Forever Amber

by Charles Sayers

The Maurepas Swamp had swallowed men before, and it would swallow Ray Donner, too, if the night had its way.

The storm pressed down like drowned burlap, thick enough to choke on. Sweat ran from beneath Ray’s stolen baseball cap, stinging his eyes, pooling at the collar of the jacket he’d snatched off a clothesline three parishes over. His prison-issue pants, soaked to the knees, clung to his calves like leeches.

He paused beside a massive tupelo, its trunk scarred by decades of flood and drought, and rubbed his palm against bark slick with moss. The tree’s heartbeat thrummed underneath. 

Back when he was a boy, when his father’s belt sang through whiskey-thick air, Ray had sought refuge here, sleeping in hollow trunks while deputies called his name with flashlights. At eight, he’d learned to catch crawfish barehanded, to read the mood of water moccasins coiled on sun-warmed logs. At twelve, he’d brought his first kill here and watched gators dispose of the evidence without judgment.

Cypress knees poked through black puddles like gnarled bone, slick with algae that glimmered in the moonlight. Spanish moss drooped in silver webs, whispering stories of Creek warriors, runaway slaves, and foolish children who’d strayed too far from home.

A bullfrog’s croak thrummed against the darkness, answered by others until the slough vibrated with bass notes. In the distance, a heron wailed, its voice sharp and mournful.

Ray thought of Mama, dead these fifteen years from cancer that hollowed her like a rotted log. She’d loved the wetland. Could read its moods—the scent of storms brewing in wet rot of buttonbush and bay leaf, sensing danger in the stillness that fell when the limpkins went quiet, the difference between mushrooms that fed and those that killed.

“The marsh don’t forget nothin’,” she’d rasped near the end. “Every drop o’ blood spilled, every promise broke, every lost soul thinkin’ they could outrun what they done. It’s jus’ waitin’, child. Maurepas got all the time in the world.”

A gator rose from a brackish pool and regarded him, its eyes glowing like jaundiced stones before returning to the depths.

In a place built on savage silences, he felt at home.

Bloodhounds bayed in the darkness—hollow, mournful, relentless—echoing above stagnant creeks. Heavy drops slapped the canopy, forcing their way down to mud, washing his scent through a dozen dead-end channels, confusing the dogs and sending guards after ghosts.

Ray had slipped through a weak spot in the Angola fence during the storm, where years of rust and under-funding had weakened the links. Thunder masked the groan of metal bending under his weight, and sheets of water turned searchlights into blind spots.

To the north, a helicopter glided over the treetops, its spotlight dimmed by the falling rain. A storm gust slammed against its side, tilting the craft sideways. Rotors howling, it banked and veered off, retreating to wait for calmer skies.

The warden threw every man he could spare into the swamp, fanning them out in lines with dogs, radios, and boots that sank into ground they weren’t built for. They waded waist-deep through blackwater and thorn thicket, machetes clearing a path one breath at a time. Dodging snakes and gators. Orders came sharp through the static—keep moving, eyes open, no one rests until the fugitive is found.

A spotlight cut through the leaves, casting shadows that writhed like bodies swinging from oak limbs. Ray flattened against a sweetgum, its trunk ridged and cool, sap bleeding from old scars. The beam passed and moved on.

Ray could barely see the dim lights that marked the edge of town, where Harold and Evie Doucet had once trusted him to sweep their antique shop for pocket change—before the state took him away at fourteen.

His chest tightened, recalling Evie’s face when he slipped through the back door that morning.

“Ray? Ray Donner?” she’d said, eyes fixed on the prison orange and the hatred in his eyes—like something wild and mean had crawled back into her life.

They’d been kind, sure—tossed him scraps and chores like bones to a stray, all smiles and warm biscuits, but when a few dollars went missing, they handed him over to the law like garbage to a bin.

Harold’s hand twitched toward the Civil War pistol on the counter, but arthritis made him slow. By afternoon, neither would speak again.

He’d expected cash. Lots of it. Instead, there were twenty-six dollars and change in the till.

Ray swept whatever he could grab into a canvas sack—rings, necklaces, bracelets, pieces that caught light and promised worth.

He tucked the bag under his coat and ran for the swamp.

Ray pushed through marsh grasses, their sharp edges biting his ankles. He followed old paths—game trails worn smooth by generations of creatures climbing to higher ground when water rose.

Radio chatter faded as the posse moved the wrong way. They’d found his abandoned shoes and dragged that stretch of bayou while he veered off to wilder stretches of the bog.

Through slats of rain and branches, a honey-golden glow shimmered high among the trees.

Within a dense tangle of brush, a shotgun shack hunched atop cypress stilts poking out of the sodden earth, its tin roof cloaked in moss and its siding weathered to driftwood gray. Resurrection fern curled from its eaves, whispering neglect. High in the limbs of a dead oak beside it, a treehouse crouched among the branches. Leafy tendrils draped the outer planks, and husks of cardinal flowers drooped in rotting window boxes.

Ray tested the rope ladder—coarse hemp, rough in his palms. The rungs held. He climbed past dangling roots that cut and scraped his cheeks. The sack of clinking against his chest.

Inside, the walls told stories of fairy-tale kingdoms. The paint was faded, cracked, and curling at the edges. Wolves in waistcoats and monocles stalked the forest with silver canes, their painted eyes following him wherever he moved. Shelves fashioned from salvaged wood bowed under the weight of leather-bound books, their spines warped, titles blurred by time and damp, the pages thin as tissue.

Dolls lined every surface—porcelain figures with glassy stares and rosebud mouths, their hands folded in laps or reaching out with fingers delicate as bird bones.

At a small tea table carved from driftwood, sat a young girl who turned and looked at Ray. Her eyes mirrored a winter sky reflected in ice—the palest blue he’d ever seen.

She looked about nine. All elbows and knobby knees, her legs smudged with dirt and striped with scrapes. Her cotton dress, once white, hung in sun-faded tatters, buttons missing down the front. Her hair fell about her narrow shoulders, and several wisps matted on her cheeks.

Ray knew ending her life wasn’t the problem. Silence was.

There were four or five steps between them—enough time for her to cry out before he could close the gap. Anyone in the shack would be on him in an instant, not giving him time to climb down to the ground.

“Didn’t mean to startle you none, cher,” he said. “Saw your light through them trees and needed a place to dry off a spell.”

She watched him like a fawn caught in an open field.

“Don’t want nothin’ from you. Ain’t here to rob or hurt you or steal your dolls. I’ll be on my way soon as this storm passes.”

Her grip on the teacup eased.

Ray leaned against the wall. “Name’s Ray,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Amber.” Rain slapped the tin roof in sheets. Frogs croaked again, slow and rhythmic, like a chant rising from the water. “You runnin’ from somethin’, mister? I heard them dogs.”

His lips curved into a smile, practiced and hollow. “I heard ‘em too, but they ain’t for me. Must be huntin’ poachers or some such. Though muckin’ about with guns in this here downpour don’t strike me as somethin’ a smart hunter would do.”

“There’s blood on your jacket. Melanie says it smells like copper pennies. Josie swears it’s more like roses that been left too long in the sun.”

Ray glanced toward the tiny figures arrayed in chairs and on shelves—each one frozen in polite silence.

“Bit of mud is all, cher. I tripped over a root; wasn’t lookin’ where I was steppin’. Probably looks dark in these shadows. I’m sure I got me a doozy of a bruise underneath.” He gave the treehouse a once-over, taking in the carved shelves, the painted walls, the strange stillness. “Quite the place. Your daddy build this here?”

She nodded. “Said it’d keep me safe from them snappin’ things that hunt below.” Her eyes lingered on the dolls seated around the tea set. “Said some critters’d be quick to make a meal outta me, even though I’m too small to be worth the trouble.”

Ray chuckled. “He sounds like he knew what he was talkin’ about.”

She sipped her pretend tea.

Ray scanned the walls, the window, and the trapdoor where the ladder was tied off. “Your Daddy ‘round these parts?”

She nodded toward three dolls sitting together at one end of the table—a man in a tiny suit, a woman in a blue dress, and a baby wrapped in yellowed lace. “We’s all together—Daddy, Mama, baby Robert, and me. Grandmère Eulalie left us, though. Didn’t wanna stay. I asked her to, but she said no. Said she had to go ‘fore the bindin’ wore thin. She gave me this here.”

Amber lifted a pendant from beneath her dress—amber the size of a robin’s egg, suspended from a silver chain around her neck.

Even in the dim light, Ray recognized its perfection—the clarity of the resin, the way it caught and held the lamplight. Inside its golden depths, something dark floated.

“That’s mighty pretty.” He leaned in closer.

Her fingers tightened around it. “Grandmère said it holds a black pearl. Old magic that binds what shouldn’t be loose.

Folks said she was a witch, but I think she was just old and didn’t have all her teeth.”

Ray’s breath caught. A pearl of that size would be worth a fortune to the right collector—more than enough to get him out of Louisiana, maybe out of the country. The amber setting only added to its value.

“Your grandmère must've loved you somethin’ fierce,” he purred.

“Maybe once,” she said, voice soft. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

Amber leaned her ear close to one of her dolls. She smiled, nodded, then turned to Ray.

“Mama says the swamp can tell good from bad. Said it tastes lies on the wind and feels ‘em rippin’ through the black water.”

Ray took a step toward Amber and wrung swamp water from his pant leg. “There’s danger all over, cher, in and out the marsh. That’s the truth of it. Take that necklace of yours—dangerous thing, wearin’ somethin’ that fine out in the open. Lotta bad folk might do worse than ask for it polite. Lucky for you, I ain’t bad. You ever take it out to look?”

Amber shook her head. “Can’t. Grandmère said somethin’ terrible would happen if it got opened.”

Ray patted the drying mud from his cuff and took another step.

“How’s it open?”

“Got a crack on the side,” she said. “Like an egg that got glued back together, but Grandmère said what’s inside weren’t meant to see no moonlight.”

Ray crossed the rest of the way and snatched the necklace from Amber’s throat.

She gasped and stepped toward him, hand outstretched—but he drew his knife.

She stopped. The blade’s edge caught the lamplight.

“Sorry, cher. This here pearl’s gonna save my life,” he growled. “Get me far enough gone that the law stops lookin’.”

Amber edged backward across the floorboards until her back met the wall. Her face was pale, her eyes fixed on the knife.

“You said you wasn’t bad people.”

Ray shrugged. “Bad people lie.”

He drove the knife into her chest, slicing a straight line between her ribs. Shock bloomed into pain. She gasped. Her hands flew to the wound as blood spilled across her dress like an unfolding rose. Life left her eyes like a snuffed candle, their lids fluttered shut, and she crumpled to the floor.

Ray yanked the knife clean. He was too focused on the necklace to notice Amber’s expression.

She was smiling.

He studied the amber in his palm, turning it over, the chain dangling from his fingers. Whatever was sealed inside was rough, not smooth like a pearl.

Dark as dried blood, balled tight like hair torn from a screaming scalp.

He found the seam—a fault line in brittle glass.

He pressed the blade into the groove and pried it open.

The amber shattered. Sharp, golden slivers scattered to the floor like dying sunlight.

A sulfurous stench filled the room, thick and foul. Sharp. Sour. It stung his eyes and burned his throat.

What remained in his hand wasn’t treasure.

A tangle of corn-silk hair, bound in copper wire. Bits of bone, no bigger than baby teeth, each one carved with a screaming face—eyes pinched shut, mouths open in agony. Outside, wind, rain, and lightning shrieked through the trees.

The temperature plummeted. 

Ray’s breath fogged white. Frost bloomed across his sweat-slick skin.

The dolls turned their heads.

Amber sat up.

The wound sealed with a soggy whisper, skin knitting over sinew. Her flesh curdled like spoiled milk. Veins surfaced—black, ropey things that wriggled beneath her skin.

The eyes of the thing that was once a little girl opened, the pale blue overtaken by slitted pupils swimming in pus-yellow pools. Its fingernails elongated into jagged black hooks.

Her mouth stretched, tearing past her cheeks. The teeth inside, glinting needles, curved backward like fish spines to trap what wanted to escape.

A thread of something thick and clear slid from her lips and fell to the floor.

He hadn’t killed Amber—he’d freed something. Something the girl’s witch grandmère had bound and buried with resin and warning. 

The Amber-thing leapt and fastened herself to his neck. The heat left his limbs, his fingers spasmed, then went slack. The sack fell, scattering jewelry like relics from a tomb.

His skin blistered, then cooled, hardening, paling. Cracks spiderwebbed up his legs as flesh calcified. His blood thickened, slowed, turned dense and dry, settling into veins of painted blue. His spine clicked and snapped into a fixed curve. He collapsed backward, but the sensation of falling was strange, light, brittle, and boneless.

Ray’s thoughts folded inward, racing and collapsing into a terrible clarity.

He was not dead. Not alive. 

Collected.

The thing that fed through Amber’s form had been trapped in this treehouse for decades, bound by Grandmère’s magic—too dangerous to destroy, too strong to roam free. So it waited, patient and hungry, feeding only on those unlucky enough to stumble into its lair. The dolls around the table weren’t family; they were meals, each one transformed and left to bear witness as the curse claimed its next soul.

Amber lifted him by the torso, her clawed fingers digging into his back. She turned his painted face towards hers. “There you are,” she whispered, brushing a smear of blood from his cheek with her thumb.

She nestled him beside the others at the table—the man and woman and baby who’d once been her family, ages ago, before Grandmère learned what the child had become and bound the evil inside her with amber and prayer.

Inside the doll, Ray’s soul screamed.

She straightened his tiny jacket and ball cap. “Don’t you look lovely?” Her voice rattled with phlegm, layered with a chorus of mouths speaking as one, scraping like branches against an empty coffin lid.

“Merci beaucoup, mon cher.” A forked tongue traced her upper lip. “I been hungry for so long,” she said.

*** 

The storm passed. In its wake came the hush of a world holding its breath—broken by the drip of rain on the leaves, the bellow of bullfrogs in the reeds, the slither of snakes in the spongy earth, and the sorrowful grind of the crickets in the inky blackness.

Amber climbed down from the treehouse, barefoot and humming a lullaby her mother used to sing—back when the swamp was younger, and old women still knew the spells that kept monsters bound.

Deputy Gerard Boudreaux slogged through knee-deep muck behind the crumbling ruin, flashlight gripped tight in one hand, the other swiping at mosquitoes that buzzed like tiny chainsaws around his ears. His beam cut wide arcs across the underbrush, diffused by damp motes that danced in the air.

He had been born three miles from this stretch of water and learned to trap as soon as he could walk. He took the lead in the search for Ray Donner because no one else knew the swamp like he did, someone raised by it, fed by it, marked by it.

His walkie crackled—orders to abandon the hunt. The choppers had turned back. The dogs had gone quiet.

Boudreaux stayed.

He watched the moon vanish behind a rag of black cloud, its light smothered by cypress limbs and curtains of vine. The canopy had grown thick as wool, hiding the stars and swallowing the wind. In the hush that followed the storm, every leaf dripped, every limb creaked. He held his breath and listened, ears tuned to a world wrung damp.

Movement.

A barefoot girl stood amidst the brush and gnarled roots, dress torn at the hem and streaked with mud. Wisps of hair, yellow as split cane, stuck to her cheeks. She stared at the deputy with the palest blue eyes he’d ever seen. “You alright, cher?” he called out. “What you doin’ out here this time of night? Where’s your mama and daddy?”

The girl regarded him, tilting her head like she was listening to something he couldn’t hear.

“Let’s get you out of this weather and somewhere safe.” Boudreaux reached out to the girl to take her into his arms.

She smiled.