Written by Nicholas Driscoll
Originally submitted to a story contest on Reedsy Prompts, in response to the prompt “Write about someone who’s so obsessed with a goal that it leads to the destruction of their closest relationship.”
Leonard Field watched the blurry white dot high above, longing to pull himself out of the muck at the bottom of the swamp. He was halfway submerged beneath the mud, and the rest of his body too was darker now. He clenched his right hand around a chain that happened to be splayed out across the swamp bottom, the individual links digging into his fresh-rugged flesh.
“I can breathe out there,” he said. “Nothing is keeping me down here.”
He could speak underwater, and when he did, no rush of bubbles emitted from his mouth. He did not breathe air in the way he used to. Technically, he didn’t breathe at all. He didn’t need it anymore.
He felt fleshy tendrils around his shoulders gently press against his body; the armored tubes that pierced his chest expanded and contracted.
“We can breathe here for you,” said the voice on his back. “As long as we need to.”
Leonard allowed himself to sink an inch more into the mud, his eyes still staring upwards. The white blur shifted and twinkled, and the fear he felt that it might go away constricted his heart.
“I have to go up there,” he said. “I can’t stay here forever.”
The voice on his back hummed contemplatively, the vibrations providing his body a warm and gentle massage.
“We must agree together,” it said. “Wherever we go.”
Leonard did not reply. The mud covered his mouth. He pushed himself deeper into the dank sludge, brushing against the chain as he did so. He heard the click of metal links, the shifting of silt. He was beneath the floor of the swamp.
Restless. Waiting.
Leonard and the thing slipped across the bottom of the swamp, exploring. The voice on his back was moving its muscles as they went. Leonard could feel it probing, snapping up weeds and small fish, crunching up crustaceans.
They never rose far from the floor of the swamp, always staying close to the mud, where they could easily escape danger any moment. Though the mud floor seemed like nothing but slime and sludge from the surface, there was a home underneath of tunnels and chambers that could easily be accessed by easing through the filmy, gooey silt and ooze that was the floor and was the ceiling.
Leonard paddled languidly while pulling himself along with his hands, dislodging plants, chasing out small animals so the thing on his back could catch them and eat them.
“You should eat, too,” it said. “Your body can eat them now.”
Though Leonard looked down at the floor of the swamp, his mind was above. He remembered cooked foods. Steak. Hamburgers. Even skewers of fish roasted over a fire. A wriggling swamp worm was not food. It was a horror show.
“Are they still there?” he asked.
“We share much now,” the voice said. “When I eat, you take nutrients, but… If you don’t eat and use your own body, you become weaker. It’s bad for us both.”
“It’s bad for us if I don’t see her,” he said. “It makes me weak not to see her.”
“You want to mate,” it said. “It’s a good thing, to reproduce. But the timing isn’t right.”
“I want to live,” Leonard said, and he turned his body around so that his face was towards the sky.
The white blur was still there, not far away. Still shifting in the waves. Still calling to him. Despite being underwater, his mouth felt suddenly dry.
“Watch out!”
The voice spoke too late. Leonard’s head collided with a large rock. He curled up in a ball, clutching at the back of his skull. When he opened his eyes again, he saw strings of red rising around his line of sight.
“It’s not serious, I think,” said the voice. “I can look. I can lick it and make the wound clean.”
“No, no,” Leonard protested. “I’ll check it myself.”
He touched the wound, flinched.
“Oh, no one saved this one either,” said a voice.
Leonard felt his heart drop, and he began to uncurl himself to get a better look.
The rock he had hit his head on was in reality a piece of concrete, round, heavy, sunk in the mud. Above it was another chain, still mostly clean with only minor accretions of swamp muck in the links. The chain floated upwards towards the surface and attached at the end of the chain was a man, naked, and very much dead. But his body was still buoyant enough to keep the corpse from settling down to the ocean floor just yet. Leonard stared at dead body, the series of bubbles still stringing up faintly from the deathly dumb face.
“We can eat him,” said the voice. “He is still fresh, and the flesh will be good for you. Familiar flesh for your body.”
The man looked familiar. Leonard had not known the man well, but he had been a crewmember on the ship. John or Dell or something, it didn’t matter anymore.
Something was happening up there. Crewmembers were dying, and they were burying them in the swamp, where their bodies could become a part of the ecosystem again—a cold and scientific way to deal with the dead, but one he approved of. It was the right thing to do. But still, why were they dying?
Were his friends okay? And what about her?
“I have to see why these men are dying,” Leonard said. “I can’t stay down here forever.”
“That which floats on the surface is large and dangerous,” said the voice. “It swallows many lives. Even before you fell to this world, that which floats took many lives from below. This voice does not trust it.”
Leonard was quiet for a time.
“I came from there,” he said. “They are waiting for me.”
“Are they?” asked the voice, monotone.
Leonard continued to pull himself along the bottom of the swampland, and a slow prickling annoyance arose and seemed to prance upon his temples. Of course they were waiting for him.
Of course she was waiting for him.
Several days later he caught sight of her. When the voice on his back was asleep, Leonard crept out onto a small island far from the ship. It was barely an island so much as a swath of thick mud and reeds that could only just bear his weight, and his limbs were deep in the muck.
Though he was far from the ship, he knew a way to peer long distances with clarity, as if looking through a pair of binoculars. It was a trick the voice had taught him after they had become one. Leonard’s body had changed in some ways after the voice had fused with his back. His hair had thinned, and webs had grown between fingers and toes. The voice had shown him that he could touch fingers to thumb in a certain way, and then, after running his hand through the water, pick up bubbles that, if he shifted his fingers just right, would form into makeshift lenses in his hand—lenses through which he could peer and see farther away.
Of course, peering through a bubble caused some distortion and warping of the image, and if there were impurities in the bubble—refuse from the swamp water—they could disrupt his vision. It took him several tries that morning on the mud island, hiding behind the reeds, before he could get the bubbles shaped just right in his hands, and clean and clear enough to look through.
She was walking on the deck. Long, dark hair framed her perfect, moon-shaped face, now distorted through the filmy water She was wearing a white one-piece swimming suit that hugged her curves, delineating her body. His mouth watered as he stared at her breasts, her hips. Even through the bubbles in his hand, she was gorgeous.
He remembered the first time he had been close to her, smelling a warm scent of jasmine. When they had held hands, the flesh of her fingers so soft in his rough laborer’s hands, the way she would kiss him fiercely on the lips, how they would…
On the ship, she raised her hand to her mouth, a small red dot winked on, then she flicked something into the water below. A cigarette—no doubt one of the new “safe” ones with none of the dangers and a healthy hit of vitamin C, but still… littering here? That was against regulations. He would have to chastise her lightly when he…
The thing with the voice on his back seemed to hum, a feeling like a light vibration playing against his spine. It was waking up. It wouldn’t want him on the surface of the water. It definitely wouldn’t want him spying like this. He didn’t want a fight over what his body did or where his body went.
He clenched his teeth and backed away into the water, letting the colorful and translucent water cress close over his head.
The voice didn’t say anything about the island visit until they were in the tunnels later that day.
The tunnels stretched in every direction underneath the swamp. They were not just the living quarters that Leonard and the thing on his back called home, but other scampering creatures lived there, too. Leonard was always careful stepping through the tunnels because he didn’t know when one of the clawed, sinuous lyre worms would ping like a struck note and lunge out of the puddles to latch on to his heel.
“It is good to walk carefully above too,” the voice said.
“I was careful,” Leonard replied. “I wasn’t even walking. I was low. I got down into the water when you started waking up.”
He had hoped the voice hadn’t noticed that he had been out. It often slept so deeply, but this time… He clenched his fists, and the webbing between his fingers crinkling uncomfortably.
“Better to stay in the tunnels,” said the voice. “You can’t find anything of value on the mud banks.”
“She is my girlfriend!” snapped Leonard. “She cares about me, and you’re keeping me from her! What do you expect me to do, wait underwater until my balls fall off?”
The thing on his back seemed to tense against his shoulders, and it let out a thin stream of warm water that ran down the small of his back. He used to think the creature was urinating on him, but apparently it thought it was calming him down with a “gift” of warm and comforting liquid stored and heated in its body.
It didn’t comfort him. The anger burned hotter.
“If we leave this swamp, we can find other options,” said the voice.
Leonard felt his eyes flash, and he nearly choked with rage.
“I am a human being! And I want to love a human being!”
The thing on his back seemed to consider this. Leonard waited, expecting another warm trickle of not-urine to snake its way down his thighs. It didn’t come.
“Are you sure who she is?” the thing said.
“I’m in love with her,” Leonard said, feeling an overwhelming longing. “I want her.”
The thing hummed and held him, crouching in the dark in the tunnel.
“I will catch a twinkling eel tonight,” said the voice. “It has a pleasing poison inside, it will make you feel good.”
No, thought Leonard. Nothing would make him feel good enough as long as he was under the swamp, stuck in these tunnels, away from his real life, away from everything that he was supposed to be.
The twinkling eel—a long and sinuous blue creature with dozens of sparkling appendages that snap and writhe as it swims—was delicious in its way. Leonard did not eat it, of course. However, even still, after the thing on his back consumed it, Leonard felt the effects of the toxins in the eel’s body entering his own bloodstream.
They filled him, fingertip to fingertip, toes to scalp, with a sense of kinetic energy and a rush of euphoria. Like jagged waves of energy, he felt his nerves jangle and swim across his skin. It felt as if the allure of the toxin reached into his farthest depths, into his deepest desires.
And he saw her. Salinda Powers. Her flashing smile, her curving waist, her flowing hair. Every word like steam from her lips, beckoning him. Every movement lithe and smooth and seductive, like the most delectable dream.
The voice was silenced on his back. Whatever effects the toxins may have had on Leonard, their force must have been multiplied several times over on the thing as it was the one who consumed the eel directly.
Thinking that the voice could not resist any longer, Leonard stumbled through the tunnels, treading over lyre worms and clicker crabs, and pushed out of the muddy bottom of the swamp, out into the water, and up, up, the excitement inside him building, eyes wide, staring at the blur of white above as it grew larger and larger.
He felt the power inside, felt invincible, felt a lust he could not contain. His webbed hands grasped the chain leading off the side of the ship. The cold metal sent a shock of pleasure through him, almost as if he was caressing her arm. Hand over hand he climbed, his breathing ragged, the thing on his back like a dead weight.
He clawed his way onto the ship, gasping, eyes on fire, teeth bared in desire, and pushed himself to his feet.
“Salinda,” he croaked.
He saw her, pointing at him. He tried to smile.
And the men came. They had sticks of electricity. He could not look at them, but only at Salinda, even as the electricity called out his voice and sent his screams spearing into the sky.
When Leonard awoke, something was missing, and something else was there. In his state of mind, it took him some time to figure out which was which, despite the gaping psychological absence. He tried to feel his face, but found that he was bound, and when he tried to turn his head, he discovered himself encased in wires and tubes at every quarter.
Clacking footsteps rang out, and when Leonard looked up, he saw Salinda. As she came more clearly into view, he saw she was wearing a long white coat over a professional gray top and ironed raven-black pants. Her mouth was open in excitement, and he tried to speak, but heard a strange rasping sound instead.
“Shhh,” Salinda said. “You’ve gone through a lot. Your throat sustained a lot of damage I’m afraid.”
She sounded gentle, and Leonard wanted to lean into the comfort of her voice, but he saw in her eyes a jet professionalism mixed with a frightening excitement that pulled at the corners of her mouth and gave a taut character to the skin around her eyes.
“Salinda,” he managed, hearing his voice finally in that awful rasping.
“You remember me,” she said, and allowed her face to be pulled into a savage smile. “I thought you might.”
Leonard imagined those days before, in the spaceship, holding Salinda close, his hand upon her cheek, her hand upon his side. Feeling his hands now as he clawed at the bedsheets, he only found rough scales, the webs between his digits stiffer now, even more uncomfortable.
“I love you,” he said.
The savage smile softened a bit, and she pressed her lips together in a sympathetic grin.
“That might have been the difference,” she said. “That might have been what finally brought one of you back.”
He stared at her, desperately, willing the restraints to go away, aching to reach out for her.
“You deserve an explanation,” she said, taking notes from the monitors connected to his flesh. “We wanted the parasite. But the parasites are smart. Smart, but, I don’t know, good-hearted? Some of the other scientists are already calling them the Samaritan suckers. They suck onto you, you know—and they are suckers for someone who is dying underwater.”
Leonard almost choked.
“Some people did die,” Salinda said. “The suckers don’t always rescue everyone. They bond with land-dwellers so that they, too, can become ambulatory on land. But they also seem to want to save people, and prefer to bond with sentient lifeforms. We don’t really know why yet, but we are trying to figure it out.”
Leonard thought back to the many times it had warned him, how it tried to help him.
“Turns out we got real lucky,” she said, patting Leonard on the upper arm. “Not only did one of the suckers go for the bait finally, it just happened to be a bait that I had had a fling with. At the time I never dreamed that dalliance would matter. Just a nice pastime, you know, and you weren’t so ugly, and I knew you wouldn’t stay around forever. We just tied you to a rock, like we deal with corpses anyway. We thought the chains would hold you, and then we would have the sucker, too, captured as it tried to bond with you. But it managed to get you loose.”
Leonard felt fireworks in his mind, broken shards of darkness and light.
“Where is he?” he hissed.
“Oh,” said Salinda, frowning a little. “Unfortunately the sucker didn’t survive. Thought it would be hardier than that. But we can still learn a lot from its remains. We are dissecting it now.”
The smile appeared again on Salinda’s face, the same kind of taut excitement returning, pulling open her cheeks so that they revealed teeth that nearly snarled, flashing in the harsh light. She put her hand on his, her flesh soft, her fingers hooking around his scales.
“We will learn a lot from you, too.”