the bedraggled thing, humanoid, weed-drowned and waterlogged, that rose from the fens like a growth, its too-long arms ending in a ragged, jagged tangle of branchlike fingers that held his foot. The stench of something rotten on the bottom of a pond was all around him, and the joyless laughter was all around him too as the thing dragged him sliding on his back, inexorably down into the marsh. Something caught his collar and pulled back with startling force against the creature’s grip. The fen-monster shrieked with rage, its open mouth revealing an eel’s chaos of needle teeth, white in the
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