Elsie had drifted the swamp alone for a hundred years, and tonight she meant to end that. A lantern bobbed through the reeds ahead. A living boy. She floated closer, her wet hair trailing, her glowing eyes soft, ready to whisper him toward her the way she lured everyone who wandered lost. But before she reached him, the boy screamed and bolted. Something huge slid through the black water behind her. She turned. The gator surfaced. Its skin hung in strips, and bare ribs showed through the rot. One half of its face was skull, one half green flesh. Yellow eyes glowed at her. Broken teeth clicked. It had been hunting her paths for weeks, scaring off every soul before she could draw them near. Each time a traveler saw those eyes, they ran and never came back. Elsie did not have long. The boy's lantern still glowed between the trees, not yet gone. She knew this dead creature could not be fought or fed. But it moved by hunger and fear, and fear was a sound as much as a sight. If she could not chase the gator off, she could drown it out. She reached for the one thing she still carried from her living years. A small gold locket, warm against her cold chest, its face crowded with painted flowers around a pink heart. Elsie opened it. A thin tune spilled out, a lullaby her grandmother once hummed. She had not heard it in a century. She let her own voice rise under it, low and even, filling the mist. The song did not frighten. It settled. It smoothed the water flat. The gator slowed. Its clicking teeth stilled. The lullaby wrapped the whole clearing, and the beast's glowing eyes drifted half shut. It sank, slow, until only ripples remained. Across the reeds, the boy stopped running. The scream had left his face. He stood by a burned dead tree, its bark split with blue cracks, and he listened. He wore suspenders and a flat cap gone gray with mud. His cheeks were streaked where he had cried. A newsboy, lost, far from any mother who might call him home. Elsie kept singing. She let the tune pull him, one slow step at a time, back toward the water's edge. "Is that you singing?" the boy asked. His voice shook. "My grandma sang that one." "Come sit," Elsie whispered. "You're safe here. I won't let it near you." He came. He sat on a root at the water's edge and hugged his knees, close enough that she could have touched his cheek. For the first time in a hundred years, Elsie was not alone. But the lullaby would end. And under the still water, the gator's yellow eyes had opened again, fixed now on the warm, living boy she had drawn so near.