Windward Review Vol 21 (2023): Myths and Hauntings

lives would be like when they left the emergency room.
Jamal cleared his throat. “I don’t know, sheriff,” he said. “My
memory’s pretty jumbled up right now.”
“I guess things did happen pretty fast,” the sheriff agreed. “Had
to, in order to be over before we could even get close.”
“It’s not that so much,” Jamal said. “It was more like ... one thing
happening twice at the same time.”
“Son, I’ve got no idea what that means.”
“Not sure I do, either. Sorry.”
I hadn’t heard the name for years, let alone said it out loud. It
was from a song we sang when we were growing up — not exactly a
nursery rhyme, but more of a cautionary tale:
27
#
Never sleep too near the water
else you’ll dream of dreadful slaughter
‘til Old Connie pulls you down
and holds you under ‘til you drown.
It was a silly song we sang to scare each other in our non-PC
adolescence. We’d always assumed it was universal, like Mother Goose
or the Bogeyman, until I went away to school and realized it was strictly
local to Cave-In-Rock. It never once occurred to me she might be real.
“Please tell me you’re seeing this,” Jamal whispered.
“Hello?” I tried softly.
#
The figure pulled back its hood to reveal the face of a young
black woman, no more than twenty years old. The moonlight made her
seem opalescent, almost translucent. She dropped the rest of her robe to
reveal a plain blouse and long skirt above her bare feet.
Somehow, I knew. “It’s Connie,” I said.
“Do you think she can see us?” Jamal asked.
Her stare was distant, looking right past us at something downriver.
I turned and saw a tiny figure-eight of light being drawn in the air
about five miles down, near the mouth of the river cave. “Is that somebody
signaling?” Jamal asked.