The Attic (Completed)

Chapter 28

Ian turned to Varkis who was standing with hairy arms crossed over his chest, feet spread wide.

"What do you think?" he asked. The last thing he wanted to do was enter the swamp, but Kurik had given him no other choice.

"I think it wasn't a smart idea to come with you after all," the dog man responded.

"Come on. Seriously."

"Who said I wasn't being serious?"

Lily was standing between them, one hand on her hip as she squinted up at the sky. Dusk was fast approaching.

Ian ran a hand down his face and took a deep breath, nearly choking on the stench of the water. "Well. . . . Let's get this over with then." He stepped into the cold goop, weed-muck sucking at his foot.

He took another step forward and sunk down, slimy vegetation and dank water swirling about his knees.

"Come on guys," he glanced over his shoulder. "We have to get to the Jubaka and get out of this swamp before nightfall or we won't live to see morning!"

Varkis harrumphed. "This swamp gets deep fast, you do realize. We're going to have to swim a lot of the way and it's going to be freezing."

"I know." He met eyes with Lily in an apologetic glance. She looked frightened. "We'll take breaks as needed and warm up afterwards."

She frowned. "Does anything, uh, dangerous, live in this swamp?"

"Not that I know of."

It was a lie.

There was something lurking in the swamp; something that had started out quite small but had been growing for many years since.

When Ian left Alvernia as a boy, he'd taken some kind of tadpole from his father's collection of species, thinking it a frog. He'd then released the little creature into the swamp. Later, when he realized his mistake (that it was no tadpole), a year had already passed. Of course it was possible the creature had died right off the bat, for he'd seen no sign of it in the few times he'd been at the swamp—but he wasn't about to assume this. Better to err on the side of caution.

The three of them trudged forward in a row, every step threatening to suck off their boots.

He looked at Lily. Her face was ashen and taut, but she was at least keeping up.

Varkis, on the other hand, would not stop voicing his complaints.

"I'm never gonna get this guck out of my fur. Couldn't we fashion a boat so we don't have to swim through this slime?"

"We don't have time."

"I'm going to itch for weeks. Look at this—" He raised his arms from the goop, revealing half a dozen leeches.

"You're also going to smell like rotten eggs," Lily cut in. She grinned as she said it but her eyes remained clouded.

The sludgy waters had nearly reached their shoulders.

"It's not the swamp that smells like rotten eggs," the dog-man responded. "The mushrooms I had for lunch made me gaseous."

Ian took another step forward and the water bed gave way beneath him, forcing him to tread water. "Here we go," he said, swimming with wide frontward strokes, arms getting tangled in the weeds.

Their progress was slow-going as they swam around protruding tree branches, logs, and patches of reeds. He tried not to think about what might lurk beneath but his heart drummed in his chest. What if something sucked Lily down before he could do anything to stop it? The water was opaque: even if he dived after her it would be impossible to see anything.