 I'm thinking some of you might not know what the woods in Louisiana are like. So let me help you. Take a normal, perfectly good, pleasant forest. Add a little bit of poison ivy, a hell of a lot of boars and deer, and then as much mud as you can imagine. I'm talking metric tons of the stuff. Every trail, every foot, everywhere. If you want to avoid pure foot blistering hell and the realm of all things mosquito, wait for a two week dry spell and then try hiking. The mud will be gone and the mosquitoes won't be bad until dusk, but otherwise wear jeans, wear a t-shirt, and suffer. And here's another little fun fact. It loves to rain. Loves to flood too. So much, in fact, that our 57 acre property has a ramshackle levee that borders a stream to the north of our house. You normally couldn't drown in it if you tried, but the little shit gets higher than a stoner every time the sky so much dribbles on us. You might be thinking that I don't like the rain. And you'd be right. For a good reason. Trust me. Let's get to that in a second. So this levee, right? 70 years old, as best as we can tell. Already here whenever we bought the property, and it keeps us high and dry. Without it, we'd basically have the vague outline roof of a house surrounded by an impromptu lake, followed by whatever piss poor fish that actually live in the stream. As best as we can tell, there's a larger brook further up north that this creek branches off of. But it's just a small runoff route. Thanks to a log jam, except for when it rains and the water burst right past the jam and damn near drowns my house. But it doesn't. Thanks to one of the only useful pieces of redneck engineering to ever exist. Our little rinky dink ass levee. Since my family is in the business of not choking on swamp water every time it rains, we check the levee after every bad storm. They come once, twice a month, or something like that. Sometimes back to back, sometimes once a year, doesn't really matter. What does matter is that I'm the one who gets sent out into the muddy hellscape that is our woods trail to check the damned bank whenever a storm passes. It's pretty much a routine at this point. But things get a bit weird sometimes. The woods have a lot of crazy shit in them. Old sheds and clearings no one's ever used. Car seats miles away from the nearest major road and hundreds of feet off the trail. Random piles of sheet metal and tire rims, y'all get it, redneck shit. But every now and then something new turns up or gets uncovered, whatever you'd like to call it. Sometimes it's just an old water well that was covered up and it turns out the concrete plug of whatever was sealing had just finally given out. In other times, it's the remains of some poor family stray trampoline. But last time was different. That's why I'm writing this. Consider this whole post a warning to anyone who likes poking around rural properties. Stay away from any drainage or runoff systems. Flash floods are real after a rain. Ensure as hell real enough to bulldoze you into the nearest tree. But more specifically, avoid the levees. If you have to check them, wait until the mud dries up to look them over. Until the sun beats down and the woods are as bright as can be. Don't wait till it's late and the sun has a chance of setting. And don't do it alone. Don't trust the levees. Last time I went out, it was creepy and quiet, which is pretty much the norm for the woods. You start to hear the bugs and the birds as time goes on, but they seemed a little slower to get revved up after this rain. Nothing to worry about. It was just a couple fallen trees I thought unlucky but expected. Water turns the dirt into mud and the wind takes care of the rest. But usually the things are already half rotten and blow down during the worst of it. Which is why it was a little more concerning when I saw one fall down right in front of me. Contrary to popular belief, trees that have leaves and branches fall awfully slow if you aren't right next to the base, so I had plenty of time to get clear. But it didn't bode well for me. I couldn't even imagine the last time a storm had been bad enough to knock down hardwoods like that or the last time I'd check to see if our chainsaw worked. It was work for another day. One less muggy and miserable for damn sure. That was closer to the entrance of the tail leading to the levy, so I forgot about it pretty quickly after a few minutes of walking. You focus more on trying to find solid ground so you don't have to spend a few minutes pulling your feet out of a mud hole or two or ten. And then there were the deer rubs. There patches on younger saplings that bucks rub the bark off of, sort of as a claim to the land. Or maybe because they're antlers itch, hell if I know, my paw was the hunter. You might see one every now and then, but, well, everything looked dead or dying. Deer wander in herds, sure, and you might see quite a few bucks around in hunting season. It was that time of the year. But it was like every male deer in a 15-mile radius had saw fit to scrape every inch of bark off of every tree they could reach. There were even a few broken nubs on the ground. With blood, like they had rammed the older oaks, or fought each other. That was another weird thing. It wasn't even just the saplings. It was the pines and the water oaks, and whatever else too, with the ground stamped to hell and back. If any hunters know anything about this, or hell, any arborists either, let me know. I'm just guessing at what happened, but there were tracks leading every which way, and the trees were more naked than, well, I'm running out of metaphors anyway. You get the gist, Cajun exaggeration only goes so far. I'll cut to the chase, shit got weird, fast. It was supposed to be a 30-minute walk after that. It was a bend in the trail I took every trip, and I knew the way back by heart. But I walked for at least a couple of hours, just plotting through the mud and swatting away the bugs. The trail never ended, and the sky never got dark. I even started marking trees to see if I was going crazy. But I never passed the same tree twice. The sky was starting to get dark. I'd put the walk off until after an early supper, but I kept going. There wasn't much else to do, since I had no idea where the hell I was, and I didn't even have another two hours to spend going the same way back. I figured I'd run into the levee eventually. It ran across the entire northern property line, a few hundred feet before our land actually ended, and I could orient myself then, and cut back across the property. But I never did. Another 30 minutes later, with me trying not to piss myself at every sound I was hearing in the trees, the trunks around me started to look different, blacker, darker than they should have been, even given the setting sun, diseased almost. Like they had rot, but the air smelled fine, still like it does after a rainstorm. I'd like to say I was cool, calm, and collected, but I wasn't. I kept throwing glances over my shoulder, and up at the sky, and glancing at my phone occasionally. It was telling me it was 4.30. That gave me a little bit of pause. It got dark around 5.30 or 5.40 at this time of year, and I must have left the house at 4, given that I ate supper, and had to wash the dishes afterwards. But I was more worried about getting out than my phone bugging out, so I kept going, running even, and that's when I heard it. It was a low rumble at first, like an earthquake, or a train, but it just kept getting louder, and louder, growing from behind me. When I turned around, I was facing directly down the length of the levee, the side to my left sloping away at a steep slant, the right just a mud plain going on for miles. And just around a bend, about a mile down the glorified ditch, I could see something getting closer. Here, I think my words are going to fail me, maybe my fingers too, with the way they're shaking right now. Even staring down at a speeding train with your feet glued to the tracks, or a bowl charging you while your shoelaces are tied together, or something big, black, watery, and beady-eyed, tearing down a concrete and mud trench that hurts to look at in a way you can't comprehend, stretching from right in front of you to the rightmost edge of the horizon. Yeah, it was mostly that last one, but I can't do it justice. It felt evil. I don't say this lightly. I grew up vaguely Christian, and if there was one thing Pa taught me, it's that evil is real and rare. It was his reason for being religious. He said he'd stared down true evil in this world and could only cope by believing in true good. And that's the feeling that hit me. True evil, rolling off of the damn thing like an oily smoke. It looked like a hunk of flotsam one moment, riding on a giant wave and in another. It was something long and muddy with pincers and black eyes, like a crawfish ready to bite back. My feet were moving before I wanted them to, already bringing me towards the edge of the levee. It was impossible to climb up the thing normally, but one of the dark trees had bunches of ivy trailing down its trunk, and one of these vines had continued on down the side of the levee. The other direction wasn't even a choice. There'd be no running in that, just tripping and slipping in the gunk. I don't know how fast that beast was going, but it covered the mile between us in less than a minute. I was barely on the bank when it blew past, sucking the air along with it and nearly sending me tumbling back down into the dip. It stunk like death where it had passed. Not sickly sweet, but rancid and rotting, like seafood baking under the sun for a week. It's hard to say what happened after that. I didn't stick around to find out if that thing could scale the banks of the levee. I just sprinted. For how long I was running and stumbling and cussing, I can't tell you. But eventually my foot snagged on something good and sent me tumbling down to the ground. I thought it was the pincer branch of the thing that nearly got me earlier back to finish the job, but it was just a pile of sticks. Or rather, it was a pile of sticks now. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but it had definitely been something deliberately made before I smashed it. There were two halves of a square twig base, crudely tied together with a wooden figure of something laying on the ground next to me that must have been on some sort of platform. Or altar. Now, I don't know what you know about Cajun culture, but there's something called voodoo that we joke about. Black magic is what we mean, really. And I know that this probably wasn't real voodoo, that it was something else by a more prim and proper name. But there's some superstitions, some hates, that you just can't throw off. Voodoo was the first thing that popped into my head. Fake enough when we were joking around, but less so when you're staring at a witch's doll. And then I crushed the damn thing beneath my heel as soon as I got up. Some things just feel right, and I didn't have any tinder with me to give the figure the proper scorching it deserved. After that, a relatively uneventful trip back to my house, it must have only taken 15 minutes to make it home, and the sky had even lightened a bit once I was out from the trees. Even after I'd stopped running after my fall, when the beast didn't come after me when I crushed the figurine. The talisman, whatever it was. I'm inside right now, in front of the fire I've built. I don't feel like being in the dark at the moment, and the heat helps me relax. But I can't help but wonder. The woods were never like that before. The levee never bordered a mud flat like that. It should have been more woods. Calmer woods. Something was different. Or rather. Something had changed it. My mind keeps going to that talisman, or idol and witches, and black magic. Tales about things lurking in the swamps and the bayous. Bedtime stories. I wasn't supposed to hear as a kid. And I'm starting to wonder if me and my family are the only ones living on this land. One thing for damn certain, though. I am not checking the levee next time.