I think the marsh sleeps, but with one eye open and a mouth that curls strangely. A snoring chorus of insect things accompanies this melancholy slumber. Dozing really, activity may rouse it into stifling all and making silence renewed. Jealous of the dryer climes, the bog will drink high ground when it can; gurgling swallows echo in it's bubbling stomach. Straining the ear, one can hear muffled tales of cold, unblinking ancientness creaked out by the corroded mail-links worn by those who sleep under the peat. The bog stench speaks of low tide, alligator-backed but not tropical mangrove or lively Amazonian lagoon. Youth, like dryness, is a concept unknown within the bowels of the slough. No crocodiles but rather afancs here, things of the bitter north that swish in murk. Noses cold, legs itching from sweat, lone travelers move warily through reed and rut, stagnant pool and loon nest. The burning light of home is always too far off. Mislead by foxfire, an unholy hoax, the marsh becomes a laughing web. An eternity of lonesome souls have had their footprints stamped in and then erased by the ooze.
An enormous stone wheel grinds slowly, turned only by wounded eddies, a current spilling from the last breaths of dying hatchlings. Travelers become transfixed by still pools. Their circadian rhythms get sticky, gummed up. Something clicks slowly, deep. A deliberate and methodical rhythm like clockwork, its springs festering with squirming swamp-things. Too deep for the ear, the clicking is heard by the teeth, the bottom of the skull, the innards catch it and move in time. Looking beyond with eyes of purest fog, Ink is the water that laps childlike at your edges. Cold fell, phosphorescent specters exhaling smoky coils of mist into the thornbush hair of a quietly moaning nymph. Soaked to the bone, the reeds whisper at sullen waterfowl. Some birds stay too long in the marsh, they stop moving and sprout with angry grasses.
There is a stone in the marsh that shrieks due to its proximity to that which is buried beneath it. Hunters have been rent asunder and become food for the tiny things when straying too close. The springs of Gehenna reach to our world's surface in the marsh, many nooks of hell are housed by it. With hair of snow and eyes wild, some return to the hearth after mere hours lost in the fen. Secrets, mysteries that ruin the pink mind, making it gray and sodden, encrusted with broken mollusk shells and putrescence, these things a stumbling lamb may receive. The morass belches Saint Elmo's fire, the blinking eye of many a peat-fleshed troll, moss-furred and hungry. Toothless, they suck victims to a dark and pungent place.
Having crawled out of the peat, hairless and sun sensitive, so too does one go to the peat. Despite repeated bathing in the new, moss grows in neglected fissures. The night parts, sun shy areas of consciousness that gibber with black tongues behind soap fragrant ears, still squirm in the marsh. Worms raise young in one's belly. They murmur in sleepy tones, soothing the shock of decomposition. Parasites become beloved children.
Frustrated, soulless and sexless, the marsh has no lover but is always pregnant. It births the putrid by parthenogenesis. It sees the things that live in its skin as progeny. It grins at the things breeding and its pools, longing to nurture and strangle them. Swimming in itself, It tries its hand at mothering, but its sympathy is acidic; corrosion is its very breath. It cares wickedly.
Having no true children, the bog is always longing. It desires outside life, it is a thing of snares and traps. It cannot hide its true face completely, but will try. With a gurgling voice of mock sweetness, it bids the traveler, "lie in me child, weary you must be. Motion is tiresome. A thing-of-forever in me, you shall become. Though it seems to choke, the mist shall preserve you. Lie down child, lie down."
It lies about its lack of movement. It moves inside. Deep under it all there is a space where the roots, the rot, and the wet to give way to the deep orb. It rotates way down and keeps the humming click synchronized with the mosquito's incessant buzzing.It is a perpetual motion machine powered on quicksand suction and the chemical fermentation of dead matter. Whole histories are down there, lost pack animals and men. Small bubbles hint at things nibbling underneath, forgotten days when, with a belly full of blackberries and millet, the shaven adulteress was cast down from her lynch-spot. Swallowed by greedy muck, she roared at her role beneath a dim sun. She is still down there, and is kept company by cruel wishes and millions of teeth gnashing in unison. This is the engine of the quagmire.
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