She wept, the tears spilling down her face hot and bitter with regret. She cried, a wailing moan clawing its way up from deep inside her, its weight pulling her to her knees on the spongy sodden ground, releasing a screaming vent of anger and frustration to the desolate moor surrounding her, and in that moment she knew George and finally understood his madness.
The movement of the sun programmed her days, dressing in the pre-dawn hours, driving to Ayres Kame in the dark, heading across the field in the dawn light and walking the Coffin Road as the sun crested the horizon. It was hard to tell which day it was any more, or what month. All she knew was that with each passing day the sun was sinking into the sea earlier and rising later the following day.
Winter and its darkness was fast approaching, every day, every minute on the bog becoming more desperate.
Taking up her position, Deidre switched the detector on and started arcing.
So focussed on the ground, she hadn’t noticed the mist that had crept in with the stealthy silence of a kidnapper, catching her off guard, enveloping her, blinding her within its opaque cloak. It distorted her sense of direction, Deidre swinging her head from left to right unable to tell east from west, Ayers Kame hidden in the thick vapour. Listening, her ears straining, she listened for the sound of waves against the distant shore but could hear nothing, the subdued sea silent, all sound muffled and absorbed by this dense blanket of moisture, the silence it had born an entity in itself.
Never before had she experienced a fog like this with so much texture, the eerie moist shroud surreal, supernatural. Taking a step forward, she stopped, rooted to the spot, unsure of her direction. Ayres Kame had been to the right of her, but now she wasn’t sure, her mind had been wandering, paying no attention to the direction she had been heading in. Taking another step forward, and another, she hesitated. She was walking blind, dangerous in this treacherous territory. She took a step back, the metal detector beeping suddenly, unexpectedly loud and erratic in the thick silence, the sound so obtrusive, the mechanical robotic song so discordant in this atmosphere of preternatural fog it startled her, prompting a short, sharp scream. She swung the detector away, staring down at the spot, her heart thumping as the silence closed in again.
That was a new sound, she’d listened to the machine make all kinds of beeps, bleeps and bells over the past months, but nothing like that. That was the sound of something different.
Sweat blossomed on her skin, her breath shallow as she aimed the detector over the spot again, the machine singing to her like an ecstatic mechanical budgie raging on amphetamines.
Deidre glanced over her shoulder. She’d left the spade impaled in the ground a few meters back, a few meters that had been stolen from her vision, a few meters that might as well be miles in this fog. Resting the detector over the spot, she nervously stepped away, leaving it beeping furiously in the fog.
Like a knife impaled in melting butter, the vague shape of the spade appeared about twenty feet away, sticking out of the turf at an exaggerated angle. Grabbing it, Deidre followed the sound back to the beeping detector, moved it out of the way and sunk the spade in to the soft peaty earth.
A trench had formed, stretching about four feet square, three feet deep, maybe more, hard to gauge with water seeping in, continually filling the void, mounds of wet sopping peat surrounding the rim like a ghastly meringue crust.
Her hands, her back, her neck ached forcing her to stop frequently to rest, stretch, arch her back. During these breaks she switched the detector back on swinging it over the deepening hole, the singing beep becoming louder, more urgent, urging her on, reinvigorating her each time, her excitement growing despite the fatigue that stalked her like a circling shark, hungry and ready to devour her.
A low persistent tremble shuddered through her bones. Exhaustion. Resting the spade against the wall of the trench, she lifted her numb hands to her face staring at them as if they were two alien appendages, black and bent into claws, blood tricking from the raw broken skin. Her focus moved past them to the trench she had dug. She now stood waist deep in the rounded excavation, feeling drugged and somnolent, slowly becoming aware of her surroundings as if waking from a deep sleep. Looking out over the mounds of dirt, she noticed that the fog had lifted, drifted away as stealthily as it had crept in leaving behind its sublime silence and unearthly stillness like a lingering presence. A thick rolling blanket of cloud filled the vast sky giving no hint to the time of day or how long she had been out here. It must be hours, she thought, staring back into the pit she had dug, feeling awed and dumbfounded by this feat of endurance.
She needed to rest, just for a little bit, she thought, hoisting herself out of the trench and lying down at its side, closing her eyes just for a moment. Just for one small moment.
Assuring her that she wouldn’t fall, Taran gripped Breeta’s hand tightly as he escorted her around behind Brud Stone. Small squeaks of fear broke from her as she stood on the cliff edge, her nails digging into his skin as he helped her into a seated position. Taran sat down beside her, their backs against the great monolith, wrapping his arm around her shoulder and pulling her close.
Starlight filled the black ocean of sky stretching out past the edge of the world, the sea below them, calm in the cold windless night, mirrored the heavens above. They’d come to watch the glow from the mighty fire of the Gods, its tremendous flames so fierce and bright they burst from the other side of the great dark to surge and swirl across the night sky, the smooth surface of the sea reflecting the spectacular show of incandescent colour.
Taran inclined his head towards Breeta, watching her as she gazed up to the phosphorescent firmament, the sight of her more wondrous to him than the effulgent spectacle gleaming above them.
She turned to him suddenly, the luminous green waves of light radiant upon her face. ‘My heart is filled with you,’ she said.
A sudden unexpected deluge of emotion overwhelmed him, smothering the breath in his lungs, an ache in his throat so raw it stole his voice and all he could do was stare back at her, a pain in his chest so exquisite he wanted to cry out to the dancing heavens above. He felt that he might buckle under the weight of this love he felt, the enormity of it, larger than the sky, more brilliant than the Gods’ fires; he feared that his heart, not large enough to contain it, might explode.
The Gods had given him this gift, this love – and it terrified him.
He pulled Breeta close to him, wrapping his arms tight around her, the terror of ever losing her as deep and cold and dark, as eternal as the ocean below them.
‘Deidre.’
She woke with a start, lying prostrate on the ground, feeling as cold as death, her limbs as stiff as rigor mortis. Blinking, she focussed on the feet standing at her side, slippered feet. Slowly, her eyes moved up the legs to the torso, the shoulders and head, a single shaft of bright sunlight breaking through a crack in the clouds highlighting the face set against the dark glowering sky.
‘Hello Deidre.’
She gazed up, disbelieving, the face so familiar, so loved, so missed.
He crouched down beside her, smiling.
She sat upright. ‘Dad, what’re you doing here?’
‘I came to see you.’
She stared into Douglas Hart’s face in astonishment. He was so close, the details so real, the age spots she’d watch develop on his cheekbones over the passing years, the glasses perched on his nose, the glasses she’d slipped into his pocket the day before his burial. The love in his eyes as he looked back at her.
‘Am I dreaming?’
‘Aye, of course yer dreaming, hen. I’m deed, remember?’ A small chortle rasped from his throat, a chuckle she remembered so well and yet had allowed to fade from her memory. ‘It’s the only way I can get in contact wi ye. I canny send ye a, whit d’ye call it,’ he wagged a finger in the air, thinking. ‘An email,’ he declared, conjuring up the word. ‘And the price of a phone call, it’s worse than international.’ He paused, the humorous glint
in his eye turning serious. ‘I’m just here to give ye a wee nudge. You’re lying oot here in the middle o’naywhere, Deidre.’
Deidre’s eyes scanned the wild empty moorland around them, the hole she’d been digging at her side, dark brooding clouds lying heavy and dense just above their heads.
‘Ye need to wake up and finish the job yiv started.’
His voice, so familiar and resonant with memories of home, of her life before she’d heard of George Hart. The quirks and idiosyncrasies that made up the character, the person that had been Douglas Hart, all came flooding back to her; the swimming pool of water on the floor after he’d washed the dishes, the teaspoons of garlic he would swallow at the first hint of a cold. The minutiae of day-to-day life over the decades she’d spent with this man; the day he’d screamed the house down when her pet dog Fluffy had stolen his false teeth from his bedside table in the middle of the night and chewed them to small bits. She’d been ten years old then, Fluffy, a mongrel who, with her strong encouragement, had followed her home from school two weeks prior. Fluffy was was taken to the pound later that day. She’d cried and thrown an almighty tantrum, Douglas admonishing her, his words thick and lisping as he tried to annunciate his words through bare gums.
‘I miss you so much Dad,’ she said, her voice thick with emotion and grief. ‘I want to go home. I want things to go back to the way they were. I want to go back to the kitchen at home and sit with a coffee in the morning sun, just you n’me, the way it used to be.’
Douglas Hart smiled benevolently on his daughter. ‘I know ye do, hen. But we canny go back there. Now, come on.’ He stood up, opening his arms to her. ‘Come and give yer dad a hug before I go.’
Deidre stood up, stepped into arms that enveloped her, pulling her close. She felt him, could feel his heat, the texture of his cardigan, breathing in the scent of him as if it was the last breath she would ever take.
‘I’m so sorry Dad. I’m so sorry.’
‘What’re you sorry for hen?’
She shook her head into the crook of his neck, unable to speak, filled with too much sorrow and too many regrets.
‘Just always remember that I love you ma wee girl,’ he said. She could feel his hand on her head, stroking her, could feel him fade from her embrace.
‘Don’t go Dad, please don’t go. Don’t leave me here alone.’
But he was gone, the warmth of him leaving her, coldness wrapping around her like a cocoon.
Deidre opened her eyes, blinking away the tears pooling there, looking up at the dirty clouds heavy with uncried rain. She was still on the ground she realised, on her back, her neck creaking like old wood as she turned her head to see the mounds of wet peat surrounding the trench.
A dream.
She closed her eyes again, willing herself back into the dream. Douglas Hart’s presence had been a tangible thing, she had felt him in her arms, she still held the scent of him in her nose, could still feel the warmth of his hug. He had been here with her, she was sure of it, and unexpectedly she didn’t feel sad or bereft, but elated. He’d come all this way to visit her, he’d held her in his arms, and dream or not, it had been real to her.
Although the waders had kept her legs dry, moisture from the wet ground had soaked through the lining of her jacket, the chill turning her rigid with cold. It seized her like a sudden convulsion, shaking her, her body shuddering, her jaws clattering together like castanets with enough force to shatter her teeth.
With some difficulty, she pushed herself into a sitting position. She needed to get warm, knowing there was a thermos of hot coffee in her backpack, as well as Stuart’s crafty donation of scotch he always slipped in there. ‘Just a few wee drams fur when it’s really cauld oot der. It could save yer life, ye know,’ he’d advised, refilling the empty flask as needed, which was most nights as she’d developed quite a taste for straight whisky, had come to look forward to it as her afternoon reward to herself after a long day on the moor. But today, it very well could just save her life.
Hauling herself upright, she lurched her way across the marsh with the stiff staggering gait of a newborn foal.
Her hands shaking uncontrollably, she could barely unzip the backpack, side-tracking the coffee and going straight for Stuart’s flask, the hot molten heat of its contents rushing through her with the first swallow. She sat on the rock, sipping the scotch, waiting for the body-quaking cold to subside; staring across at the trench she had dug, wondering how she had missed that spot all this time.
She’d gone over that ground before, she must have, she knew she had. She could even guess at the path Breeta had been taking that morning, panic stricken and terrified, the shelter of the Priest’s chamber inaccessible she had probably then tried to reach Ayers Kame unnoticed, forced down from the high exposed rim around the bog and running blindly into the fog shrouded marshland.
Deidre screwed the cap back onto the flask, stuffed it into her jacket pocket and, rejuvenated, made her way back into the mire.
The trench had almost filled with water. Deidre slipped the flask from her pocket, unscrewed the cap and took another sip of its contents staring woefully down into the moat she had created. She exhaled a long deep sigh, the scotch taking the edge off her frustration. There was no point standing here staring at it, she would need to empty it before she could continue. She turned, making her way across the marsh again to her backpack, pulling out a plastic container, prising the lid off. Deep and square, it contained two rolls thick with fillings. She pulled the rolls out, stuffed one back into the backpack and chomped into the other as she headed back to the hole, Vee’s empty Tupperware container in hand.
She barely took notice of the thin gossamer threads floating to the surface and disappearing again with each displacement of water. At first she assumed they were thin fibrous grasses, these black pools of water a soup of decaying vegetation, the bog itself a carpet of moss floating on top of saturated soil. Her knees sunk into the soft turf around the edge of the pit as she bent over, scooping water out of the trench one container full at a time, mindlessly working to a rhythm, the water slowly depleting.
Resting, she pulled the flask out of her pocket again, her numb fingers unscrewing the cap with the dexterity of an arthritic old woman. Sipping from the flask, she stared vacantly into the shallow pond, her eyes falling on the clump of fibres floating again to the surface of the still pool. Sipping, she considered the thin tuft, its faint hint of colour in the muddy puddle, the fine strands fanning out and separating from each other like hair in water.
She heard Taran’s voice in her head speaking in his ancient lost language.
‘Ebintas artesna ketaln.’
The colour of the sunset.
Her heart thumped in her chest, one loud bang like a sledgehammer on stone, cracking her open and waking her from her physical and mental stupor.
The coldness of the black, ankle deep water penetrated through the skin of her waders. Deidre squatted down in the trench, her eyes focussed on the intense coppery band of colour glowing incongruously against the glistening shape rising out of the thick glutinous sludge at the bottom of the ditch. Tentatively, she touched the bright strip of orange. It felt hard and wiry, unpleasant and she pulled her hand away, staring disconsolately at the form covered in a thick shell of centuries old compressed peat. Deidre was no archaeologist. She didn’t know how to go about doing this, extracting an ancient body from its grave.
Aware of its fragility and in fear of causing damage, she reverently scraped and hollowed out the clinging mud from around the base of the body, and painstakingly working her hands beneath it, prised it free with some delicate and gentle manipulation, the moist peat eventually giving up its captive with surprising ease.
With a little effort she lifted the body out of the trench, the weight in her arms like that of a heavy, mud-coated blanket as she carried it carefully across the bog in the dimming light. Respectfully, she placed it onto the slab, her eyes never leaving its form as she slipp
ed her backpack on over her shoulders before gently lifting the body in her arms again.
Water, filtered and purified, drained from the higher marshland bog as it had done for millennia, cutting its course across Muddow’s Field on its incessant journey towards the sea. Deidre had used its pristine waters many times to slake her thirst and wash her hands and face. Now she would use it for a more hallowed purpose.
She knelt at the edge of the fissure and carefully immersed the body into the stream, a dark cloudy bloom billowing from it as large glubby lumps of centuries old mud came loose and washed away. Deidre held the body down, her fingers gently coaxing the release of the thick mud from the body’s form, the strip of coppery orange growing wider, longer, the sluicing of the gentle, fast moving rivulet exposing long flowing hair rippling in the water.
The mud melted away revealing a woman’s head, the skin tanned to a dark bronze, the features indistinct in the murky light and blurred under the running water. Deidre moved her hand over the body, rubbing away as much of the remaining mud as she could before carefully lifting her out and resting her at the side of the burn.
‘Breeta,’ she said, gazing down on the body preserved in a semi foetal position, the legs loosely bent upwards, the arms held close to her chest, the face, although distorted by the weight of the peat over a millennia remained intact in minute detail, the dark leathered skin perfectly preserved; eyelashes and eyebrows, nose and lips. A small, shrivelled hand gripped at the edges of the sheepskin cloak, the withered wrist encircled by two thick silver bracelets gleaming in the twilight. She remembered pushing them onto Breeta’s delicate wrist, forcing them over the protruding bone of her thumb, Breeta’s voice still clear and distinctive in her head. ‘Ow, Barasioka. Bakatan, eku-abargh.’ Don’t be so rough. She remembered the desperation she felt, Taran felt, the urgency to get Breeta away, to send her to a safe place, to the Priest’s chamber before the invaders made landfall.
The Stone Dweller's Curse: A Story of Curses, Madness, Obsession and Love Page 26