Swamp Thing 1

by David Houston

  Ferret continued to interrogate his intended victim. “I’ll bet you do just about everything right, don’t you, Bill? Steady job with a moderate amount of excitement, eight hours sleep a night? You married, Bill?”

  “No, but—”

  “Ah, there’s a lady somewhere. Just one, I’ll bet. What’s her name?”

  “Gail.”

  Bill managed to shake himself out of his passive state. The girl heading for the door was going to open it! He tossed the Scotch in Ferret’s face and ran toward Caramel.

  He was too early. She had not opened the door yet—though there was a key in her hand—and she had sense enough to wait. Bill grabbed for the key; she tossed it to Bruno.

  “I’ll let you out, sugar,” Bruno volunteered. He climbed slowly out of his recliner, as though he was aching all over, and walked like an old man to Caramel’s side.

  Bill had darted from his failure with the key to another door—one that seemed to lead directly outside. It was locked.

  Ferret cut him off before he could reach the third door.

  The last door was in a corner not far from the conversation alcove. It had a handle rather than a knob, and in the split second before he opened it, Bill realized that no one was bothering to stop him.

  A fluorescent light flickered on in a long refrigeration chamber. Strong odors of preservatives and decay assailed him as Bill gaped into the metal tunnel. There were animal and human corpses, in various stages of autopsy, and shelves of limbs and containers of organs. There was a row of human babies—misshapen, contorted—and something that looked as if it might have been Siamese triplets all massed in a single hideous lump.

  Arcane saw the subject of Darkow’s horror and said pleasantly, “Marsha had that one for me. Like it?”

  Bill backed away as Arcane closed the heavy door. Bill backed away and stepped on the queer dog—which emitted a cork-in-a-bottle squeal. Its spindly neck had snapped. It was dead.

  “Nothing you can do about it when your number comes up,” Arcane mumbled as he picked up the little body. “Get it over with, Ferret.”

  Bill’s heart sank as he heard the door a long room away click shut. The muscleman had helped Caramel leave with her bar, and now he guarded the door.

  “Drive a new American-made car, I’ll bet,” Ferret said, “and you always will. Grow roses when you retire from government service?”

  Darkow sprinted for one of the black lab tables. He grabbed a flask from a bracket and threw it at Ferret.

  Ferret laughed. He spread his arms batlike and walked relentlessly toward Darkow, who continued to throw glass. Ferret said for the benefit of Bruno and Arcane: “Just like this afternoon when that other unstoppable monster walked into my gunfire. I know how he felt! Invincible!”

  Bill threw a beaker of fluid. Ferret sidestepped it; it sizzled as it cracked and its contents ate into the hardwood floor.

  Ferret kept coming and Darkow kept throwing—anything he found loose on the table. He hoped to make it to the end of the workbench and, from there, to the window. He’d throw himself through it . . .

  Suddenly he felt a pain in his back and a convulsion in his chest. He heard Arcane say:

  “Sorry, Ferret, but this has gone on long enough. I can’t have my lab in shambles.”

  Ferret asked: “What did you do?”

  Arcane said: “Simple surgery.”

  Bill felt his knees give way as black splotches converged in his eyesight. Then everything went black forever.

  Arcane was behind the collapsing body. He tossed a bloody Byzantine dagger into the lab sink.

  Bruno walked over slowly and looked down at what was Bill Darkow as if he had never seen a murdered man before.

  Ferret regarded the body too, but with indifference. “Have any use for this?” he asked Arcane.

  “Not that springs to mind.” He laughed. “Too bad we haven’t any pet alligators to feed it to. What are you staring at, Bruno?”

  “Nothing,” he said turning away.

  “Why don’t you trundle off to bed?” Arcane suggested. “You’ve had a busy day, little man.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he said quietly.

  “A busy day, big man,” Arcane corrected, making it worse, accusing him even more of childishness.

  “Can I have a girl?” Bruno asked Arcane hopefully.

  “Certainly, Bruno, almost any one you want. Marsha? Celia? Dawn?”

  “Terry,” said the big man.

  Ferret guffawed. “No taste in women either. Old plain Terry.”

  “She—” Bruno began defensively and stopped short.

  “Wild sex?” Ferret supposed.

  “She likes me,” Bruno got out with acute embarrassment.

  “We’ll see if she’s available,” Arcane said draping his arm over the top of Bruno’s thick back and leading him to the door.

  “Do I have to have a shot?”

  “I think not, Bruno. No more experimenting for a while, till we have Holland’s formula. I suggest you and Terry go so far as to take steps against pregnancy.”

  “Okay. ’Night, Mr. Arcane. Are we starting out early in the morning?” He stepped across the threshhold and waited obediently for instructions.

  Arcane nodded. “Helicopter, I suspect. I’m not sure you’ll be needed, Bruno. Check with me around seven o’clock.”

  “Right,” he said. He pulled the door shut. “ ’Night, Mr. Ferret,” he said, just before the lock clicked. Ferret did not respond, and apparently Bruno had not expected him to.

  Ferret asked Arcane, “What have you got against Bruno? He’s one of the few I trust.”

  “Like I said earlier, he has limits. He may be reaching his limit for . . . doing whatever may be necessary. But if you want him tomorrow, take him.” Their last drinks were on a lab table, untouched. Arcane took them and delivered Ferret’s to him. “Exciting times, Ferret,” he said, making a quasi-toast and half-raising his glass. “We’re at the start of an enterprise you and I will never top. Inhuman sacrifices will be required of us.”

  Ferret mulled over the implications of that and asked, “Such as?”

  “Who can say?” Arcane sipped. “The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ may be about to take on a world of new meaning.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “One day at a time, eh? An air search. You lead it while I arrange for the delivery of some new equipment.”

  Ferret nodded. He raised his glass. “To the future.”

  “All of it,” Arcane agreed laughing.

  17

  The next morning was clear, and cooler than it had been. There was very little ground fog for the sun to dissipate when it finally rose.

  Cable and Jude were out just ahead of the sun, in Jude’s little skiff. The black boy poled them through a passage in the cypresses that was like a subterranean cavern. The floor was a carpet of blooming lilies that parted obligingly to let the boat pass and then closed solid again. The walls were broad treetrunks; above, admitting the sun only in spots like confetti, the canopy was a cathedral vault of branches and leaves.

  Everything, the boat included, was dew-drenched and sparkling. Clouds of large blue dragonflies flew and hovered, darted and drank, low over the white blossoms among plate-sized leaves.

  “He was right,” Cable said to herself. “It is beautiful.”

  A bullfrog jumped from one lily pad to another.

  “Who was right?” Jude asked.

  Cable woke up in the here and now and sat straighter. “Guy I knew. He loved these swamps.”

  “He wasn’t so crazy. Listen.”

  “To what?”

  “Hear any danger?”

  She shook her head.

  “See? Only big mistake God made with the swamps is mosquitos.”

  “Good thing for me you know your way around,” Cable said, smiling.

  He nodded. “Reckon it is.”

  A large green leaf lighted on the hand Cable rested on the boat rim. The leaf
had legs. Cable saw Jude watching it without concern, and she held her hand still.

  “That’s a katydid,” Jude told her. “Look so much like leaves the trees don’t know better. Mantis looks like sticks. Butterflies look like flowers.”

  She nodded. Jude had become a bit more conversational since they first met.

  He asked, “Can’t you call that guy that loves the swamp? Maybe he’d come get you outa trouble.”

  Cable averted her eyes and shook her head.

  He understood her silence. “Ain’t nobody you can call?”

  She cracked a wry smile. “Actually, I thought there was. But when I tried him, those goons back there showed up to make Swiss cheese out of your gas station.”

  He gave the pole a strained push and the boat skimmed a little faster. “They weren’t glad to see you,” he agreed. “You didn’t pay your bookie or something?”

  “Or something.”

  The tranquility of the morning was marred by a sound they both recognized. It came from the distance, got very loud, and then trailed away: a helicopter.

  “Much farther?” Cable asked her boatman.

  Jude surveyed her, saw a return of yesterday’s apprehension, and shook his head. “Just a little ways.”

  She leaned over the edge and picked a huge white water lily.

  Jude asked, “What you got to go back for? You said they totaled the place.”

  “I have to get something I left there.”

  “Somethin’ more important than gettin’ away from the goon squad?”

  Cable nodded gravely.

  Jude nodded with her, deadpan, mocking and at the same time conceding: if you say so. He poled toward the bright end of the cavern of trees, where it met the shallow lake around the peninsula of the ruined camp.

  They were not alone in wanting to return to the camp that morning.

  Ahead of them, already wading in the water of the inlet, the fearsome monster of the bogs and marshes returned to the pool that gave him birth.

  As if the ruins emitted some kind of ray that became more harsh the closer one approached, the swamp thing fought off tensions and agonies that grew stronger with each sloshing step. He ripped away a hanging vine that was in his way, and the violence of it startled a snake heron which took to the air with a piercing cry.

  There was an acrid odor of smoke in the air.

  He looked for the steeple and saw nothing rising above the trees.

  The bridge was still there. He stopped in the water and looked up at it. Where his blazing hand had touched the railing there was a charred area—and several sprouts, green shoots that grew with the grain and curved up looking for sunlight.

  Lumbering up through the mud and tall grass, he swiped aside a dozen cattails, and trudged—amber tears forming in his eyes—toward the church. The wreckage of everything about it was devastating.

  He shoved timbers away, and a black billow of ash blew into the air; he snatched up what was left of the old oak front door and sailed it like a stick, angrily, across the compound.

  He made his way, first, to the arboretum that had been along the side wall. His tough bare feet shattered the remains of what had been the glass enclosure.

  Moving among the shriveled corpses of a thousand plants, he paused to touch them tenderly as a father might his lost children.

  He moved into what was left of the laboratory of Alec and Linda Holland.

  He passed from one disaster to another—sooty meltdowns of exquisite instruments, shattered racks of beakers and vials, the gutted remains of the electron microscope. Cable’s voice came to him: “You ought to put a cover on that.” He dropped what was left of the circuit box into the ashes on the floor.

  His tour of horror ended at the burned-out socket of the wall safe where the notebooks had been secured. There wasn’t an ash that might have been one of them. Someone had them. He stared into the safe and, like a pilgrim at the last station of the cross, sagged at the emptiness.

  He was too preoccupied to notice the sound of a pole scraping the metal bottom of a boat as it reached shore, or the low voices that were not made by breezes in the trees.

  Jude and Cable dragged the skiff through the grasses and propped its prow on mossy land. They stood by the boat, ankle-deep in water.

  Cable said, “You stay here, Jude.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I planned to.”

  She took a step away and turned back to say, “If you see anyone coming, give a yell.”

  The boy gulped and nodded. “Don’t worry.”

  Cable tried to sound casual but failed because she was frightened herself. “And if you yell and I don’t come, then just go on and get yourself out.”

  Jude’s eyes widened perceptably. He said nervously, “I can handle myself. Don’t worry.”

  Cable smiled reassuringly, impressed by the boy’s courage. “I’m not worried,” she said.

  She climbed up the bank and headed directly around the side of the church toward the tree at the rear where she had hidden the notebook.

  Cable missed hearing Jude mutter to himself, “Well, I’m worried.”

  Some of the studs of the side of the church and the lab’s interior wall still stood, but there were tall slats of air where planking had been. The side looked rather like open Venetian blinds turned sideways. She did not want to look in. The building was a corpse. There was something indecent about being near it, like an invasion of privacy. She kept her eyes on the charred path to the back.

  She walked quietly—though she could not have said why. There was no sign of anyone else.

  Suddenly her ear picked up something from inside the church. An animal, she told herself, or maybe rubble falling, burned splinters blowing.

  She waited a moment, and then walked on.

  She heard it again. Something was moving inside. Something, from the sound, picked up a piece of debris and tossed it aside.

  Hiding behind a shrub, she peered inside. She saw nothing at first. Then something near the ground stirred. She saw a massive green back, the back of a huge head. Strangely, he was kneeling, and rocking back and forth. He was intent upon something at his knees on the ground. He reached down and scooped up something from the ashes. What, Cable could not see; his giant body obscured his hands.

  He had picked up Linda’s locket from where Bruno had sentimentally placed it: on Linda’s ashes. Fumbling, his hands too large, he managed to trigger the spring. The locket opened. The face inside was that of Alec Holland—a handsome, square-jawed smiling man, with blue eyes and light brown hair and skin that was fair and modeled by a light reddish suntan.

  His hideous face grim, driven, the moss-covered exaggeration of a man laid the locket where it had been. Then he wrested himself upright on his knees and shakily to his feet.

  Cable continued to peer out from behind the shrub, hoping he would not hear her or look her way.

  The creature pawed his way through a jumble of charred wreckage. He pulled out a rack of test tubes that had somehow escaped damage. Carefully, almost tenderly, he carried the rack to a half-burned table.

  Cable wanted to see better. She stood and walked right up to the wall studs. She kept herself ready to run. What does it think it’s doing? she wondered.

  He returned to the wreckage where he had found the test tubes and tore into the rubble; he dug frantically. He lifted a large buckled cabinet and placed it on the ground gently. Inside he found bottles of chemicals that were still whole, and several graduated cylinders. He placed these with extraordinary care on the burned table.

  Out of the pile he next pulled a rectangular shape, an instrument of some kind. He looked at it, rubbed it as Aladdin did his lamp, and then hurled it away. It crashed not five feet from where Cable stood.

  She did not budge; he did not look her way.

  Cable thought of chimps she had seen in shows, animals that mimicked the behavior and movements of humans with such precision that audiences implicitly believed that the animals had t
he same motives and knowledge as men. This ape of the swamps, this prehistoric humanoid was miming the actions of someone absolutely familiar with the laboratory and its furnishings. This thing had watched—who? Alec, Linda?—laying out implements for experimentation.

  Even more incredibly, he picked up a vial and seemed to be holding it up to look at the contents. But the great beast was too clumsy, his hands too massive and powerful; the vial burst under the pressure of his grip. The monster reeled back, surprised. He let out a sharp snarl of anger.

  Cable was terrified by her own compulsion to stay. She felt as she might if she were in a foreign land she had never visited before—seeing the face of a primitive native who looked hauntingly familiar to her. It was absurd.

  With shaking, fierce concentration, the creature tried again, this time to decant the contents of a beaker into a test tube.

  Cable watched the muscles of his enormous tendoned back and arms; his body was incredibly tense, active, attempting to master some kind of control. His legs stiffened.

  But the fragile beaker slipped from his clumsy hands and smashed against the floor. The monster’s lunging attempt to prevent this only heaped disaster onto accident, upsetting the entire rack. A horrible domino reaction began and glass containers toppled, rolled, fell and shattered.

  The beast howled in frustration. He slammed and splintered the table with a single blow. Enraged by his own rage, he struck out senselessly to break the nearest thing he saw—a timber from a roof truss. Then he reeled through the charred mess, smashing everything within his reach—cabinets, shelves, bookcases, tables, materials.

  Suddenly he stopped. He listened. He looked directly at the slot in the wall where Cable had been standing. There was no one there now.

  Cable had fled. She had run directly toward the old tree—past the slotted half-destroyed wall, in easy view if the creature had happened to look or hear her running. But his violence and noise had kept him occupied.

  She reached the tree, fumbled in its roots, found the notebook and frantically searched for a way back to Jude that would not take her right past the church in the open.