The Bog Read Free Page B

started to kiss his wife on the back of her neck.
    Melanie could think of a thousand different reasons why she didn’t want to move. To begin with, being the wife of an Oxford academic was about as rustic as she wanted to get. Her father was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, and living on a professor’s salary had been a difficult enough situation for her to adapt to. She had been on digs before with David, and the thought of returning to the back woods was almost more than she could bear.
    She had also never told David, but once as a small child she had been separated from her parents while on vacation and had been lost in the Vermont woods for a day and a night. The experience had left her with a deep and irrational fear of any tract of land that did not have pavement or stoplights within twenty feet of it.
    Still, she knew there was more to her unhappiness than just reluctance to leave Oxford. She had successfully overcome such misgivings before, but this time something was different. Something formless had been troubling her for months now. She did not know what. She was only just beginning to realize that it was there, that she also had a tiny voice trying to communicate something to her. But she loved her husband and she still tingled beneath his touch.
    “I think we can do something about your mood,” David said. She looked at him and saw that he had the devil in his eye. Suddenly he began to tickle her, and she thrashed wildly in the sheets, breaking into gales of laughter.
    “Oh, stop it,” she cried. “We’ll wake the kids.”
    “Then we’ll just have to be a little more quiet,” he returned as he kissed her again and drew her into his arms.
    On the following Monday at nine o’clock in the morning David Macauley set out in his Volvo for Fen-church St. Jude. According to his instructions he was to meet Brad Hollister at an intersection of two roads known locally as Nobby Fork. The purpose of this, Brad had explained, was to protect David from getting lost, for although David had chosen the mile-long strip of bog where they were to dig, the precise location of the camp was deep in a labyrinth of country lanes in a valley that held both Fenchurch St. Jude and Hovern Bog and was known to geologists as the greater Devon basin. Although it was almost noon when he reached Nobby Fork, the sun had not yet cut through the cloud cover, and a veil of early morning mist still lay over the land. He found Brad standing beneath a tree, framed by a sheath of fog that made him look very much like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
    The younger man spotted the car coming and waved. He was tall, standing over six feet, broad-shouldered, and slim but muscular, with a mane of shiny black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard and mustache. He might have looked Mephistophelian had David not known him to be one of the quietest, most gentle individuals he had ever met.
    “Professor Macauley,” the younger man greeted him as he got into the Volvo.
    “How are you, Brad?” David returned. “Boy, sure is spooky with all this fog about.”
    Hollister shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry.”
    “Oh, I’m not criticizing,” David interjected quickly, recalling how self-effacing the younger man was. “Actually, I kind of like it. Lends an air of mystery to everything. Just tell me where to go.”
    Hollister nodded and motioned for David to take the left turn in the fork.
    As they drove on, David noticed that a slight tension had developed momentarily between them. This was not because there was any animosity between the two men. On the contrary, when the two of them were heavily into a project they worked as if they shared a single soul. The tension was due instead to the fact that Brad was the archetype of the shy and reclusive intellectual. He was brilliant and fanatically dedicated to his work, but a very quiet and private person, and always a little ill at ease in the company of other people. Consequently, whenever the two of them had