Chapter 6 - The Floorboards Above
A shower of dry plaster and rotted lath rained down into the cellar as the ceiling fractured above the northern corner of the room. Caleb dropped the slip of paper, his hand snapping down to grip his revolver as he aimed upward into the dark void between the first floor and the cellar.
"Get back!" Caleb shouted, his voice echoing menacingly against the stone foundation.
Two small faces peered down through the jagged hole in the ceiling. The twins looked down at him with wide, unblinking eyes, their messy dark hair dusted white with powdered lime from the saloon floor above. They didn't look frightened; they looked expectant, like predators waiting for a wounded deer to stop thrashing.
"Uncle Caleb," the twin on the left whispered, her voice carrying a strange, unnatural resonance that seemed to vibrate inside Caleb’s own skull. "The ledger is incomplete. You forgot to sign the last page."
"I never signed anything of the sort," Caleb growled, stepping away from the open barrel and raising his gun higher, though a strange paralysis was beginning to creep into his finger joints.
The sheriff scrambled backward into the corner, whimpering like a beaten dog. "Don't listen to them, Caleb! It's a trick of the dust! If you answer them, you give them title to your shadow!"
The little girl on the right tilted her head at an impossible angle, a sickening pop echoing from her neck. She dropped a small, heavy object through the hole in the ceiling. It hit the dirt floor with a dull thud right at Caleb’s boots.
Caleb looked down. It was a brass pocket watch—his father’s pocket watch, the one that had supposedly vanished into the flames of the Missouri farmhouse ten years ago. The crystal face was cracked down the middle, frozen permanently at 3:14 AM.
"That's impossible," Caleb breathed, the gun lowering an inch in his grip. "I buried that watch in the orchard."
"Nothing stays buried in Red Creek," the twin above chanted in chilling unison, their voices blending into a single, metallic chord. "Everything comes back to settle accounts."
Suddenly, the heavy front doors of the root cellar upstairs groaned as the iron chains were violently ripped away. Heavy boots thudded against the top of the wooden stairs. Someone—or something—was descending into the darkness, carrying a lantern that cast long, claw-like shadows against the whitewashed walls.
Caleb spun around, his back to the open barrel, his finger tightening on the trigger as a tall silhouette materialized at the bottom of the stairs, clad in a familiar black duster and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
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"Put the iron down, brother," a voice rasped from beneath the brim of the hat. "You're only making the interest rate go up."
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