Swamp Thing

Poison Ivy took the drunken reporter by the arm and guided her to a private room. A skylight let in the moonlight. Something in roughly human shape sat on a chair, the trunk-like legs rested in a kiddie pool. A bottle of tequila lay close at hand, and there was a glass in its hand.

Yet what struck Lois Lane was the smell, the humidity. The air smelled like a swamp. There were lily pads on the dark surface of the kiddy pool, its waters swam with tadpoles. Spanish moss hung from the walls, not mere decoration, but growing over exposed wooden beams, rooted here and there amid other plants that seemed to have burst through the wooden floorboards. The figure in the pool was only barely human in outline, a hunched parody of a human figure...but when its eyes fell on Lois Lane, yellow and strange, she was struck by an infinite, terrible sadness and yearning that went beyond words.

"His wife left him, and took the kid," Ivy whispered. "He needs a little company. Treat it like an interview. With your pussy."

Lois Lane blinked, not sure how to parse that...but then Ivy was gone, and the **** reporter found herself alone in the moonlight with the Swamp Thing.

The swampy smell wasn't entirely unpleasant, after the reporter had a moment to get used to it. It reminded her of hiking in the Okefenokee Swamp, of boat trips down in the Louisiana bayou. She had visited there, after the last hurricane, to talk to the folks that still lived out away from the highways. There were cabins there which had been built and rebuilt by generations of hands. They had shown her the moss-hung remains of **** cabins given back to nature, and the deep dark pools where the snakes swam between the twisted roots.

She tried on a smile. Not even sure what she was doing here. "Is there another glass?"

The lump of a head shook, which caused vine and tendrils to tense oddly. Things grew in his "chest," like yams. Lois watched in fascination as small buds pushed their way through the greenish surface of its forehead, and blossomed into a crown of pink flowers. One arm—it looked like a muscular arm, for all that it was undeniably a mass of twisted roots and vines and green mold and moss, in terrible parody of a human shape—lifted the bottle to her.

"Only bottle," the swamp thing rumbled. Its chest heaved, **** air through a channel that mimicked an esophagus. It was a voice like the whisper of wind between trees, the growl of roots gnawing soil. How else might plants talk?

Lois stepped out of her heels and forward...into the kiddie pool, to feel the slime at the bottom ooze between her toes. Her hand grabbed the bottle, and in that brief moment she first made physical contact with him...and that's when she saw it.