Before the archaeologists contacted you—a cryptozoologist—they initially reached out to an entomologist, since the first creature appeared to be, mostly, an insect. The peat bog in Sumpit had brined an unusual body, preserving the chitin wings and exoskeleton just as well as similar anaerobic environments in other parts of the world conserved hair, skin, primitive wooden tools, and leather.
Sumpit, a sprawl of swampland, is accessible by dirt roads that your GPS loses signal on. The area is colloquially referred to by locals as Some Pit or Summit. It’s a swampy basin that retains runoff from the surrounding farmland. Though its epicenter is the point located at the lowest altitude for hundreds of miles, massive clouds of bog gas sometimes flash in the sky, contributing to an illusion of mountain peaks of Olympic proportions.
There aren’t many forks diverging the road, so you feel confident rolling the rental car forward. You keep your eyes peeled for the tour company welcome center, anticipating its emergence behind every copse of tupelo trees. Herons pay you little attention as they wade through duckweed, stepping around cypress knees that jut from the water like woody stalagmites.
At a decrepit building, you cut the engine in the mostly empty lot and shove all your supplies into your pack. A planeboat bobs atop the water, tethered at a half-sunken dock. Swamp grass clutches the rusted metal sledge. The propeller blades shriek in metallic tongues as you and others step onto the flat-bottomed craft and arrange your gear. You adjust the strap digging into your neck, pop open your camera’s shutter, fiddle with the aperture, snap.
A scaley tail flicks away into the reeds, presumably a dinosaur of an alligator startled at your flash. The planeboat jolts forward, slicing through the murky water. Skeletal tendrils of mangrove roots brush the sides of the swamp boat, clawing the cage that houses the air propeller. High in the canopy above, animals shriek and shake branches. You try taking another photo, but darkness is quickly falling.
When your camera will be found, weeks later, and the film developed, a stranger will find the image blurred, an unrecognizable smudge of sallow moon and shadowed tree limb.
As the boat rocks over the marsh, you survey the other expedition members. One person’s pack bulges with climbing equipment. Someone else shoulders a rifle. Usually when you’re called away from the university out into the field, there’s a shoddy camera crew filming a docuseries. You’re often accompanied by other “special” guests: psychic mediums and superstitious fanatic conspiracy theorists, hapless fools who swear they were abducted by aliens, see ghosts, or encountered bigfoot.
They’re the types who believe the evil government is keeping a lid on all things supernatural, gaslighting the general populace for their own sick amusement. To you, cryptozoology has always been a social science, a study in human psychology, history, and local cultures instead of the occult.
Insects with humming wings hover over the rippling surface of the water, reminding you why you were called down to Sumpit, to identify bodies, among them a pickled corpse that’s half man, half bug.
The propeller slows, and the boat stalls, drifting listless into a tangle of vegetation at the swamp’s muddy bank. A member of the archeological dig team emerges from a void, pushing back a curtain of Spanish moss. Their flashlight’s jarringly white beam temporarily blinds you. You shield your eyes with a hand and jump out of the boat. Silty water washes into your rubber boots, swelling the fibers of your socks.
A trail of torchlight winds over the spongy moss-padded ground, ending in a clearing at the dried-up bog where peat extractors uncovered the first body, and more anomalous corpses soon after. Hidden in a moldering log cabin is an additional development that no one could plainly explain over email.
The tiki torches provide sufficient illumination, allowing you to snap a photo of the shack. This winning shot features the investigators meandering restlessly, making the porch steps creak. Behind them, the broken door gapes. A hum emanates from the depths of its darkness, a distant, alluring song you’re imagining in your exhaustion.
You’re here to examine and positively identify mothman and friends, but, strangely, the urge to explore the house is more compelling.
“And all around the world,” one of the archaeologists says, “ancient cultures appear to have been aware of the conserving properties of peat bogs and utilized them as burial grounds, which is evidenced by the variety of ages and ceremonial objects usually discovered with bodies. Therefore, we can speculate that these creatures, who once lived here—”
“Who lives there?” you blurt, jutting your thumb at the structure that looms, lingers.
The man flinches. “Legally, the building is abandoned. The property’s on national park land, but there’s evidence some squatters were living there: cigarette butts, sleeping bags, plastic bottles. Anyway, you’re the . . . ?”
“Cryptozoologist.”
A bobbing nod. “Ah, then right this way.”
Scientific advancement doesn’t wait on trivialities like tomorrow and daylight. Kneeling by an obscured lumpy figure, the archeologist with salt-and-pepper hair pulls back the plastic tarp.
During the Carboniferous period, there were Arthropleura as large as cars. Although not as massive as those vehicle-sized millipedes, the late Permian era boasted the prehistoric insect Meganeuropsis permiana, a dragonfly with a three-foot wingspan. What’s left of the wings of the creature in front of you implies they were once even larger.
“Some kind of ritual?” you mutter to yourself, knowing that can’t be right.
Body modifications are a practice practically as old as mankind, and civilizations have always participated in ritual dress. For example, you recall the mummified corpse of Otzi the Iceman, dated to have been from 3300 BCE, which was covered in more than sixty crude charcoal tattoos speculated to have been for therapeutic intent, similar to acupuncture, to treat spinal deterioration. Other ancient cultures tattooed symbols of virility onto the body, using piercings to protect against evil spirits. Colorants, particularly red paint on Stone Age bodies, suggests the presence of ritual in their cultures—your mind is wandering, running through familiar facts to provide a sense of grounding.
And there’s a copious amount of evidence that this corpse in front of you isn’t a human body at all. Take the head alone, its unusual facial structure: wide-set, bugging eyes and a small, sloping beak in place of a nose. This creature wasn’t a member of any species branching off of the H. sapiens tree. The samples analyzed in the lab were the same polysaccharide polymer that makes up the shells of various arthropods and cell walls of fungi.
You’re not going to call this creature mothman, at least not until the check to your institution clears and the documentary producer has you seated comfortably in a greenroom. Still, something noteworthy reclines in front of you, limp with death but not loose limbed, stiffened, hardened chitin. This is a discovery undocumented except on a few cellphones and government cameras, and, strangely, you don’t feel like taking pictures.
“There was a missing persons case,” you prompt.
On your way in, you noted that Sumpit has become a hub of activity, from the park rangers holding back the press at the traffic stops, to the federal investigators whispering into their walkie talkies at the log cabin, to the senior members of the archeological dig team instructing their fresh-faced students.
“There were some cadaver dogs out looking for a beauty pageant runner-up,” the archeologist explains with a flippant wave. “Her friends lost contact with her near the trailhead, just past the restrooms. Of course, we quickly ruled out any chance of these bodies being that young woman.”
Parallel rows of tarps stretch across the clearing, rolling hills of blue, yellow, and clouded white plastic sheets. You finally take a wide shot, just to capture the vastness of the burial ground.
“Mx.—, please look at this one,” an intern interjects, redirecting your attention with giddiness. Material rustles as a semi-opaque sheet is torn off another corpse. Unlike the hardened shell covering the first body, matted hair—no, fur—coats this one. The college student helpfully unravels a paper tape measurer, but you don’t need a ruler to estimate three yards. The elongated limbs hang like an orangutan’s.
Under the other tarps, you expect to encounter more cryptids, a wolfman’s snout and mud-crusted canines, goat’s horns on a devil’s body with wings and cloven hooves. This has got to be some psychopath’s sick prank, right? Someone was dismembering medical cadavers and reassembling them with animal parts, Victor Frankenstein style.
No, the dated samples already confirmed the ages of the bog bodies and their strange components. Some of the complete corpses were thousands of years old . . . others more recent. The team is only looking for your seal of approval as an expert in your field. And if this isn’t your area of expertise, could it be anyone’s, really?
You could positively identify the bodies now and drive back tonight, or say no thank you, nothing conclusive (lie), and leave. Your flight out isn’t for a few days, but there’s a small town, quaint with a general store and some historic sites. Maybe you could linger for a while, get a drink at the soda fountain, roleplay that you’re living a few decades in the past and not a few centuries, in whatever time marshmen and their ilk ruled the swamp.
“And in that shack there’s . . . ?” you ask. You expect: vape cartridges and beer cans and propane canisters and That’s on a need-to-know basis.
“The pit,” the bearded archaeologist says, just as the excited student with braided hair blurts, “The portal.”
“A gate,” the archaeology professor explains flatly.
“A carved-out cavern, discovered under a mildewed dresser and some pried-up floorboards.”
Spelunkers wearing helmets and climbing harnesses waddle toward the cabin carrying coils of rope.
You should go, you should—
“Go with them,” you say, your voice sounding disconnected, echoing in your ears like the rush of ocean waves. “I should go with them, in case they encounter anything down there.”
Perhaps you should have asked more questions: whose human hands built a house on top of this pit in the earth?—Some relationship between the cryptids and humans?—Suggestion of superior intelligence or worship? What was the age of the earliest body found, again?—When did the use of the burial ground end?—Suggestion of an end of species, migration, change in cultural practice, or a continuing civilization stretching from antiquity to modern times? How many people go missing each year in Sumpit?—Does that really even matter?
You step over crunching detritus inside the cabin, moving through shadows into deeper darkness, an abyssal portal in the damp earth.
The last time you played hide-and-seek as a child you got stuck in the crawlspace, your mother will say when she cries on TV, pleading for the search for your body to continue.
You’re claustrophobic, so why would you hook your carbineer to the metal cable and repel down into hell?
Your poor mother doesn’t realize how large that gaping maw is, has to be, to accommodate creatures of that size. She hasn’t heard the siren humming that thrums underground, calling out in invitation. A draft snakes up, chilling the sweat on your skin and the slick substance coating the earthen walls.
The cable snaps ten minutes into your slow descent, and the team above loses contact as you sink into that place where monsters with too many eyes live, slinking out from their subterranean cities only to seek bridegrooms and vittles and honor their dead.
Did you find that missing woman, runner-up Miss Peach Blossom? Your shaky photos in the darkness are mostly indiscernible. Nice to meet you, by the way. I’m the forensic pathologist, asking questions to your gnawed over bones. For your information, they didn’t have their servants bury you in the bog, just threw you out like the trash with your smashed up camera.
The government filled the pit to try and cover all this up—I thought you would get a kick out of that, conspiracy theory skeptic that you were. The problem is that this swamp is full of peep-hole knots in trees, and every time they flood one cavern with gravel and soil, the marshmen excavate a new one, somewhere else in Sumpit.
Sara Omer is a SWANA-American writer with prose and poetry published/forthcoming in PodCastle, Apparition Lit, Small Wonders, Archive of the Odd, and others. She lives in the woods outside of Atlanta with an old cat. You can find her on most social media sites as @omersarae or at sara-omer.blogspot.com.