Ol’ Man Croaker's Arc

Chapter 2 of 12

The water broke first. Croaker heard it from inside the houseboat before dawn, a sound too heavy for wind or current. He grabbed the lantern and stepped out onto the deck. Something pale moved through the fog, drifting slow toward the shallows where he kept his boat tied. It wasn't the catfish. The skeleton floated just beneath the surface, ribs as thick as boat oars spreading wide. The skull stretched longer than Croaker's entire boat, jaw locked open in a permanent scream. Deep gouges scarred the bones, fresh enough that bits of flesh still clung to the spine. Whatever had killed it was bigger. Croaker set the lantern down and watched it drift past the old stone marker his grandfather had placed at the water's edge, the one carved with frogs to mark where the deep marsh began. The skeleton moved like it was being pushed, not carried by current. Croaker climbed into his boat and followed it. He didn't pole far, just enough to see where it came from. The fog thinned as dawn spread across the water, and he could make out the dark line of the deep marsh ahead. Something had sent this thing out as a message or a warning. He turned the boat around and headed back to the dock. The catfish was real, his grandfather had been right about that. But if something this size came out of the marsh already dead, then whatever was still down there wasn't what he'd been looking for all these years. It was something his grandfather had never mentioned, and that silence meant more than any story ever could.