In the summer of 1998, deep in the Atchafalaya Basin, a man named Jean-Claude Boucher spent six months alone in a shack on stilts, listening for something that had no business making sound. He was a hydrophone operator for a university study on underwater acoustics—until one night in August, when the hydrophone picked up a bell tone from a part of the bayou where nothing lived, where the water was still as glass and the fish had learned to stay away. Luna heard the story from Jean-Claude himself, years later, in a bar in Morgan City. He told her about the night the bell started ringing, the night he realized it was coming from inside his own skull, and the morning he burned the shack to the waterline. This is that story.