Spooky Texas

by S. E. Schlosser

  10

  The Lady in the Veil

  BROWNSVILLE

  He had not expected to meet the woman of his dreams walking home from the weekly card game at his neighbor’s. But he had. She was strolling along in the moonlight beside the wrought-iron fence of the cemetery, and she seemed to sparkle with a heavenly light that glinted off her dark hair, glimpsed just faintly under the old-fashioned hat with a veil that she wore on her head. Her figure, wrapped in a lacy black dress, was to die for, and Carlos quickened his pace until he was level with her, hoping for a glimpse of her face under the veil.

  “Buenas noches, Señorita,” Carlos murmured huskily in the most romantic tone he possessed.

  “Buenas noches, Señor,” she returned politely, and her soft contralto sent shivers up his spine. Oh, this one was a keeper, he thought. Oh, si, she was!

  Carlos made a few remarks about the beautiful night and the lovely weather—anything to keep her talking. To his surprise, she stopped abruptly when they reached the end of the wrought-iron fence and turned to face him. He caught a glimpse of dark eyes glinting behind the veil, and in the moonlight he saw that her lips were blood-red. The full moon cast odd shadows over her lovely form.

  “What is it you want of me, Señor?” she asked.

  Carlos beamed at her. “A date, Señorita. Just a date. I want to see you again.”

  She paused for what Carlos considered a second too long. Then she said: “I do not know. Let me think on it.”

  Carlos’s heart sank. She had responded so well to his conversational overtures. Perhaps she didn’t think him handsome enough? Then she said: “Ask me again in this place at this time tomorrow night, and we shall see.”

  Carlos’s heart leapt in his chest. So she was playing hard to get? Well, fair enough. She was worth the courting. And perhaps tomorrow he would get a glimpse behind the veil covering her lovely features! He kissed her hand and then floated away, leaving her standing beside the cemetery gate. So what if she wasn’t ready yet to show him where she lived? He would see her tomorrow, and then she would fall into his arms!

  Carlos could hardly sleep that night, he was so excited. As soon as it was light, he was on the phone to his cousin Diego, who lived next door, to tell him about the lovely woman he had met the previous night. Diego was less than thrilled by the early morning call, but being a good friend, he dutifully asked him the girl’s name.

  “Rosa,” Carlos practically sang the name into the receiver. “Her name is Rosa.”

  He filled in the details—the meeting by the cemetery, the lady playing hard to get, the second chance today. Diego did not seem as enthusiastic as his cousin would wish, but Carlos put this down to his having wakened him from a deep sleep.

  The day dragged by for the infatuated Carlos, and he had trouble concentrating on his work. But at last he was free and running the few blocks to his home to change into an outfit suitable for romancing a lovely lady.

  He could barely contain himself, and he reached the wrought iron fence by the cemetery a few minutes early. Rosa was not there yet, but Carlos was not bored. He entertained himself by picturing his beautiful bride in their new home, cooking an elegant meal for all their friends. And suddenly Rosa was there in front of him, as if she had appeared out of nowhere. She was still dressed in black and wore the same hat with a veil. The moon was almost full that night, and it sparkled off the sequins dotting her veil. Carlos was enchanted.

  They talked for hours, standing in front of the fancy fence, ignoring the statues and gravestones in the background. Rosa was as witty as she was beautiful, and Carlos begged her for a date. This time, she relented. “We will go out tomorrow night,” she said. “I will send you a letter with the place and time.”

  Carlos kissed her hand and floated away again, so happy he wanted to sing for joy. He paused at the edge of the fence to look back at Rosa, but she had vanished as quietly as she had appeared. Still, he would see her tomorrow!

  Carlos was absolutely useless at work the next day. All he could think about and talk about was his Rosa. He was already planning their wedding, and they hadn’t even had their first date. His colleagues teased him, but he was too happy to notice. After work, he rushed home and found a letter in his mailbox. Eagerly he read it, not pausing to wonder how Rosa knew where he lived. Then he ran next door to show it to Diego. His cousin read the note and turned pale with shock when he saw the signature.

  “Carlos,” Diego cried. “This girl, Rosa Gonzales—she died in a car crash last year. I am sure of it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Carlos snapped. “There are many girls with the same name. This is a different Rosa.”

  “Sí? Than why does she want you to meet her at the cemetery tonight?”

  “Because that is where we met before,” Carlos replied. “Honestly, Diego, I thought you would be happy for me. Don’t slander my girlfriend before you have even met her!”

  “Girlfriend? You haven’t even taken her out on a date yet,” Diego shot back. But he knew his cousin well and backed off before Carlos stormed out of the house.

  Still, something in his cousin’s words had affected Carlos. As he dressed for his date, he thought about what Diego said. Had it been mere jealousy on Diego’s part, or was something wrong with Rosa? Then, remembering her sparkling voice, her lovely figure, and her mysterious face beneath the black veil, Carlos forgot his apprehensions and hurried out to meet his girl, not knowing that his worried cousin followed behind him.

  Carlos bounded through the intricately designed gate of the cemetery and over to the large gravestone decorated by an angel. And there was his Rosa, lovely in the light of the waning moon. “At last, we go out!” he cried to her. “But first, my Rosa, show me your lovely face!”

  At his words, Rosa turned her face up to her suitor and pulled aside the veil. Back at the gate, Diego gave a gasp of shock, for she had the desiccated face of a skeleton, all bone and withered flesh. But he was frozen to the spot by the power of the evil specter, unable to move or even shout a warning to his cousin. Looking down upon his Rosa, Carlos only saw the glamour the ghost was projecting. He swept the gruesome figure into his arms and kissed her. It was only as the skeleton’s withered arms encircled him, trapping him within her embrace, that the veil on his eyes was lifted and he realized in one heart-stopping moment the abomination he was kissing. And then the ground opened up beneath them, and with a laugh of triumph, the specter pulled him down and down into her tomb. The earth closed with a clap like thunder over Carlos and Rosa.

  THE LADY IN THE VEIL

  Diego, freed from the ghost’s spell, ran into the cemetery, shouting his cousin’s name in terror. But it was too late. By the time the grave was excavated by the horrified, disbelieving family, Carlos was dead—locked for all time in Rosa’s arms.

  11

  Restless Spirit

  WINK

  It was hard work manning the oil rigs. Heavy labor at its finest. But I was glad to have a job after the crash of ’29. “The Great Depression” was what the economics folks called it, and it was a tough time for everyone. I had been working my way up to a cushy desk job in a local newspaper when our parent company closed due to “financial difficulties” (in other words—they were broke). Now I was slaving away at the oil rigs, thankful I had money in my pocket. The missus fretted a bit when I came home exhausted each night. But we had a baby to feed, so what could she say?

  The one thing I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the ghost. Yes, you heard me right. It wasn’t too long after I took a job on the rig that the ghost showed up. A cold wind whipped across the camp and the whole place fell silent. Goose bumps rose on my flesh at the eerie hush. The wind was followed swiftly by the figure of a young man wearing the clothes of a native tribesman. The lad had a white sheen over him liked he’d been dipped in translucent paint, and he was riding a large horse that shimmered in the misty, golden glow of dawn. The ghost came galloping up out of nowhere around dawn, just as I came on duty
, and rode heck for leather through the camp. Scared the life out of me when I saw him. I could hear him urging the horse on, bending low over of the critter’s neck as he spoke urgent words in his tribal lingo. I stood staring with my mouth open and my knees knocking until the ghost vanished again into the mist as if he had never been.

  “What in the name of Glory is that?” I demanded of the foreman, my voice gone high-pitched with shock. My heart was beating so fast it felt like it would jump right out of my chest, and I was shaking all over.

  “That’s just our ghost,” the foreman replied.

  I glared at him, furious that he could be so calm about something so eerie. Then I saw that his hands were shaking, and he was wringing them together in an absentminded way. I don’t think he knew he was doing that until he followed my gaze and yanked his hands apart, flushing slightly. Raising his voice, he called gruffly to the day shift to get moving, and such was the power of the man that we all hopped to in spite of the ghostly appearance.

  I told my wife about the ghost that night at dinner, and she nearly keeled over from apoplexy.

  “A ghost?” she shrieked. “Mark Hanover, I’m not having you working someplace with a ghost! What would our boy do if that creature decided to drag you to perdition with it?”

  Took me quite a while to calm her down. Wasn’t until the boy started wailing in his cradle that she took a deep breath and returned to her normal, pleasant demeanor. I didn’t say anything else about it, and I could tell from her attitude that she realized—same as me—that it was the only work to be had. Between a ghost and starvation, I’d take the ghost anytime.

  We saw the ghost just about every day. Always, the cold wind and the hushed silence heralded his arrival, and always he rode as if the devil were on his heels. His frantic urgency was palpable, and after he vanished, we discussed the ghost among ourselves as we prepared for the day’s work. Some fellows thought the Texas Rangers were after him. Others claimed an enemy tribe was about to attack, and he was riding to warn his people. I privately thought that a mountain lion had tried to jump him. I saw scars on the withers of his horse that might have come from the claws of a lion. The one thing none of us could figure out was why he was haunting the oil field.

  “Why don’t we ask him?” my buddy Jake suggested one misty morning after the ghost made his daily ride through camp. He proposed that we try to stop the ghost on his way through the camp the next morning and ask him where he was going and why he was haunting us. Personally, I wasn’t in favor of the idea. I didn’t like messing about with the supernatural. But the other fellows were quite enthusiastic about the plan, so I went along.

  The next morning, every man in the day shift arrived a bit early, and we strung ourselves in a line across the path the young boy and his horse rode each morning. I was nervous, let me tell you. I could feel my knees shaking as we waited for the cold breeze to spring up. In my mind, I heard again my poor wife’s shriek when she realized I was working on a haunted site. She was afraid the specter would drag me down to perdition with it, and now here I was deliberately putting myself in its path.

  Before I could think up an excuse to leave the line, the cold wind came blowing through the camp, bringing an eerie silence with it. The young tribesman swirled into existence in a shimmering white cascade of light and came riding swiftly through the camp, desperately urging his horse to ride faster. I noticed for the first time that the horse’s hooves were a few inches from the ground. The boy paid no attention to the line of men in his path, even though the bravest of us were already shouting at him to wait, stop, talk to us.

  The ghostly horse was aimed right at me, and when it became apparent the rider wasn’t going to stop, I tried to jump out of the way. Only I bumped into the foreman and staggered back into the rider’s path, just in time for the ghost horse to run at top speed through me. It felt as though a sheet of ice hit the front of my body, drove right through every internal organ, and then slammed out my back. I bent double, clutching my head, as the horseman continued his ride through the camp and then disappeared.

  “Mark, are you all right?” the foreman cried, catching me by the arm and easing me down to the ground.

  “No, I’m not all right. I was nearly frozen to death by that ghost,” I snapped, completely terrified by my experience. “Boss, I’m not staying here another minute. You can keep your job and your ghost. I’m not taking a ride to perdition on a ghost horse. No, thanks.”

  As soon as I could stand, I got my back pay from the office and went home. My missus didn’t say a word of rebuke when I told her the story. She just gave me a big hug and told me about a job opening in a grocery store her cousin managed in El Paso. Apparently, she’d been looking around for something ever since she first heard me talk about the ghost. The cousin had guaranteed me the job if we were willing to move to El Paso. My wife had been wondering how to break the news to me without making me go all stubborn and proud and angry at her interference. I suppose I would have been mad if she’d broached the news any other day. But at the moment, I was still shaking and upset from my encounter with the ghost, and the idea of putting many miles between me and that restless spirit seemed like a very good idea.

  RESTLESS SPIRIT

  I had us packed up and moved within a week, and we never looked back. The job in El Paso was just the ticket. By the time the Depression was over, I’d worked myself into a management position, and we were doing quite well for ourselves. We’d stayed in touch with Jake and his family over in Wink, and it was Jake who told us that the ghost suddenly stopped appearing in 1939. No one knew why the spirit had grown restless enough to haunt the oil camp back in 1935, nor why it stopped its haunting in 1939. It was Jake’s private opinion that the foreman had gotten a priest in to do an exorcism during one of the national holidays while there was only a skeleton crew manning the rig, but no one knew for sure.

  I heard years later that pipeline workers found a boy’s skeleton buried in a sitting position near the place where the restless spirit had made his daily ride. Tests made on the skeleton revealed it as belonging to a Native American tribesman about sixteen years old. So that explained, at least in part, why the ghost had chosen to haunt the oil camp, though we will probably never know why he was making such a desperate, fear-filled ride.

  12

  Remember

  SAN ANTONIO

  They didn’t stand a chance. Sheer numbers dictated that the men manning the walls of the Alamo and the foolish but brave soldiers inside could not survive this attack. Yet still they flew their banner: “Liberty or Death.”

  I admired their spirit. I am a Mexican citizen, loyal to my bones, and I deplored the way the Texans had rebelled against their president. But still, I admired them. And deep inside where it did not show, I too did not approve of the way President and General Antonio López de Santa Anna had abrogated the Constitution of 1824. But I wasn’t ready to bring civil war to his nation because of this.

  Santa Anna was determined to squash the Texan rebellion without mercy. He believed in the old ways of fighting, and that meant that no soldier standing in the old mission today would be alive on the morrow. The impromptu banner, flapping so merrily over the walls of the fortress, was more appropriate than the men might realize. In the beginning, Lieutenant Colonel Travis, commander of the Alamo, sent out couriers carrying pleas for help to communities in Texas. On the eighth day of the siege, a band of thirty-two volunteers from Gonzales arrived, which brought Travis’s numbers up to around two hundred. But we had been joined by another thousand soldiers, bringing our numbers up to twenty-five hundred, and our forces now completely surrounded the Alamo.

  Two hundred men were not enough, I mused, even such men as Lieutenant Colonel Travis and Jim Bowie, the brave frontiersman and knife fighter who led a failed mission in search of the lost San Saba mine before joining the Texas rebels and leading men in the Battle of Concepción.

  And then there was Davy Crockett. I winced visibly when I thought of
the name, and my mind rebelled against the notion of attacking the wildcat of Tennessee. How could I? Davy Crockett had long been a hero to me and my family. Yet duty and conscious dictated that I must.

  It was my wife Elena who started it. Her cousin Anna had married an American and moved to Tennessee. The two women were close, and so Anna began sending Elena the Davy Crockett Almanacs shortly after she arrived in Tennessee. Elena read the stories aloud to me and the children each night by the fire. Oh, how we gasped over Davy Crockett’s frontier adventures and laughed at the way he unfroze the dawn the day the sun got stuck in the winter sky. My favorite story was called “A Bear-Thief.” It chronicled the time a bear walked up to Crockett’s camp on its hind legs, took the reins of Crockett’s horse in its paws and stole the horse! As he chased the bear to retrieve his horse, Crockett set up a bear trap that not only killed the bear, but also skinned it as it ran between two trees in its attempt to escape. Elena read the story vividly, and I laughed heartily every time. Elena’s favorite stories were about Davy’s wife Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind Crockett, the prettiest, sassiest, and toughest gal in the West.

  I didn’t know until we arrived in San Antonio that Davy Crockett had joined the men at the Alamo. The famous hunter, politician, and Indian-fighter led the twelve-man “Tennessee Mounted Volunteers” after resigning from politics. The story I’d heard from locals was that he told the electorate that “if they did not elect me they could go to hell and I would go to Texas!” And that’s just what he did.

  I was terrified of what would happen if Elena ever found out I was fighting against her hero. I was even more frightened at the thought that I might find myself face to face with the king of the wild frontier, forced to fight or perhaps even kill him. Elena would never forgive me. Still, I would do my duty. I gave a shuddering sigh and went to check in with my commanding officer, my shift over for now.