Gillian's Marsh

by Faun, Michael

  As he exited the hut, he saw a stout man in black come strolling along the path from the woods. The stranger waved peacefully as he trotted toward the cabin.

  “The hell?” Red grumbled and set down the tray on the blanket.

  Louella Lee stood and squinted at the visitor. “Who might that be?” She said and threw a hawk's eye at the boys, who were busy terrorizing a wasp's nest behind the cabin.

  “I's wonderin' that myself,” Red muttered with a frown as he approached the interloper. “Can I help you, mister?” he hollered.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” greeted the middle-aged man who wore thin round glasses and sported grizzled side-whiskers. “My name's James Graham. I'm awfully sorry to disturb your wee shindig. But see, I'm a missionary spreading the word of God, and was just wondering if I might share the gospels of Christ with you folks?” Offering a meek grin, he fished out a worn bible from a knapsack and held it aloft as if to strengthen his intentions.

  Red's frown changed to a welcoming smile. “Why, fer sure!” he said and shook hands with the missionary. “We's just about to have ourselves a nice family supper out here in the yard. You's most welcome to join us, ain't he, honey?”

  “Why yes of course,” Louella Lee replied as she came tip-toeing up beside Red, smiling shyly as she offered her hand. “How do you do, reverend.”

  “Boys! Come and greet our dinner guest!” Red yelled to the children.

  “A pleasure to meet you, ma'am,” The missionary put the bible back in his knapsack and cupped her hand.

  The moment their skins came in contact, a bolt of repulsion coursed through the missionary. For a split second he saw her eyes shift from human green to reptilian red and a forked tongue shoot out of her mouth.

  Gasping, he fell to his knees, hands clutching the cross around his neck.

  Red hurried to the missionary's side and leaned over him. “You's pale as the grim reaper! Honey, git the man some water!”

  Louella Lee took some staggering steps back before she turned and hurried to the cabin.

  “What's wrong with our guest?” Dwayne asked as he cautiously walked up to Red, his brothers creeping close behind.

  “Not sure, son...”

  The missionary raised his arm and pointed a trembling finger at the cabin. “That woman, s-she... she's philandering with the Devil!”

  Red cocked his head, arching a brow. “The hell you sayin'?”

  “What's philanderin', pappy?” Silver chimed in.

  “Never mind, son. Go inside.”

  The missionary's bewildered gaze wandered to the triplets and seeing their deformed cheek-lumps, his icy pallor grew even whiter.

  “The mark of the beast!” he cried and crawled backwards in utter panic, mouth agape with dread as he fumbled for his bible.

  Louella Lee came bolting out of the house with a jug of water, holding her skirt up with one hand not to trip as she ran across the grass.

  “Mama!” Jimbo hollered and pointed at the feverish missionary. “That man says you's philanderin' with the Devil...”

  Louella Lee stopped running and looked confusedly at Red. “What?”

  “Take the boys inside the house!” Red ordered, his eyes black with anger. “Git!”

  The boys scurried to their mother, who threw worried glances over her shoulder as she urged the children inside the cabin.

  Red's attention returned to the missionary. The man had toppled over on his side, his fingers in a tight grip around the bible as he ranted, “And another sign appeared in heaven; behold a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and on his heads seven diadems; and his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth...”

  “Better shut yer damn yap, mister,” Red said trough gritted teeth. He wagged a warning finger and snorted, hocking up a loogie that landed a mere inch from the missionary's sweaty face.

  “But the earth came to the help of the woman and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mou—”

  Red planted his boot in the missionary's mouth and cut off his insulting ramble. “Git yer ass up!” Blood, saliva and teeth fragments covered the tip of his leather Brogan as he kicked the missionary again, this time in the ribs.

  Coughing, the missionary got to his knees and sluggishly crept toward the woods. “...mouth and the great dragon... was thrown down... that ancient serpent... who is called the devil and Satan... the deceiver of the whole world... he was thrown down to the earth… and his angels were thrown down with him,” he whistled persistently through broken teeth.

  Red sneered at the pathetic sight. “I's gonna feed your cotton-pickin, bible-pushin' ass to the dang tree.” Clenching his jaws, he strode over to the smoking hut where he fetched his parcel of tools and a burlap sack.

  The missionary hadn't come far before he once again felt Red's relentless boot kick him in the ass. He groaned as he fell face-first into a patch of prickly herbs that stung him like hell. Red grabbed the lamenting man by the scruff of his neck and dragged him along the dirt path into the woods.

  By the time they reached the Blood Oak, the man's whining had stopped. Red's knuckles had proven a perfect cure to ridden the missionary of his useless words and prayers.

  The ancient tree looked famished. Her boils were sagging, drained of the precious milk she needed to live. Even her scarlet bark was flaking. She looked altogether haggard and Red felt a twinge of sadness in his heart.

  He dropped the missionary into a cradle of roots and ran his hand through the dry foliage which answered by rustling weakly.

  “You's lookin' thirsty,” Red whispered and patted the enormous tree trunk, “and I's got ye somethin' mighty fine today.” He opened the leather parcel and picked up his old trusted meat cleaver Betty, named after his beloved mother. He doused his warm face with the sack, turned around and positioned himself above the semi-unconscious missionary.

  Grabbing the man's wrist, he locked it in place with one hand and raised Betty high into the air with the other. The steel gleamed as he tightened his grip around the handle and with all his might chopped the missionary's hand clean off.

  James Graham let out a feeble shriek as blood soaked the moss-laden roots, which drank eagerly. Whistling, Red threw the man's severed hand in the burlap sack and proceeded with removing the other. Ridding the man of his shoes and socks, he ended his butchery by cutting off his feet.

  Red wiped the blood off of Betty and put her back in the parcel, slung his gory sack of extremities over his shoulder and returned home.

  Reduced to nothing but a torpid sprinkling can for the parched oak, James Graham was left to his own devices.

  * * *

  Louella Lee was busy clearing the kitchen table when Red returned from his venture. Shirtsleeves stained with blood, he barged in, eyes vacant as he dropped his grisly burlap sack on the floor and brushed past her without a word.

  “Oh, you've been out hunting?” Louella Lee asked softly and curiously peeked into the sack. “God, they smell awful.” Turning her head in disgust, she pulled out two gutted squirrels by their furry tails.

  “Well, I's hankerin' for some stew. Where's them boys?”

  “Silver and Dwayne's outside playing and Jimbo's fast asleep. Got stung by a wasp after supper,” she said and began skinning the tree-rats with a smile on her face.

  Red nodded and shuffled into the sitting room where he poured himself a big mug of 'shine. Thoughtfully dipping into it, he kept a watchful eye on the runaway daughter of the deranged Gillianswick clergyman, now humming as she slapped the skinned rodents onto the blazing firewood stove.

  * * *

  James Graham's consciousness returned when what felt like moist pumpkin seeds dripped into mouth. Forcing open his eyes, he was met by hazy darkness and hundreds of plump maggots crawling over his pasty face.

  He drew a dull breath of repulsion and accidentally swallowed a batch of the white larvae, which trickled down his parched throat. Chokin
g, his eyes traveled to a green phosphorescent light that shone above him. As his vision cleared, he saw that the strong illumination radiated from two huge eyes leering at him. The plump maggots dripped from the monster's squirming snout.

  A weak cry lodged inside James' throat as the leering beast's long teeth pierced the sides of his head and burrowed into his brain. He was still alive to hear the deafening crunch when his skull was pulverized between the jaws of the champing yellow monster.

  SERVANT OF THE PALE SERPENT

  Louella Lee kneels by the edge of Gillian's Marsh and scoops up mud with her hands. She smears it over her body, her chest, and into herself. The cool sludge cuts off the peak of her raging lust and keeps her orgasm in control.

  She does not want to disappoint the Master—the Pale Serpent, Imperator of the Marsh.

  He who slithers below.

  She dreamily gazes over the marsh and longs to be filled with his forbidden knowledge of the flesh.

  The arcane secrets of divinity.

  She longs to tear down the false façade that imprisons her true spirit, to fornicate to the sound of the pagan drums hammering inside her.

  The bog begins to simmer. Wide ripples spread over the viscous goo and the earth stirs under her feet. An erotic tremor sends an electrifying tingle through her body that instantly itches with primal desire.

  She inhales deeply as she rises up and wades out into the chaotic mud. She salivates onto her bared thigh and the fluid vaporizes on her hot skin.

  The pink moon is full and engraved with a luminescent black pentagram.

  A cascade of mud rains through the air as the Pale Serpent emerges. He rattles his tail and bares his enormous fangs. One vulgar white muscle, scaly and relentless.

  Louella Lee nearly climaxes from watching the Imperator loom above her and stare with his red slit eyes. She marvels over the notion of her smooth skin changing into a delicate pattern of hexagonal scales that rapidly expands until it covers her fully.

  The Pale Serpent dives back into the cloying mud. He penetrates her nether orifices with both head and tail and Louella Lee shoots out her tongue at the fertile moon.

  Replete with truth, her body does not resist but welcomes her Master's brusque intrusion. She relaxes and follows the rhythm of his violent thrusts and gyrates to the pagan drums and tiny bells.

  Her reptilian eyes are burning inside their sockets.

  She is the Whore and the Madonna.

  The Servant of the Pale Serpent.

  ORDEAL OF MURKY WATER

  August, 1876

  “I's goin' out huntin',” Red grumbled and climbed into his boots, grabbing his shotgun.

  “Will you be back before morning?” asked Louella Lee, whose hands splashed into a tub of dishes.

  “'Pends on the hunt, I reckon.”

  Louella Lee nodded, stare locked on the dirty plates. Half her face was veiled by her scarlet hair that seemed to burn in the evening sun that shone through the small kitchen window. An inscrutable smile spread over her face.

  It made Red feel as though his cock were shrinking with each passing moment.

  He muttered a goodbye and went out, slamming the door behind him.

  Carnal desire began to itch between Louella Lee's legs the moment it closed. Through the window, she watched Red lumber off into the woods and taking her hands out of the tub, began massaging her breasts. Her mind drifted off to the vision of the Imperator buried inside her, his forked tongue tickling her ass.

  She had waited for weeks for Red's departure and finally, the time had come.

  Checking that the boys were fast asleep, she went into the sitting room and waited, restlessly twiddling her thumbs. Her eyes wandered to a half-filled jar of moonshine that stood on the table. She normally never touched the strong spirits, but now she unscrewed the lid and sniffed it, coughing from the poisonous waft that clawed at her nostrils. Steeling herself, she closed her eyes and pinched her nose while slugging down two steady ones.

  The 'shine burned as it trickled down her throat and spread inside her gully, throwing a few extra logs into the hearth of lust.

  She couldn't wait any longer.

  Putting on her finest bustle dress and a pair of white stockings, she slipped into her high-laced boots before leaving the house in great haste.

  The setting sun was slowly replaced by a yellow moon and sweeping overcast clouds. The air was charged as though a heavy storm was drawing close. Holding up her fluffy dress not to get it dirty, she eagerly strode along the path into the dark woods and kept a westward direction to Gillian's Marsh, where her erotic rendezvous was to take place.

  Heedless of the hunter's callous eyes watching her every move.

  * * *

  Cyrus Reiterman stood by the large steel-case window in the study of the late Edward Burnham's old brick manor. Hands clasped behind his back, the successor to the chief magistrate's chair stared vacantly out over the moon-lit flower garden, when the newly appointed sergeant constable Sebastian Delcroix came riding toward the house in a hurry.

  Moments later Reiterman was urging the young panting lawman into his luxuriously wooden-paneled home.

  “Sir,” Delcroix greeted and took off his hat.

  Reiterman gave a nod as he lead the way up the stairs to the second floor study which had been turned into an office. “Your full report, please.”

  “The arrest went without any predicament, sir. However, Mrs. Graham has denied the charges against her. She claims her husband left Gillianswick over a week ago, and that he was going on a mission to do spiritual labor around Gillian's Marsh.”

  “So... she says James Graham was an itinerant preacher,” Reiterman scoffed. “What a coincidence.”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind. Did you find anything?”

  “Well, sir, we discovered a journal belonging to Mr. Graham.” Delcroix opened his buttoned leather satchel and produced a small book which he handed to Reiterman. “It was hidden in one of the drawers.”

  “And?” Reiterman said as he perused it.

  “The last entry strengthens her story, sir.”

  Reiterman shot the sergeant a haughty look and flipped to the mentioned page with a raised brow. Skimming the text, he closed the book and threw it on his desk. “That strengthens nothing, sergeant,” he said and took a pipe from the pipe rack. “Mrs. Graham could easily have written that entry herself.” He struck a match and lit his pipe. “And she probably did.”

  “How shall I proceed then, sir?” Delcroix asked, pretending not to know the answer.

  Reiterman turned his back to the sergeant and slowly stepped over to the window, blowing a plume of thick smoke. “Prepare Justice Hill.”

  * * *

  A week had passed since the missionary's fatal visit. The bizarre occurrence during the stranger's short-lived call had re-sown a seed of suspicion in Red who, in the fashion of stalking a deer, were pursuing his mystery-mongering woman from the black woods down to Gillian's Marsh.

  He'd had a hunch of something being quite off about Louella Lee since some time before the boys were born. The fact that her body refused to bear their children right up until the bizarre erotic meeting at the marsh that spring day in '67—after which a hint of malice seemed to edge her persona. Dismissing the paranoid bout as being merely a ghost conjured from the 'shine, on those scarce occasions he did voice his misgivings she had simply burst into laughter and bored her green eyes into his, quelling his rebellious thoughts by means of carnal yielding. But Red's apprehension about the boys' queer defects, or 'birthmarks', had lingered still. Up until a week ago, when he begun scrutinizing her every move, word, and expression.

  Crouching by the edge of the shallow swamp, Red witnessed as Louella Lee lay down in the murky marsh and pulled her fancy dress up to her waist, writhing and moaning as a shimmery white snake emerged from the mud and coiled around her thighs, slowly burying its head inside her pussy.

  Red staggered backward, his tarnished spirit wanti
ng to crawl out of his prickly skin as he lurched past the gnarled crooked trees, unable to digest this unhallowed vision of Her—the Infernal Aphrodite!

  * * *

  “I'm wilting like this damn town...,” grumbled Reiterman while staring at his face in the mirror. His sunken gray eyes reminded him of two weather-beaten tombstones in a graveyard that had been neglected for a decade.

  Since the ghastly Wishum case back in 1866, followed by the tragic death of chief magistrate Edward Burnham, a full steam curse had swept over the ill-fated burg. A disease which festered in the heart of the community, wrapping its black tendrils of witchery around the women, whose husbands strangely vanished into thin air due to this blight. Disappearances which had turned Gillianswick into a ghost town and its once blossoming commerce to a mere cripple, as the prominent families gathered their goods and chattels and left.

  Often during these dark episodes, Reiterman had wanted to climb off his horse and join them, to be freed from the fettering responsibilities that ensues the assumption of power of his becoming the new chief magistrate.

  However, pride, faith, and a smidgen of vindictiveness, had kept the heretic intentions at bay.

  “I will find the roots to the vile weeds and pull them out like rotten teeth, so help me God,” he muttered under his breath, rubbing his tired old face as he shuffled over to the bed for a short rest before his late supper.

  His eyelids were soon nailed shut in their coffins, his boisterous snores scaring away the manor mice as he fell into a dream colored by a childhood memory—conjured from a reference in the journal of James Graham...

  “Try to sleep now, Cyrus. Your father and brother won't be home until long after dark...”