The Mudborn Toll

The day my sister insisted on dragging me to the old chapel ruins in the swamp, the sky was the color of a bruise. It was November 2019, three days before my twenty-ninth birthday, and she had gotten it into her head that a ‘spiritual cleanse’ in the haunted moss-fields would do us good. She had always been the believer, the one who carried sage and crystals, while I carried skepticism like a shield. But I agreed, mostly because she’d just gone through a bad breakup and I figured a little swamp air might help her clear her head.

We parked at the edge of the conservation area, a gravel lot that smelled of wet dog and decaying leaves. The ranger had warned us about the trails being slick, but my sister waved him off with a smile. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said, her voice too bright. We started down the path, our boots sinking slightly into the mud. The trees were bare, their branches like grasping fingers against the leaden sky. The only sound was the squelch of our steps and the distant call of a crow.

About half a mile in, the air changed. It grew thicker, cooler, as if we’d walked into a refrigerator that had been left open. My sister stopped, her hand going to the small silver pendant she always wore. ‘Do you feel that?’ she asked. I shook my head, but I was lying. There was a pressure, like being underwater, and a faint smell of rot and wet earth that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I pulled out my phone to check the time, but the screen flickered and went black. My watch, too, had stopped at 2:17 PM.

Ahead, the ruins of the chapel rose from the moss like a broken tooth. It had been abandoned for decades, its roof collapsed, its walls covered in green and black. We picked our way toward it, and as we stepped through the gaping doorway, the silence became profound. No birds, no wind, just the sound of our breathing. My sister lit a candle she’d brought, and the flame bent sideways, as if something had exhaled. She whispered a prayer, and the flame steadied.

I pulled out my digital recorder, a cheap thing I’d bought on a whim, and pressed record. The red light blinked. We walked around the ruins, taking pictures of the carved stones and the faded fresco of a saint, his eyes scratched out. In one of the photos, I later saw a pale, hunched figure in the corner, its head too large for its body. I hadn’t seen it when I took the shot. My sister’s lip trembled when I showed her, and she said we should leave. But I wanted to stay; I was intrigued, against my better judgment.

The rain began as a drizzle, then turned into a heavy downpour. We took shelter under a crumbling arch, and the water poured off the edges like a curtain. As we waited, the temperature dropped. My breath fogged, and I saw my sister’s too. But then I noticed that the fog from my breath was forming into a shape, a rough outline of a face right in front of me. It hovered there for a second, then dissipated. My sister saw it too. She grabbed my arm, her nails digging in. ‘We need to go NOW,’ she said.

We started back, but the trail looked different. The path we’d come on was now a channel of churning mud, waist-deep in places, and it seemed to have shifted. We tried to follow it, but every step felt wrong, as if the ground was pulling us toward the swamp. The trees seemed to close in, their branches scraping at us. My sister’s pendant was ice cold, and she clutched it. Then we heard it: a low hum, like a single note from a cello, coming from all around. It vibrated in our bones. The mud beneath our feet began to bubble, and small, dark shapes writhed in it, like eels or roots, but they moved with too much purpose.

I stumbled, and my sister reached out to help me, but she slipped, and we both fell into the mud. The moment we hit, the hum stopped. The mud was cold, suffocating, and I felt something brush against my ankle, something smooth and strong. I kicked, and we fought to our feet, covered in black sludge. My sister was crying, her face a mask of fear. ‘It’s the toll,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘The ones who die here take a piece of the living.’ I had no idea what she meant, and I didn’t want to know. We ran, but the trail kept winding, and the light was fading fast, even though it was only early afternoon.

We burst out of the treeline onto the gravel lot, gasping. The sky was still gray, but it seemed less oppressive. We stood there, covered in mud, and I pulled out my recorder to check if it had somehow survived. I pressed play, and through the sounds of our footsteps and the rain, I heard a voice. Not mine, not hers. It was a child’s voice, soft and clear, saying, ‘You took the wrong path.’ Then a long, rising note, like a scream, but muffled, as if from deep underwater. The recording ended. My sister let out a sob. ‘It’s in us now,’ she said. ‘It came with the mud.’

We drove home in silence, the heater blasting, but I couldn’t get warm. That night, as I lay in bed, I felt something moving under my skin, just beneath the surface, like a slow, writhing knot. I scratched until I bled, but it didn’t stop. And in the mirror, I saw a tiny, dark fleck in the corner of my eye, like a seed planted in soil. It has grown since then, slowly, and sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear that child’s voice, always saying the same thing: ‘You took the wrong path.’ But there is no path now, only the mud, and it is inside me, waiting to be harvested.