Ralph Compton - The Ghost of Apache Creek

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.

Chapter 7

Jess Leslie was sure Sally had drowned in the swamp.

After they’d fled the deacon, Jess had stopped to rest in an ancient buffalo wallow, its sandy bottom well covered by brush and tall bunch grass. But Sally, terrified of the man, had kept on going. After a while, Jess heard men yelling, probably the deacon’s sons, and then the shouts had faded.

At first she’d thought Sally had been caught. Only later, when she’d stumbled into the swamp, did she suspect that her friend had probably been sucked under.

Only Jess’s discovery of a game trail through the marshland had saved her life, and now she stumbled into the darkness, gasping from effort and from sheer terror.

If she fell back into the hands of the deacon, he would kill her. He’d told her as much, claiming that he had once gouged a woman’s eyes out after she’d cheated on him with another man, and only then did he put a bullet into her.

As the girl staggered onward, her way dimly lit by a wayward moon that cast more shadow than light, she heard coyotes yipping close by.

Too close.

Had she escaped the deacon only to be ripped apart by wild animals?

Ahead of her a narrow arroyo, stunted pines growing on its slopes, promised a road to . . . somewhere. If it wasn’t a box canyon.

The moon’s thin light offered little help and Jess plunged ahead, cactus and underbrush tearing at her dress.

The arroyo narrowed, then angled upward, and the girl was forced to all fours as she scrambled up the slope. Loose shingle rattled from under her feet, and brush ripped at her face. Her breath tore at her lungs as the going became steeper.

Jess felt herself grow weaker and she was afraid of blacking out and tumbling back down the rise.

Then a flitting shadow on top of the arroyo wall froze her in place.

There! She saw another, moving through the darkness like a wraith.

She recognized them for what they were—a pair of hunting coyotes.

And she was the prey.

Frantic now, the girl redoubled her efforts, clawing her way toward the top of the ridge.

Suddenly it was close to her. She saw a jumble of bare rocks, a few wind-blasted cedars and above those a scattering of stars. At last, she reached the top and crawled onto the flat, a stretch of grass studded with pines.

Jess straightened and plunged ahead, her scared eyes searching the gloom. She saw no sign of the coyotes.

The wolf always looks bigger in the darkness, and she told herself that her eyes had deceived her. Perhaps all she saw were a pair of frightened jackrabbits. Or it was a trick of the moonlight, casting shadows just to scare folks.

But she walked on quickly, glancing behind her often. She was only fooling herself. It had not been rabbits or moonlight back there at the arroyo.

An instinct, as old as humanity itself, warned her that she was being stalked.

After ten minutes of flight through the pines, Jess Leslie came upon a fast-flowing creek. She hiked up her dress and plunged into the cold water. She stopped once in the middle of the stream to splash water on her face and the back of her neck, and then waded to the other bank.

Now the ground gradually sloped away from her and the pines gave way to wild oak and some scattered piñon and juniper.

Here the moonlight seemed brighter, though the land in front of her lay angled in deep shadow.

Then she saw it—a single pinpoint of light in the distance. A campfire maybe.

But how distant? It could have been one mile or ten. She had no way of knowing.

Jess heard a stealthy rustle in the grass behind her, and fear gave wings to her feet. She hiked up her skirts again and ran down the rise, heedless of the tree branches that slapped and swatted at her.

Then she was on flat grassland and right ahead of her was a town.

Sobbing her relief, Jess ran. She passed a darkened church and went on into the middle of the street.

She stopped in a patch of shadow cast by one of the false-fronted buildings, looking around her. The light she’d seen from the rise was straight ahead of her, throwing a pale yellow rectangle onto the street.

She prepared to run again, but the coyotes, heads down, growling, had cut her off and were now standing directly in her path.

Jess backed away, out of the shadow and into the moonlight.

The coyotes stalked closer, readying their attack.

She screamed for help—then she screamed again.

Her shrieks echoed through the silent town and came back at her. Mocking her.

Chapter 8

Gun in hand, Sam Pace staggered to the door and stepped outside.