The swamp hisses with clouds of blood-suckers the size of livers. Ancient trees drip with slimy tendrils of moss, and arterial vines loop through a intertwined web of branches that blot out the light of the voracious sun while trapping its swelter in the dark, moist world below. Giant, fat amphibians with wide maws bask in the fetid mud bank and stare up at the understory around them; a menagerie of fractals in ferns and fungi, hypnotic in the dizzying humidity, rotting logs of fallen trees, hosts to alien, multi-limbed insects and their arachnid predators, and the thin stems of brightly pigmented predatory plants that hum like corpses and grow fat on the black swarms congregating above them.
A thin veneer of moisture covers all. Droplets form on the underside of the highest canopy leaves. Small pools form in the cups of broad fronds. There is a murky, shifting border between the terrestrial and the marine. A saurian foot presses down on mud and it is filled with grim, sandy water. Red, stagnant pools sit trapped in the higher reaches of the land. Lower, water connects all the dark greenery in a greasy mirror, the trees rising into the sky between the long-stemmed rushes, spider-like weeds, and lily pads twice the width of the greatest trunk, all reflected in the depth below. Further out, lower still, the trees fall away to true mangroves at the edges of the river. Deeper than the surrounding valleys, dark as the ocean, the river is host to the giant-mawed amphibians and a strange and staggering array of fish, from fry to monsters that could swallow the amphibians whole, and the creatures that prey on all that reside here.
From the river comes a colossus. It’s shadow hovers in the abyss. Four limbs. Long tail. Then it’s up through the currents, smaller creatures parting before it in waves. A bulbous nose breaks the surface of the water. Then, further back, two knobbly brows covering two yellow, reptilian eyes, each the size of fruits, connected by a long snout below the water. Rising up like a mountain, a giant, red sail emerges into the dripping swamp air. Behind it, another sail, shorter in height but as long as the creature’s tail pushes the colossus through the shallow waters, acting as a powerful paddle.
The clawed feet find purchase on hard ground and disturb a layer of scum that swirl around the leathery, scarred skin of the colossus’ powerful back legs. Water drips from curving claws at the front of the beast as it rises from the waters, algae and weeds clinging onto the striped hide and drumming the water below with a cascade of droplets. Two rows of conical, yellowed teeth stick up and down either side of the long jaws of the creature. A hardened row of bone forms a crest on the top of its skull.
It turns its crocodilian head slowly and lets out a grunt so low most creatures in the swamp cannot hear it. But somewhere, not far, in the hollow of a dead tree, three smaller creatures do hear the call. They begin to make warbling, high-pitched chirrups. The mouldy fragments of their old eggs lie on the humus around them. Their jaws snap open and closed, anticipating the regurgitated mess of gore to come. Mother is home.
Paddy Dobson
3rd May 2021