CHAPTER 6
Drive for miles outside New Iberia, along the Atchafalaya Swamp Basin, and there’s nothing, just nothing.
But that was on purpose. Tucked away deep inside the Basin, a small cabin sits alone at the edge of the water. Largely nondescript, and similar in design and appearance to countless others that would also have been here, blended in, dotting the bayou.
This bungalow’s exterior was painted blue green, and so weathered as to be in need of a new coat. The structure itself sat on several thick wooden stilts, precariously, over the muddy brown waters of the marsh: like the swamp, it seemed to avoid focus, quickly, amidst thick gauze of hanging moss and general haze of the bog. Still, just this side of the horizon, there seemed to be the bow of a sunken Spanish galleon protruding out over the waterline?
This place.
It had been there longer than anyone could remember, although it was not the tendency to measure such things as the passage of time here. This was no tourist trap selling swamp tours and assorted gewgaws to passersby: this was a place for locals who believed the legends, and then had summoned enough courage to seek it, and them, out.
That small, nondescript cabin was certainly not an easy place to find, and as such it was not a place that one arrived by accident.
The sun was already setting when the red Gran Torino slowed to a stop in a bare patch in the cabin’s front yard.
Accordingly, shadows begun to cover the entire area, and a thick grouping of cypress trees and an even thicker covering of hanging moss, obscured the sky. What little could be seen of it was still tinged with a few quickly vanishing streaks of reddish yellow, as the dark blue of night was quickly overcoming it all, pushing it down and aside, revealing the faintest light from the evening stars.
Two men sat parked in the car outside, both staring at the aging house before them.
“Are you sure this is the right place?”