Owen had lived nine years peaceful and alone in the bayou when it happened—the thing that changed everything. 

The dead boy. 

Owen was fishing on his boat, where he had seen all kinds of things float by on occasion. An alligator. An opossum, clinging to a piece of wood. A dead bear. An old tire or any manner of random household refuse, some things stranger than others. He’d just watch it all pass by. 

Who’s to tell what goes on in the bayou? It was truly none of his concern.  

For the most part, what went on in his own small sphere of it was: very little. That’s what he liked about it, and why he’d moved there after he’d up and left his family to retreat to a tiny patch with a ramshackle cabin that his daddy had left to him, just enough inland from the swamp to be on solid land. Owen had been more than ready to give up the rough nine-to-five of working on the oil rigs, the just-barely-getting-by frenetic nature of outside society and its demands. He subsisted on fish he caught, an occasional duck he shot, canned soups and tinned meats, cheap wine and moonshine. 

He read and re-read books he picked up once in a while at library book sales, stacked in the corner of his cabin. Maybe once a month he took his beater truck to the nearest town to sell some of the seafood he caught and stock up on a few things — more canned goods, more wine, sometimes a chocolate bar if he felt the urge — but he knew he was drifting further and further from normal society with every trip. His beard grew full and his clothes grew more stained and tattered, but hell, he had no one to impress. 

They probably called him the Crazy Bayou Man. He knew his daddy had been one. He was probably turning into one, too, but he didn’t much care. It was peaceful, hard and easy at once.  And the hard part—being alone, just scraping by—was getting easier all the time.

Until that boy. 

Owen had just been minding his own business, waiting patiently for a tug on his line, thinking about the book he was going to start that night, one of his book sale finds, The Old Man and the Sea, which he knew was a classic when he scored it for a quarter, Hemingway and something about fishing. Seemed right. 

That was when he saw the body.

Something large, white and orange, and round, and as the green, brackish water gently bore its burden along, the rest of the body bobbed up and down, above and below the surface, slowly revealing itself—a T-shirted torso, stiff arms, small fingers, a blue jeaned leg, small feet wearing cheap sneakers like you’d get at Walmart. He was a boy of about seven. Maybe around Roy’s age, come to think of it. 

To his alarm, the corpse floated past then got stuck on a submerged tree trunk, just like pieces of driftwood do. As the water lapped the body, Owen gained a better view. 

The boy needed a haircut that he would never get, and that red shock now contrasted with the pale, almost bluish translucent skin. How much of that coloring was due to death, Owen did not know. There was something odd about his size, which he realized with a kind of remote horror born of shock, was probably bloating. The boy’s eyes were closed. Owen was grateful it almost looked like he was asleep, not gaping in horror or surprise. 

Owen wasn’t sure if he should wade out there and—what? He felt a little ashamed that his first thought was to just maybe poke the boy with a stick to get him unstuck so he could drift on along out of his life. Then he agonized over whether he should fish him out, give him a proper burial. Or maybe bundle him up, take him to town and contact the proper authorities?

He was at the point where he didn’t much like dealing with any authorities, though. When he still lived the town life, his ex-wife Betty had watched enough true crime stories on Discovery ID that he’d gathered that if he wrapped that dead child up in a blanket and drove him to town, it would probably look like he had murdered him. Crazy Bayou Man killed a kid! That sounded about like the reaction if he did that.

Owen groaned as he stared and deliberated. What a terrible, terrible thing to see. He was also ashamed that he wished he hadn’t seen it. If only he had overslept that day and decided to go fishing a little later. Or the next day, even. He didn’t like the mounting sense that by seeing this child, he was now somehow obligated to do something about it, and it was probably something he didn’t feel up to doing. 

He noticed the boy had something gripped in one of his hands: a small car.  That somehow made it all even worse. 

A log floated fast by his gaze. But then, it wasn’t a log at all. It had gumption.

It was a gator, making a beeline right towards the boy. It all happened fast. The gator attacked, snapped down on the corpse. Owen was so startled and horrified that he screamed.  Nearby birds that had previously been silent witnesses squawked all around him and took off into the sky. Owen threw his pole into the boat and motored fast back home, panicked, telling himself that Nature had just made the whole decision for him. 

The only problem was, as the whole scene replayed over and over before his eyes, he remembered that as the gator had clamped down into his corpse, the boy’s head had turned, his eyelids had snapped open, and milky blue eyes had stared right at Owen. 

Accusing. 

Owen tried to put it all aside when he got to the safety of his home. After a creature was dead, wasn’t it all the same if they floated by? How was this any different than the dead bear that time? Whatever had happened to that boy, it was long over before Owen had any knowledge of the situation. The chance to intervene was long gone. 

Then again, what if the parents were breaking their hearts, looking for that boy? 

And then again, what if the parents had murdered that boy, and were searching hard for a scapegoat? 

Then again, the guy who lives alone in the swamp—the perfect patsy. Forget it. 

Owen’s brain was like tires stuck in mud, squealing and spinning pointlessly, trying to find enough traction to escape on some comforting conclusion that never showed up. 

He remembered the last time he’d felt that way. He had been in his old kitchen, looking at Betty and their son Roy, bibbed and howling in his high chair. They had just had one fight too many. It started with all the unpaid bills and Owen’s drinking, but turned into how he didn’t have enough gumption to pull himself together and take care of his family. 

“What do you mean, the raise didn’t come through? You said it was a sure thing”  Betty had accused, her voice shrill. “Do I need to go back to work? Dammit, Owen, we’re not making it. If I go back to work, we need daycare for Roy. You know that, right? We need to figure this out, Owen. We can’t push it off any more, dammit all to hell!”

He’d leaned against the stove, staring at the trash overflowing the can, then at the huge stack of bills sitting on the counter. The pile was big and bound to get bigger.

 He had no answer for her. He just stood there dumb, drinking his last can of cheap beer. She’d turned back to the sink and turned the faucet on while going for the jugular. 

“What kind of man are you?” she had mumbled, just loud enough for him to hear.  

His brain had squealed and spun, all hopeless, panicking silently (because a man never admits that he’s hopeless and panicked, right?). Finally, he just got in his car and left after mumbling something about cigarettes to her stiff back as she slammed silverware and plates and plastic cups. They’d be better off without him, that was his conclusion as he raced away and never looked back. 

This time, though, there was nowhere to run to.   

His one-room cabin—which he usually considered comfortable even if it was sparse and rustic—felt newly dank and dark, maybe even harboring menace in its cracks and crevices. As night fell, that sense intensified as cicadas clamored and frogs screeched. Normal night sounds, creaks and cracks both inside and out, suddenly seemed to hold some ominous intent. 

He kept seeing that boy’s fish-belly white face. The turn of his head. His eyes, those accusing eyes, boring into his own, dead yet not dead at all, the worst condition, earthbound for infinity. It was all in clearer focus than it was when he had actually seen him, imprinted on his brain and magnified in tremendous detail. 

He tried to read his cheap book by lamp light, to no avail. He kept rereading the same page, taking in nothing.  

He finally drifted off on his camp bed, the book open on his stomach. He was jarred awake while the moon streamed a bright spotlight into his window, the dark shadow of the boy superimposed against it. 

“You left me for gator food,” the boy rasped. 

Owen hollered, sat bolt upright. The boy disappeared.

“Am I being haunted?” he asked the room. “Why? I didn’t do nothing to you! It wasn’t me that killed you! Find whoever’s fault it was that you died, son!” 

There was no response, just the cold, searing moonlight and the normal dark shadows in the corners of the room, although he couldn’t help but wonder what lurked in them. 

The next day, Owen fired up his beater truck and chugged into town. He not only bought the usual supplies, but he also stopped at the hardware store and bought some plywood, nails, and other tools. When he was pretty sure no one was looking, he rummaged through a few dumpsters to see if there was anything he could use. He found a small toy dump truck, which was perfect, and slipped it into the back of his truck with his other supplies.  

That was his first offering. He left it in his front path, saying, “I offer this to you, little boy. Please don’t bother me tonight. I will give you more, but you have to give me time.”

The first offering went well. Owen slept through the night, had no visitations. The following day, instead of going fishing, he began construction. A treehouse. What boy wouldn’t love a treehouse? He knew his craftsmanship was sloppy, but a ghost boy surely didn’t need too solid a foundation. 

He only got halfway done that first day. That night, the boy returned. “You left me,” he said, his voice sounding wet, the sound of drip drip drip on the wooden floorboards. “You were scared of that gator? You let that gator rule your life? Keep you from doin’ the right thing?”

That question sounded strangely familiar. 

“Little boy, I’m so sorry,” he said. His apology sounded like a wheedling plea, and he knew it. “I couldn’t help you. It was too late. You were already dead.”

“Nothing’s ever too late,” the apparition said. “You can always try to fix it—to make it better, anyway. Now I’m in the belly of some gator. Nobody will ever know what happened.”

“You run along now,” Owen said, trying to sound braver and more authoritative than he felt. “Scat! Go on now! I’ll offer you more, I promise.”

He finished the treehouse the next day — a ramshackle treehouse if he had ever seen one. It was just like Betty had always said—he did everything half-assed and then declared himself done. 

Still, for a ghost, it surely had to be enough. He said, “Little boy, I offer you this treehouse. I will make more offerings. Just please, leave me alone tonight.”

The little boy did not appear. He got a decent night’s sleep.

The months went by like that. The years went by like that. The dull drumbeat of offerings or some form of construction, expanding the tree house, building it higher and wider in the massive tree; at one point he even painted it. 

He fished toys and other useful items out of other people’s trash. Discarded toy cars, dolls, action figures (hell, those were dolls for boys, weren’t they?), a baseball mitt, a soccer ball, long-dead Game Boys. He’d hang the items in the trees, put them on stolen milk crates or other pedestals he made out of found objects, once he even built a racetrack for the toy trucks and cars. 

When he would stand and survey his surroundings, the more toys he could pick out. The grander and less rickety the tree house became, the safer he felt. Several years in, his small patch of marshy land grossly overpopulated with beaten up, moldy, broken toys, many with dead stares (did the trees mind?), it occurred to him that he had never stopped to think about what it was that had made him feel so unsafe to begin with. Was it the idea of bodily harm at the boy’s ghostly hands — the boy had never said he would hurt him—or simply the concept of accusation, the reminder of failing when he was supposed to stand up and salvage something? 

He had, obviously, failed at such things before. And he didn’t particularly want to ask the boy if he intended to hurt him. Although the boy wouldn’t come and torment him if he left an offering, occasionally he would still make his presence known, with the soccer ball kicked inside the cabin or some such. Once he woke up to a dirty Barbie doll on his pillow facing him, her eyes staring and her blonde hair ratty and wild, when he turned his head. 

One day he woke up with a sore throat, a headache that felt like his brain was in a vice, and godawful congestion—a really rare occurrence since he hardly ever saw any other humans—and realized he was coming down with something. If he was really sick, that meant he couldn’t make the drive to town to perform one of his scavenger hunts for an offering and he had already put out everything he had previously stored in his trunk from his last trip. 

He shivered in his bed all day, hoping that he would feel better enough to get into town, but as these things go, he kept feeling worse. A sore throat and cough developed, then a rattling in his lungs. 

He laid prone on his uncomfortable cot, miserably thinking about all the colds and flus he hadn’t caught in all these years living in the bayou. When he still lived with Betty and Roy, it was every year like clockwork. But out here? Nary a sniffle. Now, it was all for naught, since now that he couldn’t get sick, he had somehow gone and caught a bug. He shook with fever and drank some water. He wracked his brain trying to think of an offering, and swilled some cheap wine hoping it would act like NyQuil. What did kids even like other than toys and treehouses? Especially angry, vengeful kids, full of wrath at being abandoned to the cruelty of the world?

It had been years since he had seen that boy. All that stacked-up time since seeing him hadn’t been a source of relief; instead, it had spun up an insurmountable dread of an inevitable reckoning. 

Owen roused himself. His muscles, even his bones aching and his throat burning, he staggered outside. 

So many talismans of childhood, draped, nailed, hung, dripped everywhere, so many toys he had swiped from the detritus of others’ more fortunate lives—lives so fortunate they never questioned what they had. They would always have those things, and didn’t think twice about throwing away their gifts. Outgrown, too bad. That was all there was to it.

For some reason, the certainty that Owen couldn’t add one more totem today allowed him to see all the offerings the way he hadn’t been—as one majestic, impressive, ultimately futile endeavor. There were so many. Hundreds? Thousands? He stopped and wondered, burning with fever—why couldn’t it be enough? 

The boy, and everything that boy represented, was simply a black hole of need, never to be filled. The boy was a certainty of a problem that would never be solved, a wound that would never be healed. 

It was all too big for Owen. At this feverish moment, it occurred to him that it really always had been too big, right from the jump. 

 Burning and hopeless, Owen climbed up the rickety wooden slats that he had fashioned into a ladder on the tree trunk to the majestic treehouse that had never really been designed for a living human of any age. He knew it was all form, no function, although it had certainly held his weight long enough for his construction.The fact that it had held even for that had struck him as the kind of miracle God doles out sometimes. 

As he rummaged through the offerings in the main room of the treehouse for what he was looking for, he waited for the whole structure to slide out of the tree, taking him with it. It creaked but it held. 

Owen found the rope that had been meant for the tire swing that he had always meant to add but never quite got around to. Maybe he could take one of the tires off his truck, and then worry about how he would get to town tomorrow, when he felt better.

Something in him snapped at that. He was terrible at the forever grind of providing. True, he’d proven that he could provide something— used and half-assed and dirty—to this ghost boy for years, but hell. This was why he’d left Betty and Roy. 

He considered himself a sad, useless man who couldn’t be relied upon. His own company was all he deserved. What had this ghost kid even expected? 

Owen felt gripped by a hopelessness so complete it was impossible to ignore. He fashioned the rope into a noose and placed it around his neck. He tied the other end tightly to a limb to the right, close to the slightly misshapen treehouse window, listening to wood creak and sigh. The sound infused him with a sense of danger that made that final jump seem more urgent and appealing.

As Owen swung his legs over the makeshift window frame and prepared to make the final offering, he glanced to his right. Blue and gloating, the boy sat patiently on the limb, smiling and waiting. 

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Alyce Lomax’s fiction has appeared in Gargoyle, Maudlin House, Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction, Coffin Bell Journal, The MacGuffin, Pindeldyboz, and many others. Coffin Bell Journal nominated her short story, “A Good Night in the Neighborhood,” for the Pushcart Prize in 2022. She has fiction upcoming in Gargoyle Online #13, 34 Orchard, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine.