“It’s getting worse,” Murdock mused, standing just behind Eugene’s shoulder at his desk. Murdock was a big man, rough-hewn and burly, more suited to hard labor than reporting, but the Gazette was his. He ran it with the grim determination of a man who had long since lost his calling but wasn’t yet ready to admit defeat. He wasn’t really talking to Eugene; he never really did. But he talked in Eugene’s vicinity, and Eugene nodded to show he was listening. “The water keeps rising like this, it’ll flood the whole town.”

Eugene made a sound of assent.

“It’s bad business. I can feel it, like something pulling, a humming in my bones—you feel that?”

Eugene shook his head. He didn’t ask what Murdock meant.

"There's a violence to it, lately. Makes my goddamn skin crawl, like there's something out there watching me."

Eugene was familiar with violence. When he was twelve years old, a girl from town disappeared. The summer was wet and thick then too, the air rippling when the sun shone through it. He was there when they pulled her body from the bayou. There was enough of her left to identify, but only just. The gators had already started in by the time the searchers found her. She was waterlogged and blue, the pretty silk bow in her hair destroyed. He hadn’t recognized her at first, hadn’t even realized the body was human, and then his mother had pulled him away and covered his face. That was the part that ate away at him later—that he hadn’t recognized her. They said it was an accident. A slip, a fall, and then the gators had done the rest. His mother crossed herself and then crossed him. Rougarou, he thought, his mind blank before the fear and the guilt and the grief set in. Nothing accidental about it.

People died every day. Accidents or old age or poor health. Foul play was a rare thing, in the grand scheme of it. Eugene’s father had died in a car crash when he was small; his mother of a stroke when he was twenty-four. He would die too, and likely sooner than later, with his health being what it was. He wasn’t so afraid of that: dying a natural death.

But the Great Depression had driven many a man to suicide. Though the worst was passed, people couldn’t recover what they’d lost. Not entirely. Some not even close. Eugene wrote the deaths up every time. He tried to do it tastefully; he tried not to make a spectacle of the tragedy, nor speculate too intently on the circumstances. The economy hadn't been kind to folks, and who could know the secret troubles of a stranger?

Eugene had a private terror that he nurtured in the darkest hours of the night that one day, the bottom of the river might seem the most appealing option to him, as well. To walk out somewhere quiet where it was just him and the insects and God, and finish it. There was no sense to his fear; he had never been inclined to take his life. But he was afraid the mood was catching, and one man’s hopelessness might transfer to him if he spent too long in their company, dead or alive, and then—