Swamp Thing 1

by David Houston

  One of the two pedestrians spoke. “I wish we had brought a picnic. I’m starving.”

  Ferret said nothing to console his big friend.

  Then they heard it again. A wild, thunderous, animal cry from the swamp behind them. A wounded elephant combined with a hurricane. Another loud cry from not five feet away sent Bruno to his feet, wheeling his gun around: that had been an egret—probably as startled as the humans by the mysterious roar—which had taken to the air with a whooping cry.

  “Jesus,” Bruno muttered as he lowered his gun.

  “Why didn’t you shoot it?” Ferret taunted. “You could have eaten it.”

  They heard the approaching vehicles before they saw them. They stood at roadside waiting.

  The lead vehicle. Arcane’s black 1951 Cadillac limousine, belonged in a museum rather than a rutted road. It slowed to a stop. The jeep full of armed guards screeched to a halt behind it.

  The guards, except for the driver, vaulted to the ground and aimed pistols at Ferret and Bruno. Ferret ignored them; he knew that their practice was only the result of excellent training. Bruno quickly pocketed his own firearm and briefly raised his hands as a measure of reassurance.

  The two waited beside the limousine. They peered down at their own foreshortened reflections in the mirrored glass of the rear window.

  The window hummed, and their images were replaced by the shaded face of Arcane, who was not smiling.

  “You won’t believe what happened,” Ferret predicted.

  “Try me,” Arcane said. He did not open the door to invite them in.

  “I want you to just wait here a few minutes,” Ferret said. “I want you to hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  Ferret nibbled on his lip. “I don’t know.”

  “Start at the beginning,” Arcane urged politely. “Together, we’ll make something rational of it.” But still he forced the two to hunch over uncomfortably and report to him from outside the limo.

  Ferret began with activities that commenced immediately upon Arcane’s departure. He struggled for words to describe accurately what had happened—or seemed to happen—as he tried to drown Cable.

  “One of the swamp people, obviously,” Arcane said.

  “I don’t think so. I—I don’t think he was human.”

  “Well,” Arcane said condescendingly, “you go on with your story. You caught the girl again, I assume.”

  “Willie did. Or almost did. The thing got him first, broke his neck.”

  “The thing, you say. The same thing. You saw it kill Willie?”

  “More or less.”

  “Which—more, or less?”

  “Did you see him?” Ferret asked Bruno.

  “Not that time,” the big man admitted. “But I saw it good when it carried Cable out of the water.”

  “It—or him?” Arcane asked Bruno, his eyes challenging hypnotically.

  “Him. Bigger than me, covered with . . . with green stuff.”

  “Naturally. He’d been swimming under water.”

  “Naked.”

  Arcane smiled a crooked smile. “That’s eccentric.”

  Ferret insisted: “It killed the men.”

  “All of them?”

  Ferret remembered the two who were shot by their own trigger-happy comrade but saw no point in diluting the point of his story with details. “All of them,” he said.

  Arcane looked from one to the other of the faces of the two who stooped low, as if bowing to a king, to report to him. “I’m listening, Ferret,” he said.

  Ferret looked at him quizzically.

  “The beast of the swamps. I haven’t heard it. Have you?”

  “Not since you drove up.”

  Arcane nodded, frowning, wondering why Ferret and Bruno might lie about such bizarre encounters. “Ah,” he said smoothly, “what of the girl? Was she dead when the swamp thing carried her out of the water?”

  “We . . . aren’t sure,” Ferret admitted. “She may have been, but I had the impression that Willie was about to shoot her when he was killed.”

  “Yes, and why shoot a drowned lady? Right. Right.” Arcane nodded slowly. “Did any of Holland’s men survive? Don’t say yes, Ferret.”

  After a long wait and an expression of chagrin that crawled over his gray chiseled face, Ferret said, “It’s not likely, but possible that one of them may have. Bill Darkow.”

  Arcane nodded slowly again. As Ritter, he had known the Darkow brothers rather well. “Brave lad. God-fearing no doubt. Obliged to risk his neck to see that justice is done. Uninformed, though. He probably understands little of what went on back there.”

  Arcane opened the rear limo door and said, “Get in.”

  Now Ferret and Bruno were not quite sure they wanted to. Arcane had interpreted their valiant tragedy as a failure.

  “Might as well,” Arcane advised them. “Or don’t you think we’ve listened to the swamp long enough?”

  Ferret shrugged. He held the door for Bruno to enter first.

  “Listen!” Bruno whispered, half in, half out.

  A rumble, it might have been a trick of the mind, came from the swamp.

  Arcane shook his head.

  It came again, stronger, although its source seemed farther away than it had the time before—as if the thing were retreating farther into the swamp.

  The third time, even Arcane identified the sound as something wild and unusual. He said, as Ferret and Bruno settled into the limo’s jump seats, “On the radio you said Travis was wounded. Should we send someone in after him?”

  Ferret thought over the possibilities—including that he himself might be sent back in—and said, “I wouldn’t bother.

  “You know best,” Arcane said.

  The limo made a laborious U-turn—it was longer than the road was wide—and started back toward the estate. The jeep followed.

  “The girl you lost,” said Arcane, “who may be alive, is a greater danger to us than Darkow. She is what she claims to be, right enough, but because of her sensitive work and security clearances the lady also answers to the FBI at home and the CIA abroad.” He smiled and settled back into the plush camel-hair seat. “You grasp the problem, I’m sure. We—that is, you—will go back for an air search.”

  13

  Along the dirt road, Cable passed by the remains of three shacks: their porches were piles of rotting planks: windows were shattered; walls leaned and were obscured by cudweed and rampant honeysuckle. The wheelless remains of an old Ford rusted in what once-must have been a driveway. Three neighbors, long gone.

  But the road had to lead somewhere, and there was evidence—tracks and broken weeds—that the road was sometimes used.

  She heard a radio playing country music before she turned a bend and spotted a solitary shack with a couple of gas pumps and an old telephone booth.

  The sun was out now, and the ground steamed. It had been more comfortable in the rain.

  Cable trudged up to the phone booth and folded open the screaming green-metal doors. The phone was covered with rust and dust. She lifted the receiver and listened. There seemed to be something there—like the sound a seashell makes held to the ear. A yellow sticker on it called for a dime. She rummaged in her pocket; miraculously, she had a dime. She tried it. Still she heard only the sea in the seashell.

  There was a boy leaning back in a straight chair propped against the porch wall. He was watching her, but with little interest. He was in shadow, and his skin was so black all Cable could see were his eyes. He idly waved a fly-swatter back and forth until he realized Cable was watching him. He let the swatter fall into his lap.

  She approached him. “Hi,” she said.

  His eyes scanned her up and down. Closer now, she guessed he was no more than thirteen.

  He said, “You been in a plane wreck?”

  She laughed. “No, I—just out for a walk.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Cable imagined herself as he saw her: trousers still damp and caked
with mud, torn in places, her blouse and jacket in no better shape. She suspected she had twigs and seaweed in her hair and knew there was soot on her arms and hands. She laughed again. She found the kid instantly likeable.

  “Got a phone that works?” she asked.

  “Inside,” he said. He let his chair down with a clunk and held the screen door open for her.

  The room just inside was a gas station prepared for one customer every day or two. There were a few cans of oil on a sagging shelf, a dispenser of fifty-cent road maps, and miscellaneous auto parts scattered around. A little plastic radio rattled with a static-plagued station.

  With the boy’s help, she reached a country operator who reluctantly agreed to process her collect call to Washington. She listened with growing desperation to a series of electronic switchovers and finally a ringing buzz.

  “Two thousand,” said a woman at the other end. She agreed to accept a collect call from Miss 517.

  There were more clicks and electronic atmospheres, and finally a man said, “Operations. Clark.”

  “This is 517,” she said, “Cable.”

  “One moment.” He put her on hold, presumably to call up her identification and files on his video display.

  “Go ahead, Cable,” he said after a moment.

  “Operation Marshland,” she said. “Please connect me with my nearest contact. And hurry. I’ll hold on. This is quite urgent.”

  “Have you a report to make?”

  “I’d rather make it in person to my local superior.”

  “Hold again, Cable. I’ll see what I can do. The man you want is Colonel Ritter. I’ll locate him for you.”

  “No, wait—” she tried to stop him, but he had placed her on hold again. Ritter, she felt sure, had been killed. Someone else would have to be found.

  The black boy was watching her wide-eyed, intelligently. Nothing about his face moved except his eyes.

  “We’ve got Ritter for you,” Operations said at last. “I’m going to patch you through.”

  “Oh, thank goodness!” said Cable. “Listen, if a boy named Bill Darkow contacts you, help him all you can. Put him in touch with Ritter.

  “Says here Bill and Sam Darkow were on Ritter’s staff.”

  “Right, but the men have been . . . separated.”

  “Here’s Ritter for you. Is there a number where you can be reached?”

  She gave him the number on the dial of the gas-station phone, and after several clicks and a buzz found herself awaiting a new party.

  The boy said to Cable, “There’s been some killin’, hasn’t there?”

  She looked away from him.

  Only a few miles away, Arcane, in his car, had taken the Washington call. Patched in Washington, it had been patched again by Marsha back at the estate; and now the call was returned to the swamp from which it originated.

  Learning from Operations that an operative named Cable wanted to reach him. Arcane’s voice became suddenly deeper and more abrupt, less cultured, less pleasant. Even his posture adapted to the slovenly shape he had used as Ritter.

  “Yeah,” he said to Operations, “put the call through.”

  “Ritter?” Cable’s voice sounded half a planet away.

  “Where the hell are ya, Cable? You calling from the compound?” Arcane had his driver flip a switch that amplified her voice over a conference-call speaker for the benefit of Ferret and Bruno.

  “Where the hell were you last night?” she asked angrily. “The camp was attacked. You don’t know?”

  “No. What happened? Who attacked?”

  “Christ, I can’t go through all that again now. I’ll tell you later. Everything was wiped out. The Hollands were killed. I thought you were dead.”

  “Shit. I took a night off. Where are you?”

  “Uh—just a minute.” She was evidently asking someone for help with directions. She came back on to say, “At a gas station about a mile south of the road to the lab. On old farm road 87.”

  Arcane’s driver slammed on the brakes and began to maneuver the big limo into another U-turn. The jeep following close behind had to run off the road to avoid a collision.

  The cursing guardsmen jumped out to help push the vehicle out of the muck and back onto the road. Bruno laughed.

  “I’m not far from there,” said Ritter/Arcane. “What did you tell Washington?”

  “Nothing much. I said I wanted to report to you—except I didn’t know it would be you.”

  “You sound upset. Calm down and wait for us. Rest. Uh, Cable, did you . . . manage to save anything?”

  Arcane held his breath waiting for her reply.

  She said, “Damn right. I’ve got the last notebook.”

  Arcane’s face was suddenly transformed. He almost slipped into his own persona. He cleared his throat to reengineer Ritter’s voice. “Good work. That’s something anyway. Sit tight. I’ll be there before you know it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Arcane tossed the phone handset back into the front seat. When the driver had switched it off, Arcane said with a giggle, “Ah, if there’s a god of the swamp, I should get on my knees to him tonight!”

  Bruno said gravely, “There may be a god of the swamp.”

  Cable used the station’s surprisingly clean restroom to get some of the mud off her skin and out of her hair. The windowscreen was alive with huge mosquitos that could not quite get in. A dragonfly landed on the screen; the mosquitoes merely rearranged themselves. Feeling refreshed, relieved that help was on the way, that the horrors of last night were over, she strolled back inside the station to wait.

  Fishing for a quarter in her ruined pockets, she found a quarter and dropped it in the slot of an old red round-topped Coke machine. Nothing happened.

  “Doesn’t anything work around here?” she asked the boy—who had not taken his eyes off her.

  “Just me,” he said, deadpan.

  Cable gave the machine a swift kick. The boy walked over to her, concerned for his property. He said, “Kickin’ it don’t help none. Just spoils the paint.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You got to punch it.” He hauled off and rammed the machine with the heel of his hand. The thing rocked on its base, rattled and coughed an icy bottle down into its delivery trough.

  Cable grinned. “Thanks.”

  “Nothin’. Name’s Jude.”

  “Mine’s Cable.”

  The boy stuck out his hand. Cable smiled and shook it.

  Before they were introduced, the silence had not mattered; now Cable felt obliged to engage in small talk. She looked around the room. The place was wretched in the extreme—it had a desk and an easy chair—and the boy wore clean but old clothes. She almost meant it when she said, “Nice station.”

  He just blinked.

  “Your dad own it?”

  He seemed to be on the verge of saying something but changed his mind. He shrugged and looked away from her.

  Cable sighed. Evidently the boy did not share her impulse for a chat.

  A few minutes later, he said, “Looks like your ride’s here.” He was staring out the window past her.

  Cable turned to hurry out the door and stopped short. Pulling up was a tall old limousine—shining like new, like something from a time machine—definitely not government issue. It stopped at the phone booth. No one got out.

  “Ever see that car before?” she asked Jude.

  “Nope. I’d remember it, too.” He stood beside her so they could both see out the front screen door. Cable was sure no one outside could see them, as it was much darker inside.

  A jeep careened around the limo and pulled up to one of the tow gas pumps.

  “They get their own gas,” Jude said.

  Cable knew what he meant; the jeep’s gang of five were dressed for jungle warfare and armed to the teeth. She knew more; she knew these were dressed and armed like the men who had raided the camp.

  “Some friends you got, lady,” said the boy.

  “They’re
not,” she said, as much to herself as to Jude. “I wonder what they’re doing here.”

  “You runnin’ from ’em?”

  “If they see me, I’m cooked.”

  “Uh huh,” he said, not moving.

  Ferret emerged from the limousine. He looked into the phone booth, checking the number or checking to see if it worked, and looked from the booth to the station. He carried his automatic rifle as casually as a grouse hunter stalking a treeline.

  “Is there another house with a phone near here?” Cable asked Jude.

  “Not with, or without.”

  As Ferret ambled toward the screen door, Cable and Jude backed away and ducked behind the desk.

  “Don’t be afraid, Jude,” she said, her own heart racing.

  “Say that to someone whose desk you ain’t hidin’ behind,” he said in his level voice.

  She looked around. There were screened-in windows on either side of the door Ferret approached and one other window on the side near the gas pumps—where the jeep was parked, where its occupants loitered.

  “Is there some way out of here I don’t know about?” she asked Jude.

  “Yeah,” he said, “through my room back there.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “But it don’t open to the back, just to the side. It goes through the bathroom.”

  “The side by the gas pumps, or the other side?”

  “Other side.”

  Ferret was only a few feet from the screen door. He called out, “Anybody here? You open for business?”

  Cable got ready to run; she had a sudden thought. “Is there a gun here, Jude?” she whispered.

  “What kinda place you think this is?” he whispered back. “ ’Course there is.”

  He opened the center desk drawer and reached up into it, fumbling until he brought down an ancient rusty revolver with oily receipts stuck to it.

  Cable grabbed it.