BY Gina Thayer
My father hadn’t been seen in town for weeks before Mr. Mills from the general store
drove out to the cabin and found him dead.
“Heart attack,” the coroner told me on the phone. “I tried your siblings, but they didn’t
answer.”
They wouldn’t have. When I saw the area code, I’d resisted my own urge to send the
number to voicemail. But something inside me knew I should pick up. I’d been waiting for this
call for a very long time.
As such, I was the one who drove from Baton Rouge to that weather-wracked home in
bayou-nowhere to manage the logistics that close out a life.
The cabin was even more remote than I remembered, as though in my absence, the road
had stretched, elongating through the woods, pushing our house ever further from the world.
I parked beside the rusted-out hull of my father’s truck and walked around the house to
the only entrance. My key turned with no resistance, the lock long broken.
The door opened to a wave of trapped humidity. How long had my father’s body sat here
in the heat? Instinctively, I put my arm across my nose. But as I stepped inside, the cabin smelled
as I expected—damp earth, cypress floorboards, a hint of mildew. Only then, if I breathed
deeply, did I catch the lingering pinch of heavy-duty antiseptic.
I’d hired the best cleaning crew I could find. Swamps are porous places, swelling and
seeping, perpetually moist. They absorb like sponges, release when squeezed. It would’ve been
no small task to erase the stench of my father’s death.
According to the coroner, he’d died in his bed. The door to his room was now shut tight. I
was not yet ready to enter that place. I went instead to the kids’ room—empty, save the pair of
bunkbeds I’d shared with my siblings. Lizzie, Tyler, Eve, me. Such a small space for so many.
Such thin walls.
A wave of nausea passed over me. A place is not its memories, I told myself. My father
no longer haunted these rooms. Still, I had to turn away from the bunkbeds as my body flooded
with muddled memories, a shaky repulsion. I’d spent the drive steeling myself to return, but
there was no shame taking my reentry in doses.
I left the bedroom without looking back, hurried out of the cabin and into the light.
In the fresher air, my senses calmed. I went to my car and took the cooler from the
backseat. Two sandwiches and several beers lay nestled in ice.
I cracked a pilsner and carried it to the old hammock for a moment to breathe. Once
recovered, I’d begin the sweaty task of clearing out my father’s effects—pots and pans, stacks of
magazines, dressers full of denim and grease-stained flannel.
I sipped my beer. Late afternoon sun filtered through the trees. A haze of bugs and
milkweed drifted lazily through screens of light. The bayou could be weightless when it wanted,
suspended. In a matter of hours though, the sun would set, and the bayou was a different place at
night, full of sunken shadows, murky water, looming trees. The scent of secrets hovered thick at
twilight. After our mother passed when I was ten, I developed a habit of triple-checking the door
and windows each night, rattling the locks. As if by fortifying myself against the outside, I’d stay
safe from anything festering within.
But that was years ago. I was older now.
I took another sip of pilsner and let my eyes drift shut. Humidity has a way of seeping
into the skin, slowing the blood, fogging the brain. Something about the striations in the light, the
cloying scent of sweetgrass and honeysuckle. The last thing I noticed before slipping into sleep
was a mosquito alighting on my arm and beginning to feast.
*
The year before we lost her, my mother claimed she saw something in the swamp.
“Humanoid but creeping,” she described it. “Low to the ground, all slippery skin and
shifting eyes.”
No one quite believed it. My mother was a nervous woman. Even before her supposed
encounter, she’d taken to compulsively glancing over her shoulder. She jumped at the slightest
noises, shooed my siblings inside at the first hint of dusk. Her bedtime stories grew darker, more
menacing, the monsters increasingly fearsome and bold.
“Night is when the creature comes,” she’d say once my siblings and I were tucked in our
bunks. “It comes for you, Lizzie!” she hissed at my sister. “It comes for you, Tyler! It comes for
you, Eve!” She lunged at us in turn. My siblings squealed with terror and delight. But I didn’t
like the way my mother’s face contorted, the wildness springing up in her eyes.
She lowered her voice. The lights went dim.
“It’s coming for you, Eloise,” she whispered, leaning in and waggling her fingers in my
face. “Don’t let it catch you!”
She lunged. I shrieked. My siblings roared, giddy with fear. Mother threw back her head
and laughed.
Only when she straightened to leave did she regain her normal features—her mother-
eyes, her mother-smile. At the doorway to our room, she paused, framed in darkness. She looked
at all her children in turn. Silence stretched between us, clinging to the downy gloom.
The moment passed.
“Stay in bed,” she winked, and snapped off the lights.
*
When I woke, it was dark, clouds veiling the moon. But bayous have ways of creating
their own light—a deep, mineral glow strong enough to make out shapes between the trees.
Hidden insects trilled. Lichen hung in dark tendrils from the boughs.
“Careful of ticks under the oaks,” my mother used to say. “Spiders too. You won’t feel
them until they’re crawling up your ear canal.”
I swatted my head instinctively and rolled sideways.
How had I let this happen? What magical dust had been sprinkled in my eyes to put me to
sleep? Instinct surged. I swung my legs over the hammock’s edge.
Suddenly, all sound cut off. No bullfrogs croaking, no insects singing, no night birds
crying out, no rustling in the trees.
“Don’t let it catch you, Eloise,” my mother whispered in my mind.
Alarm bells screamed awake inside me.
A ripple shushed the riverbank less than thirty feet away. And then, from the reeds, I
watched it emerge.
The creature stayed low as it crept out on hands and feet. Long neck, long torso, stick-
thin limbs jutting out at crooked angles. The thing’s head was oblong as though stretched.
Hairless, slick with muck and river water. Its nose pulled out into a short snout; two round holes
poked into the tip like the beaks of the snapping turtles who lurked along the shoreline. Where
the creature should have had a lower jaw, there was only a row of tiny, sharp teeth and a long,
swishing tongue that dangled low, tasting the air as it grinned. Worst were its eyes. Wet
moonstones, bright and unblinking, its pinprick pupils darting in every direction.
My throat went dry. I couldn’t swallow for fear of alerting the creature to my presence. I
tried not to look directly at it, afraid it would feel the intensity of my gaze. My entire body
itched, but I couldn’t even shiver. I could’ve been covered in wriggling, poisonous centipedes
and I wouldn’t have moved. Wouldn’t risk being discovered as the thing advanced.
The creature swiveled its head left and right as it slunk toward the house, cunning, each
motion sly and calculated. A decisive lift of the limb. A slow, measured descent. Its iridescent
eyes swirled like oil slicks in once-clean water.
At the back porch, the thing stole up the steps and disappeared behind the wooden railing.
With the softest rattle, the back door swung open, exposing the cabin’s dark interior. The
creature slipped inside.
I remained in the hammock, immobile, stricken. I strained for any movement at the
windows, a door creaking, stealthy footing in the grass behind me. Who was to say this was a
solitary creature? There might be untold numbers slipping through the reeds upriver or treading
water further out, open mouths filtering the grimy water. There might be silent dozens slinking
down the road from town, their needle-sharp teeth slick with glistening liquid.
How many times had the creature been here, peering through windows, testing the door?
How many nights had it let itself in, observing my father from the shadows while he slept?
Hours might have passed, or one single, pregnant instant. Then the hinges squealed and
the creature darted from the house, eyes flaming, limbs frenzied, in anger or ecstasy. For a
second, I swore it looked at me in the dark. Then off the porch and around the house it ran. A
ritual, a mating dance. It scratched at windows, scrabbled in the dirt. Its panting rose to an
ancient sound, half sigh, half moan, its voice almost human, a warbling, fluted note that made me
want to clap my hands over my ears and drown it out with my own cries.
But I stayed completely still. And just as the creature’s wailing reached its peak, the thing
spidered across the grass to the river, slipped into the reeds, and disappeared beneath the water
with the softest splash.
The bayou shrieked to life—insects buzzing, rodents crunching through the underbrush,
winged things with their harsh, screeched warnings. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, couldn’t
shake the sense of gleaming eyes watching from the water’s surface.
The hammock rocked as I squeezed my legs to my chest. I couldn’t cross that patch of
darkness to the house. I waited, praying I’d make it through the night. A familiar, desperate,
childlike feeling.
I stayed that way, trembling, until dawn.
*
The sun slipped coyly between the leaves, not yet warm, though the promise of
sweltering heat was nestled in even the thinnest, palest rays. Every muscle in my body had been
knotted in place. My joints flared as I slid from the hammock. Had I slept after all? Had the
whole thing been some waking slumber where my eyes played tricks and my mind conjured
monsters?
I approached the house, my eyes darting between the river, the trees, the road.
Everywhere I looked, I expected to see the creature racing toward me, its opal eyes bright with
the gleeful hunt. But there was nothing. Only dew collecting on my ankles and a feeble inner
voice insisting that monsters did not exist.
Inside, no trace of the creature’s presence, though the door to my father’s room was now
ajar. I crossed the living room in three decisive strides and pushed it open. Dark heat. Curtains
drawn. Thick, sour air. A vague shape disturbed the center of the bed. My father’s ghost or a
lump of covers?
“Papa?” I said. No response. Of course not. The sun was gaining strength outside.
Already, I had started sweating.
A floorboard creaked behind me. The scrape of wood on wood. I whirled.
At the table, the creature was settling into my father’s chair. How had it moved so softly,
so fast?
The creature watched me, limbs bent out at awkward angles, lengthy fingers splayed
across the tabletop. It reclined and tilted its head just so. Its eyes rippled with blue—my father’s
blue. My father’s stance. My father inhabiting this creature, or the creature a cunning mimic of
him. It patted the table with one flat palm. My father’s gesture: Come here, Eloise.
My breath caught in my throat. Run, my body told me. But I’d seen the thing’s speed. If I
lunged for the door, it would catch me. There was no place to hide, no way now to escape.
Come here. The father-creature patted again, stern. I couldn’t stop from doing what I’d
been trained to do.
On shaking feet, I shuffled forward and sat down at the table where my mother used to
sit, directly across from the creature. The thing considered for a moment, then shook its head.
With long, wet fingers, it extended a hand and pulled out the chair beside it—my traditional
place when we gathered for dinner. The thing patted the seat.
It was my turn to shake my head. Where were my siblings? Where was my mother?
The creature patted again, no negotiation in its eyes.
Trancelike, I stood. My body shuddered. I almost believed I smelled my father’s cologne,
the banana-rot scent of his gun bore cleaner. I walked around the table to his side.
Tyler would’ve mocked me, called me “Daddy’s Little Pet.” Eve would’ve started to fuss
with her doll. Lizzie, the oldest, would’ve simply looked away. I took my seat beside the
monster.
Up close, the thing smelled of sulfur and decay. Rancid heat wafted from its body. It
spread its arms wide, beckoning inward with its fingers. My father again: Give Papa a hug.
I stayed rooted in my chair. The creature’s brow furrowed. It beckoned once more. When
I didn’t move, its nostrils flared. My father’s disgust.
Abruptly, it stood, chair clattering to the ground, and stabbed an angry, crooked finger
toward my room. In this household, children obey their parents.
But I couldn’t move. I was thirteen, overwhelmed and small. The father-creature’s face
contorted. It pointed again, jabbing, severe. Go to your room! I’ve had enough!
But I was trapped in time, chained to the past. The creature reared back and let out its
inhuman warble, the frequency searing my skin like a slap. The glass in the kitchen window
rattled. The wailing was clear: You’ll do as I say!
Then the creature’s hands were on my shoulders, wrenching me up, pushing me forward.
To the kids’ room. I fumbled for the knob. Behaving now meant it ended sooner. I pushed with
both palms. The door swung wide.
A creature lay in every bunk. A Lizzie, a Tyler, an Eve. The creature-Eve blinked slowly,
like Eve always did, as if every blink was a conscious effort. Creature-Lizzie pursed its lips with
Lizzie’s detached disdain. The thing in Tyler’s bunk propped itself on one elbow, peering down
from the bunk above.
Then, from my own bunk rose a mother-thing. She towered over me, shrinking me back
to child height.
The mother-thing made a cooing noise, a flutter sound, a chittering that sluiced up the
base of my spine into the cold blank space behind my eyeballs.
It’s coming for you, Eloise. Don’t let it catch you.
Then the mother-thing winked, tossed back its head, and laughed.
The others joined in. Laughter filled the room. The father-thing’s hand fell on my
shoulder from behind. He laughed a warble laugh and drew me close, pressed his cheek against
mine. The creatures had come, like my mother foretold. I carried them with me. I always would.
I stared into the mother-thing’s eyes. She smiled and whispered:
My daughter, welcome home.
Gina Thayer's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, trampset, Lunch Ticket, Sundog Lit, Five South, Orca, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently working on a collection of strange and speculative stories. After several years in the Pacific Northwest, Gina now lives in Minneapolis with her partner and cat.