Adam came striding up to the top of the ridge at the appointed hour to find the stranger perched on a flat-topped rock beside a small sapling that was growing in a large crack in the middle of the stone. He flashed a grin at Adam, and Adam shivered a bit when he saw how pointed and shiny the man’s teeth were. And how oddly shaped his boots were, as if they covered feet that were not quite normal. Hooves, a little voice at the back of his mind whispered, but he shut it down and strolled nonchalantly up to the dark figure on the rock, who was silhouetted against the blazing oranges and pinks and golds of the sunset.
Propping his rifle up against the sapling that split the flat-topped rock into two opposing sides, Adam tuned his violin while the stranger watched. Then the dark-haired figure pulled out his own violin, and Adam’s bones turned warm and weak with envy and longing. The man had the kind of fancy fiddle that Adam could never afford in his lifetime. When the man played a warm-up arpeggio, the voice of his fiddle was the voice of an angel. Stomping firmly down on his desire to snatch the fiddle out of the stranger’s hand and make a run for it, Adam said: “So, how are we going to know which rattlers are yours and which are mine, stranger?”
The dark figure smiled, and his eyes glowed with a red light that cast odd shadows over his wicked features. “I will mark them as they come out,” he said, grinning at the unease he saw in Adam’s face.
“How are you going to do that?” Adam asked, swallowing nervously.
“I’m the Devil. I can do anything I please,” the man said, flourishing his bow for emphasis. “Rattlers with a yellow dot on their heads responded to your fiddle, and rattlers with a blue dot responded to mine. You start.”
Adam gave a muffled gasp when the man identified himself as the Devil, but if truth be told, he’d already suspected it. Those wicked dark features, the oddly shaped boots, the glowing red eyes. Now that he looked closer in the dim light of dusk, he could see two little horns peeping through the thick dark hair atop the stranger’s head. The Devil eyed him with a wicked grin. “Well?” he prompted. “Are you going to play, or do you concede right now?”
Pride came to Adam’s rescue. Raising his head and standing tall, he put his fiddle to his chin and began to play. He started with a jig that set his toes tapping, followed by a march, and then a fast reel. And the rattlesnakes came as he played, their triangular heads glowing with large yellow dots that lit up the growing darkness of night, their jointed tails rattling away in counterpoint to the music. They swayed and dipped and twisted as Adam played, and he swayed and dipped and twisted in an unconscious parody of his audience.
Adam played on and on, caught up in his music and in the growing number of glowing yellow-dotted rattlers surrounding his side of the flat-topped rock. He had no idea how long he played before the Devil called a halt by saying: “My turn now!”
The Devil lifted the gorgeous violin to his chin and began to play, fast melodies, marches, slow ballads. Each song was lovelier and more fulfilling than the one before, and his violin sang like an angel. The far side of the rock gradually lit with the eerie glow of many blue-dotted rattlesnakes, charmed out of their winter den to listen to his songs.
Then the Devil and Adam played together, fast songs that made the rattlers whirl and dip, slow songs that made them sway gently from side to side, and many more. Adam was caught up in the euphoria of playing with such a magnificent partner, and with the joy of making music. It was only when the Devil stopped playing abruptly in the gray dimness just before sunrise that Adam realized that the strange night was over. With a sigh of regret, Adam pulled the fiddle away from his chin and looked around. The whole rock was surrounded by writhing snakes with glowing blue and yellow dots lighting their beady dark eyes and triangular heads. And, to his astonishment, there seemed to be twice as many yellow snakes as blue.
“Well,” said the Devil, “I’ve played my best, but it’s obvious that I must concede the contest to you.” He tossed fiddle and bow into the air, and they disappeared in a puff of sulfurous smoke. Then he made a strange half-bowing motion, his right arm stretching toward the sapling. At the same time, he threw a fifty-dollar bill down on the rock near Adam’s feet with his left hand.
RATTLER’S RIDGE
Adam’s eyes popped in wonder at the sight of so much cash.
“May you live to enjoy it,” the Devil added with a grin that was pure evil. His red eyes flashed with a menacing gleam that made Adam’s skin crawl. Then the Devil vanished with a small popping sound. For a moment the rock was filled with the scent of brimstone and hot fire. Then Adam was alone in the gray dawn.
Grinning in triumph, Adam reached down for the fifty-dollar bill—and then froze when he heard a long, drawn-out hiss like the sighing of the wind through the pines. It was followed immediately by the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sound of a rattlesnake’s warning. The rattle was picked up by another rattlesnake, and yet another, until the whole ridge echoed and re-echoed with the thunderous rattled warning of more than a hundred snakes.
Adam straightened slowly, his eyes taking in the writhing mass of snakes that completely surrounded the rock where he stood with his fiddle. Their small beady eyes gleamed at him, and the glowing yellow and blue dots on their heads bathed each snake in an eerie light that made his flesh crawl.
The snakes were slowly creeping up the rock toward him as Adam reached desperately behind him toward the small sapling where he’d propped his rifle at the start of the fiddle contest. His fingers closed on empty air. And that’s when he remembered the Devil’s strange bowing motion just before he vanished. Adam glanced back in horror to see an empty place where his rifle had been. The Devil had taken his gun.
22
The Gray Lady
FORT WORTH
She was nervous as she walked the familiar path toward home that evening, and it annoyed her that she was. She had walked this path hundreds of times over the past two years, first as a young bride going to visit her new mama-in-law, and now as a new mama herself, taking the baby over to Grandma’s house. She had never once felt nervous or uneasy during the mile walk between her in-laws’ house and her own small home. But this evening was different. This evening, her neck prickled and her shoulders tensed with an unnamed anxiety that had more to do with instinct than reason.
She jiggled her little son in the sling she wore on her back, hoping to comfort herself more than her infant in the growing dusk, all the while telling herself it was nonsense. Superstitious nonsense. Just because her mama-in-law had dreamed of the Gray Lady the previous night did not mean that something bad was going to happen.
According to local legend, the Gray Lady once lived in an old shabby house in the neighborhood. Mountain lions had pawed their way through the rickety boards one night and killed the old woman while she slept. After that, the woman’s ghost would appear in the neighborhood just prior to a death in the family.
Her mama-in-law claimed that the ghost had appeared to her in the middle of the night. With her long, beautiful white hair flying out behind her and a look of warning on her ugly face, the ghost of the Gray Lady had swooped in through the wall and hovered over the bed for a moment before vanishing with a popping sound, like a cork coming out of a bottle. Her mama-in-law had spent the rest of the night huddled over the fire in the kitchen hearth, shaking nervously and wondering who in her family was doomed to die. Of course, by daylight, the whole thing had seemed silly, and they had laughed over it while they did the weekly churning and cooked up a mess of preserves.
But now, walking home along the almost-dark lane as the westering sun fell below the horizon, she was nervous. She gave the baby another jiggle and tried to think of something else. Supper. Yes, think about supper. She’d have to prepare a cold meal for her husband when she got home, unless of course he’d gotten home first and was already stirring up a rabbit stew—his specialty.
She grinned happily at the thought, mouth watering. Then her grin faded as the thought nagging at her subconscious suddenly came to the forefro
nt of her mind. She couldn’t hear the birds singing. Not a twitter, chirp, or flutter. There was no scurrying of small paws through the underbrush. Not even a whisper of wind in the oaks. Everything was deadly silent save for the soft thud of her shoes on the dirt of the road, and the soft chuckles of her little son talking to himself on her back. A shiver ran up her spine, and she quickened her pace. Why had everything gone silent? Why did the trees and fields around her seem so dark and unfriendly, when it was not quite sundown?
THE GRAY LADY
Her ears strained to hear a noise—any noise save the beating of her heart. Nothing. Or no, not quite nothing. Was that a soft pad-pad sound coming from the thick brush and mesquite to her left? The soft swish of oak foliage disturbed by the passage of a large body? Was something stalking her?
Her frightened mind leapt to a long-ago memory that she kept buried deep in her mind. She was a little girl of five, happily helping her mother hang the wash on the clothesline to dry. Her baby sister lay in a large basket a few yards away. Her mother had carefully put the baby in the shade out of the hot sun so she wouldn’t get a sunburn. Suddenly, the air was rent by a terrible scream, and a huge brownish cougar with a white shirt-front like a man in fancy dress had leapt out of the tree right before their eyes and tore the baby from the basket. The baby had cried shrilly, only to be silenced by one violent shake of the cougar’s head. Her mother had screamed for her father, grabbed the garden rake, and tried to attack the huge cat, but it had run off with the baby in its jaws, too fast for her mother to catch it. Her father had run frantically from the house with his rifle and had chased the cat, grimly following the blood shed by his baby daughter until he found the little half-eaten corpse in a clearing a mile from the house. They’d gathered all the neighborhood men and gone hunting for the cougar, but it was never found.
As the memory unrolled in her mind, she quickened her pace almost to a run, fearing the worst. It was at that moment that her son, tired after a long day of playing with Grandpapa, let out a tiny wail of distress. Time for food. Time for home.
Her son’s cry was answered by a sudden, heart-stopping scream from the woods just behind them. It curdled the blood, and was worse than the dying scream of a human. It was the scream of a giant cougar!
Heart pounding so hard it felt like it would break right through her ribs, she started to run as fast as her feet would take her down the path. Behind and to one side of her, she heard the animal running in pursuit. Four feet instead of a measly two, and it was not burdened with a child, as she was. The thought made her run faster as her little son started crying louder, disturbed by the jolting and the waves of fear coming from his mother.
She bolted as fast as she could through the darkening lane, tripping once on an oversized root in her path. She lost a moment, then, and heard the cougar scream again as it gained on them. The baby screamed in response, his little voice a small echo of the big cat’s cry. She could hear the creature crashing through the brush almost next to her, and she increased her speed, tearing off her shawl and throwing it down for the cougar to maul. She heard the trees rustling behind her, and then the sounds of pursuit stopped for a moment as the beast pounced on her shawl and tore it to bits in its fury. She kept running, her little son wailing desperately in terror.
Each time she heard the cougar drawing close to her, she tossed off another item of clothing—her son’s little hat, a glove, a piece of her sleeve, part of her apron—until she barely wore enough clothing to keep her covered. Each time, the cougar paused to worry the object before loping after its victims with another heart-stopping scream. She was sobbing exhaustedly and was nearly without hope. Her infant was clinging to her hair, too scared even to cry as they fled through the darkness.
The cougar’s screams were very close now, and she knew that she couldn’t run much further. She could see the light from her cabin through the trees in front of her, though it was still a ways ahead. She was nearly home! In a last act of despair, she shouted her husband’s name aloud, hoping against hope he would hear her. To her joy, her call was answered at once by her husband, and she heard his feet pounding down the lane toward her.
The creature was so close now she could hear its panting breath, but it gave a snarl and swerved away at the sight of her husband running toward them, gun in hand. He waved his gun and shouted loudly when he caught sight of the huge cat pursing them. As she flung herself past him, he stopped running and aimed his gun at the bushes where the cat had fled. The gun fired once, twice, three times as she staggered through the small clearing and fell through the half-open door of her house.
She lay gasping and sobbing on the floor, too spent to speak, her little son wailing mightily on her shoulder. Then her husband came running into the house and slammed the door behind him.
He placed the gun on the rack and then fell to the floor beside her, gathering wife and child into his shaking arms. “I saw her,” he panted. “I looked out the window and saw the Grey Lady floating down the lane! That’s how I knew something was wrong. I grabbed my rifle and ran out into the yard, and that’s when I heard you calling to me.” They clung to each other, shaking and crying in sheer relief, happy to be alive and safe in their own home.
Early the next morning, her husband went out with his rifle to look for the cougar. He came back a half hour later dragging a huge corpse behind him. The cougar was more than six feet long, with a brownish pelt, long sharp claws, pale patches above each eye, and a whitish underside. Her husband estimated it weighed more than two hundred pounds. His face grew white and his voice shaky when he said this, and she realized then what a call they’d had. A cougar of that size would have killed both her and her son if her husband hadn’t seen the ghost of the Gray Lady and come running with his rifle.
Her husband skinned the creature and they made a fur rug for the living room from it; positive daily proof to her that it was gone. And her husband went out that afternoon and bought her a little mare and a buckboard to carry her back and forth down the lane to his parents’ house so she would never have to walk the lane at dusk again. They named the mare “Gray Lady.”
23
Spearfinger
HARDIN COUNTY
It was the medicine man who first heard Spearfinger’s approach during a great thunderstorm that shook the whole valley one night in late summer. She came marching down from on high, throwing massive stones between each mountain peak and using them as bridges. Each footstep she took made the earth shudder and rocks crack. Her footprints sank deep into the earth under the weight of her stone body. As she walked, she sang a pretty tune that lured people closer to hear it. “Uwe la na tsiku. Su sa sai,” Spearfinger caroled in a lovely little voice. It wasn’t until she reached the mountains above their valley home that the medicine man understood the words of her song, and trembled: “I eat liver, yum, yum!”
Rumors swept through the valley the day after the storm. Spearfinger was coming, with her disregard for human life and her taste for liver. Even now, she traveled the dark mountain pathways and streambeds, perching in hidden crags and observing the patterns of the people in this new place. Hoping some of them would come within reach of her sharp finger of stone.
The tribesmen started hunting in groups, and their wives took care to bring their children into their lodges each night. Fear trembled in every heart, for who could protect the children if Spearfinger came? Spearfinger’s body was encased in a stone skin so that no spear could penetrate her flesh, and the forefinger of her right hand was made of a long thin stone that was sharp as a knife and could slice a child open with one flick. And Spearfinger was a shape-shifter who could take on the guise of a helpless old woman, a young succulent deer, or a craggy warrior. Anything that would permit her easy access to people wandering alone through the mountains. Often, she would come in disguise to a village in search of the most appetizing morsels of all: the livers of little children.
“Stay in the lodge,” mothers warned their little ones. “Do not
walk alone in the woods, for Spearfinger is near!”
At first, the children shivered and obeyed. But a week passed with no sign of the monster that had come with the thunderstorm, and gradually the children ceased their vigilance and started playing in the fields outside their camp. And that was when the old grandmother came hobbling down the path toward them. “Come, my children,” she said to them in a sweet soprano, “Come let Grandmother brush your hair. It has grown tangled in your games, and your parents will be displeased.”
The pretty doe-eyed daughter of the chief came running to the old lady and sat in her lap. She loved to have her hair combed and submitted to the woman’s touch, only shuddering a little when the stone finger stabbed through her side and cut her liver out with a single twist. Then Spearfinger set the child on her feet and bade her walk home. The whole world swam oddly before the child’s eyes, and she wandered a few yards before falling over dead. By the time she dropped to the ground, Spearfinger was gone.
The other children had quite forgotten the friendly grandmother who had passed through their field until they found their playmate lying dead in a pool of her own blood. Then they screamed and screamed, and the mothers and old men came running, along with a few warriors returned early from their hunt. The little doe-eyed child was carried with many wails into the village, and the chief and his wife wept in despair.
Back in the woods, Spearfinger changed shape and became one of the warriors still out with the hunting party. Then she ran into the village and demanded to know why they were mourning. The warrior’s wife was completely fooled, and told the monster disguised as her husband what had happened to the chief’s little daughter. Then she left her false husband in the lodge to watch over their three children while she comforted the chief’s wife. Spearfinger chuckled in delight and made short work of the little ones left in her care. By the time the wife returned, her lodge was awash with blood and her children lay dying on the floor, their livers gone. Reeling backward at the gruesome sight, the wife screamed again and again in terror as her neighbors came running to see what was wrong. But there was nothing they could do to comfort her, and the monster who had killed her children had cut her way out of the back of the lodge and disappeared. When the real warrior returned, he was pummeled within an inch of his life before the village’s medicine man could perform the magic that confirmed he was not the monster Spearfinger, returned for more livers.
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