Collected Stories and Poems

by Joseph Payne Brennan

  Walking carefully, we pushed out onto it. It extended only a few hundred feet, however, and then sloped off abruptly into a morass of soft mud and straggling sawgrass.

  Cordiss stopped, shaking his head. “Far as we get, I guess. That stuff ahead won’t hold up a hare, much less the two of us.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “But I don’t think there’s any real mystery here, Cordiss. Undoubtedly animals have been trapped in the place. Over the years they’ve learned to avoid it. Maybe in rainy seasons the marsh extends up the ridge and beyond. For that reason wildlife have finally learned to give the entire swamp—and its environs as well—a pretty wide berth.”

  He appeared to accept my explanation but I knew that it didn’t satisfy him. He spoke little on the return trip. When we retreated to the library for drinks, I noticed that he tossed double portions of whisky into his own glass.

  As the days passed, it became increasingly obvious to me that the “mystery” of Long Hollow Swamp was actually preying on his mind. Occasionally he became morose and uncommunicative. I knew that he was still visiting the swamp site, but I seldom mentioned the place. I hoped that he would gradually lose interest in it.

  Instead, however, his obsession grew.

  I had planned to leave after a week or two, but as his mood worsened, I felt a vague but somehow compelling sense of responsibility. I hated to go off and leave him in a “blue funk,” as he would have expressed it.

  One rainy afternoon as we sat over drinks, he broached the subject of the swamp once again. “I’ve prowled about the place dozens of times now,” he said, “and I haven’t found anything that I can, well, put a finger on, as you might say. But Im more convinced than ever that there’s—something—in that swamp wholly malign and inimical—something deadly.”

  I sipped my drink. “How long have the rumors been going on?”

  “Don’t know exactly. Years and years. Seem to be passed down the generations by the natives here.”

  “In that case,” I observed, “doesn’t it seem odd to you that in all that time—all those decades—nothing has actually been seen? At least you’ve never mentioned that anything has.”

  “Nothing’s been seen that I know of. If anything has, the locals are keeping pretty quiet about it. No, nothing but rumors…”

  “In my opinion,” I told him, “nothing’s been seen, because there really isn’t anything to see—unless you include mud puddles, quaky marsh flats and possible quicksand traps.”

  “You may be right, of course,” he admitted. “But I’d still like to get to the bottom of it—and I don’t mean the swamp!”

  We both laughed and the conversation veered into other channels but I knew that he was still brooding inwardly. I suppose it arose from the personality and background of the man. All his life he had know power; he had possessed money and influence and he had always been in a position to make decisions and to obliterate obstacles. I doubt that he actually attached much importance to the projected hunting party. The swamp mystery chafed and irritated him because it had proved an obstacle which he had not been able to sweep away.

  As I look back now, I have a fearful sense of guilt. I kept downgrading the business and I suppose to some extent I lowered Cordiss’ guard. Had I possessed any inkling of the true horror which was to emerge, I would not have treated my host’s obsession with such casual concern.

  Actually, however, in spite of myself, Cordiss’ uneasiness began to affect me. My appetite fell off and I didn’t sleep well.

  On a number of occasions I woke up to hear Cordiss prowling about, doors closing and the sound of footsteps outside the house.

  One evening over dinner my host admitted that he had been making some “midnight excursions,” as he phrased it. “What in heaven’s name for?” I asked.

  He scowled. “I’ve developed a theory that whatever is lurking in that swamp, poisoning the whole damned area, comes out only at night. I mean to find out if my theory is correct!”

  I set down my fork. “You’ve been tramping through the woods to that swamp in the middle of the night? Cordiss, you’re inviting disaster! You could flounder in one of those mud flats and sink out of sight! Unless the wind was just right, I doubt that I could hear you call from the house, and even if I did—”

  He shrugged impatiently. “Oh, I don’t go out into the swamp. I know better than that I just take up my station somewhere along the edge and keep watch.”

  I resumed eating but I soon found myself merely pushing the food around my plate. “I wish you’d give it up. There are too many unpleasant things that might happen—especially at night.”

  Noting the stubborn look which came into Cordiss’ eyes, I knew that my warning would go unheeded.

  Pouring more Chablis, he spoke with deliberation. “The business has become a bother and I intend to see it through.” Less than a week passed before the horror finally revealed itself.

  I had gone to bed later than usual and drifted into a deep sleep. I began having a nightmare. I was locked in my room, it seemed, and Cordiss was outside somewhere calling my name, his voice muffled but filled with terror and desperate appeal.

  Suddenly I awoke, sat up in bed and listened. Moonlight silvered the room and all seemed peaceful. Then I heard Cordiss shout. He was outside, not too far away.

  Thrusting my feet into shoes, I threw a jacket over my pajamas, rushed downstairs and out the rear door.

  Cordiss’ cries appeared to be coming from the edge of the woods, a few hundred yards from the far end of the overgrown garden at the back of the house.

  Running the length of the narrow garden path, while branches whipped against my face, I finally burst into a relatively open area between the fringe of woods and the straggling border of the former garden.

  Although the landscape was clearly etched in moonlight, at first I saw nothing. Then I heard Cordiss call again and I saw him only a few yards from the last tongue of trees along the woods’ edge. He was crawling.

  I bolted forward. “Cordiss! You’re injured?”

  He raised himself up a bit and screamed at me. “Get back! Don’t come an inch closer! They’re right behind me—all around me!”

  For a minute I merely stared, speechless and uncomprehending. I felt that my host might be going insane.

  Then I saw them—huge black slugs, at least three feet in length, sliding out of the woods into the moonlight at appalling speed. One pair lifted tentacles—the posterior—terminated in huge, glassy-looking eyes, alien and inimical. The anterior pair appeared to be sensory organs of some sort. As the creatures glided forward, they left a distinct track of slime which glistened in the moonlight.

  Almost at once I understood why Cordiss was crawling. He had walked and then fallen, apparently, into one of these slime trails. Its effect was almost like that of glue. It covered his clothes; I was sure his boots were coated with it.

  He reared partway up. There was suppressed panic and despair in his voice. “Dropped—rifle!” he gasped. “Get to the house. Gun room. Get—” He fell prone again and his pursuers were now only feet away, their monstrous globular eyes shining with a kind of quiet ferocity made all the more hideous because of its alien aspect.

  I rushed back up the overgrown garden path, completely heedless of the wet branches which tore at my face. Dashing into the gun room, I lifted down a double-barreled shotgun, Wrenched open a drawer, stuffed a box of shells into my jacket pocket and bolted out again.

  As soon as I got back through the garden into the open I realized that I was too late. Cordiss lay motionless, literally covered by the huge black slugs. Tentacles lifted and half a dozen pairs of the glassy globular eyes turned in my direction.

  Sobbing with frustration and horror, I rammed shells into the shotgun and blasted away at that obscene mound of crawling monstrosities. I knew that I was too late to save Cordiss—that, in fact, I might even be shortening his life by a few minutes with the roaring barrage of buckshot. But I felt convinced that I wa
s acting as he would have preferred.

  The shotgun blasts, lethal though they were, seemed to have only minimal effect upon those nightmare invaders from Long Hollow Swamp. The creatures’ composition, their yielding viscosity, appeared to absorb the buckshot with only indifferent results. They were torn and rent and some of the gloating globular eyes were blasted into ragged tentacle stumps which oozed a kind of saffron ichor—yet the incredible creatures continued to move.

  I was nearly out of shells when I noticed with a sudden surge of fear that while I had been firing away at the writhing mound of slugs which covered Cordiss, a number of others had begun to close in on my flanks. I saw instantly that within seconds I might be cut off.

  Grasping the shotgun by the barrels so that I could swing it as a club if necessary, I whirled, ran back up the garden path, raced through the house and out to the garages which were situated in a wing off the front drive.

  I don’t know how I reached Colbury without killing myself; I drove like a maniac.

  Within twenty minutes I was on the way back followed by three carloads of Colbury natives in various stages of dress and undress. Sheriff Wester and his deputy, Sam Kett, came in my car. The four cars, altogether, must have included a miniature arsenal.

  There was no need of it. When we pushed through the rear garden into the open field adjacent to the nearby woods, there were no slugs in sight. Their gleaming, slime-covered trails led back into the trees. The dead or wounded ones had been either consumed or carried off.

  What held us in horror, however, was not the sight of these slime-coated tracks. It was the bare skeleton of Cordiss, stripped of every fragment of flesh, sucked clean of every drop of blood, lying in the moonlight.

  Sheriff Wester insisted on following the slime tracks for some distance into the woods, but we soon realized that it was a useless pursuit. There were no slugs in sight; the fearful creatures would be back in Long Hollow Swamp, burrowed deep in the mud, long before we could hope to reach the marsh which harbored the deadly things.

  A search party organized early the next morning found nothing further. Tracks of swiftly fading slime led into the swamp and ended. The usual aura of waiting, listening expectancy hung over the area, but not a quiver of motion was visible. Cattail bogs, stands of switch grass and deep pools of muddy water lay silently.

  Shortly after private obsequies for Cordiss’ pitiful remains had been concluded. I learned to my great surprise that he had willed his estate to me. My first impulse was to sell it, but I changed my mind. Cordiss’ death, I determined, must be avenged and the swamp horrors expunged.

  Several leading scientists who specialized in the various orders of molluscoid families listened to my story with varying degrees of skepticism. They did indicate that the creatures I described resembled overdeveloped examples of the common black slug, Arion ater, in the suborder Stylommatophora of the Pulmonata. One of them conceded that it was just possible that some heretofore unknown order of land mollusk, left undisturbed for centuries in good feeding grounds, might conceivably mutate into giantism. One suggested draining the swamp; another wanted to organize an expedition complete with oversized nets, grappling hooks, etc.

  I decided on my own solution. Fred Malant, a devil-may-care friend of both the deceased Cordiss and myself, agreed to do the work. There were few things at which he hadn’t tried his hand. He had done crop dusting with small aircraft and he knew a lot about incendiaries. The combination suited me perfectly.

  We didn’t bother with permits and the inevitable resultant tangle of red tape and delays.

  One fine autumn day Fred flew back and forth over Long Hollow Swamp, liberally spraying every yard of it with some kind of highly inflammable preparation about whose composition he remained cheerfully but determinedly vague.

  When the swamp was thoroughly saturated, Fred returned, tossing down a number of carefully timed incendiary “devices,” as he called them.

  Once the plane flew clear, after its final sweep, the whole of Long Hollow Swamp seemed to rise up in one great sheet of flame. The adjacent woods caught fire and the entire region, but particularly the swamp, burned furiously for three full days. Local volunteer firemen kept the woods fires under control, but nothing they could do had any effect on the roaring inferno which raged in Long Hollow Swamp.

  The stench which arose from the swamp was beyond description. It hung in the air for weeks.

  Arrested for arson, I put up bond, turned the matter over to my attorney and shrugged. Long Hollow Swamp was a bumed-out socket of dried mud and charred vegetation.

  Sometime later I moved into Cordiss’ house. I have visited the site of the swamp many times since, but I have never seen a single slug of any size, nor any tracks of slime.

  Only recently I noticed a deer nibbling some grass only a short distance from the former marsh.

  Even when all the circumstances were explained in court, I paid a stiff fine for setting fire to woodlands and for “willfully concealing the identity of an accomplice,” but I didn’t care.

  Never again will those tentacled horrors come gliding in their glistening tracks of slime from Long Hollow Swamp.

  The Business About Fred

  (1975)

  At the time I was a cub reporter on the local Star Daily, a morning paper. Unless something “big” was still breaking, I’d usually leave the editorial rooms shortly before midnight. I drifted into a regular routine; six nights out of seven I’d stop in at Casserman’s Cafe and drink beer until the place closed at one. A few other newspapermen would stop in; we’d talk and unbend for an hour before going home to bed.

  Casserman’s was a quiet place. I suppose it was like a thousand other bars. I can’t remember a single outstanding or remarkable thing about it unless it might be the autographed, framed photograph of Jack Dempsey prominently displayed over the cash register. But on second thought I guess at least several hundred other bars had framed autographed photographs of Jack Dempsey.

  Casserman was friendly but not ebullient. If you felt like talking, he’d lend a listening ear. If you didn’t want to talk, he’d respect your silence. He kept the place reasonably clean and he wouldn’t tolerate real rowdiness. It was just a pleasantly drab little refuge to relax in about midnight.

  Around this time of night, one of the fixtures of the place was a runty-looking guy whom Casserman addressed as Fred. He resembled a disbarred jockey or a down-at-heels tout, pale-faced, shifty-eyed and always taciturn. He’d just sit hunched up over a beer and never say a word, but his eyes couldn’t stay put.

  After awhile we paid no more attention to him than we did to the photograph of Jack Dempsey. His eyes would flick around the place and sometimes sort of accidentally meet your own, but there was never any challenge in them. They seemed vacant, incurious, oddly cold, and they slid away without revealing anything. The pale, wedge-shaped face never showed any expression.

  Casserman told us once that he thought his silent customer had something to do with horse racing and “different sports events”, but he was vague about it and none of us were interested enough to make any further inquiries.

  The months and finally several years passed. I got a city-room promotion and a raise in pay. Several of my reporter friends left and several others took their places. And almost every night, about twelve, I went to Casserman’s and drank beer. And every night when I went there, Fred, the runty little guy with the pale wedge of a face, sat at the end of the bar and silently sipped his beer. His eyes roved around as always, restless but empty looking. Sometimes I’d give him a short nod when I first went in but I never could figure out whether or not he gave a half nod in reply. If he did, it was scarcely perceptible. I never saw him talking to anyone except Casserman and even then only a few perfunctory words were exchanged.

  As time went on, the funny little runt seemed to get whiter and smaller and more silent—if that was possible. He seemed to be shrinking. I’d never paid any attention to his clothes, but I finally noticed on
e evening how really seedy they had become. All this registered in a sort of subconscious way. I had no real interest in the character. Several times during the evening you’d catch his eyes sliding away, but they affected me no more than the blinking neon sign across the street.

  More time passed. Six months. Eight months. I can’t remember precisely. I went to Casserman’s as usual and drank beer and as always the runt sat at the far end of the bar, pale and still and shrunken-looking. He just seemed to be fading away.

  One evening, toward the end, I caught his eyes sliding away and, just momentarily, something about his expression held my attention. Had I read a kind of fleeting but desperate appeal in those shifty eyes, or had I only imagined it? I was troubled, briefly, and then one of my cronies came in and we started to talk and I forgot all about the runt.

  From here on, it’s tough. The time sequence and the exact sequence of minor events.

  One evening, I remember, Casserman leaned across the bar and shook his head. “Fred’s lookin’ bad. Real bad. And not touchin’ his beer.”

  I glanced toward the end of the bar. Fred sat there as usual and, to be truthful, he looked about the same to me. No worse than usual, that is. What I do remember is that the light at the far end of the bar appeared to be a bit dimmer than it ordinarily was. I couldn’t seem to get a sharp clear image of Fred. But the room was pretty smoky at the time and I thought nothing of it. I made some reply to Casserman, glanced up to see if a bulb had

  burned out—apparently none had—and then turned toward the door as my friend, Henry Kalk, the rewrite man, came in.

  Two or three nights later Casserman leaned over and shook his head again. “I guess Fred’s gettin’ worse.”

  I looked toward the end of the bar. Fred was no longer there. I was startled; the little runt almost never left till closing time.