Swamp Thing 2 - The Return of Swamp Thing

by Peter David

  “Who’s that?”

  “Government chap. Harry something-or-other. Came out of the swamp a day or so ago, blithering, crying, barely coherent. Telling crazy stories about . . . well, I needn’t bore you with them. Sheriff came by not too long ago and talked to him about it. Doing some further checking, but he doesn’t expect to find much. The swamp is very skilled at keeping its secrets from almost everyone.”

  “Almost?”

  “Well,” and he came the closest he had to a smile since she’d arrived, “I know them all, of course.”

  “Why you?” she said, smiling back.

  “Because at night, when the darkness calls to me . . . I answer back. And the darkness favors me with the secrets of the things it hides.”

  She stared at him. There was a look of mild dementia in his eyes.

  “The darkness has spoken of you to me,” he said.

  “Oh . . . has it?” she replied, suddenly wishing she’d never set foot out of the flower shop.

  “Yes. Oh, I didn’t realize at first that it was you. Merely someone like you. Someone who would be part of the tangled skein about to be uncoiled. There will be a great duel here, you see. You will be there for the beginning, and you will be there at its end. You are the humanity that will give strength to nature for its challenge.”

  “And you are a mental case,” said Abby, backing up out the door. She paused and called out to Harry, “I’d get out of here if I were you!”

  “Oh, he will . . . when he’s ready,” said Alan.

  “Well, I hope he’s good and ready soon, because he’s going to be a complete basket case if he hangs around here listening to you spout off with your imaginary stories!”

  Grabbing her bag at the last moment, Abby stepped out into the sunlight and went to the far end of the porch to wait for the cab.

  “Of course they’re imaginary stories,” Alan called out, and grinned darkly. “Aren’t they all?”

  6

  Sheriff Buford T. Beaumont, a classic “good ol’ boy” who liked to claim he was the prototype for the sheriff in Smokey and the Bandit, slammed on his brakes. The police car skidded in the dirt as the young boy darted nimbly around the careening front fender.

  He was a lanky, twelve-year-old black kid, with a borrowed thirty-five-millimeter camera hanging around his neck. Seeing the sheriff’s irate expression, he grinned and snapped off a quick photograph.

  “Omar Brown!” shouted Beaumont, shaking a beefy fist, “wait’ll I tell your parents!”

  “Ain’t home!” replied Omar, and bolted off into the underbrush.

  Beaumont grunted and backed up slowly, nervous that Omar’s sidekick Darryl might be hanging around somewhere, and he’d probably allow himself to get run over.

  Then he started forward again, and in the distance he could now make out the Arcane Mansion.

  He hated the place.

  It had been there since the Civil War, once an elegant mansion, a place of delicate manners and polite, studied courteousness. Even the evil of slavery had not detracted from the surface beauty of what had been.

  Now, though, over a century later, the evil had erupted up from the earth and overtaken the manse. Now a chain-link fence surrounded the perimeter, and Beaumont was approaching the gate where two men in coveralls were standing guard.

  Behind them, now an elegant canker, was the abode of Arcane.

  There were many places night’s cloak seemed to render singly inhospitable. Creatures appeared to hide in the shadows, eager and hungry and waiting for innocent passersby. In the harsh reality of daylight, however, such imaginings usually vanished, to be replaced by innocuous reality.

  At the mansion of Anton Arcane, though, even at high noon the shadow creatures seemed to be there still.

  Dr. Lana Zurrell, no longer in her seductive and destructive nightgown, but clad now in stern dress and no-nonsense lab coat, continued to process information into the hungry banks of the computer.

  Whereas outside one could drown in the heat, here in the underground lab it was refreshingly cool, even brisk. Carved out of rock and earth, the lab was a curious mixture of chrome and glistening cave stone. Masses of electronic machinery sat everywhere, bizarre additions to the nature of the rock.

  When she had first come here, Zurrell had been spellbound. Now it held little interest for her . . . as little interest as did the handful of perpetual security guards who hovered nearby in loose groups.

  She input the last of the data and sat back, rubbing her tired eyes. Then she felt a hand drop softly onto her shoulder.

  Only one man in the compound would dare touch her. Indeed, he was by coincidence the same man who was actually capable of coming up behind her so softly, she had not been alerted by so much as a footfall.

  “So?” The voice that came from behind her was low and sibilant, with a discernible French accent bespeaking his European upbringing.

  She turned and stood to face him.

  Arcane waited with studied patience, arms folded across his crisp white shirt. His straight black hair was tinged gray, his square-jawed face appearing carved from harsh granite.

  “The two new patients,” she told him, “are recovering from the operation. Dr. Rochelle has high hopes. The others . . .”

  She stopped, unsure whether her words would anger him.

  “Yes,” he said in carefully modulated tones. “What about them?”

  “Well . . .”—she sighed—“see for yourself.”

  Arcane and Zurrell walked over toward the “patients”—a bizarre collection of half-man, half-animal creatures penned in cages. Insanely they all wore cheerful blue hospital gowns.

  They stood there, making frantic gestures, opening their mouths or beaks or snouts and screaming or shrieking or bellowing. They pounded on the glass, and they were the zoo of a madman’s dreams.

  But there was no sound. At most the glass shook slightly under the pounding of some of them, but that was all.

  Arcane paused momentarily, then reached over and snapped a switch. Over a loudspeaker now came a nightmarish cacophony, and even Lana Zurrell, who had hardened herself to the grisly sights she witnessed, turned away.

  Arcane smiled, drinking it in, before snapping off the sound and returning them to their mute state.

  Lana tried to find someplace to gaze that would not sicken her. She found herself staring at an elephant. The elephant turned and, in profile, an agonized human face looked back at her.

  She closed her eyes and, with effort, shook it off, pulling together her professional detachment and draping it over her like a shroud. “The gene splicing has gone extremely well. We’re very close to hitting on the right DNA combination.”

  Raising a finger and waving it as if chiding a child, Arcane said, “I somehow sense that’s an unfinished sentence . . . so finish it, please.”

  “Well . . . some of the rejected specimens have obviously mutated rather startlingly.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise and gestured at the creatures. “Obviously seems too mild a word. I am quite aware of the mistakes, Lana. Both the ones here . . .” he paused, “and the one that got away into the swamp. The Leech, I believe.”

  He said nothing further for a moment, and Lana thought, he knows! He knows I let Bernstein into the swamp! But I couldn’t stand having him around here, knowing I let that . . . that thing into me, even if I did it for you, Anton; oh, God, don’t punish me . . .

  If Arcane knew how the Leech had escaped, he gave no indication. “What I’m interested in is results. How is Dr. Rochelle doing with the new ones?”

  She gestured toward the door connecting into the lab.

  They walked into the room where Rochelle was hunched over a gurney, oblivious as always of anything else going on.

  Lana had heard of Dr. Newton Rochelle long before she’d met him. The “Doctor” was purely an honorary title now, since he’d been stripped of his right to practice medicine long years ago by the AMA because of his gruesome and inh
umane experiments. His case had been notorious in medical annals, theories so loathsome, lab tests so heinous, that even the most stony-hearted researchers were sickened.

  Since then he had dropped out of sight, and the medical profession had heaved a collective sigh of relief. If they could have seen what his current activities were, the medical profession would have been heaving something else.

  Rochelle turned and started slightly when he saw Arcane. Arcane’s pointed look of interest in the occupant of the table garnered a dismayed shrug from Rochelle.

  On the table were the remains of Chuck, the former clock-watcher, for whom time had seemed to pass with a vengeance. If his fiancée could have seen him, which thank God she never would, she would not have recognized him. Rochelle had just been disconnecting the last of the tubes attached to his withered form. His face was old beyond comprehension, wrinkled and bloodless. He was bald, his eyes sunken and lifeless, his mouth toothless and his gums blackened.

  “I’m afraid the genetic serum worked in reverse again on this one,” said Rochelle apologetically. “Perhaps it was the tranquilizer darts your men used. Affected the blood . . .”

  “Rochelle,” said Arcane, now visibly holding his temper in check, “you’ve been at this for months. No significant developments. Only a zoo full of misshapen monstrosities and a cemetery’s worth of corpses. I need the rejuvenation formula perfected.”

  “And we will have it,” Lana said quickly.

  “When?” snapped Arcane.

  “Soon.” She prompted Rochelle. “Won’t we, Doctor?”

  Rochelle was clearly unsure, but hastily he said, “Ah . . . yes. Quite soon, Dr. Arcane.”

  Momentarily satisfied, or at least pretending to be, Arcane moved off toward another operating table. On it was another recent example of Rochelle’s handiwork.

  Bob, also late of the treasury department, was strapped down. The good news was he was alive. The bad news was he was alive.

  Arcane stared down at him impassively, watching Bob’s mandibles click in horrified frustration. His segmented body twisted; his multiple legs clawed futilely at the air. Antennae protruded from what was once a human face.

  “And what’s that?” asked Arcane, his eyes narrowing.

  “Another disappointment,” said Rochelle, shaking his head. “Terrible. I tried mingling his genes with a member of the Blattidaean family . . .”

  “A what?”

  “Cockroach,” clarified Rochelle.

  Arcane coughed politely. There was, of course, no reason for Rochelle to have performed such an abominable cross. He was clearly making use of Arcane’s facilities to indulge his own ghoulish side interests, in the guise of trying to help Arcane with his own . . . difficulties.

  Rochelle would definitely have to be brought into line. That, however, could wait. This . . . abomination . . . could not.

  “We have enough insects in this place, Doctor,” said Arcane, and momentarily Rochelle wondered if he himself was the insect being referred to. “Destroy it before it multiplies, please.”

  With a deferential nod, Rochelle turned the gurney around and wheeled it toward a large, glass-enclosed unit resembling a heavily wired telephone booth. He pulled the door open, then briskly unstrapped the thing that had once been Bob and lifted it off the table.

  Lana shuddered at the sight of it. No matter how long she’d been around these things, she would never be able to bring herself to handle one of them so calmly.

  Bob was surprisingly light, or perhaps not so surprisingly considering his entire skeletal structure had metamorphosed into something literally Kafkaesque. Rochelle coolly shoved Bob into the unit and closed the door, latching it from the outside.

  “It’s in the disposal unit, sir.”

  “I can see that,” said Arcane. “Therefore, I would suggest you dispose of it.”

  Rochelle went to the side of the unit where there was a control panel with a simple on/off switch. The cockroach creature seemed to be trying to focus on him, clearly not understanding anything that was happening.

  The moment Rochelle flicked the switch, the unit began to hum. The high-pitched noise alarmed the creature terribly, and it began to pound on the door, its legs making hideous clacking and scratching noises. When this had no effect, it threw its brown crusted body against the side of the booth. The unit trembled slightly but gave no indication it was suffering any strain from the pounding.

  Suddenly the cockroach creature was hit with searing blue arcs of electricity. For one brief moment it rediscovered its humanity as an all-too-human scream was ripped from its throat. It twisted, writhing in agony, and then flame erupted from between the joints of its segmented body. Desperately, uncomprehendingly, it tried to slap out the flames, and then the thing blew apart. The interior of the unit was now covered with burning shell, rapidly becoming ash, and the air was filled with the stench.

  Rochelle calmly watched the entire execution, having had the foresight to don an oxygen mask. Lana, appalled, turned away. Arcane impatiently blew air between his lips and, once Rochelle had snapped off the disposal unit, said impatiently, “One more afternoon like this, Rochelle, and it’s back to Betty Ford for you.”

  In confusion, Rochelle said, “Doctor, please . . . there’s no need for the clinic.”

  “Not the clinic,” said Lana. “He’ll turn you into Betty Ford.”

  Rochelle stared from Lana to Arcane uncomfortably, then tried to force a laugh. The best he could manage was an uncertain cackle. “That’s . . . that’s very funny, sir.” Privately he didn’t think so. Even more privately he wondered whether Arcane was really joking or not.

  “Kee-rist! What died in here?”

  Arcane glanced around to see that Johnny Gunn, his security head, had entered, wrinkling his nose in exaggerated disgust.

  Even by Arcane’s standards, Johnny Gunn (which was probably not his real name) was distasteful. Over his jumpsuit he wore a black leather jacket, and the suit itself was unzipped down to the navel, displaying what he undoubtedly fancied to be a manly expanse of chest hair. He kept one thumb perpetually tucked in his belt, and his other hand was always dangling agitatedly near his holster, as if he couldn’t wait for the slightest excuse to pull his gun. His unwashed black hair hung down to the back of his neck. His face was round and harsh, his black Vandyke beard ill kempt and untrimmed. From one ear dangled an axe-shaped earring.

  “A cockroach died, Mr. Gunn,” said Arcane calmly.

  “Well, next time just use a roach motel, and it won’t stink up the joint.” He chucked a thumb in the direction of the elevator with which Arcane had descended to the laboratory. “Better get up there. Jerk-off sheriff wants to ask you what you know about what’s been going on in the swamp.”

  “I?” Arcane professed surprise. “I am but a humble scientist, trying to go about my business. That should be simple enough to understand.”

  “Yeah, well, you better explain it to him. ’Fore he starts poking around and I have to shoot him, and then you get to explain to the law that you’ve turned the sheriff into God knows what.”

  “Your point is well taken, Mr. Gunn.” Without a further word he left the lab.

  It was only once Arcane had departed that Rochelle realized he hadn’t let out a breath in the last five minutes. Even Lana was shaking her head.

  “He’s getting more and more desperate,” said Lana. “He needs the girl—Abigail.”

  “Right, right . . . the stepdaughter.” Gunn pulled out a cigarette, but Lana quickly reached out to snatch it from him. Just as quickly Gunn intercepted her by the wrist, holding her hand away from it.

  “No smoking down here,” she said tersely. “There’s oxygen in the next room. And let go of my hand.”

  They glared at each other for a moment and, still not releasing her, Gunn studied her carefully and said, “I hear tell you were willing to lay it on the line to get the girl down here. Gave it your all to convince her shrink.”

  “Where did you hear
those lies?” she spat out.

  Gunn nodded in Rochelle’s direction. Zurrell turned slowly and gave Rochelle a venomous stare. Rochelle shrugged helplessly. “It kind of slipped out,” he said apologetically.

  “True, then?” asked Gunn, smirking.

  Lana forcibly yanked her wrist out of Gunn’s grasp, although he just as much let it go, and she rubbed it gingerly as she said, with an intense sincerity, “I would do anything for Dr. Arcane.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting that feeling.” Gunn allowed the unlit cigarette to dangle from his chapped mouth. “Look, why go to all that trouble? Arcane wants the girl; me and a couple of guys could’ve gone to wherever she is and brought her down here, whether she wanted to go or not.”

  Slowly, even with a sort of bemused sorrow, Lana said, “Dr. Arcane has a blind spot when it comes to Abigail. He loved her mother and, by extension, the daughter. He does not want to take any hostile, forcible action against her. The doctor is a firm believer in the movings of fate. He would not force Abigail to come here and be a part of his . . . work. However, if the girl were to come here on her own, then he would accept that as the hand of destiny.”

  “I see. So he doesn’t see any harm in ‘guiding’ destiny’s hand just a little.”

  “That is correct.”

  Gunn shook his head. “And all this because he’d never harm his stepdaughter.”

  “Well . . .”—Lana smiled coldly—“ ‘never’ is a long time.”

  “And that’s the long and short of it, Doc.”

  They were in Arcane’s study, ornately decorated in walnut with gold trim. Hung along the walls were mounted, stuffed heads of animals. Sheriff Beaumont glanced up at an elephant’s head and couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that the glass eyes were staring back at him.

  Beaumont forced his attention to Arcane, who was sitting behind his desk like a patient spider, eyes glistening alertly. “The man came high-tailin’ it out of the swamp and went straight for the Wein Motel—y’know, the creepy place with the spooky Brit running it?”