The Dark Rider

The following is an excerpt from a future project:

The horse’s hooves beat on the cobblestone streets, clopping through the black puddles, furiously stirring their once calm reflections of the night sky and its infinite speckle of stars. It was the only sound to be heard. From the rider’s view, all others around him were safe in their homes asleep.

The horse itself was black, fitting for the time its rider chose to be borne through the city, as far from the upcoming rise of the sun as he was from its setting. The rider, too, dressed darkly, matching his steed, the only color being the stitched white crosses upon his breast pockets and the cream-colored buttons on his shirt’s collar and down its middle. The two beings appeared as a sole figure, fused. Had it not been for the click-clack of the horse’s feet, they might resemble an apparition floating down the street. A pale rider blanketed in darkness. Like the grim reaper, the rider held near him a scythe, strapped to his saddle and dangling safely below his feet, its blade occasionally flickering as it reflected the light of the street lamps it passed. And, the way death himself might materialize in a nightmare, the rider wore a hood. Not the hood of a black cloak, but rather a dark brown sack, holes cut for the eyes and mouth alone.

Protruding from the mouth hole was an ivory cigarette buoyed upon two pink lips. An ungloved hand, white as if unmet by the sun for many months, pulled the cigarette away as the rider blew out a string of smoke to his side. It fell behind him in a momentary fog as he rode on, peering only straight ahead.

When he came in front of the wooden sign reading Red Horse Saloon, swinging from its chain in the night breeze, he tightened the reigns causing the dark steed to stop at once. The rider gauged his surroundings, sniffing at the air. He swung his leg over the side, his heavy brown boots clunking down on the street below. He walked away from his horse and it did not move from its place. He threw his cigarette, now only a third of its original length, down into a puddle. It hissed as its pink tip turned black. He walked to the front door of the bar and, once he was right up next to it, removed the hood from his head revealing a patch of thinning brown hair underneath, wild and unclean. He leaned in close to the door, his breath fogging the glass. Upon noticing candles still lit inside, their flames flickering as they sat upon the empty tables, he rapped his knuckles slowly on the door.

Nothing.

His hands tightened into fists, his knuckles popping. He turned his head, peering over his shoulder. Still no one out on the street, only his wretched, obedient beast. He gave a deep sigh and knocked again. This time, from the back of the room, a heavyset man with a thick bushel of hair beneath his nose rounded the corner of the bar, squinting at the front door to inspect the commotion. He held in his hand a mop, as he’d been cleaning the back area of the bar when the rider had knocked. Upon seeing a figure at his front door, standing alone, just outside, he gripped the mop handle tight until the pink skin on his thick knuckles turned white and he strolled cautiously to the front. The rider’s breath created circles of fog on the glass, which would then disappear as he inhaled.

The barkeep, Carlson, reached the front, still squinting at the figure outside his front door. He couldn’t make out any of his facial features in the dark of the night. If the figure were to step inside, Carlson thought, perhaps he could see him a little better. But something gave him the feeling that he shouldn’t let this man in. He pointed the end of the broom handle at the sign hanging from the inside of the door.

“See that? Says we’re closed,” he pointed out. “No more drinks tonight, fella.”

He began to turn away when, to his surprise, the rider knocked again. He shivered, not from the knocks, but from the silence in between each one. Not much scared Carlson. When the Mexicans tried to expel his family from California nearly twenty-four years earlier, running them out of their home and scattering his family’s cattle, he’d helped a small group of settlers take two Mexican forts. This little gang of Americans raised their flag, with its picture of a star and a bear, and held the forts until the US military took over, replacing the flag with the stars and stripes. When they’d started, California was part of Mexico. When they were done, it was, for all intents and purposes, part of America.

He returned to a home burnt to ashes, thanks to the Mexican Army. He got by for the next two years, occasionally bare-knuckle boxing for money, working odd jobs here and there. He was billed in his matches as The Bear, possibly from his days in the Bear Flag Revolt, or possibly from his substantial size and body hair. It was said he could take a punch as well as any man.

Unfortunately, he took them more often than he landed them.

Eventually, the gold rush hit, and he started up his first drinking establishment to serve the boom of new men coming into town looking for fortunes in the California hills. He called it simply Carleson’s, and for the first few years, he faired rather well. More importantly, he enjoyed the work with its late nights and, best of all, late mornings. But as the rush died down, his business dried up. He was able then to find work with the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the construction of Fort Alcatraz. When the Civil War rolled around, he helped install hundreds of cannons that would never be used on the island. He stayed on as a guard at the camp until the end of the war. He was old, and his head had been used as a punching bag for far too long, so he found this was the only way he could do his part to save the Union.

When the war ended, he made his way back to the only job he’d ever really loved. He gave his bar a catchier name this time, Red Horse Saloon, and while it never made him a rich man, he was happy and he found he was good at the work. If he could handle prisoners of war on Alcatraz, he could handle rowdy drunks of Saturday nights. But the figure outside his door loomed ominously, his face shrouded in the night. He liked an enemy he could see. The Mexican Army, or a boxing opponent. Not a man with his face darkened in the shadows. It unsettled him.

He gripped the mop handle with both hands, twisting his fists in opposite directions as if trying to give it an Indian burn. He turned back towards the door and had only taken one step when the figure slammed his hand up against the glass with a loud BANG. Carleson jumped back, raising the mop handle in defense. Then, feeling silly, he shook his head to see that the figure was holding a piece of paper up to the glass, pointing to the words written on it. Carleson grabbed a candle from one of the tables and held it up to read what the paper said.

WESLEY MISSION - GODFREY STAUBMAN

THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH ASSOCIATION

OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

ALL ARE WELCOME WHO ARE IN NEED OF

FOOD, SHELTER, SALVATION, ETC.

746 EAST CALIFORNIA STREET

SAN FRANCISCO

HOURS: WHENEVER WE ARE NEEDED

“Is that it? The mission?” Carlson said looking up at the shadow where the man’s facial features should’ve been. He thought he could make out the lower portion of the face slither into a grin. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

The figure made no reply, only holding up the paper against the glass. Carlson paused, considering whether he should sick this dark being on anyone else on this night. But eventually, he figured, who was he to deny a man an opportunity to seek God?

He called out directions to the man through the door, pointing in the direction of Staubman’s mission. Without a word, the figure turned, pulled his brown hood back over his head, leaped on top of his horse, and was gone into the darkness of the night in the direction he’d been sent.