A Resurrection of Starlings

By Gretchen Rix

For your consideration: A horror novel set in the Piney Woods of East Texas near the town of Palestine where a train has mysteriously stalled. It’s 1885. The snow has finally stopped and the train’s twelve passengers have just begun to realize they’re in deep trouble. There’s something out there and it’s calling up at them to be let in. The Buffalo Soldier on board might not be enough to save them, and the legendarily brutal mass murderer he guards is no one’s hero. But it’s not a single hero that’s required. It’s all of them. A Resurrection of Starlings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gretchen Rix
• Release date: Dec 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463933787

Gretchen Rix

Gretchen Rix--I write Texas cozy mysteries in the Boo Done It series set in Lockhart, the barbecue capital of Texas. Tag line: Where there's more than indigestion brewing.I've worked as a bookstore clerk, a newspaper writer, and a book reviewer. I've had jobs as a professional typist, a truck dispatcher and a health insurance claims processor. I learned a lot from these jobs. But my true inspiration for these mysteries was our family's stubborn, huge, skittish and always-hungry dog Boo Radley. This dog could drag anybody into an adventure.My sister and I created and ran an international ghost story writing contest. It lasted four years. Now I no longer ever desire to be a magazine editor. I go to science fiction conventions. I'm a member of RWA. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I take the motto "Keep Austin Weird" seriously even though I live 35 miles away."Talking to The Dead Guys" is the first in a series of murder mysteries about a dog, strong women, and small-town living (or is it dying?). Check out all my books at http://rixcafetexican.com and my blog at http://gretchenrix.com.

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Table Of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Other Books by this Author

A Resurrection of Starlings

Copyright 2021 by Gretchen Rix. All rights reserved.

Published by Rix Café Texican

Cover and formatting by Streetlight Graphics

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this writer.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

1885 Palestine, Texas

Chapter One

V

icious gray-tipped white clouds brooded

over the pink and turquoise sky like a painter’s mold-mottled drop cloth, muting the sunrise blaze to bearable, if you squinted hard. The air was full of electricity. On a steam train ominously stalled at the brink of the dark East Texas piney forest, when instead it should have been chugging its way to Dallas, sat one passenger, her hair all frizzed out with the static. Staring out with unseeing eyes. It had snowed hard, as if thrown down from the sky in clumps by a malevolent god, and it seemed she’d been sitting there forever, growing ever colder by the minute. Not that the cold should have bothered her.

She had.

Been there forever.

~

Marjorie flinched from the window at the great bloody splat of the snowball hurled out of the near dawn, and cried out. It had sounded like a rifle shot. A sharp crack followed by a boom. Alarmed, breathing hard, she gave the inside of the glass a quick, unbelieving tap with her fingers and lost all breath entirely. She was not dreaming then. But it hadn’t been a bullet.

This time.

She bit her lips. Tasted the salty tinge of her own blood, but it couldn’t distract her from the other. Pain shot down her hand like an ice fissure splitting a frozen pond. Blood sluiced from the smashed snowball to smear what she had been so trite as to consider her view. My God, how her hand throbbed. She cradled it, kept watching for another snowball, and pushed herself off the seat. She stood up gingerly, mindful of her knee. She turned all around. Her mouth opened in shock. The train car was empty but for her. She wished she’d stayed in Austin where she belonged. Never taken this doomed trip.

She blinked, blinked repeatedly to change the facts, and looked back and forth from the bloody window to the empty passenger car. That was blood. She did know blood when she saw it. Forty years of life had seen to that. Now frozen into delicate red crystal snowflakes, blood caked her view from top to bottom, lending the scene outside a tint reminiscent of beefsteak served rare. Almost against her will, Marjorie eased back into the seat and raised a cold-stiffened arthritic hand to trace the pattern. Then at last her brain figured out what her body already knew—the train trip from hell hadn’t progressed a single yard in all this time. Not since—

Dead in the water.

Marjorie stifled an inappropriate snort, then shook her head against the picture in her mind and the tainted smell in her nose.

A train canted off its tracks sliding in fits and starts slowly into a stagnant pond. The stench of rotted vegetation clogging her senses. Panic. Fear. Resignation.

She sat up straight. The train was stopped. That was all.

Unfortunately, she felt this required some response on her part. She wiped the train window with one hand and it came away wet. But no longer did her always unstable right hand drunkenly jitter at its task. It merely quivered like its normal traitorous self. Of course, the blood stayed where it was, frozen on the outside of the train window, but Marjorie licked her fingertips to be sure.

Inside, it was so quiet Marjorie heard her racing heart. Seat by seat, row by row deserted, the other passengers for some reason gone, the car empty of the sound of their intrusive voices for the first time. This was not the pleasure Marjorie had thought it would be. More than abandoned, the car looked dilapidated, like a frowzy never-used ballgown stored too long in a closet. She frowned, bit at her dry lips hard enough that they started bleeding again, listened to her chemistry. She missed them. Those other people.

Had everyone gone outside to stretch their legs, leaving her behind? Not likely. Not in this snow. Anyone out after this snowfall risked a broken leg just ambulating its depth. Besides, there were no footprints. She checked. The sun had risen farther up the horizon. The ground was covered in several feet of snow. Her cracked lips displayed annoyance even as she fought to hide such feelings, which soon turned to worry. There was no common-sense reason that she be alone in this train car.

Unless,

Dead in the water.

Crack!

A rock aimed at her head smashed into the glass. Before she knew what she was doing, Marjorie had again scooted off the bench seat and out into the central aisle. She heard nothing but the blood roaring in her ears, and thought nothing at all. It was like a dream, but surely those traitorous hands of hers that hadn’t worked properly while she peered through the window would certainly have obeyed her in a dream.

She grew suddenly hot. Flushed with what? That sense of doom that plagued her every waking moment? Her dreams did not usually come with physically unpleasant side effects. Not even the nightmares. Marjorie absently tracked a drop of sweat making its way down her cheek to the side of her mouth. When the haze across her eyes and in her head finally cleared, Marjorie knew the other shoe had dropped. This was no dream. This was real.

Someone down there in the snow beside the stalled train had thrown that snowball at her. A schoolboy prank that was maliciously tricked out with a rock.

She forced herself back to her seat by the bloodied window, calming herself with lies, determined to wait it out until the others returned. She would be glad to ignore the whole unsavory incident if that was what the others did. If only they would come back and fill her space with voices, she would pretend nothing had happened. Marjorie Hobson might be a coward, but she could hide it, by God. Bloody snowballs!

Marjorie looked around her. The car remained vacant but for her.

Bloody snowballs! she yelled, feeling liberated somehow at her daring. Until the voice spoke.

Let me in, Marjorie.

She jumped. Heart hammering. Breath ragged.

Marjorie had heard the voice as if he’d been right at her side. And she shouldn’t have. It hadn’t come from within the train car, but from outside in the snow. A young voice. A boy’s voice that still retained the feminine shrill of childhood. Strong, though, and demanding. Ordering her around.

Again, the voice. It flew up from the ground like the cry of a raptor ascending toward its prey. For the briefest of moments Marjorie thought of her mother. Her voice.

Let me in, Marjorie. Then,

Open the fucking door!

The voice came from below her window, down in the snow alongside the steaming train that hadn’t moved for days. Marjorie would look, but she would not let anyone inside. Not one of them, in any case.

One of them?

She saw two wan faces turned upwards, white, cold, watching hers and calculating . . . what? For a second only Marjorie reevaluated the situation, which seemed familiar somehow. Anyway, they were calculating something bad. As if in agreement, steam billowed from under the train to enshroud them in a cloud. They continued to look up, white on white, their mouths like black gashes, lips moving, saying something Marjorie was sure she didn’t want to hear. She tried blocking them out, holding the sound away, hands covering both ears, her blood roaring through her veins like the furnace it was.

Shaken by what she did hear, Marjorie wondered why they thought yelling and ordering her around would make her do what she was not going to do.

Hate-filled eyes belonging to a woman and an equally virulent glare from a young boy met her gaze when she deigned to look. Marjorie leaned into the window, her ears still covered, and pressed her forehead against the glass. Something was very wrong with those two. The boy. The boy looked like the child she’d seen on the train. But older. No, younger. Older.

Do you know who are they, ma’am?

Marjorie flinched. This time the questioner was really at her side. That a cultured Southern gentleman’s voice came out of a black-skinned Buffalo Soldier’s mouth had long ceased to amaze her. That he was at her ear and whispering she could choose to ignore. Or not.

He’d joined the passengers in Austin. Said he’d traveled by horseback from Fort Davis, but Marjorie knew her way around a horse. That was too far to ride. Wondered why he’d lied, and if he’d appropriated someone else’s identity. No matter, however. His voice was pleasantly soothing. She liked listening to it. Especially under these circumstances. She sighed in relief. He represented authority.

Although he was intimately close, the soldier’s attention was fiercely focused on the blood-smeared window and the two figures in the snow beneath. He didn’t act like he even knew Marjorie was still there. She squirmed. His breath tickled her neck.

Do you know why the train has stopped? he asked her.

Marjorie bit back her immediate answer and didn’t answer at all. How did he expect her to know something like that! Or was he talking to himself?

It’s cold out here, Marjorie, yelled the boy in the snow. Let us in!

The Buffalo Soldier crowded closer to Marjorie so he could point past her shoulder. His breath at her neck sent shivers down her spine. Only in retrospect did she remark its coolness.

What is that in the snow? He didn’t mean the boy.

Marjorie thought it odd he’d ignore the two people screaming up at them from the outside and focus on the patterns in the snow that she’d only now noticed herself. She studied the ground more closely at his request.

She saw dirty snowbanks as high as her knees near the end of the clearing where the pine forest stopped. But laid out in irregular spacing before it were stark, forceful, and ominous symbols alien to this time and this place. Why? Had little Stephen Lewellen, or that woman, done this? Or had the locals set this out? The small town of Palestine was likely within walking distance. Marjorie glanced at the soldier. For some of them, anyway. And if so, was it a warning? For the train?

They look like spirals, she said. Someone has fashioned a bunch of spiral patterns in the snow. All over the place.

But what about that one? he asked.

Marjorie studied the largest of the markings. Crosses, maybe, but broken at the ends. She’d seen something like this in one of the Indian art books her employer had in his study. It was a very old symbol. And for some reason it frightened her. The whole spiral-covered expanse of snow in the clearing scared her spitless. It had something to do with the boy.

It’s still a spiral, she said.

The soldier shook his head. I don’t think so.

Marjorie wasn’t going to argue the point. He’d asked her a question and she’d answered him. They were all spirals, some more stylized than others, but spirals all the same. The sooner they stopped talking about them the better she’d feel, but the soldier remained solidly at her side staring out the train window. He wasn’t going to let it go.

That’s the Lewellen boy, she said, turning to point out the window, hoping to divert his attention away from the symbols in the snow. I think his name is Stephen.

The soldier didn’t comment.

Marjorie didn’t want to make this decision, but it seemed she was going to have to. They couldn’t leave that boy to freeze in the snow. No matter how he unnerved her.

She pressed her lips together. A trace of blood dripped onto her collar, leaving the taste of salt on her tongue. She wiped at the stain on her clothes but only succeeded in spreading it. The residue coated her fingers like a light glue until she sucked it all off, feeling more like a child than a grown woman. With a shake of her head, she banished such thoughts. Her life was more than half over. Too soon she’d be an old woman.

We have to let them in, she said, fully aware she’d originally not planned to do so. That she’d preternaturally recognized the otherness in those two outside.

I don’t know what he’s doing out there, but he’s just a little boy. I don’t recognize the woman. Her voice trailed off as she realized the soldier wasn’t paying attention to her. She turned full face and studied him.

The blue uniform of the 10th Cavalry set well on his young shoulders, despite the dismal, dirty trip from West Texas. He was about twenty-two, twenty-three at the most? Marjorie had watched him moving effortlessly from one train car to the other the entire trip and had gotten used to him. She thought they all had.

A black soldier of his rank was unique to Marjorie’s experience. And perhaps unique entirely. As a housekeeper, she’d only known black servants, and a smattering of black entrepreneurs selling stuff door-to-door. Abruptly, as if reading her thoughts, the Buffalo Soldier’s alert black eyes gazed bleakly at her middle-aged face. She broke the uncomfortable staring contest.

I am Captain Sardonicus Crockett, ma’am, he said, making the introduction while deftly extricating himself from her personal space. Every bit the professional soldier, and Southern gentleman, he stood appraising her from the aisle.

Marjorie laughed. Sardonicus? Had she heard him correctly? She covered her mouth, embarrassed, then snorted, unable to contain herself.

I am so sorry, she said after a deep breath, not daring to look him in the face. It was then she noticed he smelled of pine. Clean and penetrating. But he’d continued talking and she wasn’t paying attention.

Not half as sorry as I am, he was saying. My mother had a family friend she wished to honor, he explained.

Marjorie decided not to comment, since she hadn’t really heard him. He’d been explaining his name. She’d known worse. He could have been stuck with even stupider names than Sardonicus. Marjorie had decided to tell him some of those worse names when the couple outside in the cold started railing at them again.

Open the fucking door!

Marjorie tensed. For the briefest of time, she had felt normal. Sardonicus Crockett had that about him that inspired confidence. He was able. That was it. He was able. Now her guts twisted with fear. That boy down there wasn’t really Stephen Lewellen. He couldn’t be.

I know, Sardonicus said, his voice low as if he thought the two things yelling up at the train could hear him. We have to keep them out.

A sudden stab of dismay rocked Marjorie in her seat. Her hands shot out at him, her attempt at a protest. Her original and immediate reaction to the woman and the boy had been repugnance and horror. She wasn’t going to let any of them in. Then sometime between then and now, she’d changed her mind, determined to let them in, no matter the cost. But it seemed Sardonicus was of a different mind. Saw only the wrongness and none of the humanity. Maybe he was right.

Maybe he was right.

An unexpected and very welcome sense of safety gently spread in her chest. Here was someone taking charge. Here was a more than competent man taking charge. A soldier used to the danger.

Maybe he was right.

So, Marjorie decided to go with Sardonicus Crockett’s suggestion and deny them access, but was ashamed. And then alarmed when Sardonicus pulled a revolver from under his blue coat, checked it, put it back, then nodded at the window.

Did they do that? he asked.

He meant the snowball damage. Marjorie knew that they had, but she hadn’t seen it until it hit. Honesty forced her to admit it. I don’t know.

She began shaking her head to emphasize her pallid statement. Someone had thrown the snowball. Someone had thrown the rock disguised as a snowball. Someone had bled over the snow. It had to have been one of those two. There was no one else.

I would appreciate it if you stayed right here, ma’am, Sardonicus said. Do not follow me outside. I will take care of everything.

Marjorie blinked. He’d pulled out his revolver again.

Whether the boy and the woman screaming up at them were their fellow passengers or something else entirely, they still didn’t deserve getting shot at. Marjorie opened her mouth to protest, but Sardonicus Crockett was gone in less time than it took her to blink away her outraged tears.

And maybe he was right.

You’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe. You’re safe. Those words ran back and forth through her brain like the headache-inducing rhythm of a moving train. But the train wasn’t moving. And Marjorie really wasn’t safe. Hadn’t been safe for a long while.

She looked out the window expecting to witness mayhem, but only found the same two white glaring faces staring steadily upward. Just the same as before. He hadn’t gotten to them yet. Then he had.

Frigid air suddenly rushed into the train. The hair on her arms stood up, gooseflesh erupted up and down her legs. Fear, not the cold, had hold of her. And then a hard clank and subsequent squeal of metal announced the full opening of the outer door. Marjorie shivered in her seat with her arms clasped around herself, teeth chattering. Then she saw him. The soldier must have leapt out for she watched him sprawl, dance a step or two over the snow, then fall face forward. Marjorie moved to another window for a better view, praying that he’d rise up unharmed. It got worse.

The boy and the woman. Instead of running into the train and reclaiming their seats—Let us in! —the two outside fastened onto Sardonicus and began dragging him away. But not