Creeper blinked and woke up. He swam toward his sister and grabbed on to her ankle. The skin there was still tender from the liquid burn. His grip hurt, but Piper was too happy to care. She cried out, “Yes, Monty, yes! Hang on! Don’t let go!”
A hole opened at the bottom of the pool, and the liquid started to spin and drain, forming an eddy. It sucked them down, playing tug-of-war with the tentacle, and for a moment Piper wasn’t sure which would win.
The tentacle was stronger. It dragged the siblings out of the pool, up the bank, and into the mouth of the tunnel.
“Let go of me now, Creeper!” Piper ordered. “You can’t help me! Find Perch and Tad and get out of here. Do you understand me?”
Creeper let go. But he wouldn’t give her up. He jumped on top of the tentacle and pounded at it with his fists. Clawed at it with his nails. Dug his feet into the dirt and pulled against it. Creeper grimaced and gritted his teeth. His little muscles strained to their limit, but Piper knew it was no use. The tentacle was a powerhouse, way stronger than her little brother. They’d watched a tentacle drag a four-hundred-pound black bear to its doom. What chance did a seventy-pound boy have against one?
“Creeper, let go.” Piper didn’t yell this time. She talked to him calmly, patiently, fighting back tears. “It’s okay. You’re safe. That’s all I care about. Just let go. I won’t be mad. Go home to Mom and Dad. Go home to Grace.”
“No!” he roared. “I won’t! Not without you!”
Piper tickled Creeper under his arm. He yowled and fell away. For her brother’s sake, she didn’t resist the tentacle. She folded her arms, relaxed, and let it drag her away from Creeper, away from the flashlight, down the tunnel, toward pitch-black darkness. She accepted her fate.
Perch, however, did not. He came out of the darkness beside her and hacked away at the tip of the tentacle with his bowie knife. He carved it up like a Thanksgiving turkey, spattering bits of juicy pulp everywhere. With one final chop, he severed the tip. Separated from its feeler hairs, the decapitated tentacle thrashed about blind. It slipped away down the tunnel, presumably back into the black hole it had crawled out of.
Perch wiped plant gunk off his face. “Miss me, Princess?”
Piper embraced him. “You found us. How did you find us?”
“The flashlight. I was crawling around in the dark looking for you when I saw it.” He grinned. “It’s the light at the end of the tunnel, literally.”
Piper called out for her brother. The light came bobbing up the tunnel toward them. When Creeper reached his sister, he fell on her, and they hugged each other tightly. Piper stroked her brother’s filthy hair.
“Don’t ever tickle me!” he said between racking sobs. “Don’t ever tickle me! I’ve told you a zillion times! Don’t ever tickle me!” He tried to sound furious, but he couldn’t hide the relief in his shimmering eyes. “Now I have to pee.”
“Can you hold it?” she asked.
He wiped the tears away and nodded. “I think so.”
She gave his hair another tousle. “Good.”
Perch helped Piper peel the amputated tentacle tip from her body. It took real effort, but they got most of it off. She’d scrub the rest clean when they got home, with a Brillo pad, if she had to.
“Have you seen Tad?” she asked Perch. “I left him at the edge of the clearing, but I’m worried that—”
“I did,” Perch said. “I was in the forest looking for Creeper. I saw Tad wandering between the trees with his arms outstretched like a zombie, stumbling around, lost. I called out to him, but then one of those grabby arms—”
“Tentacles,” Piper corrected him.
“Yeah, one of those tentacles came out of the ground behind him. I blinked and he was gone.”
“Then he’s down here.” Piper sighed. “I told him not to come into the woods, but he never listens. And now Mergo has him.”
“What are we gonna do?” asked Perch.
“We? Nothing. You are taking Creeper topside, then you’re getting him to the Mud Cat. I’m staying down here to rescue Tad.”
Or die trying.
With the flashlight aimed ahead, Perch led the Canfields on a crawl through the tunnels. Piper was behind him. Creeper brought up the rear, keeping a safe distance from his sister’s butt, in a position he referred to as the “cootie caboose.” The liquid he’d nearly drowned in was still messing with his brain. He was “higher than a Georgia pine,” as Perch described him, fluctuating between moments of zany highs and nauseated lows, like he was riding a sugar-rush roller coaster. They took a side tunnel here, a side tunnel there, straight tunnel, side tunnel, straight.
“How do you remember where you’re going?” Piper asked, awed by Perch’s sense of direction.
“Years of paying attention in the swamp,” he answered. “It’s ridiculously easy to get lost in the Oke. All of us guides go astray every now and then. The best swampers learn to develop an eye for details. Bird nests, for example. Each one is different from the next, and if you can remember them all, then you can use them as markers to find your way home. That’s how they did it in the old days.”
“But you traveled these tunnels in the dark,” Piper said. “You wouldn’t have seen any markers at all.”
“True. I had to get creative. Smells can be markers too. Lots of distinct stinks down here, most of ’em foul enough to gag a maggot. Still, I’m glad I spent the extra money and got a waterproof flashlight. Makes the trip back a lot easier.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Piper. “Why does it shine in four different colors?”
“It’s helpful in the swamp. The white light is best for all-around use. Red helps preserve our night vision, since the rods in our eyes are less sensitive to it. Plus, during night tours, I can shine it right in an alligator’s eyes and it won’t flinch. They can tolerate it longer than white, which burns their retinas.” Perch clicked the button, and the beam ahead turned red.
He was right, thought Piper as her eyes adjusted; it did help her see more easily, although it made the tunnel appear ten times creepier than it already was.
“The green light is the best one for reading maps at night,” Perch said.
“And the blue?” she asked. “What does the blue light do?”
“It’s good for pretending you’re a mermaid, I guess. I’ve never found much use for it,” Perch said. He voiced his objection again. “For the record, I think this is a horrible plan. I don’t see why you can’t take Creeper to the Mud Cat while I stay down here and look for Tad. I mean, I’m a guy and you’re—”
“Easily angered by chauvinists?” Piper’s tone warned Perch to choose his next words wisely.
“I was going to say you’re Creeper’s sister, so you should stick with him.”
“Sure you were,” she said. “Think about it, Perch. If something happens and I don’t make it back, you’re the best chance I have of getting Creeper and the flower home. Like you said, you know the swamp. I don’t. Plus I have no idea how to work the Mud Cat.”
“It’s easy,” he assured her.
“Most important, Tad is my friend, not yours. I’m the one who got him into this mess. I need to be the one to get him out.”
“Well, I don’t exactly hate the guy,” said Perch. “If he hadn’t stopped me from rushing into the swamp after Macey, I’d probably be dead too. So I kinda feel like I owe him. Maybe we shouldn’t split up at all. I can stay down here and help you look for Tad. Then we can make a run for the surface together.”
Piper scuttled the idea. “Absolutely not. Creeper is still messed up from his pool party. He has to get to the boat now. I need you to do this for me. Please.”
“You trust me with your brother’s life, huh?”
“I do,” she said, meaning it.
“We’ve come a long way in a day, you and me.”
“That we have, Mr. Gentner,” said Piper, returning his smile.
They crawled through the last few turns of the labyrinth
and came to a stop in front of a curtain of thin hanging roots.
“Any tunnel past this point will lead you topside,” Perch told Piper. “‘All roads lead to Rome,’ as the saying goes. Can you remember the way out?”
“I think so,” she said. “What’s your plan?”
“I’ll get Creeper to the shore, and we’ll see what awaits us in the lagoon. Hopefully the animals have left by now. Why would Mergo keep pumping its mind-control chemical into the water after the threat was gone?”
Piper hoped he was right. She leaned back against the wall to let Creeper pass. He looked sickly, like he might hurl any minute, but at least he seemed a little more clearheaded. The wacky juice was wearing off.
“You okay?” she asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “I have a headache. And I want to barf.”
“Sounds a bit like a hangover,” said Perch. “An affliction Macey suffered from time to time.”
“Perch is going to get you back to the boat,” Piper explained to her brother. “You have to go with him. Do as he says. I’ll join you soon.”
“Okay,” Creeper said.
Piper knew that if he wasn’t so befuddled, he’d probably put up a fight. She pulled him in for a hug and kissed the top of his dirt-crusted head.
“I’ll get him to safety,” Perch promised. “We’ll wait for you in the boat.”
“Okay, but not for long,” she told him.
Perch nodded his understanding.
“I love you, Creeper,” Piper said. “You know that now, right?”
He squeezed her in return with his scrawny arms.
“Good.” She kissed his head again.
Perch handed the flashlight to Piper, the red beam swinging between them. “We’re not far from the surface now. I can get us the rest of the way in the dark. You’ll need this more than we will. Take this too.” He gave her his knife. “Just in case you need to make a salad.”
“Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”
He gave her a worried look then said, “See you soon, Princess.”
Perch and Creeper crawled through the curtain of roots, leaving Piper all alone. A whisper in the back of her mind tortured her. It told her she’d never see her brother again. As the soles of Creeper’s stinky swamp shoes—the last thing she saw of him—disappeared, her heart throbbed with a dull ache. With the flashlight aimed ahead and the knife in her other hand, Piper turned and crawled in the opposite direction, down, down, down the shaft, back into Mergo’s damnable kingdom.
Piper had no idea where she was going or where Tad had been taken. She just kept her eyes peeled and her ears open and followed the red beam and her gut. She moved in constant fear that a tentacle would come slithering down the tunnel toward her. In such confined space, there’d be no place to hide. She’d be forced to fight.
The minutes dragged on, but there was no sign of Tad or Mergo. She couldn’t help but be amazed by the complex network of tunnels the plant had bored for itself through the ground. But with so many side passages and turns, she soon found herself hopelessly lost, with no sense of her bearing to the surface. She considered turning around, going back the way she’d come, but her instinct told her to keep crawling forward. She was rewarded with a sign.
One of Mergo’s tentacles slithered between two side passages and crossed her path thirty feet ahead. It was dragging a small alligator by its tail. The gator, barking its objection, tried to roll, flip, and bite the tentacle, but there was no escape for the outmatched reptile. The alligator death roll works only when the alligator is the predator, not when it’s the prey. The tentacle and its prisoner disappeared into the opposite side passage.
Piper climbed into the tunnel behind them and followed. Her hope was that the tentacle was forwarding the gator to the same place the other one had taken Tad. She kept a safe distance, afraid the tentacle might see her as a more enticing prize. She tracked it by the claw marks the gator was digging in the soil and by the echo of the animal’s grunts. Something else reached her senses too. The same kerosene smell she’d gotten a whiff of earlier in the forest. The farther she went, the more intense the odor became.
This tunnel was long, but it did have an exit, and beyond that was inky blackness. She caught a glimpse of the tentacle hauling the alligator through the darkness, and then plant and beast dropped down out of sight. Piper crawled to the lip of the exit and peered out into a black void. She leaned forward into it and felt a surprising chill on her face and arms. It was a very big chamber, airy and dark.
This can’t be good. This can’t be good at all.
Piper shined the flashlight into the chamber, but the beam couldn’t illuminate more than a fraction of its space. She raised her light to the ceiling. It was high. She was deeper underground than the gradually sloping tunnels had led her to believe. The roof was supported by a tight lath of branches. It sagged a bit at the middle, but the meshing was a sufficient bulwark against the relentless pull of gravity. She aimed the flashlight outward. It was powerful, but not powerful enough to reach the far wall. The beam dissolved in the dark. Piper couldn’t tell if the chamber was empty or if there was something waiting for her inside.
She turned around and wriggled backward through the tunnel exit. She lowered herself carefully over the lip. She wasn’t tall enough to reach the chamber floor—it could be two or twenty feet below her, she didn’t know—so she was forced to drop into it blind. Piper didn’t fall far. When she landed, she felt something crunch beneath her feet. She swept the light over the floor and squealed. It was covered with bones. Not just covered—piled with bones. Her right foot was lodged inside the rib cage of a small mammal, a raccoon or possum, maybe; she was wearing it like a shoe. Piper kicked it away in disgust, and it clacked apart in the shadows.
The chamber was filled, wall to wall, with skeletons, some whole, some disassembled, some ground into splinters and powder over the course of centuries. Even the dirt walls were packed with skeletons, like a relief sculpture of embedded bones and deep shadows. Nearly every vertebrate in the swamp was represented, from fish to birds to mammals. Not even Mergo’s reptile defenders were safe from its voracious appetite. The flat, broad clothespin-like skulls of the American alligator were present in great numbers, and empty turtle shells were strewn everywhere, like shields on a battlefield. There was clearly no clemency for loyal service.
Piper waded through the dunes of bones. The red filter of the flashlight made them look awash in blood, so she clicked the button on the handle until the beam was back to white and she saw that, for the most part, the bones were perfectly cleaned, almost as though the flesh had been boiled away.
She clamped her hand to her mouth to suppress a scream. There was a human skeleton in the mix. It was clad in the scrap remnants of a soldier’s uniform. Piper could tell by the style—gray wool, with a belt that held a cartridge box and an empty scabbard—that this man once fought for the Confederate army in the Civil War. Maybe he’d been pursued by Union soldiers, attempted to hide out in the swamp, and encountered Mergo. Of course, bayonets and bullets would have been useless against a giant carnivorous plant.
The soldier was the first of many human skeletons Piper found in the chamber. Whatever Mergo couldn’t digest remained on the bodies and spoke to who these people had been when they were alive. These clues offered a history lesson in human occupation of the swamp. There were skulls capped with miner helmets, a collapsed rib cage wrapped in the mackinaw jacket of an early nineteenth-century lumberjack, Creek Indians draped in shreds of buckskin, and even a hunter clothed in the latest L.L.Bean gear. Piper noticed that the great majority of the dead were wearing jade jewelry. Jade, she knew, was a South American mineral. There must have been at least a hundred Tasketcha entombed here, all bedecked in finery that could only be funeral attire. They’d died first and then Mergo ate them. Were the Tasketcha feeding their dead to the plant? Then why had they bothered to build tumuli in the woods? She worked out the ghoulish answers in her h
ead. The Tasketcha had buried their dead. And then Mergo tunneled its way underneath the tumuli and snatched the bodies from below, stealing them without ever being noticed. That’s why some of the tumuli had collapsed inward. The plant was a clever grave robber. This also explained how Mergo developed a taste for human meat. If the Tasketcha had brought Mergo as a plantlet with them from South America with the expectation that it would grow to become their subservient protector, they’d misunderstood two key things: fully grown, the plant would accept no master, and to Mergo, all meat was good meat.
An anguished roar echoed from somewhere beyond the chamber. The alligator had just died horribly. Piper had to know how Mergo killed it. She had to know if Mergo had killed Tad too. She moved swiftly in the direction of the gator’s death cry. The carpet of bones grew deeper the farther she went, until she was forced to use her arms to help her scamper up and over the ever-shifting piles. “Forgive me, y’all.” She felt a pang of guilt—she’d been raised to respect the dead, not step on their skulls and use their bones as ladder rungs.
Piper came to a gap in the far wall of the chamber. The kerosene stench she’d smelled on the beetle balls and in the tunnels was wafting in through the hole, pricking her eyes and polluting her taste buds with a chemical flavor. She crawled through the gap and found herself inside the second half of a double chamber, not unlike the shell of a peanut. This half was somewhat larger than the one with all the bones, but it contained something far more disgusting.
Piper’s first impression: the chamber reminded her of a factory. Her aunt Cindy worked at the BMW factory in South Carolina and had once given Piper and Creeper a tour of the assembly floor. As she observed the vast network of Mergo’s tentacles whipping about the chamber, busy in their tasks, she thought of the giant mechanical arms that moved car parts around and welded them into place.
The tentacles were everywhere, snaking in through holes riddling the walls like Swiss cheese, engaging in a range of duties. Most, like the one she’d followed, were hauling captive animals of all kinds into the chamber and bashing them senseless against the walls. The room was filled with dead and dying creatures. Even with the intense stench of kerosene hanging in the air, she could distinguish the metallic odor of blood.
The Murk Page 25