His breathing was flat and labored. His hair stuck to his forehead with a sheen of sweat. Walter Harrison did not wonder for long where it had all gone wrong. It had all started with the little girl in the white mask. She had stared into his soul like a little hell spawn.
That little girl had been the herald of doom. When she showed up was also before Walter had learned of the arrival of the Goodchilde family in the town of Dead End. A grim, bleak-looking small town at the foot of the Appalachian mountains, but one that he had helped build with his own two hands. He had the calluses to show and the Goodchildes had none of that. Rich folk who showed up with servants and acted like they owned the place. Walter believed that particular family was everything that was wrong with rich folk in the South.
Like quite a few people around Dead End, Walter was no friend of slavery. A lot of the gentry around here in Kentucky had been saying that slavery was protected by their constitutional rights. Though in a mining town like Dead End—at the fringes of very society—nobody cared about that. Hell, they even tolerated some of the natives peddling furs here. A lot of people were like Walter and had exiled themselves to this haven of hard work with few reminders of city life and fewer questions asked about their past.
That little girl wore a white porcelain mask.
Walter heard from Thom Dougherty that she was disfigured. Hereditary. Probably because the Goodchildes were of some incestuous lineage of European nobility. It did not matter to Walter and Thom made up a lot of tall tales anyway. All that mattered was that the little girl would stare back at him, pure darkness beyond those sockets in the fine porcelain mask. It made his skin crawl from the very first moment on and would not subside even when the fair lady Goodchilde took her girl by the hand and guided her off. The masked girl continued to stare back at him while being dragged along, and she haunted Walter in his dreams. It was like she saw his guilt. The sins he had only confessed to the Reverend Gainsborough, and nobody else knew of.
Marvin Goodchilde had bought up all the coal mining business around here and other nearby towns. “Making a killing,” as Dougherty worded it, and it stung how accurate that sounded to Walter. Goodchilde also brought his own slaves into town, having them work in the mines. Putting miners like Walter and his friends out of work.
Walter Harrison had helped build the saloon and two of the residential houses in Dead End. This place had weathered over a decade of sweltering hot summers and unforgiving winters. Its people feared God, and the devil was not welcome here.
Peter Cobbs was a black man. Neither Walter nor anybody else ever questioned why he was a free man. One cold evening over one too many glasses of whiskey, the good Reverend broke his oath and accidentally told Walter that Cobbs killed his master and escaped from a plantation further down south. Everybody had suspected as much, but nobody ever said it out loud nor cared. Peter Cobbs worked, and he worked hard in the mines, he was quiet and earned his keep and respect from everybody even though—or because—Doc Barnes refused to treat him for any ailments and Milly from the General Store marked up all prices whenever Cobbs shopped there. Despite these odds, Peter Cobbs was overwhelmingly welcome in Dead End, like anybody else down on their luck and eking out a new life.
And knowing everybody would disapprove, Peter and Walter would secretly share some of their nights together, staving off the loneliness together in sin. The Reverend showed a lot of understanding, and their secret never left the confessional. Walter feared he would eventually go to hell for his transgressions of what the Church preached, but the holy man repeatedly assured him that God loved him nevertheless as long as he repented. Alcohol did the rest of drowning Walter’s feelings of guilt. So all was good, in a way. And Dead End had never been home to lynching.
The damned girl—the little masked girl—she was the first sign of the ghosts showing up in this town—ghosts of war and hungry fires that devoured the black folk. Ghosts in form of living, breathing people. The Klansmen, they called them. Walter and some of the others had heard of them and their movement. Neither the war nor the Klan nor lynching had reached Dead End. Until now. Marvin Goodchilde was one of the ghosts. The little girl was creepy, but to Walter, Marvin Goodchilde was downright terrifying. Stoic face, puffy cheeks, meaty hands that had never worked a day. But he had a fierce determination and the devil himself in his eyes.
He saw that devil in his eyes when he saw Marvin riling up a crowd on the town square one night. It was not just the reflection of the fires burning up crosses. They bore those eerie-looking, pointy white hoods and marched off into the night. Walter had rubbed his face and missed most of the speech in a bit of a stupor between too much bad whiskey, too little sleep, and too long of a day in the mines.
The screams from Cobbs’ shack down the road woke Walter up again. Goodchilde and his Klansmen had murdered Cobbs and burned his home down. In a matter of hours, a man had been wrenched from life, a life that everybody in Dead End would remember. Walter himself remembered how Peter Cobbs had even saved his life in the mines one time. Peter was his friend, and now he was dead. He needed not check, he knew it and immediately threw up when the realization hit him. The screams and the pillar of smoke in the distance had said it all.
Upset and having emptied the rest of his whiskey bottle, Walter found himself in the graveyard. Dawn had not even broken yet, and he was visiting the grave of Jon “Cold-Blood” Hunter. Hunter was the fiercest bounty hunter known to this and all neighboring states, and he was buried here after a U.S. Marshal shot him in the face for having unlawfully slain an adulterer—for pay from a scorned and wealthy wife on the East Coast. Hell hath no fury and all that. Considering Hunter had taken down some of the most infamous outlaws known to Kentucky in the past years, his crudely crafted wooden cross was rather pitiful. Jon Hunter’s legend did not end there, though.
Cut your palm and bleed onto the gravestone of Jon Hunter, and Cold-Blood will rise from his grave. You can trade your life and soul to him, so he takes down criminals in your stead. That is what local lore used to preach. Even one of the natives had claimed he saw the walking corpse of Jon Hunter once.
With his vision blurred and his senses already having escaped halfway to the Mexican border, Walter slowly realized he had cut himself. The pain was dulled by the whiskey, and he vaguely remembered the sound of shattering glass, the smell of cheap booze, and the shard he used to cut his flesh. Dark red spots formed in the dried yellow grass of the ground in front of Hunter’s grave.
Walter was short of breath and covered in sweat. There was a fear deep down in his belly, wrenching his gut. His head was spinning with dark thoughts, things more malevolent than even the devil in Marvin Goodchilde’s eyes. Walter was too drunk to spin around at the sound of jingling metal spurs accompanying the bootsteps thumping down behind him in a spooky monotone.
It was the spitting image of Jon Hunter, his brown duster covered in dry, powdery dirt and resting his hand on a holstered gun. Walter had blinked and wondered if Jon was missing his lower jaw, but the dirty brown bandana wrapped around the gaunt face just concealed it.
“Kill that turd,” Walter said and then spat on the ground, staggering where he stood. “I wanna see the Goodchildes die like dogs. Even tha’ little creepy girl. Kill ‘em all.”
Cold, dead eyes stared out from under the brim of Hunter’s hat. Jon said nothing. There was something sinister, hollow, and piercing in the milky white of them where a pale blue color used to be, and it chilled Walter to the bone. It froze him on the spot, leaving him oblivious of what was happening as he heard the bootsteps gain distance, spurs jingling, and Jon Hunter walking away from him, unholstering his revolver and loading it, slowly and deliberately, bullet after bullet.
It was all a blur, and it was getting warmer and warmer, like fire. Walter’s breath had been growing more and more flat, labored. He faintly remembered the screams from town, blinking, and rubbing his eyes with hands covered in dirt and blood, and then rubbing them again and realizing how he saw Goodchilde Manor ablaze. The fair lady Goodchilde running out the front door, and Jon Hunter calmly walking after her, dropping the severed head of Marvin Goodchilde onto the floorboards of the porch as Cold-Blood’s every step thundered just as menacingly with a slow and ponderous thud each. Her shriek was clipped and barely heard when Hunter gunned the lady down with two bullets in her back. The porcelain white mask rocked on a soft-looking carpet just behind the front door, cracked and bloodied and gradually being engulfed by the flames.
Walter had stumbled back to the grave of Jon Hunter. It had all been a delirious haze. He remembered how he had lost his footing and fallen—straight into an empty coffin in a shallow ditch. The sun was rising behind him, and it cast a long shadow over the brim of Hunter’s hat, hiding his ghastly face in an unfathomable void. A bony hand like that of the pale rider himself grabbed the edge of the lid and slammed the coffin shut over Walter. That was his very last sight of the skies over Dead End.
The sound of dirt raining down on the wooden lid came back to him. And again. And again. He knew where it had all gone wrong and it filled him with a twisted sense of satisfaction. Walter reckoned he would be seeing Marvin Goodchilde soon.
