Let’s get it on with some more free summer reading fiction and Chapter 1 of SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS. Each of the major parts of Badlands begins with a little poem from Edgar Allen Poe to hopefully set the mood for what is to follow. Of course, if you haven’t read the Badlands Prologue , feel free to do so before diving in.

SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS

PART I

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD by Edgar Allen Poe

Thy soul shall find itself alone

‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tombstone

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy:

Be silent in that solitude

Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again

In death around thee, and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still

The night—tho’ clear—shall frown—

And the stars shall not look down,

From their high thrones in the heaven,

With light like hope to mortals given—

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish—

Now are visions ne’er to vanish—

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more—like dewdrop from the grass

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—

And the mist upon the hill

Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken

Is a symbol and a token—

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

CHAPTER 1

June 22, 1850

It was easy to watch them burn. To watch their bodies roast as the flames first licked, then consumed them whole.

He stood his ground as man and woman, adult and child perished in the fire, dying in unspeakable agony. From his vantage point, the Stranger could see and smell everything. Those who had not been felled by the thick, acrid smoke begged for help, for a mercy that would not be forthcoming, their cries only muffled by death itself. Those that died screaming as their lungs exploded from expansion caused by the super-heated air lay drowned in their own blood, which simmered inside their bodies.

His feet were unmoving, no matter how hard he tried. Night after night he could not escape this nightmare as those around him, trapped in the charnel house of his mind, pounded on the locked doors of the church that was to become their tomb. Even on the rare morrow that he would awake not entrenched in night sweats, he could still feel the presence of the horrific vision in his mind, seared into his brain as if branded with a red-hot iron.

The sun had barely risen though the Texas heat was already unbearable. At least inside the cell where the Stranger slept, directly in the shadow of the gallows that were being built for his hanging the following day. Truth was the Stranger wasn’t sleeping but had taken to keeping his eyes closed and pretending he was. During the moments he was noticed to be awake, he was subjected to non-stop barrages of verbal and physical harassment by the jail’s proprietor who felt the Stranger deserved no better. After all, he was to be the town’s guest of honor in what would serve to be the only real entertainment in weeks.

To a certain extent, the Stranger didn’t believe he deserved any better than what he was being promised. His had been a life of unrepentant sin fueled by anger, jealousy, greed and every range of emotion felt by a man with no direction or boundaries. He had stolen, murdered, robbed, raped and taken the lord’s name in vain—sometimes all while even in service of his own country. Mostly though, while under the influence of alcohol, the self-medicating lubricant that had greased many a wheel set in motion toward his own path of destruction.

His past, what he could remember of it, had been soaked in blood of the innocent and not so innocent in return, and now that the last two weeks being cooped up in this stifling cell without a drop of whiskey to drink had dried him out, his past was now becoming one full of regret.

Regret of a life wasted. Of loves never found. Of promises left unfulfilled.

But even the regret, he reckoned, would be temporary given his date with the gallows in less than 24 hours.

With a creak, the Stranger could hear the front door of the sheriff’s office open. Someone was coming in. He kept his eyes shut and his back to the cell door hoping that continuing to feign sleep would keep whomever it was from bothering him during what few hours he had left. Along with the sound of boots on the rotted wooden floor came giggles that were unmistakably female.

“Thar h’is,” spoke the bug-eyed rail-thin deputy, the one the Stranger had discovered everyone called Kentuck for no better reason than that’s where he’d claimed his kin had migrated from. Along with Kentuck was a nearly toothless whore who, though only in her twenties, looked two decades older from the years on her back and a half decade-long habit involving laudanum.

“Git up!” Kentuck yelled through the bars. When the Stranger didn’t move, Kentuck sucked a wad of tobacco-stained saliva into his cheek and spit onto the Stranger’s back. “I says git up!” he repeated.

His incarceration here in Sagebrush, Texas, this small border town just north of the Rio Grande, had been marked with similar such abuse after abuse. The night he had been arrested, it was Kentuck along with the Sheriff himself, a stocky and cantankerous man named Overton who had beaten the Stranger into unconsciousness in this very cell while the Stranger’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. The charge had been stealing a horse, of which he had definitely been guilty, and also of killing the man whose horse it had been. The latter a debatable charge at best since the Stranger claimed he’d just been firing a warning shot and the hapless geezer in question had impeded the passage of said bullet with his foolhardy head.

After the Stranger had been caught, instead of calling in a Marshall or a judge, Sheriff Overton deemed the situation one that was to be handled without the “meddlin’ of outsiders,” as he liked to put it. Besides, he reckoned, given the chance, a proper hanging would be a spectacle that would be good for morale, especially if the condemned danced an agonizing mid-air jig for several minutes at the end of a rope instead of dying quick from a neck snap. That would be right entertaining, it would, he thought, and would go a long ways to help him get reelected as Sheriff come Fall.

“Git to yer feet!” Kentuck yelled to the Stranger. He repeated it and with his mouth wet with chaw it came out more as “Gitcherfeet”.

The Stranger obliged, if only to prevent the young deputy from getting any ideas regarding shows of bravado in front of his female guest. The Stranger also had one other reason to stand—to get a glance at what may be the last woman he would ever see up close. Not that Cherokee Sue, as the locals called her because of her mixed blood, was any real specimen of beauty. There’d been a tale the Stranger had overheard shortly after his arrest about Cherokee Sue having given birth to a child to which no less than a half-dozen men claimed paternity. What the Stranger wanted to know, and had the sense to keep to himself, was how many men in town had denied being the father? The child had passed in its third day, and given the conditions of the town and the prospects of its upbringing by Cherokee Sue, it was perhaps a merciful thing at best.

“He don’t look ornery,” Cherokee Sue hooted. She spat onto the wooden floor between her and the cage.

“He ain’t,” hooted Kentuck. Though it came out in one syllable like “Y’aint.”

“Not after we got through w’him,” he finished. Kentuck had made it real clear he’d been proud of the beating he’d put on the restrained man.

“You wanna see one las’ cunny before ya die?” Cherokee Sue was grinning, already raising her dress above her knees. “I’ll show it t’ya.”

She took a step forward, standing right in front of the cell. As the hem of her filthy dress rose to her dirty and blood-stained thigh, the Stranger leaned closer, enough to smell the booze and grime on her body. One lesson he’d learned early on was you had to take whatever little you could get, no matter what it was.

And as the tattered hem of Cherokee Sue’s dress came just above mid-thigh, she leaned back and spat right into the Stranger’s face, cackling her toothless laugh at him.

“Ja see that?” she hooted to Kentuck. “He t’was so mesmerized, I coulda walked up and put a blade in his eye.” She dropped her dress back down to cover herself, flattening the front with one hand as if there was something proper about her attire that needed attention.

“Can’t wait to see you dance,” the whore cackled again as she and Kentuck left arm in arm. “Better make it a good one.”

The Stranger sat back down on the bunk but something caught his eye as the door closed—the face of a man, one he hadn’t seen since…

His thoughts trailed off. Where he’d last seen that face burned in his mind. An August day, 1847, three years previous. A battlefield shrouded in smoke. It was the last day the Stranger had worn that uniform, one not too decidedly different from the one worn by the man whose visage he had just imagined having seen.

Another ghost from the past come to torment me in my final hours, the Stranger thought to himself.

It was obvious what little time he had left on this Earth would certainly not be spent in peace.

He stared at the door for what seemed to be hours, waiting for it to open yet again. To see if that face, one no less chilling than that of Beezelbub himself was still there waiting for him. The door remained closed as the jail in the town of Sagebrush was no hub of activity, especially given Sheriff Overton’s proclivity of holing up daily in one of the town’s three saloons.

At midday, Overton finally entered carrying a yellowed plate topped with a grayish stew and a hardened biscuit, which he wordlessly gave to the Stranger. No sooner had Overton sat at his rolltop desk when in through the front door of the jail came a bearded man the Stranger had not seen before. He was nattily attired in a black suit, contrasting sharply with the skin of his face, which had the color and look of the fleshy inside of an apple.

“Stand up,” Overton told the Stranger before opening the cell door. Putting down his plate of rotten food, the Stranger obliged and as the bearded gentleman in the black suit proceeded to remove a measuring string from his pocket, it became clear the purpose he served here.

“Just about six feet tall,” the hangman said, reading the markings of his string from the Stranger’s feet to the crown of his head. The hangman examined the Stranger up close, eyeing the man’s build. He grabbed the Stranger’s shoulders and squeezed.

“Solid, I’d say about two hundred pounds, give or take.” The bearded Hangman made some notes on a small pad of paper.

The Stranger thought the number sounded low and would have argued the point if he’d known his actual weight. What he did know was if the Hangman’s eyeball calculation was light and the rope too short, he’d drop from the gallows floor and bounce up and down like a yo-yo, indeed slowly strangling to death.

“Coffin?” the Hangman asked. “For an extra five bucks?”

Overton shook his head without taking a moment to even think about it. “I say we leave him strung up for the birds as a warning to any other would-be horse thieves and murderers that come through these here parts.”

Great, the Stranger thought. Overton was sparing no effort to make an example of him. Of all the towns to steal a horse, he had to pick this one.

The Hangman charged Overton a dollar for the rope he’d brought which the Sheriff gladly paid given the thought it would be an investment toward his re-election. When the Hangman’s grim business was over, he left with a touch of his hat brim in Overton’s direction but barely a glance toward the Stranger. As the Stranger sat back on his bunk, feeling the rancid stew churn in his belly, he stared out at the dry Texas sky visible to him through the bars of his window. It had been a sky he’d carelessly stared into many a time as a free man. Today he cherished every last moment of daylight he could see, marveling in the shades of blue he’d never taken the time to notice before.

As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the Stranger could hear the unmistakable sounds of nightly revelry drifting down the street from the town’s saloons. No doubt, he thought, he’d be the topic of conversation for sure and Overton would be in there buying drinks, slapping backs and reminding everyone to show up bright and early to get a good view in front of the gallows.

The Stranger even imagined Kentuck would be cashing in Cherokee Sue’s toothless gratitude that night for the chance to spit in the face of an actual murderer.

If they only knew, the Stranger mused. If they only knew.

Inasmuch as he fought it, not wanting to cede one precious moment of consciousness, the Stranger fell asleep, his body finally surrendering to the exhaustion he’d felt. His eyes closed, bringing with them a fractured sense of peace.

On his wooden slat bunk he tossed and turned for again, his bothered sleep tormented by spirits of darkness had returned with a grinding thump in the night. Of all the nightmares that had come the last few years, leeching into his subconscious mind, this was different.

“Brother Thomas, please do something!” the woman shrieked at him, her eyes boring into his own as the firelight danced across her frail features. Her mouth had been curled in agonizing panic. The Stranger recoiled from her hands, pawing at his coat. The sounds, screams for mercy, screams of unbridled fear rose around them as they pounded against a locked door and fire licked greedily at their heels.

There was no mistaking the crucifix on the wall, even as fire reclaimed it to ash. This was a church all right, but not the burning house of God from his previous nightmares. That one, a recollection of a memory seared into his mind, he had seen with his own eyes. This new vision, a similar tableau twisted, was somehow keenly different. All about him was the agonizing helplessness embedded in the thick smoke of charred flesh and bone. Though as he became overcome with his own panic, his mind exploding to find his own escape from this flaming incarceration, he spun to find before him the grinning face of a man with eyes blackened in appearance like a bottomless well.

“Yes Brother Thomas,” the face of evil laughed at him. “Please do something!” The bellow coming from his mouth chilling the Stranger to the bone as the fire rose all around them to consume them back into the earth.

As the sun broke through the bars of the cell, falling upon the Stranger’s face, he stirred, then awoke.

“Dammit,” he thought. It was morning. He began cursing himself for his lost night. What he’d figured would be his last. In moments he expected Overton and that rat-faced boy sidekick deputy, Kentuck, to come in, cuff his hands and lead him to the gallows. The Stranger sat with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his eyes shut as he tried to remember any kind of prayer from his past. When they came for him he would not beg, nor would he cry. He would take every step to his death with whatever dignity he had left.

But minutes passed, then what seemed like hours. His stomach grumbled from hunger and finally the Stranger got to his feet and peered out the window of his cell. The gallows were still in plain view, a brand new ten-strand hemp noose awaiting his neck.

But there was nobody there.

No men. No women and children perched upon buckboards awaiting the spectacle of his slow execution.

And that’s when he noticed it.

The door to his cell was unlocked and slightly ajar.

*****

If you enjoyed reading SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS, please visit my sponsor links. Thanks!

[ad code=1]