“What is that?” I stammered as he removed his paper, revealing the Celtic cross-engraved signpost I’d seen with Gavin. Or thought I’d seen, anyway.
“That, ladies and gentlemen, is perhaps one of the most famous remaining Pictish stones,” Mr. Drackle said, almost wheezing with excitement. “Left behind by the Pict tribe, believed to have been named such by the Romans for their elaborate blue, full-body tattoos. You’ll all know this towering specimen is called the Maiden Stone, but does anyone know why?” He wisely didn’t stop to wait for an answer. “Legend has it that a young maiden bet her hand in marriage that she could bake a bannock—”
“A plate of scones,” Jo whispered in translation for me.
“—faster than a handsome stranger could build a road to the top of a local mountain. He won, of course, because he was the Devil disguised. She ran away, praying, and God turned her to stone for her safety. That missing piece is where the Devil grabbed her shoulder as she fled.”
The fact that my teacher had a demonic story about the familiar stone confirmed it for me, along with the fact that there was no sign of a village: I had dreamed the entire thing. As I walked past the stone, my head started pounding, and I wondered if déjà vu was supposed to hurt so badly.
The farther I got from the cursed artifact, the quicker the pain subsided. While the class spread out all over the valley, our group followed Elsie toward a marshy bit to seek out the flower specimens.
We were still about thirty yards away from the murky, standing water, when suddenly my boot sank in invisible mud. It was like stepping off a small ledge; one minute I was walking on seemingly normal ground, and the next, the ground gave way. I looked down and saw that my entire left foot had disappeared in the earth, which had greedily closed in around my boot at the ankle. It was so weird; the right foot was standing on a piece of ground that looked exactly like the spot where my left foot was now submerged.
While I stared at the mystery that was my buried foot, the mud must have congealed or turned super sticky, because when I tried to lift my foot out, it wouldn’t budge.
I couldn’t believe my foot was really stuck. In a heroic act of idiocy, I tried to pretend it wasn’t and just walk forward, and almost ripped my leg off. I caught my balance just before I fell and did any serious damage.
“Hey, Stuart!” I yelled.
He turned and saw me standing unevenly, one foot set deeper than the other.
“Och, you’ve found the bog then!” he hollered. He whistled for the others, and then walked back to me.
“This isn’t the bog,” I said, pointing ahead to where the ground actually was all muddy and wet. “That is. This is just dry ground.”
“Then where, might I ask, is your left foot?”
“I must have stepped in a little hole or something,” I replied.
He stopped in front of me and smiled. “Then step out,” he said, crossing his arms across his chest.
“I tried,” I answered. “I can’t. My boot’s stuck.”
“That’s because you’ve stepped in the bog,” he said. “Here, put your hands on my shoulders. Let’s get you out of the boot, and then we’ll get the boot out of the bog. They’ll never come out together.”
I did as he said and eased my foot out of my boot, then hopped one-legged over to Jo. Stuart bent down, twisted my Wellie, and then with both hands yanked it upward. There was a loud sucking sound as the ground resisted, but he was able to free my shoe from its underground prison. He placed it on solid ground next to me with a small flourish. The bottom half of the boot was covered with a light tan mud that dried the second it hit the air. I stepped back into it and thanked him.
“My pleasure,” he said, bowing exaggeratedly.
Elsie came stomping up. “What’s the hold up?” she demanded.
“Maren just met the bog,” Stuart said.
“Don’t you know to watch where you step out here?” she said, disgusted, before stomping off. I couldn’t believe a girl who looked like Scottish Barbie was advising me on hiking.
“I know the bogs are deep,” I said, “but I thought that was the bog over there.”
“The bog is everywhere,” Stuart said.
As we all continued our walk toward the obviously wet bog, I tested each step with my toe before I committed to it. This slowed me down a lot, but Stuart hung back with me.
A bank of mist started to roll in, blocking the sun and giving the whole area a spooky feel.
“This is so weird,” I said to Stuart. “Does the mist always just come in like this, out of nowhere?”
“Yeah, especially over the bog,” he intoned. “The bog is no joke. People have used it for centuries to hide their dirty deeds.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like their dead bodies. Dump one in the bog, and no one will ever be able to find it.”
“You’re making that up,” I said.
“No, I swear, there’s no bottom to the bog,” Stuart said, “and the police can’t skim it or anything, so the bodies stay sunk forever. Well, not forever. Every couple of years, it’ll spit a body back up for no reason and everyone will go doo-lally.”
“This is total fiction,” I said.
“It’s true,” he protested. “National Geographic’s done tons of documentaries about bog bodies, because the chemicals in the peat preserve ’em like mummies.”
I did remember an article about mummified bodies, when scientists discovered some ancient dude in the ice in Greenland. Maybe he isn’t pulling my leg.
Satisfied he had my attention, he continued. “A few years ago, a body popped out of the bog that they decided had been in there forty years. So the police started looking through all the missing persons reports from back then. They found that this local lady had disappeared, without a trace, and they went and visited her husband. They told this old man they’d found her body, and he went crazy, thinking she had come back to seek her revenge. He confessed to everything—that he had killed her and thrown her body in the bog.”
“That’s awesome,” I said. “She got him back.”
“It’s even better than that,” he said, “because after he was in jail, the forensics guys figured out the body was actually four hundred years old, not forty. He confessed for no reason.”
“No way,” I said.
“’Tis true,” he answered. “You can ask anyone. The bog is to be feared. Beware the bog.”
“Beware the bog?” I said.
“Aye, beware the bog.”
“What are we looking for, again?” Elsie asked, clearly sick of wading through the wet grass and mud. We’d been wandering the moors for two hours, and still hadn’t found half of the things on our lists. Most of the class was scattered around the bog’s edge now, including Mr. Drackle.
“What are you missing?” he asked Elsie.
“I can’t find the blaeberry,” she whined.
“Ah, the noble blaeberry,” he said. “Also called black-hearts in the nineteenth century. Has anyone read Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native?”