BEFORE SAM McCORD, THERE WAS ...

Very little survived my house fire:
not my dog, Hercules, nor my cat, Pebbles ... nor my writings.

Or so I thought.

Digging through my boxes still unopened from my move to my new apartment, I was searching for a small book I thought I still had.

And I discovered a smoke-stained Notebook with the hand-written novel, MYTH AMERICA,

whose hero was my very first construct:

SILVER AMBROSE HART,
the eternal Mountain Man born in Virginia when it was called Raleigh's Country --

now living in the America wastelands of nearly 200 years from now.

I am tempted to transcribe and publish it since to me it holds up rather well.

What do you think yet again?

{Deirdre Manes, the Nightchaser, courtesy of the genius of Leonora Roy}

CHAPTER ONE

IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH?

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

- Henri Bergson

I sighed.  My eyes were good but not even an eagle could read the tiny print in this twilight.  I closed the small book and slipped it into the inside pocket of my buckskin jacket. THE PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES was the title.  Each chapter started off with a quote from the philosopher who fascinated James, Henri Bergson.  I had a stash of such books hidden all over the desert.  But I always returned to this one.

The rising sun cast hot ghosts of gold across the bruised dark of the horizon.  Were any ghosts skulking behind the Joshua Trees waiting for the dying sun to slip into sleep so as to greet the welcoming rays of the rising moon?  I shook my head at myself. 

Trees and houses were not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the landscape on which we stand, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.

Not ghosts of ectoplasm but specters of words and actions that haunt and claw worse than any spirit could.  Any man could give birth to a legion of such ghosts.  I spawned more than a few myself.  Were any still living who were haunted by not being able to forgive my past words and actions or forget them or both?

Sam nudged my hand.  I smiled.  The old beggar.  The only vampire wolf in existence.

I made sure of that.  What had those scientists been thinking?  If a pack of such genetically engineered wolves had made it to the outside world, Hell would have had a suburb on earth.  I snatched the only puppy they had created, destroyed their research, and killed all but one of the scientists.  The last one served to feed Sam.  Who would have guessed a puppy could drink so much?

Sam nudged my hand again.  I took the canteen of blood from my belt and poured the white wolf a lap or two in the hollow of the rock shelf upon which we perched.  His anvil head lowered, but his eyes never left the desert around us.

For long moments he lapped.  His great head rose, and his unreadable eyes flicked to me.  I sighed.  The big ninny.  I took out a rag from my back pocket and wiped his mouth and chest clean.  He licked my hand with a blood-smeared tongue.

Loping away a few paces, Sam sat on his haunches, studying the rising moon.  The night winds whispered its mocking secrets to him.  The icy moonbeams embraced and fired his strange eyes.  Damn those scientists.  They had tinkered with Sam’s brain capacity as well.  Then, they left him with a mouth and jaw incapable of speech.

He scanned the endless depths between the stars as if wondering why a wild spirit like his had to live as he did, driven by desires and questions that he could not voice.  His face tore at me.  He did not understand why he felt compelled to live as he did.  A soft mewing began low in his throat.  Finally, Sam could take it no longer, and he raised his head to sing mournfully to the moon, another seemingly lost spirit in the night.