Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
A group of men stood around the body almost leaning into the wind, the fluorescent yellow of ambulance men waiting to take it away, policemen in black waterproofs and chequered hats who thought they had seen it all before. Until now.
They parted wordlessly to let Gunn through, and he saw the police surgeon crouched down, leaning over the corpse, delicately brushing aside crumbling peat with latexed fingers. He looked up as Gunn loomed overhead, and Gunn saw for the first time the brown, withered skin of the dead man. He frowned. “Is he . . . coloured?”
“Only by the peat. I’d say he was a Caucasian. Quite young. Late teens or early twenties. A classic bog body, almost perfectly preserved.”
“You’ve seen one before?”
“Never. But I’ve read about them. It’s the salt carried in the wind from the ocean that allows the peat moss to thrive here. And when the roots rot it creates acid. The acid preserves the body, almost pickling it. His organs should be virtually intact inside.”
Gunn gazed with unabashed curiosity at the almost mummified remains. “How did he die, Murdo?”
“Violently, by the looks of it. There appear to be several stab wounds in the area of the chest, and his throat has been cut. But it’ll take the pathologist to give you a definitive cause of death, George.” He stood up and peeled off his gloves. “Better get him out of here before the rain comes.”
Gunn nodded, but couldn’t take his eyes off the face of the young man locked in the peat. Although there was a shrivelled aspect to his features, they would be recognisable to anyone who knew him. Only the soft, exposed tissue of the eyes had decomposed. “How long’s he been here?”
Murdo’s laugh was lost in the wind. “Who knows? Hundreds of years, maybe even thousands. You’ll need an expert to tell you that.”
Two
Two
I don’t need to look at the clock to know the time.
It’s odd how the brown stain on the ceiling seems lighter in the mornings. The crystalline traces of mould that follow the crack through it seem somehow whiter. And strange how I always wake at the same hour. It’s not the light that creeps in around the edges of the curtains that does it, because there are so few hours of darkness at this time of year. It must be some internal clock. All those years rising with the dawn for the milking, and everything else that would fill the waking daylight hours. All gone now.
I quite enjoy looking at this stain on the ceiling. I don’t know why, but in the mornings it resembles a fine horse, saddled, and waiting to take me away to some brighter future. While at night, when it gets gloomy, it has a different mien. Like some rampant and horned creature ready to carry me off into darkness.