“The Devil of the Marsh” was written by H.B. Marriott Watson and first appeared in Diogenes of London, and Other Fantasies and Sketches (1893). Henry Brereton Marriott Watson (1863-1921), born an Australian, made his success in England as a writer of historical romances and supernatural fiction.

The nameless narrator of “The Devil of the Marsh” meets a nameless woman on the moors and falls in love with her. She insists that they tryst in the depths of the Great Marsh, and so he makes his way there, despite the forbidding and desolate scenery and weather and the strange and unwholesome noises he hears. They embrace, and he vows to take her away from the marsh, but she tells him first that “I am a creature of this place...I had sworn you should behold me in my native sin ere you ravished me away”¹ and then “Look, my friend, you who know me, what I am. This is my prison, and I have inherited its properties. Have you no fear?”² He vows he has none, that he does not care about her powers or senses or habits, only that they be together. “She moved her head nearer to me with an antic gesture, and her gleaming eyes glanced up at me with a sudden flash, the similitude (great heavens!) of a hooded snake,”³ but before she can do whatever it was she was going to do next, a horrid creature lurches out of the fog, “its face...white and thick, with long black hair; its body gnarled and twisted as with the ague of a thousand years.”⁴ It calls the woman out and tells the man that “She is the Presence of the marshes...the accursed marsh has crept into her soul and she herself is become its Evil Spirit; she herself, that lives and grows young and beautiful by it, has its full power to blight and chill and slay.”⁵ The Devil of the Marsh took the creature, he warns, as she plans to take the narrator, and drained him of health, mind, and soul. But the narrator tells him to go away. The creature grabs the Devil, and the mists envelop them, and then the narrator hears “the dim noise of a struggle, a swishing sound, a thin cry, and then the sucking of the slime over something in the rushes.”⁶ The narrator rushes forward and sees the Devil looking at the bog and smiling, and he then flees, “and as I ran the thickening fog closed round me, and I heard far off and lessening still the silver sound of her mocking laughter.”⁷

Marriott Watson effectively conjures the atmosphere of an evil swamp through tactile description, and the Devil is a memorable enough supernatural femme fatale (see: The Fatal Woman) in her way, but “The Devil of the Marsh” is a vignette rather than a story and would have been strengthened by expanding the story and describing the narrator’s first encounter with the Devil rather than referring to it in the past. “The Devil of the Marsh” is certainly entertaining, and the cumulative effect is chilling, but the story could have been a masterpiece had Marriott Watson expanded it to its proper length.

Print: H.B. Marriott Watson, The Devil of the Marsh and Other Stories. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2004.

¹ H.B. Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” Diogenes of London and Other Fantasies and Sketches (London: Methuen, 1893), 25.

² Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” 25.

³ Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” 26.

⁴ Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” 27.

⁵ Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” 28.

⁶ Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” 29.

⁷ Marriott Watson, “The Devil of the Marsh,” 29.