Hell Come Sundown

by Nancy A. Collins

  Troubled by Specters, Ghosts and Phantoms? Fear No More! There Is Help! Call For The Dark Ranger: Ghost Breaking A Specialty! No Spook Too Small, No Fiend Too Fierce! Write Care of: Box 1, Golgotha, Texas. Our Motto: ‘One Wraith, One Ranger.’

  “Dark Ranger?” Hiram rubbed his forehead, baffled by what he was reading. He glanced over at the man seated across from him with something akin to awe. “You a Texas Ranger, mister?”

  A look of profound sorrow flickered across Hell’s face and was quickly gone, like a cloud scudding across the moon. “I was. Back before the troubles.”

  Hiram raised an eyebrow. “Cortina?”

  Hell took a deep breath and nodded, as if the very memory caused him pain. “Yep. I was at Rio Grande City. Now that the Rangers have been replaced with those carpetbaggin’ State Police, I break ghosts and scare off things that go bump in the night.”

  “Any man who rode with Captain Ford is more than welcome in my home,” Hiram said, putting aside his shotgun. He stood and offered Hell his hand. “And I am eternally grateful for you helpin’ out my boy here.”

  “You’ve got a very brave and resourceful son, Mr. McKinney,” Hell said, accepting the rancher’s handshake. The Ranger’s grip was hard as horn, and as cool and dry as a snakeskin. “Not many boys his age would have had the gumption to do as he did.”

  “No, I reckon not,” Hiram agreed, a hint of pride in his voice. “I’ll be damned if I can figure out how you got into the house in the first place, though.”

  “I let him in, Pa!” Jake explained. “Miss Pretty Woman rode up this morning, while you was out tendin’ the herd and Maw was out in the coop seein’ to the chickens. She gave me this note that said Mr. Hell needed me to leave my bedroom window open so he could sneak in and hide before I went to bed. That way he could catch the haint unawares.”

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Hiram said. “But, son—why didn’t you tell your Maw and me what was goin’ on?”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me. Besides, I was afraid it might hurt y’all. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to you and Maw on account of me.”

  Hiram looked into his son’s face with a mixture of amazement, respect and love. “So you just kept goin’ to bed, even though that thing was waitin’ for you every night?”

  “It weren’t there every night. But, yes, sir, I did.”

  “Here you go, dear,” Mrs. McKinney said, handing her husband a tin cup full of hot coffee. “How about you, Mr. Hell? Would could care for something to drink?”

  “No thank you, ma’am,” he replied, smiling without showing his teeth. “I don’t drink—coffee.”

  Pretty Woman stepped out of Jake’s room and coughed into her closed fist. Hell stood up, visibly relieved that he no longer had to make small talk.

  “Ah! Pretty’s finished with your unwanted guest. It’s safe to go back in now.”

  “You sure?” Mrs. McKinney asked uneasily.

  “Ma’am, there’s not a lot of things in this world I’d bet good money on—but Pretty Woman’s medicine is one of ’em.”

  As they entered the bedroom, the creature scuttled to the far corner, its head ducked low like that of a dog that’s been kicked once too often. The speed of its movements made Mrs. McKinney cry out in alarm and clutch her husband’s arm.

  “No need to be fearful, ma’am,” Hell said calmly. “The fight’s been took out of it.” He strode over to the creature and grabbed the grass-rope noose about its neck. “Come along, you,” he snapped.

  “What—what, exactly, is that thing?” Hiram asked, trying to keep the unease from his voice.

  “I’m not rightly sure. I’ll have to ask Pretty.” Hell turned to the medicine woman and said something in Comanche.

  The medicine woman wrinkled her nose as she replied in her native tongue, pointing to the walls as she spoke. Hell nodded his understanding.

  “According to Pretty, this here’s a nature spirit of some sort. These critters attach themselves to things like rocks, trees, creeks and the like—I reckon you could say they live in them. Some are friendly towards folks, others ain’t. Seems this one attached itself to the tree that the planks used to build this room were milled from. By using various incantations and spells, in combination with a specially prepared rope, Pretty has rendered this particular spirit harmless—as long as y’all keep the noose about its neck, and feed it nothing but salt.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Salt weakens unnatural things,” Hell explained. “That is why the signs of power used in calling down the things from between worlds are drawn in salt; it saps their strength and binds them to the will of the conjurer.” Hell stepped forward and handed the loose end of the rope to Jake. “I reckon he’s yours, if he belongs to anyone. You’ll find having your own private fiend has its advantages. For one thing, they chase off bad luck, as well as snakes. You feed this bogey a tablespoon of salt a day and he’ll be yours until the oceans run dry and the mountains crumble. Provided you never take off the noose.”

  “What happens if it’s removed?” Hiram asked, eyeing the creature cautiously.

  “Just see that you don’t,” Hell replied gravely. “I don’t do refunds.”

  After a few minutes of haggling, it was decided that five dollars cash money and a spool of ribbon was fair pay for a night of ghost-breaking. Though the McKinneys offered to let Sam Hell and Pretty Woman spend the rest of the night in the barn, the pair politely declined.

  “It is most kindly of y’all to extend such an invitation,” the Ranger said, touching the brim of his hat. “But the nature of our business demands that we be on our way long before sun-up.”

  As they rode off into the night, Hell turned to look one last time at the McKinney clan as they stood in the dooryard of their homestead. Hiram leaned on his shotgun as he waved goodbye, his free arm draped over his wife’s shoulders. Miriam McKinney stood close to her husband, occasionally casting worried looks in the direction of her son, who was busy poking the captive fiend in the rump with a sharp stick.

  After they rounded a bend in the road and were no longer within line of sight of the McKinney ranch, Sam reached inside his duster and retrieved a long, thin cigar shaped like a twig.

  “See? I told you advertising in the back of penny dreadfuls would pay off,” he said, biting off the tip of the cigar with a set of very white, inhumanly sharp teeth.

  “I’ll grant you that,” Pretty Woman replied in perfect English. “But I do not see how it will help you find the one you seek.”

  “Texas is a big place. I could wander forever and a day and never find him. But if something spooky is happening, odds are he might be near at hand. Kind of like high winds and hailstones mean a twister’s nearby.”

  “There is something to your way of thinking,” the medicine woman conceded. “But I still believe it was a waste of perfectly good money.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. After all—you got yourself a nice spool of ribbon out of the deal, didn’t you?”

  “That thing could have torn me apart like fresh bread! That’s hardly worth a spool of ribbon.”

  “But it didn’t, did it? And that ribbon should look real nice wrapped around your braids.”

  “Point taken,” she replied with a smile. “Still, do you think it was wise telling them so much about yourself?”

  “I didn’t let on too much. There was plenty of Rangers that fought at Rio Grande City and Brownsville. Besides, they don’t know my real name. And there’s no Rangers headquarters left to contact anymore, even if they did decide to try and check up on me. As far as the state of Texas is concerned, Ranger Sam Yoakum is long dead.”

  Chapter Three

  Texas, 1861:

  Sam Yoakum first signed on with the Texas Rangers back in ’58. Since then, he had fought more than his fair share of Comanche, Apache, Mexicans, cattle rustlers and outlaws, all for the grand sum of one dollar and twenty-five cents a day.

  Now that Texas had joined the Confederacy,
Yoakum knew it was only a matter of time before the Governor would be forced to muster what was left of the Rangers into an army, despite very real concerns that Cortina and Juarez would use the war between the gringo states to their advantage and attempt to reclaim Brownsville and the surrounding territory in the name of Mexico. But until the day he was expected to turn in his Ranger’s star for a set of rebel grays, Yoakum continued to patrol his assigned territory and check on the various ranchers, settlers and townsfolk between Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande.

  One such town was Golgotha, Texas—population forty-six, give or take a chicken or mule. Even from a distance, Yoakum could tell there was something not right about the place. Even the tiniest frontier settlement normally showed some sign of life, even if it was just a mangy dog wandering about or a horse tethered to a hitching post. As he rode into Golgotha, the only things roaming the streets were tumbleweeds and dust devils.

  The town was still. Not in the sense of it being a sleepy little village where nothing much happened, but in the way a dead body is utterly motionless. As the wind shifted in his direction, Yoakum caught the odor of spilled blood. During the Cortina War, when the Mexican bandit lord had laid waste to the lower Rio Grande Valley, Yoakum had come to know the smell of death all too well to ever mistake it for anything else.

  He reined his mount to a halt before Haygood Swanson’s General Mercantile. In his five years ranging the frontier, he had come to know the various townsfolk under his general protection fairly well. Goody Swanson, as he was known, was an affable fellow, who could be counted on for a free chaw and a decent price on salt, biscuits and coffee.

  “Goody? Goody, are you there? It’s Sam Yoakum!” His boot heels struck hollow notes on the raised boardwalk that fronted the store. As he pushed open the front door, the bell that alerted the shopkeeper that someone had entered his store gave a deceptively merry jingle.

  The interior of Swanson’s General Mercantile looked as if a tornado had hit it. Bolts of cloth lay strewn about the countertops, and the barrels that held the flour, sugar and nails lay on their sides, their respective contents spilled across the plank floorboards. Glass cases had been smashed, cabinets overturned and the potbellied stove that dominated the central room had been pulled free of its ventilation pipe and knocked onto its side. As he moved toward the back of the store, something crunched under his boot, and Yoakum smelled a cross between paint thinner and fermented grain. He glanced down and saw that he was walking through broken bottles of redeye.

  Yoakum pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead, puzzled by what was before him. He didn’t care how crazy they might be—Indians, outlaws and bandits never let whiskey—no matter how cheap—go to waste. If Cortina had raided the town, he would have taken every last barrel of flour he could have laid his hands on. After all, armies—even those comprised of bandits and outlaws—traveled on their stomachs.

  As Yoakum turned to leave, something caught the corner of his eye. He bent over and picked up a shotgun from the tangle of unraveled cloth, broken glass and spilled sugar. The stock was marked with the initials h. s. and the barrel was bent back on itself. Yoakum dropped the useless weapon back where he found it and hastened out the door. He strode out into the middle of the empty street and cupped his hands to his mouth.

  “Hullo! Texas Rangers! Anybody here? Can anyone hear me?” he shouted.

  His only answer was the echo of his own voice. Whatever had happened to the citizens of Golgotha, it was more than a one-man job. He’d have to ride on down to Brownsville, pick up a couple of men and come back to sort things out.

  Just as he was about to saddle up his horse, the tolling of a bell broke the eerie silence. Yoakum turned and looked in the direction of the sound. It was coming from the church, which stood in the very middle of town, catty-corner from the general store. The frantic nature of the bell ringing was more like a call for help than a somber call to prayers. He cast his gaze about, but saw no signs of life from any of the surrounding buildings.

  He approached the whitewashed wooden church with his gun drawn, not knowing what to expect. As he drew closer, he could see several panes of stained glass had been busted out, as if by someone throwing rocks. The front door of the church swung inward as he touched it with the muzzle of his gun. As he stepped inside, a beam of sunlight illuminated the dim interior, falling across the figure of a solitary man, who stood at the back of the church, pulling on the bell rope that lead to the steeple.

  “Where is everyone, Reverend?” Yoakum called out.

  The bell-ringer stopped and turned to look at Yoakum. His face was gaunt and pale, covered with several days worth of gray stubble. His hair was greasy and uncombed, and his eyes were red-rimmed and more than a little wild, like those of a man who has stood guard on the ramparts with far too little sleep for far too long.

  “I ain’t no preacher,” the bell-ringer replied. “And as for where everyone is—they’re dead. Every last one of them. Ain’t nothin’ and no one left alive in Golgotha but me.”

  “And who might you be?”

  “The name’s Farley. I got me a place a couple miles east of town. I’ve been livin’ in these parts since ’52. You don’t need to point a gun at me, Ranger,” he said, nodding at Yoakum’s pistol. “I ain’t gonna give you no trouble.”

  “You say everyone’s dead. If so, where are the bodies?”

  “That’s a long story,” Farley said with a weary sigh.

  “Humor me,” he said, motioning for the other man to be seated in one of the nearby pews. As the other man sat down, Yoakum holstered his pistol but did not take his hand off its butt.

  “It begun when Merle went and dug himself a new well. You see, he’d bought a parcel of land off this Meskin feller, name of Garcia. Merle already had him a place, but he wanted to build a little house on its own plot so he could bring his mama and the rest of his family down from Back East. He needed the new well, on account of the old one being too far away. Anyways, Garcia’s old grandpa gets all riled up when he hears what Merle’s doin’. He rides out and tells Merle he can’t dig where he’s diggin’.

  “Merle tells him that he’s bought the land off his kinfolk fair ’n’ square, and if he wants to dig straight to hell, there ain’t nothin' the old man can do about it. Then Old Man Garcia tells Merle that his grandson had no right to sell him the land without talkin’ to him about it first. Merle says that’s tough, but they’ve already signed papers on it and money has changed hands, so the sale is legal. Then Old Man Garcia offers to buy the land back from Merle—and at a good price, too. But Merle ain’t havin’ none of it. So Old Man Garcia, he goes home, packs up his family, and next thing you know they’re gone—and they was in these parts since the conquistadors.

  “After a few days diggin’, Merle’s about eight feet deep, I reckon. He’s far enough down that he’s got to use a ladder to get in and out of the hole. And he’s got a couple of good ol’ boys from town, Billy McAfee and Hank Pierson, out there helpin’ him haul the dirt and rocks up topside. Then his spade strikes something made of metal, but it’s too dark for him to see what it is.

  “Merle yells up to Billy to lower him down some light. So Billy sends down a lantern. Merle lights it and bends over to get a look-see. He finds what looks like the lid of a big iron box. There ain’t much showin’, but from what he can see it looks like it’s the size of a steamer trunk. Merle and them get to talkin’, and they decide that it must be buried treasure—maybe gold the

  Aztecs tried to hide from the Spanish, way back when. At first they mean to keep it to themselves, but as they get to uncoverin’ the metal box, they realize it’s too big and too heavy for just the three of them to pull it free of the hole.

  “That’s where I come in. I lived down the road a piece, and Merle knew I had me a string of mules. At first I didn’t believe a word he said, but then he takes me over to where he’s got the well started and tells me to climb down and take a look for myself. I have to admit that once t
hey put the notion in my head, all I could think of was gold. I kept thinkin’ that if that box was full of treasure, it would go a long ways to settlin’ debts and makin’ life easier for me an’ mine. So I ran and fetched the mules and brought them back to the well.

  “By this point, the boys had uncovered the whole damn thing. It was about four foot long, three foot high and three foot deep, with an old-fashioned hinged iron padlock. I hitched up the mules and wrapped the box in a set of chains I use to pull stumps. But when I laid my hand on the top of the box, I jumped back and hollered on account of it being so cold. My hand tingled and burned like I’d just stuck it in a bucket of ice water. Merle figgered it was cold like that because it had been buried so deep all them years. That didn’t make much sense, but I was in too big a hurry to lay claim to my share of the treasure to give it much thought.

  “I fastened the chains around the box and then climbed up top to fix them to the team. Usually my mules are pretty easy to work with, but that day they was givin’ me fits, stompin’ the ground and rollin’ their eyes like they do when they smell somethin’ fierce nearby, like a cougar or a bear. I really had to lay into them with the whip. Their rumps were runnin’ red before they finally gave in and started to pull. But once they did, that ol’ box was out of the bottom of Merle’s well just as easy as yankin’ a rotten tooth. Still, it took all four of us to lift it up and put it in the back of Merle’s buckboard.

  “By the time we finally managed to get the chest over to Merle’s place, it was gettin’ on dark. Since the danged thing was so heavy, we decided to just pull the buckboard into the barn and open it out there, as opposed to tryin’ to drag it into the house. Billy and Hank rassled the bastard off the back of the wagon and set it on the barn floor.

  “While Merle was busy fetchin’ his chisel and pry-bar, I took a few seconds to study the padlock on the chest. It was a big rascal—as large as a baby’s head—and when I looked at it close, I could make out some kind of symbols through the rust and the dirt caked on it. The funniest thing about the lock, I noticed, was it didn’t have no keyhole. Once that critter was locked, it was meant to stay shut.