Lucid Marsh is the boggy wet land just south of Charlottesville and east of Christian Light Road. The place has a reputation of being quite easy to get lost in, as well as a couple of old legends about a certain “moonlight fairy,” that supposedly leads the more disoriented folks into sinkholes. I doubt any of those rumors are true, but regardless the marsh is home to glowing swamp gas and a particular breed of giant moth that showed up seventy years back. It’s also where most of the town’s drainage ends up.
So here’s what happened; almost a month after I thought the whole Harlequin thing was over and done with, this outdoorsy guy came into the Broken Window bitching about how the Sheriff is a lazy prick and tried to round up a pose to help find his friend. Terry, being an outgoing and generally empathetic man went ahead and asked him what happened. As the guy apparently told Terry, he and his buddy “Bud” Huston were out “catfisting” in the marsh, when Bud, while reaching his arm down into a murky hole, suddenly started screaming before being dragged under the shallow water, only to reemerge fifty or so feet away. When Jake (the outdoorsy guy in the bar) finally got over to him to help him up, he saw that Buds ears and nose were both bleeding. Bud, mumbling to himself incoherently, tried to bite Jake before running franticly away into the deeper part of Lucid Marsh.
Billie and I later went out to the marsh with Jake to see what we could find. We came home empty handed. A waste of an afternoon and a good pair of shoes in my opinion.
It wasn’t long after that that other people started to disappear. Not a whole lot mind you, maybe two or three, but it was enough to get the town talking again about those weird lights in the sky and the unexplained aneurysms. Oh right, the lights… yeah, it sounds cool but the truth is that it will scare the absolute piss out of you. They didn’t show up all that much, or for all that long either, maybe once every couple of weeks for a second or two, but never more. However, I have personally seen them twice. The first time was… unexpected to say the least, but the second time was something else entirely. Walking home one starless night after work, I started to get this feeling that something was sneaking up behind me. When I turned around though, the feeling didn’t go away. It was like no matter which way I was facing there was always something just behind me, ducking out of sight the moment I changed direction. It was about when I started to get dizzy from spinning around so many times that I heard this low rumbling coming from above. It wasn’t a thunderclap so much as it was a foghorn, so deep and low that I didn’t hear it so much as felt it. I looked up, and the sky blazed in a yellow-green flash of a dozen or so orbs, pulsating and circling around each other, disappearing and reappearing into and out of the clouds.
Then they were gone. I remember standing there in the middle of the street, covered in sweat and shaking. It had to have been at least ninety degrees that night, but I can’t think of any other instance where I felt so cold.
