The people of Beowawe said the man had railroad smoke in his veins. For forty years, he’d stood beside the tracks, swinging his lantern through the Nevada dust to guide the locomotives westward.

He was a flagman, proud and patient, until the day the coupling broke and sent a freight car rolling down the line. The accident left his legs mangled, twisted things that clattered when he walked. He retired after that, but retirement never quite took.

He lingered around the yard like a ghost that had forgotten how to fade. You’d see him out there at dusk, poking at the gravel with his cane, whistling tunelessly, eyes fixed on the horizon as if expecting something to come crawling out of it. Nights were for stories and the glow of the pot-bellied stove, where men swapped lies about coyotes and train robbers while the wind rasped against the windows.

Then the fires began.

It wasn’t unusual for Beowawe to catch flame in the cold season. Desert air and woodstoves made for easy kindling.

Most of the time, the volunteers doused the blazes before they took hold. But that winter, it was as though the fire had learned patience. It crept closer to the rail yard, smoldering in sheds, leaping to stacks of lumber, always hungry.

The nightwatchman, Harlan Jessup, a quiet man with a large family, was found burned black near the switching station. They said he’d gone in to save a stray cat that lived in the tool shed.

Brady was the first to find him. He’d been called from his bed by the alarm, the sky above the yard bruised red and orange, smoke rolling like surf over the rooftops. When the fire crew dragged Jessup’s body out, something caught Brady’s eye: a figure limping away from the tracks, the dull gleam of a metal brace on his leg catching the light.

The flagman.

Brady’s stomach turned cold. He knew the man’s gait, the slow rocking motion of it, the way he planted his cane before each step as if measuring the earth. But there was something wrong now, something too steady about the limp, too deliberate, as though being guided by an invisible rhythm only he could hear.

Brady followed.

The man’s house stood at the edge of town, half-buried in tumbleweed and cinder. When Brady forced the door, he found the crippled flagman crouched by an oil drum, whispering to something inside. The air shimmered around him, and for a heartbeat Brady thought he saw movement, like smoke swirling against the inside of the drum, taking shape, pressing outward.

“What the hell are you doing?” Brady demanded.

The man froze, his eyes wide and glassy. “You shouldn’t be here, Brady,” he said softly. “They’ll see you too.”

“Who’s they?”

The man smiled, a cracked, weary smile. “The ones behind the lights. Been calling me ever since the accident. Said they’d show me the truth beneath the rails.”

Brady’s gaze dropped to the floorboards. The house vibrated faintly, though no train passed this late. Beneath the floor, something pulsed—slow and deep, like a buried heart.

“You killed Jessup,” Brady said. “You set the fires.”

The flagman’s expression twisted. “Not me. I only opened the way. The fire needs doors, that’s all.” He looked past Brady then, eyes unfocused. “They ride the lines, you see. The rails don’t end in Reno or Salt Lake. They go down. Down where time don’t run straight.”

Brady lunged, tackling the frail body to the ground. It was like wrestling a bundle of sticks.

The man howled, thrashing, but Brady’s anger was stronger. He bound him with a length of cord, looped a noose over the beam, and forced him onto a chair.

“You know the nightwatchman had a family? A wife and five children,” Brady said.

“Yeah,” the old man croaked, “but how’s I ‘spose to know he’d try and be a hero? That ain’t his job.”

“And setting fires isn’t your job.”

The man wheezed a laugh. “You think this’ll stop it? Go ahead. Make your choice, too.”

Brady struck a match and touched it to the curtains. Flames licked up the fabric like eager tongues. “No,” he said. “You’ll make a choice. Burn or jump.”

He turned and left the house, shutting the door behind him.

As he stepped into the cold, the sound came, not a scream, but a long, metallic shriek, like a whistle echoing from deep underground. The ground trembled, and from the cracks in the earth came a faint orange glow.

The rails began to hum.

From a distance, a light appeared, a headlamp, round and blinding, gliding silently along the tracks toward Beowawe. Yet no engine followed, only the light itself, suspended in the smoke. The air smelled of hot iron and ash.

Brady backed away, heart hammering, as the light passed through him. For an instant, he saw the flagman’s face reflected in its glow, eyes hollow, mouth open in awe. Behind him, vast shapes moved in the brightness, long and jointed, coiling like serpents through an impossible sky.

Then the light vanished. The rails were still. The night was quiet again.

By morning, there was nothing left of the flagman’s house, just a black square in the dirt, and the faint impression of two sets of tracks that led nowhere at all.

And sometimes, when the trains pass through Beowawe, the engineers swear they see a crippled man by the signal post, swinging his lantern toward the dark, as if guiding something in that no living man ought to welcome.

Every woman has a bit of Marilyn in her. You jus’ have to figure out if it’s Monroe or Manson.

After screaming for help and scratching at the box, buried far beneath the dirt, for hours, I gave up. I gave up my fear of the ungodly darkness, of suffocation, of death and let it come upon me in as natural a way as possible.

That was two years ago. This morning I heard the heavy machinery above my desiccating body and knew they were finally going to disinter me.

The nearer the hand shovels came, the more I could hear them talking between each other. There was fear and trepidation in their voices.

As felt my casket lifted from the ground, I wondered, “Why are they so scared, after all, I’m the one that was buried alive.”

The thicker my glasses get due to age, the better I can see through other people’s B.S.

The two elegant figures trotted up the ramp like the other beasts, two-by-two. But Noah turned them away telling them, “The time for magic had ended on Earth.”

“But our rhinoceroses cousins are inside.”

“Yes, but their horns, unlike yours, are not magical.”

So the two Unicorn headed north and stood on a nearby mountain as it began to rain. Soon the water was over their hocks and they believed that they had breathed their last.

But God saw their plight and took mercy on them. He whispered, “Use your magic one last time to become something that will be able to withstand the ocean’s depth.”

“We’ll become fish,” one said to the other.

“Better yet, let us change ourselves into whales.”

“Can we keep our horns?”

“Yes, we can – we’re magic.”

Thus the Unicorn disappeared and became the Narwhal, the unicorn of the sea. Narwhal are known to dive to a mile in depth and the more elder the whale, the whiter they become.

latent finger prints
beaten and battered heart
bruised up but not broken

“So, shall we do this thing,” John said.

“If you think it’ll make us rich,” James answered.

James caught up his horse and rode out of New Helvetia, heading to the water-driven sawmill he had built in nearby Coloma on the south fork of the American River. The idea was to salt the river with a few nuggets of gold John had brought from Europe in 1834, before embarking westward towards California.

The pair wanted to create a new town and believed this was the perfect way to get settlers to cross the wide open plains, the Rocky Mountains, Nevada’s scorching deserts and finally Sutter’s fertile land holdings. And they were right, as hundreds of thousand left their Eastern homes at the news and struck out to get rich.

Unfortunately, Sutter nor Marshall had any idea that the land was rich in gold and that this gold would destroy their dreams. Eventually, New Helvetia and Sutter’s Fort would be replaced by the city of Sacramento.

A home in the process of being built was severely vandalized recently, having nearly every bit of copper pulled from its walls. This incident is the catalyst for this horror story…

Tanner quietly walked up the freshly asphalted street in southeast Reno, and into the cluster of houses under construction. He found one without the drywall in place and knew it would be easy pickings.

Within an hour he had pulled the majority of the copper wiring and tubing from the wall spaces and the three sink areas. Next he located the hatch that was the opening to the crawl space and he slipped under the house.

He worked quietly and quickly filling up the last duffel bag he’d brought with him. He was yanking out what he believed to be the last piece of piping when he heard what he thought was footsteps on the unfinished flooring above him.

Tanner crawled over and pulled the hatch cover into place and then waited as he heard more footsteps crossing back and forth above him. He listen intently as the footfalls faded and were replaced by muffled voices.

Soon even the muffled voices faded away. Not wanting to take any chance of being discovered, Tanner remained in place for another hour.

Certain that the coast was clear, he finally dragged the bag of ill-gotten goods over to the hatch and raised the wooden square out of its resting place. As quietly as possible, he lifted the bag up from under the house and slipped the hatch back in place.

He lift it to his shoulder and raced to retrieve the other two, when he was met with a harsh and gravelly voice, “Going somewhere?”

Tanner froze in place and slowly turned. He tried to scream as the dog-like figure, with red-glowing eyes and white glistening fangs stood up, crossing the room in two strides and ripped his throat out.

Brady rode the Mustang along the gravel flats of Beowawe, north of the railway, when the wind shifted. It carried a strange, fetid scent, not of sage or dust, but of something acrid and burning.

The horse snorted, ears flat, and nearly threw him when the odor thickened. He pulled back on the reins and steadied the animal, patting its neck, his eyes narrowing toward the source of the smoke that curled above the flats like a lazy serpent.

He knew this place. The tallow works, a grim little shack and furnace where the non-edible parts of livestock, and sometimes wild beasts, were rendered down for soap, grease, and leather. The smell was never pleasant, but this was something else, wrong.

As he drew nearer, Brady saw a figure outside the shack: the owner’s boy, no more than twelve. The lad moved strangely, pacing back and forth from the furnace to the rutted drive, turning sharply at invisible markers, his steps oddly measured, like a man counting time to a rhythm only he could hear. He did not seem to notice the burning stench, nor the smoke rising in sluggish spirals behind him.

Brady dismounted, loosening the loop that held his Colt. The Mustang stamped nervously and refused to come closer.

“Hey there, boy,” Brady called.

The child’s head snapped up as if yanked by unseen strings. His eyes were too wide, pupils small and fixed. There was something off about his grin, not just in its sharpness, but in the way it trembled, as if pulled tight by some deeper, quivering force.

“Where’s your folks?” Brady asked, taking a few cautious steps forward.

The boy’s lips parted. “Cooking.”

“In the house?”

“No,” the boy said, and his grin widened until it threatened to split his cheeks. “In the pot.”

He nodded toward the shack.

Brady saw the revolver then, a Texas .44 tucked in the boy’s waistband, too large for his thin frame. The child’s hand twitched toward it, but Brady was faster.

The Colt cracked once, echoing across the flats. The boy’s head jerked backward, his body crumpling to the dust like a puppet with its strings cut.

The world went terribly still.

Even the wind seemed to die. Only the whisper of the furnace remained a low, rhythmic bubbling, as though something vast and patient stirred within.

Brady approached the shack. The stench hit him like a physical blow, a choking blend of scorched hair, bile, and fat. He gagged, pressing a handkerchief to his mouth as he looked into the vat.

At first, he saw only the usual horror, flesh, bone, something unrecognizable in a slurry of grease and lye. But then, through the haze of smoke, shapes began to move beneath the surface.

A hand rose, or something like one, bloated, translucent, and pulsing as if with a heartbeat of its own. The viscous fluid rippled, heaving like a creature’s chest.

Brady stumbled back, gun raised, but the liquid was already shifting, forming faces that flickered in and out of coherence. The man and woman he’d known, the owners of the works, appeared for an instant, eyes wide, mouths open in soundless screams. Then they melted away, replaced by something worse: a single visage, stretched thin, eyes merging into one great, lidless orb that gazed directly at him.

The shack’s timbers groaned as the fire roared higher. The very walls seemed to breathe.

Brady’s instincts screamed at him to run, but some deeper compulsion rooted him in place. He could feel it, a hum beneath the earth, like the pulse of buried machinery. A whisper crawled through his skull, faint but unmistakable, not in words but in intention.

Feed the fire. Complete the rendering.

He turned toward the boy’s corpse, lying half in the dust, half in the creeping shadow of the shack. His fingers moved without his will, holstering his Colt, grabbing the limp form by its ankles. The skin was already cooling, stiffening, but Brady dragged it toward the vat all the same. The thing inside seemed to quiver with anticipation.

When the boy’s body hit the surface, the bubbling surged. A hissing sound filled the air, not steam, but laughter.

Wet, gurgling laughter that slithered into Brady’s mind and filled it with lightless corridors, fleshy walls, and impossible geometries. He saw things vast and formless writhing beneath the flats, their tendrils reaching through the soil, feeding on death, on fat, on the very essence of what the tallow fire rendered down.

He stoked the flames, though he did not remember fetching the wood. He stayed long into the night, until the stars themselves seemed to bend and twist above him, their patterns no longer those of familiar constellations but of alien, squirming forms that mirrored the shapes in the vat.

When dawn finally broke, Brady found himself standing outside the shack. The furnace was cold. The pot was empty. The smoke had vanished. Only the faint residue of grease on his hands told him it had been real.

The Mustang was gone.

In the distance, from beneath the gravel flats, came a sound, faint and deep, like a great, slow heartbeat.

Brady turned toward Beowawe, walking as if in a trance. He did not look back, though he knew that behind him, in the ruins of the shack, something new was forming in the pot, something that seemed almost human.

He would return the following day to check on the family’s rendering.

Don’t be surprised to see me standing with my left foot off the ground at midnight as I plan to start the New Year out on the right foot. Here’s to 2020 and thank you 2019.