T is for TERROR ON THE TRAIL
The fire finally blossomed like a
cactus flower, orange and pink and dancing with the strokes of the evening
breeze, and was just starting to melt away the chill of the desert as the
bruise of night set and deepened from yellow and purple to deep, dark blue.
Grant stoked the chunky ash beneath the kindling and watched the flames
undulate, transfixed by their dance.
He had been three days off the
beaten path, with not so much as a lost coach or a hungry coyote for company.
Just scrub brush, pear cacti, and sand. And the heat. And after three days
basting in his own sweat, having the desert filtered through his pores, sand
sticking to the perspiration on his body so that his skin felt like roofing
shingles, Grant was ready for a break.
And it was here in Whistling Valley
that Grant broke. It was fitting, since the town seemed fairly broken itself.
What remained left of the small community was a Main Street overgrown with
scrub and sentried by dilapidated false fronts. The Red & Black Saloon,
Gundersen’s General Store, First Bank of Whistling Valley—they were all masses
of dust-tattooed boards, heat-cracked mortar and filthy, shattered glass. The
wind played through the standing debris, producing a thin, blue whistle.
However applicable the town’s moniker had been before it became a ghost town,
it certainly, perhaps ironically, fit now.
Grant had made his bed in the
livery, now a mess of probably-mouse-infested straw, under a warped canopy of
shaggy wood beams. Just enough cover to hide himself, should the need arise,
from any vagabonds whose curiosity may be piqued by his fire, and the necessary
setup for retiring his horse for the night.
Grant wondered what made a town
like Whistling Valley dry up and crack. Of course there were hundreds of small
settlements between here and anywhere with the same story—miner hits ore, town
blooms around lucrative mine, then turns into a ghost town once the mine collapses
or its fecundity wanes. The same story dots the landscape from Minnesota to New
Mexico: over-logged mill towns, over-mined mining towns, towns that dried up
when their water supply did after a drought or became too polluted to use. And
all that was left to memorialize Whistling Valley was a ramshackle, open-air
sepulcher.
There was something different about
this place, though, from the other empty carapaces of homesteads he’d traveled
through. There was something unsettling about the boughs nailed to the front
doors of the small, ramshackle homes, about the way the cross that would
normally stand erect from the peak of the church roof like a mast on a ship,
was snapped from its base and lying in the street.
Of course it could just simply be
the product of a high wind.
After a meager meal and few hours
of sleep, Grant woke. The whistling of the aptly named Whistling Valley, that
he’d gotten used to. It took some hours of restlessly pulling his hat down over
his face, as if making things even darker would somehow assuage his
sleeplessness, but now there was a new sound. Something dry and jointed. It
reminded him of the clack of knitting needles and of dim, lantern-lit evenings
in Birch Creek, watching the darkness and the nodding shaggy heads of the pine
trees while his mother busied herself so as not to think about his father—her
husband.
Perhaps, he reasoned to himself,
it’s the dry creak of the chains holding the general store sign to its pole
above the business’s door. Or an animal scrounging around the junk-cluttered
yard of a building looking for mice to eat.
No, it was an even beat. Like
footsteps.
Perhaps this was a ghost town after
all, in more than name.
Grant rose from his makeshift bed,
brushing the straw from his clothing.
This was when he noticed that he’d
just now noticed his horse was gone.
And then he saw…it. Standing in the
street outside of the dilapidated saloon; it was a human skeleton, still
patched with some mossy clumps of fetid human flesh, green and gray and dry as
the dirt it should’ve been resting in. The creature tipped a glass bottle to
its lips. Grant watched a surge of liquid, silver-by-moonlight, spurt from the
bottleneck and splash through the empty, throat-less gullet.
It wore a holster on its hip.
Grant’s gun was in the saddlebag
that had been strapped to Goldie, his horse. No chance of using that right now.
Then again, he decided, it probably wouldn’t matter if he did have it. What
possible use could a bullet be against something that was already dead?
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