The Swamp Man

It was not exactly an old town, or one that was particularly well known. The houses neither new nor falling down.  There was an odd feeling about the place, however. Nothing really noticeable, just a profound strangeness in the air as he arrived in the town. A feeling that something wasn’t quite right. An itch on his skin even though it was too early in the year for mosquitoes. He absentmindedly tried to scratch it with a left arm that wasn’t there. He laughed, slightly, as he leaned against the car, the metal a bit warmer than was to be expected this early in the spring. It had been almost half a year now. Almost half a year since the sharp metal had pierced through his skin and muscle and he had felt his bones snap and stab into his arm from the inside, as if a thornbush had grown beneath his skin in that moment. Almost half a year since the cold machine had pulled back its steel jaws, its unfeeling mechanisms doing as they had been made to, for it did not know what a “human” was and it did not care. Almost half a year since his flesh had made that horrible snapping sound that he could still hear if it was quiet enough. Since he felt his blood soak through his work uniform, saturating every part of it before pooling on the concrete floor beneath his feet. Almost half a year since he turned in his notice, not that they would have had any use for him after it happened, anyway. 

He had grown up in this state, but his old town now felt different. The familiar way the light filtered through the old buildings and maple trees only reminded him that he couldn’t feel it with all of his body anymore, because there was no longer any such thing. As he would walk beside the building of his old school, he tried to once again put his hand to the rough brickwork as he walked, only to realize that he could not do so on the way back without circling the building. He felt, on some level, that the town was made for someone that no longer existed. Someone that had stopped existing even before it happened, maybe. So here he was, in this small town by the swamp. A new home perhaps. A new start. Maybe if he started again, then what he was now could be all of him instead of just most of him. 

Despite everything, some things were the same. The air still felt pleasantly cold as it blew from across the lake and over the mountains, the tapwater still tasting better than any of the stuff you could find in a plastic bottle. Then, of course, there was the forest. There was nothing like the kind of forest you get here. A place with a history to it, the old slate-stacked walls crisscrossing the tree-covered hills always coated with a thick moss. Creeks winding down the ridges, each pool a world of its own if you bothered to look closely. There was a way the moonlight reflected off the still pools of the quarries, the walls of smooth granite on all sides topped with trees that had worked quickly to retake the hills from which they had once been removed. There was a sort of silence, once you got into the forests here. One made of presence, not absence. A silence that was the true state of things. Many things had changed, but nature was always the same. Even if a tree falls, there’s the knowledge that it was never meant to stand forever. 

He sighed slightly, his eyes gazing upwards at the mountains in the distance. There was a swamp of sorts upriver from town, he had heard. He made a note to investigate when he got the chance. 

That night, his dreams were of a song that came from the swamp. One woven from the voices of everything that was born and lived and decomposed in the cloudy water. A song that told him that here, he could be whole. The words stuck with him as he got dressed and left his small house, now a mess of unpacked boxes. They echoed through his head as he saw a man, walking through the center of town. A strange scar forming a ring around his leg below the knee. It was only then he thought of how strange it was that he had picked this town. Far too small for anything interesting to happen there, and definitely not as many job opportunities as he might find in Burlington, even if going near the college presented the same torn nostalgia as all of Montpelier did. He watched the man continue to walk, limping slightly as if he wasn’t quite used to that leg. His hands twitched slightly, as if there was an itch he wasn’t allowed to scratch, his eyes reflecting what seemed to be a sense of determination not to claw at his mysterious scar. “You can be whole here.” What did that really mean? 

He awoke that night long before sunrise. The moon illuminated his nearly empty room at an angle that meant it couldn’t have been up for more than a few hours. The air conditioning had been on to compensate for the odd heat, but he still found that the bed was soaked with sweat. His mind raced with a feeling he couldn’t understand. Somewhere between longing and hunger, almost to the extent where he felt a need to snatch one of the long shadows that danced across the wall with the movement of a passing car. His whole body itched, although this did not extend to the empty space beyond his left elbow. Instead, he felt something, far away yet more intense than any feeling he had experienced since the pain that day. An intense desire that pulled him from his sweat-soaked mattress and into the night. He didn’t know what he would find as he stumbled through the near-darkness, stopping at the river and gazing into the dark water before wading slowly but deliberately across and continuing upriver along the bank. The plants of the streambed wrapped around his legs as if inviting him to sink. The night was more alive then he had expected, the size of the town inverse to that of the ecosystem. Only as his feet began to sink into the mud of the swamp did he realize exactly what he was doing, and where exactly he was. With a sudden panic, he spun around frantically, trying to remember which way he had come from, when suddenly the frogs began to sing.

There is a frog called a “spring peeper". A charming name, given to it by someone that has seen one. It is a curious creature, for to see it before you is a falsehood. Its true nature is the sound it makes. In the dark, damp places where the shrubs grow thick and the mud causes you to sink almost past your knees it is a shrill sound that surrounds you, drills its way into your brain itself through your aching eardrums like ten thousand tiny needles from all sides. On the spring nights where all things that crawl below your sight sing of their desire to multiply, it feels as if there is nothing making that sound, for nothing could possibly be capable of making it. all that exists is that pulsing melody that reaches into your mind with every piercing note and pulls all thought from you. It doesn’t matter where you go. Even as you drag yourself through the mud, submerged branches clawing at your flesh and as the vast clouds of insects begin to partake of your blood, it will just keep getting louder. And here, in the depths of the swamp, the river doing little to carry away the stagnation, it was deafening. Forgetting his desire of returning to the place he tried to call home, he clutched his ears as much as he could and fled into the forest, each thorn and twig tearing at his skin. He did not know how long he ran, that horrible sound not pursuing him because everywhere he went it was already there. His clothes nearly shredded, leaving bloody rags clinging to many thornbushes across the forest. He came to a stop in a clearing, the unsolid ground still clinging to his exhausted legs as he came to a stop in the center. 

The moon was directly overhead, but only helped to cast the areas beyond the clearing into total darkness. The stars were nowhere to be seen, the light pollution from the town drowning them out. Humanity feared the night, and because we could not pull the stars from the skies, we made our own, in the process hiding the true ones, and further darkening the places we feared. He gazed into the dark beyond the trees, hearing every snap of a twig, every heavy breath that he hoped desperately was his own. Nights such as these he thought are when everything we evolved to fear emerges. So who are we to claim that what can be seen in the light is all that hides in the dark. It was then, at the moment the cold light from the moon was muted by an encroaching cloud that spread across the sky, that standing in the middle of this place, the horrible sound piercing his mind with each pulse, the mud beginning to pull him down almost to the waist, the innumerable things that crawl in the dark hungering to take him apart with a thousand tiny jaws, that he came to a realization.

All life is fundamentally made of violence. From the creatures that tear into our still-warm corpses and feast on our organs to the bacteria which, once symbiotic with us, begin to consume us from the moment of our deaths, rendering us unrecognisable. Everything in this world is formed from something that met its terrible end, digested and decomposed and shaped into something new. Beneath what humans see as beautiful are countless things, eating and killing and multiplying. In the swamp, this cycle of death that can never die, each pulse of the deafening sound, each crunch of the footsteps of some unseen thing, each buzz of the mosquitoes that now covered him, all formed a note of this wonderful song of ending. Of decomposition. Of being taken apart and distributed every speck of your biomass being reshaped into a worm or a frog or a leaf. It sang that he could be whole. The words were not there, for the thing that sang them to him had no need of such things. The meaning was forced into his brain with every voice of the maddening chorus-- we see you. You will be whole. We will make you a part of us, and we will feast on what is left. You will feast too. He had sunk past his waist into the dark mud of the swamp, clawing at his ears and at his itching skin. In the dark, he was unsure how he could see it when the flower sprouted and bloomed from the ooze before him, unfolding until the center of it was revealed-- an arm. A left arm. Mosquitoes swarmed over it, piercing it with their needle mouths and filling it with the blood they had taken from him. As the melody of the swamp reached its crescendo, he lunged forward as far as he was able, seizing the arm that sprouted from the mud and tearing it from the flower. He felt his teeth sink into it, a warm, metallic flavor seeping between them and down his throat. With a quick motion, he jerked his head to one side, tearing off a large chunk of flesh. The arm twitched as he crushed a finger bone with his jaws, shredding off the meat to expose the broken bone and drink of what was inside. As he ate, each drop of blood that fell to the ground bloomed into great patches of mold and moss, spreading to where he sunk and tracing a path up along the lines of blood that dripped down from his face. He could feel them follow it into his mouth, filling his stomach and lungs and veins. He did not care as he snapped a bone before grinding it into shards with his teeth and swallowing them. He didn’t care as each one pierced his tongue and all he could taste was blood. He didn’t care as the crawling things came up from the mud and burrowed into his skin. He would be whole. 

He awoke to the sun filtering in through his window, illuminating the piles of yet-unpacked boxes. He rose, putting weight on each leg which had no beetle-holes, feeling the light on his not-bloodstained face. He reached up to brush the hair from his eyes. With his left hand. He stared at it, a look of amazement on his face as he ran his fingers along skin which had disappeared into the machine months before. A pattern of scars ran along it, branching like roots before ending in a ring around the place where it had once been severed. He felt amazing, as if he had discovered some great truth about the universe as he exited his sheets, which were devoid of any sweat. The day proceeded as usual, though there was a peculiar itch in his left arm, not just following the pattern of the scars, but almost within the arm itself. He scratched at it absentmindedly, and it left grey marks where his fingernails touched. He didn’t notice it as he ate breakfast (a bit more than usual), wandered the town (strangely empty) and did his work (though neither the manager nor anyone else had bothered to show up.) as it became later in the day, however, it intensified, but he refused to scratch it in earnest. An idea filled his mind, two words in his own voice-- don’t look. He glanced at his arm, but there was nothing to see. Nothing besides the gray marks which now oozed some sort of fluid. As he tried to wipe it away, the itch increased, spreading to everywhere the liquid touched until it coated all of his left arm. Finally, surrendering to the urge, with a scream that could not have come from a human he dragged his fingernails along his skin. There was that same sensation of an open wound. That same sickening warmth that drips from it down your arm and onto the ground. There was no blood, however. He stared at the rotting wood beneath the thin layer of flesh that coated it, cloudy water dripping from the cuts and soaking his shirt. A small insect, perhaps a beetle, recoiled from the light and burrowed away into the soft wood, the top of its carapace sliding against the inner layer of flesh that wrapped around it, he felt it chewing through him, and in a panic he withdrew his pocketknife, sinking the blade into his arm before sliding it along the length of it, widening the cut and tracing the path that he believed the beetle had taken. Each movement of the knife revealed more rotting, infested wood, like that of a tree that had fallen weeks before. He screamed again in that voice which wasn’t quite his as he saw that it extended well past the ring-shaped scar on his arm. He hacked at it, hoping to uncover some bone or artery beneath the soaked and decomposing mass, but as he reached the other side of the core of his left arm, the hand dangling limply, held on by a section of flesh that did not bleed, he realized what he had left in the swamp to be consumed. 

He staggered through the empty town, trying not to look at what seeped from under the doors of many houses, the things that were blood and the things that were not blood oozing from whatever sat behind each door, chewed and decomposed and hopefully not still alive. From each dark red puddle bloomed reeds and flowers, reaching up towards the sky. His left hand continued to drip dark water, hitting the soil like raindrops and leaving a trail of thick moss wherever he walked. He felt the soft snap of old wood every time he took a step, felt the creatures burrowing through what he knew was his innermost layer. it knew immediately that it was not human. It had left its humanity in the swamp and it was going to get him back. It shambled through the tall grass, the dense plant growth barely impeding its movement, the mud surprisingly solid under its feet. It was of this place now. The sun became muted as the trees became denser, producing a darkness that supported the variety of fungus that sprouted from each shadow like fingers reaching up from the dark. The forest floor smelled old and rotten, or was that just the scent of his arm as numerous tiny centipedes slithered in between the soft, damp fibers. It had left its humanity here, discarded a piece of him amongst the roots and mud with each step it had taken the night before. It could feel him wandering here, and every now and then saw scraps of torn clothing or glimpsed a movement of three limbs that quickly disappeared into the trees. It walked, its legs not growing tired for it was not truly walking at all, merely moving a piece of itself through its own body. Blood cells do not tire as the heart forces them through the veins, and in this way it did not tire as it moved through the swamp that was itself. It spun around as it heard the snap of a twig behind it. Nothing. Where was its humanity hiding? Did he fear the thing that it was now? He could not survive in this place. He would need to let it become him again. What is a human to the swamp? Nothing but food, correct? But no. no, that was not right. To the swamp a human is an axe. A fire. A hunter. An invasive species. It realized then that its humanity was not hiding from it. He was following it. It was of this place, and he meant to harm it. It felt something strike it in the side of what would be its ribs, the wood caving in on itself and a thousand tiny things that crawled within it scurrying away from the damaged area that now dripped mud and water. It saw him, the humanity he had left behind, stalking it from the trees. He was not meant to be here, His body fundamentally incongruous with the mind that had abandoned it for one formed from the cycles of decomposition found there. His skin was scraped and bloody, every mud-filled cut inflamed and oozing as he stumbled towards the self that was no longer part of him. His emaciated form drained of blood by the swarms of insects that still carried it away, landing on the swamp-man and depositing it into the flesh that wrapped around its rotted core. It mixed with the dark water that seeped from the wood. He shambled from the forest, swaying side to side as he clawed at the beetle-holes in his skin and at the roots of the flowers which burrowed into his flesh. He reached up to the side of his neck with a dry right hand, gripping the base of the flower that pierced through the muscle and wrapped around the spine and with a sickening sound of tearing meat he tore it loose. What little blood remained in his body dripped down from the wound, flowing down his shoulder and soaking into the twisting mass of roots and vines that had sprouted from what remained of his left arm, woven through his flesh nearly up to the shoulder and creaking audibly with each pained movement of the joint. His dehydrated flesh pulled tightly across his face, stretching it into an unsettling smile of still-bloodstained teeth. With a scream that was too human he lunged at the swamp-man, grasping one shoulder with his right hand and piercing the other with the sharp branches that replaced his left. The rotted core of it provided little resistance as the numerous points of his left arm punctured through it. It screamed its inhuman scream as he sunk his teeth into the side of its face, tearing away the loose-fitting flesh before spitting it to the side and  biting once more into the wood at the center. He could taste the rot and fungus and feel as many crawling things within were crushed between his jaws, their innumerable legs twitching wildly and their segmented carapaces contorting as they burst, coating his tongue with a bitter flavor and the texture of a thousand twitching legs. A soft rain began to fall, the light impact of each drop punctuating each consecutive point of the left arm as it was driven once more into the swamp-man’s chest, one spike breaking through the flesh to the core within, then another, then another. The frequency of the raindrops speeding up as it gripped his arm feebly with both hands and, in an attempt to remove it from his shoulder, jerked its arms to one side, the old fibers of the wood of them snapping softly in an instant. Both limbs now hung uselessly by its side as he rose his right arm, the bones nearly breaking the skin as he tightened it into a fist and brought it down again and again on what remained of the creature’s face, each strike landing in time with the thunder as the skies poured the tears of eyes that had just been torn out. The ground beneath their feet began to soften as the rain pooled around them. With the last of its strength, the swamp-man lurched forward, slamming into him and bringing them both down to the mud. Its knees crumpled from inside as they landed, the creature desperately trying to tear out his throat with teeth that turned to damp splinters against his skin. He could feel the things inside crawl up from the depths of its core, now spilling from its mouth onto his neck and beginning to burrow into him. He tore into its stomach, ripping out the slimy fungus caps that mimicked organs, pushing aside the firmer roots that acted as ribs. They fell to the ground beside him, blooming into things that grew upwards at unnatural angles and into his sides. He searched for the heart of it, some central thing it could not live without it, but as he snapped the thing-that-was-not-a-spine, and he felt it convulse as he placed an arm on each half and pulled the thing in two, it remained clinging to his throat, the crawling things burrowing deeper within him. He knew then that this thing could not die. For as long as there was water and nitrogen and phosphorus. For as long as things lived and died and rotted. This was not a creature. It was the swamp that it was. He let his arms fall to his sides as the mud liquified around him, and they sunk together to the depths of the swamp. The thing that was whole and its humanity that believed he was not.