Cold Vengeance

He stopped. The trail had ended in a broad, quaking pool of muck. He looked around for cairns that might lead through it and saw none. Hell, he hadn’t been paying attention. He turned, looking back over the trail on which he had come. Now that he looked at it, it didn’t look like a trail — more a linked series of dirt patches. He started to retrace his steps, then stopped: there seemed to be two ways he could have come in, two wandering paths. Examining them both closely, he couldn’t see his footprints in the hard surface, now puddled with rain. He straightened up and sca

He took a deep breath. The cairns were placed a couple of hundred yards apart. He couldn’t be more than a hundred yards from the last. All he had to do was go slow, take it easy, stay calm, and get his ass back to the previous cairn.

He took the right-hand path and moved slowly, stopping every now and then to peer ahead for the cairn. After going about fifty yards, he concluded that this could not be the way he’d come — the cairn would have been visible by now. Fine; he would take the other path. He turned back and retraced his steps about fifty yards, but for some reason it didn’t return to the fork in the trail that had puzzled him previously. He went a little farther, thinking he had misjudged the distance — only to find the trail dead-ending at another bog.

He stopped, controlled his breathing. All right: he was lost. But he wasn’t that lost. He still couldn’t be more than one or two hundred yards from the last cairn. What he had to do was look around. He would not move until he had oriented himself and knew where he was going.

The rain gusted, and he could feel a cold trickle down his back. Ignoring the sensation, he took stock. He seemed to be in a bowl-like depression. The horizon was perhaps a mile away on all sides, but it was hard to tell with the incessantly moving mists. He started to take out his map and then shoved it back into his pocket. What good would that do? He cursed himself for not bringing a compass. At least with a compass, he could have known his general direction. He looked at his watch: one thirty. About three hours to sunset.

“Damn,” he said aloud, and then, louder: “Damn!”

That made him feel better. He picked a point on the horizon and began to scrutinize it for a cairn. And there it was — a distant vertical scratch in the shifting mists.

He worked his way toward it, stepping from one gravelly patch to the next. But the bogs conspired to block his every turn: he kept having to go first one way, then another, and then retrace, until it seemed he was stuck on some sort of snake-like island in the middle of the bogs. Christ, he could see the stupid cairn not two hundred yards away!

Coming to a narrow stretch of bog, he spied the trail itself ru

He was almost there. He reached his foot across one large gap, placed it on a hillock, pushed off with the other foot — and lost his balance. With an involuntary yell he tried to leap over the last piece of mire to hard ground, came up short, and landed in the bog with a heavy smack.

As the clammy muck settled around his thighs, pure, hysterical panic took over. With another yell he tried to wrench one leg free, but the movement only pulled the rest of him in deeper. His panic spiked. Yanking the other leg had the same effect; struggling just sucked his body deeper into the icy pressure of the mud, the effort releasing bursts of bubbles that broke all around him, enveloping him in the stench of swamp rot.

“Help!” he cried, the small part of his brain not yet in panic mode registering how stupid the cry was. “Help me!” The muck was now above his waist; his arms flailed instinctively, trying to push himself out, but this merely anchored both his arms and drew him in deeper. It was as if he were fastened in a straitjacket. He thrashed, trying to get at least one arm free, but he was powerless, like a fly in honey, sinking slowly and helplessly into the mire.

“Help me, for God’s sake!” D’Agosta screamed, his voice echoing over the empty moors.

You idiot, that small rational part of his brain told him, stop moving. Every movement was driving him farther under. With a superhuman effort, he willed his panic into submission.

Take a deep breath. Wait. Don’t move.

It was hard to breathe with the pressure of the mud encircling his chest. It was up to the tops of his shoulders, but by not moving, by remaining absolutely still, he almost seemed to have stopped sinking. He waited, trying to overcome the panicky sensation of the mud creeping up toward his neck, slower now. Finally it stopped. He waited in the driving rain until he realized that he had, in fact, stopped sinking; he was stable, in equilibrium.

Not only that, he now realized he was only five feet from the trail on the other side.

With exquisite slowness he began to raise one arm, keeping his fingers straight, extracting it slowly from the muck, avoiding any suction, giving the mud time to flow around it as he drew it out.

A miracle. His arm was free. Keeping it buoyed above the surface, he ever so slowly leaned forward. There was a huge moment of panic as he felt the mud creep up his neck, but by immersing more of his upper body he could feel a buoyancy effect on his lower extremities, and his feet felt like they might have risen just a little. As he leaned forward more, his feet rose in response. Gingerly, he immersed part of his head in the muck, which increased the effect and brought his legs up still more, tilting his body toward the embankment of the bog. Keeping as relaxed as possible, moving with agonizing slowness, he continued leaning forward and — just as the mud came up to his nose — he managed to reach out and grasp a branch of heather.

With slow, easy pressure, he drew his body toward the embankment until his chin rested on the grass. Then he extracted his other arm — slowly, very slowly — and reached out with it as well, grasping another bush and pulling himself out onto firm ground.

He lay there, feeling a wash of infinite relief. Slowly the pounding of his heart subsided. The heavy rain began to rinse the mud from him.

After a minute or two, he managed to stand up. He was chilled to the very bone, dripping with foul-smelling mud, his teeth chattering. He held up his wrist and let the rain wash the mud from his watch: four o’clock.

Four o’clock! No wonder it was getting so dark. The sun set early in October in these northern climes.

He felt himself shivering uncontrollably. The wind was gusting, the rain was lashing down, and he could hear rumbles of thunder. He didn’t even have a flashlight or a lighter. This was insane — he was risking hypothermia. Thank God he had found the trail. Squinting into the gloom, he saw the cairn ahead that he had been trying so hard to reach.

After shaking off as much mud as he could, he started cautiously toward it. As he approached, however, it began to look wrong somehow. Too thin. And then when he came up to it, he saw what it really was — a small dead tree trunk, stripped and silvered and scoured by the wind.