Lizardman
By: Robert R. McCammon
Originally published in
The lizardman, king of his domain, rode on air into the swamp and gnashed his teeth against the night.
He had a feeling in his bones. A mighty feeling. He was old and wise enough to know the power of such feelings. Tonight---yes, tonight---he would find the beast he sought. Out there amid the cypresses and on the mud flats, somewhere betwixt moonrise and dawn, the Old Pope waited for him, in robes of gnarled green. Tonight he would pay his respects to the Old Pope, that chawer of bones and spitter of flesh, and then he would sail his lasso around the Old Pope's throat and drive his gaffhook into the white bellyflesh to pierce a heart as tough as a cannonball.
The Lizardman chewed on his unlit cigar, the wind streaming his long white hair back from his leather-brown face, and powered the airboat over a sea of weeds. The light of a single battery lamp, mounted on the frame behind his seat, speared a direction for him, but he could have found his way in the dark. He knew the sounds of the swamp---the chirrs, croaks, and whispers---and he knew the smells of the swamp, the stale wet odors of earth caught between dry land and sea. The lizardman had navigated this place in drought and monsoon; he knew it as a man knows the feel of a well-worn shirt, but in all these many years the Old Pope had found a secret pocket and would not come out to play.
'You'll come out,' the lizardman growled. The wind ate his words. 'You'll come out tonight, won't you? Yessir. you'll come out tonight and we'll dance us a little dance.'
He had said those same words every night he'd left the shore and ventured into the swamp. Saying those words was a habit now, a ritual, but tonight . . . tonight he could feel the true power in them. Tonight he felt them prick the hide of the Old Pope, like darts thunking into treebark, and the Old Pope stirring in his underwater cavern, opening one red eye and exhaling a single bubble from the great, gruesome snout.
The lizardman changed his direction, a wrinkled hand nudging the tiller. South by southwest, into the sweet and rancid heart of the swamp, where honeysuckle covered the hulks of decaying boats and toads as big as dinner platters sang like Johnny Cash. Some of those boats had belonged to the lizardman's friends: other lizardmen, who had sailed the sargasso seas of the swamp in search of Old Pope, and found their eternity here. Their corpses had not been recovered. The lizardman knew where they were. Their guts and gristle had nourished Old Pope, had rushed through the reptilian bulk in bloody tides to be expelled into the dark mud thirty feet down. Their bones had moldered on the bottom, like gray castles, and slowly moss had streamed from their ramparts and consumed them in velvet slime. The lizardman knew. His friends, the old braggers and bastards and butchers, had made their living from the swamp, and the swamp now laid new foundations on their frames.
'Gonna dance a little dance,' the lizardman said. Another correction of the tiller, the fan rotor roaring at his back. 'Gonna prance a little prance.'
He had seen sixty-three summers; this sweltering August was his sixty-fourth. He was a Southern man, burned dark by the Florida sun, his skin freckled and blotched, his eyes dark brown, almost black, revealing nothing. He lived alone, drank rotgut whiskey straight from the moonshiner's still, played a wicked game of five-card stud, had two ex-wives who couldn't stand the sight or smell of him, and he made his money off gator skins. He'd done his share of poaching, sure, but the gators were growing wild in Florida now and it was open season. He'd read in the paper last week that a gator had chomped three fingers off a golfer's hand when he'd reached into the bushes for his ball on a Sarasota course. That didn't surprise the lizardman. If it moved or used to move, a gator would go after it. Mean sonsofbitches, they were. Almost as mean as he was. Well, the lizardman figured, it took mean and ugly to kill mean and ugly.
A slight nudge of the tiller sent the airboat heading straighter south. He could smell honeysuckle and Indian weed, the sweet tang of wild persimmons and the musky fragrance of cypress. And the odor of death in the night air, too: rot and fungus, putrifying gas from the muddy bottom, something long dead caught in a quicksand pool. The wind took those aromas, and he arrowed on, following the beam of light. Wasn't too far now; maybe a mile or so, as the buzzard flew.
The lizardman did not fear the swamp. That didn't mean, of course, that he came in asking to be gator bait. Far from it: in his airboat he carried two gaffhooks, a billyclub with nails driven into it and sticking out like porcupine quills, a double-barreled shotgun, a bangstick, and his rope. Plus extra food, water, and gasoline. The swamp was a tricky beast; it lulled you, turned you into false channels and threw a mudbar up under your keel when you thought you were in six feet of water. Here, panic was death. The lizardman made a little extra money in tourist season, guiding the greenhorns through. It always amazed him how soft the tourists were, how white and overfed. He could almost hear the swamp drool when he brought the tourists in, and he made sure he stayed in the wide, safe channels, showed the greenhorns a few snakes and deer and such, and then got them out quick. They thought they'd seen a swamp; the lizardman just smiled and took their money.
The Seminoles, now, they were the tall-talers. You get a Seminole to visit the little hamlet where the lizardman lived, and his stories would make curly hair go straight. Like how Old Pope was a ghost gator, couldn't be killed by mortal man but only by God himself. Like how Old Pope had ridden on a bolt of lightning into the heart of the swamp, and any man who went looking for him was going to end up as nuggets of gator dung.
The lizardman believe that one, almost. Too many of his friends had come in here and not come out again. Oh yeah, the swamp had teeth. Eat you up, bury you under. That was how it was.
He cut his speed. The light showed a green morass ahead: huge lilypads, and emerald slime that sparkled with iridescence, The air was heavy, humid, pungent with life. A mist hung over the water, and in that mist glowed red rubies; the eyes of gators, watching him approach. As his airboat neared, their heads submerged with thick
He lit his cigar, puffed smoke, reached for his rope, and began to slip-knot a noose in it. The airboat was drifting over the lilypads, making toads croak and leap for safety. Just beyond the area of lilypads was a deeper channel that ran between glades of rushes, and it was at the edge of this channel that the lizardman threw his anchor over the side, a rubber boot full of concrete. The airboat stopped drifting, in the midst of the rushes on the rim of the deep channel.
The lizardman finished knotting the rope, tested it a few times and found it secure. Then he went about the business of opening a metal can, scooping out bloody chunks of horseflesh, and hooking them onto a fist-sized prong on the end of a chain. The chain, in turn, was fixed to the metal framework of the airboat's rotor and had a little bell on it. He tossed the bait chain out, into the rushes, then he sat on his perch with a gaffhook and the lasso near at hand, switched off the light, and smoked his White Owl.
He gazed up at the stars. The moon was rising, a white crescent. Off in the distance, toward Miami, heat lightning flared across the sky. The lizardman could feel electricity in the night. It made his scalp tingle and the hairs stand up on the backs of his sinewy, tattooed arms. He weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds, stood only five feet seven, but he was as strong as a Dolphins linebacker, his shoulders hard with muscle. The lizardman was nobody's kindly old grandpap. His gaze tracked a shooting star, a red streak spitting sparks. The night throbbed. He could feel it, like a pulse. To his right somewhere a nightbird screeched nervously, and a gator made a noise like a bass fiddle. Tonight the swamp seethed. Clouds of mosquitoes swirled around the lizardman's face, but the grease and ashes he'd rubbed onto his flesh kept them from biting. He felt the same powerful sensation he'd experienced when he was getting ready to cast off from shore: something was going to happen tonight, something different. The
