Blood and Rain by Glenn Rolfe

’em back.”
    â€œI have to get it; it’s probably my dad. He’s acting a little strange since last night.”
    He watched her reach over the edge of the bed and snatch the phone up off the floor where it had fallen.
    Alex plopped down on the bed, bummed out about the interruption, but relieved that he had not blurted out those three little words. He did love her, but he was definitely going to hold off a little longer before saying so. He wrapped his arms around her and tried to listen in.
    Joe slowed the Range Rover, pulling off Old Gilson Creek Road, and headed between two large pines. The path, overgrown with tall grass and sporadically birthed blackberry bushes, was much as it had been the night he transported the carcass of the dead creature to what he believed would be its final resting place.
    Joe reached for the pack of Camel Lights on his dash. He had started smoking again—another secret he was hiding from his daughter. He kept telling himself it would all be over soon…at least, that’s what he was hoping. They could just go back to having the wide-open relationship he cherished so dearly. Until then, he would continue to be evasive when answering her questions, he would remain vague when telling her where he was heading and what he was doing, and he would continue to smoke his way through his anxieties.
    About a hundred feet in, the path disappeared. He parked the truck before a small group of trees and cut the engine. Horace Cemetery was a little farther within the woods. He could find his way to the small group of crumbling gravestones that made up the old graveyard with his eyes closed. As the first of the old headstones came into sight, Joe was flooded with a rush of memories.
    His introduction to Horace Cemetery, the first and original graveyard of Gilson Creek, and its haunted past was something he would never forget. He was out on his first hunting trip with his father and his uncle when they happened upon the old burial site. The graveyard was ancient and brittle, the result of being uncared for and forgotten, which had only made it that much more frightening as a child. It seemed so out of place, cast out like spoiled meat and left to rot in the middle of the woods. Joe’s father only increased his unease by telling him that the place was haunted. His father did not elaborate on the subject; he just ushered them away with a quiet but stern sense of urgency.
    It was his best friend, Jack McKinney, who told him about the soul who contaminated the place. According to the legend, a murdering monster of a man by the name of Gordon McDonough had been hanged and buried in the cemetery in the late 1800s.
    McDonough killed thirteen people in all—four adults and nine children. He then walked right into the town’s small saloon, carrying an old potato sack that was dripping with blood and, supposedly, filled with body parts of two massacred families. The townspeople dragged him out to the cemetery to meet his judgment.
    They say he never said a word as to why he committed the murders, that he just smiled as they grabbed ahold of him, and kept on grinning whilst being dragged up and down the dirt roads leading to the graveyard. They also say he was wearing the same ugly smile when they slipped the noose over his head and raised him up. The smile was said to have still been on his face as the cold, dark earth was shoveled upon it.
    Townspeople, from then on, claimed to feel an evil presence lurking around them when visiting the graves of their dearly departed. Gilson Creek made a new graveyard the following spring, leaving Horace Cemetery to the surrounding forest and the ghost of Gordon McDonough.
    Joe had not returned until the night he brought out the burnt body of the beast he shot down, burying it toward the back with the older, smaller and mostly unreadable headstones. He couldn’t think of a better place than Horace Cemetery to put to rest such a hideous