When I was a little girl, Marshall Reaux was found just a few hundred feet from his house after having been lost for days. He had a hole in his back and all the marrow had been sucked from his bones. I overheard my papa say once that his bones had just crumbled like powder when they moved the body. Now my father, like most, could be prone to fanciful tales, but he hadn’t been fanciful when he was saying that. In fact, it was one of the few times I remember ever hearing him sound scared.

As the three of us looked around the forest for whatever had been following us, I understood that fear. I had never been much for ghosts and goblins, but I had seen the trees and the tracks and I knew something was wrong. There was an electric warning on my skin and a taste in my mouth like I was sucking on a penny.

Something was coming.

We started moving again at a quicker pace, our eyes now torn between the path back and the trees around us. Jesse wasn’t as familiar with the stories as me and Orry, but she had heard of Marrowtooth and knew enough to be scared when her best friends were. Orry was a bit on the heavy side and was getting winded as we went, but he was still whispering that we needed to hurry, that the tracks must have left ours at some point, that this thing could be anywhere…

And then Orry was just gone.

We looked for him for what felt like an hour, but I have a feeling it was much less. Me and Jesse took turns calling out to him, and we were never more than ten feet from each other the whole time. I was terrified, but I was also determined that we weren’t leaving until we found him. Orry had been my best friend as long as I could remember, and I kept telling myself he must have stepped into a bog or fell out somewhere and we were just missing him. But then I realized I was searching alone now, because Jesse was gone too.

I ran then, any idea of following tracks or searching for my friends lost in my fear. I had seen a fox run down a rabbit once, and I had always wondered what that tiny, screaming thing must have been thinking as it ran for its life. After that day in the swamp, I didn’t have to wonder no more.

I cried a little when I broke through some brush and saw I was only half a mile from home. I found my mama and told her what happened, and the next three days the whole community was out searching for Orry and Jesse, but they never saw any sign of them. I wanted to go back out and help search, but I was terrified to leave the house.