EVICTION WARNING – Final Notice!
I sat in my office on the ratty swivel chair that hadn’t seemed nearly so beaten when I’d purchased it second-hand three years ago. My stomach was in knots. I tried to steady my thoughts, to fight the gnawing anxiety eating at my mind, but it was like poking away a horde of rats with a stick. They were hungry, and eventually I would be too tired to poke anymore.
The ringing of the door chime brought my scattered thoughts into focus.
“Just a second,” I called out, eyeing myself in the open compact mirror. My makeup was sloppy. A thin line of eyeliner had escaped my left eyelid, and I’d put on too much blush. If someone had shown me two photographs, one of myself and one of the body in an amateur mortician’s first open casket, I would have had to begrudgingly accept their likeness.
With the greatest enthusiasm I could manage, I composed myself, exited my personal office, and entered the lobby of Wildlands: Bayou Expeditions—my airboat tourism business. The beige carpets could have used a heavy clean half a year ago, dust thoroughly lined the windowsills, and the place had the faintest lingering scent of vomit that I’d spent the last two months trying in vain to conceal underneath scented candles and four separate motion activated air fresheners. Nothing seemed to do the trick.
“You look exhausted, dear. Those pretty features of yours won’t age well without proper sleep.”
My gaze launched towards the voice like a heat-seeking missile. For a moment, I thought it was another of Jeb’s motorcycle club lackeys. It was not. The woman in front of me was a gnarled old thing, closer to her own wake than the celebration of another decade. Her hair was a greasy collection of wispy white curls. Pockmarks littered her cheeks, and wrinkles had overtaken the rest of her face. Still, she carried herself with confidence. Her green eyes were piercing, even as blood vessels choked the irises like thorns. Harboring a guess, she might have drawn many men, and even some women, in her time, but those days—however long ago they were—had since passed.
“I’m sorry, long night. Will it be just you, or will your family be joining you for the adventure?” I asked.
“Just me. Is that uncommon?”
“Actually, a bit. I rarely have lone candidates, and if I do, they’re almost always young men. It’s a pleasant change of pace.”
A wrinkly hand extended onto my desk. She was clutching a brown envelope.
“I have a pair of coordinates that I’d like you to take me to.”
“Coordinates?” I asked, trying to hide my apprehension. “Well, I usually just take folks through the standard sightseeing routes.”
“Ms. Fontenot… or would you prefer Jamie?” she inquired.
“Jamie’s just fine—” I began to say. Had she merely assumed my relationship status from the lack of a wedding ring, or did she know about Ted? The mere presence of his name passing through my thoughts lit a bundle of matches, and without warning, I was thinking about him again. After a year with that junkie bitch, would there ever be a day in which he’d come to his senses and at least apologize?
No, this was Ted. Any man who can kiss you in the morning and then clear out your entire office safe in the afternoon is incapable of guilt. He’d planned it well and likely left the state if the cops were to be believed.
When would the memory disappear completely? Get a hold of yourself, girl, it was just a guess. Focus on the customer.
“Jamie, there’s fifteen thousand dollars in this envelope that I’m holding, and I have this envelope’s twin in my purse.”
My jaw unlatched like a cartoon character’s.
Thirty thousand dollars? We had set rates, and this far exceeded anything I’d ever charged by a mouth-watering margin.
“We can do that,” I said, unconsciously declaring this enterprise to have more than one employee. It didn’t, but that was the least of my concerns. That amount of money was life-changing. With every passing month in the last year, it became more challenging to keep the business afloat. I was now on eviction’s door, but thirty thousand dollars… an amount like that bought me time to consider my options.
“Half up front, half at the drop-off point.”
“Don’t you mean when I bring you back?” I asked as I plugged the coordinates into my laptop and realized she wasn’t a complete nutcase. The coordinates ended up just about as deep as you could feasibly go up Big Pinesnake Bayou, but they were legitimate coordinates, which led to a definite location.
“Is that your airboat out there on the jetty?” The woman pointed to the bay window directly behind me. Outside, the weathered road wrapped around the building and led to the neck of Little John Bayou. There were three boats tethered to the jetty, but mine was obscured from view.
“No, that’s Marty’s. His fishing depot is next door. Mine is the red and black one, but you can’t really see it from here.”
“Good. That shade of bright purple is… unpleasant.”
I paused for a moment and looked at the envelope in her outstretched hand. Just what was being asked here? An old woman bursts in with an obscene amount of money and requests a one-way delivery to a set of strange coordinates. It seemed like a prank or something illegal, even. Sensing my hesitancy, the woman slid the envelope towards me and withdrew her hand.
“We should leave now. I’m sorry I caught you at the end of the day, but if you want to return with a little light left to spare, then we must depart now.”
“I’m sorry,” I nearly stuttered. “You mean today… like right now? This is kind of weird, if you don’t mind me saying. You want me to take you deep into the middle of Big Pinesnake Bayou and just leave you?”
The woman snatched back the envelope with a speed that seemed nigh impossible for such skinny, weathered arms. “No further questions. If we’re going, we go now, Jamie. Otherwise, and I don’t want to do this—but I will—I’ll just take the money up to Macready and work something out.”
“I at least need you to sign these safety waivers that—”
The woman made a show of standing up, and I knew that she’d just given me one last opportunity to commit. There was no time for confusion, only for action. With the press of a button, the printer beside my laptop sputtered to life and produced a map of the route with a weak cough. No potential customer of mine would fall to Macready. He was the first to take a hammer to the dream I’d shared with Ted. The bastard had opened up his own airboat tourism company in a spot far closer to the interstate. Hell, even with the location, Macready didn’t have the experience that I had. The Fontenot family had fished and explored these waters for the last two centuries. I had him beat on know-how and navigation. It was his buck-toothed wife and her skill at marketing on the apps that had damned us. Their arrival was the turning point, and it had only been downhill ever since. So, no, she wouldn’t be taking her business over to Macready. Not if I still lived and breathed.
“It’s a deal. Meet me out back in five minutes, miss…?”
“Agatha Horne. Aggie for short,” she replied, sliding the envelope back towards me.
I opened it and counted the bills. She wasn’t kidding. Fifteen thousand dollars accounted for in hundred-dollar bills.
“Pleasure doing business with you, Aggie.”
The summer’s heat had faded as October crept firmly into view. Outside, the bayou was still, and the air was comfortable. A pair of sparrows chirped contentedly in the distance, their song faint but still audible beneath the classic rock station leaking from Marty’s shop. I walked with Aggie across the gravel street, explaining some local history as I did so. She listened attentively, never taking her eyes off me even when we descended the six-foot stairwell onto the jetty. Her gaze finally broke when I offered her a hand to hop onto my airboat.
Even now, I still think it’s a beauty. Two crimson racing stripes swept across a charcoal-black hull. The flooring comprised a series of metal panels that I kept so clean that they shone under the oppressive sunlight. Today was no exception.
I climbed on after her and instructed her to take her pick of the eight passenger seats while I unlocked a chain that kept it moored to a large wooden post. She chose one in the back row and buckled her seatbelt without requiring my insistence. When she was firmly seated, I went ahead with a standard safety explanation. It pained me to know that I had allowed her to board without forcing her to sign a safety waiver. If this was an elaborate ploy in which she was injured, she’d probably win any legal proceedings, but I couldn’t let this opportunity get by me. Thirty thousand dollars doesn’t just fall into your lap every day now.
I removed the printed route map from my pocket and placed it inside a translucent plastic protective cover in front of my other maps.
“You ready? We’re going deep into the bayou after all,” I said as I shimmied into the driver’s seat.
“Ready, dear? I’ve been ready for a long time.”
The way she said it with such finality made my skin crawl.
After a few seconds of scouring through my right pocket, I removed the ignition key and slotted it in. I confirmed that the battery selected switch was set to BOTH, and I turned the key to the ON position. My foot depressed the throttle pedal twice, priming the carburetor. Finally, I released the throttle pedal, and I turned the key to the START position. The fan at the back of the craft roared to life, and we sped off through the brackish water.
There was maybe a mile up Little John Bayou before the route forked into the spiraling waterways of Big Pinesnake Bayou. I predicted it would be about an hour’s journey, and not wanting to spend that in complete silence, I tried to ask a question now and then. It was difficult over the roar of the water at first, but as we neared the fork, I lowered the speed and conversation became viable again.
“So, do you have any family around these parts?” I asked.
“You could say that.”
“St. Sebastiansville or another place?”
“Another place.”
Many, if not most, of the older women I’d met in my life could simply not wait to tell you about their grandkids, their politics, or their faith. Aggie volunteered none of that information. Normally, I’d have been thankful if she volunteered a more generic topic instead, but she whittled down each conversation starter I brought up with shorter and shorter responses. This carried on for a few minutes before I eventually got the hint and resigned myself to sit there in silence.
The bayou was a charming sight nearly all year round. We’d taken the fork five minutes ago, and the bayou was gradually beginning to tighten. I rarely consciously noticed the smell anymore, but I took a second to isolate it in the absence of conversation. The water smelled vaguely like a sewer, or rather like musty water currently absorbing the scents of rotting aquatic life. It sounded disgusting when described, but I didn’t think it was. Some people hate the smell of cigarettes or gasoline. I was never one of them. Maybe my early proximity to the strong odors of the bayou played a role in that.
The water had grown darker since leaving Little John Bayou, and as I slowly maneuvered the rudder stick along our route, I noticed clumps of algae forming floating archipelagos in the distance. Overhead, Spanish moss hung from the outstretched branches of the cypress trees like long-abandoned spiderwebs. That line of thought had especially frightened me as a child. What kind of spider could spin webs so large, and with the sheer quantity of the plant, how many spiders did that then imply?
“Have you ever seen a gator in these parts?” Aggie asked, shattering the last five minutes of silence.
“Sometimes.” I pointed to a large wooden stick that stuck up beside my chair. It was carefully held in place. “Got a spear, of sorts. Alligators usually want nothing to do with an airboat. They’d prefer a small dog or a lone child.”
She unbuckled her seatbelt and turned to her side, angling her head so that she could fully see me. The airboat was moving slowly enough through the winding waterway that I didn’t immediately demand she put it back on.
“Do you mind if I play a song?”
The skin around her throat sagged like a half-eaten drumstick as she spoke.
“You hiding a banjo somewhere?” I said, half expecting her to reveal that she actually somehow was.
She opened her purse and removed an object that, at first glance, appeared to be a stick she’d picked up somewhere. My first impression was incorrect as she pressed it to her lips and began to play a tune. The instrument was about six inches in length and had four separate holes around its perimeter. It sounded closest to a flute, but deeper in tone and muddier in texture. The melody was slow at first, even haunting. Long, somber notes of yearning. It was not the happy church hymn I’d expect someone’s mawmaw to practice. There was a primal element to it, as if it were a song of ancient legend. Studied now only by stuffy academics in dusty Ivy League music halls or maybe a museum.
As I listened, I found myself bound by the sorrowful notes. I felt as if I were no longer Jamie Fontenot on my airboat in Louisiana, but a hunter in a time before language, sitting at the bonfire I’d made myself. Then, little by little, the notes increased in their velocity. Haunting as the song still was, it was no longer solitary. I was not alone by the fire anymore. There were other figures wearing a variety of pelts. Someone had brought a primitive drum, and by the time everyone had joined the assortment, the fire was blazing with life.
I lay back in my chair as the song continued to unfold, telling a story that was nearly indecipherable to an untrained ear. We were now nearly two-thirds of the way to the location of her coordinates. The banks had been overtaken by spiky bushes, while some of the cypress trees had decided to migrate directly into the water and present themselves as obstacles. It was a strange sight, though I’d grown accustomed to it over the years. It was impossible, however, to grow accustomed to the mosquitoes. Even with a layer of fresh bug spray that I’d applied before leaving, I was forced to swat the occasional straggler who had not been dissuaded.
In the sky above us, the sun was setting. We still had maybe another forty-five minutes of daylight before I would be forced to turn on the massive LED light bars that hugged the front of the vessel. Although the airboat was equipped to navigate the night, I’d resolved long ago to avoid navigating tight stretches of the bayou without daylight easing my path.
The song was winding down now, the additions to that ancient bonfire drifting on to their own solitary paths, when I noticed that the familiar scent of the swamp was receding. Strangely, it was instead replaced by a drier and earthier fragrance for which I could not consciously name. Each note left the instrument at a slower pace now, the crescendo behind us. It was settling back into the haunting melody from which it had first risen. And then, with a final few notes, the melody was over.
“That was beautiful, Aggie. Strange, even downright spooky in parts, but beautiful still.”
“Is it?” Aggie said, standing up fully. “It’s only a pale reflection of the real thing.”
“Hey,” I said, surprised. “You’ve got to sit down, otherwise you might fall—”
“Do you recognize it?”
The look in her eyes was unfamiliar. A strange fire that scorched the surrounding earth. She licked her withered lips and suddenly darted for my left hand on the rudder stick with a speed I’d never seen a human body produce. I had neither the time to react nor the expectation of what would follow as Aggie dug the nail of her pointer finger deep beneath my thumbnail and popped it right off. Blood overwhelmed the raw flesh. I reflexively jammed the rudder stick to the left, flinging a heavy splatter onto the deck below.
Pain seared through my thumb as if I’d just crushed it with a hammer. This had all happened in a matter of seconds, and time seemed to further lose its hold on my perception as I watched Aggie catch my nail mid-air with a delirious grin before putting it onto her outstretched tongue and swallowing it whole.
She began to move her lips, as if to say something, while her right hand grew closer to my face. Panic overtook me then, and I found my body reacting on animal instinct as I spun my right leg squarely into the side of her head with a dexterity that I had thought long since left on the high school soccer field. The impact didn’t feel right at all. She was light—too light—and I watched once again, dumbstruck, as she was thrown, purse and all, cleanly off the airboat and into the marshy waters below.
The confusion of what had just happened bore down on me all at once. Though our pace was not fast, I yanked the rudder stick back to a neutral position, narrowly avoiding a cypress tree that had sprouted in the middle of the water. My left hand reached back and yanked the lanyard connected to the engine cut-off switch while my right hand rapidly tore off my seatbelt. My thumb still throbbed with a blind heat as I dropped onto the deck, but the shock had been the worst of it.
Where did Aggie fall? She was an old woman, not some kind of fish. She should have been maybe fifteen feet behind the airboat, but I saw nothing at all. No bubbles of air, no movement to indicate someone swimming underwater, no foreign colors beneath the murk. Aggie was gone, plain and simple. There had to be a rational explanation for her behavior. A manic break? Some kind of—I stopped myself. An explanation would have to wait. Could the woman even swim? I’d never inquired any further when she’d declined the waiver. Just another screw-up in what was looking like the strangest day of my life as a professional guide. I grabbed the spear upside down, a few inches below the blade, and dove in, ignoring the fear that she might be intentionally waiting beneath the surface. I couldn’t just leave her out in the water.
The depths below were hardly depths at all. The water appeared to be roughly eight feet deep, but it was never a good idea to assume the mud floor to be solid. My eyes took a second to adjust to the interior of the bayou. It wasn’t particularly safe swimming here, but I hadn’t seen an alligator since we’d departed, and I hoped I wouldn’t soon meet one. There were other concerns, of course, namely leeches and bacteria. But all of that I would risk to prevent someone from drowning, especially if her death was my fault. And so I swam, breaking the surface and then diving once more to scour another stretch. I repeatedly dove, thinking each time about how much I would like to restart the day, wake up in bed this morning, ignore my alarm, and spend an afternoon on my sofa watching travel shows with a po’ boy in one hand and an iced tea in the other.
She wasn’t there. I surfaced once more and ran my gaze around the banks on either side of me. The vegetation practically formed a barrier. Of the little holes with which I could see deeper into the swamplands, I saw no women panting against trees, cursing that I hadn’t dived in sooner. There wasn’t even any disfigured foliage. It was as if the moment she hit the water, her body had simply evaporated into the surrounding air, but that certainly couldn’t be right. People don’t just disappear.
I clutched onto that spear desperately, a divine rod tethering me to some semblance of normality and protection. Treading water, I listened to the sounds of the bayou. It was quiet, too quiet. The insects did not buzz excitedly overhead anymore, and the birds made no distant song. All I could identify beyond my immediate splashing was the sound of the wind distantly guiding a breeze through the tips of the trees.
Seeing no reason to stay any longer in the filthy water, I swam back towards the airboat, pulled myself onto the deck, and then collapsed. The adrenaline was steadily fading, and I found myself uncomfortably cold despite the remaining heat.
“Aggie,” I called out, praying for any kind of response at all. “Agatha Horne?!”
I was greeted with silence. Great. This day is going just swell. An idea surfaced in the back of my mind then. Why not leave her? She attacked you, so she’s clearly a threat. Even then, out of the kindness of your heart, you still tried to save her. You’ve already got the first of the two envelopes sitting back at your office. That will get the unpaid rent smoothed over. Open your bag, grab the emergency kit, disinfect and bandage your thumb, and if she’s not back after all that, then leave. She chose this.
That line of reasoning was dangerous and threatened to twist my stomach into knots. Forcing it back, I focused on cleaning my wound. I rose to my feet and unzipped the sealed black bag that hung from the rightmost seat in the back row. I opened a bottle of antiseptic alcohol and stifled a whimper as the translucent liquid set my nerves aflame. Grit your teeth and deal with it. The bandaging came next, and then that was that. Yet as I put the medical kit back in the bag, my right hand brushed against my phone. I couldn’t just abandon her. I had to call someone, so I unlocked the screen and dialed 9-1-1. It took a moment before I spied two very unfortunate words.
NO SIGNAL
When had I ever been without a signal out here? St. Sebastiansville and the surrounding bayou were rural, sure, but not that rural. There was always some form of strained connection. I nervously tapped my left foot as I sank back down into the driver’s seat. If she’d died down there and I somehow hadn’t spotted her, then my staying wouldn’t do much good, and if she’d found her way to the shore and she was currently running around in a state of delusion, my staying would do even less good. No, I had to leave. Once I made it back to my office, I’d call the police and let them gather a search party. It would probably get ugly if she had any family that she’d failed to mention, but my conscience wouldn’t just let me cut and run.
I gazed up at the sky. It had felt like twenty minutes since it had all gone to shit, but the sun still beat down upon the tree canopy at the same angle. The shadows had not moved an inch.
I put my phone back into the black bag and zipped it shut. With another step, I pulled myself back into my chair and began turning the airboat on again and then firmly around. Making a U-turn in these tighter waterways was never an easy feat. Still, after some careful maneuvering, I was heading back in the direction I’d entered from. Heading home, my bandaged thumb pulsed with a dull heat. All around me the swamp had shut its maw and slunk into an eerie slumber.
A part of me wanted this story to be one that I’d later tell friends around a kitchen table, but would I actually want to? It felt insane, and yet I’d just lived through it. How could she just disappear? Questions would inevitably form, and I wasn’t sure I even knew how to answer them. She just did! No response felt right. Maybe she climbed ashore? My eyes kept scanning, dissecting every detail of the swampy woodland surroundings, but I saw no motion, felt no pair of eyes digging into my neck, cursing, wondering, and deranged. Agatha Horne had simply disappeared as she hit the water.
I was lost, and it was not getting darker. The dual-realization now brought a queasy ache to nest in my stomach. I checked the map for proof that I hadn’t also met with some kind of unnoticed head trauma. It shouldn’t have been possible. I knew these cuts in some ways better than I knew my own home. Even as a little girl, my pa had led me through all the surrounding bayous. Fishing, exploring, and taking our neighbors on sightseeing trips. There he sat with his own rundown airboat, the one I’d drunkenly crashed shortly after his funeral. I remembered it vividly. I sat beside him. We’d stopped to fish in a secluded opening a mile and a half down Little Canary Bayou. He was deep in a six-pack of Abitas. The sweat clung to his dark hair, carefully held behind him in a ponytail.
“You should stop it, pa. We’ll get lost out here.”
“Are you scared of getting lost, Jamie?”
“No,” I pouted. “I’m old enough to only be scared of things like heights and clowns.”
“And why are you scared of clowns, dear?”
He was teasing me, but ever the one to take on a serious adult question, I tried to answer it to the best that an eight-year-old could.
“Because they’re real. Ghosts aren’t. Vampires aren’t. Santa isn’t either—at least that’s what Emma, who sits next to me at lunch, says—but clowns are!”
“Lots of things are real, but that don’t mean you need to fear ‘em.”
“They just look wrong. Like they’re almost human, but not really. I don’t think God was paying attention when he made clowns.”
“Maybe it’s like you say, Jamie. They’re masters of disguise. Us adults make ‘em use elaborate face paints and silly suits with bright colors, so we can recognize ‘em.”
“What do they look like underneath it? Under the diss-guise?” I asked, over-enunciating the first three letters as if they were two separate words.
Pa paused for a moment to drain the rest of his beer. He wiped his wet lips and scanned among the distant trees beyond the bank.
“Like trees. Bark for flesh, leafy green hair, and countless rows of teeth.”
He was smiling at me maniacally. To him it was clearly funny, but my eyes widened to saucer proportions, and I scanned those same trees. I’d felt safe out here with him, but no longer. There could be clowns watching us. Staring at us from underneath the webs of Spanish moss, hiding amongst the ancient cypress.
“I want to go now, pa.”
His smile faded, and he realized just how deeply he’d frightened me.
“Don’t worry about it, Jamie. There’s one thing I haven’t told you about clowns.”
“Wh-what?” I said, refusing to break my gaze from a mangled tree whose mid-section—in my mind—had contorted into a face.
“They’re terrified of water. Even an inch of it and they go poof like a cloud of smoke. Gone forever.”
“Really?” I asked, finally daring to return my gaze to my pa.
“It’s a well-known fact.”
I sat down awkwardly on one of the chairs in the front row of the airboat, tightly clutching my rigged fishing rod. He’d said the last line with such confidence that I had to believe it. Parents didn’t always tell you the whole truth of things, but they never outright lied. Even so, as I looked out once more into the shades of brown and green that wrapped around the water, I felt uneasy. Regardless of whether we were safe on the boat, the image of those woodlands as private and safe had been thoroughly shattered.
“I think you’re right. It’s time we headed home. And before you fix yourself up in a tizzy about being lost. Us Fontenots never get lost. No amount of devil’s brew would ever change that. I’ve got it all right here.” He said as he pointed at his head with a shaky index finger and a proud smile.
My faith in my pa’s confidence was eroding. I’d passed through the cut that should have deposited me back onto Little John Bayou twenty minutes ago. Where the route should have slanted, it had instead held true. It didn’t make any damn sense.
I eased off the rudder stick, my thumb still throbbing with that fiery ache, and then removed my seatbelt. How could I have been wrong? I pulled my phone out of the bag again. The march of time had walked the digits on the digital clock forward. It had been nearly an hour since I’d tried dialing 9-1-1, yet the bayou remained a vacuum, absent of insects and birdsong. It was as if I’d slipped out of the world I’d known and found myself somewhere else—somewhere similar, but not quite like it either.
As I let my thoughts wander, a new sound slithered into the ambiance. Somewhere distant down the bayou, in the direction I was headed, came the faint melody of woodwinds. I knew it at once to be the tune that Aggie had played, and yet it was fuller and more vibrant. It could not have come from the tiny instrument she’d carried. No, there was more weight to it, almost a hypnotic pull. My mind conjured wild images before my eyes, far more vivid than what my imagination had drawn before. A primordial group of figures, their physical features unclear beneath heavy robes and makeup, their camp an open field made next to a wide body of water, a chorus of woodwinds, a flurry of feet, a raging fire. As the fire grew hotter and gradually turned into an inferno, and the tempo kept pace with the raging flames, I felt a strange and overwhelming compulsion to follow it to its source. To be an observer of something that no human had seen in an innumerable amount of time.
I blinked, and the visions shattered, though the melody remained—a distant lover calling to me still. The only path was forward, to wherever the bayou took me. I didn’t look back; I just punched the throttle.
The fans sped up, and the airboat took off, roaring down the waterway. I could have gone for a drink then. My hands trembled as the vessel split the swampy water, launching it back in waves. I could have even gone for two. Anything to keep me grounded against the monotonous foliage that boxed me in. There were no recognizable landmarks. In fact, it was the opposite. I’d felt for a time that I’d at least once known parts of the route, but the more I progressed, the more it felt like each stretch was taken from familiar parts and recycled further and further until I recognized everything and nothing at all. Beneath it was a sense of empty scale. It’s easy to take for granted how our minds tune out wildlife, insects, background noise—anything that cannot meet a threshold of importance. If we did not, I could only imagine our brains would simply turn off from the overwhelming amount of sensory information. The opposite was true here. A feeling, icy and ancient, had activated in the reptilian part of my brain. Nature was supposed to hold more life than just plants, and yet these woodlands did not. Instead, they were so still it was as if they’d been placed in amber, a single moment frozen and forgotten in God’s basement.
I would welcome Aggie if I found her now. She must have known about this place somehow. Nothing else made sense.
Hours had passed. My hopes of finding the source of the song—or a way out—had been drowned in the murky depths. The evening heat beat down on me as if I’d been locked in a sauna. I always kept spare water bottles in the trunk behind my seat. Two were already drained, and I cursed not restocking. Rationing supplies was now a topic that had crept into my mind.
It was around that time that the endlessly straight cut began slanting to the right. Soon after, mangroves began to dot the banks as well. Their hard roots winding up and about as if to create a cage around the land itself. Suddenly, my ears perked up. They’d tuned the sound of the fans, the water, and the haunting melody into one consistent ambient stream. The song had just grown a decibel louder, as if its point of origin had not been set until I’d crested this stretch. It grew deeper and bolder. Each note quickened my heartbeat, and the vibrations felt as if they had joined the very air in search of me.
Soon, little windows emerged through the scraggly swampland foliage. Each of those windows expanded bit by bit as the cypress and mangrove trees grew sparse, until finally the cut straightened once again and opened up on a wide, circular lake. The water was of the deepest blue and more dazzling than a postcard of the Canadian Rockies. My eyes were drawn to the center of this mysterious lake, where a cluster of cypress trees grew tightly together in the water. I wondered if the music emerged from whatever they concealed, but as I focused further, it seemed to come from beyond them, from the opposite end of the lake. Pushing the rudder stick forward to build speed, I once again stole a glance at the sky to see if the change in scenery had reflected a change in time. The sun was still frozen, as if this private retreat had captured the sky itself in its otherworldly pull.
The fans whirred angrily behind me as I sped across the lake. I stole a glance at the grove of cypress trees as I passed them and saw they were guarding a growth of spider lilies whose shades varied between sharp reds and cream-colored whites. Compared to the endless slog of repetitive waterways, never detailed enough to be properly memorable, it felt curated—like a set piece from a performance that had existed long before the first human crawled out of a cave.
Leaving the grove behind me, I gradually neared the other end of the lake. It was a distant blur until it wasn’t. No bonfire raged, and no figures danced upon the shore. But I knew it to be the place summoned in those visions. It was a field, roughly square, and utterly devoid of occupancy and detail beyond trimmed grass and eight separate trees.
A sudden weariness shut my eyes. When I reopened them, the details had changed. Had my eyes deceived me? It was as if two frames of a film had been combined into one, my presence functioning as the catalyst. A lone figure stood on a small, battered jetty with a single wooden post for tying boats. A hand rose in greeting as the airboat drew closer. I was still too far away to identify the figure clearly, but who else could it be but Aggie? My hand slid instinctively to the holstered spear beside my chair. There was some small comfort in knowing that I had a weapon.
I pulled the throttle to idle and let the craft decelerate as it skated toward the jetty. The melody instantly jumped in strength, no longer muffled by the beat of the fans.
“Where the hell am I?” I called out, closing the distance.
“Louisiana,” replied a voice that was distinctly Aggie’s.
“Damn it, Aggie! Don’t play no games with me. Where are we really?” I asked, trying my best to restrain the confusion and frustration stumbling out of me.
“The coordinates that I gave you, dear. We just came about it… differently.”
What kind of answer was that? Clearly, we weren’t. Those coordinates corresponded to a real, tangible location. Not some freaky mirror place where the sky was frozen mid sun-set.
“That makes no sense—and damn it if I won’t get to the bottom of it. But I’m itchin’ to ask: why the hell did you attack me?”
“I needed to bind you to me, to prevent you from getting lost, and me getting lost with you. That nail, that piece of you, worked well enough without me taking an ear or an eye. Think of it as the price for admission.” She replied. “Admittedly, our separation was unplanned.”
The breath shot out of me as if I’d just taken a kick to the stomach. Bind me? It hadn’t been some kind of manic break? I felt like a rat in a maze, trapped in an experiment I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around. My blood ran cold, and my innards gnashed and twisted at the sight of her. The urge to flee was screaming up my spine, but I knew the instinct was useless. This was all her design, and I didn’t think I could pilot my way out of a place that didn’t want me to leave. Besides, leaving would mean never understanding the source of those haunting woodwinds. And in the back of my mind, that seemed a far worse fate than whatever Aggie had planned.
“What do I do now, Aggie?” I asked, my voice thin with exhaustion. “I got ya here alright.”
“Come ashore, dear. We have time. And once it’s all been settled, you’ll return to your life and your money. Not another scratch on you.”
I did as she instructed, cautiously guiding the airboat to the landing. I didn’t tether the boat to the post immediately. My palms were slick as I sat there, eyeing the distance between us, my hand hovering near the spear. Despite her assurances, would she swipe at me now that she’d gotten me within reach? The instinct to flee hadn’t dissipated.
Aggie said nothing, instead removing the stick instrument she’d played earlier. She joined in on the melody, and instantly I could no longer tell what notes came from her and what notes simply were.
The music, in its totality, filled the air with a new weight, and the fears I’d been harboring grew muted in an almost opiatic haze. Her eyes were not predatory. They weren’t even deranged. The flames that had raced through them before, threatening to set her surroundings ablaze, were nothing but cinders. Aggie just seemed tired. Older now than when she had introduced herself. Much older.
She stopped playing, but the sense of calm did not cease. I tied the airboat to the post with my rope and stepped off onto the jetty. It was a strange, lonely feeling standing in a place so close to the bayous I’d known my whole life, yet so remote that I doubted anyone would ever reach it again without Aggie guiding them.
Behind her lay the field in clear view. Though odd to see open ground in the middle of the swamp, it would be without note were it not for the even, cut grass and those eight trees. Each was cypress and stood approximately an equal distance from the others. They were tall and gnarled, with the bark giving each a strange face.
“Where is this place?” I asked.
“You already know the answer to that question.”
“I’m in no mood for games, Aggie.”
“This is where the coordinates led.”
“That’s a pile of fuckin’ hogwash.”
Aggie’s lips pulled back, revealing a mouth of uneven yellow teeth.
“You are attached to the wrong question. You’ve asked it thrice now.”
Her index finger rose to her lips. “Tsk.” Then her middle finger. “Tsk.” Then her ring finger. “Tsk.”
Despite everything, I wasn’t angry. I did not interrupt her.
“When is this place? That is a better question. Out of time, maybe? If there was a suitable answer once, I’ve long since forgotten it.”
I couldn’t tell whether the woman was playing games with me or if this was her own strange, garbled way of answering questions. Regardless, she must have had a purpose in dragging me out here.
“Why bring me here? You got yourself to this spot just fine!”
“That’s a better question,” Aggie paused, her gaze drifting towards the trees. “I want to show you something.”
She started walking towards the first of those eight. My mind was a flurry of questions, but I kept silent and followed her through the field.
“I’ve brought you here to witness the last of something that’ll ever be.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“It’s selfish, I suppose. Dangling the desires of a person before them and then coaxing them into an experience so far removed from what they understand.”
“Still lost, Aggie.”
Aggie gave a half-smile that was dripping with disappointment, as if I were a cat that had just knocked over a vase.
“I’ve brought you here to witness me, the last of my kind—change.” Aggie declared. “Have you wondered about the song?”
“Of course. Even now, it’s like I’m drunk off it.”
“We make it once our transformation is complete. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? A last gasp to prove our existence.”
My mind worked slowly, like some ancient Victorian mechanism. The gears gradually came to life and spun into motion. Agatha Horne wasn’t human. It was utterly insane, but so was everything else I’d just experienced.
“The money is life-changing, so thank you—seriously. I really needed it, but… why me?”
“This was never meant to be so upsetting. I’m old, Jamie. Older than you can understand,” she said. “I had no one left, and so when I found you, I knew we could help each other. No one wants to die alone.”
I opened my mouth to say something and promptly shut it. Any formulation of a response had simply popped like a pin through a balloon.
“The time has come, dear,” Aggie said, after studying my silence patiently.
She retrieved the second envelope from her purse and handed it to me. I took it, shoving it carefully into my back pocket. I said nothing as she took slow steps, stopping every few moments to bend down and run her weathered fingers across the grassy soil. Eventually, she seemed pleased and moved to a spot that appeared equal in distance to the two trees furthest from the water. Aggie placed her purse on the ground beside her and gave me a motherly look. I wasn’t sure what it intended to communicate.
Then, a grimace stole across her face. Her brow furrowed, lips drawing back into a snarl. What followed was haunting: the skin around her cheeks began to sag and liquefy, like a chocolate Easter bunny slowly melting under the sun.
“It gets lonely, Jamie,” she rasped. “Being the last of your kind. I hope that money is enough payment for your companionship. And I apologize… for the nail. Guiding someone to a place like this is no easy measure.”
A part of me wanted to run over to her and wrap her in a hug; another piece wanted to scream. I was starving for answers about her, about this place, yet if I could just pinch myself and wake up in my bed, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. My legs were gelatin, and I stood frozen, struck by the irrational fear that if I dared move an inch, I’d collapse and never walk again.
“I’m sure you’ve got many questions, Jamie, but it will probably prove easier for you if I do not provide them. You’re welcome to remember this encounter as a strange hallucination if your mind digests that more satisfactorily.”
“H-how will I get home?” I stammered.
“Once I’ve passed, you will find the route you took here returns you to what you know.”
I wanted to force out another question, but it was too late. I felt the finality of her life as the last word left her withered lips. Agatha Horne stood up straight, her feet planted firmly upon the dirt, and died. Her gaze froze, her head fell back, and a foul, bitter scent billowed from her body.
The skin came off in clumps, falling through her baggy clothes, leaving a sloppy mess of leather-thick flesh. On the ground, the remains writhed and danced with acidic bubbles and boils. Her mouth twitched, and then locked into an exaggerated ‘O’ as her lips tore away.
My legs failed me; I crumbled to my knees, unable to look away. The bones in her legs burst through the meat to plant themselves firmly into the ground. Her spine then stretched upward, tearing apart her torso and shredding her blouse, leaving her head mounted high like a macabre street light. Bark crawled over bone, consuming everything until only the fleshy hole of her mouth remained.
The tree that had been Aggie began to sing, and the haunting melody joined the ensemble.
The sound hit me like a slap, snapping me back to reality. I heaved, spewing my lunch into the dirt. I wanted to scream, to scramble straight for the airboat, but little by little the melody dissolved my fight and washed me back into a sedated state. There was no danger, no malicious intent. The woman I’d ferried through the bayou was gone, but something approximating her consciousness remained. She had transcended her flesh and completed her purpose, leaving behind the memory of her human body, perhaps only with me.
Having finished what I’d been paid to do, I stood up, my legs finally steady, and turned my back on the field. I left that lake of radiant blue without ever looking back. I wondered then, guiding my way up the cut as the sun finally set, if the memory would hold. Would I wake up the next morning, head heavy from drink, with no idea how I’d gained thirty thousand dollars? Or would it remain a secret known only to myself?
A laugh bubbled up in my chest, low and dry, until it broke into a genuine chuckle. My pa, drunk and rambling all those years ago, had been closer to the truth than he ever could have realized. Maybe he’d heard a story long ago from his own pa, and it had twisted into what he’d told me all those years ago. Maybe the stories went back as far as people had lived in these swamps. But they weren’t clowns, no. I couldn’t imagine Aggie’s folk with a red nose and crazy hair. No, what my pa had never realized was that the most convincing costume of all was a human face.
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