Read Chapter 14: The Hollow Man

The first sound was a knock, but it wasn't on the door. It was on the hull of the skiff, three slow thumps like someone testing melon for ripeness. Caleb came awake with his hand already reaching for the shotgun propped against the chapel wall, the taste of last night's river water still sour on his tongue.

Elodie was already sitting up on the pew, her hair a dark tangle, her eyes sharp despite the hour. The gray light through the broken stained glass made everything look underwater.

Another thump. Then a groan, low and animal.

Caleb moved to the door and cracked it. The fog had rolled in thick as cotton, and the skiff was tied to the same cypress knee where they'd left it. But there was something in the boat that hadn't been there before.

A man.

He was curled in the bottom of the skiff like a drowned cat, one arm flung over the gunwale, fingers trailing in the black water. His clothes were plastered to him—a torn flannel shirt, canvas pants—but his boots were what caught Caleb's eye. Alligator leather, hand-stitched, with silver toe caps that caught what little light there was. The kind of boots that cost more than a month of boatyard wages.

Remy Landry's boots. Caleb had seen them at the bait shop, propped on a chair like a king's scepter.

"Stay back," Caleb said to Elodie, but she was already behind him, peering over his shoulder.

"Is he dead?"

"Not yet." Caleb stepped into the skiff, the hull rocking. The man's head lolled. His face was a map of ruin—cheekbones sharp enough to cut cloth, skin stretched tight and gray as ash. His eyes were open but wrong, the pupils blown so wide they swallowed the iris. When they fixed on Caleb, something in them moved that wasn't quite human.

"Broussard," the man said. His voice was a dry rasp, like wind through dead reeds. "You're late."

"Who sent you?"

The man tried to smile. His lips cracked and oozed something dark. "Sent? No one sends me anymore. Remy went into the swamp last night. Went to find a better offer." He laughed, a wet, broken sound. "There is no better offer. There's only the terms. He learned that."

Caleb crouched, keeping his weight back. "Where is Remy now?"

"Everywhere. Nowhere. The mud remembers what the flesh forgets." The man's hand shot out with a speed that didn't belong to his wasted frame and grabbed Caleb's wrist. His grip was cold and impossibly strong. "The thing wants you to know. If the debt isn't paid by the high moon—" His voice dropped to a whisper that seemed to come from somewhere beneath the boat, beneath the water, beneath the world. "It will find a new line. Not just the Broussards. It will take everything up to the interstate. Every house, every child, every dog in its yard. It will drink the parish dry and move on."

Caleb pulled his arm free. The man's hand fell limp. "What does it want?"

"You know what it wants. You read the ledger. You felt the water rise." The man's eyes rolled back, then snapped forward again, clearer this time, more human. For a moment, he looked terrified. "It speaks through me now. I can hear it all the time. Like a hymn under the ground. Remy thought he could bargain. Thought he could offer something else. But it doesn't want Landry blood. It never wanted Landry blood." He swallowed hard. "It wants yours."

The man convulsed. His back arched off the hull, and a sound came out of him that wasn't a scream—it was a gurgle, thick and wet, as his mouth filled with black mud. It poured from his lips in a steady stream, not vomit but something more deliberate, like water from a spring. It pooled in the bottom of the skiff, glossy and alive with small movements that might have been insects or might have been something else.

Then the man went still, his body slack, and the mud stopped flowing. The only sign of life was the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Elodie had backed up to the chapel door, her hand over her mouth. "Caleb. We need to get him to town. To a doctor."

Caleb didn't look away from the man. "He's not going to make it to a doctor."

"We have to try."

Caleb exhaled hard. He checked the man's pulse—weak, but there. "Fine. But we take the main channel. I don't want that thing following us up the backwater."

They hauled the man ashore and laid him in the chapel's single pew. Elodie found a rusted basin and filled it from the rain barrel, and she cleaned what she could from the man's face while Caleb worked the outboard. The engine caught on the second pull, coughing to life. He helped Elodie drag the man back into the boat, then cast off.

The fog was thinning as the sun climbed, but it still pressed close to the water like a held breath. Caleb guided the skiff down the channel, past the cypress stumps and the hanging curtains of moss. The man lay between them, his breathing shallow, his lips moving sometimes as if he were saying something in a language of mud and water.

Ten minutes in, the engine stuttered.

Caleb frowned and throttled up. The engine coughed, spat, and died. He pulled the starter cord. Nothing. He checked the fuel line, the spark plug. Both fine. He pulled again. The engine turned but wouldn't catch, and the water beneath the hull had gone still, so still it looked like black glass.

"What's wrong?" Elodie asked.

"I don't know." Caleb yanked the cord again. Nothing. The skiff was drifting now, turning slowly in the current—or lack of it. The water had stopped moving entirely.

The man in the bottom of the boat opened his eyes.

"Turn back," he said, clear as a bell.

Caleb looked at him. The man's face was calm now, almost peaceful.

"It doesn't want you to leave. And it knows every way you can." The man's chest rose and fell. "You carry its claim on you now. You're marked. You go toward town, the water will hold you. You go back to the house, it'll let you pass. That's the deal."

Elodie knelt beside the man. "Who are you? What's your name?"

The man blinked at her, and for a moment he looked almost young. "Doesn't matter. I was a volunteer. Thought I was helping Remy with a job. But the swamp... the swamp is not a job." His eyes drifted to the water. "It's a mouth."

Caleb sat back. The engine was dead, and they were maybe three miles from town and ten from the house. And there was nothing in the water but silence.

"What's your name?" Elodie pressed.

The man opened his mouth to answer, and a single bubble of black mud rose from his throat and burst on his lips. He coughed, spat, and tried again, but only more mud came, and then he closed his eyes and went still. Not dead—his chest still moved—but gone somewhere else.

Elodie looked at Caleb. "What do we do?"

Caleb stared at the water. The skiff had stopped drifting entirely now, held in place as if by an invisible hand. He thought about the ledger under the house, the rising cistern, the way the water had filled the dry well the moment he'd read his father's final confession. He thought about his mother, and why she'd been told never to come back.

And he thought about the map Elodie carried, and the cisterns marked on it, and the one at the center that sat under his own house.

He put his hand on the outboard's tiller. "We go home."

Elodie's eyes widened. "Caleb—"

"It's not going to let us leave, Elodie." He nodded at the boat, at the mud-caked man. "And it's not going to let us warn anybody. So if we can't go to the sheriff, we go to the source."

"The source?"

"There's a cypress," Caleb said, pulling on the starter cord again. The engine caught, roaring to life. He turned the skiff back toward the Broussard property, back toward the house with the filled cistern beneath it. "The biggest one in the swamp. My great-grandmother's dower cane is there too, the one with the iron head. The marriages were recorded under that tree."

The engine hummed, steady now, the water parting obediently before the hull, and Caleb felt the hair on his arms stand up because he hadn't turned the tiller. Not once.

"Caleb," Elodie said, her voice thin. "What are you going to do there?"

Caleb looked at the black water sliding past, at the man who wore Remy's boots and spoke with the swamp's voice, and he thought about his father's last page, the confession written in a shaking hand.

"I'm going to ask it what it wants. Face to face."

The water rippled beneath the hull, a long, slow swell that had no business in a channel this narrow, and from somewhere deep beneath them came a low, answering hum, like a horn heard from underwater.

The man on the boat floor smiled, and his lips formed a single, silent word: *Finally.*