Around him, the Congaree Swamp seemed to recede, blurring at the edges, becoming a haze of gray and black and green, with only the dripping of water and the calling of birds to distract him. Soon, even that was lost to Landron as he moved to his own, private rhythm in his own red world.
But Landron Mobley had not left the Congaree.
Landron Mobley would never leave the Congaree.
The Congaree Swamp is old, very old. It was old when the prehistoric foragers hunted its reaches, old when Hernando de Soto passed through in 1540, old when the Congaree Indians were annihilated by smallpox in 1698. The English settlers used the inland waterways as part of their ferry system in the 1740s, but it wasn’t until 1786 that Isaac Huger began construction of a formal ferry system to cross the Congaree. At its northwestern and southwestern boundaries, the bodies of workers are buried beneath the mud and silt, left where they died during the construction of dikes by James Adams and others in the 1800s.
At the end of that century, logging began on land owned by Francis Beidler’s Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, ceasing in 1915, only to recommence half a century later. In 1969, logging interest was renewed and clearcutting commenced in 1974, leading to the growth of a movement among local people to save the land, some of which had never been logged and represented the last significant old growth of river-bottom hardwood forest in this part of the country. There were now close to twenty-two thousand acres designated as a national monument, half of them old-growth hardwood forest, stretching from the junction of Myers Creek and the Old Bluff Road to the northwest, down to the borders of Richland and Calhoun Counties to the southeast, close by the railroad line. Only one small section of land, measuring about two miles by half of a mile, remained in private hands. It was close to this tract that Landron Mobley now sat, lost in dreams of women’s tears. The Congaree was his place. The things he had done here in the past, among the trees and in the mud, never troubled him. Instead, he luxuriated in them, the memory of them enriching the poverty of his current existence. Here, time became meaningless and he lived once again in remembered pleasures. Landron Mobley was never closer to himself than he was in the Congaree.
Mobley’s eyes flicked open suddenly, but he remained very still. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he turned his head to his left and his gaze alighted on the soft brown eyes of a white-tailed deer. It was reddish brown and about five feet in height, with white rings at its nose, eyes, and throat. Its tail flicked back and forth in mild agitation, displaying its white underside. Mobley had guessed that there were deer around. He had come across their split heart tracks a mile or so back toward the river and had followed the trail of their pellets, of the raggedly browsed vegetation and the worn tree trunks where the males had rubbed the bark off with their antlers, but had eventually lost it in the thick undergrowth. He had almost given up hope of killing a deer on this trip; now here was a fine doe staring at him from beneath a loblolly pine. Keeping his eyes on the deer, Mobley reached out with his right hand for his rifle.
His hand clutched empty air. Puzzled, he looked to his right. The Voere was gone, a slight depression in the soft earth the only indication that it had ever been there. He stood quickly and heard the deer give a loud whistling snort of alarm before padding into the cover of the trees, its tail erect. Mobley barely noticed its flight. The Voere was just about his most prized possession and now somebody had taken it while Mobley had been daydreaming with his dick in his hand. He spit furiously on the ground and checked for tracks. There were footprints a couple of feet to his right, but the bushes were thick beyond them and he could find no further trace of the thief. The soles were thick with a zigzag pattern, the tread seemingly heavy.
“Fuck you,” he hissed. Then, louder: “Fuck you! Fuck!”
He looked at the footprints again and his anger began to fade, to be replaced by the first gnawings of fear. He was out in the Congaree without a gun. Maybe the thief had headed back into the swamp with his prize, or maybe he was still close by, watching to see how Landron would react. He scanned the trees and the undergrowth, but could catch no sight of another human being. Hurriedly, and as silently as he could, he picked up his knapsack and began to walk toward the river.
The journey back to where he had left his boat took almost twenty minutes, the speed of his progress diminished by his reluctance to make more noise than was necessary and his decision to pause at regular intervals to search for signs that he was being shadowed. Once or twice, he thought that he caught glimpses of a figure among the trees, but when he stopped he could detect no trace of movement and the only sounds came from the soft drip of water from leaves and branches. But it was not the false sightings that increased Mobley’s fear.
The birds had stopped singing.
As he neared the river, he increased his pace, his boots making a soft sucking noise as they lifted from the mud. He found himself in a dwarf forest of cypress knees, bordered by downed logs and the gray remains of standing dead trees now home to woodpeckers and small mammals. Some of this destruction was a relic of hurricane Hugo, which had decimated the park in 1989 but had, in turn, stimulated new growth. Beyond some rising saplings Mobley could see the dark waters of the Congaree River itself, fed by the spills of the Piedmont. He burst through the last low wall of vegetation and found himself on the bank, Spanish moss hanging low from a cypress branch almost tickling the nape of his neck as he stood close to the spot where he had tied up his boat.
His boat too was now gone.
But there was something else in its place.
There was a woman.
Her back was to Mobley so he couldn’t see her face, and a white sheet covered her from head to toe like a hooded robe. She stood in the shallows, the ends of the material swirling in the current. While Mobley watched, she lowered herself down and gathered water in her hands, then raised her face and allowed the water to splash onto her skin. Mobley could see that she was naked beneath the white robe. The woman was heavy and the dark cleft of her buttocks had pressed itself against the material as she squatted down, her skin like chocolate beneath the frosting of her garment. Mobley was almost aroused, except-
Except he wasn’t sure that what was beneath the cloth could actually be called skin. It seemed broken all over, as if the woman were scaled or plated. Some kind of substance had either been released from her skin or smeared upon it, causing the material of her cloak to adhere to it in places. It was almost reptilian and lent the woman a predatory aspect that caused Mobley to back away slightly. He tried to glimpse her hands but they were now beneath the water. Slowly, the woman bent down farther, submerging her arms first to the wrists, then the elbows, until finally she was almost hunched over. He heard her exhale, as if in pleasure. It was the first sound he had heard from her, and her silence unnerved, then angered, him. He had made more noise than the frightened deer as he tramped heavily toward the bank when the river came in sight, but the woman appeared not to have noticed, or had chosen not to recognize his presence. Mobley, despite his unease, decided to put an end to that.
“Hey!” he called.
The woman didn’t respond, but he thought he saw her back stiffen slightly.
“Hey!” he repeated. “I’m talking to you.”