When he opened his eyes, the man was standing at the pulpit. The stained-glass windows arced up around him, casting him in whispered colors like a long-dead saint. He didn’t look at Eugene but rather through him, and darkness coiled through the church like a current. The air was suddenly stifling, the church’s emptiness a threat, and Eugene unclasped his hands and tensed, scared to move in the man’s presence.

“Where were you?” Eugene whispered.

The man looked at him then, a snarl on his lips, and Eugene shrank back. A resounding crack split the air and the pulpit broke in two, splintering down the middle like a tree caught in a lightning storm, and the man turned, his coat flaring behind him, to stalk out the back door into the courtyard. The man was the devil or a ghost; either way, he wasn’t human. Eugene only hesitated a second before darting from his pew to run after him. Outside, a storm gathered, turning the blistering sky gray with the coming rain. The sun lanced through in weak beams. Everything looked alien and strange, the green of the bayou reflected in the clouds.

Eugene followed the man through the courtyard, beyond the church grounds, down to the bayou where the trees grew gnarled and gray, and the soil was wet and sucking underfoot. The man stopped at the first line of trees before they disappeared into the heavy fog, a cutting image in his fine black suit amid the leaning tree trunks and the gray-green atmosphere. He turned and looked back. Eugene only saw his face for an instant—fine-boned and pale, beautiful rather than handsome, with eyes like a wild animal—and then he vanished into the swallowing fog, shimmering out of existence like a mirage. Eugene swallowed hard, the heat crushing his lungs, and stepped into the bayou.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. His mother had always cautioned him away from the place. It was too easy to slip and fall, moss clinging to every surface and turning the trees slippery with slime. And there were the gators, too, their teeth sculpted before the dawn of time and waiting to sink into something soft and easy like a child. And more, even besides the gators: stories of ghosts and spirits made manifest, creatures lurking deep in the swamps, the rougarous and the Haitian zombies—

But it wasn’t the ghost stories or the threat of gators that made Eugene sick with panic. There was a sense of something greater and more terrible in the bayou, a sense of dread and wrongness that took up residence in his guts and made the hairs on the nape of his neck rise up, shivering at the back of his skull, urging him to check over his shoulder to see that nothing had followed him in. He picked his way over rocks and tree roots, careful to avoid stepping in the water.

Mary Beth had told him once about bog bodies, how a corpse could mummify if left underwater long enough, flesh turning to leather, bones and teeth and organs all perfectly preserved down under the surface where the air and the hungry insects couldn’t get to them. Eugene’s mother had dismissed it, saying Louisiana was far too hot for any such thing. Anything left in the bayou would rot away. Eugene tried not to think of rot as his shoe slipped into the water with his next step. Patterns of decomposition swirled around his ankles, grimy and thick with death. Plant matter and animal remains, all sucked down deep into the water and the mud.