There was someone calling to him from the bayou. It whispered around his heart and throat as the night pressed in. There were no words, or none he recognized, but it pulled at him as if there were a string tied under his ribs, tugging him down.

“He left me here,” Mary Beth said. Her lips, once pink and full, were withered like dried petals. He could see the outline of her teeth through her sunken cheeks, and her voice—that voice—was layered with something older than the sweet tones he remembered from a lifetime ago. Something powerful that dug into his chest like a meat hook and reeled him in. “He left me here, and no one came to find me.”

“We found you,” Eugene whispered. “We were just too late.”

“I’m still here.”

Eugene bolted upright in bed, fumbling for his glasses and gasping for breath. The bedsheets were tangled around his feet and he kicked them off, his skin prickling. Sitting up, he pressed one hand to his chest, his heart thudding unevenly under his palm. He closed his eyes until it calmed. The air in the room was very still; the night beyond the boarded window was quiet. He imagined prying the boards away to press his forehead to the windowpane behind, to open the glass and feel the night air, perfumed by the blooms that clung to the house. Instead, he pressed the soles of his feet to the floorboards and willed his body to return to equilibrium. When he was as still within as the air without, he rose with one hand on the wall for balance as a wave of dizziness washed over him. He shut his eyes until it passed.

Padding downstairs in the dark, he clung to the inner edge of the staircase to avoid the groans of the old wood. Passing through the silent kitchen, the table and chairs lurking in the shadows, he paused by the porch door. It was strange for the night to be so quiet. He was accustomed to the sounds of Chanlarivyè: the frogs at dusk, and the whisper of the night breeze through the trees. The distant call of a barking dog. The farmhouse may as well have been a mausoleum, and they all entombed alive as the weeds grew over the walls.

He pushed the door open and stepped onto the porch and then froze, like a rabbit spotting headlights on the road. A figure stood on the bottom step, tall and thin and wavering, as if it weren’t entirely tied to this world. A heartbeat passed and the figure turned, and Eugene saw the face in profile: Nancy, her hair loose over her shoulders, wearing only a nightgown that shifted around her like a shroud.

“Do you hear it?” She didn’t look at him as she spoke; her gaze drifted back to the line of trees, and through them to the waiting water beyond.

Eugene descended the steps, careful to avoid the places where the splinters poked through. “I dreamed the town was gone,” he said. “The buildings were there but the people weren’t. There was something sinister in the air.”