Places

Few residents of Cushing know the true history of La Bête Noire, or how much its tragedy informs the lore of their society. In the present day, the only real remnant of the dim history of that house lies in a Crybaby Bridge legend. Unbeknownst to most, the babe in the legend once lived in the great Black Beast. Most legends about La Bête Noire are false, exaggerated to gruesome degrees. Many are admonitions to stay away from the place simply because it is bad. The stories have grown, transforming it into a charnel house. It was the den of a taxidermist who began stuffing human bodies and feeding the entrails to the alligators; the lair of swampland pirates who rowed up to the back steps of the house to regularly hold vigil in the abandoned house’s lower floors, while hiding from murder or taking in their next victims. Every tale is more terrible and incredible than the next.

In truth, the house only awoke to its power when the town began to fear it.

The original owner’s toddler drowned in the waters of Bayou Chantilly. Grief-stricken, the owner’s wife left the house one evening, walked into the swamp, and vanished. The owner, driven mad by grief, began to excavate the bayou, and lay plans to drain and build over it. While committing his fortune to his growing feud with the land, he called séances in his home almost nightly, until the mediums searching for his wife and child began to refuse to visit La Bête Noire. The mystics who had sent their minds into the nearby swamp to find his family had found something else instead, something ancient, bleak, and hideous. When they returned to their homes at night, it followed them through their dreams. “La Bête Noire is cursed,” one psychic told him. “Move out while you still can. Condemn the place.”

Instead, the man intensified his war with the bayou. According to those few who know the tale, he vanished into the swamp with a lantern and a shovel, as if to dig out the source of his misery. There is one other ending to the story, however, told only once, by the man’s business partner in Shreveport. He told his tale months after, and by then his partner’s disappearance had soured in his memory like an off note. On the night the man was last seen heading into the swamp, his partner also saw him in Shreveport. The man had come to visit him, to tell him to cancel their plans to drain the bayou. At the time, he hadn’t noticed how wan his partner had looked, nor how his hair seemed to be damp, nor his pale flesh and damp palms, and spongy they were when they shook hands. He was stunned by the cold adamancy of his partner, and began signing the proper papers and killing the orders. He did not realize he was seeing his partner for the last time.

In any case, the owner disappeared. The house has been associated with the deaths, and the debacle that followed, ever since. The particulars fell out of circulation over time; perhaps they never mattered. What matters is that the town inflated the story. In the minds of the bayou people, the place was cursed, and they brought forth that curse by stories and their ways. Whatever had sparked inside the house fed on their fear and awe and grew strong. Eventually, it grew strong enough to draw the Black Spiral Dancers.