Lake of Sorrows - Softcover

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.

Copyright © 2004 by Erin Hart

1

Seventy miles straight west of Dublin, at the northern perimeter of Loughnabrone Bog in the far western reaches of County Offaly, Nora Gavin 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 few hectares of arable land.

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 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 ...