Long Black Veil Excerpt, Mark A. Zeiger

Long Black Veil

An excerpt from the forthcoming short story collection, Shy Ghosts Dancing: Dark Tales from Southeast Alaska by Mark Zeiger

On nights like this, when storms rage in from the ocean, she visits her lover.

When the glass drops and the hour grows late, she steals from her marriage bed, bundles herself in her dark woolen cloak, secrets her identity in a long black veil, and walks the harbor road to the cemetery. There she finds the place they laid her lover to rest.

Unseen, she settles, resting against the massive stone. She mourns his passing in silence, longing for the feel of his body next to hers, the warmth of his breath in her hair, the sweetness of stolen hours.

On many of these visits she watches, with an amazing detachment, other activities in the graveyard.

Creatures beyond imagining come down from the forested mountains, into the cemetery. They take advantage of the same covering storms that allow her to visit her lover’s grave. The howling wind and the hiss of driving rain mask from human ears the wild laughter, cries and scrabbling of a hideous mob of beings.

Vaguely human in shape and deportment, they differ as markedly from mankind as they do from each other. She has roused herself from her mourning to observe them closely. Some have long beaks and black, shining eyes, like monstrous cousins of the ravens that haunt the region. Others sport fangs of startling length and sharpness, shining from wide, flat, noseless faces. Some are hirsute, others obscenely naked, fishy white in the light of the riding moon that peeps from scudding clouds. Some individuals she can never quite see, her whole attention being arrested by their large eyes that seem windows of pure evil. Others, she believes, have no eyes at all, or squint like moles. They seem dressed, such as they are, in moldering casts-off, mixtures of clothing styles and eras as astonishing as the variety in their physical appearance.

Their errand among the dead is hideous. Descending upon this or that grave, they attack the earth, upending headstones, cracking crypts, digging with their claws until the soil is piled high all around. Once they have unearthed their victim, they give themselves over to orgiastic feasting. Snapping with tooth and beak, they tear the remains of the dead asunder, devouring the decaying flesh and bones.

They are ghouls, feeding on the unfortunate dead.

So great is her love for the man she mourns that these activities cannot drive her away. For their part, the creatures seem to have but one singular mission among humans. She has watched them on many nights, allowing them to pass quite near her, but they never molest her. She feels very little fear of them, or of anything. She carries, in the folds of her voluminous cloak, her lover’s Winchester rifle. She used this same weapon the previous spring, when a brown bear interrupted an afternoon’s lovemaking in her lover’s cabin on Gold Creek.

She delighted to break away from her lover’s embrace when their activity reached a certain heat. She would rush outside and bathe in the snow, then return taut and tingling to bed. The bear, drawn to the food cache near the cabin, surprised her as she stepped out the front door, stripped to the waist and glowing. It reared and lunged, while she calmly reached through the doorway for the rifle. She cocked it, swung it to her bare shoulder and fired in the breadth of an instant, dropping the beast at her feet with a single round. Afterward, the lovers often frolicked on the cabin floor, wrapped in the bear’s capacious pelt. The image of her, brazenly naked above her long skirt, high-piled hair haloed in fly-aways from their amorous tussling, drawing a quick bead on the huge creature, stayed with her lover forever after.

Ownership of that particular rifle could encourage uncomfortable questions. It is hard to guess where she keeps it in her house, away from chance discovery by her husband.

Incredibly, the ghouls’ strange activities go undetected by the townspeople. Their revelry uproots and destroys graves. Yet, once their vile appetites are sated, the beasts somehow manage to return the scene of their crime to a state so closely resembling its original that none would know the dead have been so disturbed.

And what of that, she must wonder? After one dies, what does the disposal of the body really matter? Do the dead care? She thinks not.

She does become curious, eventually. She notes that these strange beings go directly to specific graves in the cemetery. They commit their desecrations against a single resident each night. She begins to wait until the ghouls have set things to right and raced cackling and screeching back into the mountains. She then draws near the defiled grave to learn the victim’s identity.

She begins to see a pattern.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Thank you for reading this excerpt! To read the rest of this story, and others like it by Mark A. Zeiger, order Shy Ghosts Dancing: Dark Tales from Southeast Alaska.

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