Shahrazed’s Weblog

To get to the Swamp, you’ve got to stop.

Stop everything, realize just how comfortable you are, safe and cocooned somewhere warm and worn in, like an old gas lit private library of the mind, with mahogany desks and shelves polished by a thousand studious hands, stocked with dark leather-bound books quietly full, pregnant with evenly-spaced print, lines and lines of information already categorized, organized, accessible. With patchwork quilts and faded throws draped over dark leather loveseats, worn heirloom carpets over ever smoother worn floors. Outside it may sleet or hail against the panes, fires may burn out of control and wars may ravage. Here you can rail against the cold, upside down world, luxuriate in righteous angst and lean against the windows of your soul sighing at all is wrong outside of yourself, and stay warm and dry. When you are done with your respectable fits, maybe you even have a cup of tea.

After you see this, only then you can let the bottom drop out from beneath you, and plummet into whatever lies below this careful construct. It happens fast, you find yourself Below, in a dank and hollow space, a tunnel full of senseless quiet whispers. Crumple against its curving wall, all cold corroded metal and ragged concrete, oozing a slimy, fecund sort of moisture that collects in little pools at your feet. Now you are in the underworld of your mind, catacombs which run the length and breadth of your consciousness. The sewers of your brain. No authority visits here much, and over time, they have developed a half-life of their own. Things inhabit them, ghosts and phantoms, mostly, echoes of guilt, agony, woe, faded emotions, the might-have-been’s and yet-to-be’s. Through this organic pipeline you must wander. Maps won’t help you here; there is no Dewey decimal system that can organize this elaborate pipe work world. It’s always changing, and you want to get lost anyway. Catch glimpses and shimmers of things unidentifiable around each bend, half-remembered, familiar things that you don’t really care to identify. Pick you way around the puddles and struggle to stay upright on the sloping, algae covered surface. Walk yourself into a trance, focused only on avoiding a fall, not thinking, just moving in no particular direction.

Now, if you’re brave enough, you might find the Swamp. Or could you shake yourself awake, climb out of the sewers, drag yourself back into the daylight, numb. You could shower, clean up, wrap yourself in that favorite, worn-in quilt and just sit blankly for a little while. You could forget all about it.

But you don’t do that, can’t go back now, when you’re finally almost there. You hesitate. Don’t want to go on, don’t want to go back. Try not to think about it, avoid making a decision, just stand in the semi-darkness and breathe. It might be an ugly place, this Swamp, uglier than where you’ve already been. You know it’s full with ghosts of much more substance, the sort that doesn’t fully belong to you, that will face you without fear instead of vanishing around corners. It’s full of wolves and women, with a bloody moon hanging low in the sky, so full of life and death and decay and pulsing, growling, wailing things. So full of you. It might be breath-taking, might answer you’re every question before you even move you lips to ask, might bow to your whims easily, willingly, even desperately. Or it might not. It might fight you, swallow you up whole, wrap you with its choking creepers and strangle, might encase you with its glorious, living self. It might not let you leave the way you came. It might not let you leave at all.

Oh, God. It’s too late now, you can feel the gravel beneath you feet, offering you a steady purchase instead of a constant struggle. The slimy curvature of concrete pipe is gone; the Swamp has let you in. You look down, at white pebbles, so pale and wan in the moonlight. You’re afraid to look up, the look around. All you see are small, rounded, white stones, shadows of dark vegetation encroach at the edges of your vision.

Eventually, you are going to have to look up, you know. But not yet. What are you wearing now? You feel different. You’re wrapped in something white, all gauzy and light, almost glowing in the moonlight, a whisper of pale material. White silken slippers on your feet, blending into the white gravel of the path you stand on. White, silken ribbons twined around your hips, up and around your waist, cinching in the gauzy drape of a dress so insubstantial it might as well be made of a spider web. White silken ribbons continue up, drape across your shoulders, tangle through your hair. Silver cuffs and bangles encase your arms and wrists like shackles. Silver encircles your neck with delicate strands like the metal has been spun into thread by some evil imp in a fairy tale. Silver tendrils spiral like sweet pea shoots around your fingers.

Breathe. Heavy air, wet and thick with a thousand different heady notes, perfumes of life and death, wet leaves, jasmine, magnolias and sweet almond, cedary sandalwood, myrrh, earth and loam, rot and new, sprouting life, water. Even the gravel path has a smell as it crunches beneath your feet, a mineral puff, dust, eternity.

As you take the step, one pristine, silk-shod foot in front of the other, and listen to the gentle rasp of stone on stone, the sound of the Swamp suddenly assails you from every direction. Cicadas sing, so loud, so loud! The keening shriek of the trees, wood on wood creaking, rocking against one another in the night. The leaves sigh and whisper sibilant stories in the breezes, like your silks, rustling against themselves, full of the gossip of your skin. In the distance, water rushes, trickles, seeps and laps against muddy shores, and somewhere in this eternal night of your soul, faint but unmistakable, one wolf howls and a chorus of heartbreaking wails answer her back.

You close you eyes and lift you chin, take one more breath before you give into the Swamp. Open your eyes. You are alone, just inside an ancient, rusting gate, its gateposts hugged by gnarled and twisted trees, wrapped tight with fat vines, all but obscured, its foundation disappearing into a darkness made up of still more tangled growth. There is no wall, just the gate, hanging askance, part way open, neither inviting you in nor warning you away. You’ve already stepped through it now, still on the white path, still alone. There is no one but you to protect you from yourself.

Keep walking, stay on the path, you’ve been here before. Your eyes have adjusted, pupils dilated. You can see beyond the edges of the gravel now, into your past. New life has sprung from the husks of old loves that you cast aside here. Things are blooming, thriving here. A veritable rose garden has sprung from the ashes you scattered here, once upon a time. The Swamp has taken them, claimed them, used them. Found ample nourishment in your dead, fed itself from your victims and the extra pieces of yourself. Go ahead and claim it back now, this dead love still belongs to you. Step off the path and let your slippers sink into the rich black loam, take a rose to remember and wind it into the ribbons of your dress. Let its thorns snag the silk, and the skin, too. This garden has been growing over for a long time now, but it still stings, a little.

Another howl wakes you from your reverie, don’t get too entrenched here – this is not your purpose. Keep going, forget the path and push on following the fainter trails that crisscross each other in the dirt. Its getter wetter, first just damp, now spongy with water, now a collection of shallow pools to wade through. Murky, tepid water swirls up around your ankles. There is the occasional stepping stone, but you ignore them, don’t need them, prefer to pick your own way through the water. You’re moving toward the howls, slowly, but deliberately.

Another garden grove opens before you, no flowers this time, just a violent mass of green. Creepers studded with heavy buds reach out from a dark, wicked-looking center, plump new shoots and buds and oily, wet looking leaves all tangled up together, a viney, pulsing temple of vegetation. These vines still want to strangle; they’re not ready to bloom. But you must take a memento from this new life, too, repossess it as your own. Reach out to the tiniest tendril, let it wrap itself around your wrist and creep up your arm, nuzzle your throat, becoming one with your silken ribbons. Now move on, don’t linger here unless you want a fatter creeper to find you and pull you down.

You begin to imagine what might come next, and you pace slows further; you’re not sure you want to find it, not sure at all. Your shoes aren’t white anymore and the clinging mud has streaked your calves with green and brown. Your dress seems even more insubstantial now, a gauzy affair torn by reaching branches and smudged with mossy stains. You seem to have as many ribbons that are made of vine as are of silk and a oversized quiet moth has settled itself at your collar, a feathery, living brooch. With each step, the Swamp is claiming you as you try to claim it.

Keep going. The ground is rocky now, the undergrowth less dense. Water is rushing up ahead, so loud it competes with the ever present cicada song. A fountain wells up through a heap of rocks, overflowing and running down the stones to fill a shallow depression, a rock pool. From the cracks that radiate out around the artesian spring a tree has sprung, still young but lifeless, a sapling really. Dozens of tiny new sprouts cling to its exposed roots, as if they had sucked away what ever hard won life it might have had and now struggle to grow on their own. The sapling’s leaves, brittle and faded still cling to its branches, buds just beginning to open are caught in stasis, like something pressed into a book, the faintest traces of their perfume still lingering on desiccated petals.

You reach out to one of the dried flowers, just barely brush it with your fingertips and it crumbles against them to sweet smelling dust. You’ve stepped too close and the parasitic suckers on the roots seem to sense you, sense life passing by them. They sway as if agitated by some unfelt current, searching. One of them touches you, just at the ankle. It stings like ice. A drop of blood wells up as it attaches to your skin, wrapping like an anklet made of nettles, it tightens around your leg, closing in to form a perfect stinging circle. You watch, transfixed as minuscule blooms explode where each drop of blood lands among the roots-and-sucker-mass.

You back up, aghast but compelled, leave this wretched thing to its struggle for life fed by a young tree’s death. You’ve done all you can for it, it’s not the reason you come to wander here. You cross back to the pool with the heavy red moon reflecting in its still waters. You wander what you would look like reflected there. Leaning down towards it, what a mess you must be with your tattered dress, a mud-streaked wretch, with vines and brambles clinging to you almost as it they’ve sprouted from you very flesh, which in a way, they have. You kneel at the edge of the pool, wanting and not wanting to see the reflection. It’s Lilith staring back at you, a woman and a demon in one. Now Astarte, now Hecate, now a wolf howling at the blood red moon, now you, now all of them at once, the Swamp reflecting you reflecting it, now Lilith again, eternal, untouchable.