But he knew what happened. He had already seen it. Mary Beth clawed strips of the priest's skin away under her nails, fighting as he got his hands around her throat. He squeezed until she went limp, her eyes blank like she was already dead. The priest finished with a sound like something dying and Eugene threw up, retching bile onto the church floor, but the priest never heard him over his own panting.

Mary Beth uncovered Eugene's eyes and he stumbled away from her, momentarily blind, the taste of acid fresh on his tongue.

"You saw the whole thing," she said coldly. "Every minute of it. He told you that he was a fairy-tale monster and you believed him because that was easier, but rougarous aren't real. This swamp wasn't haunted until I made it that way."

"The medicine they gave me—"

"You were happy to take it. You wanted to forget."

He swallowed his denial, flushed hot with shame.

“You should've left Chanlarivyè when you had the chance. Everyone should have. My parents did.”

“Am I the last one?”

“Yes. They all came to me, sooner or later. This town’s guilt is a palpable thing. First came the ones who knew and did nothing. They slipped from their beds in the middle of the night to drown themselves in the deepest, darkest parts of the water. Then the ones who had only heard rumors. Then the ones who barely remembered my name. In the end, they all came. Now you're here. And now the world can forget Chanlarivyè ever existed. See?”

She drew back far enough for Eugene to get his bearings, and his insides flooded with ice. The bayou was laden with dark shapes, some just breaking the water’s surface, others caught up against the thick tree roots. A whole town's worth of bodies gone black with rot, their faces eaten away by the insects and the fish. They thickened the water with their bones and soft, sloughing meat. And from their skeletal mouths came that humming, ghostly voices raised in an echo of life, droning like insects, urging him deeper into the water to join them. His name was called from a hundred dead throats like an incantation, worming into his ears and burrowing into his skull until he couldn't hear anything else. His stomach pitched at the wrongness of the sound, and he swayed, overwhelmed by vertigo.

“The church is drowning as we speak,” Mary Beth said unflinchingly. “The water’s taken everything for miles around. The old farmhouse is sinking under the swamp. The gators are coming. Soon everything will be gone.”

“Todd and Nancy Brown?" Eugene forced out, above the noise. "They weren’t from Chanlarivyè.”

“My mother’s sister. They should have moved back to Ireland when my parents did.”

Something nudged Eugene's hip, and he looked down before he could stop himself. Benoit stared up from empty sockets, recognizable only from the cut of his cheekbones. Eugene clapped one hand over his mouth and staggered away from the corpse, staring around wildly. He could find his landlady if he looked long enough, and Murdock and his family, too. They were all part of that terrible choir, waiting for him to succumb to their call.