“Keep digging.” Malcolm sounded feverish. If he was young, he’d been digging too. We were all scared and angry. I was dealing with grief too. My wife was dead. My sister was dead. The women in town were being brutalized and murdered.
This wasn’t the first time it had happened in our little town in the Rockies. It had happened twenty years ago. Three women had been slaughtered. Now there was a rampage. A fury had been unleashed on the town. And then there were the hallucinatory nightmares. A demon was plaguing us.
“Dig,” yelled Malcolm. Twenty years ago they caught the man. Druid Pierce. A well-spoken, pugnacious beast. He laughed when he was arrested and laughed when they stuck a needle in his arm. It was a hoot. Murder.
We were digging up the grave to make sure. We needed to see his skeleton in a barren box. We figured it would rid us of the nightmares. The demon that grabbed our souls and wouldn’t let go. If we could see the skeleton we could focus on finding the actual culprit. The Druid Pierce copycat that infected our town.
The men hit the coffin with a thud. They jumped in. Cleared dirt and then pried open the lid. We stared and couldn’t believe what we saw. It was empty. Dry and clean.
We heard laughing. I looked over. It was the mayor. Delighted.
“I know that laugh,” said Malcolm.
The mayor kept laughing. The demon never left town. He got a new face. A new life.
[amazon_link asins=’0062572237′ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’200wordshort-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d073c9c5-6f0c-11e8-aaad-830a1bd3202b’]