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You force yourself to slow down and think. <span class="mu-i">It's covered in leeches, so whatever's under them can't possibly see right now. The leeches themselves don't have eyes, so they can't see either.</span> It's entirely possible that it's only reacting to the sounds you make, or possibly the vibrations you make when moving through the mud.
Holding still proves your hypothesis right. Once it recovers from being pushed over, it seems to be standing there tensely, waiting for any sign of movement around it. With agonizingly slow movements, you start to shift in the mud, deathly aware of every sound you make. It twitches with each tiny squelch the mud releases as you free your shoe from it, but it's not enough to provoke it to attack.
You move over and pick up a rock on the side of the road, before aiming it over at a tree and chucking it. It cracks against the wood with a sharp sound, and the swarmhost bursts into action once more, sprinting towards the tree and practically lunging at it. It goes feral on the tree trunk for a few seconds, before it seems to realize that it's not the prey that it's looking for and waiting alertly for any more noises. You try the same trick again, to lure it further away...<span class="mu-r">but it ignores it, seeming to have caught on to your ploy now.</span>
Over the next fifteen painfully sluggish minutes you work your way a couple hundred feet away from the thing, just to be on the safe side, since you can't throw things to attract it elsewhere anymore. You would curse the surprisingly intelligent son of a bitch if it wouldn't get you mauled to death or worse. As it is, each minute spent is a minute too long with those bloodsuckers feeding away on your neck and back.
When you finally feel that you're in the clear, you click your zippo open and move the flame under what leeches you can actually reach with the flame. They writhe around in pain, some of them even regurgitating their meal all over your fresh and open bitewounds, but it's better than letting them suck you dry. You're definitely going to want to wash that up later, though. Something tells you that getting an infection out here would be a death sentence...it'd be quite the ironic way to go, dying to an infection when you're surrounded by monsters.
You trudge along for the next few minutes until you finally, at long last, see your grandfather's Cabin once more. Stepping around it, you notice that there's a line of caution tape wrapped around one end of the house - put up by the authorities, or by your Grandfather himself? You don't know, but you slip past the tape while heeding the warning, making sure you don't step on or touch anything that looks particularly unstable.
