The pressure finally eased once I had dug a pit about as deep as I was tall.
“Ta ta,” said the hag as she staggered off towards the cemetery gate, hounds trotting at her heels.
Norv tried to help me out of the pit. He brought me a ladder. Rope and harness. Block and tackle. Nothing would work. My weight increased several tons with every upward step. I was officially cursed.
I dug the pit larger, by undercutting the walls. Norv brought me a chair and a blanket. He tarped over the top to keep out the rain and prying eyes. Brought me meals.
One or more of the dogs would come by from time to time to make sure I was still confined. Some children found me. I pretended to be dead. They ran away screaming.
I expected the spell to wear off, but it never did. After a time I began to get restless. That’s when I began tunneling. Thank the Lord we are blessed with such thick deposits of loess. My wanderings would have been impossible had there been bedrock or glacial till.
What I had was a moveable cave, a roaming tunnel. I shifted the shoring back to fore to support the newly dug areas and filled in the back with diggings. I maintained a layer of sod overhead to keep undercover, employing a metal pipe for ventilation. Norv kept track of my whereabouts every day, stuffing meals and drinks in plastic bags down the shaft.
I learned how to tunnel a hundred feet a day without any subsidence, without anyone knowing I was down below. I had to maneuver occasionally around caskets, until one glorious day I was off the grounds of the cemetery and it was all backyards and open corn fields to the horizon.
The day after the vernal equinox, Norv stopped coming around. I presumed he had done something to annoy the hag and picked up a curse of his own. When the hounds came to check on me, there was a new dog with them. Sleeker fur. Devoid of scars. A pup.
Without Norv, I now had to raid the occasional basement to re-provision. Fieldstone foundations I preferred because I could make my intrusions look like a natural collapse and cover my tracks. Unfortunately, most contractors in town lay concrete slabs these days.
One glorious summer I managed to break into the city storm drains. I could put down my shovel and wander at will, eavesdropping on the news at the bus stops, listening to live music from the gazebo in the park.
But then the hounds found their way in. They were not pleased. They chased me down every corner of the sewer system until they had me trapped. The alpha dog extracted a pound of flesh from my leg as punishment for my transgression. I nearly died from loss of blood and the ensuing infection.
***
“Joel!” Marsha put a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Do you hear … barking?”
The snap and snarl of fighting dogs could be heard beyond the casement window. A sharp whimper. Silence.
“Oh no! That sounded like Sparky … the neighbor’s dog.”
There came a scratching from upstairs. Something was clawing at the screens on the storm door.
“They’re here,” said Mr. Fallow rising. “I must go.” He grabbed his shovel and made for the breach in the foundation. Despite his slight frame, he moved like a thousand pound man, feeling the press of not keeping six feet under.
Something glassy crashed upstairs. Heavy paws with claws thudded and clattered on the hardwood overhead.
Joe grabbed the sledge hammer off the ground. Marsha rushed over to a gun case and unsnapped it. Inside was an heirloom shotgun she had inherited from her grandfather. Mr. Fallow wielded his shovel like a battle axe.
“Do you have any silverware? Stainless steel won’t do.”
“There should be some in one of these boxes,” said Marsha, fiddling with the gun.
“Silver, I suspect, is the only way to kill them clean.”
“Kill them? Oh, I don’t want to hurt them,” said Marsha. “I just want to make them go away.”
Joel crept up the stairs.
“Joel! Where are you going?”
“Just making sure the door’s locked.”
“Don’t go up there!”
“I don’t hear it anymore. I think it went away.”
He opened the door an inch. A mass of scars and fur and teeth slammed into it, knocking him down the stairs. Joel screamed. The beast clamped Joel’s head in its jaws.
Marsha pressed the shotgun against the dog’s breastbone and pulled the trigger. It convulsed and went limp. Blood streamed down Joel’s cheeks.
“Oh my! I’d better get the first aid kit.”
“Silver! You need silver,” said Mr. Fallow. “To finish off the beast.”
Another dark hulk came flying down the stairs, barreling into Marsha. The shotgun went flying. The hound grabbed Marsha by the foot and shook her like a limp rag.
Joel swung the sledgehammer and crushed the creature’s skull. Its jaws released and it crumpled to the ground. Joel rushed back up the stairs and locked the basement door. When he came back down, Marsha gasped.
“Didn’t you shave today?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Your face. It’s growing fur. And your nose, it’s changing.”
Marsha, too, was developing a bit of five o’clock shadow on her cheeks and chin. The hounds were slowly re-absorbing their fur, lengthening their limbs, turning back into people. Dead people.
“Oh my Lord!” said Mr. Fallow. “That younger beast, it was Norv Brooks.” He tucked his shovel and ducked through the breach in the basement wall.
“What’s happening to us?” said Marsha.
“Transformation. Possession. It’s another of the hag’s spells, I’m afraid. These hounds, they’re immortal. They take over the life force of those who try to kill them. They can’t be truly killed without silver.”
“You can’t leave now! How do we break the spell?”
“My death, dear people. I’m afraid that's only way. I’m so sorry. You’ve been very kind to me, but I’m not quite ready to go yet. I’m only fifty-eight.”
“So once you die, we’ll go back to how we were?” said Marsha, touching her ever enlarging snout gingerly, like someone patting a fresh bruise.
“There’s only one way to find out.” Joe snarled, displaying his newly sprouted two-inch canines. He stalked across the basement and lunged for Mr. Fallow’s throat.
*****
The Bog Wife
A stream of bubbles rose from deep in the bog. At first, they were few and sparse but soon came in great gulps and belches till the water boiled and bulged with froth. The moon would be full the next time it rose—the first full moon on a summer solstice eve in almost thirty years.
A human hand broke through the surface. Withered and quaking, an index finger extended heavenward. A second hand joined it. Together, they parted the living peat and grasped the sheet of matted moss on either side of the slit.
Through the seam, a hooded head emerged, skin browned by a millennium of acid and tannin. Squirming, writhing, his shoulders pressed through the gap like a baby through a birth canal. How many such births had the bog attended over the centuries? One hundred? Two hundred?
A knee and an elbow found purchase on the matted surface of the bog and hauled the rest of him dripping, out of the hole. The Elder took his first rattling breath in decades, expelling great volumes of brown water from his nostrils. Like a cold and sluggish salamander emerging from hibernation, he crept towards the edge of the bog in fits and spurts. Between bouts of crawling, the last light of the day fell softly upon his heaving form as he rested among the reeds.
His skin was tough and tanned, indistinguishable from his leather skullcap. His jerkin and breeches, slick with the slime of centuries, clung as if joined to his skin. A knotted flaxen cord dangled from his crooked neck, a relic remnant of the ritual murder that had rendered him immortal. A bracelet of wooden beads and pierced seeds dangled from his bony wrist.
Sucking sounds bracketed each erratic, rattling inhalation. A fine brown froth bubbled from gaps between his ribs, and from the holes in his throat. He rested his palms on the mossy earth
and stooped down to kiss the ground. His ground. Good rich Welsh mud.
The sun now gone, left an afterglow where it had died in the hills. He looked up, and a slow, sad smile creased his lips. Dark eyes with whites gone brown had seen more sunsets than any living man. Lines furrowed his brow, documenting worries long abandoned with his life. He was all business now, his existence reduced to a single function, passing on his seed and that of his ancestors to whatever generation currently resided on the bog.
He moved his lips, chanting wordlessly. His wheezing breath added a rhythmic fluting cadence to his chants. For now he had no voice, but it would come. The solstice moon, when it came, would bring him strength for the coupling as it always had and always would, so long as men and women walked this earth.
He sat up and waited for the change, pressing flush flaps of separated forearm flesh against exposed bone, like a man self-conscious of a rip in his trousers. He sighed and waited for the moon.
***
Ben Greenberg hovered near the Cornish pasty stand at the end of the platforms at King’s Cross station, cradling a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath. This was E-Day—E for elopement—and Ben refused to believe that there was any chance that Jillian Dunn would not be coming down from Swansea on the seven o’clock train. Outside the station, Ben’s wing man and would-be best man Nigel idled at the curb, behind the wheel of a little blue Ford Festiva, ready to whisk them away to the registrar’s office for a civil ceremony.
In black jeans and a blue button-down open at the collar, he worried he might be under-dressed for an elopement. But Jillian was a simple country girl. She had insisted on no tux, no ties, no fancy dress, just something clean and comfortable.
But he had won some compromises regarding their honeymoon. They were going to Italy, to Cinque Terra and then Florence, even though Jillian had never been off the British Isles all her life. And then Ben would begin his new job in Brixton as a research drone in a biotech firm.
They had planned way too long for this day for it not to go according to plan. Sure, it concerned him that he had not heard her voice in two weeks and that it had been almost as long since she had responded to his texts, but he had absolutely no reason to doubt her commitment.
How many nights had they whispered, sharing wishes and dreams that meshed and converged in so many uncanny ways? They were soul mates, meant to share their life. That fact was unassailable.
She had warned that things might go this way. It wasn’t her fault she had the weirdest parents, as eccentric as they were strict. Vile, really. Anti-Semitic. Anti-American. Anti-modern. Fundamentalist Luddites. By keeping silent, she gave them no reason to suspect that she was running off to London to marry a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Believing that was the only way he managed to keep calm.
The train crept into the platform, only five minutes late. Pins and needles shimmered through his core. He watched the mob unload and fetch their suitcases. Businessmen rushing to work. A boisterous football side from a boy’s boarding school. Bringing up the rear came some wobbly grandmothers with canes and wheelchairs. No Jillian.
Heart broken, he squeezed the bouquet until the rose thorns dug into the meat of his thumb. Eyes damp, he texted her one last time: “Jilly. Where are you?” He didn’t expect a reply, but as he made his way out through the lobby, with those flowers now a burden, his cell phone warbled.
“Crymlyn.”
***
Ben hopped into the front seat of the Festiva. Nigel pried at him with his eyes.
“What’s up mate? Train delayed?”
“No. It came on time.”
“Well then. Where is she?”
“She texted me. Some place called Crymlyn.”
“So why didn’t she come? Cold feet? Did she say?”
“Obviously, it's some parental issue.”
“Well, at least she texted you back. Right?”
“Yeah, but what does she mean? Does she mean: Ha ha, I’m in Crymlyn, fuck you? Or: Help. I’m in Crymlyn. Come rescue me?”
Nigel made a sour face. “It has to be the latter. That girl doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body. She’s not the type to taunt. You know that. Obviously, she’s in some trouble.”
Ben sighed. “Yeah. I know. I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Her freaking parents must have found out about the elopement and talked her out of it … or worse.”
“Worse? How so?”
“Well, they’re pretty old school, to put it mildly. I wouldn’t put it past them to have locked her in a basement or something.”
Nigel sighed. “So where is this Crymlyn place?”
“You’re the native. I was hoping you would know.”
“Never heard of it.” He shrugged.
“I suppose it would have to be near Swansea, but out in the countryside. The way Jillian described it, her parents’ estate is surrounded by bogs and fens for miles around.”
“Doesn’t quite narrow it down. That part of Wales is fairly swampy all along the coast.”
Ben looked his friend in the eyes.
“Nigel, you need to drive me to Wales.”
“Oh? I do, do I?”
“You are … my best man.”
Nigel sighed. “That I am. And I intend to live up to it. No worries mate. We’ll get you there. Though, I have to admit, I’m not crazy about meeting this demented family of hers.”
Ben tossed the flowers into the back seat as Nigel threw his car into gear and drove off down Euston Road, heading for the Westway.
***
As they sped westward on the M4, Ben couldn’t stop staring at Jillian’s one word text. It was the first communications he had received from her in weeks. The fact that she had used her phone at all was a revelation. It meant that she still had it with her. Her parents hadn’t confiscated it yet. It was charged and linked to the network. He pictured her checking it umpteen times a day, waiting for a message or a call from him, even he had long stopped texting after the first dozen went unanswered.
He took a chance and called her mobile. The call went straight to voice mail, which apparently was full of his prior pinings and musings and unable to accept any more.
He unzipped his day pack and rifled through it, retrieving their marriage application, bearing her precious signature, a token of hope and love affirmed that he had spent many an hour gazing at during their unplanned separation. Beneath the mobile number that she no longer responded to, she had filled in a number for the family land line. She had expressly forbidden him to ever call there. She said that if her parents ever took a call from a man they didn’t know it would trigger a major clamp down. He wasn’t sure what she had meant by that, but her silence made him wonder. To what extremes they would go to isolate their daughter from a man they didn’t want her to marry?
The woman was twenty five years old. Surely, she had the right to make her own choices.
He called the land line. A long series of clicks and stutters crackled before a connection was made and it began to ring. Ben had experienced smoother connections calling halfway across the world to rural India. Hard to believe this was happening in the twenty-first century UK.
“Hullo?” A male voice, gruff and hesitant.
“Yeah, hi, this is Ben Greenberg. I’m … a friend … of Jillian’s. Is … she … uh … Is she home?” More crackles. A long pause. Ben wondered if he had been disconnected.
“Jillian can’t come to the phone right now. Thank you very much.”
“Well, can you please have her call me back? She … she has my number.”
“I’m afraid that will not be possible.”
“Just … have her call me when she gets a chance. Please.”
“You must be the young man she’s been seeing.”
“Um … yes.” How did he know that? Had Jillian told him of their relationship? Did the family have informants?
“Well, I’m afraid you won’t be seeing her any more. Nothing personal, young man. Life sometimes takes unexpected turns. Yo
u’d best move on with your life. Jillian’s going to be indisposed for some time. Family duties.”
“I don’t understand. What sort of duties?”
“Nothing for you to be concerned with. Good day.”
“Can I please talk to her … just for a minute? Just to say … goodbye?”
“If it’s any consolation, this has nothing to do with you. You sound like a decent enough chap. But things are different now. You’d best stay away from her. That’s the best advice I can give you. You sound like a decent enough lad. Don’t want you to get hurt.”
The line crackled out. The silence stung.
***
Once they reached Swansea, finding the right Crymlyn was a matter of trial and error. There were several localities sharing that name in the south of Wales, all associated with peat bogs. The best known bog of that name turned out to be a false lead, a nature preserve near Swansea. The Crymlyn of the Dunns turned out to be a smaller bog to the north where the hills began to poke their bulk out of the landscape. If they hadn’t come across an old farmer hauling a hay wagon, they never would have found it.
“Is it the Dunns you’re looking for? God help you, then.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Let’s just say that they are not ordinary folk. They are a queer lot. Their whole history is a bit tainted. How they came about their land. How they get to keep it.”
“How so?”
“Some things are better left unsaid. Putting words to it only riles the spirits, if you know what I’m saying.”
“The Dunns. Are they landed gentry, then?”
“They’re landed, I suppose. Forty hectares of untillable slough. Far from gentry. Some would say they got shafted. But such bargains are made in desperate times. And this one was forged a thousand years ago. Things were different, then.”
“A thousand years? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” said the farmer. “I’ve already said too much. But the Dunns’ estate is just over that rise. Go have a look-see if you insist. But do take care.”
The farmer slammed his tractor into gear and pulled away.
“I say we park in that patch of oaks over there and investigate on foot,” said Nigel.
“Shouldn’t we … find some lodging? It’s gonna get dark soon.”