The Bog (23 page)

Once, when he was about to step on what he thought was solid ground, at the very last moment he noticed a solitary lily growing impropitiously a few feet away. Mindfully, he pushed the area with a stick, and was horrified to see it vanish into oblivion as it was quickly covered over by black water. On another occasion he walked full into one of the webs of the filmy dome spiders and found himself momentarily gripped by a silly and almost primal fear of the thing. Still he pressed on.

As he neared his destination he slowed so as not to broadcast his arrival, and finally he detected the faint but acrid stench of the feeding grounds. He assumed that the villagers had taken away Winnifred Blundell’s body, and that the smell was coming from the other profuse remains in the area. At last he saw the muddy clearing in the moonlight, and he froze in silence when he became aware of another sound in the night.

It was the bleating of a lamb. He crouched down behind a short clump of blackthorn and peered through the thicket. In the clearing ahead and illuminated by a shaft of moonlight, he saw the poor creature staked out like its predecessors on one of the muddy hillocks. However, there was no sign of its unknown adversary. Given that the thing now seemed accustomed to feeding on sheep, he reasoned that the bleating would attract it before long. He settled in to wait.

He had been there for well over an hour, and to his dismay had found the incessant bleating of the lamb on the verge of lulling him to sleep, when at last he heard something coming. He slowed his breathing and suddenly wondered fearfully how keen the creature’s hearing was, or whether it would smell him, but he then dismissed the fear. He knew that the question would be answered before long.

Whatever it was, at least it did not slither, for he could clearly make out the sound of slow and ponderous footsteps. However, he could not tell whether it walked on two feet or four. In the distance a sapling snapped as the creature made its way toward the clearing. Then, to his amazement, he suddenly felt the familiar amorphous pain buzzing into wakefulness in his teeth and jaws. He squinted in the dim light, keeping his eyes trained in the direction of the approaching footsteps. The lamb also detected the intruder’s presence, and its bleating became even more desperate and frantic as it pulled madly at its tether.

David could hear the squishing of the creature’s footsteps as it entered the clearing, but he still could not see it. Suddenly the lamb ran out of his vision as it apparently tried one last time to evade its attacker, but it was of no use. He heard it give a piteous squeal as the thing apparently cornered it. The lamb continued to squeal agonizingly as the night was rent by a snap of bone and then the slow and measured sound of mastication. Still, the lamb bleated heartrendingly as David could hear its flesh ripping and the almost lazy munching continuing.

Able to stand it no longer, he crept forward, and there, in the moonlit stillness, he finally saw what he assumed to be Ol’ Bendy.

At first glance the creature was humanoid, but some seven or eight feet in height. It was also naked, and like the centaur, possessed an awesomely powerful musculature, but with the same sagging look of moribundity and decay. Unlike the centaur, it did not glow or give off any luminescence of its own, but was instead a cadaverous and stony gray, and possessed the mottled and bumpy look of a toad, or an ancient and battle-scarred lizard. From its massive and sagging sexual organs, strangely human in design, it was clear that it was male.

Its most anomalous feature, however, was its head, which was immense and oddly misshapened, as if a square pillowcase had been filled with concrete and allowed to harden. In the middle of the flat and almost featureless expanse of its face were two large and sulfur-yellow eyes with shiny vertical pupils that were occasionally eclipsed by reptilian and semi-transparent nictitating membranes. Its ears were massive and pointed like a bat’s. For a nose it possessed only two vertical slits in which grew small fleshy protuberances that fluttered in and out as it breathed, and its incongruously tiny mouth was human and almost disconcertingly feminine.

As it ate the still-writhing lamb, for the first time David discerned how it made those peculiar lacerations. Completely lining its tiny round mouth was a perfect circle of small, razor-sharp teeth. These teeth, it seemed, were capable of independent movement and rasped in and out as it munched, almost like the mouth of a sea urchin, or a snail as it rasps away algae from the side of a fish tank. In time the lamb that it suckled went limp, and when this happened the creature held the small dead thing high above its head and literally wrung it out, hungrily drinking the remaining blood that drizzled from its body, almost as one might hold a wine skin above one’s head and squeeze it to drink its contents. When it did this, David noticed that its hands were humanoid but, like the centaur, its fore and middle fingers were peculiarly extended.

Finally it tossed the carcass aside and belched heartily. And then, squatting slightly, it evacuated its bowels. As David watched the disgusting and fantastic spectacle, he realized that part of the stench of the place was due to the fact that the creature had apparently repeated this function often on the muddy hillocks. Indeed, with growing repulsion, he looked down and saw that the very ground he knelt on showed traces of well-trampled excrement. He also noticed something else. Illuminated faintly in the moonlight he saw gobs of hair mixed with the excrement, only it wasn’t white, like fleece, it was shorter and darker. With growing horror he thought that he recognized the hair, but in the feeble light he could not be sure. Swept with uncontrollable loathing and curiosity, he shielded the flashlight with his body and held it just a fraction of an inch above the ground. And then he clicked it on. In the small circle of light he saw what he had so feared. He had seen the hair before. It was Ben’s.

At the same instant that he had clicked the flashlight on the creature apparently had heard the sound and turned around. Fearing discovery if he clicked the light off again, David lowered the lens of the flashlight into the mud to ensure that none of its light escaped. And then he returned his attention to the creature. Whatever the thing was, the click of the flashlight had clearly alarmed it. It pricked its massive and pointed ears and listened carefully. David held his breath and tried to maintain himself in as motionless a state as possible. As he kept his terrified pose he saw the thing lift its huge and ferocious head and then, almost like a deer or other wild animal trying to catch the scent of an intruder, it sniffed the air carefully, the fleshy protuberances in its breathing slits fluttering in and out. And then, to his astonishment, it smiled as it seemed to pick up his scent. It turned in his direction and started to advance.

For a moment he was frozen in terror, unable to believe that the thing was real. The centaur at least had been more phantasmagoric, and seemed more tenuous and ephemeral. But as the creature before him advanced, he could see the dull solidity of its flesh, hear the labor of its breathing, and see the striations of its pupils change as it struggled to discern more details in the darkness.

Its feet squelched loudly in the mud as it continued to plod forward. Soon it would be upon him.

He stood up quickly and, bracing the butt of the rifle against his shoulder, he pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked, but it did not fire.

The creature gurgled in a way that might almost have been construed as amusement.

In a panic, David quickly cocked the gun again and pulled the trigger one more time. Still it clicked uselessly. Not knowing what else to do, he quickly lifted the flashlight up and turned the beam into the creature’s saucer-size eyes. Its pupils narrowed instantly as it squealed and raised one of its massive arms to shield itself from the light. But before David could do anything else, with its free arm it reached out and knocked the flashlight from him with a force that made his hand ache as if it had been struck by a two-by-four. By now the thing was so close to him that he could smell the cold decay of its breath, and he realized that whatever the thing was, in spite of its decomposed appearance, its strength was preternatural. His jaw and his teeth throbbed as if they were going to explode.

Still holding the rifle, he turned and ran.

The thing broke into hot pursuit behind him and he could hear it crashing loudly through the underbrush as it tried desperately to catch up with him. In some distant part of his mind a voice cautioned him about the dangers of the bog, and he attempted as best he could to retrace his path out, but in his own blind panic he devoted most of his attention to simply running as hard and as fast as his legs would support.

Because he had been on the opposite side of the blackthorn bush he had gotten a lead of perhaps fifteen to twenty feet on the creature, and because of the creature’s greater size and hence reduced maneuverability through the dense vegetation, he was able to maintain a certain measure of that lead, but he knew it was a losing battle. Suddenly one of his feet struck the matted and tangled edge of a sink, and with no other option he hurled himself forward, leaping over the open area and hoping that he would come down on solid ground on the other side. To his great relief he did, and he glanced briefly behind him only to see that the thing was taking advantage of his momentary pause to quickly close what slight distance still separated them. He ran on, his heart pounding, when he suddenly heard a great crash behind him. He turned, and to his momentary relief saw that the creature had itself blundered into the sink. He stopped and watched as it flailed around and snarled ferociously, but only succeeded in further entrenching itself in the mire. It snorted once or twice, desperately trying to clear its breathing slits, and then vanished beneath the dark surface.

At first he felt a great wave of relief pass over him, but he immediately cautioned himself not to be so quick in claiming victory. Instead, he fumbled with the gun, opening it up and rattling the rifle cartridge in its barrel to make sure that it was properly in place. In the sink something stirred.

He closed the rifle, cocked it, and pointed it over his head. He pulled the trigger, and to his delight a shot rang out and a flurry of small creatures rustled in the night. He quickly discarded the empty cartridge and loaded the rifle again. It was none too soon. In the sink a terrible foment started to bubble forth, and suddenly the creature came crashing up through the surface like a great whale leaping out of the ocean, as it snorted and sent large clots of peat and strings of mucus streaming out of its breathing slits.

As it continued to shake its massive head, loosening what peat that remained, David cocked the gun again and aimed it squarely at the creature. It struggled to look at him, its nictitating membranes slowly clearing the last bit of the black ooze from its eyes. Then it realized what he was up to and emitted a hideous snarl. It lunged forward. David prayed the gun would work, and pulled the trigger.

The thing let out one last menacing and furious scream as a second retort echoed through the night and a large chunk of the creature’s torso was blown to bits. Ghastly gray and white viscera dangled from the wound as the creature’s head lolled to one side and it stumbled backward. But before David could savor any sense that he had won out over the thing he realized that something strange was happening. At first it sounded like the buzzing of an angry horde of bees, but as he squinted into the darkness he realized that the pieces of flesh and severed bone that the rifle shot had scattered over the ground were now waking into a strange new state of life. Like the armillaria fungi he had seen earlier, they glowed a dim but phosphorescent white as they rattled and moved across the ground and the remaining hulk of the thing seemingly effervesced into a cloud of glowing, blue-white mist. Then, with the same strange buzzing, as of a thousand furious hornets spurred into action, the entire mass coalesced and went whipping through the forest like an angry ghost. A terrible wind enveloped him as the glowing mist continued to move at lightning speed, occasionally enwrapping trees and nearly snapping them with the force of its passing, until, like a heavy stream of sand, it all hit the earth in one spot and congealed into a larval mass. As he continued to watch breathlessly, the mass pulsated and a splay of veins suddenly snaked through its surface. Vestigial organs coalesced in its luminous depths, and then the features of the thing that had chased him started to sculpt themselves once again in the waxlike mass.

The conclusion was inescapable that somehow the creature was repairing and reconstituting itself. And at the rate it was going he realized that it would not be long before it completed the task.

He turned and once again broke into a run. He moved as quickly as good sense told him was possible, and he had scarcely reached the edge of the bog when he heard an enraged howl echo behind and around him. He realized that the thing was once again whole.

Another furious blast of wind moved past him as if it were some advance guard of the force now pursuing him, and he ran out into the moonlit lane. As he looked around he realized that he had exited the bog from quite a different point than he had entered and in the distance, across the purpled moors, he saw the silhouette of the church. A light glowed dimly in one of its windows and he ran toward it. He did not have time to reflect deeply upon his actions, but he hoped, prayed, that this house of God might provide him some sanctuary from the thing that now stalked him.

As he tore across the moors he heard the creature howl once again and he realized the sound was frighteningly close. It would not be long before it reached the road.

He ran up to the church and pounded frantically on the door.

It seemed like an eternity before he heard footsteps inside, and finally the door opened. The vicar looked first surprised and then apprehensive when he saw the gun in David’s hand.

“What is it?” he asked worriedly.

“Please!” David shouted, pushing past him and entering the church. The vicar shut the door behind him.