December 17, 2025

Dead Man's Posse
by Chad Gayle

This story appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of SPOOKY Magazine.

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.


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The sheriff didn’t carry a gun. Had his tin badge pinned on his chest like every other lawman, but instead of a holster belted to his hip, he had a leather satchel slung from a shoulder strap. Didn’t ride a horse neither, and when I asked him why, the sheriff smiled this kind of sad smile he had, a smile that seemed to signify that the world is a broke down thing that ain’t never going to get fixed. It made me mighty uncomfortable, that smile of his, although I didn’t rightly know why.

There were five of us working for him on the posse. Myself, two boyish looking thugs who never said a word, an old geezer who was missing most of his teeth, and a cowgirl who was duded up in fancy chaps and a brightly colored vest. Because the sheriff didn’t have his own horse, the county didn’t see fit to give us horses neither, which struck me as a deal breaker since I ain’t exactly fleet on my feet. When I brought this oversight to the sheriff’s attention, however, he made a motion with his hand like he was patting a shoulder no one could see and told me not to worry none.

“This ain’t that kind of posse,” he said. “You stay close to me, Garth, and you’ll do just fine.”

Gave me a cold chill up the middle of my spine every time he called me by my name. I thought at first that was because he never would look me in the eye, but I realized later that it was because of how he said my name, like it was some kind of secret. Damned strange—but not any stranger than the job itself.

For instance: the fellow we were after, he’d killed a man, but he was right there in town—he’d never left. We knew this for a fact because he liked to go skulking about the back streets after sunset to scare the living daylights out of little old ladies who would come by the sheriff’s office the next day to bend his ear. Equally odd were the tales the town’s upstanding citizens told about how they’d seen the killer floating outside a window or something similarly silly; one of them even went so far as to claim that the creep had popped up in the tub while she was taking a bath. Of course I figured they were joshing because these stories always petered out the same way, with the killer vanishing when our good neighbors tried to get a better look at him, but the sheriff, well, he didn’t seem to mind. He would nod at these folks sort of sagely after they finished, kind of like the way a preacher nods at the end of a good sermon, and then he would thank them sincerely for their help and go on about his business, almost as if they weren’t even there.

His business mostly seemed to consist of visiting the rooming house where the killer had lived, the saloon where he’d liked to drink, and the barber shop where he’d once worked. The sheriff palmed little bits of trash from these places when he thought we weren’t looking—a bit of stuffing from a torn pillow; scraps of stained wallpaper; a broken comb. These things wound up in his leather satchel, which got a little plumper with the passing of each day.

One afternoon while we were standing idle in the empty room the killer had once occupied, the sheriff took a black book out of his satchel and started reading a bunch of gobbledygook that I couldn’t make heads nor tails of. It made me real nervous, what he was reading out of that book, as if I had pins and needles in my head instead of my hands or feet, but it didn’t seem to bother the rest of the posse, and since the lot of them hadn’t said more than three words to me since we’d started working together, I decided I’d had just about enough of the whole crazy business and stepped outside.

The first thing I noticed out there was that the air was still as mud. Feeling a plum bit odd, I walked out to the middle of the street to get a better look at the town proper and got the scare of my life when a runaway wagon liked to run me over. Frightened as a jackrabbit, I jumped back on the sidewalk and, in the process, nearly knocked a missus in a bustle onto her keister.

I mumbled “’Scuse me, ma’am” just as quick as I could but she kept right on walking. Didn’t so much as glance in my direction, which did rub me the wrong way. It wasn’t my fault that some crazy wagon driver had tried to kill me, after all, and so I sort of slunk back to the rooming house and leaned against the outside wall.

That’s when I noticed that none of the folks walking up and down the sidewalk would acknowledge I was even there. This made me sore all over again; sure, I was just another good for nothing who’d never amounted to much, a wandering vagabond whose luck always seemed to turn out bad, but none of them had the right to hold their noses up so high. Well I just stood there awhile, wishing I could be somewhere else, and then the people all around me seemed to get a bit blurry around the edges, as if I was looking at them through frosted glass. Figuring that I’d had too much sun, I closed my eyes to clear my head and right away I seemed to sink down into the ground, down into the earth packed beneath my feet. Worms gnawed at my fingers and my toes, and my bones felt dried out and brittle, like pieces of chalk.

I don’t rightly know what kept me from screaming when I opened my eyes. The townsfolk were still passing to and fro in front of me, pretending I didn’t exist. I found the sheriff waiting for me in the open door.

“What’s wrong, Garth? Got itchy feet?”

I shivered when that chill that wrapped around the way he said my name sprung up my back, but I was feeling pretty ornery, so I told him I didn’t cotton to taking the county’s money when I wasn’t doing a damned lick of work. “How you conduct yourself is your business, Sheriff, but this sure does seem like a waste of time to me,” I replied.

Patting the satchel on his hip, he smiled and said, “Be patient with me, son; you’ve already been a great help, whether you know it or not.”

Somewhat reassured, I stuck with him as much as I could for the next few days but I found myself wandering off again and again, almost as if I did have itchy feet, like he’d said. Sometimes when I was out traipsing about, I would hear this strange sound, a long, low kind of keening that should’ve raised the hairs on the back of my neck but didn’t. The last time I heard it, I was trying to figure out where the sound might be coming from when the sheriff suddenly showed up. He didn’t chastise me none but I could tell he was piqued by how antsy I seemed to be, so I tried to apologize. He just smiled that sad old smile of his and shook his head.

“S’all right, son. I know I’ve asked a lot of you, but don’t you worry—we’re going to wrap this business up tonight,” he said.

“Tonight? Why tonight?” I asked.

“Because of the full moon. Peaks at midnight; that’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

I hadn’t a clue what he was referring to but I nodded like I did and walked with the rest of the posse back to his office, where the sheriff propped his feet up on his desk and pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes to have a nap. I stood by the front window as long as I could, trying to figure what I owed to the gamblers and card sharps who’d bested me at this, that, and t’other saloon while the sun slid down behind the huddled huts of the sheriff’s quiet little town, but when it was full on dark, I couldn’t stand there any longer; I had to be outside. Before the door was even closed behind me, I heard that keening sound again, that wild little wailing that seemed to be saying my name. Since I knew the sheriff wouldn’t be needing me until the stroke of twelve, I let my feet take me where they wanted me to go.

They took me cross the street to start with, and then we kind of zigzagged from one block to the next, weaving in and out of the streams of pedestrians who were milling about. Pretty soon I’d reached the outskirts of town, where the low buildings that were all strung together gave way to rolling green fields and lively, limber trees, and I found that the wail was even louder, so loud that I knew I was closer to its point of origin than I’d ever been before. At about the same time, I felt something tug at me, something a little like a noose looped around my neck, so I kept on following my feet, and they led me up and over the first hill outside of town, and then I saw it, and I knew where the sound was coming from.

The cemetery.

There was a church next to it but the sound was coming from under the ground in the cemetery, from under the dirt piled up in so many rows, and when I closed my eyes, I could see the worms in the empty eye sockets of the dead and buried, and I started sinking again, sinking fast. Then something snapped inside of me like a rubber band, and I heard the sheriff say my name.

Garth!

His voice was stuck between my ears, not in them, and it chilled me to the quick, like an ice chip wedged in my skull.

Please, Garth. I need you here with me, son.

I was back in his office in a flash. The rest of the posse was crowded together in one of the jail cells; I was mighty dazed and confused, but the sheriff seemed to understand.
“S’all right, son. You take your place with the others; it’ll be over soon.”

I slipped into the open cell. He’d drawn a pentagram with a circle around it on the floor with a piece of chalk, and I stood on one of the points of the pentagram, along with the other members of the posse. The junk that the sheriff had collected in his satchel was piled in the center of the floor—scraps of cloth, the broken comb, and something I hadn’t seen before: a locket on a chain, the kind you put a picture in for safekeeping.
The woman in the fancy vest nodded when I looked her way.

“He hung himself after he done it,” she said. “After he murdered the judge’s son and his fiancé.”

She stretched her arms out, and without even thinking about it, I stretched mine out too. My fingers should’ve been touching her fingers on my left side and the dirty nails of the old geezer on my right, but I couldn’t feel anything. It was as if I was touching air.

The sheriff came into the cell to put little candles at our feet, candles that he lit, each in turn, before he sprinkled a pinch of black powder on the little pile of leavings. Then he stepped out and started reading a passage from his black book, and when he finished reading, the powder he’d sprinkled on the mementos burst into blue flames that leapt up as high as the ceiling, flames that left behind a column of smoke that took on the form of a man.

It was the man we’d been looking for. He screamed a scream that made my ears feel like they were about to burst, and when he reached for me with those bloody claws of his, I flinched. I’d be lying if I claimed that I would’ve stayed put without my feet being glued to the floor, but I couldn’t move, not an inch. I was protected by the pentagram or the words the sheriff had spoken or both, and so long as I kept my arms out, the dead man couldn’t get to me—he couldn’t even get past me.

This made him even madder, of course. While he eyed us with all of the hate that’s ever been let loose in the world, he tried to strike at me and then he whirled round and round until he became a cyclone of smoke and sparks that sucked the bits of paper and cloth in the middle of the pentagram up into the air. Suddenly the candles were snuffed out, and I thought for sure that the monster would blow the roof right off the building and take us with it, but then the sheriff snapped his black book shut and shouted the killer’s name.

It was the only time I’d ever heard the lawman raise his voice. When he did it, the smoke in the circle thinned and split into threads spinning about like dust devils on a hot, dry day, and I saw the claws that had tried to grab me by the throat start to crumble. The killer folded up on himself like a wax statue left out in the sun for too long; he got smaller and smaller, and when he got to be about the size of my fist, a bright blue light flashed in the darkness, and he was gone.

I looked to my left and my right. The rest of the posse was gone too; I was alone in the cell. I lifted my leg and was relieved to see it floating ably in the air.

“Come on out, Garth,” the sheriff said. “You did good, and we’re all done.”

I didn’t understand what had happened but I came out and looked the sheriff up and down. “That’s it?” I asked. “We got our man?”

“We did, and you’ve got your pay. You don’t have to go back to where I found you.”

I almost asked him what the hell he was talking about, but then I remembered the worms and the dirt deep down in the cemetery and that odd sound I’d heard out there, and I felt a stirring in my chest, kind of like a stitch being pulled. For no reason at all, I wanted to throw my arms around him and squeeze him real tight, but I knew he would prefer not to be embraced by someone as ghostly as myself, so I kept still and wondered out loud whether he’d willing to take me on for another job. He shook his head.

“I’m afraid I can’t, son. I’m only allowed to use you once.”

Before I could ask him why this was so, he held out his hand. There was a shimmering ticket stuck to his palm—a train ticket. He smiled that sad smile of his and said my name, but this time, when he said it, it didn’t give me the same kind of chill. This time it was the chill of hearing a door unlock when you’ve been standing outside in the cold, that little thrum that runs through you when you know you’re about to sit down at the foot of a blazing fire to get warm.

“Take this to the station. The next train’ll take you where you rightly belong.”

His sadness flowed through me like a cool spring rain as he sent me on my way. Only thing that bothered me later, when I got on the train, was that he never did say goodbye.

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Chad Gayle’s short speculative fiction has appeared in DreamForge Magazine, Inner Worlds, and Cosmic Horror Monthly.