by Grace Draven
He touched the camera in his pocket. Better move it to the bag, in case he had to wade. He was just cinching down the go-bag’s flap when he looked out over the spring, where the fireflies were gathering in a glowing green dance that rose and fell like a tiny whirlwind looping back on itself.
There, lit by the last of the sunlight, was Jenny’s little shack, standing on its mossy piers, half in and half out of the water. It was so close he couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t seen it before that moment.
He had circled the spring.
There had been no channel.
No channel, no outflow where that mighty throat full of water ebbed away into the swamp. No point where he’d waded, rather than walked, where he could pretend to have found where the spring broke through the scrub, something to follow. No gap in the sweetgum fence.
It was impossible.
“No!” he shouted, and the cry echoed up and down the spring. The woodpeckers quieted, the fireflies paused in their swirling. “God dammit, no!”
“Why, there you be, Charles Napier,” Jenny called, standing waist-deep in the water not far from her treacherous sandy beach where she devoured the live white crabs. His relief at seeing her was so enormous, so overwhelming, that he stumbled to a lurching run past her shack. The buzzard had its head tucked under its wing where it sat on her porch.
“You’re not dead,” he gasped, splashing a step or two into the water, soaking his boots. The water was cool and welcome to his hot, sore feet.
Jenny laughed. “Why, whatever give you that idea?” She came out of the water, taking his hand, bringing him back to shore. “Oh, look at you. Your poor face. You’s all burned and cracked.”
Napier couldn’t look away from her, from the wet blonde hair dripping water over her breasts and down her sweetly curved belly, and below.
“You’re not dead,” he repeated, catching hold of her shoulders.
“Did you find what you was looking for? Them birds?” While he gawked, she was busy, slipping the bag from his shoulder, unbuckling his belt, unbuttoning his shirt. “What you need is a cool swim and a long, long drink.”
“I found the birds,” he said, feeling dizzy and unsteady. He remembered this sensation from the Middle East. It was impending sunstroke. “I found them. I have the proof. But now I have to go. You have to help me leave, Jenny. Show me the way through the sweetgums. I know there’s a way.”
For answer, she put her mouth to his chest, her cool tongue against a nipple, jolting him into an awareness that overrode his exhaustion. Her mouth moved slowly upward, and behind its coolness against his raw skin came the scratching sting, like a thousand tiny needle-pricks. “You ain’t got to go, Charles Napier. Not right yet, anyway. It’s almost dark.”
He was naked again, without real knowledge of how he’d gotten that way, and Jenny was walking backward into the water, pulling him along. Her eyes shone with pleased welcome. Her smile was closed-mouthed but sweet, and when she held up cupped handfuls for him to drink, he swallowed it down, handful after handful. Then she sat him down on the sandy bottom so that the water lapped at his chest, and gently rinsed the sweat of the day from his body.
When Jenny touched him, beneath the water, and guided his hardness inside herself, he surrendered with a terrible sense of inevitability.
“You done come home, Charles Napier,” Jenny whispered into his ear, riding him, riding him. “You done come home.”
“Yes,” Napier gasped, lying back, letting the water close over his head. It was…better, easier that way. Jenny’s mouth fastened on his, a kiss that parted his lips and fed him air one silver bubble at a time.
He didn’t drown, though for a very long time he wasn’t certain about that. After a while, she led him up the stairs of her shack. He supposed, dimly, that this was what had happened last night. Jenny settled him on her nest of tied sheets and moss, and stood beside it, looking down at him. There were fireflies in her hair—mysteriously dry now, despite him distinctly perceiving the two of them completely underwater as they mated.
No other term, still, fit the description. It was the anonymous closeness of animals, of fish, the slippery twining of amphibians and snakes. And yet he wanted it as he had wanted nothing else in his life, except maybe more water from the spring to drink. When Jenny walked away from him for a moment he reached out for her, fingers brushing her ankle. He looked at the slime that came away on his fingertips. This, too, he remembered.
“What are you, Jenny?”
“Jus’ Jenny,” she said, hands busy with something at the table. When she turned back to him, a magnolia leaf lay in her palm. Something white lay on the leaf. A firefly crept down her body between her breasts, its lamp lit, and it seemed that was all the light Napier needed in the darkness of the shack. She was beautiful and strange, painted with a pale menace in the green light of the insects. Utterly inhuman. She brought the leaf to him like an offering, and knelt beside him. “You be hungry.”
The magnolia leaf’s odor filled his nostrils, a sharp, cutting green scent with a dusty, musky undertone. White crab legs, freshly broken from the body, lay on the leaf.
He felt sick at the sight of them, remembering the chewed bits of claw he had vomited that morning. This, too, they had done last night. He wanted more spring water. “No.”
She nibbled a leg delicately, crunching shell and all. “Hungry. I can tell.”
He reached out for the firefly between her breasts and watched it crawl onto his finger. Where it passed, it left a thin trail of luminescence that glowed for a second or two before fading. He held his finger to Jenny’s nipple. The insect crept onto her breast, and she smiled, looking down at herself, where his finger stayed, exploring the way her nipple peaked and puckered at his touch. “Or maybe you ain’t hungry for food, not just yet, Charles Napier.”
“Not just yet,” he agreed.
Jenny set the leaf aside and stretched out beside him in the nest. She turned a sly smile to him, propped on her elbows, lying on her belly. “You should eat.”
“Not just yet,” he repeated. He touched her ribcage, marveling that her hair was so dry while the rest of her was still moist, slippery with that mucus and slime like a fresh-caught bream. He tried a tentative lick at her shoulder; she was neither fishy nor smelly, merely slick. He moved aside her hair and traced around her shoulder blade. High on her back, just to the left of her spine, was a small wound, a cut with raw, tender-looking edges. There was no blood, just the lips of the wound, parted and gaping.
“What happened here?” His fingers traced the edge and she arched upward with a soft, keening cry that reminded him of the calls of the ivory-billed woodpeckers.
“Don’t you remember, Charles Napier?” she asked, but then she turned her hips toward him and drew up her knees, exposing a different tender wound to him, and he sank inside her once more.
This, then—this too they had done last night. He remembered that much, sliding deep, liking the way she pushed hard against him. No quarter given; no quarter asked.
Later, she tucked a crab leg between his lips, and to please her he took it. It had a faintly muddy taste, like catfish or mullet, without the brine of marine crabs. What he wanted, what he craved, was more spring water, but he knew that was not right, either. He had already drunk almost to bursting.
He had just enough presence of mind not to swallow the white bite of leg—you got your own vittles?—and when she curled next to him and seemed to sleep, he spat it silently into his cupped hand and made sure it vanished down a crack in the floorboards before he let himself drowse behind her. He might have heard its tiny splash in the spring below.
Don’t you remember, Charles Napier?
Things is angry out there.
You don’t put this pig-sticker in your pack, you don’t take that canoe up the Choctawhatchee.
Don’t you remember, Charles Napier?
Don’t you?
He thought perhaps he did.
His eyes snapped open in
the graying darkness of the shack. His thirst was terrible, and his gut twisted in on itself in his hunger. Jenny was still beside him, curled in the curve of his body. Her hands held something at her belly. It gleamed like the inside of an oyster shell with the pale coming of day. Napier sat up, his head aching again, though not quite as bad as yesterday. That’s because you skipped the creepy crab cake appetizers, Chuck my boy.
In Jenny’s lap, wetly glistening and transparent as glass, was a single globular egg the size of a cantaloupe. In the center of that globe a tadpole as fat as his thumb twisted and flicked, a tiny greenish glow bursting outward with each movement it made.
All the horror in the world rained down upon him in the dawn. He scrabbled away from Jenny, crabwalking out of the nest, not taking his eyes from that horrible thing as it contorted, flicked.
We made a baby. We made a thing. Jesus Christ oh no no no. Frogspawn. Smothered by frog bellies, and no Joan Van Ark to sweeten the deal good Christ—
Napier reached the door in a heartbeat, pulling it open and slipping through quick as a fish. He shut it silently behind him and sought for something to shove in front of it, to lock Jenny and the thing inside. There was nothing on the porch except the roosting buzzard, still there, always there, rusty black feathers and sickening bald head. He pressed his face at the window, but Jenny slept on, the tadpole safe in the angle of her belly and thighs.
Had there been a tadpole yesterday morning? Had they made another? Were there two? What would have happened had he eaten the crab, as she had insisted? Would he have slept until noon again, oblivious, while she brooded the freakish fruit of their congress?
His fingers curled over one of the ivory-billed woodpecker beaks that decorated the glass. It came away in his hand, the glue brittle and weak. He ran down the stairs, not caring that his passing shook the shack like thunder. His clothes and go-bag were where Jenny had left them, nearly buried in the sand once more. The bag had almost vanished entirely. All that was left of his shirt was a sleeve cuff, peeping from the white sand. His cargo pants had fared better—something didn’t like that poniard slung on the belt. He pulled them on, zipping up quickly, nearly catching his raw, red dick in the teeth in his shaking haste. His jockeys were gone, but he wasn’t about to dig for them. He jammed his feet into his boots and tied them as they were, sandy and wet. The blisters were going to be a bitch, but better blisters than whatever was growing inside that ball of clear jelly in Jenny’s lap. He snatched for the shirt and go-bag, put his hand on the poniard, looked up at the shack where the door was opening, and ran.
The world spun around him. North was nowhere, north was everywhere, his canoe lay that way, no, it was this way—vertigo threatened to stand him on his head. Bile rose.
Napier closed his eyes and kept running. That was better, but now he was tripping and stumbling over the brush he couldn’t see to avoid, the saw-edged stems of palmettos slicing at him.
“Charles Napier!” Jenny’s cry from the porch went through him like a stab from a sword. “You cain’t leave us!”
Us. A nightmare of horror and responsibility crashed over him. It’s yours, Chuck, whatever it is, it’s yours, don’t you want to see it grow up—
“Don’t you go, Charles Napier, don’t you go!”
Napier crashed headlong into the wall of sweetgums right where his instincts had insisted all along the gap should be, but there was nothing but their gray trunks.
That small wound on her back. What happened here?
Don’t you remember, Charles Napier?
He remembered, he remembered, and now he unsheathed the old man’s pig-sticker and stabbed it hard into the trunk of the nearest sweetgum, and pulled it out again.
Jenny’s scream, from the steps of the porch this time, was as loud and shrill as an air-raid siren. The sound of her pain and thwarted fury was clear and sharp and crystalline.
When the sweetgums opened the gap, right where it should have been, Napier went through it and kept running.
The world spun again, but this time it was spinning into its rightful place. North settled. The canoe was over there. He felt it with a certainty that was absolute. He was sprinting down the corridor of blueberry bushes, the last bit of Jenny’s world reaching for him. The shrubs tossed in a hurricane wind, and the white sand beneath him kept falling away into sinkholes meant to trip him, slow him down long enough for her to catch him.
He didn’t dare glance over his shoulder, didn’t dare spend the moment it would take to confirm she was, or wasn’t, behind him.
He knew where the wound in her back had come from, the way he knew she had felt the pain of the blade—the old man’s brittle, soft iron blade—stabbing into her palisade of ghostly sweetgum trees. What are you, Jenny? Just Jenny. Just Jenny. Just Jenny.
It was dark in the hamaca, beneath the oak trees and the rest of the scrub, but all the same Napier kept running, even though he stumbled and sprawled in the sandy grass and palmettos. He heard nothing behind him, but Jenny’s scream still rang in his ears. He passed the cluster of oaks where he had once—was it only two days ago?—thought to sling his hammock for the night, and knew he had almost found the canoe. He slowed, letting his senses take him where he needed to go.
As dawn slanted into the hamaca, piercing the darkness, what little cool the night had brought with it became sticky humidity, the temperature rising several degrees in only a couple of minutes. Napier’s skin beaded with moisture, and from nowhere rose gnats, mosquitoes, and a sweat bee to drone in his ears. Jenny’s spring had been blessedly free of all of those pests.
In the end he nearly fell over the canoe. It was farther from the hamaca’s shore than he remembered, and lodged in a thicket of blueberry bush and loblolly bay. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said someone tried to hide it from him. He dragged it down the slope, thinking about the giant catfish that had chased him out of the water when he first set foot on the soil of the hamaca. With a slap, the canoe settled in the shallows. Napier threw his bag and shirt in, stepped in with his left foot and pushed off with his right, passed by a clump of cypress knees with shedding, fibrous bark on them, and was away from the land.
The canoe did a slow spin as he rocked around in the bottom of it, locating a paddle and setting it to the water. Where he had emerged, a turkey buzzard was slowly climbing into the sky.
“Goddam spy,” Napier hissed into the brightening morning. “That’s right. You go tell her where I am. If I had a gun, I’d—”
He shut up. It was better spending his breath on paddling and getting his heart rate down, than swearing at something he could not control.
For nearly twenty minutes, he paddled and pushed, depending on the water depth. He knew the general direction of Jolly Bay, but he did not know where he’d left the channel, much less the main current, to follow the ivory-billed woodpecker ever deeper into the swamp. His pulse subsided, but the throbbing in his head did not. He was dehydrated; he was ravenous. He was raw with Jenny’s love-bites—but looking down at his chest and belly now, he wondered afresh at the size of the monster hickeys. Now that he felt safer, he could take a moment to make himself more comfortable. He looped the canoe’s painter over a cypress knee and stripped out of his clothes and shoes. He slipped carefully over the side of the canoe and submerged himself in the tannic water of the swamp, scrubbing quickly with his hands, giving his cock and balls a good rinse while he shuddered. He stood next to the boat, ankle deep in muck, and shook out his boots, then rinsed them as well. More wet wouldn’t make them worse, but the sand inside could scrape him raw, since his socks were probably buried beneath Jenny’s little beach, along with his jockeys. The white sand he shook from the boots and his clothes sank, leaving a bright patch near his feet that came and went with the movement of the water. He climbed back into the boat, lying in the bottom of it to struggle into his pants and keep from tipping over.
Next he tended to his go-bag, emptying it and taking inventory at the same time. The jerky, ev
en inside its Ziploc bag, was sandy, but he rinsed a strip quickly in the swamp water and started gnawing, following it with a precious half-bottle of his own water. He consumed his last apple in a few huge bites, just like Jenny.
The camera was clogged with sand. He blew the grit away as best he could, hoping the data card inside was still fine. The camera itself could be discarded, if only the pictures of the ivory-billed woodpeckers were intact.
The bottle of spring water gleamed up at him from the dark bottom of the bag, sullen in its nest of sand. He almost didn’t want to touch it, superstitious dread clenching in his gut, but he grabbed it and emptied the sand from the bag over the side of the canoe. There was a good several ounces of the white stuff. Jenny’s beach had done its best to hide his gear and keep him there, naked, ravenous for white crab legs, thirsty for her spring water. Longing for her body, for the burning intensity of sex and the dark rapture of the drowning.
What the hell was she? Terms like “monster” and “succubus” didn’t seem to apply. She was wholly alien, simplistic in some ways, but clever and determined in others. Napier had trespassed, but not without her knowledge, and perhaps not without her deliberate intention. Once he was inside, she had schemed to keep him there. She and her sweetgums.
He wondered if, were he to search again from outside Jenny’s trees, he would find the channel of that spring.
Somehow he doubted it.
He shook out the shirt, dunked it over the side several times, and pulled it on wet. The cloth rasped at his red, raw skin, but the tannic water seemed to help calm his flesh. He repacked his go-bag and placed it in the bottom of the canoe. Resting his ass against the middle thwart, Napier used the blade of his paddle to untether the boat, and pushed back from the cypress knees.
