I came up with the idea for this story when Hurricane Ivan began rolling through St. Charles Parish, and I started writing it during that storm when the power went out. I didn't finish it then, but when some buddies of mine at the Jericho Hill message board suggesting having a "scary story" competition between the members in honor of Halloween, I pulled it out and finished it. Is it a Halloween story? Well, it's kinda creepy, I think, and it's got a monster in it. It's not gold, but I like it. I hope you do too.

As hurricanes go, I had seen worse than Ezra. I made it through Betsy, although I was just a baby at the time, and Andrew hadn’t savaged Timberton Parish, Louisiana the way it did other places in the Gulf South. Ezra, at a strong Category 2 by the time it hit land near Biloxi, Mississippi, was a cupcake for those of us hunkered down in Timberton.

Even cupcakes have sour patches sometimes, though, and as a technician with the Timberton Parish Public Works Department, it was my job to keep those patches from poisoning the public when things got nasty. It was four in the afternoon, three hours after we first started to feel the hurricane-force winds and 18 hours after the Parish President had declared a state of emergency. I was out on a call, my third of the storm, checking on a pump station that some busybody reported wasn’t working. Down in the Emergency Operations Center we had a computer mock-up of the entire parish, with handy-dandy little red lights that let us know if and when any pump killed. Still, whenever we got a call that a pump wasn’t doing its job, if it was even remotely sane to do so, a couple of us got sent out to take a look. There were still a lot of people in Timberton who didn’t trust computers, and our public works director was one of them.

I was paired off with Joey Beauchamp when we got sent out to the St. Mark pump station. I liked working with Joey. He was a couple of years older than I was -- old enough for me to defer to, at least, but never the sort to lord it over you – but more than that, he was a genuinely pleasant guy, which was a rarity working in the parish government. We were both bundled up in bright green rain slickers in his Jeep, slogging through the rain and wind, when I got the buzz over my satellite phone.

“What are we lookin’ for, Timmy?” he asked.

“Resident claims he saw someone tampering with the pumps at St. Mark,’ I said.

“Probably some jackass who thinks it’s not working and is trying to kick it on himself.”

“Probably,” I agreed. Still, with something like this, we couldn’t afford to take chances. Most fatalities in hurricanes don’t come from the wind or the rain, but from the storm surge, and there was a lake just on the far side of Kane Forest just waiting to spill its banks. The St. Mark Pump Station was on the edge of the forest, and I wouldn’t put it past some stupid teenager or drunken fool at a hurricane party to be out there screwing with the pumps just out of general spite with the universe.

We drove through Timberton, just yesterday a frenzy of motion with people boarding up their houses, buying supplies and topping off their gas tanks. Now we were driving through a ghost town. A lot of people evacuated, but most stayed behind for a storm this far away. Those that were at home were safe behind plywood frames that protected them from the storm and turned each individual house into a lifeboat.

“We’re coming up on it, Timmy,” Joey said.

“That we are.” It was dark, even in the middle of the day, but the halogen lamps in the Jeep cut right through the rain and dark to the pump station. Even from here, through the wire cage that cut the pumps off from meddlers, I could see the green light on the station flashing, indicating that the pump was on and running.

But those headlamps also showed us we weren’t alone out there.

We could barely see the guy until he moved. He was wearing dark colors, completely blending into the pitch-black woods, even with the lights hitting him. He was at the cage, rattling the door, oblivious to the light. After a second, though, we saw a head turn back to look at us, then a whole body start to run away, jogging into the woods.

“Did you see that?” Joey asked. I nodded.

“What do you think? Looter? Vandal?”

“Maybe. Probably thought we were the cops coming to arrest him.”

“Or at the least, that we were calling the cops.”

“Come on, forget him. We’ve got a pump to worry about.”

This far from the eye of the storm, sustained winds were only in the 20 mile-per-hour range, but we were getting the occasional gust in the 50s. It didn’t matter. If those pumps failed, a couple thousand people would get back to Timberton Parish after the storm ended only to find they now had indoor swimming pools in every first-floor room in their house. Taking care to put the parking brake on, we got out and pulled ourselves to the pump.

“She’s fine!” I shouted, giving the pump a quick inspection in the beam of my flashlight. No missing parts, no damage, nothing written on the machine and it was running smoothly. If our visitor had intended trouble, we’d made it there before he had a chance to pull it off.

“What do you think he wanted?”

“Beats me,” Joey said. “Trying to cause a little trouble, probably. He won’t be back here.”

The satellite phone on my belt chirped. It was on a direct line to the EOC – no need to ask who was calling. It was Stacy Gautreaux. “Tim! Joey! Come in!”

“We’re here, Stacy. What’s up?”

“How’s the pump station?”

“It’s fine. We saw a troublemaker out here, but he ran away when he saw our headlight. Ran straight into the woods.”

“The woods? Is he insane?”

“I guess.”

“Well listen, you boys better get back to the barn. The National Weather Service just reported Ezra is getting stronger.”

“What? I thought it make landfall hours ago!”

“I’m just passing the word,” she said. That made no sense – these storms always lost steam over land, away from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico that acted like fuel. For it to be gaining strength with the ye over Mississippi… I’d never seen anything like that before.

Joey closed the cage around the pump station and locked it tight. “Did she just say Ezra was getting stronger?”

“I guess so. Damndest thing I ever heard of.”

“I’ve heard of damnd-er,” Joey said. I couldn’t be sure in the downpour, but I thought he winked. “Let’s get back to the barn before this gets any nastier.”

We did not, I must tell you, succeed in avoiding the nastiness. As we drove back to the Emergency Operations Center, the rainfall was getting demonstrably heavier, and Joey started to have trouble with the wind jostling the Jeep around. More than one street was starting to show water pooling at the edge, culverts bubbling over and leaves and branches clogging drains. I began to fear that there wouldn’t be enough pump stations in the parish to save a hell of a lot of carpets. I could only hope it would turn out to be no worse than that. When we rolled back into the EOC we were greeted by a typically warm salutation: “Is that Beauchamp and St. Pé?” a voice bellowed.

“Nice to see you too, Eddie,” Joey said. Eddie Caillet, our EOC chief, was never a puppy dog, but whenever things went into high gear he got even ornerier. He stormed in, cheeks and eyes puffed and red with anger and exhaustion, silver hair unkempt and hanging down over wrinkles. He was a great planner – thanks to him we had EOC guys in every ward of the parish, satellite phones charged, ready to go out and handle anything that got hairy. Caillet didn’t have what you call grace under pressure, though. When the wind kicked up and the water rose, he started to flake, and that was something we couldn’t afford. The EOC chief was appointed by the Parish Council, and while every member of that body had been approached by someone in the EOC or Public Works about this problem at some time or another, Caillet was an old chum of the parish president, and as such, it was harder to get rid of then diaper rash.

“Where the hell have you two been?”

“Making sure Adams Lake didn’t swell up and flood half the parish,” I said.

“’Zat all right?”

“You wanna watch your mouth, St. Pé? Don’t go forgettin’ who’s in charge around here!”

“Whoa, Eddie, relax,” Joey said. His voice was cool, soothing. He peeled off his raincoat and draped it over Caillet’s shoulder. “Timmy’s just tired. Poor fella’s been awake damn near 37 hours by now. You know what one of these storms does to a man.”

“Yeah, but that don’t excuse--”

“Eeeeeeeeed.”

Caillet “harrumphed” at me. “Thirty-seven hours, huh?”

“You know what these storms are like, Ed,” I said through grit teeth. He nodded, although you could almost see an implied grunt as he did so. “Go sleep it off.” We’d set up a few cots in the back room just for this. When a hurricane hit, we all became 24-hour workers. Having a chance to sneak a few Zs could be the difference between catching a broken pump and flooding an entire subdivision. Before I went to the cots, though, I stopped by the front office where Stacy had been fielding phone calls all day. She was a pretty thing, in her mid-20s, with chin-length brown hair, gorgeous green eyes and a gargantuan husband that rendered the rest of her attributes somewhat moot.

“Hey, Stacy, I know this isn’t a good time, but would you mind if I used the phone for a minute so I can call home?”

She winked at me. “What phone?”

“You’re a peach.”

Allie, my wife was a veteran at going through these storms. My 15-year-old, Dan, helped me board the house up yesterday before I’d gone out to work, so I was fairly confident in their safety. But still, I wouldn’t be a husband or a father worth the name if I didn’t worry a little.

“Allie? Hey hon, how’re you holding up down there?”

“The power’s been out for a while,” she said. “I don’t suppose you could light a fire under those boys from Entergy and get ‘em out here to fix it, could you?”

“Take a look outside, darlin’. Ain’t no fires getting’ lit tonight.”

“Well then, how about just getting you home so you could have a decent rest in your own bed?”

Allie couldn’t possibly have known how sweet that sounded to me. To be in my own house, on my own pillow, arm curled around her waist (a little plumper than when I married her, but that just gave me more to hold on to). If the Good Lord Himself asked me what I wanted as my eternal reward, I don’t think I could have asked for much more than that.

But around me, phones were ringing, computers were blipping and everyone was in a state of… well, not panic, we were too well trained for that, but a sort of frenzied readiness. And I knew without a doubt that my arm wasn’t getting wrapped around anything tonight.

“Wish I could, Sweet Pea, but they need me here.”

“Of course they do,” she said. “Serves me right for marrying the hardest working man in the whole parish. I should have gone with David Dupré when he asked me.”

We both laughed at her little game – a bit of whistling past the graveyard, jokes to calm her nerves. It was just our subliminal signal that everything was fine. I needed it, and I loved her for it. “Stay dry, Sweet Pea,” I said. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

I put the phone back in its receiver and carried Allie’s voice with me, taking her to the cots in the back. I kicked off my shoes and lay down in the semi-dark, the emergency exit light still burning, flickering softly over my head, and making the room far brighter than I liked it when I tried to sleep. Like the light, the sound got to me too. Actually, it was the lack of sound. Just a few feet away the center was buzzing like an anthill, but with the door closed it was stone quiet. It would be different at home, I know. More frightening, perhaps. I would lie in bed, my arm around my wife, and listen to the wind scream and the heavy tattoo of rain on the windows. With the windows and doors boarded, sealed up, it would be like an escape pod at sea, black as midnight, hell raging outside. All things considered, I was much safer here in the EOC, in a reinforced basement in the sturdiest building in Timberton Parish. But I’d have stayed in a reed hut if I could have had my arm around my wife and my son just down the hall.

I woke up to Stacy gently nudging me and whispering my name. “Tim? Timmy, wake up.”

I snorted awake. “Wha? Ah… Eddie needs me to clean up after him again, doesn’t he?”

“He needs everyone to clean up, Tim.”

That didn’t sound good. I flashed on a broken pump somewhere, streets flooded, the Weather Channel finding the biggest idiot in the parish and showing him in waist-deep water for no good reason. I should have been so lucky.

“What’s going on, Stacy?”

“The storm got stronger again. It’s a Category 3 now.”

“What?”

“I know. Eddie’s getting everyone on alert.”

“Hasn’t anyone told this friggin’ storm it’s supposed to get weaker over the land?”

“Nobody can figure it out, but it’s getting bad out there. All the pumps are working at full capacity, but it may not be enough.”

“The storm surge?”

“It’s up to four feet and rising fast.” That was bad. If it hit eight feet, the levees may not be enough to hold the water back. I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, popped my feet back into my shoes, and followed Stacy to the war room. Everyone was in there – Eddie, the parish president, the public works director… even the superintendent of schools. Only the sheriff hadn’t arrived yet, and he was supposed to be on his way.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Storm’s worse,” Joey said.

“And it’s jogged west,” Eddie added.

“What?” The last time I had seen a weather map there was a high-pressure front rolling in from Texas and Oklahoma. That should have kept Ezra to our east… or at the very least, send it northward. Now it was getting stronger and headed this way. This was bad on so many levels. It wouldn’t have been as bad as it was, though, if the thing had strengthened and headed our way in the first place. This cupcake storm was so far from us – on the good side – that we’d only ordered a voluntary evacuation. There was a hell of a lot of people holed up in this parish who otherwise would have been in Texas or Alabama, cozy in motels worried about their homes but not their lives. Now they were trapped in their houses, lifeboats that could be dashed against the rocks if things kept going the way they were going.

Asa Simon, the parish president, was staring at a computer screen, looking at the projected path of the storm. Hurricane Ezra had gone north from the Gulf into Mississippi, but once it was inland, it had taken a turn almost due west. It was coming straight for us, and it was going to tear through New Orleans and the barrier islands to do it.

“Dammit, Eddie, you gotta do something,” Simon said. “I didn’t call for an evacuation because you said there wasn’t doing to be a need. One of our asses is going to be on the line once this blows over, and it’s not gonna be mine!” Simon was right every once in a while. People wouldn’t remember that no one predicted the storm would come anywhere near Timberton Parish. They wouldn’t remember that everyone – every blessed one of them – had been caught with their pants down. They would just remember that they should have evacuated, as it turned out, and that no order was given, and whose fault was that? I was no fan of Asa Simons or Eddie Caillet, but neither of them deserved the blame for God changing his mind.

“Okay, enough of this screaming. What can we do?” Simon finally asked.

“Open the shelters, although I don’t think I’d recommend anyone leaving their house to get one just now,” Joey said.

“That’s the whole damn problem,” I said. “If anybody was gonna go anywhere, they should have done it yesterday. They try to run in what we’ve got now, they could be killed.”

“We wait it out,” Caillet said. “Wait it out and clean up as fast as we can once it’s done.”

“Zeringue Place is where I’m most worried,” Joey said. “There’s a lot of old houses there, built before the codes got stricter after Andrew. And a lot of those homes got old folks who ain’t the type to evacuate just because it’s good for ‘em.”

“Which means most of them are probably still there,” I said. “How’s the pump station look?”

The Zeringue Pump Station was brand-new, installed after some heavy rains last spring put six inches of water in over two hundred houses. That was just from a conventional rainfall, albeit a heavy one. The idea of a Category 3 hurricane… I could barely imagine how bad it would be there. Water rising, drenching carpets, seeping through drywall… homeowners huddled on couches and tables, climbing into attics if they had them, because very few homeowners in that area could afford a house with a second story.

“It’s looking okay so far,” said Tab Thomas, one of the monitors for the EOC. He pointed to a black and white television image that gave us a clear view of the pumps – or at least, as clear a view as was possible through the rain and flying debris. It had been an uphill battle to convince Eddie Caillet that installing security cameras at the pumps was a good idea. Tonight was going to prove us painfully correct.

“Geez, Timmy, I’ve never seen someone stare so hard at a TV that didn’t have nekkid women on it. What are you looking for?”

“The Zeringue Pump Station is the closest one to St. Mark, just a few miles down the road on the edge of the forest.”

“So?”

“So, when me an’ Joey were at St. Mark earlier, we saw somebody tryin’ to mess with the pump. If he’s still lookin’ to cause trouble, Zeringue Place would be the best – and easiest – place to do it.”

“Man, even the trouble-makers are boarded up by now, Hoss. Ain’t nobody in this parish crazy enough to be out in this, ‘cept maybe Desmond Louviere, an’ he saves up all his crazy for the Parish Council meetings so he can accuse Asa of takin’ bribes from the CIA to hid the new alien landing strip in the middle of the forest.”

I didn’t blame Tab for being skeptical. It would have been crazy for anybody to be on the streets in weaker storms than Ezra had turned into, but Tab hadn’t been with the department long enough to work a storm like this. People did go crazy. Looters, vandals… storms, like full moons, brought out the loony in people.

We sat there for some time, monitoring the storm. We would get the occasional phone call from some busybody wanting to complain that a pump wasn’t working or that the power was out, but our board showed all the pumps as fully operational. As for the juice – hell, they should be calling the damn power company. We gave them the number for Entergy. Let them worry about it. In the meantime, they were at home, boxed in, in the dark. Truth be told, unless you were stupid enough to go outside, hurricanes were usually boring as hell. And that was a good thing. Around 9 o’clock, long after it would have been dark even without Ezra blotting out the sun, Tab called out my name.

“What is it?”

“That fella you saw at the St. Mark Pump Station… what did he look like?”

“We never really got a good look at him. He was in dark clothes and there ain’t a hell of a lot of visibility out there. Why?”

Tab tapped the monitor with his index finger. “I’m just wonderin’ if he may be puttin’ in a repeat performance.”

I looked up at the screen to see a shape moving around that did not belong at the pump station. It was a large man, with a build like a circus strongman, but through the rain we couldn’t make out much more than his shape. He was moving fast, though, much more sure-footed than I would have been in that monsoon. I got all this in the split-second before the screen blipped to another pump station, one without the added detail of the hulking brute who didn’t belong there.

“Where did he go? Where did he go?” I shouted.

“The monitor rotates to all of the pump stations in the parish. We’re lookin’ at Sunset Court now.”

“Well get Zeringue back, dammit!”

“I’m working on it!” It took him maybe 15 seconds of frantic tapping on the keyboard, but it felt like an hour. “There,” he said. “Back to Zeringue.” Tab looked back up at the monitor. “He’s gone!”

“He did what he came there for, though.” I pointed to the board where little green and red lights marked off the status of the pump stations. Zeringue had just flipped from green to red.

“What did he do?”

“I can’t tell. It doesn’t look like the pumps are running, though.”

“Is that a hole in the cage?” Joey asked.

“What the hell did he do?” Tab yelped.

“Forget what he did, where did he go? My God, all those people… this is going to be the worst flood this parish has ever seen.”

“No it ain’t,” Asa Simon said. “We’ve gotta fix that thing.”

“Have you lost your mind, Asa?” Caillet shouted. “There’s a Cat-Three hurricane headed straight for us!”

“No there isn’t.”

We all turned to Tab, who was now looking at the ticker from the National Weather Service.

“Category four.”

“This is crazy,” Caillet said. “Hurricanes don’t do this. Hurricanes can’t do this.”

“Well somebody tell that to Ezra,” Tab said. “The eye is 15 miles east of Pearl River now. We’re getting Category 2 winds here already, and the lake is rising.”

“You see, Asa?” Caillet asked. It’d be suicide to go out in this.”

“Yeah, but we may not have a choice,” Joey said.

I turned to him, eyebrow raised, hoping he caught my clear implication that he had lost his damn mind. “Do what?”

“That place is outside of the Hurricane Protection Levee,” Joey said. “Without those pumps, that area is going to turn into a giant, swampy punch bowl. There are hundreds of people who will lose everything they own. Assuming they don’t drown first.”

“Joey--”

“Look, Tim, if nobody goes out there to fix that, people are gonna die. And if we don’t fix it now, it’s just gonna get worse.”

“Aw crap,” Tab grumbled.

“What? Please, please, give me more good news.”

“It just got worse.”

“We’ve got a tornado warning. One just touched down in Hahnville.”

“Hahnville?” Joey said. “That’s thirty miles away!”

“Tell that to this big red band the National Weather Service just threw up.”

“Eddie, we’ve got to get out there. We have got to get that pump fixed. Ignoring it isn’t an option anymore.”

“Are you willing to go out there in this?”

“Damn right. By myself, if I have to.”

“You won’t,” I said. I could hear Allie in the back of my head shouting at me for saying something so stupid, but Joey was right. “I’ll go with you.”

“Two of you have lost your mind?”

It was more than two, actually. More hands crept up, and soon there were five of us who had lost our minds.

“Fine,” Eddie said. “Get out there. But if this department gets a bunch of lawsuits from your widows, I’m goin’ out there to piss all over your graves.”

We didn’t take Joey’s Jeep back out there. Ray Roberts, Dick Hymel and Ted Fabre took a van, while Joey and I took out a pickup truck with the clamshell in place, shielding tools and replacement parts. Fixing the pumps in the storm would be hard, but not impossible. The good news was that the Zeringue Pump Station was south of Kane Forest, and the trees broke up the wind. There was still a danger of flying debris, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The beams of the two vehicles cut into the pump station, and even through the storm I could tell something was wrong. “Good grief, where the hell is the rest of the cage?”

The cage – a simple metal lattice fence to keep animals and intruders away from the pumps – had been ripped open. The whole west side was gone, and the corners where it touched the north and south sides, which included the gate, were curled back and ruined.

In times of disbelief, the human brain can ask some stupid questions. What I asked was, “Could the storm have done that?”

“I don’t see how,” Joey said. “The wind is coming from the wrong direction, and if anything had hit the gate it would have done a hell of a lot more damage than that?”

“Then what?”

“Let’s fix it first and worry about that later, okay Timmy?”

The boys in the van apparently had the same idea. They filed out and, carrying tools, ran into the ruined cage. Joey and I looked at each other, then back at the tools in our own truck. “Let’s go son.”

“You got it, Hoss.”

The damage, from what we could see through the too-thin beams of our flashlights, wasn’t too extensive. Each of the five pumps looked like they had been smashed with a hammer. The intake pipes had been pounded and smashed right off the machines. Dick went running back to the truck for replacement parts, and the rest of us got to work taking apart the ruined pipes, hoping to snap the new ones in. The obvious question never escaped our lips. We were all wondering who the hell could have done such a thing, and why they would do it, but getting the pump station back in working order was more important than figuring out how it was broken just now.

The pipe was segmented where it bent up into the pump, so it was only the work of replacing one part. Of course, we had to do it five times in hurricane-force winds. Hey, we were pros.

“Never thought you’d get a work order like this, did ya Timmy?” Joey shouted as I held the first pipe up for him to bolt into place.

“Never did!” I agreed.

“What the--”

“What? What is it, Ray?”

“What the hell was that?”

He couldn’t point – he had a pipe in his hands – but I could follow his line of vision into the storm-soaked woods. There was something in there – the trees were moving in a pattern totally inconsistent with the battering wind. I grabbed my flashlight and shone it into the brush, but I didn’t see anything but water and blackness.

“Who’s out there?” I shouted. “Come out or… or I’ll open fire!”

“We don’t have guns, Timmy,” Ray chirped.

“Well hell, they guy out there doesn’t know that, dumbass,” Ted snapped at him. I shot them each the dirtiest look I could manage, weather permitting, and started to walk.

“Tim! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“I don’t know who that crazy SOB is, but he ain’t getting’ away to do this to another pump!”

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Joey screamed.

“That’s KANE FOREST!” Ray wailed. The hurricane wasn’t what had his knickers in a bunch, it was the crazy old boogeyman legends about this forest.

A second flashlight beam came from behind me, bouncing, like the person bearing it was in a trot.

“Joey!”

“I’m not lettin’ him go by himself!”

“You’re both crazy!”

“I guess!”

The rain was starting to slack off, but Joey and I knew better than to let that give us a false sense of security. One band of the storm was passing, but another would be coming in hard and fast any time. In the forest, everything was drenched. The lake was rising, and I was sloshing through a good six inches of water. The wind sent ripples through the water like mini tsunamis. They lapped at our legs, sluicing into our boots. I was running as fast as I could without losing a boot to the mud and muck, but we hadn’t gone fifty yards into the woods before I could no longer make out even a hint of motion to betray our quarry’s passing.

“Where the hell did he go?” Joey yelled.

“I lost him. I lost the son of a bitch!”

“Calm down, Tim. Mess like this, it would have taken a miracle to find him.”

I turned around, my flashlight beam cutting across Joey and then back into the woods. “Well here’s another miracle. How the hell do we get back?”

“Ray! Dick! Ted! Richard Hymel, you jackass, where the hell are you?”

“Timmy, calm down. Screaming our throats out ain’t gonna do it.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

He didn’t, of course. The flood covered any tracks we would have left, and the heavy ceiling of leaves and branches kept the sky from providing any sort of celestial navigation. The only even vague idea we had about direction was that the wind should have blown from the northeast. Northeast-ish, at least. So as we felt it pelting us from behind, we could assume we were headed in the right direction. The trees broke the wind, though, and became tunnels of howling gusts, cutting in on us from all angles. We may have been going back towards the pumps, but we may have just been getting more lost. Our flashlights were enough to keep us walking straight into a tree, but they didn’t cut far enough to help us figure out where we were, and there were no telltale beams of light coming from the pumps.

“Hey Timmy?” Joey called out. “You lookin’ to die out here?”

“Not by a long shot, Joey.”

There was a crash off to the left – the direction that may or may not have been east. There were a lot of bangs and crashed in these woods, but few this loud. “Did you hear that?”

“Hell of a lot of that out there, but yeah.” Joey turned his flashlight beam in the direction of the noise and we saw a body move, running just out of the beam.

“Get back here, pally!” I hollered. “We’ve gone through too much shit because of you tonight!” We both had our flashlights trained on the woods, in the direction of the noise we’d heard, so it was perhaps understandable when we were taken completely by surprise. A bolt of motion ripped between us, sending us both flying into the air. I went spinning, falling face-first into the water. I wound up with a nose full of water and a mouth stuffed with mud, and was desperately trying to empty them. Slime and muck streamed down my face and, after I pulled my face from the water to get some air, I splashed it up to clean my eyes. The water was getting higher. I’d guessed it was about six inches. Now it was at least ten.

“Joey? Joey, are you all right?”

He didn’t answer – not clearly, at least. I heard a moan over the howling wind.

“Joey? Where are you?”

I grabbed my fallen flashlight – thank God they were waterproof – and turned it in the direction of the moaning. I saw Joey slumped against a tree, lying at a really bad angle, half-in, half-out of the water.

“Joey!” I ran through the muck and pulled him up into a sitting position against the tree. He howled as I pulled him, and I thought his ribs may have cracked in the impact with the tree. What the hell could have possibly thrown two grown men so hard?

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he grunted.

“Like hell you are. Hold still, I’m gonna go find help.”

“Dammit, Timmy, go after that thing! I’ll be fine!”

I was stunned for a moment, taken aback that he would want me to just leave him there, but he was right. “Keep your flashlight on,” I said. “Shine it in my direction so I can find my way back to you.”

I turned around and started to run again, slogging through the water, trying to keep my balance while darting around trees and avoiding low branches or high roots. Twice I lost my footing and wound up facedown in the mud, but I pulled myself up and ran. The rain was starting again. The trees above were thick enough to act as a sort of natural umbrella, but there were places that the collected rain drained down like waterfalls, and I ran straight through those as well.

As I broke between a narrow pair of trees, I slipped one more time and splashed down in the water, but this time I didn’t hit mud, but wet sand. I pushed myself up to my knees and turned my flashlight back in front of me. I was in a clearing, a big, massive, flooded clearing with water stretching out maybe 70 feet around before the trees came back.

Or was it a clearing? No, I didn’t think so… this was a pond. A pond totally submerged in the flood. I didn’t even know there was a pond in Kane Forest. Nobody ever came back here.

Off to my left there was a sound, a howling noise, like something gasping for breath through a megaphone. With no trees for cover here, the rain pelted down and the winds whipped at me, and it was all I could do even to stay on my knees, but I pulled my flashlight around anyway to see what could possibly be making that noise.

There was our intruder. Even after the way it had danced through the flood and hurled Joey and me aside, I didn’t expect to see the strange thing in my flashlight beam. This guy was tall, maybe seven feet, and bulky, but most of his height came from his long, long legs. He was wrapped in black clothing – a robe or a cloak or something – pasted to his skin by the water. Only his arms and head were bare. The arms were covered in warts and pustules, pine green in my flashlight, and the tops of his arms were a slightly weaker shade. The flesh underneath was lighter, almost a sickly purple, and his fingers were thick and webbed. His eyes bulged under his green, hairless brown, and his mouth was big and bulbous, with thick, meaty lips. He stood with his arms outstretched, not even teetering in the face of the massive hurricane that was bearing down on us. A long, pink, snakelike tongue peeked out of the corner of his mouth and licked his lips, and he raised his face into the storm, welcoming it, embracing it… Calling it.

“What the hell are you?” I whispered. Over the wind and rain, I don’t think it heard me.

But I know it saw me.

The thing looked down and picked me up by one webbed hand, its slimy flesh wrapped around my throat. A wheezed and kicked, trying to free myself, but it shook me around and tossed me back behind it, rolling through the water and coming to a stop near the edge of the tree line, then it turned away and looked back into the storm. It was drinking in the hurricane like Mother’s Milk, and it wanted more, and more. My neck still bruised, the wind knocked out of me, I struggled to my feet.

“Stop!” I howled, trying to draw a full lungful of air. "Please, stop!” If it

heard me that time, it just ignored me, focusing instead on the waves and waves of water that cascaded over it. I grabbed the heaviest thing I had, my flashlight, and with what little strength I had left I ran at the creature. I hit him full-force, striking him in the back of the head with the flashlight and toppling him over, and we both went spilling into the water. We didn’t stop a few inches in, though, he must have been standing right at the very edge of the pond, because we fell deep and were submerged completely. The water was freezing, the coldest water I’d ever been in, and it was rushing about me somehow. I couldn’t tell which way was up anymore, and the water was swirling so badly I closed my eyes. I grabbed on to the creature’s robe, and felt a sharp tug in one direction. Suddenly, just when I thought I’d pass out from a lack of oxygen, my face broke the surface and I gasped for sweet air.

Something was wrong.

It was quiet.

I opened my eyes to see the creature towing me to the edge of the pond, but it wasn’t the pond we had fallen into. There was no flood anymore, the pond was edged with dry, gray gravel, and the sky was neither black nor blue, not swirling with clouds or pounding down upon us with rain. It was gray and blank, like looking up into nothing at all. At the edge of the pond was, not a forest, but a single tree, and beyond that, other single trees, each next to a pond of its own. Some looked normal – like an oak or a pine or even a palm and a cactus, but others were bizarre colors, crystalline, stone or even flesh. One tree, a meaty, orange thing, seemed to wave at me.

The monster stood above me, looking first out across this unearthly terrain, then back down at me.

Then he shook his head.

Then he picked me up again and threw me back into the pond. The freezing water twirled around me again, and again I lost my bearings, drifting through it without knowing what way was up. I felt a pull again, like I was floating to the surface, and followed it. Just when I thought I was going to break the water, instead, I found myself coming up into a layer of much warmer water – still cold, but warmer than the freezing tide beneath – and after a foot of the warmer water, I tasted air. When my head came out, I heard the wind and rain again. I was back in the forest, back in the hurricane. I paddled until I came to what would have been the shore if there weren’t a flood, now just a shelf where the water was shallow enough for me to stand up. Which I did, standing up, teetering on my feet. I looked back across the water, wondering exactly what the hell was underneath there, and I felt a chill from much more than the wind cutting into me. I turned my back on the pond, and again, I began to run.

I’m not sure how long I ran before I finally stumbled onto Ted, Dick and Ray, canvassing the forest with their flashlights, looking for Joey and me. I was in panic mode by that time, not thinking straight, and when they brought me back to the van I just kept babbling about Joey and the thing and the pond, and none of it made sense, not even to me. They locked me in the van and turned the heater on and went out looking for Joey again. They didn’t find him.

At about one in the morning, the National Weather Service reported that Ezra had suddenly dropped back down to a Category 3 and was weakening, and more so, was jogging to the north again. It cut into more parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, but the damage was less the further it went, and the worst was over for Timberton. The boys had managed to get the pump station working again, but not before the water overflowed some of the nearest streets. About 50 people had to get new downstairs rugs and a couple of folks had to replace some drywall, but it could have been worse. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.

As the weeks went by and the tally of the damage from Ezra was finally rung up, some 87 people were listed as dead or missing across the Gulf South, including Joey Beauchamp. They’d gone out into the woods looking for him, or looking for what was left of him, but all they ever found was his flashlight, half-buried in mud next to a tree, the battery spent. I wasn’t there when they found the flashlight, but I suspected that if they had followed the direction it was pointing in, they eventually would have come across a pond, and beyond that pond, something from another world entirely.

But nobody ever did find the pond, nobody I ever talked to about the forest even seemed to know it was there. Even the next fall when a search party went into the woods looking for a bunch of kids that got lost, or the following Christmas when Denise Watson, one of the court reporters, vanished into the woods, I never heard about anybody finding a pond to dredge for bodies. I never went back into the forest myself – in fact, I quit working for the parish and started my own business as a plumber. Better money, and the biggest hazard was a temperamental garbage disposal.

And the next time a hurricane came, I spent it at home with my arm around my wife and my son down the hall. But I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake, holding on to Allie, listening to the rhythm of the rain and the whistling of the wind. And even though it never came, I was terrified, certain that if I listened hard enough, I would hear a pump being smashed and a knock at my front door.