Chapter 4: The Whispering Moss

Savannah, Georgia — July 24, 1838

I push onward through the cypress grove, wary of the sinking twilight. Around me the swamp breathes – heavy tendrils of air thick with decay wrap around each breath, ghostly in the narrowing light. My machete swings along a faint trail, and I trudge through the chest-high water that slicks my legs with cold dread. Vaneiro has led me in this dance, and somewhere ahead Samuel's muffled cries tug at my mind like a painful memory.

The reek of rot and fungus clings to everything, and leaves drip onto my shoulders as though weeping – the forest mourns me. I think of Julia now; with each step the memory of her face frays by distance and fear.

She sends me letters slashed by grief: tales of shadows shifting on walls and voices calling her name in the empty dark. My heart squeezes. Hope is a slender thread. If I fall here in this black water, what will become of her fragile sanity?

The hush is broken by a faint snap of twig. I whirl in place – nothing moves but the mist and a snake stirring sluggishly in the mud. Even the frogs and cicadas seem to hush their song. In the silence I hear it: a sibilant susurrus whispering close, like breath on the nape of my neck, whispering my sins. The cypress trunks sway slightly, as if to reveal hidden faces in the rippling bark. Moss ghosts drop silently; their stain pale, they flit in the shadows like mournful wraiths.

I clutch the crucifix pressed against my chest. The swamp is watching.

Time warps oddly here. A tide of memories collapses on itself, and in that pulse I see something impossible: a moss-covered stone, half-tipped in mud, the name on it my own. "Ambrose Rowan," it reads – the letters curling with thick mold and strange decay. I stumble, disbelief coursing through my veins.

Did I carve this into the earth in a mad dream, or did the swamp simply know my name long before I drew breath? I cannot tell; this haze has no logic. The past is alive again in whispers and half-formed images, and I stand upon the very shrine of my lineage, on soil thick with the blood and sorrow of forebears.

The sky looms low and bruised, swollen with dusk's last breath. The swamp's chorus swells again – dripping water, distant hounds baying at nothing, branches creaking like tortured wood. A sudden movement catches my eye – knee-deep in the mire stands Samuel, or a broken imitation of him. His clothes hang in tatters; his eyes are hollow and his skin drained of blood. Next to him stands Vaneiro, tall and impassive in the gloom. Under the tarnished moonlight, he looks more spirit than man.

My pulse drums in my ears. I advance slowly, machete held before me. Behind me, I hear a skitter of movement – Elias? I whirl. Only the silhouettes of herons flutter between the marshy glades. Elias's return is a ghost here; I fear he is either safe beyond these waters or already claimed by them. I force my gaze back to Vaneiro. His lips move in silent words, and Samuel's head cranes upward as if listening to a lullaby I cannot hear. The boy's eyes remain unnaturally still, and his pallid face cracks into a hollow smile.

"Fear not, doctor," Vaneiro intones softly. His voice ripples across the marsh like poisoned silk. "He is almost home," he says, and Samuel sinks slowly to his knees in the muck. The boy's thin hands claw at the water, and his lips tremble as though trying to speak. Horror lances through me. Once bewilderment, now vacant eyes. The final frayed thread of hope snaps.

With a scream I charge forward. The earth rises beneath my feet, swallowing me in tangled roots and sticky bog. The world tips. Something cold and sinewy wraps around my ankle. I fall hard. The last thing I see before darkness takes me is Vaneiro's silhouette melting into the reeds and Samuel's pale face reaching for mine through the water.

Beneath the Water, and above the Grave.

I sink into a churning shadow, gills of cypress and tupelo pressing at my back. The swamp's icy arms seize me and drag me downward. Water floods my nostrils and mouth, but I do not quite breathe — I am neither alive in air nor quite dead. All at once I am weightless in a glassy prison, the world above stolen by murk and tangle. Panic hammers my chest, but no air comes.

Around me, the swamp is alive. A chorus of muffled croaks and moans swirls through the black water as though the cypress knees and tangled roots are groaning in exhaustion — or hunger. The thick air from above is replaced by the sour musk of decay: rotting vegetation, stagnant algae, and the coppery stink of iron in the water. I can't move my arms. My legs are entangled in vine and eelgrass. The mud pulls them, slow and deliberate, as if the swamp itself will not release me until I have given it something more.

My mind races for the surface that is far above. I thrash, but the swamp is cunning: it tightens its hold. Every breath I gasp is a gulp of cold poison. For a moment, I wonder if this is drowning or something worse. The darkness around me grows familiar, like an old memory, and far off behind the blackness I begin to hear it: whispers in a language I do not know but somehow recognize. The water carries their voices; they slide along my skin like scales. They say nothing in words I understand, only crooked phrases of longing and reproach.

I remember Mother's stories. She said these bayous were full of old ghosts. Her voice, soft and cracked, used to call them the Changelings of the Water, straining to lure the living down into the depths. Her warning comes back to me now: "They hunger, child, deeper than your fear or shame." A weight settles on my chest greater than the water itself. Fear plants a seed in my stomach.

For some timeless second, I yield. My soul drifts. Memories start to rise like bubbles: flickering candlelight in the front parlor of an old house I barely remember, laughter around a supper table, the heavy scent of my grandmother's gardenias. I see the face of a stranger — a man with hollow eyes — and somehow know he was kin. I feel the touch of someone delicate, someone small and frightened, maybe a child who once clung to my side. The feelings are familiar. But what are these people to me? They drift away like mist as the swamp closes in and forces me up again.

The darkness is absolute. I try counting heartbeats to keep panic at bay. One — my chest is up against slick wood, the underside of an overturned canoe? Or a rotten log? My fingers scrape at something brittle. Two — a flash: a pale face before me, floating in the blackness. Her hair fans out like river moss; her eyes are open and empty. It is Julia. I know it before I know it, because her face is half-blurred light and half-darkness, and because somewhere inside me I recognize her sorrow. But this Julia is not entirely Julia. She is translucent, humming with water-wreathed light. A corpse, or a living woman in a dark dream?

My breath catches — still water in my lungs — and she drifts closer. I want to speak, but only rasp can come out: "Julia?" The water distorts my voice. She smiles very slightly, and it is not a happy smile. It is a warning.

In the silence of the deep, I hear her clearly, in a voice like running brook stones: "Ambrose… you shouldn't have come."

Her lips don't move, yet her words are inside my head. They carry both kindness and betrayal, a sorrow I feel down to my bones. Julia the seeress, the dreamer — but this face is as cold as slate. "Julia?" I try again. But only bubbles answer me.

She cannot speak out loud, cannot come to me. If she is alive, why is she underwater? If she is dead, why does this haunt feel so intimate? These questions snag at my mind as the swamp's silence presses me to listen. Around us, the water starts to stir, and I know it is not content to watch silently any longer.

Already, shapes are forming beyond Julia's pale shoulders: enormous forms with drifting tendrils, like monstrous plants or drowned figures risen from graves. They circle in slow reel, cypress roots swaying like arms reaching out. The black water suddenly seems shallow, as though they have brought me into a shallow room lined with gravestones of bay leaves and marshgrass. The swamp's heart is here — an ancient sacrifice ground — and I realize the face of one gravestone looks like my own name.

Julia's eyes meet mine. Now she speaks, but still without words. Images crowd behind her gaze. My own memories flash around me: that summer I thought I saw Jacob, the little boy who drowned here last year, waving from under the canopy of algae; the many nights Elias and I toasted ourselves to dry bones for warmth; my grandmother softly weeping by the riverbank, calling names I've since forgotten. Why am I here, beneath the water?

The swamp pulses, slow and deliberate. Its currents tug at Julia, at me. I try to swim upward, but the forces keep me pinned. I feel something brush across my cheek — a spider lily drifting, then a ghost of a hand on my shoulder. Julia's face is inches from mine now. In the murk, her eyes shimmer golden-green, reflecting the faint moons of light that hover far above the surface. The skin of her arms is dotted with old, saltwater wounds — bruises that bloom in the darkness of the water. Her lips move against mine.

No warm flesh is there. The cold. So very cold.

For a breath, even in this horror, I am comforted by the familiarity of her touch. I think: Julia came for me. I've been drowned but she has not left me alone.

Then the water around us jolts — a ripple that shatters the moonlight ceiling. In that instant, Julia's eyes flick to something beyond me, something in the void. Her smile twists, somewhere between fear and recognition.

I hear him then — a new voice slithering through the depths, deep and rumbling. Not a voice of man, but of something monstrous. The sludge of centuries. The voice of the swamp.

It says a single word in the darkness: "Stay."

Julia turns fully to it. She does not turn back to me. Her face is conflicted — loyalty or love torn by something she fears. Then, with an abrupt shudder, her form begins to waver. In the black water between us, she splits in half, as if two identical twins parted. On one side she moves toward me, beckoning with pale hands. On the other side she drifts away into darkness.

"I'm here, Julia," I hiss-speak. But she moves in a straight line, as if the water is a road, and soon she melts into the murk. The light in her eyes snuffs out. What remains is only shadow.

My hands claw at the swamp-flower and vines holding me down, but they slip. A low gurgle echoes all around as if the dead are laughing at me. Fear spikes — no, terror — that I will be left forever between the jaws of this watery grave.

A distant thunder of footsteps pounds in my chest. My heart. It races even now in the dark bowels of the bayou. Memory surfaces: Elias calling my name at sunset, something about a promise. Yet he is not here. The guilt and dread collide — I recall leaving him behind, but I was sure he followed. Now the swamp has taken him too, or maybe I just watched him go.

Light appears. Above, faint and distant, a shimmering glow. The surface. I must reach it! But each stroke upward is slower. The swamp's pull intensifies. I feel slimy fingers curl into my hair, around my wrists. They hold fast. The water vibrates with low voices now chanting: a litany of names—some I know, some I don't. It is a congregation of the drowned.

My grandmother's voice, I think. She's calling out a name. "Let me go," I croak.

One chant becomes loudest, a raspy mutter. I recognise it: it is me. I hear them whispering: "Rowan… Rowan… Rowan…" Each repetition of my name draws me deeper. I am sinking.

The water touches my face — cold, suffocating. But suddenly I feel something warm and trembling: not water but flesh. Weak fingers, splashing around me. Hands—maybe two, maybe four—are tearing at the vines as if freeing me. I feel real movement. I hear a gasp from somewhere above me, a distant scream muffled by the waterline.

One voice fights through: "Ambrose!"

I thrash toward the sound. If Julia had left me, perhaps someone else found me. Maybe Elias, maybe the living.

The swamp's grip loosens abruptly. I surge upward, and from the blackness of the water comes a woman — not the ghostly Julia but the real Julia. She breaks the surface and carries me with her into air. My lungs catch fire as cool night air floods them. I cough and vomit brackish water. Julia's face looms above me, her eyes wild with a terror I could not have imagined.

I gasp for breath and blink at her, seeing her whole and unmistakably alive. "Julia…?" The question is a plea and a prayer.

She holds me tightly, but before I can ask how — or why — those words tumble out of her. "No time," she says. Her voice is a raw whisper. Her lips are cracked, voice hoarse. "Listen to me, Ambrose. Whatever you think happened, it's a trap. The swamp — it ate you. You're lucky to be here."

I sit up on a half-sunken log. Moonlight cuts through drifting Spanish moss above us. Julia's hair is plastered to her face. She jerks her chin at the water around my waist. "You were under," she gasps. "Under for hours. I… we pulled you out." Her eyes flick up, as if seeing shapes behind me in the darkness. "Something moved in the deep when we did. We had to hide. Please, Ambrose, do not look!"

I shake away the muddy water dripping from my arms. I try to ask if Elias came — but my voice chokes. Julia's gaze is fierce: shame, fear, something desperate. "Ambrose," she whispers, gripping my shoulders, "don't lose yourself. Remember who you are. Remember me. Promise me, promise…"

Her voice catches. Something shifts in the water again, behind me. The moss overhead rattles, though no breeze blows. I dare not turn, but I feel it — that hunger watching us. Above the water, in the air, it is less solid but still present: a foul breath, a dark pulse.

Julia is crawling away from the edge, dragging me with her toward firmer ground. Every step lifts me out of the water until suddenly my boots are on packed mud and decomposing leaves. She holds me upright. We are near a knotted banyan tree, cypress knees around our feet like bent fingers. The swamp's surface is calm behind me, as if nothing happened.

My heart is drumming. Shaking, I turn to see Julia's face lit by a beam of moonlight. The woman beside me — the living, flesh-and-blood Julia — is the same who surfaced from my nightmare. But her eyes, those eyes, are empty now too. They glide over me with a distant gleam. She is nodding, pressing my hand in hers. Warm, real, but altered.

"Don't speak," she begs, lips trembling. She disappears into the Spanish moss without another word. I call after her name, voice small. Moss and darkness answer.

I stand alone at the edge of the swamp, dripping and gasping. Behind me the water is as black and still as an open grave. Somewhere far above, an owl cries. The night is silent except for my own ragged breathing. Elias is nowhere to be seen.

Grasping at the half-hope that maybe Julia will come back, I brush my wet hair from my face. Blood — maybe mine, maybe hers — trickles down one shoulder. The swamp had a price to pay to free me.

A single lantern flickers in the distance between swamp shadows. It could be Elias with help; it could be another nightmare.

But I will not call out again.