Amelie stared wordlessly at the body. An odd sense of relief came over her, for though she had been right in her presentiment, she had also been wrong.
She’d found the body she’d come looking for, but it wasn’t the body she’d expected.
The body in the shallow water didn’t look anything at all like George Coulton.
Slowly, she began making her way back through the swamp.
She came to her house and passed it by.
Soon, in the distance, she came to another shack, very like her own, crouched at the edge of the swamp.
But this house was different. This one had electric lights brightening its windows. And in this house there was a telephone.
Amelie sighed. It was going to be a long night.
4
Kelly Anderson gazed at the footbridge uncertainly. Was it really the same bridge she’d crossed earlier? And what had she been doing for the last hour?
She couldn’t remember.
The only thing she was certain of was that it had still been light when she’d crossed the canal and set out along the path that wound through the tangled foliage of the island. It didn’t seem as if she’d walked very long; indeed, she could barely believe it had taken more than fifteen minutes before she found herself back where she’d started. And yet the sky was black, and the full moon hung well above the horizon.
Why hadn’t she noticed that night was falling?
She was in for it now. She could already hear her parents, telling her how irresponsible she was, demanding to know where she’d been and what she’d been doing.
The thing that frightened her most was that she couldn’t tell them.
It wasn’t just that she’d promised to stay away from the marshes.
It was that she couldn’t really remember what had happened.
She searched the corners of her mind for some clue.
There had been a sound, almost like music, but not quite. The tones had struck a chord in her, and she’d felt herself drawn … drawn where?
She didn’t know.
There were only fragmentary images, nothing she could put her finger on.
But now, as she thought about it, she had a sense that she hadn’t been alone.
There had been others near her … but who?
No faces came to mind. Only images of indistinct figures, figures that drifted past her, going somewhere.
Somewhere she could not find.
Something had been happening, something she should have been part of but was shut away from. She could bring none of it into focus, yet all of it had an eerie sense of familiarity.
The people around her — whoever they had been — were people like her.
The phrase echoed in her mind. How could they have been people like her? She’d never met anyone like herself before, never known anyone who shared the lonely inner emptiness that had always pervaded her.
But now, as she looked back at the wilderness, she had a compelling feeling that somewhere, lost in the tangle of growth, she’d found other beings like herself.
Yet there were no clear memories of anything. The fragments in her mind seemed nothing more than remnants of a dream.
She started across the footbridge, but came to a sudden stop as she heard the wail of a siren. She listened, frozen, as the sound grew. Had her parents called the police? They couldn’t have — she wasn’t
Unconsciously, she held her breath until the sound began to recede. Letting her lungs collapse in a sigh of relief, she ran across the bridge and started back to her grandfather’s house, already searching for a story that would cover her lateness.
A few minutes later she opened the back door and stepped inside. From the den she could hear her parents’ voices, still talking with her grandfather. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could slip up to her room and, if anyone came looking for her, claim that she’d been there for nearly an hour. But as she passed the open door to the den, her mother called out to her.
“Kelly?”
Kelly went to the door, bracing herself for the tirade. But her mother was only looking at her anxiously. “Honey? Are you all right? We were starting to get worried.”
Kelly hesitated, then suddenly found herself blurting out the truth. “I’m sorry. I just lost track of time. All of a sudden it was dark, and I wasn’t anywhere near home.”
To her surprise, neither of her parents said anything, neither of them pointed out that she’d broken her promise to be back before nightfall. They simply accepted her words. In the silence that followed, Kelly found herself once again speaking with no forethought. “I like it here,” she said. “I’m glad we came.”
After Kelly went up to her room above the garage, Ted gazed questioningly at his wife. “Well, what do you think? Did we do the right thing?”
It was his father rather than his wife who answered him. “Of course you did,” the older man said. “Kelly’s exactly where she belongs. If you ask me, this is just what the doctor ordered.”
• • •
Michael Sheffield’s boat slipped silently around a bend in the bayou, gently bumping into the dock at the tour headquarters. He dropped the mooring line over the cleat, but instead of getting out of the boat, remained where he was, staring at the bucket of frogs.
There were half a dozen of them in the bucket.
Half a dozen — all of them dead.
And he’d been gone almost an hour and a half.
It was fully dark now, and Michael gazed around, feeling puzzled. Puzzled, and frightened.
This had happened before.
There had been many times when he’d gone out into the wetlands, intent only on exploring, and lost track of time. Over and over, when he’d come home, his mother had been waiting for him, demanding to know what he’d been doing. “Just looking around,” he’d invariably told her. “I wasn’t lost or anything.”
“You said you’d only be gone an hour!” his mother would protest. “For heaven’s sake, Michael, you know how dangerous it is out there.”
“But I wasn’t in any trouble,” Michael would insist. “I always knew where I was.”
Which was almost the truth, for often, when the mysteries of the swamp would close around him and time would begin to telescope in upon itself, he would find himself sinking into a world of his own, only to come out of his reverie in a completely different place from where he had begun.
Never a strange place, never an unfamiliar place.
Simply a different place from where he’d started.
He’d never told his parents about that, certain that if they were aware of his unconscious wanderings in the swamp, they would forbid him to go into it again.
Besides, nothing had ever happened to him. He’d always come out of his daydreams, packed up whatever specimens he’d collected, and gone home.
And he’d certainly never killed anything he’d collected.
He got out of the boat, tied off the stern line, then, still uncertain about what had happened to the frogs, emptied the bucket into the water. The dead frogs floated on the surface and slowly began drifting away.
