Forever Amber

The Maurepas Swamp had swallowed men before, and it would swallow Ray Donner, too, if the night had its way.

The rain pressed down like drowned burlap. Sweat streamed from beneath Ray's stolen baseball cap, stinging his eyes, pooling at the collar of the jacket he'd snatched off a clothesline three parishes over. His prison-issue pants, soaked to the knees, clung to his calves like leeches.

Pausing beside a massive tupelo, its trunk scarred by decades of flood and drought, he rubbed his palm against bark slick with moss. The tree's heartbeat thrummed underneath.

When he was a boy, back when his drunken father's belt sang through the air, Ray had fled here, sleeping in hollow trunks until the old man had slept it off.

The summer swamp had been a different kind of cruelty then — heat thick enough to chew, gnats tormenting his lashes, the swamp air pressing down like a wet wool blanket left out to spoil.

At eight, he'd learned to catch crawfish barehanded, to read the mood of water moccasins coiled on sun-warmed logs. At twelve, he'd brought his first kill here and watched gators dispose of the evidence without judgment.

Ray waded forward. Cypress knees scraped at his shins like gnarled bone, slick with algae that glimmered in the moonlight. Spanish moss brushed his face in silver webs, whispering the stories he'd grown up hearing — Creek warriors, runaway slaves, foolish children who'd strayed too far from home and never strayed back.

Ray had slipped through a weak spot in the Angola fence during the storm, where years of rust had thinned the links. Thunder masked the groan of metal bending under his weight, and sheets of water turned searchlights into blind spots.

A bullfrog's croak thrummed against the darkness. Ray let it settle into him as he caught his breath. Others answered, until the slough vibrated with bass notes deep enough to drum his sternum. Off in the dark, a heron wailed, sound as familiar as the voice of his mother.

Mama had been dead fifteen years now, hollowed out by cancer like a rotted log. She'd taught him to read the swamp — the scent of storms brewing in wet rot of buttonbush and bay leaf, the stillness that fell when the limpkins went quiet, the difference between mushrooms that fed and those that killed.

"The marsh don't forget nothin'," she'd rasped near the end. "Every drop o' blood spilled, every promise broke, every lost soul thinkin' they could outrun what they done. It's jus' waitin', child. Maurepas got all the time in the world."

A gator rose from a brackish pool and regarded him, eyes glowing like jaundiced stones before vanishing beneath the surface.

The wind shifted off the dead water. The sound of pursuit echoed across the silence.

The howl of bloodhounds rolled out across the stagnant pools and came back doubled. Heavy drops slapped the canopy, forcing their way down to mud, washing his scent through a dozen dead-end channels and sending guards after ghosts. Radio static limped through the muck — disjointed orders chasing a felon not worth the overtime.

To the north, a helicopter glided above the treetops, its spotlight dimmed by the downpour. A gust slammed against its side, tilting the craft sideways. Rotors whined. The helicopter banked and veered off.

Below, guards fanned out on foot, wading waist-deep through blackwater and thorn thicket, machetes hacking a path through the brush.

A spotlight swept the canopy, casting shadows that writhed like bodies swinging from oak limbs. Ray flattened against a tupelo's trunk. The beam passed and moved on.

Dim lights marked the edge of town, where Harold and Evvie Thibodaux had once trusted him to sweep their antique shop for pocket change — before the state took him away at fourteen.

Harold recognized trouble the second Ray walked into his shop. Evvie forced a smile.

"Ray? Little Ray Donner?"

They'd been kind, sure — tossed him scraps and chores like bones to a stray, all smiles and warm biscuits, but when a few dollars went missing, they handed him over to the law like garbage to a bin.

Harold's hand had twitched toward the Civil War pistol on the counter, but arthritis made him slow. By afternoon, neither would speak again.

He'd expected cash. Lots of it. The till had held twenty-six dollars. The cash alone wouldn’t take him far.

Ray swept the jewelry into a canvas sack — rings, necklaces, bracelets, pieces that caught light and promised worth, tucked it under his coat, and slipped into the swamp.

Ray pushed through, following old paths — game trails worn smooth by generations of creatures climbing to higher ground when water rose.

Radio chatter faded as the posse moved the wrong way. They'd found his abandoned shoes and dragged that stretch of bayou while he veered off to wilder stretches of the bog.

Deeper into the Maurepas than he'd ever been as a boy, Ray caught sight of a honey-golden glow shimmering high among the trees and moved toward it.

Within a dense tangle of brush, a shotgun shack hunched atop cypress stilts gone soft at the base, tin roof half-caved beneath a quilt of moss, its back wall sloughing slowly into the muck. Resurrection fern curled from what remained of the eaves, fattened by years of wet and neglect.

The porch had given up long ago — only the posts still stood, leaning toward each other like old men sharing a confidence. High in the limbs of a dead oak beside the wreck, a treehouse crouched among the branches. Leafy tendrils draped the outer planks, and husks of cardinal flowers drooped in rotting window boxes.

Ray tested the rope ladder — coarse hemp, rough in his palms. The rungs held. He climbed past dangling roots that tore his trousers. The sack of jewelry thudded against his chest.

Inside, a mural of forests crawled across every wall, the paint cracked and curling at the edges. Wolves in waistcoats and monocles stalked the trees with silver canes. Their eyes followed him wherever he moved. Shelves of weathered wood bowed under leather-bound books, spines warped, titles blurred by time and damp, pages thin as tissue.

Dolls lined every surface — porcelain figures with glassy stares and rosebud mouths, hands folded in laps or reaching out with fingers delicate as bird bones.

At a small tea table carved from driftwood, a little girl turned toward him. Her eyes mirrored a winter sky reflected in ice — the palest blue he'd ever seen.

Nine, maybe. All elbows and knobby knees, legs smudged with dirt and striped with old scrapes. Her cotton dress hung in sun-faded tatters, buttons missing down the front. Hair fell about her narrow shoulders, and matted wisps stuck to her cheeks.

Ray moved slowly. Ending her life wasn't the problem. Silence was.

Four or five steps between them — enough time for her to cry out before he could close the gap. Anyone in the shack would be on him in an instant, before he could climb down.

"Didn't mean to startle you none, cher," he said. "Saw your light through them trees and needed a place to dry off a spell."

She watched him like a fawn caught in an open field.

"Don't want nothin' from you. Ain't here to rob or hurt you or steal your things. I'll be on my way soon as this storm passes."

Her grip on the teacup eased.

Ray leaned against the wall. "Name's Ray. What's yours?"

"Amber." Rain slapped the tin roof in sheets. Frogs croaked again, like a chant rising from the depths of the swamp. "You runnin' from somethin', mister? I heard them dogs. You done somethin' bad?"

He favored her with an easy smile.

"I heard 'em too, but they ain't for me. Must be huntin' poachers or some such. Though muckin' about with guns in this here downpour don't strike me as somethin' a smart hunter would do."

"There's blood on your jacket. Melanie says it smells like copper pennies. Josie swears it's more like roses that been left too long in the sun."

Ray glanced at the porcelain dolls arrayed in chairs and on shelves.

"Bit of mud is all, cher. I tripped over a root, wasn't lookin' where I was steppin'. Probably looks dark in these shadows. I'm sure I got me a doozy of a bruise underneath." His eyes moved over the carved shelves, the painted walls. Nothing creaked. Nothing settled. "Quite the place. Your daddy build this here?"

She nodded. "Said it'd keep me safe from them snappin' things that hunt below. Said some critters'd be quick to make a meal outta me, even though I'm too small to be worth the trouble."

Ray chuckled. "Sounds like he knew what he was talkin' about."

She sipped her pretend tea.

Ray scanned the walls, the window, and the trapdoor where the ladder was tied off. "Your Daddy 'round these parts?"

She nodded toward three dolls sitting together at one end of the table: a man in a tiny suit, a woman in a blue dress, a baby wrapped in yellowed lace. "We's all together — Daddy, Mama, baby Robert, and me. Grandmère Eulalie left us, though. Didn't wanna stay. I asked her to, but she said no. Said she had to go 'fore the bindin' wore thin. She gave me this here."

Amber lifted a pendant from beneath her dress — amber the size of a robin's egg, hung from a silver chain.

Even in the dim light, the resin showed clear, holding the lamplight as if from inside. Something dark floated within its golden depths.

"That's mighty pretty." He leaned in closer.

Her fingers tightened around it. "Grandmère said it holds a black pearl. Old magic that binds what shouldn't be loose. Folks said she was a witch, but I think she was just old and didn't have all her teeth."

Ray's breath caught. A pearl that size would be worth a fortune to the right collector — enough to get him out of Louisiana, maybe out of the country. The amber setting only added to its value.

Ray’s voice softened. "Your grandmère must've loved you somethin' fierce."

"Maybe once." Her thumb traced the rim of the teacup. "I'm not so sure no more."

Amber leaned her ear close to one of her dolls. She smiled, nodded, then turned to Ray.

"Mama says the swamp can tell good from bad. Said it tastes lies on the wind and feels 'em rippin' through the black water. Says you might be bringing danger with you."

Ray wrung swamp water from his pant leg. "There's danger all over, cher, in and out the marsh. That's the truth of it. Take that necklace of yours — dangerous thing, wearin' somethin' that fine out in the open. Lotta bad folk might do worse than ask for it polite. Lucky for you, I ain't bad. You ever take it out to look?"

Amber shook her head. "Can't. Grandmère said somethin' terrible would happen if it got opened."

Ray patted the drying mud from his cuff and took a step toward Amber.

"How's it open?"

She turned the pendant in her fingers. "Got a crack on the side. Like an egg that got glued back together, but Grandmère said what's inside weren't meant to see no moonlight."

Ray took another step and snatched the necklace from Amber's throat.

Amber gasped and stepped toward him, hand outstretched. He drew his knife.

The girl stopped. The blade's edge caught the lamplight.

"Sorry, cher." He raised the knife. "This here pearl's gonna save my life. Get me far enough gone that the law stops lookin'."

Amber edged backward across the floorboards until her back met the wall. The color drained from her face. Her eyes fixed on the blade.

"You said you wasn't bad people."

Ray shrugged. "Bad people lie."

He drove the knife into her chest, slicing a straight line between her ribs. She gasped. Her hands flew to the wound as blood spilled across her dress like an unfolding rose. Her eyelids fluttered, then closed, and she crumpled to the floor.

Ray yanked the knife clean, too focused on the necklace to notice Amber's expression.

She was smiling.

He studied the amber in his palm, turning it over, the chain dangling from his fingers. Whatever was sealed inside wasn't smooth or round, not like a pearl.

Not black, either. Dark as dried blood, balled tight like hair torn from a screaming scalp.

He found the seam — a fault line in brittle glass.

He pressed the blade into the groove and pried it open.

The amber shattered.

A sulfurous stench filled the room. It stung his eyes and burned his throat.

What fell into his hand wasn't treasure.

A tangle of corn-silk hair, bound in copper wire. Bits of bone, no bigger than baby teeth, each one carved with a screaming face, eyes pinched shut, mouths open in agony. Outside, wind and lightning shrieked through the trees.

Ray's breath fogged white. Frost bloomed across his sweat-slick skin.

The dolls turned their heads.

Amber sat up.

The wound in her chest sealed with a soggy whisper, skin knitting over sinew. The flesh curdled like spoiled milk. Veins surfaced — black, ropey things that wriggled beneath her cheeks.

Her eyes opened. The pale blue had drained, replaced by slitted pupils swimming in pools of pus-yellow. Her fingernails lengthened into jagged black hooks. Her mouth stretched, tearing past her cheeks. The teeth inside, glinting needles, curved backward like fish spines to trap what wanted to escape.

A thread of thick, silver phlegm slid from her lips and dribbled to the floor.

He hadn't killed a girl. He'd freed something monstrous.

The Amber-thing leapt and dug its teeth into his neck. The heat left his limbs, his fingers spasmed, then went slack. The sack fell, scattering jewelry like relics from a tomb.

Ray’s skin blistered, then cooled, hardening, paling. Cracks spiderwebbed up his legs as flesh calcified and his body compressed and folded into itself. His blood thickened, slowed, turned dense and dry, settling into veins of painted blue. His spine clicked and snapped into a fixed curve. He collapsed backward, but the falling was strange — light, brittle, boneless.

Ray's thoughts folded inward. Dimming. Narrowing to a point.

Not dead. Not alive. Transformed into a doll.

Amber lifted him by the torso, her clawed fingers digging into his back. She turned his painted face toward hers.

"There you are." She brushed a smear of dust from his cheek with her thumb.

She nestled him beside the others; the man and woman and baby who'd once been her family.

Inside the doll, Ray's soul screamed.

She straightened his tiny jacket and ball cap. "Don't you look lovely?" Her voice rattled, layered with a chorus of mouths speaking as one, scraping like branches against an empty coffin lid.

"Merci beaucoup, mon cher." A forked tongue traced her upper lip. "I been hungry for so long."

The storm passed. In its wake came the hush of a world holding its breath, broken by the drip of water on the leaves, the bellow of bullfrogs in the reeds, the slither of snakes in the spongy earth, the rasp of crickets in the dark.

Amber climbed down from the treehouse, barefoot, humming a lullaby her mother used to sing — back when the swamp was younger, and old women still knew the spells that kept monsters bound.

###

Deputy Gerard Boudreaux slogged through knee-deep muck behind the crumbling ruin, flashlight gripped tight in one hand, the other swiping at mosquitoes that buzzed like tiny chainsaws around his ears. The storm had taken the wind with it. The heat was crawling back.

His beam cut wide arcs across the underbrush, diffused by damp motes that clung to the air.

He had been born three miles from this stretch of water and learned to trap as soon as he could walk. He took the lead in the search for Ray Donner. He had been raised by this water, fed by it, marked by it.

His walkie crackled — orders to abandon the search. The choppers had turned back. The dogs had gone quiet.

Boudreaux stayed.

The moon vanished behind a rag of black cloud, its light smothered by cypress limbs and curtains of vine. The canopy was thick as wool, hiding the stars and swallowing the wind. Every leaf dripped, every limb creaked. He held his breath and listened, ears tuned to a world wrung damp.

Movement.

A barefoot girl stood amidst the brush and gnarled roots, dress torn at the hem and streaked with mud. Wisps of hair, yellow as split cane, doused and dripping onto her shoulders. She stared at the deputy with pale-blue eyes.

He kept his distance. "You alright, cher? What you doin' out here this time of night? Where's your mama and daddy?"

The girl regarded him, tilting her head as if listening to something he couldn't hear.

"Let's get you out of this weather and somewhere safe." Boudreaux reached out to take her into his arms.

The child smiled.