A thought struck Jack. He turned back to Carl, intending to ask him if he knew them, but the half-sick look on his face as he watched the pickup bounce away into the trees said it all.

“You know those guys, don’t you.”

Carl swallowed. His left eye was already looking away; the right followed. “Why you say something like that?”

“Because I think you do. Who are they?”

“Nobody to mess with. You don’t want to know ‘em.”

“Yeah, I do.” Especially after what his father had told him last night about the accident. Jack gave him a hard stare. “Who are they, Carl?”

Carl looked like he was going to try to float some bullshit, then his shoulders sagged and he shook his head.

“They live out in the Glades. On a lagoon in one of the hardwood hummocks.”

“I thought no one was supposed to live out there except maybe some local Indians.”

“Well, I think you know that what’s upposed to be and what is ain’t necessarily the same thing.”

Yeah. Jack knew that.

“You know where this lagoon is?”

Carl nodded. “I guess so.”

“How do I get there?”

“You don’t, not unless you know the way.”

“Can you show me on a map?”

Another shake of his head. “It ain’t marked on no maps. It’s pretty well hid.”

“Then how come you know where it is?”

Carl looked away. “I was born there.”

This didn’t surprise Jack. He’d seen what the folks connected to the red pickup looked like, and figured there had to be something wicked strange about Carl’s right arm. Add that to what Anya had said about the mutating effects of the Otherness leak at the nexus point in the Glades, and the connection looked obvious.

He remembered other misshapen people he’d met earlier in the year…Melanie Ehler and Frayne Canfield…both had attributed their deformities to “a burst of Otherness” during their gestations. Carl’s story was most likely the same.

“All right then,” Jack said, “take me there.”

Carl backed away a step, holding up his hand. “Nuh-uh. No way. I left there years ago and I ain’t goin’ back.”

“Well, if it’s not on a map, and you can’t tell me how to get there, and you won’t take me there, how am I supposed to find it?”

“You ain’t. That’s the whole point.”

As if to say he was through talking, Carl bent over his putter and lined up a shot. He tapped the ball and it went wide.

“I’ve good reason to believe they caused my father’s accident and were setting him up to be eaten by an alligator when the police interrupted them.”

Carl straightened and looked at him. “Alligator? That woulda meant your daddy’d go the same way as the others, killed by a swamp critter.”