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LAKE
OF SORROWS
Book
One
Deep Crimson on Them
A
Feidelm banfáid,
cia facci ar slúag.
Atchiu
forderg forro,
atchiu ruad.
“Oh,
Fedelm, woman prophet,
what do you see on the host?”
“I
see deep crimson on them,
I see red.”
—from
the Old Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge
(The Cattle Raid of Cooley)
Prologue
It
was the cold that roused him. The moment he plunged into the frigid
water at the bottom of the bog hole, his eyes fluttered open, and his
mind grasped the fact that he would certainly die here. He knew it was
the reason he had been brought to this place, the reason he had been
born. His body, however, seemed to require further persuasion. He shook
his head, groggy, as though awakened from sleep. Was all this real, or
only a vision of what was to come? He remembered running, a glancing
blow, and before that—
For
a moment he remained very still; then he struggled to right himself in
the bog hole’s narrow fissure, pressing against the walls with his
hands and elbows, treading slowly against the dark, pulpy liquid into
which he’d already sunk to his hips. It was pulling him in, downward.
Nothing would stop him now. He gasped for air, feeling the leather cord
encircling his throat, all at once aware of a strange, spreading warmth
upon his chest—blood, his own blood, sticky and metallic. But the
primary sensation was cold, a deep, numbing chill combined with an
utterly astonishing softness, whose deceitful purpose, he knew, was to
draw him into its familiar, bosomy grasp and keep him here forever.
Above
his head the midsummer evening remained fair and mild, and his eyes
reflected the waning twilight still visible at the top of the bog hole,
scarcely more than an arm’s length above his head. His muscular
shoulders were those of a man who had herded cattle milked at daybreak
and evening, who each spring broke the virgin soil with his plow, who
sowed corn and reaped it with sharpened blade—a man ruled by circular,
circadian rhythms of light and darkness. The slight hollows in his
clean-shaven countenance bespoke hard labor and scant harvests.
He
knew this place, this bog. It was a mysterious, holy place, home to
spirits and strange mists, a place of transformation and danger. He had
crossed it countless times, treading carefully among glittering blue
and green damselflies while tracking a hare or a slow-moving grouse.
He’d seen the same evening light in its pools of standing water that
recalled a hero’s footprints or fragments of firmament fallen to earth.
At their edges he had crouched, watching crimson masses of bloodworms
as they transformed almost before his eyes, and rose from the water to
join quivering clouds of midges that hovered, faintly droning, above.
He would never see them again, for he had entered a place from which
there was no return.
Trapped
by the weight of his own body, he could feel himself sinking with every
passing second, could feel his hands moving uselessly against the
seeping walls of the bog hole. Letting go an involuntary howl, he began
to twist and claw furiously, reverting to the instinctive behavior of a
trapped animal, baring his teeth and straining with every fiber, unable
to reason or comprehend. But his feet were firmly mired in the
slurrylike peat and would not come away. He was getting light-headed.
His legs were numb, and as the frigid water seeped steadily higher, he
began to tremble violently. Even as he felt the dread chill envelop
him, he knew that his heart’s blood would soon begin to slow. He ceased
struggling and kept still, feeling each breath flow in and out, each
one shallower than the last. A memory brushed like spider silk across
his consciousness—a luminous face, a woman’s voice soft against his
ear. He had sunk to his shoulders; soon he would be swallowed up,
devoured by the insatiable earth, the origin and end of life.
In
the last few moments, it was only instinct that kept his chin above the
surface, as each involuntary shudder drew him further downward. The
water stung as it touched his wounds, and began to trickle into his
ears, slowly shutting out all sound but his own beating heart. Soon
only his face and hands lingered above the surface, but his eyes
remained open, staring upward, so that the last image imprinted there
was the dim, familiar outline of a head and shoulders, framed in the
jagged opening above him by the dying light of evening. His savior, or
his executioner? An instant later, living moss and damp peat showered
down upon him from above, closing his eyes and filling his nostrils
with the scent of sweet grass and heather as he abandoned all
resistance and finally yielded to the bog’s chill embrace.
LAKE
OF SORROWS
Chapter
1
Seventy
miles straight west of Dublin, at the northern perimeter of
Loughnabrone Bog in the far western reaches of County Offaly, Nora
Gavin’s mind had already formed a distinct image of the man she was
supposed to rescue today. It was not a complete figure she imagined,
for the man she was going to see had been cut in half—jaggedly severed
by the sharp blade of an earth-moving machine. The image lodged in the
back of her mind was of frayed and slightly shrunken sinews, ragged
patches of skin tanned brown from centuries spent steeping in the bog’s
cold, anaerobic tea. She knew she should feel grateful that even a
portion of the body was intact; a few more seasons of turf cutting and
he might have been completely scattered to the winds. It made her
suddenly angry to think that an entire human being had been preserved
for so long by the peat, only to be destroyed in the blink of an eye by
the thoughtless actions of men and their machines. But the bleak
reality was that she might never get the chance to examine an intact
bog body, so she had to make the most of each fragmentary opportunity.
It
was Monday, the seventeenth of June. The excavation season had begun
only a week earlier, and the bog man had turned up the previous Friday.
The business Nora would be engaged in today was just a recovery
operation, to salvage the torso dug up by a Bord na Móna
excavator. It remained to be seen whether the body’s lower half was
still embedded in the bank beside the drain. That mystery would
probably have to wait for the full excavation—something that would take
several weeks to coordinate, since it involved a whole crew of wetlands
archaeologists, forensic entomologists, environmental scientists who
analyzed pollen and coleoptera and ash content, and experts on metal
detection and film documentation. But since the bog man’s upper half
had been removed from his peaty grave, the recovery was urgent. Without
the proper conservation procedures, ordinary bacteria and mold would
start their destructive march in a matter of hours.
Nora
glanced down at the large-scale map she’d laid out on the passenger
seat of the car. Driving into the West from Dublin, you couldn’t be
blamed for missing County Offaly. The two major motorways managed to
skirt it almost entirely. The county had a reputation as a backwater,
perhaps befitting a place that was one-third bogland. The Loughnabrone
workshop, her destination, showed as a cluster of industrial buildings
on a dryland peninsula, a scrap of solid earth jutting out into the
bog. Bord na Móna, also known as the Turf Board, was Ireland’s
official peat-production industry, and had dozens of operations like
this all over the midlands. The bog itself appeared on the map as a set
of irregular blank areas between the River Brosna, and the hectares of
arable land that enclosed it.
She
was surrounded on all sides by bogland, and had evidently missed the
turn for the workshop. It seemed too arduous to backtrack; the easiest
way to navigate now might be to steer toward the looming pair of
bell-shaped cooling towers at the nearby power station. That should put
her within a quarter-mile of the workshop. The power station looked
like the old nuclear plants at home, but chances were the electricity
produced here had always been generated by burning peat. No smoke
poured from the stacks now, but the towers remained still and silent
landmarks in this strange landscape.
Scale
was definitely the overpowering element here, where each furrow was
fourteen meters across, and human beings were reduced to miniature
among the gargantuan machines and the mile-long mountains of milled
peat. Deep drains cut through the bog at right angles to the road.
Ahead, Nora saw an enormous tractor with fat tires that kept it from
sinking in the spongy peat. The extensions suspended from its cab on
long cables looked like vast wings. Bearing down on her, with two front
windows glinting in the sunlight, it took on the aspect of a monstrous
mechanical dragonfly. Far in the distance, several similar strange
contraptions in a staggered formation churned up huge clouds of brown
peat dust. She drove on, toward the very center of the vast brown-black
desert.
The
sun was still low, but strong. Racing before her on the road she could
see the car silhouetted in the golden morning light, a shape that
contained her own weirdly elongated shadow. There was no one else on
the road for miles. She opened the window and thrust out her hand out
into the wind, the way she sometimes had as a child, and felt her whole
arm swimming, salmonlike, against the strong current of the cool
morning air. She glanced over at the passenger seat and imagined her
sister Tríona as a child, red hair trailing down her back, her
arm out the window as well. She grasped Tríona’s hand as she had
done years before, and they flew along together for a few moments,
reveling in their sisterly conspiracy of wickedness, and giddy with the
sensation of being at least partially airborne. Suddenly her mother’s
voice echoed in her head: Ah, Nora, please don’t. You know she insists
on copying everything you do. Tríona’s bright face vanished, and
Nora pulled her arm back into the car. There was little comfort in such
memories. Tríona was gone, and these fleeting images had become
a precious, finite commodity.
Eventually,
the road’s surface became so uneven that Nora had to slow to a crawl to
keep her head from banging against the roof of the car. Bog roads
provided only the illusion of solidity; they were merely thin ribbons
of asphalt, light and flexible enough to float above the shifting,
soggy earth beneath. At this level, right down on the surface of the
bog, you could see an unnatural barrenness where the earth had been
stripped, year after year, to prevent the spread of living vegetation.
It was only in comparing this landscape to what she knew of ordinary
boglands that she could understand what was missing here—the teeming
proliferation that existed in a natural bog—and could grasp the fact
that the dark drains stretching to the horizon and beyond were actually
bleeding away the life-giving water.
She
imagined what the bog must have seemed to ancient people—a strange
liminal region, half water and half earth. To them it had been the
center of the world, a holy place, a burial ground, a safe for stowing
treasure, a region of the spirits. She tried to conjure up an image of
what this spot might have been like thousands of years before, when
giant oaks still towered overhead. She had seen their sodden, twisted
stumps resurrected from peaty lakes, the trunks used up for ritual
structures, or plank roads to traverse the most dangerous marshy
places.
It
was astonishing to her that bogs, despite their role as collective
memory, were still being relinquished to feed the ever-growing hunger
for electric power. Up until a hundred years ago, the bogs had been
considered useless, mere wasteland. Then the men of science had gone to
work on them, devising ever more efficient ways to harvest peat—only to
find out, too late, that this was a misguided effort, and perhaps the
wrong choice all along. Twenty years from now, the outdated power
plants would be gone. This bog would be stripped right down to the marl
subsoil, and would have to begin anew the slow reversion to its natural
state, layer by layer, over the next five, or eight, or ten thousand
years. Without even realizing it, the men of science and progress had
given up a book of the past, whose pages contained an incredible
record—of weather patterns, and human and animal and plant life over
several millennia—all for jobs in a backwater wasteland, for a few
paltry years’ worth of electricity.
Since
prehistoric times, bogs had served as sacrificial sites; it was strange
to think that the bogs themselves had become the sacrifice. She thought
back to the archaeology books she’d been reading steadily all winter.
She had found a kind of fascination in the description of hoards
recovered from watery places, including many of the artifacts she’d
seen on display in the National Museum. Most had been discovered
completely by accident. She had been stunned by the beauty and
complexity of the ancient designs. Some of the objects were distinctly
military: ornately patterned bronze swords and daggers, spearheads,
serpentine trumpets like something from a fairy story. Others suggested
domestic, or ritual purposes: gold bracelets and collars, fantastic
brooches and fibulae that mimicked bird or animal forms, mirrors with a
multiplicity of abstract faces hidden in their graved decoration. The
reason these objects had been deposited in lakes and bogs remained
shrouded in mystery, the enduring secret of a people without written
language.
And
of course it was not only artifacts that had been found in bogs; nearly
a hundred sets of human remains had turned up as well. Judging from the
bare facts in the gazetteer of bog bodies she’d been updating, some
people had simply gone astray and fallen into the deadly morass; the
careful inhumations might have been ordinary burials, or suicides, or
childbed deaths refused burial in hallowed ground. But there was still
vigorous debate surrounding the assertion that some older bog bodies
had been victims of human sacrifice. And this was not the only point of
argument. The latest studies showed the difficulty of pinpointing
radiocarbon dates, and experts debated whether bog men had colored
themselves blue with copper or had just absorbed the element from the
surrounding peat, even whether they had been murdered, or had been the
subjects of ill-fated rescues. Nothing was absolutely certain. When it
came down to hard facts, all they really had were dots on a map, the
points at which objects had been found.
Driving
across the border into Offaly, she had been acutely aware that she was
approaching the ancient region known as the Mide, the center. It was a
place that had been ascribed all sorts of magical attributes, the
powerful locus represented by the central axes of the crosses on Bronze
Age sun discs, from a time when the world had been divided up into four
quadrants, North, South, East, and West, and a shadowy central place,
which, because it was not There, had to be Here. Where was her own
Mide, her center, that point where all the pieces of her life met and
intersected at one infinitesimal but infinitely powerful place?
She
had tried very hard to avoid thinking about Cormac on the trip down
here, but she felt her resolve weakening. It was just over a year since
she’d made almost the same journey westward, to the place where their
lives had been bound together by the untimely death of a beautiful
red-haired girl whose head they’d recovered from the bog. She hadn’t
meant to find someone like Cormac Maguire. She hadn’t meant to find
anyone; she’d come to this place as an escape, a retreat from too much
feeling. It hadn’t happened suddenly, but gradually, like a slow
envelopment. There was no question that she had soaked up the warmth he
offered like a person nearly perished from cold, but were those moments
of intense happiness real, or only an illusion? It seemed as if the
entire year had passed like a dream. With the coming of spring, she’d
known that the dream couldn’t last; that certain knowledge was like a
goad in her side, sharp and getting sharper with each passing day. She
couldn’t wait to see him, but her eager anticipation was tempered by
mounting anxiety.
She
had no business fashioning a life for herself here. Her stay in Ireland
was supposed to be temporary, a period of respite after her long
struggle to find some semblance of justice for Tríona’s terrible
death. Sometimes she dreamt of her sister’s battered face, and woke up
weeping and distracted. The dream would linger, encroaching on her
waking mind, a heaviness remembered in body and spirit that sometimes
took days to dissipate. Worse still were the dreams where Tríona
came back, whole and restored, as if she’d never been away. Though Nora
knew these visions to be false even as her subconscious conjured them,
upon waking from such a dream she still experienced new shock and
sorrow.
She
had picked up the phone two days ago, and heard the tremor in her
mother’s voice: “He’s getting married again.” There had been no need to
ask; Nora knew she meant Peter Hallett—Tríona’s husband, and her
killer.
Remembering
the conversation, Nora suddenly felt her stomach heave. Afraid she was
about to be sick, she brought the car to a screeching halt and climbed
out, leaving the car door open and the engine running. She walked back
along the road the way she’d just come. If she forced herself to
breathe slowly, she might be able to keep from hyperventilating. She
sat down abruptly on the roadside and dropped her head between her
knees, feeling the pulse pounding in her temples.
After
a moment the steady noise of the wind began to calm her, and she felt
the nausea subside. Suddenly buffeted by a strong gust from behind, she
raised her head. The breeze encircled her, then picked up a scant
handful of peat dust. The tiny whirlwind danced over the surface of the
bog, spinning eastward into the low morning sun, and then dissipated,
nothing more than a breath of air, briefly embodied and made visible.
She
sat for a moment longer, listening to the strange music of the wind as
it whistled through the furze bushes along the road, watching the bog
cotton’s tiny white flags spell out a cryptic message in semaphore.
Bits of organic debris danced overhead, caught in the updraft, and the
strangely dry air contained something new, a mineral taste she could
not readily name. When she stood up to return to the car, Nora
understood instantly what had given the air its metallic flavor: an
immense, rapidly moving wall of brown peat dust bore down on her from
only about thirty yards away. She froze, momentarily stunned by the
spectacle of the storm’s overwhelming magnitude, then made a headlong
dash for the car; but it was already too late. The dust cloud engulfed
her, along with the road and the vast expanse of bog on either side,
closing her eyes and filling her nostrils and throat with stinging
peat. Suddenly unable to gauge any distance, she ran blindly until her
right knee banged hard into the car’s rear bumper. The glancing pain
took her breath away. She didn’t dare open her lips to cry out, but
limped around to the driver’s side and climbed in, closing the door
against the dust that tried to follow her. After desperately trying to
hold her breath out in the storm, she gasped for air and promptly burst
into a coughing fit. Once the car door was closed, the dust could not
penetrate the sealed windows, but a fair amount of peat had blown in
through the open door, and now the tiny airborne particles began to
settle, covering the seats and dashboard with fine dark-brown organic
material.
The
outside world had disappeared, and Nora gripped the steering wheel,
feeling like a cocooned caterpillar at the mercy of the wild elements.
It was far too dangerous to try driving across a bog when visibility
was so poor. There was little she could do except wait, and listen to
the wind whistling under the car and around the radio antenna,
furiously pummeling away at any object, animate or inanimate, that had
the audacity to remain upright in its path. She rubbed her throbbing
knee; she would have a lovely bruise tomorrow.
All
at once, she made out a figure standing just ahead of the car. Although
its general shape was human, the face was strange and horrible: huge
exophthalmic eyes stood out above a flat black snout. She and the
insectlike thing stared at one another for a surreal moment, then
another heavy gust blew up, and it was gone. A second later, a solid
thump sounded on the window just beside her ear, and she felt a rush of
fear, until at last it began to dawn on her that the mutant creature
was actually nothing more dreadful than a Bord na Móna worker in
an old-fashioned gas mask. She could see that the man was trying to
communicate, but his voice was hopelessly muffled by the mask and the
wind. He pointed a gloved finger to her, then to himself, and then
forward. He wanted her to follow him. The wind was beginning to
diminish, and she could just make out the back end of a tractor about
ten yards in front of the car. She realized in horror that she might
have crushed her rescuer if she’d simply put the car in gear and
started driving. She watched through gusty clouds of peat as he climbed
up into the cab and turned the tractor around. When he drove forward,
she followed.
It
was impossible to tell how far they traveled; time and distance were
distorted in the strange dark fog. Gradually the peat cloud began to
thin away, the world began to reappear, and they were once again in the
clear air. Nora watched the brown wall recede eastward, all the while
keeping a close tail on the lumbering tractor until they reached the
Bord na Móna sign at the entrance to Loughnabrone.
Inside
the grounds, the driver pulled up to a row of hangarlike metal sheds
and climbed down from the cab; Nora caught up to him just as he was
entering the large open door of a workshop, where several other men in
grease-spotted blue boilersuits toiled over a huge earth-moving blade
with acetylene torches.
“Excuse
me,” she said, reaching out to touch the man’s arm in case he hadn’t
heard her. The other workers looked up, their torches still blazing.
The tractor driver turned to face her, and it was only then that the
gas mask came off, revealing a youthful face with strong features and
intensely blue eyes. “Excuse me—I just wanted to say thanks.” She
offered her hand. “Nora Gavin.”
He
looked at her for a split second, then dropped his gaze, and Nora
wondered whether it was her red eyes, her dirty face, or her obvious
American accent—or a combination of all those things—that had this
young man so mortified. He took her hand very briefly. “Charlie
Brazil,” he finally said, pronouncing his surname the Irish way, with
the emphasis on the first syllable. He colored deeply, and glanced at
the other men, who had stopped working when she approached.
“Well—thanks, Charlie. I’m grateful for your help.” She could feel the
workmen’s eyes upon them, and understood that all poor Charlie Brazil
wanted was to be shut of her as quickly as possible. “I’m afraid I have
to ask another favor. Could you point me toward the manager’s office?”
“Over
there,” he said, indicating a single-story pebble-dashed building about
fifty yards away.
“Right,”
she said. “Thanks again.” Heading toward the manager’s office, she
heard a leering voice behind her inquire: “What’d you do for the lady,
Charlie?” There was an unsettling chorus of sniggers, and Charlie
Brazil’s deep voice muttered darkly: “Ah, feck off and leave me alone,
why don’t you?”
Copyright
© 2004 by Erin M. Hart
HAUNTED
GROUND
Book
One
A
Fateful Wound
Créacht
do dháil mé im árthach galair.
A fateful wound hath made me a hulk of sadness.
—Irish
poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, 1652
Chapter
1
With
a sodden rasp, Brendan McGann’s turf spade sliced into the bank of
earth below his feet. Had he known all that he’d turn up with the
winter’s fuel, perhaps he would have stopped that moment, climbed up
onto the bank, and filled his shed with the uniform sods of extruded
turf that a person could order nowadays by the lorry-load
But
Brendan continued, loosening each sopping black brick with the
square-bladed turf spade, tossing it over the bank, where it landed
with a plump slap. He performed his task with a grace and facility that
comes from repeating the same motion times without number. Though his
father and grandfather and generations before had taken their turf from
this same patch of bog, Brendan never thought of himself as carrying on
an age-old tradition, any more than he considered the life cycles of
all the ancient, primitive plants whose resting place he now disturbed.
This annual chore was the only way he’d ever known to stave off the
bitter cold that crept under his door each November.
Chilblains
were the farthest thing from Brendan’s mind this unusually sun-drenched
late-April morning. A steady westerly breeze swept over the bog,
chasing high clouds across the watery blue of the sky, and teasing the
moisture from the turf. Good drying today, his father would have said.
Brendan worked in his shirtsleeves; his wool jacket, elbows permanently
jointed from constant wearing, lay on the bank above his head. He
paused, balancing his left arm on the handle of the upright
sleán, and, with one rolled-up sleeve, mopped the sweat from his
forehead, pushing away the damp, dark hair that stuck there. The skin
on his face and forearms was beginning to feel the first pleasant
tightness of a sunburn. Hunger was strong upon him at the moment, but
just beyond it was an equally hollow feeling of anxiety. This might be
the last year he could cut turf on his own land without interference.
The thought of it burned in the pit of his stomach. As he clambered up
the bank to fetch the handkerchief from his coat pocket, he searched
the horizon for a bicycle.
Forty
yards away, his younger brother Fintan made a comic figure as he
struggled against the weight of a turf-laden wheelbarrow. Fintan dumped
his two dozen wet sods at the end of a long row, one of many that lent
the surface of the bog the temporary texture of corduroy. For a good
square mile around them, little huts of footed turf covered the
landscape. Here and there on the neighbors’ allotments, large white
plastic bags bulged with sods dried as hard as dung.
“Any
sign of her yet?” Brendan shouted to his brother, who raised his
shoulders in a shrug and kept at his work. The two men had been hard at
it since nine, with only a short tea break midmorning. Their sister Una
was to bring them sandwiches and tea, and pitch in with footing the
turf. It was cumbersome, backbreaking work, turning the sods by hand so
that they dried in the sun. It would be another month before this lot
could be drawn home.
Tucking
his handkerchief in his back pocket, Brendan descended once more into
his gravelike void, noting with a small grimace of satisfaction the
angled pattern his sleán had made down the wall of the bank. He
was reaching the good black turf now, more appreciated in these parts
for its long-burning density than for the fact that it had remained in
this place, undisturbed and undecayed, for perhaps eight thousand years.
He
set to work again, trying to drown out the rumbling in his belly by
concentrating on the sound and the rhythm of cutting. He was used to
hard physical labor, but there was no doubt about it, something in the
bog air put a fierce hunger on a man. What might the day’s lunch be?
Chicken sandwiches, or egg, or perhaps a bit of salty red bacon on a
slab of brown bread. Each stroke became a wolfish bite, a slug of hot
sweet tea to wash it down. One more row, he thought, heaving each
successive sod with more violence, just one more row—and then his blade
stopped dead.
“Shite!”
Fintan’s
head poked into view at the edge of the cutaway. “What’s the matter?
Strike a bit of Noah’s ark down there?”
“Ah,
no,” Brendan said. “Only a bit of horsehair.”
There
were four things, their father always said, that could stop a man
cutting turf. Brendan could hear the old man’s voice: Wig, water,
blocks, and horsehair. Then he’d hold up four fingers in front of their
faces. Meet any of them, boys, and it’s your Waterloo.
“Hand
us down the spade, will yeh?”
Fintan
obliged, then leaned on the handle of his fork to watch. Though these
things typically turned out to be tree trunks and roots, other wonders
turned up in bogs occasionally—rough beams of oak, ancient oxcarts,
wheels of cheese or wooden tubs of butter. Stores buried for keeping in
cool wetness and long since forgotten—objects caught and suspended
outside of time by the watery, airless, preserving power of the bog.
Working
deliberately, Brendan dug around the perimeter of the fibrous mat,
probing for its edges, and scraping away loose bits of peat. He knelt
on the spongy bank and pulled at the strands that began to emerge from
the soaking turf. This wasn’t horsehair, it was tangled and matted, all
right, but it was too long, and far too fine to be the rooty material
his father called horsehair. Brendan worked his broad fingers into the
dense black peat he’d pried loose with the spade. Without warning, a
block in his left hand gave way, and he cast it aside.
“Holy
Christ,” Fintan whispered, and Brendan looked down. Almost touching his
knee were the unmistakable and delicate curves of a human ear. It was
stained a dark tobacco brown, and though the face was not visible,
something in the line of the jaw, and the dripping tangle of fine hair
above it, told him at once that this ear belonged to a woman. Brendan
struggled to his feet, only dimly aware of the cold water seeping
through the knees of his trousers and down into his wellingtons.
“Sorry,
lads. You must be perished with the hunger.” Una’s breathless apology
carried toward them on a bit of breeze. “But you should have seen me. I
was literally up to my elbows...” Her voice trailed off when she saw
the faces her brothers turned toward her. Brendan watched her stained
fingers tighten their grip on the flask, and on the sandwiches she’d
wrapped hastily in paper, as Una stepped to the edge of the bank beside
Fintan and looked down at their awful discovery.
“Ah,
Jaysus, poor creature” was all that she could say.
HAUNTED GROUND
Chapter
2
Cormac
Maguire was in the shower when the call came. He let it ring, as he
customarily did, until the answerphone came on. But hearing the
excitement in Peadar Wynne’s voice, he hastily wrapped himself in a
towel and sprinted down the stairs, hoping to catch Peadar before he
rang off. Cormac stood just over six feet and, though he’d begun to
feel a few creaks during the passage of his thirty-ninth year, still
possessed a rower’s lean, muscular frame. His dark brown hair was cut
short; intense dark eyes, a long, straight nose, and a square jaw
defined his angular face. His pale olive complexion would soak up sun
as he spent time in the field during the summer months. He had
neglected to shave for the past couple of days, and now water dripped
at irregular intervals from his chin to his bare chest.
Peadar—a
technician in the archaeology department at University College Dublin,
where Cormac was on the faculty—was a normally languid young man, whose
concave frame and large hands invariably put Cormac in mind of a stick
figure from an ancient cave painting. The cause of Peadar’s agitation
was soon clear: some farmers cutting turf had discovered a body
yesterday in a raised bog near Lough Derg in the southeast corner of
County Galway, about two and a half hours west of Dublin.
Although
hundreds of bog bodies had turned up in central Europe, mostly in
Germany and Denmark, they were somewhat of a rarity in Ireland. Fewer
than fifty such discoveries had ever been made in Irish bogs, and they
offered an unparalleled opportunity to gaze directly into the past.
Peat bogs not only preserved skin, hair, and vital organs, but even
subtle facial expressions, and often revealed what a person who drew
his dying breath twenty centuries ago had taken for his last meal on
earth. Modern turf-cutting methods often damaged bog bodies. If this
was a complete specimen, it would be the first in nearly twenty-five
years, since the ancient remains of a woman had been discovered at
Meenybraddan in Donegal. This body today had been found by a man
cutting turf by hand, so there was a good chance that it was intact.
With
Peadar’s voice seeping into his ear, Cormac crossed to the desk to put
on his glasses, and culled from the flow of words the few that were
pertinent to the matter at hand. “Has Drummond been there?” he asked.
Malachy Drummond, the chief state pathologist, visited the scene of any
suspicious death, to decide whether it should be classified as a police
matter. Drummond had been to the site this morning, Peadar said, and
upon examination of the remains had declared it a case for the
archaeologists rather than the police. The National Museum had
jurisdiction over all such bog remains, but as it happened, Peadar
explained, their entire conservation staff had just left for a
conference in Belgium and would be away for the next four days, so the
the museum’s keeper of conservation had phoned from Brussels to see
whether Cormac would be available to do the excavation.
“He
said he realized you were on leave, but that he’d consider it a
personal favor.”
“Phone back, would you, Peadar, and tell him I’m on my way.”
Cormac
paused to clear his throat before he broached the next subject. “I
presume somebody’s informed Dr. Gavin.” Nora Gavin was a lecturer in
anatomy at Trinity College Medical School, an American with a
particular interest in bog bodies—and as it turned out, the one person
Cormac felt disinclined to have working beside him, though he didn’t
see how it could be avoided. It would be easier if he didn’t have to
phone her himself.
“She’s already been notified. Says she’ll meet you there,” Peadar said.
Twenty
minutes later, Cormac was on the road. What would they find at the bog?
Given the natural preservatives in peat, it was difficult to tell at
first how long someone had been buried in it—he remembered an account
of English workmen uncovering the remains of a middle-aged female in a
fen during the 1950s, spurring a tearful confession from a local man
who told police he’d killed his wife and dumped her body in the marsh.
Later—shortly after the remorseful husband hanged himself in his prison
cell—the corpse in question turned out to be a woman who died sometime
in the late Iron Age. The remains of the missing wife never turned up.
Cormac
felt a growing excitement as he considered the possible significance of
this new find. It had been ten years or so since he himself had been
involved in an excavation of bog remains; he and a colleague had
uncovered a fully articulated hand and arm at a bog road site in
Offaly. He remembered studying the grooved and brown-stained
fingernails, in particular. It was curious how arbitrary preservation
in bog environments could be; sometimes bones were completely
decalcified, but the skin, hair, and internal organs were intact. A
well-preserved ancient body could often be found alongside completely
skeletized remains in what one would quite naturally presume were the
same conditions.
Cormac was dressed for the field, in jeans, a dark cotton pullover, and
a bright blue anorak; he had tossed his waterproofs and wellingtons in
the back of the jeep. As he drove through the confusion of suburban
developments that had begun sprouting along the major roads out of the
city, past the point where the built-up areas began to give way to the
expansive pastures of prosperous farms and the tree-lined edges of
stone-walled estates, he looked forward to escaping the din of Dublin.
This journey would take him west across the great shallow basin of low
bogland and pasture that formed the Midlands, and to the lip of the
Shannon estuary, the place he always considered the most significant
border on this little island. The larger world invariably imagined
Ireland divided into north and south, but for him a greater division
had always existed between east and west, especially between the lush,
fertile planters’ dominion around Dublin that early English settlers
had dubbed “the Pale” and the stony, wind-beaten west, where the last
vestiges of Gaelic Ireland had long since been quite literally
banished. You could still hear the echo of an ancient culture in the
traditional music, of course, but it was also in the way people spoke,
in their manner, in the very pace of their lives, which seemed to slow
perceptibly the farther west he traveled. This drive always seemed to
take him backward in time.
The trip would take at least two and a half hours, so Cormac fished
with one hand in the glove box and brought out a tape of Jack Dolan, a
flute player of the old puff-and-blow Leitrim style. Beside him on the
passenger seat was his wooden flute case—East Galway was an area fairly
saturated with flute players, and you never knew when a bit of music
might turn up. Alongside the instrument case was Cormac’s site kit,
which he carried in his father’s old medical bag. The small gilt “J.M.”
on its worn leather surface reminded him that he was also heading back
into his own past, to a place only an hour’s drive from where he had
grown up, on the west coast of Clare. He should, he knew, make a trip
to the church in Kilgarvan where his mother was buried. He berated
himself for harboring such ambivalence about her. There was nothing to
be done now, except to try to understand her better in death than he
had in life. He’d visit her grave—if he had a chance.
Cormac
disliked driving the motorways. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he savored
crawling along the secondary routes. Today there was a reason for
haste: once removed from its sterile environment, a bog body was
susceptible to dehydration and rapid decomposition. The usual procedure
was to excavate around and then cut away the entire section of turf
containing the body, continuing to use the peat in its preservative
capacity even after the remains reached the lab at Collins Barracks in
Dublin. Conservation methods used on bog bodies so far—tanning,
freeze-drying—had yet to prove successful over the long term. Bacteria
and mold still set in too easily. The current approach was to pack
remains in wet peat, then in several layers of black plastic sheeting,
and keep them refrigerated indefinitely at four degrees Celsius. The
National Museum recently had a room-sized unit built specially for the
purpose. Not ideal, certainly, but the best current option.
Cormac’s
mind began sorting out the details of the excavation. If one cubic
meter of waterlogged peat weighed a ton, what type of a crate would
have to be built to contain two cubic meters? And how long would it
take to excavate the whole area by hand? But beneath the ticking
metronome of these conscious thoughts was a hidden melody, aroused by a
chance connection to a human being whose life and death were about to
intersect with his own. He wondered for the first time whether this new
bog body was man or woman. It mattered little to his work whether the
person was male or female, ancient or modern, but each individual found
in the bog—and indeed any human remains—had a unique story to tell. The
question was always how well you could decipher the story from what was
left behind.
It’s
easy to get caught up in the methodology, in all the highly technical
aspects of what we do, his colleague and mentor Gabriel McCrossan had
once told him. But that’s just our way of seeking knowledge, it’s not
the essence of what we’re about. Keep in mind that our main concern is
people—we learn about ourselves by studying those who have come before.
This would be his first trip into the field without Gabriel. Only three
weeks ago, he had dropped by the office and found the old man dead at
his desk. The fountain pen had tumbled from his right hand, and a large
blot of ink had formed where it had last made contact with the paper.
Cormac knew the old man would have shared his excitement about this new
find.
Gabriel
had always maintained that all scientific inquiry, whether it was
undertaken through the lens of a microscope or the lens of a telescope,
consisted of peering at the vast universe through one tiny peephole. He
had often spoken of their archaeological work as seeing through a glass
darkly, trying to reconstruct the past with sparse and imperfect
evidence. Gabriel had relished the moments when something turned up.
Another piece of the puzzle, my boy, he’d say, rubbing his hands
together in anticipation. Another little piece of the puzzle.
Cormac
had just crossed over the Roscommon border at Athlone, noting the
gradually shrinking proportions of the fields, the increasing
narrowness of the roads, the first signs that he was well and truly in
the West, when he remembered the potentially awkward situation that
awaited him at the site. Gabriel had first introduced him to Nora
Gavin. Although Nora was American, her parents were from Ireland, and
she and the old man had some sort of prior connection; he’d been at
university with her father or something. It was hard to tell how old
she was; probably somewhere in her late thirties. From the way Gabriel
had kept mentioning Nora, and insisting that Cormac must meet her, he
also guessed that she was unattached. She seemed intelligent, and
pleasant enough on the few occasions when they’d met, but nothing had
come of Gabriel’s prodding. Then one evening about six months ago, he
and Nora had both been among a small group of people invited to supper
at Gabriel’s house, and the old man had pressed him into giving her a
lift home. Cormac remembered how annoyed he’d felt, letting himself be
maneuvered into a corner. Nora lived in one of those modern blocks of
flats along the Grand Canal, not far from his own place. He’d hardly
spoken a word to her on the drive, and hadn’t even waited to see
whether she got inside safely. As he pulled away, he glanced into the
rearview mirror to find her at the curbside looking after him. He
hadn’t seen her since. Surely she’d been at Gabriel’s memorial, but his
memory of that day was too clouded by grief to be trusted.
At Ballinasloe he turned off the main road and headed south toward
Portumna, the town at the head of Lough Derg. To the west, the ground
sloped gradually upward to the feathery pine forests that covered the
Slieve Aughty Mountains; to the east lay what remained of the ancient
body of water that once covered the whole center of Ireland. Farther
down the lakeshore were the holiday resort towns of Mountshannon and
Scarriff, but in this remote corner of Galway, there was only farmland
and mountain overlooking small, hidden lakes and treeless stretches of
bog. As he approached the lakeshore, he began to see homemade signs
posted along the road. At first he thought they were To Let notices or
adverts of some kind, but as he drew near the first one he read, “No
Bog License”; a bit farther on was one that said, “No Bog Evictions”,
and finally:
YEAR
1798
REBELLION
YEAR
1999
TURF CUTTING PROHIBITED
YEAR
200?
? ? ?
He
wasn’t surprised to see such sentiments expressed along the roadside.
There had long been controversy about Ireland’s use of peat, since it
was an unrenewable resource. Irish bogs also provided a wildlife
habitat unique in all of Europe, and there was increasing pressure from
the EU to consider the environmental consequences of turf-cutting.
Cormac
arrived at the site at a quarter past two. The sun was still fairly
high overhead, barely veiled by a few wispy clouds. Here and there the
bog’s heathery surface was scarred with deep black gashes. There were
no ditches here, no fencing, no visible evidence of property boundaries
on this raised blanket of turf. And yet he’d wager each of the locals
knew precisely where his own turf allotment ended and his neighbor’s
began. A random scattering of spiky, pale green furze bushes, not yet
covered in bright saffron blossoms, stood close to the road. Beyond
them, a patch of bog cotton shivered in the breeze. And beyond that,
about fifty yards away, Cormac could see a small group of people,
including Nora Gavin and a uniformed Garda officer. He felt something
like dread as he stepped into his waterproof trousers, then carefully
removed his shoes and plunged each stocking foot into a sturdy
wellington. He stood for a moment at the roadside, squinting as he
surveyed the horizon for some fixed point, a church steeple or radio
tower, anything that would help him map out exactly where the body had
been discovered; nothing appeared. A short distance down the road, the
door of an ancient-looking Toyota opened, and a squarish man in a brown
leather jacket emerged. A slight protrusion of the man’s midsection
suggested a fondness for porter, and the sunlight glinted off his
silvery-white hair. He seemed to have been waiting. Cormac lifted his
jacket and site kit out of the passenger seat and extended his hand as
the man drew near.
“Cormac
Maguire. The National Museum asked me to oversee the excavation.”
“Ah,
the archaeologist,” said the man, taking the hand Cormac proffered and
giving it a firm squeeze. Now that Cormac was closer, he could see the
man’s fresh pink countenance belied his hoary head; he was probably no
more than forty-five.
“Detective
Garrett Devaney,” the man said. “Dr. Gavin will be glad to see you.
Said she had to wait for you to begin.” Devaney spoke out of the corner
of his mouth, as if every word were an aside, and his pale blue eyes
darted slantwise under their lids, giving him a perpetual look of wry
amusement. Then the policeman tipped his head across the bog, and they
turned to make their way to the gathering, treading carefully over the
soggy ground, with Devaney leading the way and talking backward at
Cormac. “You probably know most of it, local farmer cutting turf.
According to him, nobody’s so much as opened a drain on that section
for a hundred years or more. Malachy Drummond—you know Drummond, the
pathologist?—apparently agreed. He was in and out of it in about ten
minutes this morning.”
“If
you don’t mind me asking, what’s a detective still doing here, all the
way from...”
“Loughrea.”
“...from
Loughrea, if this isn’t reckoned to be one of your unsolved murders?”
“Ah
well, we didn’t know that for certain, now did we? There was some
notion it might be a woman gone missing from nearby. I’m just here to
clear up any questions on that score. And I live just down the road.”
“Is
there much disturbance around the body?”
“It’s
fairly clean,” Devaney said. “Once he realized what he was onto, the
lad with the spade set it down in a bit of a hurry.”
Nora
Gavin approached as they drew nearer the cutaway. She was taller than
Cormac remembered, and dressed as he was, in jeans and Wellingtons, but
no waterproofs. Her large blue eyes, dark hair, and milk-white skin
exemplified the paradoxical features so common in Ireland. Occasionally
some word or inflection would hint at her Irish origins, but for the
most part, Nora’s accent betrayed the years she’d spent in the broad
middle of America. Her hair was different, perhaps shorter than the
last time they’d met, and drew Cormac’s attention to the graceful line
of her neck, something he’d not noticed before. In his recent fit of
self-recrimination for the way he’d behaved toward her, Cormac had
quite forgotten how thoroughly attractive she was, and felt vast relief
that the excitement of the occasion seemed to have removed any
awkwardness about their last encounter.
“Cormac,
it’s good to see you,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “I’m
realizing I must have driven the whole way like an absolute maniac, and
I’m sorry to say I’ve been pestering these poor people with questions.”
“I
apologize for keeping you waiting,” Cormac said. “Good to see you as
well.” He turned to Devaney. “The man who found the body—is he here?”
“Brendan
McGann,” Devaney said, indicating the stocky man of about thirty who
stood a few feet from him, leaning on the handle of a two-grain fork.
The shaggy curls that framed McGann’s face cast it into shadow. Apart
from the reticent farmer, the mood of the group was expectant as
Devaney introduced them. Declan Mullins, the young Garda officer,
obviously fresh out of the academy at Templemore, had a slender neck
and prominent ears, which lent him the air of an overgrown altar boy.
The fair-haired woman in the denim jacket and Indian skirt, whom he
guessed to be in her midtwenties, was McGann’s sister Una. Cormac was
struck by her large dark eyes, and the way her broad mouth turned up
slightly at the corners. But most unusual were her hands and
fingernails, which were stained as though they’d been steeped in
blackberry juice.
“All
right if I have a look?” Cormac asked Brendan McGann, who said nothing,
but put his lips together and tipped his head to signal assent. Cormac
climbed carefully into the hole with his site bag, feeling the soggy
turf spring like rubber under his weight. The cutaway was a space a
couple of meters in length, but narrower than a man’s arm span—large
enough for one person to work comfortably enough, but extremely close
quarters for two. One wall rose higher than the other, and its surface,
which graduated from sepia to coal-black, bore the oblique impressions
of a foot sleán. The floor was uneven, and Cormac turned his
attention to the area of loose peat where Brendan McGann had apparently
been stopped in his work. He knelt and used his bare hands to scrape
away the damp peat that had been replaced over the body. It was too
risky to use a trowel in a bog excavation: a sharp metal edge could too
easily damage waterlogged objects. His breath came faster as he caught
the first glimpse of finely preserved hair and skin, but he was
unprepared for the wave of pity that struck him at the sight of an ear,
as small and fragile as that of a child. He looked up to see Nora Gavin
crouched at the very edge of the cutaway, captivated by the grisly
image that had just emerged from the peat.
“Are
you ready?” Cormac asked. She nodded wordlessly, then climbed down into
the cutaway beside him.
“First
we have to determine the way the body is situated before we begin the
complete excavation,” Cormac said. “The head appears to be turned at
roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the cutaway floor here, which
means the body could be articulated in any number of different ways.”
He was aware that this was probably Nora’s first experience of a bog
body in situ, so after carefully covering the head once more with wet
peat, Cormac pulled paper and pencil from his bag and hastily drew a
sketch to show her what they were about to do.
“So,
here’s the head—right? The body could be fully extended or flexed, and
it could also be angled downward, if it’s intact. We’ll mark out as
much of a circle as we can, then dig small test pits, like this,” he
said, making small circles on the diagram, “starting from the outside
of the circle and moving inward. That way we can establish how large a
block of peat will have to be removed. The pits should be about fifty
centimeters apart, and twenty to thirty centimeters deep. We’ll have to
dig with our bare hands; that way we can’t do any damage, and it’s
important for sensing the texture of the surrounding material.” He
unstrapped his wristwatch, glancing at it briefly before putting it
into his pocket. “If only it weren’t so late in the day. We’ll have to
work quickly.” He handed her his waterproof jacket. “You can kneel on
this if you like. Any last thoughts before we get stuck in?”
“I
don’t think so,” she said. Her eyes rested for an instant on his
stubbly chin, and as she turned away, Cormac felt a faint flush of
embarrassment; in the rush to get out here he hadn’t taken the time to
shave. He lifted his sweater over his head and rolled up his sleeves.
As he worked, plunging his bare arm into the dense, waterlogged peat,
he considered that there was nothing in the world quite like the
consistency of turf. If a bog wasn’t exactly liquid, it wasn’t quite
solid either, but a curious mixture somewhere between the two. It was
also extremely cold; with their sleeves and shirt fronts completely
soaked through, both he and Nora had to stop every few minutes to warm
their hands. After nearly twenty minutes thoroughly probing almost the
entire arc of their circle, they had turned up nothing at all.
“Is
it just me,” she asked, leaning back and rubbing off the tiny flecks of
wet peat that stuck to her arms, “or is something missing here—like any
sign of a body?”
“Let’s
have another look at her,” Cormac said. With Nora watching over his
shoulder, he removed a larger portion of the protective peat, to find
the woman’s features obscured by her long red hair, which clung like
seaweed on a victim of drowning. Bog tannins gave hair of every
hue—even black hair—a reddish tinge, but it was still possible to tell
the original color. Cormac carefully lifted the damp strands and laid
them aside, then froze when he saw what lay beneath. The girl’s mouth
was clamped tightly shut, her top teeth deeply embedded in the flesh of
her lower lip. One eye stared wildly; the other was half closed. Her
face seemed distorted with fear, a far cry from the images he’d seen of
Iron Age bog men, whose unblemished bodies and tranquil expressions led
to theories that they were either drugged, or willing victims of
sacrifice. In its brief exposure to the air, the girl’s hair had
already begun to dry, and a few strands began to play in the breeze
that scooped down into the trench. Something about this tiny movement
made it seem, for one surreal instant, that she was alive. Cormac felt
Nora Gavin’s involuntary start beside him. “Shall I go on?” he asked.
Nora’s head slowly turned until her eyes met his, and she nodded.
Cormac
continued scraping away the soft black turf with his fingers, until
what he had half suspected was confirmed. The girl’s neck ended
abruptly, he estimated, between the third and fourth vertebrae. He sat
back on his heels.
“My
God,” Nora said. “She’s been decapitated.”
The
girl was young, perhaps no more than twenty, and, if you removed the
ghastly expression, had probably been quite beautiful, with a
gracefully arched brow, high cheekbones, and a delicate chin. Beside
his knee, Cormac could make out a ragged fringe of rough fabric, like
torn burlap. Who was this girl, that she had come to such a harsh and
desolate end? When he rose slowly to his feet again, he found the
McGanns and the young policeman gazing at her solemnly, as he and Nora
had, in silence.
The
sound of voices came from the road. Detective Devaney was having words
with a stranger—a tall, fair-haired man dressed in jeans and heavy work
boots. The man broke away from Devaney, and began to cross in long
strides to the digging site. Devaney followed after, leaping sideways
through the heather like a terrier. They could hear the policeman’s
words: “...completely unrelated... Haven’t we promised to notify you if
there’s any news at all?” The stranger ignored Devaney, and marched
stone-faced through the scrub. When he reached the cutaway, the man was
breathing heavily, though he still said nothing. His eyes met Cormac’s
for an instant, but his gaze was distracted until it at last seized
upon the terrible, upturned face of the red-haired girl. And at that
moment, all purpose seemed to drain out of him. He fell to his knees
and clapped a hand over his eyes, as if suddenly overcome by extreme
exhaustion or relief. After a moment or two, Una McGann stepped to the
stranger’s side and helped him to his feet.
“Hugh,” she said, looking into his face intently, “you know it isn’t
Mina.” He nodded mutely, then straightened and let her walk with him
away from the trench. Devaney’s eyes had never left the stranger’s
face. Now the policeman raised a hand to the back of his neck and
sighed. Cormac caught another slight movement with the corner of his
eye, and glanced up to see Brendan McGann twisting the two-grain fork
in his hands, his eyes trained on his sister’s back.
In
the course of his work, Cormac had often felt like a detective, sorting
through evidence and piecing together clues to unlock the secrets and
the lives of those long dead. Here were two mysteries dropped in tandem
right into his lap. What—if anything—had they to do with one another?
He wished he could keep digging until he had discovered what word or
thought or deed had brought the red-haired girl to this place. But
archaeology was not that kind of science. Whatever small knowledge he
could gain came in shards, in fragments, in frustrating, piecemeal
fashion. Would they ever find out who she was, or why she died? He
looked down into the dead girl’s once-beautiful face, and pledged that
he would try.
Copyright
© 2003 by Erin M. Hart
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