“The witch sent me back,” said Clementine through muddy lips, and Meriday had the sensation that she could hear her mother’s voice before she even spoke, in a kind of watery echo. “I saw the place where she comes from,” she continued. “A place at the beginning and the end of the world. Come with me and I will show you.”

By now Jonah was experiencing such a mixture of emotions he could not hope to untangle them—joy, relief, fear. She reached out for him, dry, wearing dry clothes, and when he grabbed on to her outstretched wrist, the skin began to flake off like bits of paper. Calm as ever, she got up, went out to the edge of the island, and dunked herself in the water until she was sufficiently wet again.

All the rest of that day, Clementine was the terrible marvel of the camp. By that evening, Jonah had agreed to let the Cherokee hold a purification ritual to cleanse her spirit. They burned herbs and chanted in their native tongue while Clementine sat before the fire, which lit her slick skin ghoulishly.

Smoke billowed up from the fire and the damp burning herbs like a spell of demons, the smoke conjured by wet things. Clementine grinned with a mouth blackened by mud, which oozed out between her teeth. At first it seemed her glassy eyes reflected the fire, but in truth her eyes themselves now burned like flames.

Wind Walker saw within those hellish depths something that froze him with dread.

“Would you like to know the truth?” said Clementine. “She comes through a crack in the world. A hole. Comes from a place you could never imagine. She’s been in the swamp a long, long time.” The fire in her eyes danced and shivered, and Jonah felt a cold rush of fear. “She does not mean to hurt us, though. She wants us to experience the world like she does, in all its splendid glory. Here we are, stuck in our little minute, in our narrow little window of the world, when we could see everything—everywhen, the magnificence of it all.”

The tribe’s chief chanted louder.

The undead woman looked at her husband. “She says there will come a time when our people are free. And there will come a time when the Indians take back what is theirs. But that is all far from now, and we shall never see it in this lifetime. Don’t you want to be free?”

“We are free,” Jonah said, through his budding tears. “We are free.”

“The only way to be free, truly free, is to die, to cast it all off,” she said. “Life binds us to our here and now.”

Jonah shook his head.

“I will help. You and Meriday—we shall all go together.”

He stood up. “No!”

Before he could grasp her by the arms, shake her, call forth his wife from wherever she might yet live buried in that unholy flesh, a plume of smoke obscured her from him, and in the confusion he lost sight of her.