“You knew what that priest did. Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

The thing outside pushed up against the confessional, panting through the curtains with hot, ragged breaths. Eugene sat petrified as a hand parted the fabric and a pair of pale unblinking eyes stared in at him through the dark.

“Why didn’t you tell?” Mary Beth asked.

Eugene woke.

There was someone walking around outside the house. He crept from his bed and pressed his cheek to the boarded window, straining to hear. There were no sounds in the night besides the footsteps pacing through the weeds. The person's shoes sank into the earth with every step, the grass whispering as it bent beneath their feet, clothes rustling as they moved. He slipped from his room to descend the stairs, through the kitchen to the porch door. There he hesitated. The house was silent all around him, dark and unknowable. He eased the door open and stepped onto the porch, the wood warm beneath his bare feet. A figure walked toward the line of trees at the back of the yard.

“Johnny?” Eugene called.

The figure didn’t pause, and its silhouette was slowly eaten by the shadows. Eugene stepped off the porch into the yard. The grass brushed against his ankles, long and unkempt and wet with dew.

“Eugene . . .”

A breeze rippled through the yard, carrying his name. His stomach turned and he took another step.

“Eugene, come and find me . . .”

He stopped when he reached the trees. The bayou had already soaked the back of the yard, inching up around the tree trunks and drowning the grass. Between the leaf-laden branches he could see the figure that looked like Walker, a shadowed wisp heading deeper into the dark. All around him, the bayou hummed a deep, discordant sound, like a planet slowly churning on its axis.

“Eugene, come and find me!”

He woke up again.

XIII.

The devil was alive and well in Chanlarivyè, just as he was all through the South. Folks didn’t need so many churches unless they had something that needed praying away. Eugene didn’t attend church with any regularity after Mary Beth died. The services left him cold and squirming, an unsettling feeling of unbelonging in his guts, and a wave of nausea every time he heard Father Latimer’s sermons. He went just often enough to keep people from talking. He didn’t know if he believed in the devil beyond the wicked things people did of their own accord, but if the devil had a face, it would look like Johnny Walker’s.

Johnny laughed when Eugene told him so. They sat side by side on the top step of the porch, watching the trees stand black and unmoving under the violet-gray sky. At the bottom of the steps, the ground was wet. Puddles formed in tiny lakes, swimming with decay, green like the weeds the Browns had long since given up trying to keep in check.

“Is that what you think of me?” Johnny asked.