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Okay, so my injuries were real enough. That still didn’t mean...
“We lost ‘em up in the mountains, boss, but we’ll go back and flush out the mangy shifters. Don’t you worry none.”
My gut dropped at the eerily familiar voice coming from outside my window. In my dream a disgusting brown bearded man in old miner’s clothes and greasy red bandana...
“No,” I rasped. “No, please.”
Hobbling quickly over to the window ledge, I looked through the lacy curtains to see the man one flight below. It was! It was Bandana Man in the disgusting flesh facing another man in western clothing.
I blinked hard to clear my vision, then focused harder.
“No!”
The two men shot a look up to my window, and I reflexively jumped back before either spotted me.
Heart racing, I waited a minute before inching back and peering down at them again. The slicker cowboy I noted had a silver star badge pinned to his black leather vest. The town sheriff then, Ray Wilkens.
How did I know this?
“I do worry, Slade,” the sheriff growled, shoving Bandana Man in the barrel chest. “I worry that none of you idiots can do the job you were trained to do to flush out and kill those abominations of nature!”
“We’ll do it, Ray, I swear! We picked up their trail again just this mornin’.”
“Then lost it again.”
“Yeah, but...Won’t be long ‘til we find and kill ‘em. Both of ‘em.”
“Do it, then, and don’t show your face in town again until you have their furry hides hanging from your saddlebags. Got it? Now get going, before I personally eliminate my problem by starting with you lot!”
The sheriff turned and clomped down the wood planked walkway with ringing spurs. Grumbling, Bandana Man made a rude gesture at the man’s broad back, then jumped astride a nearby horse and galloped down the unpaved main street.
That when I saw that the dirt road and surrounding rustic buildings and everyone walking around were just as I had dreamt, like a television episode of theWild, Wild West.
So not dreamt then—remembered.
“No, no, no!”
I stumbled back two steps, then whirled around and spotted a letter sitting on the antique dresser. Quickly I snatched it up to read the handwritten date of May 2, 1888. The paper and ink looked new, fresh.
Quickly I limped across the room, opened the door, then gimped down the narrow hallway, drawing up short at the familiar voice.
“I don’t know,” Michael Bryant said quietly. “I can’t put my finger on it, Alice, but there’s something very strange about that woman. The way she speaks, the things she says. What the hell is quack-a-mollie anyhow? She said that twice.”
With held breath, I edged up and peeked around the corner, blinking hard and refocusing. Yes, there he sat in the living, breathing flesh—Michael Bryant himself. Just as I remembered him from the photo.
And my own personal experience.
It hadn’t been a fevered dream then. Everything yesterday, last night, this morning, all of it had actually happened. It was all real. Somehow, some way I had been impossibly transported a hundred years into the past!
I assessed the small kitchen for verification—the wood stove, the water well handpump attached to the sink. No refrigerator or radio or toaster or electric lights or anything at all modern to confirm this was all just some twisted joke at my expense.
“Quack..?” The forty-something woman in calico dress sitting across the table from Bryant shook her salt and pepper bunned head. “Do you think she’s one of them?”
Bryant gripped the glass tumbler in his hand, then tossed back its amber liquid and shook his head. “Don’t think so. She helped me escape the Arcans yesterday herself, then took the time and effort to heal me when she could’ve just let me die. No, I think it was just bad luck that she was in the area when they found me in shifted form.”
“What was she doing up there, I wonder?”
“Says she was hired to explore some cave. I searched the entire town for the people she spoke of, but no one’s heard of her or them. It’s possible that she made up the entire story. For what reason, I’ve yet to find out. But I plan to.”
