The Swamp Thing

Something nasty followed the men slowly up the Sandy Gate road. It had no true name but we can call it the Swamp Thing. The Swamp Thing was a long time resident of the Autumn Country and a lesser known member of the Halloween horde. It lived in the warm depths of the forest where it swallowed careless travellers whole and reduced them to mulch. It was the essence of squelch and it lived off anything that rotted away. And if victims weren't rotting away before they met the Swamp Thing then they usually were soon after. The Swamp Thing wasn't a fussy eater - rotten fruit and rotting flesh were all the same to the Swamp Thing - food. The Swamp Thing thrived on the heat at the heart of compost heaps. It loved sucking bogs warmed by hot Autumn sunlight, the stench of night soil from unsanitary cess pits and the sweet sickness of overripe middens. Its breath carried the vile aroma of putrefaction and its metabolism ran on decay and marsh gas. Clouds of flies followed it, wherever it went and mould and fungi grew from the weeping sores of its body.

The Swamp Thing had an ancient enemy and that enemy was frost. Frost hardened the squishy edges of marshes where the Swamp Thing lay in wait for prey and helped to keep them out of its deadly clutches. Even worse, frost slowed the very processes of decay, cooling the warm heart that kept the Swamp Thing alive. Frost preserved things and in the eye of the Swamp Thing, preservation was a very bad thing indeed. Preservation was a swear word to the Swamp Thing in the same way that the name of the Swamp Thing would have been a swear word to every other living thing, if only it had had a name.

— Extract from chapter 18 of the Autumn Country