In The Everlasting Swamp

It happened weeks ago now, but I still don’t know what to make of it. Whether it was true, or a dream, or whether those are one and the same thing.

I set up my camp on the edge of the everlasting swamp, in the Clarence Valley out beyond Lawrence. On that afternoon, empty purpling sky gave way to midnight foliage cast over the wide pools of rippling, puddled abyss. Water striders skimmed across its surface, in between reeds and the reed-like legs of a hunting Heron. Tadpoles squiggled in the darkness under the heron’s watchful gaze, each hoping not to be the one plucked out between its muddy-grey beak. They swam beneath a drifting plastic bag that caught and curled around the leg of the Heron. On the shore, a newspaper was wrapped in rot and deposited next to a pile of empty beer cans, among which a frog nestled, surveying his little land of ruin.

The wind whistled on the taunt guy ropes of my tent, buffeting the colourful canvas walls in-out, in-out, in-out like a panicked and erratic heartbeat. Harried, frantic, begging me to leave. The walls seemed thin buffer between me and the night waiting beyond the distant horizon.

In silence but for the wind and rustled needles of the swamp pines, I flicked flint and steel as on the bundled paper flame flared to life. The light and warmth it flung cast leering shadows on the rippled grey bark of the surrounding trees.

“That’s a little better.” I said, looking longingly back down the winding trail I took to get here, then resignedly at the little clearing I had set up in; the first at all I’d seen along the way.

A sudden gust shook the swampy forest and threw sparking embers up and across the wide black pool that stretched off to one side, vast, and into the gloom. The points of burning light fell on the inky surface, swirling a galaxy of quickly dying stars.

The few embers that fell short of the water I hastily stomped into the sodden soil, and considered doing the same for my fledgling fire. But as the wind died, so did my guilt fuelled willingness to do without the fire’s comforting light.

For the sun had, minutes hence, begun passing the baton off to the tiny, fluttering flame. I saw shards of sky above, splintered by the forking tree limbs, shift hues from purple to emerald green mixed with the blue of the sea at dusk, then fall to night.

In my new, flickering orange world I busied myself with dinner.

Beside the fire lay an oblong stone of rough and irregular shape, but with a flat section along the middle where I sat. My view was directly into the swamp and that vast, black pool.

I dragged my pewter coloured backpack toward me, leaving upturned mulchy ground in its wake and pulled out my tin pot and a pack of instant noodles. With a wet stick I dragged out the fires first batch of embers and arranged them in a circle with a flat stone at the centre. There, I placed the pot and poured in some water from my flask.

Slowly, the water boiled under my watchful gaze as I dug little furrows in the ground with my hiking-booted toes. A synthetic crackle and crunch rang out in the swamp as I opened the garish red noodle packet and added its contents to the water. The tiny sachet of beige seasoning and one of shrivelled, dried vegetables followed. I licked the flavour off my fingers and stirred the pot.

As I waited, the shadows beyond the fire’s light drew my eye. Looking out and across the water, they did their dark and dastardly dance between rocks and reed outcroppings, slipping across and back over the border of visibility. They seemed, to my tired mind, like the lithe forms of strange figured fiends who watched me in return.

Goosebumps prickled on my neck.

I tried to pick out some true form or threat in the darkness, but there was nothing but shadows to see.

I took my noodles from off the heat and took deep, shaky breaths to calm myself. I left the pot on the ground to cool a touch and threw a few more logs on the fire, hoping to banish my fears farther into the trees.

The pot’s long handle in one hand, camp fork in the other, I began slow, slurping bites of the noodles despite my lack of appetite. The civilisation I brought along in my wake bid me wipe the juice that ran down my chin as I threw a furtive glance at a sound in the trees. I shook my head and stirred the noodles round and round, lifted another bite to my lips, then let it fall back into the pot.

With a sigh, I sipped the noodle juice, then put the pot on the ground and stood, dusting my knees. My camp mattress needed me and I needed sleep. I made my careful way around the fire, building a levy of dirt and mulch around the flame to keep it contained, then added on a heavy log to carry the embers through to morning.

The zipper of the tent flap screeched as I pulled it down and stepped inside. Outside I heard the heron calling in the middle distance, whether warning or goodnight wishes I could not tell.

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I don’t know why I woke. I found myself, a caterpillar in a sleeping bag cocoon, staring at the canvas ceiling of my tent. The subtle glow of my dying fire lit one wall in crimson light. The forest outside was hushed, as though recently woken from its own, sound slumber.

A hum and quiver started in the air, like the rhythmic beat of butterfly wings. A hollow green glow began to grow, spreading, mixing with the red firelight. Visions sprang of a forest fiend or fellow campers flashlight, fluttering back and forth across my mind.

Tooth by tooth, I unzipped my sleeping bag, emerging foot by foot from its warmth. I crept to door, did the same, and peaked out.

Outside the fire burned low, red light in white ash that made the forest seem an endless, impenetrable backdrop to my little world.

I slipped out of the tent and grabbed the stick I used on the coals earlier in the night, and crouched, one hand on the ground. Twigs dug into my palm.

Across the vast black pool, the hollow green light still shone. I saw it was distant, drawing closer, bathing the water in its spreading glow. As it moved, the shadows it cast shifted and creased and curled behind trees like the wake of bows that follows a walking monarch. Reverent, in fearful supplication.

The only sound was my heart rushing in my ears and the soft whisper of the breeze, mingling.

“Hello?” I called. My voice sounded too small for the fear in my chest.

A figure began to form within the approaching light. I hissed air into my nose, and fell back, but froze, pinned in place, by their placid gaze.

Their body was the colour of pale ivory cast in wan green light, or the colours reversed.

They were tall, slender, floating above the dark water that rippled from the steady beat of their luminous wings, which arched wide and taller than they from behind their shoulders. The wings looked coated in the fine power trapped moths leave behind and had a darker spot at the centre of their upper segment. The steady beat of them calmed me, lulling me to peace.

The woman, the woman-like figure, had wide, round dark eyes with no iris. But still I could tell she looked at me. Emerging, and intertwined with her hair rose two fuzzy, frilled antenna that quivered slightly and drooped down either side of her face to the upper tip of her jaw, where waited full lips and a mouth that looked ready to smile.

Her body, was full formed and lovely, but wrapped in some creeping sense of inhumanity. The curve of her breast did not rise and fall with mortal breath, nor did her flesh seem to hold any warmth at all. But her fingers, flickering, were long, with wide pads at the end made for tender caressing, and skin that looked so soft, like the soft underbelly of an insect. The supple lengths of her arms and legs were graced with extra joints that bent the wrong way.

As we held each other in mutual gaze, her head tilted to the side and the beginning of a smile snuck to the corner of her lip. As though she did not know what to make of me. Benignly amused at my astonished cowering.

Her gaze shifted to my oblong seat and the budding smile withered. I looked too, running my eyes over it to uncover what upset her. Our eyes met on the way back to each other, and she seemed expectant.

I stood in a low crouch of half bowed fear, and walked to the stone. I pointed with one finger to it and looked back to the woman. Her smile was a whisper on her lips. She gestured with one inhuman arm to the stone, encouraging me on. But on what course of action I could hardly tell.

Dirt coated on my knees as I crouched and ran my hands along its length. The rough stone curves and ridges took shape in my mind, telling a tale of no natural force in their making. They were unnatural. Man-made. Made by more than a man, or less.

I stole a glance at the waiting, floating figure, my skin, in wonder, crawling at her visage. My mind worked to reconcile her tints of humanity and fae form, as with her hands she gestured to me.

Hands horizontal, parallel, she flipped them to be vertical, as though miming the righting of an overturned potplant, or garden statue. No. More the righting of a fallen idol left downtrodden in a desecrated temple, by humble, mourning worshipper.

I looked back to the rock, knelt, before her and it, then lifted it upright and wiggled it to settle into place. It was a fallen statue, I could see, of her.

With shaking hands and barely daring to look up, I worked the caked mud from the crooks and crannies of it’s the carving. The larger end of the stone was the wide curving of her wings. One of her hands was carved upraised like a Neolithic saint, legs and toes poised in flight above stone water which made the statue’s wide base.

With rising urgency, I refilled my flask with swamp water and poured some over the idol. I scrubbed with my hands, watching with relief as the liquid carried away all the grime I could not reach. Now clean, or as clean as I could make it, the statue was of a pale stone like the colour of her naked flesh, but cast in crimson from the fire, still burning low.

I dared to look up and saw her pleased. I was expectant, waiting, anxious, to see what happened next. What I must do next.

The inky abyss of her eyes was the captured, endless black of the everlasting swamp as they roamed around my camp, looking for something. Rippling, shimmer, shine of the water and the light, dancing in the ritual moves of the darkness and the night.

One of her long fingers pointed to my pot of abandoned noodles, then to the glowing bed of embers. I looked up at her in confusion and she gestured again, more insistent.

I grabbed the pot by its long, poking handle which shook in my nervous grip. I looked to the noodles, then the dying flame. Thinking hopeful thoughts of sweet aroma sacrifices to ancient gods, then poured them on.

The offering burned fast and hot, lighting the swamp around with a brighter, warmer light at odds with the figure’s green glow, and threw up a billowing pillar of sickly black smoke. I let out a gasp, out of my depth and sinking fast in ancient workings I did not understand. Wrapped up in some sacred ritual of ages past.

I looked to the figure. The woman. The fae. And saw her smile bloom, wide and full and true. The kindly way she looked on me was at war with the firelight dancing in her eyes; the flicker of flame on shining sword as villages burn down, the fiery tail of rogue comets in the sky, the red of wild fire flitting from tree to tree across never trodden ground. Blood on black stone, shed by black knife in pagan dawn-lit rite.

I shook my head, the corner of my eyes crinkling in horror. What had I done? What had I done? The fire grew, blazing in the night. Her form and figure glowed brighter too, as she held one arm out to me. In invitation to hide from the world and the havoc she would wreak beneath the shadow of her luminous wings.

The path in her arms opened in my mind, wondrous and terrible. The flitting of place to place beyond anything I could ask or imagine; a rainbow chitin world of fluttering wings behind and above our own. The light, the colour. The screaming.

Human guts and corpses crushed underfoot like gooey caterpillar bodies. I saw burning cities, and horrors beyond words fluttering through the sky, drawn to the light. The death. The Death. Red blood falling like rain and running through the streets to water a blooming new age of the Fae.

I saw me. Me as something more, something changed with wings and maggot skin on high cheekbones around shining midnight eyes. Shining with the flame of endless lives lived and endless lives taken.

But I could take no more.

With the last will I had I grabbed my flask of water, and poured it out on the fire. The ashed hissed and popped and the monster screamed, inhuman face contorted in a snarl of rage as her green glow faded with the dying embers.

And all went black.

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I don’t know why I woke. I found myself, a caterpillar in a sleeping bag cocoon, staring at the canvas ceiling of my tent. The subtle glow of my dying fire lit one wall in crimson light. The forest outside was hushed, as though recently woken from its own sound slumber.

I sat up with a gasp, breaking the zippers clasp in my haste and did the same with the door to my tent.

Outside, I panted and spun, looking for the figure or shinning green light in the endless dark of that swamp. But I saw only the night, and the wind amidst the trees.

I looked to the fire, but a chill ran over me.

The statue was gone, as though it has never been. A patch of sodden ground sat in its place, looking unremarkable and undisturbed by the passing of the ages.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. The air that seeped into me was the sultry sigh of the wind and drifting black clouds above.

The earlier foreboding of the forest was gone. Around me, the everlasting swamp was at peace, calm and stately:

A cathedral long abandoned by all but its own glory. An empty tomb, body exhumed.

Set free, by me.

Despite the peace of the swamp, I trembled at the figure embedded in my memory.

I tremble at what future I have loosed on the world.