They called him the Musician.

Hunched over a Hammond organ in a murky mausolean grotto, surrounded by bayou and a spiked wrought-iron palisade. Improvising bossa nova with that vacant look in his eye.

The man never ate. At night, he lay on the organ bench and shivered until the warbly demonstration song drowned him in sleep.

They were humid nights. The air was sauna fog, groaning with the sounds of bullfrogs and the organ’s anguished tones. A dirge, droning through cypress trees. Mosquitoes bigger than bats. And the grimacing moon, casting shadows of Spanish moss over the basin like bedraggled voodoo beards of so many dancing skeletons.

The Musician wore coattails. Coattails and a wedding band and a long sunken frown.

Stéphane sat cross-legged under the weeping willow and listened. He had been observing, silently, for days, scrawling mysteries in the journal his mother gave him for his fourteenth birthday.

He was there when the music… stopped.

He saw two men leaving the moor. And one of them was dead.