Skunk Man Swamp

by P. D. Workman

  Her senses told her she was lying on a mattress or pallet. Someone had at least gone to the trouble to make her comfortable. The air moved freely around her. Not a coffin. Not a closet. Maybe a room or cell. She could hear water running somewhere.

  All day they had skimmed over the water of the Everglades, and the river itself moved so slowly it seemed to be standing still. Now she could make out a trickle of water, falling over rocks or in a fountain. It made her thirsty. How long had it been since she’d had something to drink? Corvin had warned her against getting dehydrated. She knew that when dehydration set in, it could turn things bad very quickly. She needed water if she were going to survive, even in the humidity of the Everglades.

  She lay there for some time, the minutes passing by so slowly it felt like she was there for days before she detected someone’s approach.

  The stealthy sounds were so quiet she didn’t know at first whether it was the person who had trapped her or whether it was a rat rustling around in the darkness looking for something to eat. She reached out with her mind, pressing against it.

  Not a rat.

  But something familiar. She had seen or felt it before. Reg probed, trying to find out more about it without giving herself away. It was against the rules to enter another being’s mind, of course, but it was also against the rules for that being to kidnap her. Reg didn’t feel any guilt over what she was doing. She just didn’t want him—him? Yes, definitely him—to know that she could touch his mind.

  The mind was intelligent. Dark. Cunning. She found the presence of both vast stores of knowledge and a sharp, predatory instinct. Who was he? What was he?

  As he moved closer to her room, Reg gathered more details about him. But it wasn’t until the air flow shifted that she had new sensory data. A foul, rotten smell clung to the creature—a hideous smell like a hundred dead, decomposing things.

  And that was when she knew. When she remembered the scent, she had smelled earlier in the day on the boat that had turned her stomach.

  Tybalt.

  She breathed shallowly, trying to ignore the smell that made her want to retch. If she ignored it, then sooner or later, she would get used to it. Like a coroner in a morgue. It wouldn’t bother her anymore. She would be able to just forget about it and to focus on other things. Things like how she was going to escape his lair.

  She tried to speak as he got closer but still couldn’t make a sound. What had he done to her? She explored her mouth with her tongue but did not find any kind of gag inside or outside. Everything was black, yet he seemed able to move around with ease. Even cats had to have some light entering their pupils to see in the dark.

  He drew up close to her. She could feel him breathing. His eyes were on her, whether he could see her or not. She could feel his watchfulness and attention.

  “Reg Rawlins,” he said, drawing the words out. He sounded foreign. British, maybe? She hadn’t noticed that when he had talked to them earlier in the day. Was he faking an accent now? Or had he faked an American accent earlier?

  Reg’s mouth opened, and saliva sprang up around her tongue. She tried again to speak.

  “Tybalt.”

  This time the word came out. He had released whatever spell had been keeping her silent. Reg wondered if she should chance screaming for help. Were they close enough to anyone who could help her? Or would she just be angering Tybalt when she needed to keep him happy with her to ensure her survival?

  She’d better not do anything until she was sure. Maybe she hadn’t understood what had happened to her. Maybe he had rescued her and would take her back to her friends.

  “Yes!” He sounded pleased that she knew him and remembered his name. “Yes, Tybalt. You remember Tybalt from yesterday.”

  Reg nodded. “Of course. I spent a long time with you.”

  “Ah, but some people don’t remember. Or don’t recognize me when they see me here. Or don’t see me here.”

  “Why can’t I see? Why don’t you turn on the light?”

  “The light is on.”

  “Where? I can’t see anything. What happened to my eyes?”

  She tried to bring her hands up to her eyes to rub them. To see if they were open or closed and whether she was blindfolded. She wasn’t even sure she had eyeballs anymore. Maybe he had stolen them. Maybe if she could see around her, she would find shelves filled with jars of preserved eyeballs from everyone else he had blinded.

  But her hands were bound behind her; she couldn’t bring them up to her face.

  “You have nothing to fear. It is not permanent.”

  “What, then? What did you do to make me blind?”

  “It is merely a potion. It will wear off.”

  She was relieved to hear that. She still didn’t know how she was going to get away from him, but she’d work something out. She would find out everything she could about Tybalt and their surroundings, and then she would get out. It was bound to work. She and the others had gotten out of worse fixes before.

  The others.

  She hadn’t given Damon and Corvin a thought until then.

  “Where are—”

  “The others are perfectly fine. I left them there. I didn’t want them.”

  “Why did you want me? I don’t understand. Want me for what?” Her skin crawled when she imagined what his intentions might be.

  She couldn’t see him, but she could still feel his shrug and the slight tilt of his head. “I just want a little company.”

  “You had company. We spent almost all day yesterday with you.”

  “Yes, but that’s work. Don’t you want to see people outside of work? Maybe it doesn’t matter to you anymore. Maybe you enjoy your mind games so much now that you don’t feel the need for any other interaction.”

  “Well… no. I still want to see other people,” Reg admitted. “I have friends. People who come over for a visit, or we go out to a restaurant together. Or… something.”

  “Yes. You have many friends, don’t you? It must be lovely to have so many friends. To pick up the phone and call them and have them come over to see you. To watch TV with them. To go out to restaurants and eat with them.”

  When she remembered how they had dismissed him at lunchtime when he was probably hungry, she felt ashamed. They should have invited him along. She might not particularly like the guy, but he had helped them out when they needed it, and they had treated him as if he were just an afterthought. Someone who didn’t matter, who could just be pushed aside and ordered around at a whim. Would it have hurt them to have invited him to the Skunk Man Saloon too? Treated him to something nice for lunch and a drink with him?

  But they hadn’t.

  This was what happened when you ignored people and let them get lonely and depressed. When you made them outcasts because you didn’t have anything in common or because they smelled bad. Reg swallowed, trying to forget the smell again, to keep from gagging with how close he was to her.

  “I’m sorry. We should have asked you along.”

  “Nobody invites me along. You don’t take someone like me to decent places. No one does.”

  “Like you?”

  He prowled back and forth restlessly, stirring up the air around them. It was hot and muggy. Already daytime. Where were the others? Tybalt had left them in their camp. Where did they think Reg had gone? Did they know that he had taken her with him? Or did they think it was another creature? Or that she had wandered off? She might have sleepwalked into some slough or she might have decided that she’d had enough of marshes and gone home. She could hitch-hike or find someone to take her back to Black Sands. It wouldn’t have been that hard.

  “You interest me,” Tybalt declared. “What are you? You’re a psychic? But you have red hair.” He touched her tiny braids fleetingly. “And you have fire. Tell me what you are and from where you hail?”

  “I’m a psychic, yes,” Reg agreed. It was best not to let him know what all of her powers were. If she could play a human with very little power,
she would have the advantage. He would be less careful. He would not know the things she could do. “Sometimes I can talk to ghosts. Under the right circumstances. It isn’t easy; it takes a lot of concentration.”

  “But on the boat, you said that you knew where this lost man was. Were you communicating with his ghost? On the boat?”

  “Uh…” Reg was a good actor and did her best to sound sheepish. “Well, to tell the truth… sometimes I have to put on a bit of a show, you know? Yes, I’m helping them look for him… I told them I could do it. But… I thought we could just ask around, and I could get some clues, and then I would put them together, and when we found him, I would get the credit…”

  “You can’t find him? You don’t know where he is?”

  “You said that lots of people get lost here.”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “And you know the Everglades. Really well.”

  “Of course. I have lived here all of my life.”

  “So, you would probably have a better chance of finding him than I would.”

  He made a nasty, wet sound, and it was a moment before Reg figured out that he was chuckling. “It is a game? You are only pretending you can find him?”

  “I have psychic powers. I might be able to find him.”

  He discounted this immediately, deeming her a charlatan. If she had powers, then she would have used them to find Wilson, and she had not.

  “But you had fire,” he said. “I saw that with my own eyes.”

  “Yes,” Reg agreed, trying to make her voice sad. “But what good is that? I mean, you can’t direct it like a flashlight. In a place like this, everything is too wet to even light a campfire. So you can hold a little fire in your hands. Good party trick, but pretty useless.”

  “Reg Rawlins.”

  Reg shrugged. “That’s me. I guess… I’m sort of a disappointment if you were looking for someone who was… more interesting.”

  “You do not have to be powerful to interest me.” He touched her red braids again. People liked to touch them. People she didn’t even know would approach her and ask if they could feel them, fascinated by seeing red hair done up in tiny box braids. It was so unusual, people overcame their natural reluctance to approach a stranger in order to get a better look.

  “I’m not that interesting.”

  “I don’t need interesting. I just want company.”

  “Okay… well… I guess we could visit for a while. And then I want to get back together with my group. They’ll be worried.”

  “Ah. That doesn’t matter. They’ll forget you soon enough. Everyone is forgotten, sooner or later.”

  Reg felt a chill climbing her spine. Everyone? How many people had he taken before? How many of those disappearances in the Everglades had been his doing? It wouldn’t be that hard for a tour guide. He would have access to anyone who came in for a single tour. And for small groups like Damon’s, he could still separate one person from the group and take her away in the middle of the night. Especially if he drugged the members of the group. Or put a spell on them. Somehow he had made them sleep much more heavily than they should have.

  Corvin would not be happy at being duped. And Damon would blame himself. They would both be worried. They would try to find her. They wouldn’t give up.

  But it niggled away at her. How long would they keep looking? Sooner or later, they would have to give up and go back to their lives. Sooner or later, Reg would be just one more person to disappear into the swamps of the Everglades.

  “Do you… take a lot of people? You have done this before?”

  “No need to worry about that right now. You should try to get some more rest. I don’t think you’ve had enough yet.”

  “What are you going to do? I want to go back to my party. I want to go home. You can’t just keep me here.”

  “Don’t worry about these things, Reg Rawlins. You do not need to concern yourself with anything. Rest for a while longer and we will talk again when you wake up.”

  Reg opened her mouth to protest, but was overtaken by a blackness pouring into her mind that was even darker than her eyesight.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Reg had to escape.

  She had to get away from Tybalt. She didn’t know what kind of power he was using over her. She didn’t know if it was a spell that made her sleep or if it was some kind of drug. She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything as far as she knew. But there were injections, IV’s, patches, and gases. All different ways to administer a potion or poison. She hadn’t been able to feel her body well enough to know whether she had been on an IV drip when she had awakened last.

  It was a little easier to awaken the next time, with vague memories of what had happened and some returning vision. She could see shapes around her. The bed she lay on. The walls of the room. Or the cave. The walls were much darker and rounder than she had expected. She couldn’t yet see enough to be sure, but she thought it was a natural structure rather than man-made. A cave or a clearing. Dim, but not pitch-black like she had thought the first time. There were passages to other rooms, caves, or tunnels, some of them covered by boards.

  There was little of interest. She was relieved that she still had her eyes and was not surrounded by jars of eyeballs or any other body parts.

  When Tybalt returned to find her awake, he gave a formal little bow and then stood in front of her, looking over her with glittering dark eyes.

  The lighting was dim, but Reg could see reasonably well, and the first thing she realized about him was that he was not wearing his outback hat. Of course not. Why would he keep wearing it in his own home when he was no longer taking tourists on his boat. It was to protect him from the sun.

  Only it wasn’t, she realized. The large, floppy-brimmed hat had served another purpose. To cover his large, pointed ears. Reg gasped sharply. Tybalt looked at her.

  “You’re… what are you?” Reg asked. The fairies she had seen had not had ears like that, but maybe different families or subspecies looked different. He didn’t look like anything she had seen before. How had they not known that he was something other than human? His skin was pallid, especially for someone who had been out in the sun so much. Even without seeing his ears, they should have been able to guess from his skin and smell that there was something different about him.

  “Kobold,” he said, with another little bow. Reg wasn’t sure whether that was a name or a title or whether he was even answering her question. What was a Kobold?

  “Knockers,” Tybalt tried again. But this was no clearer to Reg. He must be some kind of being that Reg hadn’t ever heard of before. There was such a variety of creatures on the earth; was it surprising that she hadn’t heard of them all yet?

  “I hate the human names,” Tybalt said with vehemence. “Why should we have to go by the name another species gives to us? Are we not what we say we are? Do we not have the right to self-identify?”

  “Um… yeah. Of course. Why not?” Most of the species she had learned about so far had their own names to identify their people. The Kin. Gnomen. Piskies.

  “But you do not know these names. You do not bother to educate yourselves.”

  “I’ve had to learn a lot since I got here. I’m sorry if I haven’t covered that in my education yet. It’s been sort of… haphazard.”

  Tybalt sighed. He leaned closer to her, his foul stench rolling over her in waves. “I am… goblin.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was not as much of a shock as it might have been. Reg knew Tybalt was something foul. Corvin had warned her about swamp goblins. Then why had he suggested Damon hire one? Did Corvin even know what Tybalt was? She would have expected someone who studied history and other magical species to be able to recognize one when he saw it.

  “A goblin,” she said. “I mean—what did you say? Kobold?”

  Tybalt nodded. “Gobelin and its derivatives mean ‘evil spirit.’ Don’t you think that’s prejudicial? You do not know what kind of spirit a person has until
you get to know them. Do you think that all Kobold have evil spirits?”

  Was it racist to brand all goblins as evil? Or was it the truth? Tybalt had been a good guide. He had been knowledgeable about the Everglades and had not made any threats against them. He had apparently bought Reg a sleeping bag as a gift, knowing her need. Did that make him evil?

  Until they got to the point where he had bewitched Corvin and Damon and kidnapped Reg, holding her hostage in his lair, blind, gagged, and bound hand and foot.

  He couldn’t exactly claim that was for her health.

  Reg looked around, trying to learn as much as she could about the place where she was being held. It seemed to be a cave, but she was not sure it was enclosed on all sides. There were trees along one side, and she didn’t know if the trees were growing inside the cave or whether the cave and the trees formed a natural lean-to. If she weren’t bound, she might be able to walk right out of there.

  But where would she go? Reg had no idea where she was or where his boat was. If she walked out into the swamp, how would she find her way back to her company or civilization? The Everglades swallowed people. They went missing there all the time.

  She swallowed. “Do you know what happened to the missing man?” She deliberately did not call him a wizard.

  “Which one?”

  “The one we are looking for. Jeffrey Wilson.”

  Tybalt pondered that for a while. “People don’t always introduce themselves,” he said, with a smile that showed his teeth. Not gap-toothed like a Jack-o-lantern, but there were spaces between them, and his incisors seemed a little too long to be human. How had she taken him to be human? She should have been paying more attention. “Do you have a picture of him?”