And just that fast, it was all over.
He stood up, shaking. The airboat rocked, rocked, rocked, a cradle on the deep. He found the light and turned it on the beast at the chain's end.
The lizardman gave a soft gasp, his mouth dry as Sahara dust.
The gator had been diminished. More than half of it had been torn away, guts and gore floating in the water around the ragged wound.
Bitten in two, the lizardman thought. A surge of pure horror coursed through him. Bitten by something from underneath . . .
"Good God A'mighty," he whispered, and he let go of the rope.
The severed gator floated on the end of the chain, its insides still streaming out in sluggish tides. On the fallen tree trunk, the crabs were scrambling over each other, smelling a feast.
The lizardman realized that he was a long way from home.
Something was coming. He heard it pushing the reeds aside on the edge of the deep channel. Heard the swirl of water around its body, and the suction of mud on its claws. Old Pope. Old Pope, risen from the heart of the swamp. Old Pope, mean and hungry. Coming back for the rest of the gator, caught on the chain's end.
The lizardman had often heard of people bleating with fear. He'd never known what that would've sounded like, until that moment. It was, indeed, a bleat, like a stunned sheep about to get its head smashed with a mallet.
He turned toward the airboat's engine, hit the starter switch, and reached for the throttle beside his seat. As soon as he gave the engine some gas, the rotor crashed against the frame, bent by the force of Old Pope on the chain, and it threw a pinwheel of sparks and crumpled like wet cardboard. The airboat spun around in a tight circle before the engine blew, the flashlight flying out of the lizardman's grip as he fell onto the rough hides of the dead gators. He looked up, slime dripping from his chin, as something large and dark rose up against the night.
Swamp water streamed from Old Pope's armored sides. The lizardman could see that Laney had been right: roots, rushes, and weeds grew from the ebony-green plates, and not only that but snakes slithered through the cracks and crabs scuttled over the leathery edges. The lizardman recoiled, but he could only go to the boat's other side and that wasn't nearly far enough. He was on his knees, like a penitent praying for mercy at Old Pope's altar. He saw something---a scaled claw, a tendril, something---slither down and grasp the snared gator's head. Old Pope began to pull the mangled carcass up out of the water, and as the chain snapped tight again the entire airboat started to overturn.
In another few seconds the lizardman would be up to his neck in deep shit. He knew that, and knew he was a dead man one way or the other. He reached out, found the shotgun, and gave Old Pope the blast of a barrel.
In the flare of orange light he saw gleaming teeth, yellow eyes set under a massive brow where a hundred crabs clung like barnacles to an ancient wharf. Old Pope gave a deep grunt like the lowest note of a church organ, and that was when the lizardman knew.
Old Pope was not an alligator.
The severed gator slid into Old Pope's maw, and the teeth crunched down. The airboat overturned as the lizardman fired his second barrel, then he was in the churning water with the monster less than fifteen feet away.
His boots sank into mud. The flashlight, waterproof, bobbed in the turbulence. Snakes writhed around Old Pope's jaws as the beast ate, and the lizardman floundered for the submerged treetrunk.
Something oozing and rubbery wound around his chest. He screamed, being lifted out of the water. An object was beside him; he grabbed it, held tight, and knew Old Pope had decided on a second meal. He smelled the thing's breath---blood and swamp---as he was being carried toward the gaping mouth, and he heard the hissing of snakes that clung to the thing's gnarled maw. The lizardman saw the shine of an eye, catching the crescent moon. He jabbed at it with the object in his grip, and the bangstick exploded.
The eye burst into gelatinous muck, its inside showering the lizardman. At the same time, Old Pope roared with a noise like the clap of doom, and whatever held the lizardman went slack. He fell, head over heels, into the water. Came up again, choking and spitting, and half-ran, half-swam for his life through the swaying rushes.
Old Pope was coming after him. He didn't need an eye in the back of his head to tell him that. Whatever the thing was, it wanted his meat and bones. He heard the sound of it coming, the awful suction of water and mud as it advanced. The lizardman felt panic and insanity, two Siamese twins, whirl through his mind. Dance a little dance! Prance a little prance! He stepped in a hole, went in over his head, fought to the surface again and threw himself forward. Old Pope---swamp-god, king of the gators---was almost upon him, like a moving cliff, and snakes and crabs rained down around the lizardman.
He scrambled up, out of the reeds onto a mudflat. Hot breath washed over him, and then that rubbery thing whipped around his waist like a frog's tongue. It squeezed the breath out of him, lifted him off his feet, and began to reel him toward the glistening, saw-edged jaws.
The lizardman had not gotten to be sixty-four years old by playing dead. He fought against the oozing, sticky thing that had him. He beat at it with his fists, kicked and hollered and thrashed. He raged against it, and Old Pope held him tight and watched him with its single eye like a man might watch an insect struggling on flypaper.
It had him. It knew it had him. The lizardman wasn't far gone enough in the head not to know that. But still he beat at the beast, still he hollered and raged, and still Old Pope inspected him, its massive gnarly head tilted slightly to one side and water running through the cracks on the skull-deep ugly of its face.
Lightning flashed. There was no thunder. The lizardman heard a high whine. His skin prickled and writhed with electricity, and his wet hair danced.
Old Pope grunted again. Another surge of lightning, closer this time.
The abomination dropped him, and the lizardman plopped down onto the mudflat like an unwanted scrap.
Old Pope lifted its head, contemplating the stars.
The crescent moon was falling to earth, in a slow spiral. The lizardman watched it, his heart pounding and his arms and legs encased in mire. The crescent moon shot streaks of blue lightning, like fingers probing the swamp's folds. Slowly, slowly, it neared Old Pope, and the monster lifted claw-fingered arms and called in a voice that wailed over the wilderness like a thousand trumpets.
It was the voice, the lizardman thought, of something lost and far from home.
The crescent moon---no, not a moon, but a huge shape that sparkled metallic---was now almost overhead. It hovered, with a high whine, above the creature that had been known as Old Pope, and the lizardman watched lightning dance around the beast like homecoming banners.
Dance a little dance, he thought. Prance a little prance.
Old Pope rumbled. The craggy body shivered, like a child about to go to a birthday party. And then Old Pope's head turned, and the single eye fixed on the lizardman.
Electricity flowed through the lizardman's hair, through his bones and sinews. He was plugged into a socket of unknown design, his fillings sparking pain in his mouth. He took a breath as the Old Pope stepped toward him, one grotesque, ancient leg sinking into the earth.
Something---a tendril, a third arm, whatever---came out of Old Pope's chest. It scooped up mud and painted the lizardman's face with it, like a tribal marking. The touch was sticky and rough, and it left the smell of the swamp and reptilian things in the lizardman's nostrils.
Then Old Pope lifted its face toward the metallic crescent, and raised its arms. Lightning flared and crackled across the mudflats. Birds screeched in their trees, and the voices of gators throbbed.
The lizardman blinked, his eyes narrowed against the glare.