Swamp Thing 1

by David Houston

  Good against evil, as it has always been—And the man named Arcane is evil. No price another might pay will be too much if his dream of world domination can be realized.

  One man stands in his way—Dr. Alec Holland, a great scientist searching for ways to feed a hungry world. But in his pride Holland struggles with forces that he cannot control, and in the process, he may lose his beloved, the beautiful Alice Cable: his humanity: and ultimately—his very soul.

  SWAMP THING

  Not long ago, in the unexplored reaches of an unmapped swamp, the creative genius of one man collided with another’s evil plan, and a monster was born.

  Too powerful to be destroyed, too intelligent to be captured, this immensely powerful being still pursues its savage dream . . .

  A Melniker-Uslan Production of a

  Wes Craven Film

  Louis Jourdan

  Adrienne Barbeau

  Based upon characters

  appearing in magazines

  published by DC Comics, Inc.

  Produced by

  Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan

  Written and Directed by

  Wes Craven

  An Avco Embassy Pictures Release

  SWAMP THING

  Copyright © MCMLXXXII SWAMPFILMS, INC.

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates,

  8-10 W. 36th St., New York City, N.Y. 10018

  First printing, April 1982

  ISBN: 0-523-48039-3

  Cover illustration TM& © 1982 DC Comics, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Pinnacle Books, 1430 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10018

  1

  Things of the swamp know each other.

  Mottled bullfrogs make way for lumbering alligators; the rare snarl of a wildcat sends creatures under cover; water moccasins must move invisibly in order to deceive; when a deer runs, the air fills with herons and flamingos.

  And every living thing understands the wind.

  But the noisy helicopter that slapped the air violently on a recent summer afternoon could not be taken for granted. The perpetual symphony of nature quieted; the creatures shrank back and listened.

  A possum looked up from the torn catfish on which it dined. It never saw the loud machine menacing it from the sky, but nevertheless it bolted for the fragile cover of a palm bog. The murky water of a vast shallow lake vibrated, broke out in chills under the reverberant air. Fish dove, as during a storm, though the clear air was hot. Birds cowered in the cypress trees, unsure whether to fly or hide.

  The copter came down low over the water and skimmed toward a misty mound of green at the tip of a peninsula that looked like the finger of a giant mossy hand. The hand was one of countless limbs stretching out from more solid bodies of land into the aimless currents of the waters which were thick and brown with a conspiracy of life and decay.

  There were no signposts. From the air, direction-finding could be a matter of luck.

  “The damn place is invisible,” muttered the copter pilot, a young man with short red hair; he was dressed in jeans and a Western shirt. He and his two passengers craned forward to see the land at the distant edge of the water rushing below them.

  “Supposed to be invisible,” said the man next to him. This was Charlie Tanner, a weather-worn gray-haired man who clutched a map and glanced at it nervously. “I’ve made this trip before, but nothing out there looks familiar. You’d think the trees and islands wander around and rearrange themselves just to be confusing. We could be over any number of inundated lowlands; they all look alike.”

  “All I’m doing is following a compass,” said the pilot. “You sure as hell better know where we’re supposed to set down.”

  “I think it’s that land jutting out dead ahead.”

  “What’re you going to do when I let you off? Swim?”

  “That’s been worked out.”

  The third occupant of the copter leaned forward between the two men. “Where’s the nearest good restaurant?” asked Alice Cable.

  “About sixty miles back the way we came,” the pilot said with a chuckle.

  “Depends,” Charlie interjected. “If you’re human, the best restaurants are all the way back in Washington. If you’re an alligator, it’s wherever we land.”

  Cable nodded and smiled. “I brought the wrong clothes,” she said. She was pretty, in her late twenties, dressed for work in office or laboratory: in a tailored gray-blue suit.

  “That’s it,” Charlie said, pointing ahead.

  “Oh,” said the pilot, “that’s a boat. I thought it was a floating log. Okay, down we go.” He adjusted his controls; the copter banked as it slowed and descended.

  Charlie turned to Cable. “Thank your lucky stars you’re coming in at the end of this venture. You might have been stuck down there for months, years.”

  Below, under cover of trees and tall ferns on almost dry land, sentient eyes watched the copter descend. The eyes belonged to a man named Ferret and the several men who looked to him for truth. The men were hiding; they kept their weapons low to the ground but dry. Ferret alone was on his feet, trusting that as long as he did not move no person or thing would notice him. While his reasoning was sound, anyone who did see him would find him difficult to forget. His features were gaunt and geometrical, as if carved out of slate; his eyes were hard as broken glass. The loose-fitting clothes he wore were army surplus, utilitarian jungle camouflage; and from his belt dangled a pearl-handled .45 and a polished machete. The gold earring he wore labeled him a pirate—which is why he delighted in wearing it.

  The helicopter, its pontoons approaching the water, dipped out of sight; and Ferris gestured for his men to follow him. They got silently to their feet.

  “Will he go to the chopper?” one of the men asked his leader.

  Ferret shook his head.

  He led his men through ferns and across a mossy clearing—away from the landing helicopter—toward the water on the other side of the peninsula.

  “Are you sure they don’t know we’re here?” another man whispered hoarsely.

  Ferret nodded.

  The copter descended onto a sheltered lagoon covered with water lilies, which pitched and tossed with the powerful downdraft of the rotors. There the pontoons touched down, and the copter was at rest.

  Cable pointed to the woods where Ferret and his men moved among the giant ferns. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Deer, perhaps,” said Charlie.

  A blue outboard was approaching from across the field of water lilies. Two men were in it. The one who steered had a semiautomatic weapon slung over one shoulder; it looked out of place with his nonmilitary, Joe College attire. The other man, similarly casually dressed, fumbled with a suitcase and duffle bag as the boat pulled alongside the copter.

  Charlie helped Cable step onto the pontoon. “Holland insisted on locating out here,” he said. “Not just for the practical reason of privacy and security, but because of some romantic notion of his that the swamp is where life is. He loves it out here.” A mosquito dug into Charlie’s neck and he slapped it to a dark red spot. “He’s certainly right about this being where life is. There are probably more living things per square inch here than anywhere else.”

  The man with the luggage tossed his things to the pilot, who stowed them in the rear seat.

  “In fact,” Charlie continued, “one of the larger life forms out here nailed the technician you’re replacing.”

  The departing passenger heard this and said, “A woman? They sent a woman out here?”

  “What the hell does she look like?” asked Charlie. “A penguin?” He laughed to ward off the meaning behind the man�
�s words. He had no wish to alarm the newcomer.

  As they stepped into the boat, the new copter passenger laughed, too, a different sort of laugh that Cable did not find reassuring. The weapon worn by the boatman did not reassure her either.

  The boatman said, “Hi, Charlie. Good trip back to civilization?”

  “Quite pleasant, Bill,” he said. “Why are we losing that one?” He gestured toward the man entering the copter.

  The rotors revved again, and whined and flapped.

  “He couldn’t take it any more,” said Bill with a shrug. “But I guess he’s been here longer than most. You know, the scientists have it pretty easy, compared with the rest of us. They get to stay inside. We live with the mosquitos and water moccasins . . . and just this constant smell of decay. It’s not strong, but it adds up after a few months.” Having stacked Cable’s luggage in the boat and cast off the loose line that held them at the pontoon, the boatman turned to Cable with a self-approved smile and waited to be introduced.

  “This is Cable,” Charlie informed him. “She’s our new electronics man, uh, person. Computers and instrumentation. She’ll work directly with the Hollands. Cable, meet Bill Darkow, one of our more loyal guardians.”

  Cable wanted to ask why guardians were necessary, but her chance was obliterated by the almost simultaneous roars of the rising copter and the departing boat. Lily pads flew through the air; one slapped the side of her face.

  “How far—?” Cable shouted over the noise.

  “You can see our pier now,” Charlie said; now that the copter had risen, he spoke in a normal voice. “Too much overhang to allow the copter to get very close. Short boat trip. See the lab—that gray steeple through the trees?”

  “Looks like a church.”

  “It was.”

  “Out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “There’s a good stretch of dry land in there, and what’s left of a community. The church was a mission built nearly a hundred years ago. Abandoned, like the town.” Charlie ran a hand through his gray hair, which was dampening from the boat’s spray, and asked the boatman, “How’s your brother? He still with us?”

  “Something’s bugging him,” said Bill, “and I’m damned if I can figure out what.”

  Bill’s twin brother, Sam, was at that moment approaching the opposite side of the peninsula in a blue boat exactly like that in which Cable and Charlie were being ferried.

  Sam cut the motor of his boat and listened. The copter was gone, and he could hear, very faintly, the motor of Bill’s boat across the finger of land. He heard crying birds and buzzing insects—and sounds that seemed to imply that large creatures were rustling through the underbrush, perhaps creatures as large as men.

  His coasting boat carried him under a drapery of Spanish moss; the hull thumped against a cypress root.

  He, like his brother, carried a semiautomatic strapped over his shoulder; he slipped it into a more useful position.

  The boat continued to drift toward land; he continued to hear the rustling sound. A bullfrog large as a cat plopped into the water as his boat passed the stump on which it sunned.

  The rustling sound stopped; so did the sound of Bill’s distant boat. Sam thought he heard a voice, but it could have been so many things.

  He stepped shakily out of the boat and, picking his way among cypress roots, made his way to land. The gnarled wood—like twisted bones—was slippery with moss.

  Sounds had disturbed him before; now it was silence that made his heart race. Why had the creatures stopped singing? They did that, he knew, when conditions were puzzling to them—as they had when the helicopter approached—and sometimes there were pauses in the chatter of the swamp for no apparent reason. And sometimes the creatures stopped to listen when there were humans nearby. But he knew of no humans with cause to be in the vicinity.

  Sam walked slowly, his feet silent on the soft earth, along a path that had been cleared a month ago; already it was being reclaimed by the vegetation of the swamp. Off to the sides, he recalled from earlier trips, were bogs of quicksand invisible under layers of fallen leaves and branches.

  He approached a clearing where one of the Project’s remote sensors was positioned. The sensors both monitored the conditions of the area and served as a perimeter security system. The sensor up ahead—he could see it, now, in the center of the clearing—was number three; and for no apparent reason, it was dead. Sam wondered why.

  He stopped and drew in a sharp breath. Something moved in the clearing. Three men. Had they seen him? Sam doubted it. He held his rifle ready and slipped a walkie-talkie from his belt.

  The three men had their backs to him; they looked like mercenary soldiers—in camouflage, high boots, and armed with rifles.

  “I’ll take the walkie-talkie,” said a casual voice behind him. “And the rifle.”

  Sam turned slowly and looked into the face of a stranger—in a part of the world where there were supposed to be no strangers. This man was a gray skeleton, a tall man with a gold earring. Government dispatches had described such a man, called him extremely dangerous, said his whereabouts were unknown, gave the names by which he was known. Among them was Ferret. The name fell from Sam Darkow’s lips.

  One of the men—now there were nine of them—approached and asked Ferret, “Take care of him?” He was large, evidently a body-building hobbyist, whose shirtsleeves were tight as a paint job. His face was oddly boyish, innocent—in fact, stupid.

  “Perhaps, Bruno,” said Ferret as he tossed the man Sam’s radio and weapon, and the pistol he had leveled at Sam’s heart.

  Sam thought fast, as he had been taught to do, and spun around to charge back toward his boat—while the brutish Bruno had his hands full and Ferret was unarmed.

  Sam made it out of the clearing, but then Ferret’s men forced him off the trail, toward the quicksand bogs.

  Ferret himself was in the lead. It seemed to be understood among the men that their leader would be the one to bag the quarry, and the others were just helping him out a little.

  Sam’s left boot slid into quicksand; he pulled it out with a sickening plopping sound. That slowed him down enough. The men blocked every turn. Ferret, with a gleeful whoop, tackled the young man and sat on his legs. Sam looked up into the barrels of an assortment of pistols and rifles.

  Two of the men hauled Sam to his feet.

  “What do you want?” Sam asked.

  The tall skeleton shrugged cheerfully. “Anonymity, among other things. I doubt if there’s much you can do for me.” Ferret slipped a glove onto his right hand and thrust it into the deep cargo pocket of his fatigues. Something in there was moving. He pulled out a large cottonmouth, holding it behind its head; the poisonous fangs were already bared in a wide-open mouth.

  “No,” said Sam, the color draining from his face, “that’s ridiculous. You can’t—”

  Ferret touched the head of the cottonmouth to Sam’s bare forearm. The fangs sank in, and Sam screamed.

  A great heron was startled and flapped into the sky.

  As Cable and Charlie stepped onto the pier, they heard what sounded like a human cry. It echoed. Bill Darkow heard it too. They listened, but there was no second cry, and the birds and insects seemed undisturbed.

  “Weird, huh?” said Charlie. “Local fishermen think this place is haunted.”

  Cable’s eyes rested on a row of gravestones, each angled slightly differently due to the subsidence of the ground. Evidently the graveyard had belonged to the church.

  “I don’t know where we are, Toto,” Cable muttered to herself with a brave smile, “but it sure isn’t Kansas.”

  “What?” Charlie asked.

  “Nothing,” said Cable.

  2

  Alice Cable was a practical scholar in search of . . . something. Something that would ever after focus her energies, her intelligence, her drive, her love of her work. She had a phobia of jobs that, in the last analysis, were nothing but production lines—even research and
development positions often meant nothing more than tinkering together one patentable gadget after another for an electronics firm.

  At graduation time—she had been near the top of her class at MIT—she had been one of those courted arduously by the personnel departments of worldwide video, communications, and computer concerns. She had flown with others of her classmates to visit the firms, at company expense, to examine job possibilities. Enviably, it had been the applicants who interviewed the companies and grandly turned them down. But her group had dwindled as the others had accepted well-paying positions in industry.

  She had looked at them with the thought: How can you settle for so little challenge merely for the money and the fringe benefits? She had also envied them their satisfaction.

  She had gone back to school and obtained a master’s degree. With it, she had become a troubleshooter for the Government’s diverse installations. But that wasn’t it, either. She wanted something more vital. Had they been enlisting colonists for Mars, she would have signed up without a second thought.

  Men, as a race, did not seem to understand Alice Cable. Though she was pretty—slender, with brown hair and regular features—she was too intense. Though she was not “tough,” she seldom laughed or smiled, and this made her seem remote. “You’re a better man than they are,” a college counselor had told her once. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Cable replied, truly perplexed.

  No one had called her Alice since high school. She was just Cable.

  Her attempts at love had led her into promiscuity for a brief period during college—until she met Les Brand, who made her forget and regret the others. Brand was a painter, a maverick out of the mainstream of art who was, if anything, more intense and hard-working than she. They had met by accident on campus the day he dropped out and went back to his art; it had been cold and windy, and she had helped him gather up his blowing sketches. Their love had also been cold and windy, and the values they shared had kept blowing away. His spirit of doom had dragged her down; her spirit of adventure had made him anxious. Her love of the real world had clashed with the romantic fantasy he tried to bring into existence, a romantic fantasy in which he felt safe because it was not real.