Opal Gulch was just a dusty little dried-up town this side of nowhere, until the horrors came.

Ellalee Gather twitched aside her calico curtains one long afternoon, just as the first horror glomped into town. It started as a shadow upon the horizon, under a pearl of distant sun. As it drew closer, the shadow fuzzed out into a shapeless roil and seethe, pulling itself along the single sand-drift road that passed for Main Street. Darkness puddled in the horror’s wake. The bleached siding and shackledown roofs all seemed to shimmer as it passed.

But Ellalee just shook her head and let the curtain fall. Whatever had slouched into town, it wasn’t her Malcolm, so it wasn’t her business.

* * *

Sweet fuck-all for a body to do these days, in Opal Gulch. As the opal mines dried up, the town had dried with ‘em. Ever since her boy Malcolm left, promising to strike gold and come back a king, Ellalee knew she’d dried up too. No one knocked on her door wanting their fortune told. No one knocked on her door to sell subscriptions, or convert her to any newfangled religion, or even to collect on her decade of unpaid taxes. No one knocked at all except Nettalynn Groan, who came daily from next door to sit on Ellalee’s porch, eat peanuts, and complain.

“Just disgraceful,” Nettalynn said the next day, one boot up on Ellalee’s sagging porch rail. “You seen that thing with wiggly claws skulking about?” She crunched a peanut. In front of the saloon across the way, a many-legged, indefinite shape pried uncertainly at the swinging doors. “In broad daylight!”

Ellalee tsked, fanning herself absently. “My Malcolm won’t stand for it.”

“Your Malcolm,” said Nettalynn, “ain’t coming.”

“He’s coming. He told me, when he went away, he was a-hunting for gold. When he comes, he’ll make this town rich.”

Nettalynn flicked a peanut shell off the porch, into the dust. “Twenty years you been saying that. Your Malcolm’s long dead.”

The horror at the saloon doors started up a high, windsong sobbing. There was something too lonely about it, too cold. Ellalee covered her ears. A gentleman stumbled from the saloon. He paused to hold the door open, tipping his hat to the horror, which quieted, and then scuttled inside.

“I raised my boy to keep his promises,” Ellalee said calmly. “He’ll come back.”

* * *

The horrors kept coming. They oozed out of the desert and clustered in empty doorways. Tendrils snaked out of the dust to brush Ellalee’s cane on her daily excursions to and from the crumbling general store. The air filled with barely audible buzzes and whispers. Dusk thickened: stick your hand into the sundown wind and it’d come back oily.

Ellalee watched the horrors slither-slump-halumph into town, and snapped her calico curtains shut every time. Not her Malcolm. Not her business.

But Opal Gulch itself wasn’t immune to the horrors. New shadows dripped from roofs. A dark rainbow sheen crawled up the walls of the general store. The desert dust went astringent, clinging to the insides of lungs. It burned.

And in the corners, the shadows began to whisper, to buzz:

Make way. He’s coming.

Make way.

Then, one sunup:

He’s come.

In the slow thick dawn of a thousand shapes, there was a faint knock upon Ellalee’s door. Ellalee peered between her curtains.

On the porch stood something that was no longer Nettalynn Groan. It was draped in her flour-sack dress, offering a handful of peanuts, but it didn’t fit quite right in only three dimensions. There were too many mouths. When one of them opened, what emerged wasn’t speech, but a deep gurgle, and then a slow overspill of liquid, golden-black.

“I know!” snapped Ellalee, who didn’t need a horror at her door to tell her. She seized her cane, stepped over the sludgy puddle, and stomped out to the street.

He’d come.

The sun shone darkly iridescent upon the slow-rising flood spreading up Main Street. The saloon was soaked, dark and gleaming; the general store bowed under its oozing eaves. An array of shadows surged through town, keening, clamoring, churning the odorous air, a rattling homecoming for the horror towering over Opal Gulch.

He’d come as a mountain, dripping and sly. Oil-king, horror-king, huge and slick and mean. Kiss your cronies, crude king kaiser, drown ‘em ‘til they gleam.

Petroleum, oceanfuls of it, heaved down the slopes and into Opal Gulch, undepleted, more, more, more, always pumped up from within. The dark tide rolled over Ellalee’s boots. It sucked at her cane. The horror in Nettalynn’s clothes waded past her, through the muck, and threw itself into the slow-sliding scree. But Ellalee did not run, did not bow. She saw what was underneath the end of all things, and stood firm, until the horror’s fathomless regard turned at last on her.

Make way.

But there was still something of her laughing, hopeful boy, buried in all that petroleum. Ellalee took a huge breath of burning air and said, “No.”

The horror and all attendants roiled to a halt before her, all the mean ravines and avalanche screams subsiding. Something in the upside-down air shivered and thrummed, like a warning.

“Malcolm,” Ellalee whispered, “what have you done?”

A ridge twisted, in the same old way his shoulders used to hunch in shame, long ago. He’d brought all his wealth back home, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that enough? Something trembled, deep within, and fissured.

Open wide, chasm-mouth, show them you’re a king.

She’d raised him to keep his promises, just as she kept hers. And so, as all those riches surged forth upon the town of Opal Gulch, Ellalee Gather opened her arms, and she welcomed her boy home.

* * *

Ⓒ Bree Wernicke