SADDLEBAGS, Trunks, and Tombs

Chapter 3

Jackson:

     The smoke was clearing, though he could not truly see it.  There were screams.  No one screamed at gunfights anymore.  The women, who might be around, were very good at keeping it down as gunfights were illegal.  Gunfights were a thing of the distant past now a days, but every once in a while....  He had felt the bullets sear into his skin.  Four?  Five?  Yet he felt no pain.  Nothing but utter stillness hung in the air around him.  

Jackson could feel the noonday sun beating down on his skin as well as what felt to be numerous pairs of hands grabbing him on every side.  Still, he could hear the screaming and now what sounded like the muffled distress calls of a child.  There had been no children around when he had run into street, yet the cries were definitely those of a child.  Something wasn’t right.  He would bet his life on it, if he was lucky enough to have a life left after all was said and done.

     ‘Old Jack’, watched the two bodies being taken from behind the railway postal building where they had been hidden from the sun and the local brass.  The men who carried the bodies began to walk off into the cool darkness of the moonlit desert.  As he stood off in the distance, he watched the first body being carefully placed into its grave, covered, and what appeared to be a cross of Jesus Christ placed above it.  A bright column of golden light appeared, though the men digging the graves didn’t seem to be disturbed by it.  

Not too far away, the second of the two bodies was dragged and tumbled into the second grave.  He could almost feel each grain of the desert sand on his skin as the grave was covered.  When it appeared that the burial was complete, he heard a thud near the grave and those that were there began to walk away. 

     There was no strange column of light around the second grave and no cross to mark it.  Jackson Winchester stared at the second grave for a long time.  Were his feet beginning to move him forward?  He would have sworn not and yet he seemed to be moving closer and closer from the spot where he had been watching the double burial.  

The light atop the first grave, to his right, was starting to dim now.  He was, somehow, standing at the foot of the unmarked grave when he felt the first pull.  There was suddenly no darkness and no light, just the gentle pulling.  He began to fall forward onto the mound of dirt in front of him.  He instinctively threw his hands out, hoping to catch his own weight and roll off to the side, but it was not to be.  There was a flash of light as he hit the softness of the desert sand that covered the grave but the falling didn’t stop when it should have.  He tried to scream but the darkness swallowed his final call. 

The Watcher:

I am not a drinker.  As I told you before, I enjoy my wines, but this night I was finding my solace in a cheap bottle of spiced rum.  I don’t remember buying this crap, but here it was held tightly between my hands.  I just don’t know what to think.  I’m not sure if I am thinking at all at this point.  I have been staring out of the window, the window that has given me such pleasure over the years, sunken within the couch, waiting.  

The night lights of the river front condominiums, shimmering off the water, are as they have always been for this time of year.  Shock??  I wish that were all I was feeling.  Or maybe it was, as I can’t say that I have ever been in shock before, but if not, this seemed to be everything I ever thought shock would and more.

For all I was feeling and going through this night, part of me, the writer in me, wanted the window to swirl again, with its nauseating twists and turns.  I wanted the window to show me something, something I could watch, something I could write.  A small movement caught my eye.  The letter on the coffee table had moved slightly, as if there were a small, silent breeze that had blown through the kitchenette window even though that window was closed.  Bending slightly forward, I reached forward to pick it up.