Night Freight

The editor who commissioned this story, Peter Crowther, specifically requested a horror tale set in the Old West which deals with a little-known superstition. I had a devil of a time (no pun intended) coming up with a suitable idea until I happened to be paging through a book on nineteenth-century village life, hunting inspiration. One of the chapters was entitled "The Coffin Trimmer "—a pleasant piece of nostalgia about a gentle, benign spinster who worked for a mortician in the author's hometown. My coffin trimmer, naturally, is anything but gentle, the superstition she represents is anything but benign, and what happens after her arrival in the village of Little River is anything but pleasant. . . .