When the twins turned sixteen, their handsome cousin Enrique came from Spain for an extended visit with his American family. Eagerly, the twins took him to their favorite places, and Emilia prepared for him the best Mexican dishes. Inevitably, they told him all about the Weeper who wailed beside the river at night, finding it a relief to be able to speak freely about Llorona to someone their own age. To their dismay, Enrique laughed at them and told them in a superior way that they were silly children to believe such a story. Donaldo’s eyes flashed at being called a child, for Enrique was only a year older than him, and he told Enrique that he had seen the Llorona with his own eyes. Enrique called him a liar, and Emilia had to pull the boys apart to keep them from killing each other in their rage.
The boys sulked all through dinner, and Donaldo refused to accompany his sister to the local dance that evening, though he had promised to escort her more than a month before. Happy to show up his younger cousin, Enrique gallantly offered himself as a replacement, and Emilia accepted. As they left the house, their old abuela roused herself from the nap she was taking in the rocking chair and warned them to steer clear of the Weeper. Donaldo gave a sulky grunt and marched out of the room, but Enrique chuckled and promised the old grandmother that he would obey. It was obvious from his superior smile that he was just placating her. Emilia frowned at her cousin and then tucked her shawl around her and followed him out onto the street.
It was a short walk to the dance hall from their house, and soon they saw the lights spilling from the open doorway and heard the sound of the fiddle playing. Enrique quickly abandoned his cousin in favor of the punch—which was spiked with rum—and spent the evening drinking heavily. Emilia danced happily with the boys from her school and avoided the punch.
The dance was only half over when Enrique staggered into the corner where Emilia sat chatting with a few friends. His complexion was greenish and he looked ill. The rum had not agreed with him, and he wanted to go home immediately. Emilia sprang to her feet and took his arm, but he shook her off. “Stay and dance. I am sure one of your friends will escort you home,” Enrique told her. At once her classmate Lorenzo, who had long admired the pretty Emilia, volunteered to walk her home at the end of the dance. Startled but pleased, Emilia blushed and accepted.
THE WEEPER
So Enrique hurried away from the noise and bustle of the dance hall, which made his head spin and his stomach turn. He was violently sick in the yard outside, and then, feeling only marginally better, he started home through the darkened streets. As he passed a crossroad that led down toward the Rio Grande, he heard a shrill wail. He felt a shiver run up his spine and his arms grow clammy with sweat. Just a lonely tomcat, he told himself, hurrying down the dark road a bit faster, in spite of his spinning head. The wail came again, closer now, and his shoulders tensed as an ancient instinct whispered into his mind that he was being followed. Enrique’s stomach lurched at the thought, but being a brave boy, he whirled suddenly and shouted: “Who’s there?” No one answered.
Enrique turned back toward home and gasped in fear when he found himself face to face with a swirling mass of white light. He stumbled backward as the light coalesced into the form of a young girl in a white dress. Her dark hair coiled and writhed around her as if each lock were alive, and her eyes were red rimmed and wild. The Llorona gave a long wail and stretched out her hands toward Enrique. He screamed and fled back the way he had come. But the Weeper appeared in front of him again, sobbing and holding out her arms. Enrique swerved and ran down the side road toward the river, gasping desperately as the ghost wailed louder and louder, her voice drawing ever nearer to his fleeing form.
Enrique was bathed in the glow from her incandescent body as he swerved off the road and plunged through the bracken near the river. He leapt over a small wire fence and fell heavily to the ground on the other side. A pain pierced through him, and he screamed. He tried to roll over but found himself fixed to the ground, and he saw with horror that a rusty, broken fence post had pierced right through his shoulder. He groaned in pain and found himself suddenly staring up into the weeping face of the Llorona as she drifted through the wires of the fence, her hands reaching for him as she moaned. Enrique wrenched himself off the rusty fence post, shouting terribly at the pain that stabbed through his whole body. But the horror in his mind outweighed the pain, and he rolled upright and ran again, trying to find his way home.
The Llorona disappeared suddenly, leaving him in pitch blackness. Enrique stopped abruptly, confused and clouded by the fog of pain from his shoulder. Then white light blinded him as the ghost appeared again right in front of him, her horrible, insane eyes just an inch from his own. Enrique staggered backward with a choked sob that was somehow more terrible than the loudest scream. His foot slipped as the ground dropped away beneath him, and he tumbled head over heels down the incline. His head struck a rock; he tumbled a few feet more; and his unconscious body slid head first into the river. Then there was only darkness and silence and the soft swish of the Rio Grande murmuring in its banks.
When Emilia came home on the proud arm of Lorenzo just before midnight, her parents wanted to know what she had done with her cousin Enrique. She was alarmed, and told her parents that he should have arrived home hours before. Immediately, they roused the rest of the family and set out in search of him, fearing that he was lying ill somewhere from too much drink. It was Donaldo and Lorenzo who saw the leg of a man caught in a dead tree branch half in and half out of the water. Lifting the lantern high, they brought it close to the man’s leg and saw the body of Enrique lying head-down under the water of the river.
Officially, Enrique’s death was considered an accidental drowning caused by his drunken state. But abuela insisted that Llorona had taken him for her own because he had laughed and not believed in her. And the twins, remembering the face of the Weeper as she appeared to them, thought she was right.
The sun has risen and set many times since that tragic night, and many things have changed. Abuela died of old age shortly after Enrique’s death, and was buried beside the boy. Emilia married Lorenzo when she graduated from high school, and the young couple moved far away from the haunted city where they were raised. As for Donaldo, he spent all his years in Lardeo and raised many handsome sons and beautiful daughters.
And what of Llorona, the Weeper? She still roams the byways and riverbanks of Laredo, doomed forever to search for her dead sons. They say on moonless nights beside the Rio Grande, Llorona still weeps.
20
No Trespassing
AMARILLO
They were driving down a lonely stretch of highway at dusk when the thunderstorm came crashing down on them. The wind whipped the car crazily, making it hard to steer, and the gusts of rain made it hard to see. Peggy’s boyfriend, Tommy, slowed the car until they were barely moving forward. They crept their way past the only house they’d seen for miles, a formidable, dilapidated structure with a sagging tower in one corner and a warped wrap-around porch. The front yard was surrounded by barbed wire fences. Plastered all over the fences and on every available tree in the overgrown yard were NO TRESPASSING signs. A single light shown in a dirty, cracked downstairs window, but it did not look welcoming, not even in the early dusk brought on by the howling storm.
The house was so creepy that Tommy automatically sped up a little to get away from it, and Peggy didn’t blame him a bit. The rain was still heavy, but the wind was letting up a little, although the lightning flashes and thunder out in the long fields surrounding the road were still quite spectacular.
They were about a mile past the house when the car hydroplaned. Peggy screamed as the car turned a complete circle and then slid off the road, plunging down into a gully on the opposite side of the road. The car slammed into a large boulder, throwing Peggy violently into the door. Her head banged against the window, and a stabbing pain shot through her shoulder and arm as the car bounced off the boulder and kept sliding down the incline. It bounced off another small
boulder, spun around, and then slid sideways until it came to a shuddering halt under a large pecan tree. Peggy’s head was spinning, and she felt hot, sticky liquid pouring down into her eyes. Blood. The sharp flashes of pain coming from her arm and shoulder made her feel sick to her stomach, but the pain soon faded as dots of bright light flickered across her vision and she lost consciousness.
She was jolted awake by a sudden sharp pain as her boyfriend shook her by the shoulder, calling her name desperately above the heavy thunder of rain against the roof. Tommy probably thought she was dead, she thought hazily, considering all the blood covering her face. She managed to open her eyes and say his name, and she saw relief spread across his freckled face. He rubbed a hand frantically through his short red hair and said: “Are you all right? You’re bleeding!”
“Bumped my head,” Peggy managed to gasp. “Arm, shoulder feel bad.”
Tommy glanced cautiously at her right arm and then went completely white in the semidarkness inside the car. “Your arm is all twisted,” he said. “I think it’s broken.”
“Yes,” Peggy whispered, unable to nod her head for fear it would fall off completely.
Tommy tore a strip off his shirt and pressed it to the cut on her head. “I’m going to call for help,” he said when it became obvious that the bleeding was not going to stop right away. He grabbed his cell phone off his belt with shaking hands. Then he swore and frantically pushed at the on button several times. Peggy closed her eyes, in too much pain to care. But she opened them again when Tommy cried: “The battery’s dead. Peggy, where’s your cell phone?”
“Forgot . . . it . . . at . . . home,” she managed to say against the throbbing in her head.
“Oh, Lord!” Tommy exclaimed. “I’ll have to go for help. There was a light in that house we just passed. They’ll have a phone I can use.”
Peggy’s eyes popped wide open at this statement. Even through the haze of pain, she remembered how strange and creepy the house had looked. “No, Tommy. Stay here. A . . . car . . . will come,” Peggy had to strain through the darkness that was slowly eclipsing her mind in order to say the last few words.
“I can’t stay, Peggy,” Tommy said, running his hands worriedly through his red hair, making it stand on end. “It could take hours for another car to come, and you might bleed to death.”
Peggy couldn’t speak against a sudden sharp pain stabbing through her arm and shoulder. She just gasped and curled in onto herself, wishing she could pass out so the pain would go away.
“I’m going to lay you down,” Tommy said. “I’ll try not to move your arm.”
Very carefully, he adjusted the passenger seat back until it was as flat as he could make it. In spite of his care, she cried out once as the movement jostled her broken arm.
“Your shoulder looks funny too,” Tommy whispered, as if to himself. “I think it’s dislocated.”
He managed to wrench open the badly dented driver’s door and ran through the heavy rain to get a couple of blankets out of the trunk. He tucked the blankets around her until she was cocooned in them. Then he wiped more blood from her face and gingerly put a new, clean piece of his shirt against the cut on her head, which was swelling up.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Tommy said. “Don’t try to move until I come back with help.”
“I won’t,” Peggy mumbled through the pain. Then Tommy was racing out into the storm, shutting the dented car door behind him as gently as possible so as not to jar her further.
For a few moments Peggy drifted in a kind of daze, but something at the back of her mind was urging her to wake up. She was uneasy about that strange house where Tommy was going to seek aid. It looked very threatening, and here she was alone and helpless beside the road. Some instinct made her pull the blanket up over her head and scrunch down into the seat as if she were just a spare pile of clothing rather than a person. The movement made her arm throb so horribly that she almost threw up, but she did it anyway. No need for anyone to know she was here in the car if they came poking around. It was a silly thought, of course, brought on by the pain she was in. But she kept on sliding down the seat until most of her body was on the floor under the dashboard, and her head under the blanket lay cushioned on the seat. The steady thudding of the rain on the roof of the car lulled her, then, and she allowed the tearing weariness caused by her wounds to pull her deep into sleep.
Peggy wasn’t sure what woke her. Had a beam of light shown briefly through the blanket? Did she hear someone curse outside? She strained eyes and ears but heard nothing save the soft thudding of the rain, and no light shown through the blanket now. If Tommy had arrived with the rescue squad, surely there would be noise and light and voices. But she heard nothing save the swish of the rain and an occasional thumping noise which she put down to the rubbing of the branches of the pecan tree in the wind. The sound should have been comforting, but it was not. Goose bumps crawled across her arms—even the broken one—and she almost ceased breathing for some time as some deep part of her inner mind instructed her to freeze and not make a sound.
She didn’t know how long fear kept her immobile. But suddenly the raw terror ceased, replaced by cold shivers of apprehension and a sick coil in her stomach that had nothing to do with her injuries. Something terrible had happened, she thought wearily, fear adding yet more fatigue to her already-wounded body. Then she scolded herself for being a ninny. It was just her sore head making her imagine things. Somewhat comforted by this thought, she dozed again, only vaguely aware of a new sound that had not been there before; a soft thud-thud, as of something gently tapping the roof. Thud-thud. Pattering of the rain. Thud-thud. Silence. Sometimes she would almost waken and listen to it in a puzzled manner. Thud-thud. Patter of rain. Thud-thud. Had a branch dislodged from the tree?
Peggy wasn’t sure how long she’d been unconscious when she was awoken by a bright light blazing through the window of the car, and the sound of male voices exclaiming in horror. A door was wrenched open, and someone crawled inside just as she lifted her head and clawed the blanket off. She looked up into the blue eyes of a young state policeman. He reeled back a little in surprise, nearly knocking off his hat, and then cried out when he saw her blood-stained face.
NO TRESPASSING
“Miss, are you all right?” he asked, then turned over his shoulder to call for help without waiting for her response. Within moments, she was being carefully lifted onto the seat and examined. An ambulance was called, and the officers did what they could to make her comfortable until it arrived, though for some strange reason one or the other would pop outside the car to look at something before returning to her side. Peggy managed to tell the officers her story while they waited, and then begged them to tell her where Tommy was. Surely he had come back with them to find her? Or had he been injured in the storm? Both officers deftly avoided answering her questions about Tommy, and just kept reassuring her that help was on its way.
The paramedics arrived promptly. Within a few rather painful minutes, Peggy was strapped to a stretcher and eased out of the ruined car and into the light mist that was all that remained of the rain. It was only as they carried her carefully up the slope of the incline that she thought to look back at the car—and saw the grotesque figure hanging from a branch of the pecan tree. For a moment, her brain couldn’t decipher what she was seeing in the bright lights of the police car parked at the side of the road. Then she heard a thud-thud sound as the foot of the figure scraped the top of the totaled car, and she started screaming over and over in horror. One of the police officers hastened to block her view, and a paramedic fumbled for some valium to give her as her mind finally registered what she had seen. Tommy’s mangled, dead body was hanging from the pecan tree just above the car. Nailed to the center of his chest was a NO TRESPASSING sign.
21
Rattler’s Ridge
WIMBERLEY
Adam Gimble was the very best fiddler in Texas. It’s true. Adam could capture the heart of a you
ng maiden with a single flourish of his bow, turn old people young again with a simple melody, and charm the rattlesnakes out of their den when he played. Folks came from miles around to the weekly barn dance, just to say they’d heard Adam play.
If Adam played a jig, everybody got up and danced. If Adam played a love song, young men proposed to their sweethearts, and unattached young ladies swooned at the fiddler’s feet. If he played a march, the men queued up the next morning to join the militia. Adam would play from sundown to sunup, and folks would dance every reel and beg for more when he stopped to take a sip of punch or eat a morsel of food.
Now Adam was right proud of his reputation, and perhaps a smidgen too big for his boots, for such a young lad. Sometimes he boasted of his prowess over drinks in the local tavern. Folks at the bar would nod solemnly when he joked about charming out the rattlesnakes, sure that Adam could do it. Then one evening, a dark stranger who was new in town suddenly spoke up from the far end of the bar.
“Charm rattlesnakes out of their dens? That’s a mighty big boast for a country boy,” the dark-haired man said, stroking his goatee thoughtfully. “I’m a pretty good fiddle player myself, and I know I can charm the rattlesnakes. Fifty dollars says I can charm more rattlesnakes than you. Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?”
Adam threw up his head, stung by this slur against his fiddling. How dare this stranger challenge him?
“I’ll bet you anything you like that I can charm more rattlesnakes then you can, stranger,” Adam said defiantly.
“Done!” said the dark stranger with a devilish grin. He arranged to meet Adam the next evening at dusk at Rattler Ridge, where a huge den of snakes were resting themselves, made sluggish by the cooler temperatures of winter.
Spooky Texas Page 10