A pact, a promise, a curse.
Swamps keep quiet. Think of all that muck beneath the surface, that black water, that mud.
Night descends, the frog song a deep drone, ancient, like a groan from this wetland wasteland. Sweeping through the brush, hearing the reeds, the wind through the tall grass, a bullfrog leaps into the water, in the shallows matted with algae and reeds. The water is a sheer mirror, reflecting the night sky. Skimming the surface, we come upon small, yellow flowers. Unassuming, resembling a yellow orchid in miniature, like the aerangis citrata of Madagascar. Erect on red, woody stems, these small golden flowers peek up above the water’s surface and appear sunny, but below, they keep a secret. They are not orchids. Their tangle of roots under the water’s surface trap microscopic insects in their roots, and devour, devour.
This is bladderwort.
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A troupe of white nightgowns trek out in their rubber boots from a tall building. A small girl stands left behind on the manicured bank, her slippers covered in cut grass. Behind her, an umber brick building, moonlit. In the front, illuminated by twin globe lights, between brutal corinthian columns, in a serif font: CYPRESS RIVER GIRLS ACADEMY. All the windows are dark, save one, which flickers out.
Whispers. There’s a conspiracy going on between the girls. In the hallways, in the cafeteria between cartons of strawberry milk and orange juice, between the shelves in the library. On the outskirts of campus by the willow tree carved with aeons of initials. The girls whisper, they make their plans, they share a book: united under the spell of a sacred text which is unseen by many, but known by all. Just a mystery, a subject of gossip, to the uninitiated many who don’t possess the necessary irreverence and deviousness to be admitted. To the rest of the student body, it was just an incredible rumor. Whatever it was that these girls whispered about, passed notes about, it was trivial. Their incantations, just a matter of acting out, attention seeking. They were perceived with disdain and quiet fascination.
They swore a blood pact, a perverse promise, unbreakable. Like a curse. One that their children would feel the ripples of, like intergenerational bad karma. Maybe they’re playing with forces larger than them, beyond them. But it all just feels like make-believe. Like there are fairies amongst them, in every alcove their mischief reined, a wicked pixie dust in the hollows where light didn’t touch. A magic lilting through the halls as the bell tolls sunrise, or lunch hour. Something waiting for them that wasn’t arithmetic and phys-ed, but something only they knew; ancient runes of nymphs and sprites which only they could decipher. Their swamp knowledge. How lucky they felt, to feel the pull of a purpose. That mystic imagination that runs through the sunlight like dust motes, something that’s beautiful to believe in. To believe in anything at all.
There’s a trail of grass pressed flat by the boat they’ve dragged across the lawn. Like a crop circle. It takes all three of them to get it into the water. One by one, they climb in. Bullfrog-song ominous around them, louder as they descend into the swamp. At the back of the boat, Sylvie, makes a knot in her nightgown, wet grey and mucky at the hem.
“Are you sure we should be out here?” She looks over the side of the boat into the water, black as night, reedy, star-strewn.
Diane shushes her as she pushes out from the shore with her paddle.
“What if there are alligators?” Sylvie insists, she looks back over her shoulder. No one stood on the bank, all the windows were dark. No one to hear them.
Diane pushes them through the reeds and algae thick by the shallows. They emerge into the clearing. Diane is steadfast, sharp; she’s a guide, more than a leader.
“If there are, we’ll sacrifice you to save ourselves” This is the eldest, Ana, she sits at the helm, navigating, like a figurehead. The humid breeze in her amber curls, her face flush and determined. Ana has always been theatrical, that’s one of the things that qualified her as a leader. She makes the magic.
Diane’s smiling, complicit. She’s always on Ana’s side. Isn’t cruelty a necessary evil in girls? She likes Ana’s ruthlessness, it’s freeing to be mean. To cut deep. Diane’s never been able to.
“How are we going to get it?” Sylvie asks with concern.
“You’ll have to go diving for it.” Ana splashes water at her, and she screams as if scorched. The two braver girls shush her again.
“You’re going to get us caught.” Diane chastises.
“And then the alligators are the least of your worries.” Ana says, mean and moonlit.
Ana turns back to what’s ahead of her: that’s what she’s best at. She’s squinting into the darkness, into the scintillating black. And then she sees it: like a buttercup, or a very small snapdragon out of a fever mist, yellow like mustard. She leans towards it, undaunted.
“I see it.” She whispers, and she reaches for it, but they’re too far away. Ana reaches. Her hair dipping into the water, her blouse inches away from the surface. The boat tilts.
“Ana,” Sylvie pleads.
Ana ignores her, “Paddle us around, Dee.”
Diane swings the back of the boat out and around. Ana gets on her stomach to reach out farther, stretched out starboard.
“Almost” she can reach it, but she just succeeds in plucking the flower from its stem. What they need lies deeper, “Closer, Dee.”
She reaches down into the water to get a better grasp of the flower, but the low swamp breeze is pushing them away. She reaches, reaches, to try to pull up the roots. The boat tilts, water spills in.
“Ana!” Sylvie again, insistent.
Ana turns to her with a spark of mischief in her glare. She tilts the boat to the other side, and back again, further still. Diane joins in, their laughter startles a crane, they can hear its wings catching the air in the distance.
Sylvie squeals, gripping onto the sides of the boat, she’s muffling her protests. Diane can see the effort in her expression, fear of discovery, and fear of the swamp battling inside her.
“Stop it!” She stands, to try to counterbalance it. She had a childish habit of striking the same pose anytime she wanted to stand up for herself. But she appeared so meek, with her clenched fists. It was part of the fun of teasing her. They liked this about her. Without someone to tease, perhaps Ana would have chosen Diane as target. There must always be one.
The students wondered how someone so ordinary and soft-spoken as Sylvie would be admitted into this select society. But there was something dark and devilish in her, some cryptic knowledge that endeared her to them. They liked her, in their own way. She amused them with stories of ancient Egyptian rites, and of herbology, astrology. She was the best of the bunch, really. The smartest, the most sensitive, the most in touch with the sufferings and boredoms that they so detested. They all knew it. Maybe that’s why she was such a target.
Ana can’t stop the motion of the boat fast enough. She watches Sylvie fall into the black, black water. Almost as if in slow motion, a white nightgown caught by the wind, silhouette against the broad face of the moon, her arms out to the sides to try to catch hold of something steady and strong. Diane reaches out for her. And then the splash, and a scream.
“Grab my hand!” Diane reaches out for her. She manages to grab hold of her, but Sylvie screams again.
“Shut up.” Ana says through clenched teeth, “We’re going to get you out.”
They try to pull her aboard, but she’s heavy. Heavier than she should be. They can only get her shoulders above water before she sinks back down, kicking violently.
“I’m stuck.” She sobs, she grabs onto the side of the boat, she tries to kick herself free. She yells for help.
“You’ve got to be quiet, we’re going to get you free.”
“Maybe we should go get Mrs-”
“No.” Ana snaps at her, Diane looks at her with disquiet and surprise, “how do you propose we do that?” She motions to the expanse of swamp between the school and their boat. She grabs hold of Sylvie and gives her a tug, pulling her up and in with all her might, when she feels the distinct sensation of a pull of equal force from below. For just a moment she and Sylvie stare at each other with equal petrification. She grabs a hold of the girl’s hands. Diane looks to Ana for instruction, as she always does. But for the first time, she sees a rueful cast across her blanched cheeks. It strikes Diane that it’s fear.
They begin to pull her up again, when suddenly there’s that force from below the water which pulls her under again. She tries to scream, but it’s drowned out, burbled. Steeping their white nighties into the tea stained water, Like Earl Grey, they reach for her. The boat’s tipping dangerously, Sylvie’s grip on them is deathly. All they can see are her hands above the surface, holding them. Trying to drag them all into the abyss. The boat is going to tip.
“Let go.” Ana commands, she tries to shake her hand free.
Diane looks at her, with wild, fearful eyes, “We can’t, Ana!”
Ana’s wrestling her hand free. Water is spilling into the boat now. Something has got her. Something below, “let go let go let go!” She whispers, a whisper like a scream, like an incantation. And then, all of a sudden, she does.
The boat bobs back into place, although weighed down with water. Ana stares down into the blackness, trying to see beneath its impenetrable surface, but it’s just her reflection staring back at her, afraid.
“Sylvie?” She whispers into the water, “Sylvie!” She chances to yell. There’s no sign. Not even a bubble of air floating to the surface. She’s just disappeared.
“Listen.” Diane whispers. Ana hears nothing. And then she realizes it’s nothing that she’s supposed to hear. The swamp is silent. The bullfrogs have stopped singing, not a crane, a mouse, a bird can be heard. Diane readies her paddle. There’s sweat dripping down her blouse, the putrid smell of earth and dampness is suffocating, everything inside her is screaming that they must get out of here.
“Wait.”
Ana turns back to the abyss of the swamp, she plunges a hand beneath its dimpled surface, quick. She pulls out the sought after flower by its veiny roots.
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A small piece of paper, folded in eighths, is passed back through the rows of homeroom, with the accompanying whisper, ‘For Diane’. Rachel McCleave intercepts it, she’s in the second row from the back, Diane sits behind her. McCleave always has her nose in things she has no right to. Diane’s too distracted to notice. She’s fixed on Sylvie’s desk, empty. It’s sun-dappled, the willow outside admitting undulating shadows. She’s roused by a chair scraping the linoleum in front.
She whips around to source the noise, it’s Ana, her eyes crazed and staring down little McCleave, doing a frightening impression of a snapping turtle, her eyelids lax and half-shut, vicious as she snaps at her. Diane can just imagine Rachel’s expression, being intimidated like that. Leave it to Ana to protect the society’s secrets.
The teacher smacks the desk, “Ana. Be quiet.”
Rachel obediently and discreetly passes the note back.
It reads:
Tonight. Midnight.
It’s Ana’s swirly printing. The lowercase T’s are just stout loops crossed with a single short hatch mark. The i’s are undotted. Diane wonders what a handwriting analysis might say about Ana’s psychology. Sylvie would know. The expression on Ana’s face, in the silent swamp just after Sylvie had sunk. There’s something in it Diane can’t place. It’s not the unreality of seeing Ana afraid, nor was it the horror of the water’s pull. There was a troubled look that she couldn’t put her finger on. It’s gnawing at her.
There are dark circles under Diane’s eyes, she stares at the words on the paper with a sinking feeling, for a moment unable to place their meaning. At the top of her mind, in the quadrant reserved for practical matters, is the fact that Sylvie is gone. Sylvie’s parents will make an appearance in the dean’s office as soon as they can fly in. She saw the police cars in the lot. Soon, the students would know. Although the student body at large was unaware of their expedition last night, the members of their secret society all know that they were the last to see her. She had cornered Ana outside the gym this morning, asked her if they shouldn’t just tell someone what happened, but Ana was vehement. They’d have to explain why they were out in the swamp.
“It would ruin everything.” Ana said.
It already has.
Diane didn’t get any sleep that night, she’d laid awake with her mind replaying that moment over and over again, watching Sylvie sink into the darkness below them, hearing her screams and her hands grasping for the side of the boat. It felt like the swamp had consumed her. The phrase that kept insisting itself into her mind was that Sylvie had been taken. She hadn’t died, that reality wasn’t dawning on her just yet. She kept expecting her to walk into class and take her seat. It was that something had taken her. Something dark and damned, some force that they’d summoned into being. She had always sustained the feeling that they’d been playing imagination games, they’d been having fun. But for the first time, Diane was afraid. It occurred to her to question whether they weren’t dealing with something more real, and more sinister than she knew.
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Have you ever been at the edge of a swamp as dusk descends, and darkens the steeped water until it’s a murky void of red sky? The noise of the swamp is really something, like an overwhelming drone of insects and animals, a fallen Eden, before the flame of day goes out. You can see the reeds gold against the sky, everything pales. It’s like another world, you might sink into it, into that sinful sun. A stork wades into the shallows, a gator slinks into the depths. Everything retreats, until night blooms.
The girls of the Sisters of Satan Society one by one sneak out of their rooms. A procession of slowly opened doors, a creak, a whisper, a parade of tiptoeing footsteps. With their invitations in their hands, on which is written in gold glitter gel pen, ‘S.S.S’. A pair of redheaded twins sneak up the old, winding stairs, holding each other’s hands. They knock at the attic door, Ana admits them with a harsh whisper, “you’re late.”
The lock on the attic door was old, Ana had discovered it could be picked with a bobby pin without much trouble. It was a small room accessed through the staff hallway at the back of the dormitory. Dim moonlight pours in from the dormer windows over a clutter of old newspapers, chalk boards, and spare building materials. In the middle of this small room, the girls are lit with candlelight, casting ghostly shadows on their girlish faces. Making ghouls of them. They sat in an incomplete circle, the twins joined them, which made 7. They exchange curious glances: still one member short.
“She’s not coming.” Ana says dismissively, sensing what’s on their minds.
The girls seem perplexed by this. Sylvie would never have missed the ritual.
“Did you get the stuff?” Ana snaps at them, haughty. She’s got that look in her eyes.
‘Not determined,’ Diane thinks, ‘unstoppable’.
The girls had pulled the fire alarm during last period about a week ago. As the staff and students filed out, three of them waited, perched on toilets in the stalls, with their feet tucked beneath them so as not to be caught during checks. While the school was empty, they set to work. Emma grabbed the math teacher’s wallet, took from it ten dollars in cash, and a dirty photograph from the fold-down card holder. Diane had procured the bottle of rum from the kitchen, and a glass punch bowl was snatched from the teachers lounge during this time; usually reserved for dances. The twins offer up their specimen, it’s a knick lopped off a cat’s ear, in a little velvet jewelry bag. Chrissy, smaller than the rest and shy, wordlessly puts forward a sprig of thyme, and a dead frog she’d caught in the swamp a day ago, it was beginning to look off, putrid.
The last item of course, was bladderwort.
“Wasn’t Sylvie with you last night?” Emma was a watchful, skittish thing. She reminded Diane of a chickadee. A songbird which might peck out your eyes. Although really, she can’t imagine her even hurting a fly. It was a ruse. It occurred to her that much of this was. Although it was all starting to feel too real.
Ana doesn’t answer, she presses her lips together, impatient.
Diane can’t suppress the words, “She fell in.”
A silence. Ana stares at her with a scorching glare, “She did.”
“Is she okay?” Emma chances, timid. The girls all knew that the three of them had been out in the boat. They’d heard from Sylvie’s roommate that she wasn’t there in the morning. That by all appearances, she’d never come home.
Ana scoffs, “We laughed at her, so she stormed out of the shallow end. She thought she was drowning” She lets out a cutting, one syllable laugh. Too mean to be a laugh.
“Ana.”
“We kicked her out, I told her not to come.” Stiffly, “Let’s just do the ritual.” Ana insists.
There’s a tension between them that puts the girls on edge. They suspect something is amiss, but none suspect the truth. They’re all here now.
She puts her hand’s out to either side resolutely, expectantly. The twins join hands, until the last link is fixed when finally, with impudent delay, Diane takes Ana’s hand. They are united.
“Dear Satan,”
The girls repeat her in unison, as an entry into prayer. An unholy chant.
“We make these offerings to you to gain your love and to prove our devotion. We are sick and twisted, we have a thirst in us that is insatiable, a love for you unequalled. We have stolen, lied, cheated and sacrificed for you. A life, unto you.”
Diane sharply turns to her, but Ana’s practically crushing her hand.
“Don’t break the circle.” She commands in a ferocious whisper, there is something dark and possessive in her voice. Like it’s not completely her own.
“We adore you and the chaos you command, our worship of you gives us joy, we refuse to be mere women of this earth, work in cafes and sweep floors, we wish to be exalted beside you. Rise in rosy fire under your wing. We feel you. Accept our gifts.”
She puts each item into the cut glass punch bowl, one by one, douses it in rum, and lights a match.
“Devil, devil, devil! Come to us! Lift us from our despair!”
She throws the match into the bowl.
Hellfire.
THE END