He noticed also that Katy was unusually pensive and became especially unsettled when Melanie was around, but he did not know why. And Tuck, although his appetite improved, remained disconsolate over Ben’s disappearance, no longer ran and laughed or even played his video games, a gloomy and spiritless shadow of his former self, in the charge of the equally cheerless Mrs. Comfrey.
What bothered David most about it all was that he was so involved with his own internal struggle that he felt powerless. He knew that he should reach out and try to help his family, try to initiate some communication that would release them from the torpor that had enveloped them, but he seemed trapped behind his eyes and hands. And throughout it all, as the emotional ties that had once bound his family seemed to disintegrate, there remained in the house the subtle but omnipresent odor, the faint miasma of decay.
It was on the morning of the fourth day after their dinner at the Marquis’s that Brad appeared unexpectedly at the front door of the cottage. It was still so early that Melanie and the kids had not even arisen, and David answered his unrestrained knocking still wiping the sleep out of his eyes.
He looked wonderingly at the young man shifting his weight excitedly on the front step.
“Get dressed!” Brad ordered.
“Why, what is it?”
“You’re not going to believe it. Get dressed!”
Still curious about what it was all about, David quickly dressed and they piled into the Volvo. On the way to the digs Brad still refused to divulge the reason for his strange fervor. They reached the campsite, got out, and it was only as Brad ran ahead that David realized it had something to do with the excavation they were doing in the portion of the bog that belonged to Grenville. They reached the edge of the pit and David looked down.
This time in the red strata of the dog’s flesh there was not one, but two of the eerily obsidian bog bodies, curled slightly in fetal position and facing one another, one male and the other female. What had excited Brad so was obviously their dress. Unlike the other bog bodies they had found, the couple in the pit wore tunics and blouses, discolored but preserved by the bog water and of a far more sophisticated weave than the clothing of the Iron Age inhabitants of the valley. In addition, the hairstyle of the woman, her bracelets and the bracelets on the man, the woman’s soft leather shoes, and the
fasciae
or leg bands of the man, all were not Celtic but unique to quite a different culture. The bodies before them were Roman.
David knelt down slowly in stupefied reverence. Nothing like it had ever been found before. Perhaps no other ancient civilization had inspired as much interest, been the subject of more archaeological endeavors, of more books, films, museum exhibits, essays, and intellectual ponderings than the Roman. And yet no one, no living person, had ever done what they were doing now. They were actually looking at two denizens of that glistening and bygone empire, two ancient Romans
in the flesh.
He looked back at Brad and realized why the younger man had been so excited. It was the sort of discovery archaeologists dream of. The bodies before them were perhaps the only two of their kind in the world, and when news of the find got out it was sure to inspire a flurry of media attention.
“It’s amazing,” David murmured, and then realized that such superlatives palled in light of the momentousness of the discovery. He slipped down gingerly into the excavation. As he examined the bodies he tingled all over. This was the moment that drove all archaeologists on, that brief starburst of exhilaration, perhaps akin to the feeling a painter experiences when he puts the master stroke on a great work of art, or a photographer who, after years of work, captures that one ineffable moment on a roll of film. He savored the electricity that now coursed through his body as if it were the finest wine, for he knew that in years to come he would thirst for its memory.
And then he looked at the way that the bodies had met their end. Because these bodies were in a drier section of the peat, and he now knew what he was looking for, he was able to discern more readily what had caused their demise. Like the first two bog bodies they had unearthed, the body of the man displayed the same telltale bite marks around his neck and chest. Strikingly different, however, was the fact that his head had been savagely twisted a full three hundred sixty degrees in its socket and was almost totally severed from the body. In addition, compared to the other bodies, his expression could almost be considered tranquil. His eyes were open and the look on his face one of surprised horror, but it was not the look of unutterable dread that had been wrought in the faces of the previous two corpses. It was almost as if whatever had twisted his head nearly off had hit him with such force that he had scarcely had time to react. Given that this might be the case, David wondered if perhaps the bite marks had come after the fact, that first the man had been killed and then the beast had been allowed to feed.
He turned his attention to the woman beside the man. Determining the cause of her death was at first more difficult. Her neck and chest showed no traces of having been bitten, and although her expression was desperately sad, her eyes were closed and her head intact. It was only after David knelt down and leaned over her that he saw. In her small clasped hands was the handle of a knife, which she had apparently plunged into her own abdomen.
David straightened. Although dying by one’s own hand seemed a far better mode of demise than being mauled by an animal or having one’s head twisted off, for some reason, seeing how the woman met her end had a strangely disquieting affect on him.
“Do you think it was
her
comb?” Brad asked behind him.
“What?” he said, still distracted and gazing off into the distance.
“The Roman comb we found buried with the girl. Do you think it belonged to her?”
David looked again at the woman and at the depth of the sadness frozen in her ancient face. “There’s no way of knowing, is there?” he said. “At least not yet.” He climbed back out of the hole.
Brad continued to look down at the bodies. “No, I guess not. But she certainly looks sad enough to have wept the tears of our lady of the comb.” He noticed that David was strolling off in the direction of the hills. “Hey, where are you going?”
“To think,” David called out without looking back. “I have to think.”
As he walked he realized that what had bothered him about the woman’s suicide was the parallel he was drawing between her and Melanie. From the man’s dress it was evident that he was high up in the Roman power structure, and the woman was no doubt his wife. If the man had come here to officiate, as David surmised that he had, his wife would have accompanied him very much as Melanie had accompanied David. In fact, if the man had brought his wife, like David, he would have done so only if he believed she were in absolutely no danger, that she would be completely safe in a strange and foreign land. What, then, could have happened that had caught the man so off guard? And why hadn’t the same fate befallen his wife, instead of allowing her to linger and take her own life? David knew that it was silly to think that the events of over a dozen centuries previous might have something to do with anything happening today, but somehow he could not get the growing sense of gloom and despair that was encompassing his own family out of his mind.
He walked up to the top of the first hill and then the next, and it was only when he had reached the promontory of the tallest hill that he stopped and looked out over the valley. There was every likelihood that if the man were a Roman envoy he would have set up his camp here. Not only was there plenty of room for the soldiers, but also the prominence of the bluff afforded a clear view of anything that approached. As he looked out over the vista he wondered again what could have so savagely overcome a Roman soldier and military strategist who no doubt would have taken every precaution to protect himself.
Suddenly, as David mulled over the thought, in the thicket at the foot of the hill he heard a sound. He looked down at the wall of brush, but saw nothing. As he continued to look at the thicket he heard another sound. Something was definitely moving behind the bushes. He started down the hill, and the very moment he initiated his advance whatever it was that had been watching him took off. He too broke into a run, but it wasn’t until he had nearly reached the thicket that he saw what it was. Running at breakneck pace and heading deeper into the bog, was the little girl Amanda.
Fearful that she was headed toward certain disaster, he continued after her.
“Hey!” he yelled. “I won’t hurt you. Stop!”
It was of no use. She continued blindly on. When he first entered the thicket, his feet pounded against solid ground, but a little ways in, the ground became wetter. Not thinking of his own safety, he continued.
Amanda moved like a wild thing, like a rabbit or a deer that had been frightened out of hiding, and as he crashed through a tangle of alder buckthorn he saw that she was already some distance ahead. He penetrated deeper into the undergrowth and was once again transfixed by the primeval beauty of the bog. Along a fallen cedar to his left, luxuriant masses of rusty woodsia grew and tubers of bladderwort nestled among the spreading roots of the larger trees. Ahead, in a shaft of sunlight, the delicate little crosiers of a royal fern uncurled, and beneath a rock a boreal bog orchid with a raceme of small but exquisite white blossoms perfumed the damp air.
He leaped over one of the stagnant black rivulets of the bog, and as he came pounding down on the other side he was relieved to find that the ground did not vanish deceptively from beneath his feet. He pressed on.
Finally, realizing that he was pushing his own luck: far beyond its limit, he paused, and his boots sank several inches into the spongy ground before stopping.
“Amanda!” he called out. “Please!”
Perhaps it was the desperation of his entreaty, or perhaps the fact that he had called her by her first name, but he saw the flicker of white far ahead come to a stop.
“Amanda, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to tell you that you’re in danger in here. The bog is not a safe place to play in.”
The patch of white moved again, and he realized she was coming toward him. Within moments the dirty but angelic face appeared among the briar. He looked down and noticed that he himself was cut by the brambles and flecked here and there with blood, and there were pieces of plant debris caught in his hair. But although her hair was disheveled, it was free from such chaff, and her skin, he noticed, had also fared far better than his.
In her hand he observed for the first time that she carried what looked like the jawbone of an animal. She looked up at him shyly, but a definite curiosity shone in her cheerless brown eyes.
For several moments neither of them spoke and they just stared at each other like two creatures of the forest slowly negotiating their territory. Finally he broke the silence.
“You don’t need to worry. I’m not going to hurt you.” She looked at him suspiciously.
David smiled. “Come on, I know you can talk. I heard you, remember?”
For the first time a flicker of recognition passed through her face and she nodded timidly, seeming to recall the incident several nights previous.
Realizing that she was shy, he continued. “The only reason that I chased you just now is I was worried about you running into the bog as you did. You know, it’s very dangerous in here.”
She stared at him perplexedly, as if she were startled that anyone should care about her safety, but still she remained silent.
He decided to try a new approach. He decided to ignore her. Picking up a stick, he sat down next to one of the stagnant bog ponds and started to dab lightly at its surface. As he continued to pay her no mind he once again became absorbed in still other features of his surroundings. He noticed that shiny scavenger beetles covered the muck of the shallower portions of the pool, and a mob of back swimmers jostled across its watery surface. Still deeper in the dark mirror he saw the real lords of the pool, rough-skinned newts in various stages of development with pink, frilly gills and pebbled orange bellies scraping slowly across the bottom.
The bog was also rich with smells, the deep muggy scent of wet earth and vegetation, and sounds, the high stridulations of the cicadas and the distant buzzing of the flies. Suddenly one of the buzzing sounds grew louder, as a dragonfly swept past his face and narrowly missed the floating web of a filmy dome spider. It was a short-lived victory, for it immediately landed on the gelatinous cap of a bright-orange toadstool David recognized as the deadly fly agaric. The bog, in many ways, was a treacherous place.
As he continued to gaze at the arboreous landscape it became easy for him to imagine that the Batrachian age of great fern forests and endless swamps had never ended. In the pool before him a bubble of marsh gas erupted from the ooze and rushed upward in a swirl of silt, only to break the surface and vanish, with nothing to mark its passing but a tiny pop.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Amanda had finally sidled up beside him.
“You know, I really won’t hurt you,” he said, turning to face her.
“Then why were you chasin’ me?” she inquired unexpectedly.
“I told you I was afraid for you. The bog is a very dangerous place.”
She thought this over carefully and then looked down at the stick he was wafting in his hands. “Why are you pokin’ at the water?”
“Just for something to do.”
“Wo’ ya like to see wha’ I found?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, happy that he was gaining her trust.
But before he could say anything else she had again bounded off deeper into the bog.
“Hey!” he shouted as he once more had to break into a run to keep up with her.
Several times, as they pressed farther into the green labyrinth, she would point at a bed of lilies or an innocuous-looking clearing and announce simply, “Sink.”
Finally they reached a large and muddy clearing encircled by an almost impenetrable wall of blackthorn and mountain ash, and Amanda stopped. As they stood there for a moment David slowly became aware that another smell now mingled with the background scent of the place. It was an unpleasant smell, a fetor of putrefaction not unlike the stench that had begun to filter through the cottage. Equally foreboding, he noticed that the cacophonous buzzing of the flies had grown even louder. Amanda pointed at a large clump of brambles.