“What are those?”

“Fairy lights,” she said. “You follow them off into the marsh and you’ll never come back.”

Her voice shook, like she was scared, like this fierce half spider with her fangs was trembling in our little boat. What could scare someone like Tally?

“Quiet,” she said. “They’re listening.”

“Who’s listening?”

But Tally wouldn’t say a word.

I imagined all that could live in this swamp, ghost hermits and old dead monks ringing their bells, their cathedrals all long sunk into the muck. Kids who wandered in this swamp and got lost, turned around, folks who never made their way out, who wander still, though they’d long left their bodies behind. Not to mention all the scaly hidden creatures with bright blinking eyes hid deep in the dark and wild and muck.

“Be quiet already,” whispered Tally. “Lest you want to call them right to us. Lest you never want to leave the Swamplands alive.”

I guessed I was talking out loud again. I guessed I couldn’t tell a difference between my brain and mouth right about then. Something hollered in the woods, a high mournful yip like an old sad song, an echo of a song sung a thousand years ago that’s just been lingering around, singing to itself. Tally bristled, and every brown spider hair on her body bristled.

“You see that?” said Tally. She pointed up to a tree limb above us. A daisy chain of fingerbones dangled down, hung on it like a garland. There were skulls fit into the notches of a cypress tree.

“The Creepy,” she said.

“There ain’t such thing as the Creepy,” I said. “My daddy told me.”

Tally looked down at me, all six of her eyes wild and black and reflecting moonlight.

“If I were you,” she said, “I’d start wondering about what my daddy said that was true and what he said that wasn’t.”

10

I WOKE UP AND IT was bright noon. Tally looked just like a normal girl right then—only two eyes, not a fang in sight—slumped over and snoozing in the front of the skiff. The day was hot and the swamp water glistened gold with sunlight. Damselflies touched water and danced away, and big fat lily pads floated on by. I saw a log sticking out of the water with a pile of turtles on it, one on top of the other, like a circus trick. One of them opened his mouth and gawked at me. It was a papa turtle I was pretty sure.

“Howdy, papa turtle,” I said out loud.

Tally jerked awake and snatched up an oar like she was about to smack me with it.

“Good lord, Buddy,” she said, “you scared the dickens out of me.”

The sunlight glistened off the dew-wet leaves above us and it was like a spill of gold coins jangled in the breeze.

“It’s funny,” I said. “I never thought about the swamp being pretty. Guess I was too young to think stuff like that last time I was here. But it is, you know? It’s so calm and quiet, at least in the daytime. Peaceful even.”