Voices drifted through the fog, muffled by the trees and the wet. Shouts he couldn’t understand as words. They sounded like ghosts. He followed them anyway, picking his way through the foliage, shivering all over as the dread solidified until it was inescapable. As soon as he reached the voices everything would unravel. He was trapped in a waking dream, the bayou dense all around him, fogging his thoughts.

Another shout, and figures took shape between the trees. Eugene slipped and stepped into the water; it splashed up to his knees, warm and thick with slime. Biting his lip, he waded on, leaving the tangle of tree roots behind. There were men on the far bank, a group of them reaching to pull something from the water. A dark shape emerged from the swamp, bedraggled and trailing algae and vines.

Someone shouted his name and Eugene startled. His mother pushed past the men and reached for him; he waded near enough for her to grab his sleeve and haul him back to solid land. She ran her fingers through his hair as if reassuring herself that he was still in one piece, but his attention was drawn to the men and the waterlogged shape they had found. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing, at first; his brain was numb and flickering as they laid the thing down.

“Don’t look,” his mother whispered.

Eugene swallowed. The body—it was a body, he realized sickly, or part of one—was gray, blue around the face and the fingertips, its cotton dress black from the bayou. It wasn’t Mary Beth. Mary Beth had shining dark hair, not the black matted clumps that hung around the body’s face, and she had clear gray eyes like summer storm clouds. The body had no eyes at all.

Eugene’s mother forcibly turned him away and pressed his face against her. For a second, he couldn’t breathe again, the fabric of her blouse smothering him, and he gasped, making it damp with the air from his panicked lungs. He wrapped his fingers around the folds of her skirt until he lost feeling in them. There was nothing but the pounding of his own heart, arrhythmic and too loud. Bile and blood soured his tongue. He swallowed around the rock in his throat.

“Come away,” his mother said. Her voice sounded strange, like she too was choking. When he looked up, her face was wet with tears, her mouth a thin, hard line. “Come on, come away. You don’t need to see this.”

He had already seen it. But he took her hand and let her lead him out of the bayou, up to the path by the church, his limbs uncooperative as he walked. His shoes were ruined from the water, and left black prints behind with every step. He concentrated on stalling the fledgling asthma attack before it could take hold. As they passed the church, Eugene paused. Mary Beth’s parents stood on the edge of the property, gazing down into the bayou with stricken faces. Her mother had her hands pressed over her heart. Eugene’s mother met their gaze for a single second and shook her head. Behind the Byrnes, Mary Beth’s man stood like a shadow, and Eugene stepped back behind his mother to hide his face. When they began walking again, the long, slow trek back to their house, the man was gone. Behind them, the bayou simmered like something ancient and terrible and dead.