The Girl in the Swamp

No one liked Drunk Greg.

Sober Greg was great; everyone loved Sober Greg. However, Drunk Greg? The exact opposite. His jokes got worse (“What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A pizza doesn’t scream when you stick it in the oven!”), and he laughed louder at them. His hands started getting a little too friendly with anything above an A cup, and sometimes they weren’t even that picky. I had seen this side of him before, and just being in his vicinity was in no way scoring me any points with the ladies. Not that it made a difference, besides Emily Tanner the party was a real skank-fest. I decided to call it a night before Greg got too tanked to handle.

“I’m drivin’!” Greg declared as I pulled him out the front door into the humid summer night. Frogs sang their froggy tunes, and cicadas buzzed the harmony somewhere in the darkness; Tanner’s place was really in the middle of nowhere, considering it was only about three miles outside of town.

“Nobody’s driving, Greg. We walked here, bonehead,” I said. I yanked him perhaps a bit too roughly; I admit I was annoyed since seeing Emily disappear upstairs with that LSU grad student, Mike Yuppie Rich Jerk, about an hour earlier.

“What about Andy?” Greg said.

“Andy’ll take the car back. He’s the one who drove it here. You and me? We walk.”

“But I’m a high-flyer, a rainbow rider!” my companion protested, tore his arm from my grip, and spread both of his arms out like airplane wings before running across the yard in wide circles. His lips burbled childish airplane sounds, and spittle danced from between them.

“C’mon, G-Unit. Or I’ll leave you in the woods to the rapists,” I said and gestured to the trail we’d have to take through the forest behind Emily’s house. Greg airplaned his way towards me and stopped just before a potential collision. His face was inches from mine.

“At least one of us’ll get some action then,” he said and wiggled his eyebrows. The scent of Bacardi and Seven-Up drenched his words.

“See ya,” I said and wheeled towards the path. Greg knew better than to tease me about Emily. A crush carried for more than two years should no longer be considered merely a crush. At the very least, she was something of an obsession, but the right moment to take the step towards anything further than a casual friendship between us seemed to elude me.

“Awww, don’t be such a titty baby. Though I bet you’d like to get breast-fed. Oh yeah, my man would loooove that, you freak you,” Greg taunted, keeping step behind me.

At least he was following me back to the apartment building; I figured that was the important thing. I knew I couldn’t leave him behind without feeling guilty and being kept up all night by that stupid responsibility of mine that almost always seemed to translate into worry. I could handle his drunken chiding. I had countless times before.

We didn’t get far before Greg quieted down. In the stifling heat of the late July evening, even talking seemed to be a chore. If there’s one true thing you can say about Louisiana, it’s that it gets friggin’ hot. Especially in late July. But the woods, if you could call them that, were eerily beautiful. Moss hung from drooping branches. The trees, themselves, seemed dreamy and sad. To be honest, it was more of a swamp or the outer edge of a swamp; Emily found a rundown house out there and took up residence in it (after a lot of fixing up, no doubt) because she thought it would help with her writing. Whether it helped her write anything, who knows, but the place sure was a perfect party house. Far enough away from the rest of civilization for crazy stuff to happen without fear of the police showing up but close enough that it was walking distance for the likes of Greg and me.

But the frogs and the cicadas? They drove me nuts. At night, they never shut up. The snakes I could deal with because you just kicked them out of the way or waited for them to slither on by, and at least, they were quiet. The gators you pretty much never saw unless you were out on a boat, and they didn’t keep you up either. Just the frogs and the cicadas and whatever other insects felt like being a pain but particularly the frogs and the cicadas.

“Do you see that?” Greg asked, and then for the first time since I’d been down in Louisiana, first for school and then because I was following Emily Tanner around like a hopeful puppy, the frogs and the cicadas went silent around me.

The chill and the lump in the throat. Yes, they are clichés of countless horror novels and stories, but they are so for good reason. Because that chill slivered down my spine, and that lump arose in my throat when that silence sprung over me with the suddenness of a bear trap around an ankle. A warm breeze like a hot, tepid breath blew through the trees and against the standing hairs on neck.

“See what?” I said, but Greg disappeared into the darkness at one side of the trail.

I followed Greg, but only because I didn’t want to be alone on that trail in the swamp, enveloped within that overwhelming silence. I squinted, trying to see what he saw through the grainy darkness, and then I saw it. I saw her.

I gasped.

It’s hard to explain thought processes that are in no ways logical or have any real meaning. The act of thinking is a process that requires rationality and logic, but the thought, or feeling, or drive, or whatever you want to call it that came over me at that moment held no rationality or logic.

“She’s mine!” Greg cried next to me, and he took off at a sprint.

And I chased him. Not because I wanted to catch him before he hurt himself by stepping into a snake hole or maybe tripping over a thorny vine but because I wanted the girl for myself. I had only seen her for a moment through darkness and hanging moss, but despite any kind of rational, logical thought I might have had at the moment, I knew that I had to have her. I wanted to own her, to posses her. I just plain wanted her. She was the most beautiful, the most glorious, holiest thing I’d ever seen. No, no. I take that back. She wasn’t any of those things because the girl in the woods, in that festering swamp of burping frogs and screeching cicadas was beyond any kind of words my mind could conceive.

Draped in white, she held her arms towards us, beckoning us to take her.

I gained on Greg, overtook him, and stretched my hands towards my prize. Our fingers brushed, and then Greg yelled, “NO!” into my right ear and dragged me backwards by my shirt collar.

I twisted to meet him and only met his fist pummeling into my stomach. The air rushed out of my lungs, and I staggered with a weak gasp before doubling over. Greg swept my feet from under me with one of his legs, and I met the soft mush of the moist ground face-first. A frog, caught in mid-burp, exploded under my forehead with a fateful squish. Call it fate. That crazy thing we call consciousness went hazy for a few moments as I fought to catch my breath. Greg made sure I stayed down by placing a sharp kick to my ribs. Frog guts dripping down my face, I contested my defeat and didn’t get up.

The irony of this fight was that it lasted all of five seconds, and Greg was a pacifist.

I don’t know how much time passed, but as I turned over and blinked at the stars in my semi-daze, I tried not to think of Emily Tanner’s pink tank top, the one that barely contained her perfect chest, and her long, tan legs. Tried not to think about them wrapped around Mike Yuppie Rich Jerk, and I tried not to feel sorry for myself, knowing that she had been stolen from me just as Greg had stolen this girl in the swamp. This last chance for happiness. For love.

I didn’t feel sorry for myself long.

Not once the screaming started. I sat up the way that wrestler The Undertaker does after his opponent is sure he’s out cold, there’s no possible way that… whoa! Kind of like there’s a spring attached to the underside of his back that shoots the top half of his body up so that his opponent just about craps his pants realizing The Undertaker is one bad mofo’ and it’s going to take a whole lot more than a measly couple of DDTs for THIS three-count.

I saw the girl, the one who had been draped in white. She was no longer draped in anything, and neither was Greg. They were a fleshy tangle of legs and arms, one wrapped around the other, a lovers’ embrace.

But at first, I couldn’t make out what was happening. It didn’t make any sense. She seemed to have Greg’s entire head within her mouth, and that just wasn’t possible. The girl’s jaw extended the way the Mrs. White’s snake did, the one she kept in her fourth grade classroom in a glass cage, when Mrs. White would finally give in to our whining and feed it a mouse. The mice were always dead when she fed them to the snake, so I never felt sorry for them. Mrs. White explained the course of nature, survival of the fittest, and I was never alarmed by the snake’s meals. Not until the moment I saw Greg struggling in the girl’s arms and that girl’s mouth sliding over his head to the neck.

She was eating him. Alive.

I scrambled to my feet and ran.

Panic fueled me, and sweat lathered me. The sweat was so thick, it felt like foam on my forehead and my neck, dripping into my eyes and betraying my vision. I heard her behind me, the girl; branches snapped and the swampy ground sucked wetly at her heavy feet. I pumped my legs into their highest gear, hoping my years of track were finally going to pay off. Yet still she gained on me. I didn’t want to look back, told myself not to, but then apparently, at that moment, the whole rational thought, logic thing was once again was nowhere to be found in the area of my brain matter. I looked back.

Greg’s left foot protruded from her mouth. His size-eleven Reebok feebly tried to worm its way to freedom, but with a horrible, slobbery slurp, the girl finished him off.

Then she had me by the arm, hands closing and squeezing my flesh with an icy grip. I felt my feet tumble, balance lost, and then she was dragging me, not slowing down, keeping up her pace, the scent of sex still heavy, Greg’s muffled voice crying from somewhere deep within her, and I think I went a little crazy.

Who could blame me?

I screamed until my voice cracked and went out, until my throat was a burning, scratchy throb. For once, the frogs and the cicadas were quiet while I filled the night with the deep, rich sounds of pure insanity. Oh, how the tables had been turned.

She dragged me to some kind of hut. It was not much more than mud and sticks, something a wild animal might throw together. The hut was lighted by a small, flickering candle at its center. I vaguely wondered where she got the candle, but I didn’t spend much time pondering its holder: a human skull. The girl tossed me inside as if I were the morning paper and closed the door behind us. As soon as the door closed, the frogs and cicadas must have figured it was safe to resume their midnight swamp symphony.

I pressed myself against a far wall, if you could even call it a wall, the ends of sticks and a few leaves protruding against my back. A beetle dropped from the ceiling and onto my shoulder. I didn’t bother flicking it away. My lips trembled, and I am not embarrassed to admit, I was on the verge of tears. The possibility of being eaten alive by the most beautiful girl in the world was not a thought to stir my favorite kinds of emotions.

The girl turned and captured me with her gaze. I felt all the fear drain out of me, replaced with a burning sensation in the pit of my gut: hot, fluid desire.

Women have a certain power over men, always have. Whether it’s hormonal or mental or something else entirely, it is a real thing, and the girl, or rather this girl-shaped thing, in front of me had somehow mastered this power, and she turned it full-force on me. I had to have her, and nothing else in the world mattered. I had to have her. Greg, my friend who had somehow been impossibly swallowed whole, was long forgotten, his remains digesting somewhere deep within her. The girl looked none the worse for having eaten an entire man; her body was muscular, lean and perfect.

She uttered a feral grunt and leapt on me. My mouth found hers, our tongues met, and she tore off my clothes and tossed them aside. My tattered shirt snared a branch on the wall and hung. My shorts sent a snake slithering out through a hole on the floor. We went at each other like animals, inhibitions stripped away to pure animal instinct.

She straddled me and pulled me closer, her arms and legs wrapped around me. She bucked and I thrust and her mouth opened wide. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of my mind I knew what was happening, but that voice was tiny, insignificant. I peered into the deep dark tunnel of her throat, and dawning horror overcame me as her mouth closed over my head and-

The door to her hut crashed open, and Andy yelled, “What the hell!”

The mouth pulled away, and the girl’s eyes swung to meet the startled young man at the door. At the time, it seemed impossible; what was Andy doing there? The answer: bad luck. I later found out (between the police and Emily) that Andy couldn’t get the car started and had gone after me and Greg down the trail. I can’t say how he found us, whether he heard the girl and my grunts and moans of passion or if Greg’s screams of terror had led him into vicinity of the girl-thing’s home or what. All I know is that Andy saved my life, and he also had the crappiest luck of anyone I’ve ever known.

The girl was suddenly off me and on Andy. His screams cut the night air.

Seizing the opportunity, I kicked at the candle in the middle of the girl’s hut, the wax smacking the wall above the girl and Andy, and it burst into flames. The eager fire spread fast, too fast, and the girl and my friend were immediately consumed.

I hope that it made the end quicker for Andy.

The route for escape being blocked by the fire, I lowered my shoulder and drove it into the thatch-wall next to me. Sticks and brambles cut my arm. Blood trickled down my naked skin. But I heard it give way with a sharp crunch, just a bit. I glanced back towards the door.

The girl, engulfed with flames, began to stumble towards me; her fiery arms reached to embrace my body. Andy’s carcass was at her feet, twitching. She hadn’t eaten him, thank God. Apparently, she didn’t like her men deep-fried. Manic giggles twittered up my throat at the thought, and panic overcame me.

I felt the flames of her lover’s touch lick my skin.

I dove through the wall of her hut. Sticks tore my skin; mud clung to me in gluey black patches. But I was through, and I ran. I swept through the swamp, the woods, as if riding on air (“I’m a high flyer, a rainbow rider!” Greg’s voice rang in my mind), and only looked behind me once, just to make sure the girl wasn’t following.

Her hut was a funeral pyre, a towering flame representing the final resting place of two of my friends and something that was not of this world. Seeing that awful torch, everything hit me at once. My stomach twisted, and I fell to my knees, vomit spewing and splattering the ground in front of me.

Then I stood and ran.

I wasn’t surprised when no one believed my story. The police, they believed I was on some kind of drugs even when their toxicology reports all came back negative. They believe this falsity because it’s easier to swallow than the truth. I was barely even officially intoxicated. But in southern Louisiana, they have enough hard-to-swallow stories. They don’t need to create new ones. Considering I had no reason to kill two friends and that I had stumbled out of the swamp naked and delirious, they didn’t charge me with anything.

Emily moved not soon after because she figured New York City might inspire her more than the swampy bayous of Louisiana. She moved to the East coast. I moved to the West. I didn’t want to be around anything that reminded me of that night. I’m not much of a “dater” these days. The thought of a woman’s legs around me, the thought of one’s mouth pressing against mine… well, it makes me a little sick to my stomach.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the following year, the first thing I thought about was that girl in the swamp. I wondered if there were any other things out there like her.

I pray they were all wiped out.