THE MOON BOG

Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has gone.
I was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard his screams when the
thing came to him; but all the peasants and police in County Meath could never
find him, or the others, though they searched long and far. And now I shudder
when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places.

I had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and had
congratulated him when he bought back the old castle by the bog at sleepy
Kilderry. It was from Kilderry that his father had come, and it was there that
he wished to enjoy his wealth among ancestral scenes. Men of his blood had once
ruled over Kilderry and built and dwelt in the castle, but those days were very
remote, so that for generations the castle had been empty and decaying. After he
went to Ireland, Barry wrote me often, and told me how under his care the gray
castle was rising tower by tower to its ancient splendor, how the ivy was
climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so many centuries ago,
and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the old days with his gold
from over the sea. But in time there came troubles, and the peasants ceased to
bless him, and fled away instead as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and
asked me to visit him, for he was lonely in the castle with no one to speak to
save the new servants and laborers he had brought from the North.

The bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night I came
to the castle. I had reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as the gold of the
sky lighted the green of the hills and groves and the blue of the bog, where on
a far islet a strange olden ruin glistened spectrally. That sunset was very
beautiful, but the peasants at Ballylough had warned me against it and said that
Kilderry had become accursed, so that I almost shuddered to see the high turrets
of the castle gilded with fire. Barry's motor had met me at the Ballylough
station, for Kilderry is off the railway. The villagers had shunned the car and
the driver from the North, but had whispered to me with pale faces when they saw
I was going to Kilderry. And that night, after our reunion, Barry told me why.

The peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain the great
bog. For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he
hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up. The
legends and superstitions of Kilderry did not move him, and he laughed when the
peasants first refused to help, and then cursed him and went away to Ballylough
with their few belongings as they saw his determination. In their place he sent
for laborers from the North, and when the servants left he replaced them
likewise. But it was lonely among strangers, so Barry had asked me to come.

When I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry, I laughed as
loudly as my friend had laughed, for these fears were of the vaguest, wildest,
and most absurd character. They had to do with some preposterous legend of the
bog, and a grim guardian spirit that dwelt in the strange olden ruin on the far
islet I had seen in the sunset. There were tales of dancing lights in the dark
of the moon, and of chill winds when the night was warm; of wraiths in white
hovering over the waters, and of an imagined city of stone deep down below the
swampy surface. But foremost among the weird fancies, and alone in its absolute
unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare to touch or drain
the vast reddish morass. There were secrets, said the peasants, which must not
be uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden since the plague came to the children
of Partholan in the fabulous years beyond history. In the Book of Invaders it is
told that these sons of the Greeks were all buried at Tallaght, but old men in
Kilderry said that one city was overlooked save by its patron moon--goddess; so
that only the wooded hills buried it when the men of Nemed swept down from
Scythia in their thirty ships.

Such were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry, and when I
heard them I did not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to listen. He had,
however, a great interest in antiquities, and proposed to explore the bog
thoroughly when it was drained. The white ruins on the islet he had often
visited, but though their age was plainly great, and their contour very little
like that of most ruins in Ireland, they were too dilapidated to tell the days
of their glory. Now the work of drainage was ready to begin, and the laborers
from the North were soon to strip the forbidden bog of its green moss and red
heather, and kill the tiny shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed
with rushes.

After Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels of the
day had been wearying and my host had talked late into the night. A man-servant
showed me to my room, which was in a remote tower overlooking the village and
the plain at the edge of the bog, and the bog itself; so that I could see from
my windows in the moonlight the silent roofs from which the peasants had fled
and which now sheltered the laborers from the North, and too, the parish church
with its antique spire, and far out across the brooding bog the remote olden
ruin on the islet gleaming white and spectral. Just as I dropped to sleep I
fancied I heard faint sounds from the distance; sounds that were wild and half
musical, and stirred me with a weird excitement which colored my dreams. But
when I awaked next morning I felt it had all been a dream, for the visions I had
seen were more wonderful than any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced
by the legends that Barry had related, my mind had in slumber hovered around a
stately city in a green valley, where marble streets and statues, villas and
temples, carvings and inscriptions, all spoke in certain tones the glory that
was Greece. When I told this dream to Barry we had both laughed; but I laughed
the louder, because he was perplexed about his laborers from the North. For the
sixth time they had all overslept, waking very slowly and dazedly, and acting as
if they had not rested, although they were known to have gone early to bed the
night before.

That morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded village and
talked now and then with idle laborers, for Barry was busy with the final plans
for beginning his work of drainage. The laborers were not as happy as they might
have been, for most of them seemed uneasy over some dream which they had had,
yet which they tried in vain to remember. I told them of my dream, but they were
not interested till I spoke of the weird sounds I thought I had heard. Then they
looked oddly at me, and said that they seemed to remember weird sounds, too.

In the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin the
drainage in two days. I was glad, for although I disliked to see the moss and
the heather and the little streams and lakes depart, I had a growing wish to
discern the ancient secrets the deep-matted peat might hide. And that night my
dreams of piping flutes and marble peristyles came to a sudden and disquieting
end; for upon the city in the valley I saw a pestilence descend, and then a
frightful avalanche of wooded slopes that covered the dead bodies in the streets
and left unburied only the temple of Artemis on the high peak, where the aged
moon-priestess Cleis lay cold and silent with a crown of ivory on her silver
head.

I have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could not tell
whether I was waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes still rang shrilly in
my ears; but when I saw on the floor the icy moonbeams and the outlines of a
latticed gothic window, I decided I must be awake and in the castle of Kilderry.
Then I heard a clock from some remote landing below strike the hour of two, and
knew I was awake. Yet still there came that monstrous piping from afar; wild,
weird airs that made me think of some dance of fauns on distant Maenalus. It
would not let me sleep, and in impatience I sprang up and paced the floor. Only
by chance did I go to the north window and look out upon the silent village and
the plain at the edge of the bog. I had no wish to gaze abroad, for I wanted to
sleep; but the flutes tormented me, and I had to do or see something. How could
I have suspected the thing I was to behold?

There in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle which no
mortal, having seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of reedy pipes that
echoed over the bog there glided silently and eerily a mixed throng of swaying
figures, reeling through such a revel as the Sicilians may have danced to
Demeter in the old days under the harvest moon beside the Cyane. The wide plain,
the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms, and above all the shrill
monotonous piping, produced an effect which almost paralyzed me; yet I noted
amidst my fear that half of these tireless mechanical dancers were the laborers
whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy beings in
white, half-indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the
haunted fountains of the bog. I do not know how long I gazed at this sight from
the lonely turret window before I dropped suddenly in a dreamless swoon, out of
which the high sun of morning aroused me.

My first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and observations to
Denys Barry, but as I saw the sunlight glowing through the latticed east window
I became sure that there was no reality in what I thought I had seen. I am given
to strange fantasms, yet am never weak enough to believe in them; so on this
occasion contented myself with questioning the laborers, who slept very late and
recalled nothing of the previous night save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This
matter of the spectral piping harassed me greatly, and I wondered if the
crickets of autumn had come before their time to vex the night and haunt the
visions of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in the library poring over his
plans for the great work which was to begin on the morrow, and for the first
time felt a touch of the same kind of fear that had driven the peasants away.
For some unknown reason I dreaded the thought of disturbing the ancient bog and
its sunless secrets, and pictured terrible sights lying black under the
unmeasured depth of age-old peat. That these secrets should be brought to light
seemed injudicious, and I began to wish for an excuse to leave the castle and
the village. I went so far as to talk casually to Barry on the subject, but did
not dare continue after he gave his resounding laugh. So I was silent when the
sun set fulgently over the far hills, and Kilderry blazed all red and gold in a
flame that seemed a portent.

Whether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall never
ascertain. Certainly they transcend anything we dream of in nature and the
universe; yet in no normal fashion can I explain those disappearances which were
known to all men after it was over. I retired early and full of dread, and for a
long time could not sleep in the uncanny silence of the tower. It was very dark,
for although the sky was clear the moon was now well in the wane, and would not
rise till the small hours. I thought as I lay there of Denys Barry, and of what
would befall that bog when the day came, and found myself almost frantic with an
impulse to rush out into the night, take Barry's car, and drive madly to
Ballylough out of the menaced lands. But before my fears could crystallize into
action I had fallen asleep, and gazed in dreams upon the city in the valley,
cold and dead under a shroud of hideous shadow.

Probably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was not what I
noticed first when I opened my eyes. I was lying with my back to the east window
overlooking the bog, where the waning moon would rise, and therefore expected to
see light cast on the opposite wall before me; but I had not looked for such a
sight as now appeared. Light indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not
any light that the moon gives. Terrible and piercing was the shaft of ruddy
refulgence that streamed through the gothic window, and the whole chamber was
brilliant with a splendor intense and unearthly. My immediate actions were
peculiar for such a situation, but it is only in tales that a man does the
dramatic and foreseen thing. Instead of looking out across the bog toward the
source of the new light, I kept my eyes from the window in panic fear, and
clumsily drew on my clothing with some dazed idea of escape. I remember seizing
my revolver and hat, but before it was over I had lost them both without firing
the one or donning the other. After a time the fascination of the red radiance
overcame my fright, and I crept to the east window and looked out whilst the
maddening, incessant piping whined and reverberated through the castle and over
all the village.

Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring
from the strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I can not
describe--I must have been mad, for it seemed to rise majestic and undecayed,
splendid and column-cinctured, the flame--reflecting marble of its entablature
piercing the sky like the apex of a temple on a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked
and drums began to beat, and as I watched in awe and terror I thought I saw dark
saltant forms silhouetted grotesquely against the vision of marble and
effulgence. The effect was titanic--altogether unthinkable--and I might have
stared indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow stronger at
my left. Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy, I crossed the
circular room to the north window from which I could see the village and the
plain at the edge of the bog. There my eyes dilated again with a wild wonder as
great as if I had not just turned from a scene beyond the pale of nature, for on
the ghastly red-litten plain was moving a procession of beings in such a manner
as none ever saw before save in nightmares.

Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly
retreating toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations
suggesting some ancient and solemn ceremonial dance. Their waving translucent
arms, guided by the detestable piping of those unseen flutes, beckoned in
uncanny rhythm to a throng of lurching laborers who followed doglike with blind,
brainless, floundering steps as if dragged by a clumsy but resistless
demon-will. As the naiads neared the bog, without altering their course, a new
line of stumbling stragglers zigzagged drunkenly out of the castle from some
door far below my window, groped sightlessly across the courtyard and through
the intervening bit of village, and joined the floundering column of laborers on
the plain. Despite their distance below me I at once knew they were the servants
brought from the North, for I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook,
whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The flutes piped
horribly, and again I heard the beating of the drums from the direction of the
island ruin. Then silently and gracefully the naiads reached the water and
melted one by one into the ancient bog; while the line of followers, never
checking their speed, splashed awkwardly after them and vanished amidst a tiny
vortex of unwholesome bubbles which I could barely see in the scarlet light. And
as the last pathetic straggler, the fat cook, sank heavily out of sight in that
sullen pool, the flutes and the drums grew silent, and the blinding red rays
from the ruins snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village of doom lone and
desolate in the wan beams of a new-risen moon.

My condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I was mad
or sane, sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful numbness. I believe
I did ridiculous things such as offering prayers to Artemis, Latona, Demeter,
Persephone, and Plouton. All that I recalled of a classic youth came to my lips
as the horrors of the situation roused my deepest superstitions. I felt that I
had witnessed the death of a whole village, and knew I was alone in the castle
with Denys Barry, whose boldness had brought down a doom. As I thought of him,
new terrors convulsed me, and I fell to the floor; not fainting, but physically
helpless. Then I felt the icy blast from the east window where the moon had
risen, and began to hear the shrieks in the castle far below me. Soon those
shrieks had attained a magnitude and quality which can not be written of, and
which makes me faint as I think of them. All I can say is that they came from
something I had known as a friend.

At some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the screaming must
have roused me, for my next impression is of racing madly through inky rooms and
corridors and out across the courtyard into the hideous night. They found me at
dawn wandering mindless near Ballylough, but what unhinged me utterly was not
any of the horrors I had seen or heard before. What I muttered about as I came
slowly out of the shadows was a pair of fantastic incidents which occurred in my
flight: incidents of no significance, yet which haunt me unceasingly when I am
alone in certain marshy places or in the moonlight.

As I fled from that accursed castle along the bog's edge I heard a new sound:
common, yet unlike any I had heard before at Kilderry. The stagnant waters,
lately quite devoid of animal life, now teemed with a horde of slimy enormous
frogs which piped shrilly and incessantly in tones strangely out of keeping with
their size. They glistened bloated and green in the moonbeams, and seemed to
gaze up at the fount of light. I followed the gaze of one very fat and ugly
frog, and saw the second of the things which drove my senses away.

Stretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the waning
moon, my eyes seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance having no
reflection in the waters of the bog. And upward along that pallid path my
fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a vague contorted shadow
struggling as if drawn by unseen demons. Crazed as I was, I saw in that awful
shadow a monstrous resemblance--a nauseous, unbelievable caricature--a
blasphemous effigy of him who had been Denys Barry.