The man's hand landed on Eugene's shoulder and he jolted awake in bed, every muscle in his body locked, drenched with sweat.

* * *

After Sunday Mass when the church was empty, Eugene rose from his pew to walk the long line to the shrouded confessional booth. The man sat in the back row where the Byrnes had been during the service. Eugene resolutely straightened his spine and squared his shoulders and didn't look his way. The man watched him with passive curiosity, but made no move to follow him.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he intoned dutifully, as he had done every week, since before he had the barest notion of sin. “I think there’s something haunting me.”

“Haunting you?” asked Father Latimer.

Eugene couldn’t see him through the latticework of the confessional, but his voice was gentle, designed to put all manner of souls at ease. Eugene had never found solace in the confessional, nor in Father Latimer’s company. There was something about the priest that put him on edge. Father Latimer was too composed, too careful in his acts and words to seem sincere, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was something Eugene had never voiced to anyone—it felt blasphemous, accusing a preacher of anything, no matter how small—but he avoided Father Latimer when he could and kept his confessions short and impersonal.

He would have kept them brief regardless. The other boys his age were just discovering the idea of sex, and of girls, and spoke of both in strained, overeager whispers. Eugene avoided their conversations, eyes downcast and palms clammy. His lack of interest in girls was more damning than his peers' rabid pursuit of the subject, and he didn't need a priest to tell him he was going to hell. So instead, he bit his tongue and cycled through the same lesser sins week after week. He had disrespected his mother; he had envied some other child at school. His real sins, he kept between himself and God.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

The Church might be divided on the topic, but things were different in the South. There wasn’t a God-fearing soul in Louisiana who didn’t believe in ghosts as well as the great savior in the sky. There was voodoo in the soil, his mother always said, running in the water and making everyone half mad. Ghosts and rougarous and the devil, wandering the streets and waiting to pull your soul down into the murky waters of the bayou.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you?” Father Latimer asked.

“There's a man who sits in the courtyard and watches us play,” Eugene said, hating himself for speaking but unable to hold back. “And whenever you come back there, it's like you can’t see him. You walk right by, every time.”

It was a betrayal, telling Mary Beth’s secret like that, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the man had followed him into his dreams. Though his presence wasn’t malicious, it was old and dangerous, like something that had slunk in from the wild, sending thrills of danger through Eugene’s stomach. He didn’t know what else to do but tell.