This is an original and flash fiction story by Cliff Hansen. It had been accepted for publication by Wicked Shadow Press to be edited by the amazing Joshua Vise, but unfortunately the publisher ceased all publications. This is Copyright Cliff Hansen (C), 2024.

We Pinkertons have a reputation for being monsters. It’s well earned. But I’ve never killed a man that never deserved it, and when I did, I’ve never let him suffer longer than our lord Christ did on the cross. So when I tell you I was scared frozen, understand that I am neither a man who quakes easily nor one who runs from gore. Gore, in fact, was all that was left of the population of Dry Springs, Montana when my horse bucked me, forcing me to enter the horrid place on foot.

My client, the notorious Dorian O’Shea, is a man of Irish extraction, but despite that handicap has nevertheless found himself into a position of some influence as owner of the majority of the city’s slaughterhouses. Those he doesn’t outright control, he uses men like me to exert a bit of, shall we say, pressure.

One snowy Chicago night, a nobody named Mr. H. Jones eloped with my client’s woman and O’Shea embarrassed himself standing on the street in his night clothes, shouting any number of curses in his silly native tongue as the stolen carriage disappeared down the cobbled city street. As she was with child, he was fine to be done with the woman, but the vagabond lovers had also taken with them a rather large amount of my client’s money. O’Shea had a rather bloody suggestion of how to deal with the problem, but as I’m a romantic at heart and they had a child after all, I convinced him to let them live and I would just require a mere finger for every hundred I was unable to recover. It had taken several years to track them down to Dry Springs, and by the time I arrived, a few fingers were all that was left of Mr. Jones, his wife, and the whole bastard town!

I had fought in the war of brothers, so I have seen things no man aught to, things no man could explain to me. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to Dry Springs was when a scout burst into our camp, bloodied and confused. He said two hundred Union troops were just yonder and gearing up for a sneak attack. The scout’s warning heard, the lad died then and there, some say of his wounds, but I say of fright. We woke everyone up, got dressed and armed in a frantic, and aimed our muskets the direction the scout had fled from. But nothing happened. When we started getting itchy enough for a fight or to go back to sleep, we drew straws. My buddy Haywood got the short straw, so he left us to go see what the enemy’s holdup was. He returned to us perfectly intact and yet a broken man. He never said a word but gestured that we could lower our arms and the battle was over. We went to investigate and found a scene of carnage like nothing even the war had prepared us for. Something horrible had happened there, and we never did find out what. Fearing some wild animal the likes we’d only heard of in legend, we lit large fires around the perimeter of our camp that night, but never did learn what had happened. Those of us who told the story were soon mocked as tellers of tall tales, but I saw what I saw and I was seeing it again in Dry Springs.

All the residents of Dry Springs were dead, their bodies unspeakably mutilated. There were horrific expressions of fear on all those who still had faces. But what worried me the most were the wild animals. Scavenging coyotes, carrion birds, and even a few Indians formed a near-perfect circle around the perimeter of the town. Like my horse, they refused to enter. They knew something unholy had happened there.

It’s hard to get through life in this country without your daily sins, and prayer for me had long become a habit of listing off that which I know was wrong, but knew my lifestyle would demand I do again. As long as you had a repentance between the inevitable knife to your throat and your last breath, the pearly gates would await. Never knowing when or whence that knife would come, I was in the habit of praying quite frequently. But there in Dry Springs, as I fell to my knees attempting to pray, words escaped me. What prayer I could offer in the sight of such an unspeakable tragedy? An entire town painfully extinguished! It was like the end of days was here and just got to Dry Springs a wee bit earlier than the rest.

But the Lord is good and though I failed to find the words he already knew the answer. I heard a whimpering. Getting to my feet, I followed the whimpering to the schoolhouse, and crouched down in a broom closet was a crying girl of maybe five or six years.

“The beast…” she screamed in warning. I told her it was all over. She collapsed instantly, as if she’d been keeping herself awake for days in fear. Now that that she had permission to sleep, she did so for days. While she slept, I burned the remains, not just of the residents of Dry Springs, but the whole unholy town itself. May the fire cleanse.

My coward of a horse was at least loyal and never strayed from far the town’s perimeter and was waiting for me when I arrived, carrying the girl. The beast gave a brisk grunt of approval as I helped the young survivor on its back. Unsure what else to do, we rode east, eventually catching the train back to Chicago.

The girl refused to speak at all during that long journey. Lord knows the terrors she had seen! Occasionally when she was sleeping she would say “beast”, “monster”, or some rhyming sort of gibberish in a language I never understood. She accepted me, and seemed to understand that the world she had come from was gone, and whatever nightmare she had witnessed was over. Like the dead Union soldiers who still haunt my dreams, she would no doubt suffer from this for years, but she was strong enough to somehow hide from whatever beast had killed an entire town, so I had no doubt she would find a way to move on. Maybe someday she would share her story, but I thought that perhaps it was best she just started forgetting.

I had killed too many people and committed far too many sins to be of particular interest to the lady folk, so I had never assumed fatherhood would ever be in the cards for me. I was surprised when I saw myself watching this sprite of a girl sleeping with her head safely on my lap. I knew my days of violence and sin were behind me and I would do anything I could to protect her. I would burn down the world itself if it meant that this child would never know another moment of pain or suffering. I treated her to every sweet and luxury I could on our long journey, and though she never spoke, she would occasionally muster a brave smile.

When we finally got to Chicago, I wanted to leave her in our hotel. A dangerous man like Dorian O’Shea is not one to have unpredictable elements such as a child around, especially one who had endured whatever nightmare she just had. But the girl refused to stay alone. She kept repeating “the beast!” and clung to my side. I broke down and took her with me, figuring if she refused to leave me, the girl may at least serve as some proof that the family was extinguished.

O’Shea listened carefully as I told my story. He would occasionally gasp in astonishment in some Irish phrase I never understood. But I was solid and never exaggerated. He believed my story, incredible as it was. O’Shea paid me my sum, even giving extra for the hazards of the trip. Then he asked what I would do with the girl. I told I’d decided to adopt her, maybe find a homestead and do some farming. She pulled away from me angrily when I said that.

“No! I want to stay with you, daddy!”

“That’s what I’m saying,” I said, “I’ll take you somewhere safe and protect you.”

“Not you!” She said, eyes flashing, “Daddy O’Shea! I want to stay with Daddy O’Shea!”

“What the hell are you talking about, child?” Demanded the Irishman.

“You are my real daddy, not the man that took me! And I heard you call out to me, even though I was still in my mommy’s belly, you called out to me in the old language. You said curses, and I heard those curses and I learned them. You said a beast should kill them all and it did! I had to wait till I was born a few years more till I grew up to be a big girl, strong enough, but I became the beast, I killed them all! Just like you wanted me to, daddy.”

I pulled away from the girl looking at her in horror, while I saw a smile form on O’Shea’s massive face. He looked at the girl with confidence, “Well now, I believe you. And I accept you as my daughter. We have much to discuss about the family business.” O’Shea turned to me and gave me a firm and dismissive handshake, “thank you for returning my daughter to me. I will have no further need of your services.”

And so I left. I got as far away as I could. I try to forget, but still wake in a sweat. Every once in a while, I’ll find myself in some Mexican bar and there will be a man with an unusually ashen and disturbed face, attempting to drink away his terror. He’ll tell me stories of something ghastly he’s seen. I know the Beast of Dry Springs is still alive and well, and I was the one who unleashed her.

The end.

The Beast of Dry Springs by Cliff Hansen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0