommon, like the carnivorous pitcher plant and even an occasional orchid, trapped but given sanctuary in this Galapagos of the moors.

  Everywhere he looked there were such juxtapositions, the beautiful contrasted with the deadly, the mist mingled with the thorns. In short, he realized that like all great things, like the ocean, the night, and even life itself, the bog was a paradox. The greatest bulk of its substance was dead vegetation, and yet it behaved as if it were curiously alive. It expanded and contracted. It reached out with sinewy tentacles and took and entangled and digested. And it even stirred occasionally in its slumber, groaning and emitting the most mournful and unearthly sounds, presumably from the peat settling, but to many who had heard them, including David himself, it seemed more like the ruminations of some great beast, the restless rumblings of the living bog.

  From far overhead came the plaintive cry of a bittern, a rare and heronlike bird that also inhabited the protective confines of the bog, and David looked up to see it flying in the direction of the hills to their left. He watched it for a moment, transfixed by its beauty, when suddenly it squawked and tumbled at a ninety-degree angle, almost as if it had collided with an invisible wall. For a second he thought that it was going to crash, but then it regained its balance and flew frantically off in another direction.