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"Keep your weapons," came Blackbeard's bass growl. "I was here before - it doesn't get too hot to bear. And don't ditch your belt buckles if that means your pants are going to fall down."
A scream from the black jungle made Shandy jump, but Davies, leaning on his own oar, laughed quietly and said, "Not a ghost - that was one of those brown-and-white birds that eat the water snails."
"Oh - right."
Shandy pulled in his oar and laid it across the bow. As gingerly as if he were splitting the shell off of a too-hot lobster, he unbuckled his belt, then drew his knife - he could feel the heat of the tang even through the leather wrapping of the grip - and, using the gunwale as a chopping block, sawed off the buckle-end of his belt. It clattered down the hull and splashed into the puddle sloshing back and forth on the floorboards. He slid the hot knife back into its sheath and picked up his oar again.
Davies, who hadn't paused in his own rhythmic poling, grinned mockingly and shook his head. "Your pants better not fall down."
Shandy leaned his full weight against his oar, and wondered if the water was too shallow to float the keel clear and they were poling the boat through mud. "Yours," he gasped, "better not catch fire."
The three boats inched onward through the humid jungle, hazed in the smoke from the torches. As much to relieve his watering eyes from the flame-glare as to watch for some stealthily approaching monster, Shandy kept peering off to the sides; and at first he was relieved to see that the "whispering" was issuing from flappy holes in the round pods of a white fungoid growth that was clustered more and more thickly along the spongy banks - casting about for an explanation of the phenomenon, he guessed that their roots were connected to caverns, and that temperature differences caused air to rush up and be released in this admittedly bizarre way - but as the boats were pushed farther into the marsh, where the fungus balls grew bigger, he saw that above the loose-edged, exhaling holes were bumps and indentations that looked increasingly like noses and eyes.
The sense of a huge and attentive - but silent - entity out in the darkness became more and more oppressive. Finally Shandy looked up in fear, and though he could see the moonlight-silvered interweaving of branches overhead, he knew that a thing was bending down invisibly above them, a thing that belonged here, that owned - perhaps largely consisted of - these repellently fecund swamps and pools and vines and small amphibian lives.
The others obviously felt it too. Friend scrambled heavily to his feet and then nearly extinguished his boat's torch by dumping a double fistful of the black herb onto it; the flame guttered low, but a couple of seconds later flared up again, sending a billowing cloud of the harsh smoke unfolding upward toward the branches that roofed the river.
A scream out of the sky shook blossoms from the trees and raised ripples in the water so tight and steady that for a moment the boats seemed to be sitting on a pane of extra-ridgy bull's-eye glass. The sound rang away through the jungle, and then there was just the cawing of frightened birds, and, after they subsided, just the whispering of the fungus pods.
Shandy glanced at the nearest cluster of the pods, and he saw that the fungus lumps were definitely faces now, and from the way their eyelids twitched he was unhappily sure that soon he'd be meeting the gaze of eyes when he looked at them.
Behind him Davies was swearing steadily in a weary monotone.
"Don't tell me," Shandy said in a fairly even voice, "that was one of those brown-and-white birds that eat the goddamned water snails."
Davies barked one syllable of a laugh, but didn't reply. Shandy could hear Beth weeping quietly.
"Ah, my dear Margaret," said old Benjamin Hurwood in a choked but throbbing voice, "may these tears of joy be the only sort you ever shed again! And now indulge, please, a sentimental old Oxford don. On this, our wedding day, I'd like to recite to you a sonnet I've composed." He cleared his throat.
The invisible swamp-presence was still a psychic weight on the foul air, and the insteps of Shandy's feet were getting uncomfortably hot in spite of the thick leather between the boot buckles and his skin.
"Margaret!" Benjamin Hurwood began, "I require a Dante's muse ... "
"We're aground," came Blackbeard's call from ahead. "Stop pushing 'em. From here, we move on foot."
Christ, thought Shandy. "Is he ... kidding?" he asked, not very hopefully.
Instead of answering, Davies laid his oar in the boat and climbed over the stern and lowered himself into the black water. It proved to be about hip deep.
" ... Fitly to sing my joy after that day," Hurwood crooned on.
Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard had taken his boat's torch out of its bracket, and he and his disquieting boatman were both already in the water and wading toward the nearest bank. Shadows shifted as they moved, and new clusters of the fungus heads became visible.
"Mr. Hurwood," Leo Friend was hissing, shaking the one-armed man. "Mr. Hurwood! Wake up, damn you!"
"When," Hurwood continued reciting, "in my life's mid-point, God let me choose ... to leave the gloomy wood - "
Shandy could see Beth's shoulders shaking. Bonnett was sitting as stiffly motionless as a mannikin.
Blackbeard and his boatman had climbed up onto the bank, and, ignoring the twitching, whispering white globes at their feet, were hanging on to dangling wild grapevines to keep their footing on the mud and the arching wet roots. "We need him alert," called Blackbeard to Friend. "Slap him - hard. If that doesn't do it I'll come over there and ... do something to him myself."
Friend smiled nervously, drew back a pudgy hand and then cracked it across Hurwood's simpering face.
Hurwood let go a yell that was almost a sob, then blinked around at the boats, once again aware of his real surroundings.
"Not much farther now," Blackbeard told him patiently, "but we leave the boats here."
Hurwood peered for almost a minute at the water and the mud bank. Finally, he said, "We'll have to carry the girl."
