The Drumble

Emmett Scully took us out on the Drumble on Thursday morning, and I will describe the place properly, because everything that happened afterward happened on that ground and I do not think a reader who has not stood on it can understand a single thing about this story.

A peat bog is not a swamp and it is not a marsh, and I was told so by a man standing in one, which is a different thing from reading it. It does not look like water and it does not smell like water; it looks like a field that somebody has forgotten to mow for four thousand years, and it is soft and springy and uneven to walk on, which I established for myself in the first fifty yards, and again when Scully stopped without warning and put an arm out and said, not looking at me, "Not there." Under the green there is nothing but moss, and under the moss nothing but water and the dead moss of every year since the ice went out, and it takes a print the way wet clay does and keeps it, which is why the coast's whole criminal history used to be read out of that bog by the men who cut turf in it.

We went in from the south end, where Scully has his permit block, along a line of cut peat flags that he had laid himself over nine years like a man building a road into hell one brick at a time. For the first half mile it was almost pleasant. There were deer tracks, and a peregrine working the ground, and once a flight of geese coming down out of the northwest in a long broken V, and Scully talked the whole time, fluently and with pleasure, about the birds, the peat, the state of the county, and the way the whole of the west was being bought up by people who loved it too much to use it.

Then we reached the old cutting, and the ground under us changed.

The railway came through that bog in 1903 and it was gone by 1911, and this is what is left of it: a trench two hundred yards long and twenty feet wide, half filled with black water, cut down through the peat into the blue clay, which at the middle of it is nine or ten feet down. Stonework stands across the cut at the halfway mark, four courses of it, with the sleepers burnt in 1911 still lying on top, and one bent piece of rail coming out of the moss at the north end like the rib of a boat. The county fenced it, once, in 1968. The fence is gone. There is nothing between the flags and the cutting but forty yards of what looks exactly like the ground you have just walked across, and is not.

Scully stopped at the edge of the flags and pointed along the line.

"There. That is where the water is. Everything south of that trench drains the wrong way, and has since the war. And there." He turned and pointed down the line of the cutting toward the north end, where the moss was paler and the water was standing in sheets. "That is where my permit ends. If you want to spend your money, Mr. Vandermeer, you would begin by putting a survey team along that trench in a dry August, with a drill, and you would find out where the clay has holes in it, and then you would have an engineering problem instead of a mystery. That is what I have been asking the county for nine years." He said it with a kind of sour cheerfulness. "And here is the other thing. Look at the ground between the flags and the water. There has been foot traffic, and there has been a great deal of it, and it is not deer."

It was not deer. I am not a tracker and I will not pretend to be one, but a doctor spends his life looking at what people have done to their own bodies, and the eye learns certain things about marks. In the soft black ground along the lip of the cutting there were two paths, both of them made by feet, both of them converging at the point where the cutting was nearest to Scully's flags. And in the mud at the mouth of the northern path, in a place where the peat had been trodden clear and the clay showed, there was a print. One of those two paths was Scully's: it came down from his own flags and stopped where the stonework crossed. The other came up from the shore road, and I could not account for it, and it was three weeks before I could, and by then the man who had made it was dead and had been buried in another man's coat.

It was the print of a dog, twenty-nine centimetres front to back including the claws.

Scully looked at it for a long while without saying anything, and when he spoke his voice was different, and I do not know to this day whether the difference was fear or something else entirely.

"There," he said. "You wanted to know what's down here."

"You knew," said Cole.

"I've seen the tracks before."

"Then why did you tell me the bog was the danger and not the animal?"

"Because the bog kills everybody who comes out here," said Emmett Scully, "and the animal, whatever it is, has never killed anybody that I can prove." He turned his back on the print and started, without any hurry at all, to walk back along the flags. "It's eleven-forty. The fog comes at one. I'd rather not be explaining a Vandermeer to the coroner."

The fog came at twenty to one, and it came the way it comes on that coast: not as a mist that thickens but as a wall that arrives, so that the ridge went out of sight in the time it takes to read this sentence, and the sea went out of sight, and the sound of the sea went out of hearing, and the world became a white room with no walls in it and nothing in it but the three of us and the ground we were standing on. We were still on the flags, with perhaps a quarter of a mile to go, walking in single file, Scully in front and then Cole and then me, and I had put my hand on the collar of Cole's coat and told him to keep hold of it, and I had just decided that we would be all right, when out of the whiteness to our left, no more than sixty yards off, something began to move.

There was no sound at first. There was movement: a displacement of the fog, a disturbance in it the way a wave disturbs water, going along parallel to us at a speed no man can run and no deer keeps to, and it was big, and it was low, and the fog rolled off it. Then it stopped. And then it made the sound I had heard from my window on the second night, the sound that is not a bark and not a howl, made now at a distance of sixty yards, and the fog took the sound and threw it back at us from three directions at once, so that it seemed to come from the ground itself.

Cole Vandermeer did not run. He stood perfectly still in the middle of the flags with his hand coming up to his chest — I saw that, and I have seen it since on other men, and it is pure instinct, the hand going to the heart that is about to be asked for something — and he said, in a voice that was not steady and was not frightened, "All right."

I got my arm around him and put my hand flat over his sternum, feeling the rate of him, and it was a hundred and forty and it was regular, and I said, "Breathe out. Count. Don't move your feet." And over his shoulder I watched the fog, and the fog was empty, and the thing that had been in it was in it no longer.

Scully was twenty yards ahead of us and had not moved either, and when at last he came back to us his face was pale, and he had one hand inside his coat.

"That," he said, "is not one of mine."

We were on the last quarter mile of the flags by then, and we went down it fast, and we came off the peat onto the shore road at five past one, and there was the station's truck, and there was the county sheriff's cruiser parked beside it with its engine running, and beside the cruiser, in a raincoat and boots and with her hands in her pockets, was Deputy Marshal Nadia Ozer, waiting for us with the expression of a woman who has been waiting for a while and is now going to be unpleasant about it.

"I've been up to Harrow Reach," she said. "The housekeeper told me where you'd gone, and I want to say, before I say anything else, that I have been a fool and you have been a bigger one. Mr. Vandermeer, we found your boot."