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A shell of yellow light envelopes me as I open my eyes. Gasping, I remember the hurts Charlie, Jackson and the mob delivered upon me, but my sight and my body show no indication of injury. Nonetheless, I have been changed. The tattoos that flow across my skin now glow, the source of the yellow illumination surrounding me. The intensity of their light pulsates in rhythm with my heartbeat. I wave my arms in front of me, and soft trails of yellow linger in the dark where my skin has passed. My skin buzzes in the sensation. I cannot recall feeling so flushed with energy.
"I am freed from death!" I raise my glowing arms and shout into the night.
Were it not for the light pulsating from my tattoos, I suspect the darkness of my surroundings would be complete. My shoes sink into the mire as I twist to consider the trees of cypress and ash surrounding me. No stars twinkle overhead, perhaps for the thickness of the forest canopy swaying in the warm wind that tingles my glowing skin. Insects buzz about me. I hear the sound of creatures splashing into water. I soon sweat for the humidity. A musty odor fills my nose and leaves me little doubt that swampland extends all about me.
A mound of earth rises behind me, clods of mud and moss cast up from the ground in order to expel the pair of wooden coffins standing upon the dirt pile. The coffins are the only remainders of the cage from which I have come. Though those coffins would have been planted in the inmate cemetery that waited only a few yards beyond the front gate, the prison is no where to be seen. Perhaps I too stepped into that black and vanished in a blink into another world.
"Mr. Turner! We are free!"
Silence answers my shouts. Extending the glowing tattoos of my right arm before me like a lantern, I push into the swamp forest in search of Mr. Turner.
The mire sucks at my feet, and several steps sink nearly to my knees. My illumination struggles to penetrate very deep into the forest, and I almost step directly atop snakes and alligators as I stumble through the brush. But those creatures show no indication of noticing me. They do not hiss nor growl though I almost stumble into their fangs and teeth. Birds do not scatter as I push clumsily through their trees. It feels as if the swamp itself ignores me, as if none of its creatures can see me at all.
"Mr. Turner! I am risen!"
There is still no answer. The swamp stirs in another warm breeze. The yellow illumination of my tattoos intensifies. The patterns beneath my arms appear to move, their shadows look to shift. My skin throbs.
Suddenly, a noise from the trees steals my courage and my breath, turning my feet to stone as my illumination continues to intensify.
Something rattles in the trees.
It is the sound that so tormented blind Charlie, the rattle that came from within the prison walls. The rattles no longer sound muted in the swamp. Masonry and concrete no longer constrain the rattles' volume. The noises surround me. I tremble as the illumination etched upon my skin glows more and more brightly.
Before I hear them speak, before I actually understand the tongue that drove the blind mad, four sets of narrow, yellow eyes regard me from the swamp's shadow.
"Here's a foolish one, a trespasser most criminal," a voice hisses through the dark.
A tongue sniffs at the air. "He's risen. He's broken the Maker's law."
"He bears the mark," words slither.
Eyes blink from the swamp shadows. "He must be returned to the fold."
"He must be delivered to the watchman's cage," the tongues hiss.
The trees rustle. The yellow eyes circle me. Fear chokes me as I turn to stone, an animal betrayed by its own luminescence, a firefly aglow in the dark. I try to cover my throbbing arms, try to shroud my light, but any attempt to do so is futile. I cannot hide those marks that snake about my skin.
The circumference of my light expands upon the beasts that sneer upon me. They sniff the air through large nostrils set upon a wide, short snout. Several of the beasts grin at me, exposing mouths brimming with rows of teeth, smiles more appropriate for sharks. They hunch and howl like a pensive pack of canines. The shoulder of even the smallest beast rises above my waist, and the furless skin covering their limbs is so thin that I shudder to see the striation of their muscle shift and tense in preparation for the pounce. Horns of white bone extend down the creatures' spines and curve into a long tails that end in glistening barbs. It is the barbs that rattle as their tails slash about the air, tearing through branches, testing the forest for prey. Those beasts clatter their teeth as they circle me, their tails rattling as I my mind stammers with rising, suffocating fear.
They are creatures composed of a motley assembly of predatory parts. They are like nothing found upon any world I know. These are monsters of another plain, and the mocking hatred glowing in their yellow eyes tells me I am a trespasser they've no intention to suffer.
Their forked tongues flash out from between their rows of teeth and hiss.
"He bears the runes of the wicked magic."
"Another soul for the watchman's cage."
"Meat for our maws."
"Gristle for our teeth."
“A cushion for our barbs."
Finally, the fear snaps the cord within my mind that holds back my strides, and I bolt into the trees. I gasp for breath and my legs burn as the swamp pulls at each of my pounding steps. Behind me, the creatures howl, and my thoughts shatter for the panic that the warmth at the back of my neck is a monster's breath instead of a shifting wind. I cringe at the sound of branches snapping overhead. The creatures laugh with an awful clicking of their teeth.
"He gives us sport."
"We'll feed upon his speed."
"A clever kind of mouse."
"See how he glows through the night."
I cannot shade the intensity of my glowing tattoos. The light I cast dooms me to be easy prey. My legs falter. I fall into the swamp. I spit bile and my eyes burn as I struggle again to my feet. It takes all the will and strength I can muster to continue onward, with the rattling snapping over my head, with barbs tapping upon my shoulder as the creatures toy with me.
I stumble more than run through more leaves and trip into another clearing. I doubt I will find the opportunity, not to mention the strength, to make it back into whatever meagre cover the trees offer. My tired arms collapse upon my sides, glowing with such light that I may as well be a small sun rising in this starless and dark swamp.
"You should catch your breath before they pounce, Wilson. It won't be long now."
Mr. Turner waves at me from the clearing's far edge, a pale blue specter of man who silently flickers in the dark, like quiet heat lightning on a humid, summer night. He looks like a ghost, but his voice carries with the volume possessed by the living.
"Oh, don't worry about me," Mr. Turner laughs. "They might smell a trace of me, if their bloodlust hasn't overpowered their noses by now. But they cannot see me, Wilson. They're blinded by your glare."
"You use me as bait," I growl. "After the devotion I gave you, you feed me to those wicked beasts."
Mr. Turner cocks his head in a wicked gesture of pity. "You were a fool to think you would find any kind of god behind those prison walls, Wilson Greene. I don't offer you to those monsters. I give you to watchman."
So many yellow eyes glow upon me as I turn to face the forest from which I have come. The sound of rattles fills the swamp, crowding the air with an anxious and hungry cacophony. The beasts do not yet pounce upon me. Their eyes shift and blink as they wait to deliver the first barb, to rend with the first claw.
A low vibration moves up from the mud and into my feet. The dark shadows of trees behind those glowing eyes shake as a pounding beat thunders in the swamp. Dark shapes flutter into the air, black birds and bats fleeing from whatever approaches the clearing, from whatever thing I have little doubt my illumination has attracted.
A giant of the swamp, a titan seemingly raised from the mire, strides into the clearing, each step of his massive feet rippling the soft sw
amp floor so that my knees waver. Clothing consisting of tree bark and moss adorns much of the giant's mass, a poor wardrobe given the many tears and holes that provide peeks of the giant's underlaying flesh. The giant's skin is graveyard gray, a sick hue from exposure to the damp elements of the surrounding swamp. Long tears crisscross over the giant's skin not covered by bark or moss, and a phosphorescent substance oozes from those hurts, providing the giant with an internal illumination whose shade, though weak, matches that of the glyphs and symbols pulsating upon my own flesh.
Each of those fissures running upon the giant's skin widen as the titan's four arms strain against the thick chains that wrap around his massive torso before trailing to a sled that follows in the mud, so burdened beneath its weight that its runners disappear beneath the mire. I peek at the giant's face to measure the anguish the pulling of such a sled must exert upon him, but I can only stammer at the strange visage that silently drags its burden into the clearing. There is no mouth upon that face from which the giant might groan. There is no nose, no ears, no stubble of a beard, nor any patch of course hair. There are only eyes, glowing, golden eyes covering the giant's head, crowding the spaces where other features need be, every one winking and staring upon me.
"He's almost as ugly as our old prison's Warden Gillespie," Mr. Turner chuckles. "But I guarantee you that monster tends his cage with no less devotion."
It is the cage of thick, rusting bars tottering upon the sled that fills me most terribly with fear. A mass of shadows twirls within its confines. A magic of some kind charges those bars and sparks at those dark wisps crowding against their cage's bars to peek in my direction. The features of anguished faces flash in the moment the cage's power sparks against them, and for a short moment I hear them wail against their confines before their features vanish and they return to the anonymity of the shadow mass.
"I could've handled the watchman's pack of hounds," Mr. Turner sneers. "But I could not navigate through this dark forest between the world of the living and the dead to escape my grave had I not possessed something to offer the watchman. No one may leave this realm until they pay his toll. No magic may bend that rule."
I twist my arms, and I squint at how brightly my skin glows. "These tattoos are no key, are they Mr. Turner? They are marks meant for that giant and his cage. They mark me as the coin tendered for your resurrection."
Mr. Turner nods, and then, in a blink as quick as lightning, he is gone.
The giant takes several more steps towards me, pulling his sled clear of the swamp trees. The ground shakes me to my knees, for his steps are now so near. The sound of rattles floods the swamp, a near deafening noise that sings the pack's hunger and anticipation. My glowing arms drop to my side, and I cannot count the number of eyes that stare upon me.
The giant rattles his chains, and the beasts flood from the trees, bearing upon my illumination with snapping barbs and clattering teeth.
They cover the distance so quickly. I hardly have time for a last breath. I am gristle for the hounds. I am a soul marked for the warden.
The Warden's Mark Page 3
