Rogue time-traveler works to discover more about a developing conspiracy on her home planet while trying to keep Earth safe.
So hey, guys. How was your week?
Hi blood soaked followers!
I’ve changed the first chapter to better set up the area our story is set in, comments more than welcome.
DEVIL’S SWAMP, LOUISIANA – Oct 1st, 1893
Devil’s Swamp lay ten miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Very few people passed through it and even fewer visited. The rancid stench from the methane gas bubbling up from the rotting vegetation was one thing; but the desolate swamplands also wore an eerie cloak of melancholy on even the brightest of days. The source of its name, if not its atmosphere stretched back through the centuries to 1776.
A German emigrant had cleared some land alongside the bayou, felling cypress trees and scrub. The next day he took a wrong turn into another bayou in his canoe only to see what looked like the exact same land he had cleared, including the specific Cypress trees he knew he had felled, back up again, untouched by his axe. Not knowing he had taken a wrong turn he believed an evil spirit had caused everything to be returned to it’s original state in a single night…he fled the area never to return, and since then it had been known as Devil’s Swamp.
Tongues of lightning flickered from the sullen clouds above, bleaching the dark swamp waters either side of a muddy track; throwing harsh shadows across the desolate landscape. Mangrove roots shuddered in the howling wind, grey tentacles writhing in pain. Through torrents of rain, a black coach with a steamer chest roped to its back, raced ahead of the approaching storm.
The pale, frightened faces of five women stared out from the coach into the gloom. The driver whipped the horses with grim desperation. His face a ravaged mask framing coal black eyes. A studded leather collar barely covered the livid rope burns around his throat.
Suddenly the wind and rain ceased. They were in the eye of the storm. The coach shuddered to a halt. A skein of cloud tore across the moon, revealing a ghostly silvered landscape. Dark swamp waters shimmering in its pale light. Beneath the banks of the track, something moved. The hooded eyes of an alligator stared balefully into the night. The horses snorted, eyes rolling with fear. The alligator sank back below the surface.
Inside the coach, the weary women huddled together; it looks like they’ve been to hell and back. They wear identical red scarves around their necks. One of them, blonde haired with an ethereal beauty, looks out of the coach window. A sudden gust of wind rips the scarf from her neck. Sends it floating up into the sky, a blood red wound cutting into the dark clouds above.
The driver climbs down from the carriage -- reaches into his jacket and pulls out a pistol. He heads purposefully towards the door of the coach. The blonde girl starts to scream. Her voice snuffed out as a wall of grey water engulfs them. Coach and horses cease to exist as the maelstrom sweeps everything before it.
Gary Whitta