The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 6

This was the time, but not the place.

Sam Pace eased down the hammer of the Colt and laid the revolver on the desk in front of him.

He’d kill himself at the cemetery, near the spot where his wife and child were buried. Then all three of them could lie together for eternity.

They’d be a family again. Close.

Pace hurt all over and he was tired beyond measure. Blood crusted his scalp and face, and his body and legs were covered with purple and yellow bruises. A deep cut gashed down his thigh, angry and red.

The thought of the long walk to the cemetery unnerved him. He doubted he could make it that far in his present state. A little rest, then. To help his body heal. Tomorrow, at first light, he’d take the walk. His last.

He laid his head on his arms and closed his eyes. Within seconds he was asleep.

The candle on the desk guttered and shadows moved around the unconscious man. The wind sighed around the eaves of the office and rattled the wood shingles on the roof.

Over to the bank, a pair of hungry coyotes ate their own kind, tearing flesh, crunching thin rib bones, their muzzles stained scarlet.

The ghost of Requiem, silver pale in the moonlight, haunted the darkness and spoke with a voice all its own . . . a whisper . . . a creak . . . a groan . . . a lament for the doomed and the damned.

The voices woke Sam Pace.

He sat up, his head on one side, listening intently into the night.

Was that what he’d heard? Was it really voices?

He rose from the desk and glided across the rough pine of the office floor, his bare feet making no sound.

Outside on the boardwalk, Pace heard a distant muttering . . . coming closer. The steady shuffle of feet on sand.

He smiled, raised his arms heavenward.

They were coming back! Dear God in heaven, the people had returned to Requiem!

Suddenly he was in the middle of the street. Waiting.

A cool wind sought the scrapes and cuts of his battered body, but he felt no chill, no pain, only a feeling of exaltation.

After three long years, the folks were coming back to their home.

Pace’s eyes searched the darkness, and gradually they appeared, moving toward him like windblown leaves in the distance.

“Welcome!” he screamed, opening his arms. He wanted to hug each and every one of them. “Welcome home, folks!”

The people came closer, a grim, silent procession.

Pace backed away a step.

Where were the wagons, the mule teams, the children, and the outriders?

And where were the voices?

Pace felt a spike of fear. Something was wrong, something terrible.

These were not the people who had fled the town.

These were the dead returned from the grave.

He took a step back, then another, his arms no longer welcoming, but crossed in a gesture of protection in front of his face.

Now, in slanted pillars of moonlight, he saw them.

Rotting flesh hung in tatters from their yellow skulls and their skeletal frames were covered in rags. Only the eyes were bright—glowing orbs of scarlet in bony sockets.

Women extended their arms to Pace, dressed in the gingham, flowered calico, and silk they wore when they died. But the worms had done their work. Gone were ripe lips, damp, ready for kissing. Breasts that in life had been pert and high, or had hung slack from childbearing, were gone and in their stead white ribs gleamed.

Pace screamed. Dear Christ, where was Jane?

The march of the dead did not falter, led by one he finally recognized, but only because the man held a tattered Bible to his chest. Around his bones the frock coat he’d been buried in flapped and his skull grinned, his eyes still afire with the light.

Pace shrieked. “Reverend Brown, send them back!”

His tongue long lost to worms, the preacher made no answer, though; like the rest of the unholy dead, he made an eerie moaning sound, keening like a winter wind.

Skeletal hands reached out for Pace and he smelled the close breath of rotting flesh and the moldering earth of the graveyard.

Burning eyes surrounded him, like monstrous fireflies in the darkness, and Pace tried to turn and run away, but he stumbled and stretched his length on the ground.

Suddenly he knew why they wanted him. It was not to drag him to the grave. It was not to beseech his help, or seek his counsel.

It was for a very different reason.

They were hungry!

Pace buried his face in the sand, moaning, as fingernails, taloned from long years in the earth, tore at the flesh of his back.

He screamed and screamed again.

Sam Pace woke with a start, reaching for his Colt even as he jolted upright in his chair.

His heart hammered in his chest and his eyes were wide with fear.

Gradually, breathing hard, he managed to calm himself.

It had all been a dream. Just a bad dream. The restless dead had not come for him.

Then he heard the scream.

A woman’s scream.

A spiking cry of mortal terror.