Erin Hart - Lake of Sorrows

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 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 Triona’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 Triona 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 that she meant Peter Hallett—Triona’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, 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 each other 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 Mona 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 Mona 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.