But then again maybe not. Years ago, he had been sent down to the swamps of southern Louisiana as part of his training for the Well. He’d spent six months in that hellhole, which was literal as well as figurative. While there, he met a young boy, not more than twelve or thirteen, riding a bike. The kid looked no different from the other kids Whitman had seen in his time down there amid the mishmash of religions, superstitions, and ethnicities. The kid could have been Creole, but he also could have been mestizo, or a mix of anything, which was pretty much the norm in the noxious bayous south of New Orleans, where voodoo and Santería spawned their love children.

He’d come across the kid in the red glare of early morning, when the Spanish moss didn’t seem so malignant and the stench of oil wasn’t so pervasive. Whitman was taking a run when he saw the kid, sitting astride his bike, eating his breakfast. What made Whitman stop was the faux license plate on the bike. Instead of a series of numbers and letters it was imprinted with the phrase: CTHULHU IS COMING.

Whitman had read Lovecraft. He’d found The Call of Cthulhu in his mother’s night table and, stealing it, had read it by flashlight under the nighttime bedcovers, far after he should have been asleep. Cthulhu was one of what Lovecraft called the Old Ones, demonic, God-like beasts worshipped by people of a certain, half-mad stripe. Cthulhu was described as a colossal cephalopod with many tentacles and bat wings. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

As it turned out, Cthulhu wasn’t the only bizarre thing the kid was into. As Whitman engaged him, the kid generously shared his breakfast and started talking a blue streak. Turned out he knew a man named Preach, a big kahuna in the swamplands, according to the kid, for many, many years. People came to him for potions, curses, voodoo, and Santería spells of every shape and variety. According to the kid, Preach had been at the forefront of the struggle against the demonization of non-Christian religions, directed by the area’s fire-breathing evangelical preachers, of which there was no shortage.

The kid claimed he had witnessed a zombification ritual that had been performed by Preach in order to ease the pain of a friend diagnosed with a fatal disease.