Mercer's Ghost by Milo James Fowler

I am haunted. I tell you the truth.

Like so many others before me, I found as I approached my seventeenth birthday an overwhelming desire to test my mettle, to become my own man, and so I was led by insatiable curiosity to the western frontier to see for myself that golden land of opportunity and adventure where men were made overnight, either forged in the fires of adversity or blessed by Providence with wealth beyond measure in veins of gold or winning streaks at cards. This was my aim: to prove to my father that I was more than the son of a newspaper man. There would be no ink found beneath my fingernails but rather the dirt of my own land and hard calluses from the pickax I’d wield to claim my fortune from God’s green earth.

But alas, as with all good intentions and best-laid plans, Hell more often than not is the unforeseen destination, and so one night in the sleeping town of Warner Springs, I found myself penniless with no bed, no claim, and no plans for the future other than keeping out from underfoot. The local sheriff was a hard man who did not take kindly to vagrants sitting on the stoops in front of hotels or saloons or whorehouses, unable to afford the pleasantries that teemed within their walls.

To put it plainly, I had been swindled.

As a young man of schooling from the great city of Boston, Massachusetts, I should have known better; but at first I saw this frontier through rose-colored spectacles, as the saying goes. The man who promised me a fifth share of a certain claim—a “sure thing” in his words, a site that was releasing gold nuggets “like a bitch in heat”—took my money and vanished without a trace, and there was nothing the sheriff could do about it, reticent as he already was to come to my aid. As soon as I’d opened my mouth to speak, he heard the roots of my accent, and a look of utter disdain passed through his eyes. I have never experienced such prejudice in all my life.

Abandoned by luck, I sat on the stoop of the third hotel I’d visited that night, as the sheriff made his rounds and threatened me with no more than a withering stare—but it was enough to get me moving along the muddy streets and driving rain, my frock coat tugged tightly to shield both my chest and throat from the biting wind.

Warner Springs was not the land brimming with golden opportunity I had hoped for; rather it was no more than an uncouth frontier town that would forever leave a bad taste in my mouth. Hopes dashed by one foolish mistake—trusting a man I had no right to trust with a fortune I had no right to demand from my father, I vowed to survive the night if nothing else.

And even if I had been able to afford the train fare back to Boston, how could I have faced my father again?

“I will make a name for myself,” I had told him with my chin raised high and haughty. “You will see. I shall return richer after a month than you could ever hope to be by the time you fall upon your deathbed.”

The memory itself left a strong bitterness in my mouth.

The doors behind me crashed open as a man tumbled outside head over heels. I started to my feet, stepping out of the way as another man charged outside of his own volition, right hand hovering over the holstered six-gun at his hip.

“Mercer, you no good son-of-a-bitch!” this man roared, planting his feet on the boardwalk where I’d been sitting just a moment ago. “That’s the last time you cheat me out of a fair hand!”

A game of cards gone awry, by all appearances. I noticed there was no one else watching; the townsfolk seemed to have dissolved into the dark as soon as the ruckus started. Deciding it was in my best interest to do the same, I moved out of range of the hotel’s exterior lanterns.

The man in the muddy street rose to his feet and faced both the hotel and the angry fellow on its stoop. “You want to do something about it, Olson?”

“Damn straight I do!” Olson’s hovering fingers twitched with anticipation. “I’ll give you the count of three—”

“That doesn’t seem fair to me, you counting it off.” The man in the street backed off a step, then two, three, until he was halfway to the deserted mercantile shop.

“I sure as hell ain’t alright with you doing the counting, Mercer.”

“He’ll count for us then,” the man named Mercer said, pointing straight at me.

My heart jumped up into my throat at that, and I felt a bit dizzy all of a sudden. How had he spotted me there in the dark?

“I don’t see nobody.” Olson scowled. “You better not be trying anything, Mercer. I’ll gun you down right where you stand.”

“You’ll count it off, won’t you, son?” The man Mercer looked right at me like it was as bright as day out there.

“Y-yessir,” I managed.

Olson cursed, boots shuffling at the sound of my voice. “Fine. Count it off. Do it now!”

“One.” My voice came nearly inaudible. Mercer swept his mud-splattered coat aside to bare his holstered shooter. “Two.” Olson’s fingers kept twitching; his jaw muscle did the same, glowing in the lantern light off the hotel porch. Mercer just stared at him, his eyes pinpricks of light in the darkness. I swallowed the strong urge to flee burning inside me. “Three.”

Olson cleared leather first like the gunslingers did in all the dime novels I’d ever read, and he brought over his left hand to palm back the hammer with every shell he fired, pumping lead into Mercer’s chest like it was a target at a shooting gallery. The man Mercer didn’t stand a chance; Olson was that fast.

But Mercer remained on his two feet. Sure, he fell back a step or two as the bullets punctured him and the blood spurted outward like little gushers, but he didn’t fall.

“What the—?” Olson couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “I put all six slugs into him!” Was he talking to me? Well, I couldn’t believe it either.

Mercer coughed, spitting blood into the mud at his side. He straightened his shoulders and cracked his neck, loosening up. “You already done?”

Olson cursed, fumbling with the shells in his gun belt, slipping them into the open cylinder of his revolver and glancing up at Mercer in a frenzy.

“Feel free to have at it.” Mercer laughed, extending his arms as if to an invisible crowd. “I’ll be here all night!”

“Ain’t right, ain’t natural,” Olson murmured, sweating now, his gun reloaded.

“You count it off again, son.” Mercer was looking at me.

“Go to Hell!” Olson fired another six rounds into Mercer, who just threw back his head and laughed. Olson started crying then, calling on the name of the Lord, beseeching all of Heaven to intervene. “Why won’t you die?” Olson was shaking. His fingers wouldn’t cooperate, and his empty six-gun dropped to the boardwalk with a clatter. “What kind of devilry is this?”

Mercer took a step toward him, then another, the lantern light glowing against the wet crimson of his shirt, all twelve of the bullet holes plain to see.

“Stay back!” Olson cried out, retreating, shaking his head like he was seeing something that shouldn’t even exist.

I was seeing the same thing, and I had to remind myself to breathe.

“Go ahead and take what I owe you in blood, Olson. This fleshbag has plenty more to give,” Mercer said with a grim smile. “Load up that shooter and let’s have at it. Hot lead hurts so good!”

“You should be dead,” Olson started repeating like a fervent prayer.

Mercer nodded. “You have no idea.” He slapped at his blood-drenched chest. “C’mon now, the fun’s just getting started!”

“Stay back. Don’t you come any closer.” Olson stumbled into the hotel and slammed the door behind him, bolting it shut.

Mercer laughed again, mirthlessly. Then he looked at me. “Sticking around, son?”

I had no words for him. My legs wouldn’t move; that was the only reason I remained rooted to the ground.

“Pick it up.” He gestured to Olson’s discarded six-gun. “You might need one of those.”

“Are you…all right?” I couldn’t believe he was able to talk, let alone stand upright.

He winced, fingering one of the holes in his chest, then another. “This bag of bones won’t last much longer, and that’s a fact. I’ll have to find me another one.” Half a smile tugged at one side of his unshaven face. “But first, maybe we’ll pay a visit to that swindler who took you for all you’re worth.”

“How do you—?”

“I see things.”

Well, that much was true. He’d seen me clearly in the dark. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin to look for him.”

Mercer’s legs gave out without warning then, and he collapsed to the mud with a groan. Despite my horror, I rushed to his side.

“Guess I was a little too optimistic.” He grimaced and reached out for me, gripping my forearm. “You take my gun belt, and you meet me at the undertaker’s. We’ll ride out tonight.”

I had no response to that.

“You hear me, son? You want that money of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Then you do as I say, and you don’t ask no questions. Meet me at the coffin shop.”

“But how—?”

“I said no questions.” He unbuckled the belt and whipped it off with a splatter of mud and blood. “Here. Now go.”

I just stood there like a lost fool. “You want me to go for the doctor?”

“No good. Go!”

I took off running down the street, and for all intents and purposes I’m sure it would have appeared to the sheriff that I was up to no good, leaving a man dying in the mud behind me while I carried off his weapon. But what else could I have done? I’d seen something that night that defied all logical explanation, and the man had said to meet him at the undertaker’s. So I did. That much of it I could do.

The heavy rain pelted my face, shuddering my eyelids, and in the darkness lit only by intermittent splashes of lantern light, I stumbled and nearly fell. Lightning brightened the sky, and a few seconds later thunder shook the heavens. I felt God watching me, and I could tell He was displeased.

My mucked-up boots thumped onto the plank sidewalk at the coffin shop, and I tried the handle. Locked. There were three empty pine boxes set up inside the front window, and I knew one of them would soon be holding Mercer’s body.

Meet him there? Twelve bullets in him, and he’d still been able to stand—even if just for a little while. I’d never seen anything like it in all my life. But then again, I hadn’t been in the West for very long.

A crash came from inside the shop, followed by footsteps thudding unsteadily toward the door. The bolt slid back, and I found myself face to face with a dead body.

“You made it,” the corpse rasped, grinning at me in another flash of lightning. An emaciated hand reached out for the gun belt I carried, and I was too frozen with fear to offer resistance. “I’ll take that. You got a horse?”

“Who-who are—?”

“The name’s Mercer, son. Now pull yourself together. Haven’t you ever seen a dead man before?”

In all honesty, I hadn’t. My grandfather’s funeral service had been closed-casket. Regardless, I’d never seen nor heard of any dead person walking or talking before, and so I was understandably at quite a loss for words.

“That son-of-a-bitch who took all your money, he lit out north this afternoon. I’m willing to bet he’s headed for Dry Gulch to try the same thieving shtick on a new crop up that way. We leave now, we’ve got a chance at catching him.” The corpse chuckled. “Only fools would ride in weather like this.”

“I-I don’t understand. You—” I glanced back down the street to where Mercer’s body remained, a formless shape abandoned in the dark. “Unless I’m mistaken—” I broke off, cringing as the corpse stepped toward me in a crisp new suit.

“We could waste time jawing about what I am and what I am not, or we can go after your money. What’ll it be?”

I blinked in a sudden gust of rain-driven wind. “Why are you so keen on helping me, Mister?”

Mercer buckled the gun belt around his narrow hips and cinched it tight. “You’ve got a chance here to set things straight in your life, son.” With that, he pushed his way past me and trudged across the street to the livery stables. I followed, drenched and chilled and knowing it would be getting a whole lot colder and wetter before the night was through.

Mercer untied his mount and motioned for me to take the one next to it. Fortunately, I knew how to ride; that wasn’t the issue.

“Isn’t this stealing?”

“Got a better idea?”

I did not; so I mounted up and steered the horse out into the rain behind Mercer, and kicking our steeds into a gallop, we left Warner Springs without so much as a single soul to bid us farewell. For this I was grateful, as I had read enough about the western frontier to know that horse-thieving was a capital offense, worthy of the gallows.

But did such laws apply to me anymore? I was riding with a man who had defied the laws of nature, having died only to return in a new body—albeit the corpse of an old man. Mercer’s ghost had not been carried to Heaven nor Hell after his last breath. He was still here on the earth, wearing a different “fleshbag” as he called it. I had to accept matters as they stood; but I could not begin to comprehend them.

“Have you made some kind of deal with the devil?”

Mercer chuckled drily, half-turning in the saddle to wink back at me. “I’m sure he thought so, once upon a time. But I don’t work for that imp anymore. Only for myself.”

“What’s in this for you?” I had to shout to make my voice heard over the thunder from above and the sloshing hooves of our mounts beneath us. “Why are you helping me?”

“I was like you once, son. The whole world was mine. But I made a bad choice, one I couldn’t ever come back from.” He paused. “You’re not there yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can go home again. I can’t. Not ever.”

He kicked his mount hard, digging his boot heels into the horse’s flanks, and I did my best to keep up. We rode all through the night with no respite in the downpour. I had never been so wet and cold in all my life, gritting my teeth together just to keep them from chattering.

But the ride afforded me plenty of time to ponder on this strange soul who led me along the trail, this man who was a man and who was not. Had he the ability to leave his body at will and assume the form of another? Or could he only animate the dead with his ghost? The whole idea shivered me on top of the shivers already quaking my frame from head to toe.

“That man Olson,” I said at length. “Did you cheat him?”

“What do you care?”

“You didn’t put up much of a fight for yourself.” It had seemed as though Mercer wanted Olson to gun him down.

“I’m no killer.” He glanced back at me. “You think we’re going after this swindler to kill him, is that it?”

I swallowed. “Aren’t we?”

“No, son. That’s the sort of thing you don’t come back from. We’re reclaiming your money, and that’s all.”

“And if he’s not keen on giving it back?”

Mercer chuckled. “He will be.”

(continued on page 2)


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