Dead Echo

  *

  Now he wasn’t sure. Of course he’d heard the rumors of the old dead fisherman out there near the pond but that was for old women and children. Not grown men, surely not grown men. But the shirtsleeve had been missing and there had been an oddly hand-shaped smear of mud where he’d thought the thing had touched him before he broke from the trail. So how to explain that? He didn’t know because he could still see it emerging from the mud, the white orbs of its eyes. The stink. If seeing was believing, what was seeing and smelling? He didn’t want to know. He tried to find an excuse, a plausible explanation; after all, he had been drinking. He didn’t want to throw away that easy excuse to have to deal with the unthinkable. Maybe he’d been drunker than he thought. After all, he had run damn near the whole way back and that was close to a mile and a half from where he started. He didn’t see how that was possible but his mind supplied a ready answer: You were running for your life, you idiot. That’s why you were able to do it. If not you’d be dead. That quiet, secret voice. Drunk, indeed, it continued. You ran all that way as drunk as you wanna believe? Please.

  He turned away from the corner of the house and walked back to his chair. Pulled the flask out of his pocket again and drained it before sitting down. Besides, since the incident he couldn’t even get drunk anymore. And believe it, he’d tried. Every night since, he tried, with the same results. It brought back the memories but it sure as hell didn’t chase them away. He felt the cold hardness of the Colt strapped to his leg. That was another thing that’d changed. He always carried a piece, no matter where he was. He knew it was against Federal policy but he really didn’t care at the moment. If his piece could bring him any peace, then praise God, hallelujah.

  But if the truth be known, he didn’t think it would.