Swamp Thing 2 - The Return of Swamp Thing

by Peter David

  By the “man from Mars.” By the Swamp Thing.

  He had staggered in through the secret entrance known only to two people—himself and Dr. Rochelle. And sure enough, Rochelle had been waiting as a torn and bleeding Arcane, his body blue and encrusted with scales, his hair long and wild, his face completely unrecognizable, made it back to the lab.

  He would have died right there, gotten all the way back to the lab only to expire on the sterile floor, except for the thing he’d been clutching like a lifeline in his hand.

  A clump of moss, tangled weed . . . a piece of the Swamp Thing, torn unknowingly from the bog creature’s side during their battle.

  This clump of moss was imbued with the biorestorative formula that had salvaged the burning near-corpse of Alec Holland those years ago and preserved his life. It was a shambling, moss-encrusted mockery of life, but life nevertheless.

  Hooking up Arcane to life-support systems, Rochelle had worked feverishly, using previously drawn tissue samplings from Arcane, analyzing and breaking down his genetic structure, and combining it with all the formula he had managed to extract from the samplings of the Swamp Thing.

  The resultant mixture had been injected into the dying body of Anton Arcane.

  And it had worked.

  Sort of.

  Arcane remembered lying there on the table, naked and dazed and being told by Rochelle that he, Arcane, had been brought back from the brink of death by a scientific miracle.

  But it was not, he feared, permanent.

  Arcane had been changed, mutated. Although he bore the semblance of human form, his entire structure was now a genetic time bomb. As years wore on it would inevitably start to break down, regress, either back into his animal form or worse, if such a phenomenon could be imagined.

  Endeavors to synthesize more of the biorestorative formula from the sampling of Swamp Thing proved ineffectual. Separated from the host body, the samples had dried out, become useless.

  Arcane had begun searching for the Swamp Thing once again, for if he could capture the creature, he could create a lifetime’s worth of biorestorative elixir from the former Alec Holland. But the Swamp Thing was not to be found. It was as if, having supposedly settled accounts with Arcane, the creature had simply vanished. Perhaps, Arcane realized, the Swamp Thing had lost the will to live upon realizing humanity was to be forever denied him. Perhaps he had simply rotted away.

  Or perhaps he was out there, lurking, waiting. Arcane began to reflect upon the creature’s possibilities, upon the power that might be his to command. Such reflection made Arcane exceedingly nervous. And so he had stripped all the grounds of any greenery, afraid of what the plant life might do to him. And when months of searching proved fruitless, Arcane decided the Fates were trying to tell him something.

  And so Arcane had turned his attention to genetic research to stave off the deterioration always lurking in the back of his mind, like a cancer rotting him away . . .

  “Something wrong?”

  He turned slowly in response to the low female voice behind him.

  Lana stepped out of the shadows, dressed in a negligee that left nothing to the imagination, or to chance.

  “I don’t see anything wrong,” said Arcane in a low voice.

  She seemed to glide toward him. “I’m delighted.”

  There was a low rumble of thunder that appeared to accompany her sultry movement.

  “In fact, I like what I see very much,” said Arcane. “And what I don’t see . . . even more.” He paused. “Don’t move.”

  She stayed where she was as he circled around her. From behind her he said, “Yes, this angle is very good, too.”

  He reached out toward her . . .

  . . . and stopped.

  He stared frozenly at his hand. He held up the other one. Both were cracked and dry.

  Lana sensed the change in mood and turned. For a moment she regained her clinical composure. “You’re not showing signs yet, are you?”

  He brushed off the concern he himself felt. “Maybe just a difference in texture.”

  She took one of his hands in either of hers, studying them with concern. Then, slowly, she took them and placed them against her breasts.

  “We’ll find some way to reverse the aging,” she whispered. “I’ll never let anything happen to you.”

  “Lana.” His voice choked with passion. “Lana . . .”

  “fust stay vital, my darling.” She raised his hands up, kissing them with each word. “I . . . need . . . you . . . vital.”

  She pulled his robe open even as he drew her toward the bed. The robe, and her nightgown, fell away.

  Outside the lightning flashed brighter; the thunder cracked louder.

  Abby was running.

  In the darkness, in the blackness of the eerie house that looked familiar, yet different, she was running for her life . . . and for someone else’s life.

  A dizzying stairway stretched down before her, trailing off down to infinity. She hesitated, but whatever was pursuing her from behind was drawing closer, ever closer, and she couldn’t hesitate. She dashed down the stairway, trying to feel her way as best she could.

  She looked down and suddenly realized she was naked. Before she could figure it out, her feet went out from under her and she fell headlong down the stairs. She threw her arms out, trying to catch hold of something, but there was nothing to halt her fall, and she tumbled, end over end, stairs smashing into her head, bruising her body, before she hit the bottom. She lay there shivering on the cold marble, scrambling about, muttering, “Green. Please . . . something green . . .”

  A voice called to her from above, at the top of the stairs. She turned and froze in shock.

  “Mother . . . ?” she whispered.

  “Yes, baby.” She stood there, arms open. “I’m waiting for you. Please help me.”

  And Abby turned, not questioning her nudity, not questioning what her mother was doing at the top of the stairs, and she started to run up the stairway she’d just taken a harrowing plunge down. She picked up speed, taking them two at a time, yet she didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  At the top of the stairs her mother was starting to change color. Her skin was becoming frozen blue, icicles forming on her hair and eyebrows, frost crusting her lips, her eyes staring open and dead, and still she whispered, “Abby . . . help me.”

  With a final frantic leap Abby vaulted to the top of the stairs and threw her arms around her mother. There was a crackle, an unholy splintering, as her mother’s body cracked and crumbled into a thousand shards of ice.

  Abby screamed, but there was no sound.

  She looked down the hallway. To the left was a railing that separated the landing from a drop into nothingness. On the right was a long blank wall with a single open door. At her feet her mother’s frozen head lay intact, and she grabbed up the head and dashed down the hallway, shouting, “Please help her! Help my mother!”

  She entered the room, which was illuminated by lightning. The only thing in it was a bed, and in the bed were Arcane and Lana, bodies intertwined. They didn’t even notice her as she screamed, thrusting her mother’s head in front of her, water dripping from it. “You were married to her! You said you loved her! You have to help her!”

  Arcane’s rhythmic movements atop Lana began to slow, and he turned his reptilian gaze on Abby.

  Outside the window lightning flashed, and a hideous death’s head visage appeared over Arcane’s face. A burning skull flashed eyes of lambent green, and the skinless mouth laughed at her.

  With a scream Abby dropped her mother’s head, and it crashed to the floor, breaking beyond repair. Abby backed out of the room, feet crunching on the ice that had been her mother, not taking her eyes from Arcane’s hideous face.

  Her back hit the railing, and she remembered too late the drop awaiting her. She tried to find support, but it was too late and she flipped over the railing and fell, a long, high shriek the only thing that followed her as she plumme
ted, plummeted . . .

  Something caught her.

  Instinctively she reached out, clutching at whatever it was that had saved her. She came away with fistfuls of leaves, and dirt under her fingernails. And now her nostrils were filled with the sweet smell of lime, and her soul was filled with the eternal peace of the earth.

  She was being cradled in two massive arms, arms covered with vines and moss, and she looked up into a face that was not a face. The mouth was obscured by darkness—she could barely discern the top of the head. The only features she could make out were the eyes, small and red, floating in a pool of black.

  He spoke to her then, every word an effort, as if he were trying to remember how one moved one’s mouth.

  “You called . . . for the green . . . and I came to you.”

  She reached, feeling the blissful peace of his massive chest. “How did you know where to find me?” she whispered.

  “I . . . did not . . . know. I felt . . . the essence of you . . . but I did not know . . . do not know . . . the where of you . . .”

  “I’m . . . I’m here,” she said. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

  She stepped down from his arms, slowly, and they were surrounded by blackness, but with him there was solidity, there was no fear.

  “You . . . are not afraid . . . of me?”

  Slowly she shook her head as she pressed her naked body against his. “I love you,” she whispered. “How couldn’t I love you? I’ve been looking for you all my life.”

  She felt vines beginning to surround her . . . and suddenly he stopped, and she felt him growing distant from her. “What’s wrong?” she said urgently.

  “There is evil . . . abroad in the swamp . . . this night,” he said, looking off toward some point beyond where she could see. “I must attend . . . to it.”

  “Come back!” She started to tremble. “Don’t leave me! I need you!”

  “Come to me,” he said. “In the swamp . . . but not this night. Not until the evil . . . is gone.”

  “When, then?!”

  His body began to crumble in her arms, falling away, rotting. And from all around her a voice said, “Soon.”

  And a name came to her, a name she didn’t know.

  She cried out, “Alec!”

  Arcane paused above Lana, frowning. He could have sworn he’d just heard Abigail shout out from her room, scream out Holland’s name. He shrugged and went back to feigning passion.

  Abigail sat up, the name still frozen on her lips.

  She looked around frantically, confused, disoriented as one always is when one wakes up in a strange place.

  Within moments she realized she was still in the bedroom Arcane had assigned her. It was dark out, the night sky alive with lightning and thunder.

  She had thrashed about so much, she had twisted herself completely around in her sheets. Slowly she untangled herself, stepped out of bed, and adjusted the simple white shift she was wearing. Normally she slept naked, but somehow coming here she had wanted the questionable protection a nightgown afforded her.

  She went to the window and looked out. The night sky had cracked open, and rain was pouring down in waves. Far in the distance that mountain peak seemed to reign over all the land around it. She imagined that there, atop the mountain, sat perched the great god of the swamps . . . looking down, rendering judgment.

  Flashes of her dream returned to her. Her mother, Arcane, the faintest of memories, already mercifully vanishing.

  And something else. Something massive, something with the sweet smell of vegetation, the sharp taste of lime, and the strength of the earth in massive limbs.

  And the name she had screamed in her dream, now, just speaking it softly, brought peace to her, a sense that she was not alone.

  “Alec,” she whispered.

  I felt her . . .

  Earth mother . . . who is she . . . ?

  I sense her purity . . . and beauty of spirit . . . and her oneness . . . with nature.

  Unlike the other humans . . . of flesh and meat . . . she remembers the times when humankind . . . depended on the green . . . for survival. A time before pollutants . . . and defoliation.

  The beauty of humankind . . . lives within her . . . and she does not know. All she knows . . . is that she is unhappy . . . in the human world . . . just as I find . . . growing discontent . . . living only in the world . . . of the green.

  Perhaps we can . . . provide each other . . . a mutual bridging of . . . our worlds . . . for without her . . . I am not whole.

  But first . . . I must attend . . . to the unnatural one.

  8

  A dozen letters were already burnt out in the sign, and several more were flickering dangerously near to extinction. In its heyday the sign had read in full UNCLE SHED’S RIVER GARDEN ESTATES. WHERE THE BYWAY MEETS THE BAYOU. NO REASONABLE RATE REFUSED. DAILY-WEEKLY-MONTHLY.

  Of course, even when the sign had been at its best, it couldn’t begin to hide the true nature of the “estates”: namely that it was no more than a series of run-down, off-road bungalows barely one notch up from a crummy trailer park (and indeed, several notches below a really nice trailer park).

  All the bungalows looked basically alike, yet this rainy night a long figure scooted through the Estates, making his way through the barely lit blackness with practiced quickness.

  He was aware of the late hour, aware if his parents found out he had sneaked out in the middle of the night, they’d rip the hide off his butt, aware (painfully) that his sneakers had completely filled up with water.

  He was not aware of the hideous malevolence that watched him from the edge of the grounds.

  He got to the bungalow he sought and pounded on the door. He’d been trying for subterfuge, not wanting to rouse anyone in the pathetic group of bungalows. But with his goal so near he was becoming very impatient. And very soggy.

  “Hey, Omie, it’s me! Let me in! It’s pourin’ out here,” he added somewhat unnecessarily.

  There was some scuffling from within, and the door opened slightly, held by a chain lock. From inside, Omar Brown, who lived in the bungalow when he wasn’t out dodging the sheriff’s car, stared out at his waterlogged friend.

  And hesitated, realizing if you can’t torture a waterlogged friend, who can you torture? Hey! Water torture!

  “Well, ain’t’cha gonna let me in?” said Darryl, for such was the name of the young man who was outside.

  “Looks kinda wet out there,” observed Omar.

  “You’re damn straight it is! Now open the stupid door and let me in.”

  And in a dazzling example of twelve-year-old humor, Omar asked, “What’s the password?”

  “Password!” squealed Darryl. “Whaddaya mean, password? We never had a password!”

  “Got one now,” was the serene reply.

  Darryl squeezed his fingers into a small fist. “You wanna password. I’ll give you a password.”

  “Oh, I’m soooo scared,” said Omar in his best Pee-Wee Herman voice. He grinned inwardly and then watched as Darryl backed up a few feet, now desperate enough to transform his stout body into a human battering ram.

  “All right, you!” said Darryl with more confidence than he felt. “Here . . . I . . . come!”

  Omar’s timing was perfect, waiting until Darryl was at full-committal speed before swinging wide the door and announcing, “Hey, that’s the password!”

  Darryl shot full-speed into the bungalow, tripping as he tried to stop his charge and succeeding only in tumbling over a coffee table.

  That his friend might have split his head open never occurred to Omar. He was too busy chuckling.

  Darryl pulled himself upright with annoyance and what little dignity he could muster. “You jerk!” was the best insult he could come up with.

  “You’re a double jerk.”

  “No, you are.” With the opening salutations out of the way, Darryl looked around suspiciously. “Your folks gone?”

  “Course,” said Omar confident
ly. “Weekend trip. Won’t be back for ages. You can stay over if you want.”

  “Damned straight, ’cause I’m not going back out there, no way,” said Darryl, sliding off his rain slicker. He tried his best to restore some order to his orange hair. “Then you got ’em?”

  “Do I got ’em?” replied Omar, feigning insult.

  “Well, let’s see ’em.”

  “Be cool, bro’, be cool,” said Omar in his best Miami Vice tone. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar.” His voice taking on the tone of a confident bartender, he said, “What are ya drinkin’?”

  Moments later, the rain rattling noisily on the tin roof overhead, the boys were guzzling down Pepsi as if it had been outlawed and noisily blasting music videos on the fuzzy black-and-white TV.

  Omar came out of the forbidden territory, his father’s room, under the bed, inside his dad’s old footlocker, from which he had withdrawn a dazzling array of reading material. He dumped the pile unceremoniously in front of Darryl.

  “There ya have it. The year in pictures,” he crowed. “Dig in.”

  It was a truly impressive assortment. Every issue in the past twelve months of every smutty, sleazy girlie magazine obtainable in Lacroix, Louisiana, was scattered on the floor. For once obeying his friend to the letter, Darryl promptly dropped to his knees and dug in.

  He went through the foldouts with the alacrity of a speed-reader. The truth was, while the Playboy magazines, for example, were easy on the eyes, some of the others had women posed in positions that were not only unattractive, but downright uncomfortable to look at. He would be damned, however, if he would let his friend know any of the pictures were distasteful. No way was he gonna let Omar think he was a wuss.

  So, summoning up what he imagined passed as a macho voice, Darryl said, “Whoa, I can’t believe it. Look at these babes.”

  “Check out the one in the June ish of Young & Easy. She’s one of the old man’s favorites.”

  Darryl did so, pulling out the suggested issue and surveying the centerfold. It was one of those ones that made his eyes ache. He didn’t want to look at it, but Omar was watching him intently. “My God, she’s . . .” Darryl floundered, his eyes darting, trying to find something on the page that was noninflammatory, and he lit on the handful of words lining the bottom. “She’s . . . a Scorpio! And I’m an Aries! They get along great.”