I was frightened of my grandmother when I was a little girl. Her house lay at the edge of a foul-smelling bog filled with snakes and strange bugs during the day and alien bird cries and flickers of green swampfire at night. My mother would always reassure me that she had grown up there, and while yes, there were some dangerous critters roaming around, as long as I stayed in sight of the house and watched where I put my hands and feet, I should be fine. That eased my fears of the house and yard a bit, but it did very little to help with my fear of the woman that lived there.
It wasn’t that she was unkind, and she acted as though she was happy whenever we came to visit, but I still found her off-putting all the same. I’d like to say it was her odd ways—the small furtive movements of her thin lips as she sucked idly on hard candy, her dark eyes darting this way and that as though she was following the invisible motions of some internal metronome. Or perhaps the way she seemed to panic as it grew closer to dark, wanting to make sure that we were all inside and her “safety candles” were lit at the threshold of every door and window. But to be honest, my mother seemed to take these things in stride when we visited, and so I quickly grew used to them as well.
No, the main problem was her leg. She wore a brace on her right leg—an ancient-looking metal and leather contraption that may not have been the same one she first got as a teenager sixty years earlier, but I couldn’t have said for certain. She always wore it for support, and the soft metallic creak creak creak it made as she puttered around the house always set me on edge during the day and terrified me in the small hours of the night.
But even the brace wasn’t the worst part. It was the smell.
For as long as I knew my grandmother, she had kept her lower right calf wrapped in gauze. She was a very clean woman and would change the gauze at least twice a day, but it never stopped it from oozing a brown stain across the fresh dressings and wafting out a smell of hot decay at certain points throughout the day. Much like the swampy marsh that surrounded us, I associated that smell with death and some terrible unknown, and I was horrified by it.
I still am.
When I was eleven, I walked in on my grandmother changing her dressing. I was a little less scared of her by then, but I still froze at interrupting this secret ritual I’d never seen before. I’d also never seen what was under the bandage.
In the side of her leg was a large hole the size of a half-dollar. My eyes were transfixed to the wound, which looked old but was somehow still wet and shiny in the dim lamplight coming from her bedroom nightstand. It took a moment before I even realized she was speaking to me.
“Clarissa. It’s okay, honey. Come on in.”
Part of me wanted to retreat, to run away from that macabre scene and forget it ever happened. But another part of me seemed to sense that this was a chance, maybe my only chance, to find out more about what had happened to my grandmother. She never talked about it, and when I asked my mother, she would just awkwardly change the subject or say all I needed to worry about was minding my granny when we were near the swamp.
So I went on in and sat in a chair opposite where she was applying a fresh bandage. She worked with the speed and easy of ingrained routine, and within a few moments she was finished and looking at me again with a small smile.
“Wondering what that place on my leg is?”
I nodded with a child’s honesty and she gave a laugh. “I don’t blame you, honey. It’s funny looking, ain’t it?”
I leaned forward a little, wrinkling my nose at the still dissipating rotten smell. “Are you sick?”
Her smile faltered a little before she shook her head slowly. “No, not as such. I’m old…and I guess that’s a form of illness. Time’s a disease they’ll never cure, my grandmomma used to say. But no, I’m all right.”
“Why do you have a big hole in your leg then?”
I saw her glance toward the door before her eyes found me again. Her voice was slightly lower when she spoke next. “That was from something out of the swamp. The dark. Folks around here call it Marrowtooth.” She paused a moment, giving me a considering look. “You sure you want to hear this? You can be a skittish little thing at times, and I don’t want no trouble with your mama if you can’t sleep tonight.”
My curiosity piqued, I nodded and asked her to go on.
When I was young, just few years older than you, I went caterwauling with some friends of mine. That’s what we called it when we went to wandering the swamps looking for something to get into. We had headed out in the early afternoon, and all three of us were raised here. We knew these lands better that most anyone. But somehow, on that day, we got lost.
That by itself isn’t overly remarkable. Swamps are tricky places. Lots of places look the same, and the same place can look different depending on the weather and the time of day. If you roam the swamps all time, you’re going to wind up lost once in a while. The main thing is that you don’t panic. You either orient yourself or backtrack until you find something that you recognize.
I was with my best two friends at the time, Jesse and Orry, and though Jesse had only lived in the area a few years, she recognized we were lost before me or Orry did. She said the trees looked funny, and she was right. I couldn’t rightly say what kinds of tree they even were, other than that they were twisted and sinister, with pale white bark and bright purple berries that I had never seen before. Orry was usually full of beans when it came to stuff like this, puffing up his chest and making jokes to impress his best friends who also happened to be the only girls his age he wasn’t awkward around. But he wasn’t laughing now. Instead he just grabbed our hands as we turned and started heading back the way we came. We all knew something was wrong, but we didn’t want to say it, as though speaking it would give it more power. Instead, we just wanted to follow our trail back home.
Tracks are a tricky thing in the swamp. They can fill in if the ground is too wet or not take at all if the ground is too hard or uneven. It took us a minute, but we found them—Jesse’s cowboy boots, Orry’s sneakers, and my old workboots I had saved up for the summer before. The sun was starting to go down, but we were making good progress and every time we’d hit a patch without any tracks, one of us would spot some sign or recognize some landmark. Within a few feet of that, we’d pick up our old trail again.
We had been backtracking for probably ten minutes when Jesse froze. “What’s that?” I looked to where she was pointing, farther up the path we were taking. At first I didn’t see anything, but when I heard Orry let out a curse, I eased forward and looked again.
It was our tracks. But it wasn’t just our tracks. Because instead of three sets of footprints, there were four.
I knew the tread of our shoes, but the other tracks didn’t seem to have been made with shoes at all. Instead they looked like the marks left by bare feet, only feet that were strange—long and narrow and ending in spindly toes that seemed to sink deep into the ground. I sucked in a breath and saw my own fear mirrored in their faces. Me and Orry said it at the same time.
“Marrowtooth.”
There was an old legend around these parts of a coven of witches that used to roam the swamps late at night. They made wicked deals with old things that lived in the rotten heart of this place. One of those things was Marrowtooth. I never knew what he was supposed to be exactly—some said a demon, but I don’t know if that’s right. But if his origins and nature were unclear, his habit was not.
The stories went that if you got caught off by yourself in the dark parts of the swamp, you might find yourself being followed by Marrowtooth. He’d follow you for awhile, tricking you and getting you more turned around. And once he grew bored, he would fall on you and drain you dry.
The reason he was called Marrowtooth was because of how he looked and what he did. His head was slick like that silly putty you used to play with. Bare slits for eyes and a nose. But his mouth…well, his mouth was wide and strong, and when he opened it, you saw a single thick tooth coming down like a reaper’s scythe.
When I was a little girl, Marshall Reaux was found just a few hundred feet from his house after having been lost for days. He had a hole in his back and all the marrow had been sucked from his bones. I overheard my papa say once that his bones had just crumbled like powder when they moved the body. Now my father, like most, could be prone to fanciful tales, but he hadn’t been fanciful when he was saying that. In fact, it was one of the few times I remember ever hearing him sound scared.
As the three of us looked around the forest for whatever had been following us, I understood that fear. I had never been much for ghosts and goblins, but I had seen the trees and the tracks and I knew something was wrong. There was an electric warning on my skin and a taste in my mouth like I was sucking on a penny.
Something was coming.
We started moving again at a quicker pace, our eyes now torn between the path back and the trees around us. Jesse wasn’t as familiar with the stories as me and Orry, but she had heard of Marrowtooth and knew enough to be scared when her best friends were. Orry was a bit on the heavy side and was getting winded as we went, but he was still whispering that we needed to hurry, that the tracks must have left ours at some point, that this thing could be anywhere…
And then Orry was just gone.
We looked for him for what felt like an hour, but I have a feeling it was much less. Me and Jesse took turns calling out to him, and we were never more than ten feet from each other the whole time. I was terrified, but I was also determined that we weren’t leaving until we found him. Orry had been my best friend as long as I could remember, and I kept telling myself he must have stepped into a bog or fell out somewhere and we were just missing him. But then I realized I was searching alone now, because Jesse was gone too.
I ran then, any idea of following tracks or searching for my friends lost in my fear. I had seen a fox run down a rabbit once and I had always wondered what that tiny, screaming thing must have been thinking as it ran for its life. After that day in the swamp, I didn’t have to wonder no more.
I cried a little when I broke through some brush and saw I was only half a mile from home. I found my mama and told her what happened, and the next three days the whole community was out searching for Orry and Jesse, but they never saw any sign of them. I wanted to go back out and help search, but I was terrified to leave the house.
It was two weeks before Papa said I had to go to town. He was busy around the house and mama had been down with sickness for the last two days. It was hard going outside, and I dreaded the long walk into town, but at least it was a bright day and my route took me away from the swamp. The trip was uneventful, and I was actually feeling better by the time I made it back.
It was as I was about to climb the front steps that I heard a voice coming from under the house.
“Libby?”
I stopped mid-step, my pulse pounding. The voice was coarse and strange, but I still recognized it as Jesse’s. Feeling a thrill of happy relief, I sat down the bag I had and kneeled down to see better. “Jesse? Is that you?”
“Libby…? I’m so hot, Libby. So hot and so hungry…”
I could see dim outlines of a shadow shifting in the darkness under the house. I didn’t understand why she was under there, but maybe she had a fever and was out of her head. My first thought was to go get help, but when I went to stand, she called out to me again.
“Please…please don’t go. Help me. I hurt. My mouth hurts. I hurt all over and I’ve been alone so long.”
Crouching back down, I felt a warning buzz in the back of my head, but I told it to be quiet. This was my friend Jesse, who was likely terrified and half-starved to death. So I’d help her out from under the house and then get her someone once she saw I wasn’t leaving her.
Reaching my arms forward, I motioned for her to come closer. I didn’t like going under the house, and that dim bell of alarm kept sounding louder whenever I thought about moving forward. Still, she seemed to be coming closer. I could hear shuffling sounds in the dirt and the shadow seemed to be growing larger.
I couldn’t scream when she suddenly grabbed my ankles and started pulling me into the dark under the house. Landing on my back had knocked the air out of me. I had a moment where I felt like I was drowning, getting pulled down into some dark pit of quicksand, and then I managed kick her off one of my feet as I finally let out a thin, gasping yell.
I retreated half a foot, but then she was pulling me back in, her hands like iron on my lower legs, and then my thighs as she drug me deeper into the shadowy belly of the house. I let out a more full-throated scream, but it turned into a shriek as I felt my right leg explode in pain. There was a moment where I felt like everything was kind of…collapsing in on itself…and then I was free.
Papa had heard me and pulled me free. A moment later, Mama, sick as she was, was joining him and they were pulling Jesse out from under the house. She yelled and thrashed, and I barely got a glimpse of her, but she didn’t look like Jesse any more. Not like Jesse much at all.
They locked her in the workshed behind the house and then carried me to the doctor in town. I was in the hospital for two weeks, and when I got back, there was only a pile of ashes where the workshed had been. I asked them what happened, but they would only say that it had been taken care of.
A few months passed. I couldn’t walk good without a leg brace now, and the wound never seemed to fully heal, but otherwise I was doing all right. Then I started to have the strange dreams. I’d be wandering the swamps, my fingers long and pale to the point of almost being able to see the moonlight through them as I wound my way between twisted trees of stark white. I’d be at the dinner table when my head would begin to throb. I’d close my eyes at the pain, only to open them at the clinking sounds I was hearing in front of me. It was bloody teeth, my bloody teeth, tumbling from my mouth onto the plate below.
As the dreams got worse, they carried me to the doctor. When that didn’t help, they carried me to the old woman who had delivered me and my mama before me. She was the one who told us about the candles and how they could stop the bad dreams. Stop anything else bad from happening.
And they worked. They always have. I’ve always slept well, had a full life with a wonderful husband and two sweet children, and now a sweet granddaughter. But that…well, that’s what happened to my leg.
Looking back, I’m amazed I wasn’t more horrified at everything she had just told me, particularly when I felt sure she was telling me the truth, at least as she believed it to be. Instead, I just took it all in and then asked a single question.
“Why did you stay here if all that happened to you?”
She gave an embarrassed smile and shrugged. “It just never felt right, you know? I tried going away one time, but after a month I started getting sick, even still using safety candles every night. I finally came back here, and by the next morning I was fine as paint. I don’t know if it’s because of my leg or not, but I don’t think I’m meant much for living anywhere else but here.” Just then she looked up as she heard my mother’s footsteps approaching. Giving me a sly wink, she whispered. “Let’s keep our little talk just between us, okay?”
I nodded, and in the twenty years since I’ve never talked about it to anyone.
But then six months ago my grandmother fell and broke her hip. She was in her nineties by then, and while we called her trip to the nursing home “rehab”, we all knew she wasn’t coming out again. Still, she was in good spirits over all, and once we briefed the night staff on her routine of having a candle lit at the door and window of her room, my grandmother seemed content.
I lived farther away by then, and it was three months before I made it back to see her. I had intended on arriving by mid-afternoon, but it was well after dark before I entered the nursing home and found my way to her room.
The room was dark and silent, the only sound the light noise of rain starting to hit the window outside as I stepped further in. Looking around, I fumbled for a light without success as I tried to distinguish the shadows in front of me by the dim ambient light of the hallway. There was the bed, but where was she? For that matter, where were her candles?
creak creak
I looked around at the noise. “Grandma? You here?”
Nothing. It wasn’t a large room, but it felt massive and oppressive in the dark, almost like I was back…
creak creak creak
The pain as she bit down on my neck felt like it was going to split me apart, and I would have collapsed then if not for her strong, long hands wrapped around my arms and holding me upright. I distantly heard a woman yell somewhere behind me, and then I was falling for what felt like a very long time.
When I awoke, three days had passed. My grandmother had apparently had “an episode” and attacked me before fleeing out into the stormy night. As of then, or now, she hasn’t been found.
I still am taking rounds of antibiotics and steroids, but the wound on my shoulder just doesn’t seem to want to heal. They say I can have plastic surgery after a few more months, but honestly before last week the pain flare-ups were way more concerning than having a weird hole near my collarbone. The pain was crippling at first, and while medicine took the edge off, it wasn’t until last week that it began to fade out to something more manageable.
The same time the strange dreams began. At first I thought it was a new side effect of the meds, and then I thought it was just a precursor to the flu I seem to be getting. I've tried more medicine and rest, and even lighting candles at every door and window, but I keep getting worse.
When I looked in the mirror this morning, I barely recognized the woman looking back. Pale and gaunt, with thin, white lips that moved restlessly as I looked on in growing horror. There was something in my mouth, and as I opened wide I half-expected to see a piece of the hard candy my grandmother loved resting on my tongue. But it wasn't.
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