Neither one of us was surprised to find that Annie Durbin wasn’t home. Her clothes were still exactly as I had put them on the table and nothing I could tell was out of place. Thayer took a quick uninterested look around, then set himself on a cane chair next to the supper table lookin’ a little ill.
“You mind waitin’ here for the woman?” I asked him.
But Thayer didn’t answer me. Sounds came from his mouth, but I couldn’t make out a word.
Then, I swear, the man started to shrink. His head got smaller first—just kinda pulled in on itself while the features faded and softened. His clothes got all loose and limp and the man bowed his head low enough to where the brim of his hat covered everything brow to chin.
“Frank?” I was moving back, one eye on the door. “Whatcha doing there, Frank?”
When the hat canted back, I got a quick look under its brim. My heart slammed against my
lungs and knocked a day’s worth of wind outta me. Something told me to pull my gun and shoot whatever Thayer was turning into, but my hand was shaking so bad, I don’t believe I could’ve even hit the wall behind him, my brains gurgling with thoughts no man ever thinks he’ll have.
Fear, I guess it was, most of all. At first anyway, but then, when I figured out…
It was Annie Durbin, trying her best to turn back into herself.—make the body she used as Thayer shape itself back into a female.
About then my knees gave out and I sank to the floor. My gun thunked onto the floor next to me.
“Annie,” I whispered, not knowing what I was supposed to do.—if I should be helping somehow. “What?”
Her whole body slumped, then shivered and straightened. Crackling, like small bones breaking, and then came some slimy sound, like walking in wet mud. My eyes teared up. Plain scared, I guess.
And then things just came to a slow stop. Annie just sat there, still. Under those man’s clothes her body seemed to be about the right size I remembered. Her hair was back too, flowing down over the back of the chair. Damp now, and tangled. Breaths came in heaves and spurts.
By then I was on all fours at Annie’s feet. “Annie?” I said, as best I could get her name to come out. A noise answered me, like a bird, but not a bird. My hand reached for her hat. I had to lift it back. I had to see Annie’s face, her eyes, but a weak, sickly feeling down inside me was screaming NO. I took a hard swallow and did it anyway.
What I saw stole the wind from my chest and the blood from my heart. Time stopped. I froze right there, my hand clamped on that hat, my eyes stuck on Annie’s face.
The face of her night bird fixed there where hers ought to’ve been.
Smooth skin stretched around her head from out of the roots of her hair. Her forehead and cheeks looked right. But that was where right stopped. Her nose was now a pointed beak, hooked like some kind of hawk. Her eyes glistened dark and bead-like. But what brought hell and damnation to my mind was their size. Big around as coat buttons, they were. Wet and stuck right there in the middle of a flat face. Here and there a speck of down dotted her neck and thick tufts covered where her ears should’ve been.
I pulled the hat clean off and threw it somewhere, grabbing Annie by her thin shoulders. “Annie! Can you hear me?”
The huge eyes blinked real slow. The beak moved to where I could make out a hard, pointed tongue. And she gave out a weak and pitiful little chirping sound.
She stood up, unsteady as a child at first, but with my help, Annie tried to walk. She stumbled and cried out as if in great pain and steadied herself against the table. I took both her hands and eased her down to the floor where she sat quietly, staring ahead as if lost in some sort of daze. When she slumped forward and tilted off to one side, I thought she was going to fall over, so I put my arm around her… and I felt the wings folded against her back. They were soft but stiff with flight feathers that stretched the back of her shirt out tight.
“Annie?” I tried again.
She turned to me and those eyes bored into mine.
“Can you finish your change? Can you turn yourself back into a woman?”
The beak lolled open and took in long, desperate gasps of breath, like it couldn’t haul in enough air to satisfy the lungs. Sometimes I could hear air sucking into the two little holes in the beak but not able to take in all the air Annie’s human body needed.
I picked her up and carried her to the bed off in one corner. Remembering the wings, I carefully rolled her onto her side, thinking that was best. A corn shuck pillow worked to prop up her head, but she was fighting for breath, losing her struggle for life as I watched, helpless, no idea of what I should do. She was dying!
Annie Durbin’s last breath heaved long in her chest before life itself just seemed to drift slowly away from her. Her body was still, her shiny eyes wide open with the pains of death.
I gently closed them and got a quilt to cover her body.
That night, when it was good and dark, I buried Annie Durbin out behind her house by the dim light of a quarter moon. I stomped the dirt down good and leveled off the ground so that nobody could ever tell there was a grave there. As the sun came up and I rode back to town, a late spring shower gave everything a good washing down. I knew that would make Annie’s little grave impossible to find.
A couple of day’s later, the real Frank Thayer rode into town. The man looked nothing like Annie’s version had imagined him to be.
“You ailing?” were the first words he said to me. “You look a might peaked.”
“No. No, I’m all right.” I took him inside and showed him around the jail, the water pump, the wood stove, the two cells. That afternoon over a fresh pot of coffee I told him about Annie Durbin— her escape and her claim to be a witch. That’s all anyone needed to know.
The next morning, I rode out of Tin Cup. I took the trail past Annie’s place just to have a last look, maybe to convince myself that none of this had happened. I tied my horse to the hitch rail out front and checked inside the house. Quiet, it was, with Annie’s clothes still neatly folded on the table next to that flour sack of witch stuff.
As I was leaving, I heard what I thought was a rider coming down the trail ahead of me. It turned out to be a horse with no rider—a lonely roan with a mane all long and nut brown, like I remembered Annie’s hair to be.
Don Hornbostel is the author of two novels and over two hundred short stories. Both his Western novel “Dust to Dust” and his mystery novel “The Hairy Casino Murders” are available on Amazon or through your local bookstore. Although Westerns are his favorite, he also writes mystery, science fiction, horror, and humor. He lives in Arizona where numerous cacti constantly threaten his home
“Night Bird” started out as a mainstream Western short story with a gang of bank robbers fleeing southward from Prescott, Arizona, and getting caught and jailed in the small town lockup of Tin Cup. A temporary marshal there finds himself unable to keep them in jail due to a minor character, Annie Durbin, who helps them escape. Well, as the keyboard clicked on, Annie gradually became more interesting than the band of desperadoes and took on a life of her own. Through some irresistible force I can not begin to explain, she took control of the story. Instead of needing help to escape her cell, as the male outlaws required, Annie could handle things quite nicely all on her own. Of course a dark complication had to be thrown into the mix so that events take an unnatural sidetrack into the unknown. Life is like that.
Smile
by
Kit Volker
“No, please don’t bring him in here. Please no.” The door opened and the woman and the four year old came inside the portrait studio. “Good morning,” Molly greeted.
“I’ve come for a photograph of Andrew here,” the customer explained.
“Most boys his age can’t hold still long enough. You have to stay perfectly still for a full minute for the image to form,” she explained.
“I make him behave.”
It wasn’t anything to do with making the lad do
anything. Boys that age simply cannot hold still. It’s simply a fact. After five attempts, they departed–without a photograph. And, once again, no money.
People were stopping and looking at the display items in the window. No one was coming inside to purchase one. How she missed the Civil War. She could sell practically everything she did–newspapers, magazines, even individuals bought up images of death and destruction as fast as she could develop it.
Then, she was only a block away from Ford’s Theater on that awful day. People still ordered the print of a dying president–ten years later. But, portraits in San Francisco. Nobody wanted them.
Mercifully, five o’clock came along and she could close up. “Another day closer to death,” Aunt Hiltie used to say.
Sarah grabbed her parasol and ventured out onto the streets of her newfound home town. She liked the smells of the city. She liked the crowds. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just going. She needed to move after being cooped up in the studio.
Abruptly, someone grabbed her and pressed her against a wall. He was an uncouth man with no teeth and tobacco stained lips. He stank like a polecat. “How ‘bout a kiss?”
“Die!” she said.
“Ha!”
“No, really, die.” She opened the vial of acid with her free hand and splashed it in his face. “Photographers have chemicals, lots of them.”
Her assailant hunched over, hands glued to his face, and groaned. “I’ll get you now!”
“An idle threat, good sir. You’ll be lucky if you can even see again.” She turned away and resumed her walk. Earlier in life, such an event would’ve shocked her–left her in hysterics. Not anymore. She liked throwing acid on creeps. It had started during the war. Mostly bluecoats, thought they’d help themselves to a feel from a nice eighteen year old red haired girl. A vial of acid in their faces quickly changed their tune.
Usually, the Confederates had better manners. They called her “Miss” and said things like “please” and “thank you,” occasionally even opened a door for her. She never threw acid at a Confederate soldier, not even once. It wasn’t a political thing. It was proper manners and how to treat a lady.
But those days were gone and good manners were a rarity in the Barbary Coast neighborhoods of San Francisco. She’d walked enough. It was time to head home.
Two teenagers came racing out of the abandoned cannery that was just across the street from where she lived. They raced by her going so fast she kept looking around, wondering who was chasing them. There didn’t seem to be anyone.
She made her way to the little apartment above the studio and ate the rest of the sourdough bread and butter she’d started earlier. She loved the bread in the city, but hoped that maybe she’d earn enough money to buy some meat or fish someday.
Soon, she drifted off to sleep. Her slumber did not last nearly long enough. Someone was doing whatever over at the cannery. Third time this week. How were decent folk supposed to sleep? She wondered why somebody didn’t do something, then decided a vial of acid in someone’s face might do the trick. She ventured across the street to the big brick building.
She’d definitely heard machinery. How could the place be dark and quiet? She hiked her skirt and climbed through a broken window. The place was deserted, utterly totally deserted. Except for the drunk passed out by the stairs. He seemed a bit out of place.
Some of the local establishments served the finest in distilled liquors. This guy didn’t smell like he’d had any of that. Rotgut seemed his pleasure. And there was a whiff of vomit. He was sleeping in his own vomit. “Boy you know how to impress a lady.”
His eyes opened. He looked at her. It was an odd look, like he didn’t think she was really there.
“Get away from me!” he yelled as he clamored to get himself up. “Stay away.”
“Now, I’m not that ugly,” she protested.
He was running now. “Stay the heck away!” He jumped through a window. It wasn’t open.
“That seemed odd,” Molly said.
“Yes,” a voice said from the darkness.
Molly slowly looked over her shoulder. There wasn’t anyone there. “Hello.”
“Get out,” the voice said.
“That’s not very friendly,” she protested.
“Get out now,” the disembodied voice commanded.
“Suit yourself.” She ventured back to the broken window and climbed out.
Her mind was racing. A decade had passed since sergeants had commanded her off the battlefield. A decade had passed since she’d experimented with night photography.
She had the steamer trunk open before the tea kettle began to whistle. It had been so long. Family portraits had dulled her passion to the point of perpetual boredom. She’d forgotten the daring girl who held soldier’s tourniquets with one hand while she counted down the seconds for her camera’s lens cap in her other hand to go back on the camera.
That creepy voice had awakened something. It had been there, throwing acid on hooligans to break up the mind numbing boredom that had become her life. The special box. The chemicals she hadn’t touched in a decade. Her notes. They were still there.
“What?”
“How much longer?” the Russian lady asked. Her twins were starting to twitch.
Molly put the cover back on the lens. “All done, girls.” She handed them Ruth and Emily, her two dolls. Play with them and I’ll see what kind of an image we’ve got.”
It was ghastly. She’d been drifting off in thought all day. As luck would have it, she’d been busy for once. She developed the picture and mounted it. With a nice frame, the slightly overexposed picture didn’t look too bad. The Romanov’s seemed happy with it, and she could finally close up and go upstairs.
She just gazed at that picture. That man standing there on the Gettysburg battlefield. His eyes just looked right through a person. They were the coldest eyes she’d ever seen.
Molly never identified him. There were so many casualties. Nobody seemed sure. People had too much else to worry about. Bodies needed to be buried. Plenty of bodies. A Union Captain, beyond that, no clue. Except the photo was taken at night. She’d been experimenting. New chemicals. She’d read about the light spectrum being studied by a French scientist. She even went to his lecture in Philadelphia and watched his prism bend the colors of light.
Her night camera developed on a film instead of plates. It was supposed to. She’d designed her lens to concentrate on infrared light. She’d even thought of patenting it. A way of photographing war at night.
Then that captain appeared in the picture. He was dead. Quite dead, yet still standing there looking at her and her camera in the middle of the night.. She’d been shooting something else. There was no captain there, as best she recalled.
And the war ended.
Women can’t do photography. The chemicals are too dangerous. The newspaper had insisted. And the crime scenes too gruesome. Too gruesome, compared to battle scenes where soldiers piled bodies in front of themselves because it was the only protection they had from the relentless onslaught of Yankee bullets.
She lugged her bulky contraption over to the cannery. In no time, she had it set up. “I’m back!” she announced. “I’m not some sodden unfortunate passed out on the floor. You won’t scare me off.”
“Get out!” the creepy voice commanded.
Undaunted, Molly asked, “How many of you are in here?”
“Get out!”
“This machine I’ve brought. It can see you.”
“Get out!”
“Now, now. I take portraits. Look across the street at my studio. I can do something like those pictures in the window with you. Care to give it a try?” She pointed where she wanted the entity to sit. It was on the stairs that led up to the boiler. “Now hold still and smile.”
It was another slow day. It looked like it was going to rain. As she gazed out, a woman about Molly’s age stopped and dropped the bag she’d been carrying. Her jaw dropped and s
he just stared blankly for quite some time at Molly’s window. Finally, she came inside the studio and picked up the photograph taken at the cannery. “This picture, how did you come to have it?”
“I took it.”
“You couldn’t have. This is my brother, Thomas. He’s been dead for ten years. He died at the cannery across the street,” she explained. “The boiler exploded.”
“I know,” Molly said. “He told me.”
She couldn’t wait for it to get dark. She lugged the heavy camera back to the cannery. “I’m back. Anyone else want their picture taken?”
Kit Volker lives in San Francisco. This is her first published story. When not working as a high school history teacher, she likes to tour haunted places. She wondered how the fledgling industry of photography would go over with the ghosts of the day. It was new to most of the living, let alone the dead.
Ghost Dancers
by
Sam Kepfield
Over by one of the hovels that housed the reservation’s inhabitants, a group of young men danced in a circle, chanting rhythmically. They wore buckskin leggings, their hair long, and identical shirts made of a light-colored fabric, decorated with beads and other baubles.
“Do they sleep?” Himmel asked.
“They’ve been going at it a couple days now.” Daniel Royer was the agent for Pine Ridge. The Indians called him Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians. Savages or not, Himmel reflected, they’d pegged this greenhorn. Royer looked and acted the title, so it was no wonder the situation had deteriorated this far.
“Whole idea is to keep dancing without stopping. They do it long enough, it starts them hallucinating, they get wild. It’s scary.”
Which is why Royer had wired the Commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington, the telegram womanishly hysterical, begging for assistance. The 7th Cavalry had been dispatched, a fine bit of irony, Himmel observed. The tables were turned this time; the 7th had towed Hotchkiss guns into the reservation, which had temporarily frightened the Redskins into relative quietude for now. Some had fled, others were laying low, but not this bunch.
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