Saga of The Swamp Thing #2

Hi. My name is Abigail Arcane. I like weird stuff.

Okay, maybe that’s not the best way to introduce myself. I feel like if an eighteen-year-old girl introduces herself by saying she likes ‘weird stuff’ that some people would probably get the wrong idea in their heads. I get enough of that at school.

Trust me when I say that my opinion of the male population has fallen to a pretty desolate low. I mean, I should have seen it coming; it’s not rocket science or anything. You pack enough raging hormones into a building and people are bound to make fools of themselves.

Guys like to think I’m loose, and so far they’ve haven’t taken the hint.

I guess a lot of it has to do with my hair. I was born with something called vitiligo on my scalp, so my hair grows in two different colors. Seriously, I’m supposed to have dark hair, but vitilgo causes pigment loss, so most of my hair is white, with just a stripe of black running through it. I look like a Suicide Girl, and everyone assumes I’m just as comfortable with my body as they are.

I’m not. If I’m going to be completely honest I could use a cup size or two and my nose could do with a little work. You know, that and maybe I’d like for my hair to grow like a normal person’s.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s hard to get past people’s perceptions of you when your natural appearance lets them draw all the conclusions they want before you even speak to them.

Not like I really want to speak to them.

They call that a catch-22. That in order to change people’s perspective on me, I need to talk to them, and in order to talk to them, I suppose I need to get over my own perspective on them. Funny right?

I’m trying not to think too much about it. My spring break is only a biology quiz away, and I’m looking forward to being anywhere else but here.

Even if that anywhere else is my uncle’s creepy mansion. It used to be a plantation, at least that’s what he told me, and that it housed several generations of Arcanes throughout the years.

Now there’s just two Arcanes, myself and him. After my parents died, living with him took some getting used to. He’s sick, so there’s always a lot of people running around the house, tending to his injections and cleaning his inputs and tubes.

I’m not excited so much to go back to the house as I am to go back to my garden. Uncle Anton lets me grow things out in the yard, back where my ancestors used to grow indigo and sugarcane.

Oh, speaking of plants, I have that bio quiz to get to. Wish me luck!

Abigail, or Abby as she preferred to be called, quickly saved her journal entry and closed her laptop. The therapist she’d been seeing had recommended she start journaling, thinking that if Abby wrote down her feelings, she’d be better at expressing them.

Of course, she hadn’t thought of how much time she was using up writing, and was now dangerously close to being late for her last class before that sweet spring break freedom.

She wasn’t too worried about it. After all, when was she ever going to need to know about the biosphere anyways?

It was about an hour later, and Abby was finally free. Taking a rather jubilant skip out the front door, she twirled once before throwing herself down in the grass. She planned to spend the rest of her day packing up her things and putting her room in order, and then she’d head out to her uncle’s. But for now she was content with just lying in the grass, feeling its warm blades against her skin.

Other students simply shook their heads as they walked past her.

“That Abigail Arcane is a weirdo,” they’d say, and most of them just left it at that.



Nathan Ellery hadn’t slept in days, and not because of the atrocities he’d been a part of earlier in the week, but due to his work.

He didn’t understand it. He had Holland’s formula, he had his notes, he had literally everything he needed to make the necessary changes to the formula, but nothing had worked.

He was so close. But close only mattered when it came to horseshoes or hand grenades, and Mr. Arcane wanted results. His employer had made it perfectly clear that he was upset with Ellery’s lack of them.

Ellery was all too aware of what Mr. Arcane was capable of when he was upset.

Such was the subject of their conversation this evening, and all Ellery had to offer was a slight improvement.

“Mr. Arcane, I can assure you that although presently it is incomplete, we are so close to completion, all I need is a month, maybe two, to perfect it.”

“Such time…. we…. do…not… have…” Arcane wheezed, his horrid, shallow breaths echoing throughout Ellery’s lab. “I… need… results…”

Ellery gritted his teeth. Results took time. It took testing. It took a working formula. All of which Ellery simply didn’t have!

It was as if Holland had simply willed the substance into working. It was maddening!

“If you can give me just a little more time… I’m almost ready to begin testing,” Ellery pleaded.

“Then…begin…testing…” Arcane said. “I… expect…you…to…follow…up…soon”

Then those goons of his, Dufresne and Skein, wheeled Arcane out the door, and in his heart of hearts, Nathan felt a cold ball of fear begin to creep into his chest.

He did not want to disappoint Mr. Arcane. He did not want to die.



Night had fallen on the swamp, and the full moon bobbed lazily in the sky. The frogs were not singing tonight, the crickets were also uncharacteristically silent. Nothing was moving, nothing was speaking.

They were all waiting.

The murky waters of the swamp began to bubble, as if some great amount of mass had been displaced and replaced, the calmness of its surface disrupted by something beginning to rise from the depths. Something, something immense was coming up from the bottom. Its head broke the surface of the swamp, and mossy eyelids opened to reveal red, burning eyes.

It moved towards the shore, water sliding off its green body, taking slow, shambling steps. Its movement was labored, unfamiliar, like a man who has regained the use of his legs after an eternity of disability. Something had called it up from the bottom of the water; something was driving this muck-encrusted creature forward. In its head there were a thousand voices, but one in particular resounded over and over again, urging it to pull itself from the water.

Whatever it was, it found itself crawling out of the water, gripping the earth with wet, slick fingers.

It crawled forward, until it found itself under the dangling branches of a willow tree. The creature raised its hand to the bark, touching the tree with apprehensive tenderness. It could feel the tree’s roots, feel it taking nutrients from the soil, and feel the sun touching its leaves. But then, there came a voice from the bark, loud and overwhelming. The bulrushes and grasses seemed to chime in, each voice echoing the same words over and over again in the creature’s head.

“THE ROOT. THE ROOT. THE ROOT”

Gripping its leafy head, the creature let out a roar of anguish, howling the message of the plants and trees into the night air.



It was late in the evening when Abby pulled her beat up little compact into the long driveway that led to her uncle’s plantation. Built far from prying eyes, the Arcane family had made their fortune dealing in slave-grown crops.

When asked about its location, Abby would sometime joke that if the road was still paved, you hadn’t driven out far enough.

The house itself was immense, far too large for an ailing heir and his niece, and its upkeep required the use of many hired hands and workers.

One of those hired hands watched Abby’s car pull up from the window, a toothy, lustful smile creeping across his face. Dufresne had first met Abby when she was sixteen, just a little scrap of a girl then, and he was a con on work release.

If you had asked him, he wouldn’t have been too shy to admit that he’d figured out his intentions for her even then.

He watched her out the window with hungry, predatory eyes and chuckled.

She probably needed help with her bags, and he’d be all too happy to oblige.

Abby, on the other hand, was just sitting in her car, looking at the old grey manor. Her parents had died suddenly, and she had been sent to live with her uncle not long after that. She remembered her first week there, how uncomfortable her bed was, how the house moaned and creaked at night. She thought about how the owls would screech outside her window in the night, keeping her awake when all she needed was rest.

And then there was her uncle himself. He hadn’t been cruel; in fact he had done nearly everything in his power to make Abby comfortable. He bought her a new bed after she’d worked up the courage to ask, he had his help put out statues to deter the owls from roosting on their property, he’d even paid for her college.

Her uncle wasn’t the problem. The company he kept however…

There was Victor Skein, who Abby could tolerate so long as she didn’t have to speak to him, and then there was…

Asher “Ash” Dufresne, who, from the moment they met, had quickly become the bane of her existence. She could handle the guys who couldn’t take no for an answer, she had plenty of practice from school, but Dufresne was a different animal altogether (emphasis on the word ‘animal’).

Of course, he was headed out to greet her. Just what she had wanted to see.

“I swear the road down this way gets darker every time I’m on it, you know?” he called out jovially. “We were starting to think you had gone astray and ended up in a ditch somewhere…”

She smiled a forced grin and shrugged. “Guess I’m just fortunate,” she replied. Smirking like the devil himself would, Dufresne opened her car door and offered her a hand out.

“Oh… what a gentleman…” Abby sighed, already beginning to regret her decision to come back. She slid her hand from his and moved to her trunk, popping it open so she could remove her things.

“Well, there wasn’t much my momma taught me that stuck, but she taught me how to treat a lady.”

Abby couldn’t even summon up a response, opting to simply pull out her bags and lay them on the pavement.

“You sure you remembered it all?” Dufresne asked smugly. Abby could feel his eyes on her body as she reached into the trunk. At least she could find ways to avoid him once she got into the house. It was a big place after all; the odds of him running into her were surprisingly slim.

“Aw here, lemme give you a hand with that,” he offered, making a big show of how many of her bags he could carry. “No trouble at all.”

Abby just nodded, and followed him up to the house. She wouldn’t walk in front of him; she didn’t think it was wise to give him anything else to look at. At least she’d have her garden to keep her mind off things.

In the distance, there was a low rumble of thunder.

“Weatherman says we’re in for a rainy week,” Dufresne grunted as he attempted to open the door with his hands full. “Record rain fall, that’s what they said.”

Abby felt her teeth grind in the back of her mouth. She should have stayed at school.



Not all that far away from the Arcane Plantation, Nathan Ellery had finally found sleep. He had stayed up till nearly morning, working through what was turning out to be another dead end in his attempts to replicate Dr. Holland’s success, before his eyes could no longer stay open, and he laid his head down amongst his notes and equations.

His dreams offered no comfort, and in the depths of his slumber, he found himself under the shade of an immense tree, surrounded by darkness. There were monsters on the ground, horrible things with great jaws and sharp talons, all reaching out for him. He was dead in the dark, he had to climb higher, and he had to get away. But he found as he climbed higher the harder it was to move, it was almost as if he was fusing to the bark of the tree, becoming a part of it.

Soon he wasn’t moving at all. His hands and feet had grown into the bark. He was stuck for years, never reaching the top of the tree, always in the shade, always in the dark. The world was beginning to fade around him.

Everything was grey, but from that grey world there came a sort of calm. He felt his skin grow soft and his vision blur.

He felt himself get lost in the grey.

When he awoke only a few hours later, he felt oddly refreshed, if not looking a little the worse for wear. As his head rose from its place on the desk, he found that, in his feverish sleep, he’d smeared his writing on the page.

Upon closer inspection, it almost appeared a chain of equations had been altered, the formations made by the ink trailing off into new forms and shapes far from what they once were.

It was disheartening to say the least, Ellery found himself almost on the verge of tears as he held his ruined notes in his hands. What was he going to do? How could he face Mr. Arcane now? In a fit of madness, he felt compelled to just throw it all away, run from his lab and start over someplace else.

But then he inhaled. He felt his lungs filling with oncoming calm and acceptance. He had the notes. They could be salvaged. In fact…

He sat down at his desk, balling his toes into little fists on his bare feet, and stared at the ‘corrections’ long and hard.

That was it. As murky as the notes were, the formulas he could decipher from the mess were in fact what he was looking for all along.

An hour later, he created his first test batch. In all the other trials, the concoctions had failed spectacularly, frothing over violently, eating away the glass of his test tubes; all manner of horrible failures had stemmed from his attempts. This time however, the reaction was simple enough, for the color of the formula changed from Holland’s vibrant green to a muted grey.

Grey… just like he’d dreamt…

Pushing the dream from his mind, he took a fast shower, got dressed, all before finally packing up his things and loading his findings in the car.

He was so pleased with his findings that he didn’t even notice the black mold that had seemingly begun to spread where his bare feet had touched.



It had been walking for days, making a slow pilgrimage away from its point of origin. It stayed in the tree line, away from the sight of others, listening to the guiding voice of the plants all around it. They urged it forward, beckoning it with whispers of revenge and justice. There were three, three men who had burned the swamp, and the man who sent them. You needed to kill the root. The Root. The Root. The Root was Arcane.

The sky, full to the brim with dark clouds, opened up. At first there were just a few drops of rain, but soon that escalated into a torrential downpour, soaking the green thing as it walked.

The rain would not stop it. Nothing would stop it.

Elsewhere, in the dusty quiet of his study, Anton Arcane felt a very human chill.

The House of Arcane was old, stretching back to the days when the plague ravaged Europe and decimated the population. Of those that survived, The Arcanes seemed only to prosper, as William Arcane The First took on the responsibility of removing and disposing of the contagious dead.

William’s young son was often present at these proceedings, and helped his father burn and bury the victims of the Black Plague.

But neither father nor son ever caught the plague. Death had passed over their house.

Anton watched from his study as a car pulled onto his property, a car he recognized as Dr. Ellery’s, and observed his scientist gathering up a black case and several armfuls of notes before he made his way to the door.

Day was beginning to break, and soon Death would pass over his house again.



The morning had arrived, and Abby’s uncle had opted to leave her alone for breakfast, as he was meeting with a “potential investor”, so she had sat in silence at the immense dining room table. She didn’t mind being alone, as she hadn’t had many friends as a child, nor had she really been able to connect with anyone as she grew older, and more often than not preferred the idea of spending her time in solitude.

One thing was for sure, the people who were supposed to be cleaning up around the house were not doing their best, for she had noticed a rather disgusting growth of black mold beginning to form along the edges of the hallways. As she crouched down to examine it, there was the brief sound of heavy footprints, then silence.

Abby looked over her shoulder, hoping to see one of the staffers in the house approaching, only to find herself alone in the hall.

She turned back to the mold, trying to remember what she’d learned about the stuff in school. Mold was a type of fungus, like a mushroom, and it played a pretty major role in decomposition…

But why was it in her uncle’s house? Especially when there were so many people in charge of keeping it clean.

She rose to her feet, determined to sort this out, only to find herself face to face with Dufresne.

“Boo!” he shouted, and Abby reeled backwards, hitting her back against the wall.

“You jerk!” she shouted, throwing a not-at-all playful punch at his chest. “You scared the hell out of me…” She struggled to catch her breath; he put a rough hand on her shoulder and laughed.

“Maybe I just wanted to take your breath away,” he crooned, running a finger down her cheek. Abby recoiled at his touch, pushing his hand away.

“No. Stop it, Ash,” she said sternly, sliding off the wall so that there was open hallway behind her.

“You know what… I’m getting awfully tired of all this ‘hard to get’ stuff,” Dufresne said, advancing on Abby menacingly. “Makes a man frustrated.”

“Maybe it’s not hard to get, so much as it’s ‘not gonna get’, Ash,” Abby replied, matching Dufresne’s steps with backward ones. He bounded to her, clasping his strong hands on her shoulders.

“And maybe that’s not okay with me,” he growled, his grip tightening on her shoulders. Abby struggled against his hold but the gigantic man was far too strong for her to free herself.

He forced her closer to him and sneered.

“How ‘bout just a kiss then… then we go from there…”

She could feel his hot breath against her skin, and no matter how hard she pushed against his chest, she could not create distance between them.

She did the only thing she could. She cocked her knee backwards and brought it forward with considerable force. Dufresne stumbled backwards, his hands clutching the point of impact, and fell to the ground. Abby didn’t even give him a second glance before she took off running to her uncle’s study.



“This… is… it?” Arcane gasped, as Ellery presented him with the vials.

“They need to be treated first, once I’m certain that the formula is sound,” Ellery said. “I also still need to complete a human trial on it…”

“Then…do… it.” Arcane wheezed, his watery, cloudy eyes brimming with malice.

“Where am I going to find test subjects?” Ellery asked. “It’s not like I can just pull them off the street.”

Then there was a ruckus, and a very angry Abigail Arcane burst into the study.

“Look, Uncle Anton, I know that you have this whole ‘outreach’ program thing going on, but I’ve had about enough of Asher Dufresne,” she snarled, looking back towards the door. There were some thundering steps approaching behind her, which grew louder until a red-faced Dufresne barged into the room.

“She’s exaggeratin’, sir,” Dufresne huffed. “That’s all. I ain’t done anything to hurt her.”

Arcane said nothing. He merely looked to his niece and his aide for a moment, his sickly visage twisting up into what could almost be a smile.

“Mr. Dufresne…. you… will… escort… Mr. Ellery… to… the… cellar… You… will … assist… him… in… whatever… he… needs… there… Bring… Mr. Skein… as well.”

Abby looked furiously at her uncle, as a triumphant-looking Dufresne sauntered past her. Arcane simply abandoned her gaze as a small trickle of spittle slid past his dry lips.
He didn’t even notice her storm out of the room, for his mind had turned to other things.

Soon he would be complete, soon he would be young again… soon he’d taste immortality.



The House of Arcane stood before the creature, the light from the moon reflecting off its green hide. For a long while it just stood there, basking in the moonlight, its gaze leveled at the old mansion.

Something within that ancient structure was wrong. Something within that wooden tomb should not have been there at all.

It had come to remove it.



“You sure got a lot of crap,” Skein groaned as he let a box of research material drop to the floor.

“These scientist guys always carry around a lot of crap, remember? The last guy Arcane hired had all kinds of this stuff too,” Dufresne replied.

“What’s all this even for? I thought Holland was finished with it,” Skein asked, now seated on the floor leafing through Ellery’s notes. “Holland blowing smoke up our asses or something?”

“Naw, Holland wanted to grow corn out in the desert or some crap. Ellery needed to make it work on people,” Dufresne stated. “Don’t you pay attention?”

“Sorry, once the conversation gets all chemistry and genomes and stuff I start to tune out.” Skein laughed. “This stuff doesn’t even look like science to me though… Hey, Doc, what is all this?”

Ellery could barely make out what the two of them were saying, as a low buzzing emanating from the room was currently obscuring his hearing. The buzzing was making his head throb. He held up the vial of formula to the dim light, its rays passing through its murky grey surface. He was transfixed by its simple elegance - his Nobel Prize, his legacy.

“What?” Ellery asked, “Oh, I’m sorry, gentlemen, I was a bit distracted.”

“What’s that in your hand? Mr. Arcane’s stuff?” Skein asked, pointing at the vial.

“This… Oh no, this is for you two. I have to inoculate the both of you,” Ellery answered, taking two clean syringes out of their sterile packs. “I’m going to be working with some pretty… serious stuff here, I need to make sure my lab assistants are safe.”

He inserted the needle into the vial, drawing out a dose of formula. He beckoned to the both of them.

“Who wants to go first?”

Neither of them put up much of a fight, allowing the scientist to inject them both with his murky grey ‘vaccine’.

There was no immediate sign at first; the two of them were simply laughing and making general fools of themselves, but then…

Pain. Both of them began to groan and convulse in terrible pain, before falling to the floor and thrashing violently. Foam began to form at the corners of their mouths, as their eyes rolled back into their skulls.

Ellery shook his head, grabbing the both of them by their shirt collars and escorting the near-comatose men up the stairs and throwing them into one of the lesser-used bathrooms.

His head was still throbbing, as the buzzing was beginning to grow louder and louder, as it grew more and more persistent. He needed to sit down for a moment. He just needed to think.

He returned to his new basement laboratory and looked over his notes. He had been right about treating the formula first, that a genetic blueprint would be required before it would be of any use to Mr. Arcane.

It was awfully lucky that someone who shared much of Mr. Arcane’s genetic structure was on the mansion grounds.

There was an itching at his neck, which he scratched, and when he withdrew his hand from the site, there was a spongy growth of skin that had come loose from his neck and lodged itself under his fingernails. He stared only a little at the strange honeycombed growth before casting it aside.

He paid it even less attention than the men he had just apparently killed.

Or the young girl he’d be killing later.



Abigail Arcane had never been much for pouting, as she had found that pouting hadn’t brought her parents back, nor had it done much else for her as a child. Abby Arcane was not pouting now, especially since it wasn’t becoming of a young woman to pout. Sulking, however, was much more acceptable a behavior to her, and she had crept away to her room to be alone with herself for a while.

She hadn’t paid attention to the slamming door of the bathroom downstairs, writing it off as her uncle’s pet idiots showing off for each other. She’d never understand boys, or why her uncle chose to keep such despicable company.

After that, things were quiet for a while; Abby busied herself with unpacking the rest of her clothes and her belongings, and after that she simply laid there in bed. Her eyes were beginning to close when there came a loud horrible ruckus from downstairs. Snapping to attention, Abby peered outside her door and down the hall, but she found only the darkness of the hallway to greet her, with only the dim light from the downstairs bathroom breaking up the blackness.

Another horrible crash, followed by a nauseated moan sounded from outside, and Abby knew that it most have been coming from the bathroom. Her capacity for kindness overcoming her fear, Abby left her room, and cautiously walked down the stairs to the illuminated door frame.

“You okay in there?” she asked, her hand gingerly resting on the doorknob. When there was no reply, Abby slowly twisted the knob in her hand, opening the door. Inside were Dufresne and Skein, both looking like death warmed over.

“Very funny. You think that’s supposed to scare me or something?” Abby scolded. “Quit making all that noise and clean yourselves up, I’m sure my uncle has work for you to do.”

At the sound of her voice, Dufresne raised his head to look at her, he rasped and groaned, but he couldn’t form words. He took a few shaky steps towards her, a trickle of blood beginning to run past his lips to his chin.

“I’m serious. Quit it,” Abby said again, stepping backwards, “I mean it.”

Skein had risen from the bathtub and was now following his partner in crime towards Abby. Abby was starting to wonder if maybe they weren’t faking it after all.

Dufresne opened his mouth to groan again, and several of his teeth tumbled out of his mouth. He shrieked, and flashed wide, fearful eyes at Abby, who could only continue to advance in reverse. Skein then vomited up what looked like his entire stomach, and clutched a shrunken abdomen in pain.

Things had only just begun, however.

Abby recoiled in horror as Dufresne’s face began to melt away, revealing a blackened, ashy skeletal form. His eyes rolled sickly around in their sockets, the grey animal pupils fading and fading into milky white orbs, before melting out of his sockets entirely, the skeletal monstrosity still managing to draw sharp, hoarse breaths as it shambled closer and closer to her. There was a sickening crunch as the skeletal head turned upside down on its neck, and a violently red tongue slithered out of his mouth, splitting into a hundred tendrils.

Skein’s body was also changing, as his flesh itself began to uncoil, revealing stunted sharpened bones. His fingers and toes had dropped off, making his limbs into nightmarish whips of skin and tissue, all before his jaw stretched and strained into a horrible maw, with several rows of sharpened fangs beginning to sprout irregularly within. He moaned in anguish as he dragged his lash-like limbs across the ground.

Dufresne continued towards Abby, his lipless mouth struggling to make words, reaching out to her in agony. Abby had nowhere to go, and as the tips of its charcoal fingers just lightly traced her features, she let out a bloodcurdling scream.

Then, as if her screaming had summoned it into existence, something burst through the front door of the mansion, something with glowing red eyes and a body that seemed to be constructed of squirming green vines and leaves.

It had come for Arcane, and nothing was going to stand in its way.




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