Swamp Thing 1

by David Houston

  She stared at him a moment. Something valiant and funny danced in his great amber eyes. Her laugh was short and giddy, incredulous.

  His shoulders began to shake, and suddenly his form of laughter was born; it came rolling, thundering out of his chest—a deep helpless wave of fear and hurt and rage all transformed into the release of pure hilarity.

  It startled Cable, but soon she was caught up in it—the incredible absurdities, the ridiculous hardships that could only be tolerated when they didn’t fit in a sane world, the world she thought she knew.

  She laughed at everything that came into her mind. Her scraped and scabbed arms. The mud that caked her from head to foot. A man who wanted to rape her having his head fed to alligators. A man she wanted to love transformed into a monster who terrified her. One complex contradiction after another popped into her mind. She held her aching sides and laughed as she had not done in years.

  His laughter faded, and hers turned to tears. She walked into him and laid her face against his chest. His great arm came around to hold her and suddenly rending sobs shook her body. The monster bent low and rested his cheek against her hair.

  The sunlight shifted and lowered and reddened. Locusts began their twilight song.

  Cable said, against his massive chest, “I’m so afraid, Alec. Have I gone crazy? Is this all a nightmare?”

  He said slowly, but with ever-greater ease, “That’s what I keep wondering. I’m afraid, too. Very afraid.”

  “Are you afraid you don’t know facts from dreams any more?”

  “Everything’s a . . . dream . . . when you’re alone,” he said.

  She looked up at him and touched his face.

  He breathed in sharply at her touch, and unwanted heavy tears bled from his eyes. “I mustn’t . . . hold you,” he rumbled.

  “Yes, you must,” she said, tears returning to her own eyes.

  They held each other, frozen, in the gathering mists of twilight.

  “Alec, how . . . ?” She did not know how to ask it.

  “What happened to me?” he guessed. “I’ll tell you. Be patient . . . with my slow voice. I’m learning.”

  They sat facing each other, leaning against tree trunks. Darkness gathered while they talked.

  “Arcane said he hadn’t killed you,” he said, “but I was afraid he had. He was Ritter . . . impersonating Ritter . . . a mask and a voice.”

  “That explains quite a bit,” she said.

  “The formula . . . the one that . . . Linda flicked onto the floor, the one we planted the orchid in . . . I tried to get it away from that maniac. I . . . I was going to throw it into the camp and destroy it. After it combined with every living thing out there on the ground, he would never be able to analyze it, to reproduce it.

  “They hit me from behind . . . and the formula sloshed all over me, soaked into my clothes. I . . . I think it spread my capillary action through every fiber of my clothing and then began to penetrate my skin, eating, burning its way in. It . . . it works on animal tissue as it does on vegetable. It replaces cells at a phenomenal rate.”

  “But why the, the manifestations of plant forms, the vine-like vessels, the mossy skin? It did not seem to alter the plants in a corresponding fashion.”

  He smiled and tipped his head slightly to the side. “You think like a scientist, Alice Cable,” he said. “The volatile aspect of the substance caused it to mingle with the plant life in the bog where I ended up. I . . . I thought I was just putting out the fire. No . . . no . . . strictly speaking, at that point, I wasn’t thinking. Reflex was rushing me toward the water. All I knew was that I was dying.”

  “Oh, Alec!” she whispered, understanding. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “My memory wasn’t there . . . at least, not all of it. When I fully realized what had happened . . . I didn’t want you to see me. I didn’t want you to know . . . ever. Then . . . then all I wanted was to tell you. I’m still not really sure why. What’s the point of it?”

  After a long moment, she said, “I’m glad you did.”

  Fireflies flickered at one another, low over the emerald moss, and an owl fluttered to roost on a high limb.

  “I’m not so frightened anymore,” she said.

  He reached back to a deep black hole in a tree and took out the notebook. He showed it to her and said, “The boy’s safe.”

  He could see her nod in the blue evening light. He heard her sigh of relief. Though the sky was fast darkening, he saw her face in imagination.

  “You’re beautiful, Cable,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, turning him away from a tragic subject with a joke.

  But the subject was there—the love they could not have.

  It was inordinately dark after sundown, until the moon rose and sent dim gray beams in among the cypresses.

  When he could see her face again, he saw that she was asleep, stretched out on the soft moss.

  In the middle of the night he lifted her exhausted body and laid it beside him.

  23

  Cable awoke to the smell of magnolias and the sounds of ten thousand diurnal life forms clicking on with the first of the sun’s rays.

  She rolled away from the sleeping beast, so as not to awaken him, and got to her feet.

  Mist floated along the dewy moss in transluscent clouds and stratified in misty layers up to the high canopy of cypress branches. The leaves at the top were incandescent green.

  She stretched and yawned—and looked at her disgracefully dirty hands.

  There was the sound of a helicopter among the wild things awakening, but it seemed to be many miles away. Cable looked back at the giant form that was difficult to distinguish against the spread of moss; he had not moved.

  A vivid sparkle and dancing reflections off treetrunks told her there was water not far away.

  She found a cold, clear, spring-fed pool abuzz with dragonflies and butterflies and hummingbirds. Lilies floated on the water, and hyacinths lined the pebbled shore.

  She slipped her clothes off and stepped into the icy water.

  Alec had not seemed awake, but as she was walking toward the pool, his eyes had opened slowly and he stared after her.

  He walked to the edge of the clearing and watched her bathe from a distance. She was humming a song, softly, blending with the other songs of nature. He turned away, unable to endure the loveliness. He returned to his bed of moss, took the notebook from its most recent hiding place, and read pages of it. Linda’s notes were still meaningful to him. He read and relived the experiments, the discoveries, his deep friendship with his sister.

  Cable found the pool deep enough in places to swim in, and she delighted in the incredibly clean feeling the world underwater gave her. She examined the pebbles on the bottom and the broad-leafed plants that were miraculously algae-free, as clean as she felt. She dragged her clothes in and scrubbed them clean. She washed the mud of a million nightmares out of her hair.

  She did not think of Alec. She couldn’t. Her mind cringed from his name as a finger does from a hot stove. She thought of very little, for once, and merely experienced sensations. She felt comfortably alone, not lonely.

  While she bathed, sunlight arrived at the pool in long oblique blue-white shafts. The creatures of the daytime increased their calling, whistling, bellowing, and croaking.

  She thought she heard the helicopter again but wasn’t sure. The last of the mist dissipated while she was on shore rubbing her hair to help it dry in the sun. Her clothes were laid out on warm boulders.

  Without warning, three men jumped from concealment and tossed bright-yellow nylon ropes around Cable’s naked body.

  She screamed inatriculately at first, then managed to yell, “Arcane!”

  The man stepped out of shadows as if he’d been called. He said to Cable. “The beast knows my name? My, my, how precocious of it. We know the creature is in love with you, Cable. That’s not terribly surprising—now that I see more of you. And I expect it to prove very
convenient. Love produces such predictable effects.”

  In the next instant the swamp thing exploded like a bomb from the jungle underbrush. It crashed and splashed through the shadows, emitting a bestial growl.

  Arcane whirled toward the charging monster and shouted triumphantly, “Now!”

  Perfectly timed and aimed, a huge net was fired from an explosive canister; it fanned out in the air and fell over the creature. The creature thrashed about, but he only managed to entangle himself more. The one arm sent him off balance sprawling into the shallows.

  Another canister exploded, and another net fell. A third followed for good measure.

  The two boldest of Arcane’s men, carrying ropes, rushed to the tangle of nets and risked the thrashing arm to get closer. They stitched the three nets together and pulled them into a tighter tangle. Soon the captured beast could not move at all.

  The men were drenched from the spray of the fight. Arcane looked at his wet black-silk suit with amusement. “Bruno should be around here someplace,” he said to Cable with a chuckle. “He’s always telling me I dress unpractically.” He bent down to look at his netted trophy’s face. “Hmmm. There is intelligence in those eyes. God, what a brute!”

  The men were leering at Cable’s body, trying to catch her eye.

  Arcane asked one of them, “See if you can find a blanket for our guest. She’ll catch cold.”

  He laughed but said, “Yes, sir,” and ran back along the bank of a stream fed by the pool.

  “ ’Fraid I can’t risk removing the ropes to let you put your wet clothes back on, Cable. I’m sure you understand. On the other hand, if you’d like to lead us to the notebook . . . no, silly of me to suggest it. You seem determined to keep the epistle out of my hands. Or is it out of anybody’s hands? You haven’t gone and destroyed it, have you?”

  “If that’s what I’ve done,” said Cable, “how can I prove it to you?”

  Arcane smiled and thought it over. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  The dozen men were standing around waiting for something. The two victims were bagged—the creature in its nets, the girl roped like a calf.

  She bent and fell to her knees in front of the tangle of nets. “Alec,” she said softly to the creature.

  Arcane heard her. “Alec?” he said, “Alec Holland?!” He was thunderstruck. He began to laugh and babble about how he should have guessed.

  Cable ignored him. “You knew we’d be caught, didn’t you?” she said quietly to Alec.

  He said, “The only way out is through.”

  Bruno walked up at that moment and, with a big smile on his face, placed the fifteenth notebook in Arcane’s hands.

  “Hah!” said Arcane. “Bruno, you’re a genius! Now, remember someone called you that once; it’ll do you for a lifetime. Where was it?”

  Bruno shrugged. “Lying on the ground.”

  “Oh,” Arcane said, as if the simplicity of the situation canceled his compliment.

  “What about the girl?” asked one of the men. “Do we need her now?”

  “No, more’s the pity, we don’t,” said Arcane. He added, with a laugh, “John needn’t even bring the blanket. Oh, too late; he’s here.” Arcane himself took the army blanket and draped it around Cable’s nude body.

  There was a rumble and stutter of a big gas engine coming from the shallow stream. A tall yellow tractor on caterpillar treads bumped and lurched into view.

  Bruno asked Arcane quietly, not wanting the other men to hear, “Do you have to kill the girl? I like her.”

  “Like her? Why, Bruno, you have Thelma, or what’sername, and you have the pick of the flock. What’s special about Cable?”

  “Don’t you think she’s special?” Bruno asked. “Not like the others?”

  “Indeed,” said Arcane. He knew that both Cable and the creature could hear him. “She’s especially intelligent, especially informed, especially aware of everything that has transpired here, and outstandingly dangerous. I can’t think of a single reason to keep her and ample reason to rid ourselves of her here and now. Before lightning strikes and burns away her ropes, or any such unlikely miracle.”

  Alec Holland said, “Arcane . . . I’d rather you didn’t.” His voicc was paralyzing.

  Arcane thought it over while all eyes watched him. “Whatever will make you happy, Alec,” he said enigmatically. “Load them both onto the tractor, boys.”

  24

  By noon, Arcane had hurriedly read the fifteenth notebook and had begun to assemble the ingredients needed for the solution. He had feared that something new might be required, something Holland had imported only at the moment of his triumphant success with the mixture; but the final batch was only a rearrangement; not something chemically different from previous samples. Arcane’s pantry—patterned as nearly as possible after Holland’s—contained everything he needed in order to imagine he was beginning his conquest of the world.

  Caramel Kane assisted him. Her luscious blonde hair was tight in a bun; her horn-rimmed glasses hung on a convenient chain around her neck; and she wore a pale green lab smock. She had scrubbed up like a surgeon’s assistant and stood at attention letting water drip down her hands and forearms into the elbows of her smock—as she had seen doctors do on television.

  “We needn’t be quite that sterile,” Arcane said, tossing her a towel. “At least,” he amended, “I don’t think so.”

  He laid out the chemicals and fired up the burners. Glass heating coils had been blown clean with steam. Spiraling glass condensors sweated a faint vapor from their cooling pipes. A small thermometric titration device was operating, and its buret and stirring motors hummed. A hydrocarbon analyzer buzzed. A still bubbled with water in preparation for the addition of drops of reactant. Pressure was building in the storage tank of the big alkylation device that would combine organic molecules.

  “Might as well bring out the cultures, love,” he said. “The animal’s labeled E. coli; the vegetable’s D complex.”

  She tugged open the refrigerator-room door and disappeared for a time into the rows of corpses and parts. “The big containers, Arcane, or the little ones?” she yelled out.

  “The little ones,” he called back, without taking his eyes from the graduated cylinder he filled with a clear chemical. He dimly heard the klunk of the door closing as Caramel nudged it shut with her bottom.

  She stumbled on an oriental carpet in the conversation alcove, and one foot banged down on the floor, but nothing was spilled.

  “You must take care, little one,” he said, sweating, controlling his temper, when she laid the two containers beside him on the worktable. “You’ll find sulfonic acid on the shelf down there—” his head jerked toward the far side of the table “—and a decanter of one-fluro-two-bromobenzene. Bring them. Carefully. Oh, and the benzyl methyl ether.”

  “Right,” she said happily.

  Having delivered the chemicals, she stood behind him as he added compounds to a caldron over a blue alcohol flame. Some of them clouded the solution; others cleared it. Some colored; others bleached. Arcane—grumblingly annoyed at the inconvenience of having to do it himself—scribbled notes chronicling the sequence of events. He was marginally cheered by an unbidden thought: someday that very page under his hand might be a museum piece—like the design of the atom bomb that was scribbled on the back of an envelope.

  Caramel lost interest in the subtly changing formula and lifted up the tail of Arcane’s lab-coat. She slipped one of her cool hands into his midnight-blue linen trousers and let it rest against his gluteus maximus.

  When it became clear that he did not even notice, she withdrew and tiptoed to the conversation alcove where she found a technical journal to turn the pages of.

  “Caramel—where are you?” he demanded. “Distilled water, quick!”

  She watched him add two drops to the yellow substance before him. It kept its hue but turned fluorescent. It looked precisely like the breaker of liquid Arcane had seen in A
lec Holland’s hand.

  Arcane stood down from his stool and took an awed step away from it. “Uh, Caramel,” he began hesitantly, “I want you to . . . to contact a few people. Make a note.” She reached for the notebook and ballpoint Arcane had been using. He took the book and tore out the blank back page for her. “Contact Hajj—in Paris, I think, and Dr. Pierre Bouget—who might be in Istanbul.”

  “How do you spell—?”

  He took the page and wrote out the list himself.

  “Have Marsha get on the telephone and the short wave and contact these people,” he said, handing her the page.

  “What is the message?” Caramel asked.

  “I expect them here for dinner tonight,” said Arcane. “Late dinner to allow them traveling time, say, eleven o’clock. And have the girls prepare the appropriate number of rooms for our guests. Have Marsha tell them I’m taking care of all expenses, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

  “What if they ask what it’s all about?”

  Arcane estimated his power over them and smiled. “I don’t think a single one of them will ask.”

  While Caramel was delivering the list and instructions, Arcane stared into the beaker of glowing yellow as a wizard peers into a crystal ball. Something—he could only relate it to surface tension—caused the fluid to climb the inside wall of the beaker; and something—the rim of the glass or perhaps the air—kept the liquid inside. He struck it with a stirring rod and the inner light brightened.

  Nervously, determined not to spill a drop, he poured a dozen samples into test tubes. He was filling the last when Caramel returned and said loudly:

  “Marsha’s got on to it already.”

  Arcane spilled a drop onto the black padded-plastic tabletop. A whoosh of smoke rose from the drop and almost caused him to drop the beaker.

  Arcane said to the girl sweetly, “This material is deadly and explosive. If you allow anything at all to startle me, we will probably both die agonizing fiery deaths. Now let’s try an experiment with it—or have I frightened you too much?”

  “No, I’m not scared,” she said.