The Transect Lines at Quarrington Fen

I'll tell you the rule first because you'll want it before anything else makes sense. You never walk the same transect twice in a day. Out then back is fine. Out, back, and out again on the same line, that you don't do. Sam told me that my first week and didn't explain it, and I didn't ask, because by then I'd already noticed the flags moving.

We were doing soil cores for the drainage board, the two of us, out on the fen past Quarrington where the ditches are older than the maps. Two hundred metre transects, a core every twenty, GPS logged, little orange flags to mark where we'd been so we didn't double up. Ordinary work. Wet boots, midges, a flask of tea gone cold by ten. Sam had a habit of tapping the GPS unit twice against his palm before he trusted the reading, like it was a barometer. I never asked him why. I wish I had, now, though I doubt it would have been about this.

The fen doesn't look like much. Flat reed and sedge, black water in the dykes, willow scrub gone leggy where nobody's cut it back in years. It's not still the way a field is still, though. The reeds lean toward you when you stop, just slightly, the way grass does in wind, except there wasn't any wind that morning. I checked. I'd noticed it before and wanted to be wrong about it.

The flags were the first proper thing. I planted eleven along transect four, twenty metres apart, exactly the way I'd done it forty times before. Went back for the twelfth core and there were only nine standing. Not fallen. Gone, sockets and all, like nobody had ever pushed a stick into that ground.

Sam wasn't with me that day. He was doing transect six on the far side of the old sluice, out of shout range if the wind was wrong. It wasn't wrong. That's the part I keep coming back to. I called his name and heard him answer, quite normal, quite close, and I walked toward the sound and never got any closer to it. The distance stayed exactly the distance it had been. I want you to understand I wasn't running. I was walking at a fair pace across flat ground toward a voice that didn't get any louder or any nearer, for what felt like twenty minutes. My watch said six.

I stopped because stopping was the only thing left to try. The voice stopped too, the second I did, like it had been keeping time with my steps rather than making its own.

I found Sam's flags an hour later. All eleven still standing, in a line that didn't run anywhere near where transect six should have been. It went into the willow scrub and out the other side into a stretch of open fen I didn't recognise, and I do that ground for a living. Or I did.

His boots were at flag nine. Just the boots, laced, standing upright the way you'd leave them by a front door.

I didn't go past flag nine that day. I've read what the coroner's officer wrote about exposure and disorientation and I've signed my name under statements that use those words because there wasn't a better word offered to me. I keep thinking I should have corrected the report where it says flag ten. It was nine. I've told this enough times now that I want to get that right at least.

I'm going back out there Thursday to finish the transect. I've got new flags in the van, and a line on the map that stops at nine. I'm going to walk it properly this time, past where his boots were, all the way to twelve, and I'm not going to look at what's growing along the edge of it while I count my steps out loud.