I saw her glance toward the door before her eyes found me again. Her voice was slightly lower when she spoke next. “That was from something out of the swamp. The dark. Folks around here call it Marrowtooth.” She paused a moment, giving me a considering look. “You sure you want to hear this? You can be a skittish little thing at times, and I don’t want no trouble with your mama if you can’t sleep tonight.”

My curiosity piqued, I nodded and asked her to go on.

****

When I was young, just a few years older than you, I went caterwauling with some friends of mine. That’s what we called it when we went to wandering the swamps looking for something to get into. We had headed out in the early afternoon, and all three of us were raised here. We knew these lands better than most anyone. But somehow, on that day, we got lost.

That by itself isn’t overly remarkable. Swamps are tricky places. Lots of places look the same, and the same place can look different depending on the weather and the time of day. If you roam the swamps all the time, you’re going to wind up lost once in a while. The main thing is that you don’t panic. You either orient yourself or backtrack until you find something that you recognize.

I was with my best two friends at the time, Jesse and Orry, and though Jesse had only lived in the area a few years, she recognized we were lost before me or Orry did. She said the trees looked funny, and she was right. I couldn’t rightly say what kinds of tree they even were, other than that they were twisted and sinister, with pale white bark and bright purple berries that I had never seen before. Orry was usually full of beans when it came to stuff like this, puffing up his chest and making jokes to impress his best friends who also happened to be the only girls his age he wasn’t awkward around. But he wasn’t laughing now. Instead he just grabbed our hands as we turned and started heading back the way we came. We all knew something was wrong, but we didn’t want to say it, as though speaking it would give it more power. Instead, we just wanted to follow our trail back home.