Below

The night hummed.

Despite it being the deepest ditch of the night - an internal clock and his heavy eyelids said one in the morning, perhaps two - the swamp was alive with noise. Mosquitoes and no-see-ums whirred around his head in a relentless cloud, filling his ears with their tuneless whining. Frogs croaked and crickets chirruped in the long grass. The breeze sang through the trees lining the bog. Deep in the brush, an owl hooted.

Like an orchestra without a conductor, the parts faded in and out at will, weaving a complex, discordant but not unpleasant song as they rose and fell. It was the sound of wild places, completely devoid of the hum of generators or the ratchet of chainsaws or any evidence of human passage at all.

Wyatt had never been much of an outdoorsman - how could he be, when his job was paving paradise (to quote Joni Mitchell) - but he'd never hated the outdoors, never derived any sort of pleasure from seeing woodlands fall and fields eaten by concrete, not like some of the other construction foremans he'd met. Until now, he'd been an impartial executioner.

Now, he'd cheerfully hand over the whole of his bank account to see barren wasteland in front of him instead.

The stretches of standing water dotting the grassy field tossed up shards of moonlight.  Dead spruce trees stood like bleached fingerbones pointing towards the bottomless sky. He used them as guides, knowing that the ground would be stronger around their roots. The soft, mossy surface jiggled and squished beneath his bare feet, raspy blades of grass slicing his exposed skin. The sting was overshadowed by the chill of the water that occasionally rose through thinner peat when he put his weight on it.

His mind was instinctively drawn down, down below him to where ten feet of mud and water and rotting vegetation (but not just vegetation) waited patiently for him to misstep and punch through.

Wyatt picked his way through the swamp, shivering in only a t-shirt and flannel pyjama bottoms, his thoughts running as fast as the gauzy clouds scudding across the dim moon overhead. The last thing he could remember was falling asleep in his trailer, though this was no dream.

It was the way all of them had gone, one after the other.

He had no idea where he was in the bog, or how far he'd wandered before waking, or even what direction he had come from, but he was determined to get back. Nobody had returned after disappearing. He refused to follow that pattern. He would not die out here.

It had all started with the discovery of the bodies.

The first had been dredged up by the peat cutting equipment.  They'd dragged her rubbery, deflated body out of the blades sure they'd discovered a recent murder victim. Her clothing, preserved by the peat, had dispelled the notion. She - and it had been a girl, thin with small breasts and braided hair - had been dressed in a skirt, tunic and moccasins straight out of a tacky tourist shop, only real.

The tannins in the water had turned her skin and eyes black as coal. Her facial features had been frozen in a silent scream.

They'd put her in an icebox, radioed in the find, and gone back to work. A half hour later, they'd found the second. Two hours later, the third.

When they'd run out of room in the freezers, they'd laid them out on tarpaulins under the noonday sun, a dozen crumpled black pastries set out on blue baking trays, sizzling in the heat and sending out not the fragrant aroma of icing sugar or fresh bread but the pungent reek of ungutted corpses encountering oxygen for the first time in three hundred years.

By the time someone had been able to drive up with a freezer van and take a load back to Toronto, the corpses had been leaking black goo and his men had taken to spraying their collars with deodorant. When he had learned it would be a week before the return trip, Wyatt had relented and allowed them to dump the corpses into one of the drained mud holes. The job had been completed with a chorus of miserable gagging.