The first rider did not emerge from the dark so much as separate from it, the outline of horse and man moving undeniably slow as though the night itself was reluctant to release them. At a distance, there was nothing immediately unnatural about the shape. Just a mounted soldier moving at an unhurried pace. But the longer Elias, the night watchman, watched the more the details refused to settle on anything living. The horse’s gait was steady, too steady, each step placed with certainty and there was no sound of breath, no shift of muscle under the skin, no life in the movement beyond the function of moving.

When it passed into what light remained, the truth of it came forward all at once.

The horse was dead.

Not freshly fallen, not blood soaked or torn, but long gone to ruin. Its hide had dried and tightened over its frame, pulling back in places where the flesh had receded entirely, exposing bone along the ribs in pale, splintered ridges. Its eyes were gone, the sockets hollow and dark. They were packed with the same dry ash that covered the ground and with each step the ash lifted slightly, spilling in faint, silent drifts down the length of its face. Its lips had shrunk back from its teeth, leaving them exposed in a permanent stiffness that was not quite a snarl and not quite empty.

The rider sat in the saddle. Back straight.

His uniform had once been gray, though now it hung in strips and stiffened folds. The fabric was eaten through in places where time and fire had taken their toll. What remained clung to him as though it had fused there, not by heat but by years of stillness. Beneath it, there was no proper flesh left, only the suggestion of it. It was dried down against bone so tightly that the shape of his ribs pressed visibly through the remnants of cloth. His gloves were still on his hands, though the fingers inside them had long since withered, leaving the leather collapsed and empty in places yet still wrapped around the reins as if nothing would ever loosen his grip.

His head turned.

The movement was slow, deliberate. It was accompanied by a faint, brittle sound like wood flexing right before splintering. When his face came full into view, Elias felt cold settle into his chest.

There was almost nothing left of it. The skin had receded unevenly, drawn tight across parts and peeling away in others, leaving exposed bone with dark stains that at one time may have been blood. One eye remained, sunken deep into its socket, clouded and dry. It was fixed in a stare that did not quite land on anything but felt deliberate. The other side of his face had collapsed inward, the cheek gone. The teeth beneath it were bared in a silent, permanent grimace.

Ash clung to him.

Not resting on him, but caught in him. Packed into the hollows of his eyes, settled in places where flesh had eroded away and threaded through tatters of uniform. When he moved, it shifted slightly as though something inside of him had been reduced to the same fine dust that stirred with every motion.

He did not stop. He did not acknowledge Elias.

But as he passed the air changed, carrying with it a dry suffocating stench and Elias became aware of a new sound beneath the slow rhythm of hooves. A faint, intermitted rattle – bones.

More riders followed, each with the illusion of order stripped away. Some were little more than skeletons draped in the remains of a uniform. Their skulls were tilted at odd angles, jaws hanging slack as if whatever held them together had long forgotten the proper shape of a man. Others remained more of themselves, though not in any way that made them seem alive. Patches of blackened flesh clung stubbornly to bone, stretched thin and tight, splitting at the edges with each subtle movement. In places, it had pulled away altogether, leaving it too dry, curling into strips that brushed against the saddle or the horse’s flank they rode upon.

The horses were no better.

They came in a steady line. Elias did not step out of the doorway of the old saloon. He remained where he was, half shadowed in the doorway. The beam of his flashlight fixed outward as figures entered its reach, one by one. The light caught them gradually, intermittently, revealing fragments that settled into something whole only when passing him. A horse’s head, a slope of a shoulder beneath a gray uniform that no longer moved like fabric.

None of them looked at him.

None of them seemed aware of anything but the path in front of them. The street around them no longer matched the one from their lives, but it made no difference. They rode as if it existed in its original form, as though the buildings were lit and occupied. As though the night offered something other than loneliness.

Their line did not break and it stretched longer than it should have. They simply rode past him and continued down the street.

The last of them emerged more slowly than the others, the darkness behind him seemed to have taken longer to give him shape. Elias followed with his light, watching as they moved farther away. There was no clear point where they disappeared. Their forms faded gradually, losing definition with each step until they became little more than movement, then shadow, then nothing at all.

Elias stood there, still half in the doorway of the old saloon, slack jawed. His flashlight fixed on the darkness long after they had gone. The buildings around him, false fronts and carefully restored interiors, sat unchanged. By morning the streets would be filled with visitors walking the street, stepping in and out of the saloon, the general store, the chapel, treating it like a preserved piece of history.

A town left for people to look at. A version of the past, arranged and maintained, cleaned up and toured.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

© Copyright Kathleen McCluskey. All Rights Reserved.