Once Every Never Read Free Page B

thought. I expect a treasure heist any second now …
    It was about half an hour into the tour and even Al had long since tuned out the guide’s nasally drone. The two girls dawdled far behind the throng of keener students as they entered the Special Exhibits room, where the lights were dimmer than the rest of the museum and a banner proclaimed SPECTRAL WARRIORS: BOG BODIES OF THE NORFOLK BROADS .
    Aha. So this was the object of Al and the curator’s gruesome enthusiasm.
    The bog guys.
    “What’s a ‘broad’?” Clare asked Al. “I mean, other than the standard definition.”
    “It’s what they call a bunch of wetlands around Norwich. Rivers and swamps and marshes. Come on. Let’s check this stuff out.” Al tugged her by the sleeve farther into the shadowy room.
    A field of chest-high plinths topped with environmentally controlled, clear Perspex boxes about the size of coffins stretched from one end of the room to the other. Clare peered with idle curiosity into the first box, unable at first to make out what was in it. A plaque on the wall bore the words CLAXTON MAN —and identified the contents of the display case as the first of thirteen bodies discovered by a bunch of turf cutters a few years earlier, and named, apparently, after the tiny town perched at the edge of the soupy bit of real estate in Norfolk under which it had been discovered.
    Clare’s eyes wandered past the rest of the text and focused instead on the accompanying photo—an artist’s reconstruction of what the dead guy might have looked like back in the day: young, with dark reddish-brown hair tied back from a noble-looking face. Good bone structure , Clare thought. With a cool haircut and some styling he might have even passed for cute.
    She turned back to the case and leaned over, almost pressing her nose to the glass in suddenly acute, totally morbid fascination. The remains looked nothing like the young man in the picture. Nothing like a man at all, really. More like saddle leather that had been cut in a pattern and sewn together in the vague shape of a human being—and then discarded in a rumpled heap like a Halloween costume on the first of November. Clare could see that his head still had hair on it and that there was stubble on his cheeks and chin. She stared and stared, intrigued in spite of herself. The quality of preservation was fairly astonishing, actually. She could even make out the remains of a fox-fur armband that circled his left bicep, just above the elbow, and a thin rope cord that had been tied around his neck above a simple, decorative metal ring he wore like a collar. He had a small gold hoop in one ear and around his wrists were intricately designed matched cuffs made, apparently, of silver—although it was hard to tell. They had long since lost their sheen.
    Clare was still staring when she noticed that her reflection in the glass seemed to have grown a second head. Al had come up behind her and was gazing at the bog man with detached curiosity.
    “See? I told you,” she murmured. “Creepy. Definitely creepy.”
    “I dunno.” Clare shrugged. “Looks kinda … peaceful.”
    “How peaceful can you be when you’ve been stabbed, bludgeoned, strangled, and thrown into a bog to die?” Al turned and looked at Clare, who stood blinking, her mouth hanging open. “That’s what the sign says.” She straightened up and pointed at the plaque.
    “Oh.” Clare struggled for a moment, groping for a witty rejoinder, and then gave up. There wasn’t much she could say to that. She glanced back at the reconstruction photo and thought that the eyes of the face in the picture looked sad. She shivered a little and turned back to where Al had circled around to the other side of the glass case. She was staring with keen eyes at the morbid remains and glancing back and forth between that and the brochure in her hand.
    “Maybe you’re right, though,” she continued. “Maybe they didn’t feel a thing. According to this,