The heat in Sweetwater did not simply press upon you; it remembered you. It was the kind of heat that held the day long after the sun had surrendered to the pines, thick with the smell of rotting magnolia blossoms and the distant, persistent whine of cicadas that sounded less like insects and more like a choir of the damned. Dr. Cornelius Moreau felt it the moment he stepped off the train in New Orleans and looked north, because the heat had followed him up from the Gulf, a humid shroud that clung to his linen suit like a second skin he had not asked for.

But nothing in Sweetwater prepared him for what waited three hundred miles inland: a heat that had learned to hold its breath.

The town sat in a hollow between three flat cotton fields that had turned brown and brittle, the stalks standing like skeletal fingers pointing accusation at a sky the colour of bruised iron. There had been no substantial rain in three years. Not since Dr. Moreau's grandmother had died of a fever that the local doctor blamed on bad water, which was either a diagnosis or a confession.

The doctor in Sweetwater was a man named Ellis, who sat on the porch of the general store shelling peas into a tin bowl with hands that shook in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with the heat. When Moreau approached, Ellis looked up and said: You are Moreau's boy. From New Orleans. You look like your grandfather. You don't smell like him, but you look like him.

I am here to settle Grandfather's estate, Moreau said. The lawyer wrote to me. There is a plantation out past the creek that—

Ellis set down the peas. The plantation ain't a plantation anymore, Doc. It's a hole. And what's in the hole don't want to be settled.

Moreau waited. What is in the hole?

Ellis looked at him for a long time. Then he said: Cicely.

--- OTMES Objective Tensor Encoding OTMES-v2-C41B8E-078-M9-045-7R0058-0.8 --- OTMES TENSOR ENCODING BLOCK --- Code: OTMES-v2-C384D5-078-M4-200-7R9953-32FC M-Vector: [2.0, 5.0, 6.0, 3.0, 8.0, 7.0, 8.0, 3.0, 4.0, 2.0] N-Vector: [0.5, 0.5] K-Vector: [0.7, 0.3] Total Intensity (TI): 55.0 Dominant Mode: M4/Conflict & M7/Violence (黑色电影硬汉派) Direction Angle (theta): 200.0° Irreversibility Index: 0.55 Transform Path: Original(θ=65°, TI=58.0) → Variant 02(θ=200.0°, TI=55.0) Mathematical Distance: 37.5% angular displacement ---