The Bog-lings

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

The first night, it had been an evening clenched by mist in the early spring of 1847. A gloomy night when the forest near Moeras crept with nocturnal creatures that howled or skittered across the sunken ground. The lonely cabin crouched under the shade of twin dogwoods that stooped over the slanted shack with needle-like branches and white blossoms that floated through the whistling wind. Through the sighing fog, you could just make out a rickety skeleton of the old fence surrounding the island of jagged rock that waited in the center of a churning, black bog.

That late eve in March, a fire sparked from a single candle that pierced through the clawing tendrils of mist. It gleamed until there resounded a loud, burbling slurp deep inside the marsh. The sound of something that wriggled sank below the murk into the cool mud. Then the light simply blinked and disappeared.

The next spring, and every spring since, the glow in the window would return, reappearing in the dead of night. But it brought with it, a lumbering shadow. A shadow that haunted those living in Moeras during those foul springs.

The morning before the candle sprang to life for the first time, shouts were heard in the streets of the marshland town. Fingers were pointed towards the shoemaker’s shop where an elderly man, called Pim, lived for over ninety lonesome years in the tiny upper alcove. The store windows were smeared with grime and covered in dozens of muddy handprints that climbed up the wall and onto the roof of the musty shop. Mangled vines wound their way around the porch and sprouted up through the floorboards overnight, entangled with what looked like nests of human hair. Eyes drew especially to the sight of the entry, whereupon the door had been scrawled a straight line with two open circles and one word placed in tarish, black mud.

Omlaag.

The old man stammered, petrified and in a state of delirium, to speak of a crooked-backed thing with a cloak of twisted roots, a skirt of moss, and a bonnet formed by trails of Creeping Jenny wavering in its wake. It had pressed its head and hands expectantly against the dirty storefront, showing no distinguishable features upon its slimy face. Worms crawled from its eyes and when it unhinged its pointed jaw, clumps of mud spilled out in rivers onto the porch.

The shoemaker had only seen it for a moment, for it had swiftly absconded in a filmy blur. Later, a violent fever overcame the old man. His arms and legs failed to move, becoming thicker than lead. Speech failed him as his tongue rolled heavy in the saliva gathering in his mouth. As his pulse rapidly quickened, he began to tremble uncontrollably until he toppled over at the foot of his stairs, continuing to flail on the floor like a worm caught on a hook. That was where they found him the next morning, after spotting the signs upon his door and the evidence of a visitor in the night. They sent for the doctor but could hardly understand what had transpired.

The doors were locked and barred. Not a soul had been seen outside Pim’s store.

When the paleness of day dwindled, the candle lit beyond the fog, arousing the growing fear in the small town of Moeras. And on the following morning, the shoemaker had vanished from his bed. All that was left behind were the nightcap and Long John’s neatly laid out over the straw mattress.

A few years passed and all was not well. The mark manifested once again on the door of the ancient parsonage along with the splatterings of filth that came in tandem. Omlaag. A vertical line and two circles at either end were plastered on the white wood. The trail fell in sequence from the chapel steps to the top of the steeple, where weeds dangled in swinging strands from the church's rusted bell. The minister’s wife, Julia, had seen a face during another chronic fit of insomnia. It peered over her through the second floor window beside her bed, untethered to the ground. Within her frightened ramblings, she had sputtered about gray tangles, black teeth, and gnarled claws scraping against the stained glass. Then a fever set in, and she too, fell out of bed in a twist of thrashing convulsions before losing consciousness.

They kept watch over her when the candle glowed in the boghut. Yet, when dawn came, Julia was missing, leaving behind her nightgown and muddy tracks that led out onto the sodden road.

Year after year, another soul was stolen, their homes collapsing under the death grip of pestilent growth reaching out from the earth and pulling whatever it ensnared down into the deep black underworld. A final victim was collected, without a warning from the light across the bog. Annelies, the physician’s only daughter, was mute and walked with a hobble ever since she was small. That last evening, the town heard a howling moan from her room and found it empty with Omlaag written across her door and weeds breaking through the crumbling ceiling near where she had been at rest.

No one knew what had happened to these people of Moeras or where they had gone, not until a disastrous storm plagued the town with ceaseless rains. Water poured from the green sky until floods rose to cover the streets in a chaotic stream that flowed into the bog. During the furor, a bolt of lightning arced from the clouds and struck one of the dogwood trees that once stood watch over the empty cabin. It erupted in a red blaze before crashing through the roof of the abandoned hut, ripping itself from its submerged roots. When the storm stopped and the floodwaters finally drained away, the marshland had been shuffled around as if dislocated by a divine hand. Debris lodged itself in the muck, protruding at awkward angles and leaving the roads and yards waterlogged and filled with random detritus.

In the misty haze that settled overhead, the townsfolk laid down sturdy planks to form a bridge into the bog, in order to clear what remained of the damaged hut and the dogwood that had penetrated the flimsy roof. Inside, they found an empty shack, just as they expected, except for one item that rang familiar in the town’s memory. Thousands of broken bottles lay scattered amongst the rubble, once containing a clear, odorless substance that gathered in pools on the portions of floor that remained intact. Amongst the refuse was a yellowed label, marked with a line and two open circles.

For weeks they worked to clear the wreckage, sawing the charred dogwood into portions to be removed. But as they did so, it was discovered that something had been carved into the trunk with some kind of tool or scalpel.

Omlaag.

Down, it meant. Down. Below. And Underneath.

Under the roots of the tree, they found traces of knots formed by black, red, and gray locks entangled with plants and critters. Terror began to swell once again when they saw the word had also been scratched into the second tree, which had managed not to be uprooted during the storm. The townsfolk brought it down in the span of one dismal afternoon. Expecting to find more clumps of hair or more deposits of broken miscellaneous that must have washed out from the town.

But when the tree came down and piles of earth were dug out with spades, there lay the answer.

Pale, stretched faces stared up at them. Hollow eyes and mouths opened wide and filled with mud and crawling insects. They were buried in such thick layers of icy muck that their bodies were preserved as well as if they had been embalmed and entombed. Faces were twisted in a final gasp for breath while they had sunk beneath the bog, only to be dredged up from the bottom when the floods came. It wiped away the grime just enough so that their features were recognizable in the dim light of day.

An old man with withering skin. A woman whose struggle would be forever captured in a voiceless cry. Only one had its clothes still on them, a corpse immediately known by the awkward break of its deformed leg.

All were kept until they suffocated beneath the bog. Kept from the air. Kept from the light. There were dozens among the lifeless faces caught in a perpetual state of panic. Some even from times long forgotten by the town of Moeras. Drowned and kept cold as they were consumed by the bitter black of the swallowing bog.