Weirdbook #44

LET ME BE YOUR SWAMP SNAKE, by Adrian Cole-1

LET ME BE YOUR SWAMP SNAKE, by Adrian ColeFrom the files of Nick Nightmare

“Frogs,” the old hobo growled at me from the cloying darkness of the street. He was lurching along, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, one step forward, two back, metaphorically speaking. Well, mostly. In fact he added a couple of choice adjectives to the word, indicating he was not enamored of the amphibian tribe. “World’s full of unprintable frogs. New York won’t hold out much longer.”

I left him to his hallucinogenic haze and moved along the narrow alley, which debouched on to the towpath of an old canal. This was a run down part of the city, not a place I’d normally stretch my legs, but I knew a good bar down here with a special brand of malt whiskey they brought in from—well, who knew? I figured it was worth elbowing my way through a few batrachian beasties to wet my whistle with a shot or two.

On reflection now, I may have got that wrong.

As I headed along the canal side, hemmed in by shadows and leaning brick walls, barely lit by a vampire moon leached of all its color, I heard something out on the coal-black surface of the canal. Very little river traffic passed up or down those waters these days. This craft had no motor. Its long, thin shape glided alongside me and its lone occupant, leaning on a pole like the pilot of a gondola, called a surprisingly cheerful greeting. I gritted my teeth and waved back. It was Fred the Ferryman, and he was not famous for bringing good news.

“Fred,” I said, standing over him as his craft eased to a halt alongside. As always it was draped in tendrils of fog.

“At your service, Nick,” he said, bowing. He was little more than a thick bundle of rags, his beaming, round face swathed in a gray scarf and topped with a flattish cap. His eyes sparkled vividly. “Why walk when you could embark and be transported?”

“Probably because you’d slip me into some other place where the nights are darker, the skies are definitely cloudy all day and most of the words heard thereabouts are discouraging.”

“Getting a tad poetic, aren’t we?” His grin widened.

I stood very still, picturing again the old tramp I’d seen a few moments back. “My guess is, this has got to do with frogs, right?”

Fred bowed again. “Bravo, maestro! Step aboard.”

I did so, steadying myself, and sat on the single seat. Fred poled us off. “A friend asked me to fetch you,” he said. “He’s very unhappy. It’s the frogs. And what he fears could be a sort of apocalypse. I’d like to think he’s exaggerating, but, well, you know.”

“Which friend would this be?”

“The Mire-Beast. It’s quite a journey and we’ll have to cross over at some point. Why don’t you just relax. Have a doze. I’ll wake you when we arrive.”

I showed him my teeth, though not in a smile, and sat back, ruminating. The Mire-Beast, once of the NYPD, a man then known as David Goroth. He’d been seriously damaged under a crushing fall of masonry and rebuilt after a fashion by some pretty twisted scientists. Things had gotten worse for Goroth. They’d given him a new body, the huge, misshapen hulk that was the creature we knew as the Mire-Beast, ejecting its former persona, Alexander Cradoc, who’d returned to his native England.

Goroth, in his new form, had been involved in a huge dust-up between me, a few of my pals and members of something we knew as the Dark Army, a powerful collaboration of very unpleasant specimens hell-bent on overrunning as many worlds as they could. We’d held them up, not obliterated them. So if Goroth was feeling glum right now, it likely meant the Dark Army was flexing its muscles again.

Fred poled us out of the canal and along the Hudson, and the fog banks moved in predictably, smothering the view, not that it had been salubrious. It was impossible to say how far we traveled, or at what point we slipped over into some other place, possibly the Pulpworld. If there was a city on the invisible banks, it wasn’t the New York I knew as home. Things had gotten very quiet. I did hear an occasional splosh in the water, and twice something very large slid along under us, nudging us gently but otherwise mercifully not interested. Fred lit a lantern that hung on another pole at the rear of his craft. It gave out a bright yellow light but did little to penetrate our surroundings. Probably not a bad thing.

Eventually I knew we’d left the main body of the river and were moving up a wide creek, its waters sluggish and oily. They had a rich, pungent smell, a combination of rank weed and decay. Hell, we were entering swamp territory. Home was indeed a long way behind us. But it would have suited the Mire-Beast, a creature that thrived on this kind of location, as far from humanity as it could get. Alexander Cradoc had suffered for a long time in his imprisoning body, and now the wretched David Goroth would be enduring the same misery, doubtless yearning for release.

Fresh sounds emanated from the vapors on either side of us. Mainly a chorus of deep croaks that could only have been burped by any number of our amphibious friends.

“This is frog heaven, right?” I said to the Ferryman.

“They do seem to like it here,” he agreed. Very little ever fazed him, but I did notice he put some extra muscle into his poling. We bumped up against a landing that loomed out of the fog ominously. I clambered up onto to its weed-encrusted boards. Fred saluted me, telling me I’d be met and that he’d be on hand again when I needed him. He then dissolved into the murk. I was used to that, but even so, this was the last place anyone wanted to be stranded. And definitely no rare malt whiskey on the end of my little jaunt.

There was light of a kind: greenish and sickly, the product of certain organic growths you would not find in hometown New York. What passed here for fireflies, hornet-sized monsters that zipped around like bullets, also glowed. I went slowly down the landing, careful not to slip on the weathered boards. I did not want to end up in the surrounding swamp, which could have been dumped here straight out of equatorial Africa. As far as I could tell there was nothing on either side of me apart from that bubbling ooze and the tangled banks of low trees that drooped possessively over it.

Ahead of me the landing curved around a wide area from which gray swathes of gaseous cloud billowed upwards. Something else emerged from the muck, bulky and broad, its bizarre features highlighted by the glow. This was the stuff of nightmares, except that I recognized the creature as it dragged its way through the swamp to the landing and hauled itself up to join me. It looked like it had been formed out of the swamp, a mix of mud, stone and root. Its wide blob of a face turned to look down at me—well, it was seven feet high—the red eyes regarding me, somehow imbued with pain.

The Mire-Beast.

“You wanted to see me?” I grunted.

The huge head nodded and the long gash of a mouth opened. There were no visible teeth, but something wriggled about in there. I tried not to shudder. “Nick Nightmare.” The voice rumbled up from that vast chest. “You know about the frogs?”

I glanced around me. The croaks among the reeds and mud banks had intensified. My guess was, the place was seething. “I gather they’re planning a little coup d’etat.”

“It’s no joke. If someone doesn’t do something about it, Nick, about a billion frogs are going to swim down the Hudson and fetch up in New York—in our world, not this one. They already own this one.”

“And is there a reason they’d leave such an ideal environment as this?”

“Food. They’ll eat everyone.”

“I’m not a qualified zoologist, pal, but don’t frogs eat flies and insects and grubs and such like? Frogs don’t eat people.”

“These do.”

That’s all I needed. Carnivorous frogs. “And someone has to do something? That someone being me? A two-bit private d**k against a billion meat-eating frogs. What’s wrong with that sentence?”

“I’ll help. And the Bog Witch holds the key.”

“Ah, there’s a Bog Witch. That changes everything. Should buy us another ten minutes.”

The Mire-Beast, the wretched David Goroth trapped in that grotesque parody of a human body, was not inclined to conversation. He turned away and indicated a gap in the dense vegetation beyond the landing stage. I found a path there, a series of matted hummocks, compressed reeds, that shook as I stepped on them, moving deeper into the shadows. The light decreased, but there was enough to see by. Around me the quasi-daylight barely penetrated the vegetable walls and from them came an incessant chorus of insect and amphibian sound, not least the croaking of a batrachian multitude. I tried not to imagine my flesh being stripped from my bones by countless fleshy mouths.

We reached a larger mound, where a few stunted trees poked up from the black loam, drier land bound together by weeds and roots to form a sort of haven, although I use the word loosely. Beneath one of the trees, sitting cross-legged on a large black stone was the oldest woman in the universe. I’m not being ageist. She really was very old, practically mummified. Hairless, her skin parched, her arms and legs almost devoid of flesh, she regarded me from eyes that had long since clouded over. Blind eyes, I would have supposed, but she had far greater powers. Her presence hummed like a generator. She held a crooked staff, its point dug into the ground and my guess was she drew up all the energy she needed from it.

“Nick Nightmare,” she said in a voice like an amplified whisper, if that doesn’t sound too Irish. “A little island of sanity in a universe gone mad.”

“Shucks, ma’am, no one’s ever been that nice to me,” I said, trying not to smile.

She did and her toothless mouth widened as the smile became a cackle of soft laughter, if that doesn’t sound too Irish.

“I take it you’re the Bog Witch,” I said, bowing slightly.

“Indeed I am. I have watched over these glades for many generations. But at last, ultimate evil has entered them. Terrible powers, intent on unleashing mayhem in your world. You have tasted their deviltry ere now.”

“The Dark Army.”

“It never rests. Always looking for a foothold and worlds to conquer. Always recruiting demons, demi-gods and the vile outcasts of the dimensions. Here, in this forgotten realm, its members have imbued the Frog God with power, and with it a lust for omnipotence. They have promised it much, bound over in blood, in exchange for its service.”

“They want to consume New York. My home town.”

“They do. And pave the way for things beyond your imagination.”

“Oh, my imagination is pretty colorful, ma’am. So—I take it you want me to put a stop to this hanky-panky. Even though I am a mere mortal, with a few trinkets to ward off an evil eye.”

“Give a man the means to an end, and he’ll deliver,” she said. “What you need is Sebok’s Staff. That and its bone headpiece.”

“That figures. And you just happen to have this item to hand?”

“No pain, no gain, Nick Nightmare. You should know that.”

I should have that tattooed on my chest. I managed a non-committal grunt.

“Sebok was an ancient Egyptian God, warden of the crocodiles, among other things,” she said. “He served the pharaohs of the two lands and slew their enemies through control of the great river’s water creatures. Much of his power was invested in his staff. The headpiece is carved from the skull of the lord of the crocodiles, a great beast who, it is said, lived for a thousand years.”

I cut to the chase. “Where is it now?”

“Here, in this backwater, hidden from man for centuries. Its power has never diminished.”

“That’s hunky-dory, ma’am, but how does a crocodile totem counteract this Frog God and his minions? Frogs are amphibians, right? Crocs are reptiles.”