Well, Father, there’s one more angel in heaven, as I’m sure You noticed. That boy Orville was a little green behind the ears, but he was a good man and he stayed in that place to save some lives. I just wish we could have saved any except our own, but whatever that thing was, it won’t be harming anyone ever again. Killing is a sin, to be sure, but I think You’ll forgive me this one, when You hear what it was…and what it’d done.

It all started with the telegram that I got from Orville the day the shooting tournament – and the incident with the wolf – ended. It was pretty cryptic, and ended in mid-sentence, like something had happened to whoever was putting it into the machine. Needless to say, I was worried something terrible – if Orville was worried enough to send for us, instead of someone closer to home, then something really fearsome must have been going on. I hadn’t mended up from my wounds yet, and I doubt anyone else had neither, but I insisted we get on the train that day, and nobody argued. The train took us to Denver first; while we were there, Pete insisted on tracking down a New Scientist to mend that flame-hose he picked up from the deserters a while back. Now, I can’t stand that contraption myself, and I didn’t want to waste the precious time, but he insisted it’d only be an hour or two so I gave it to him. Hope that didn’t make any difference, and that You’ll forgive me if it did.

When we got on the train from Denver to Dodge, a new passenger came on board: a convict, on his way to Dodge with a lawman escort. He seemed a genial enough fellow, so I did a little probing and determined he was to be locked up for a train robbery, but hadn’t ever killed no-one, so I persuaded him and the badge to take a drink with me’n Ms. Sontag – Pete, of course, had already beat us there. He introduced himself as Jesse McCallister, and while I came off a little preachy, he didn’t seem to take any offense, and we got along just fine – that is, until we stopped for coal and water the next day.

I could tell something was wrong as soon as I stepped off the train to stretch my legs – the place was completely deserted. I hadn’t seen a place this empty since I first rode into Red Creek while Begley still owned things down there. This was even worse, though – all the doors and windows were boarded up, in every house and every building in the whole damned town, ‘scuse my French. We knocked and shouted for a while, but no answer. It didn’t seem like anything was alive in the whole place.

Then Pete and Ms. Osten started to hear something – a kind of buzzing, they said. After a while I could hear it too, as it was getting louder – and louder, and louder, until we realized what we were hearing: insects, lots of ‘em. We started running towards the train, and as we turned we saw the biggest God-damned swarm of bees I’d heard of since the book of Exodus, and I hope You’ll forgive one well-deserved obscenity. We managed to get back to the train before they were on top of us, but the lawman escorting Jesse got it in his head to stand and fight – what a horrible way for a man to die. Jesse himself wasn’t going to make it, shackled as he was, so I dove out and shoved him in. Things would have gotten reeeeal dicey for me if it hadn’t been for Pete pulling me back in, and then the train was on its way. On the way, I let Jesse know he was off the hook as far as I was concerned – but that he better be on his best behavior all the way to Dodge.

We pulled into Dodge dryer’n Hell, and fresh out of coal – but we made it. The Doc complained to the conductor about leaving while people were still in town, but he didn’t pay the Doctor any mind – his responsibility was to himself, and to the train. I didn’t want to delay any further – the people of Aurora could’ve been dying as we spoke – and so without further ado we set off.

We hadn’t been riding for but a day when we came upon a gruesome scene. It was a pair of men, as badly sliced up as anyone I’d ever seen, and I’d say I’ve seen a lot. They were covered with slashes in sets of four, like the claws of an animal - but an animal that left no tracks, disturbed not one blade of grass. And we searched around a fair bit, too. Apparently it was also the hardest creature on Earth to hit – these fellows had fired off what musta been a hundred shots, and they hadn’t hit a single thing. We noticed, though, that there we no campfire – either they were in a real hurry, or they didn’t want to be seen. Or both. They’d only made it about a day away from town, so without hesitation we rode off towards Aurora.

I didn’t think there was a town between here and Perdition that was grimmer than the one we’d passed on the train, but this one had it beat. It was just empty – it was downright dead. There was no denying what had happened to the people here – nobody’d even taken the trouble to bury their bodies. Same thing as the man at the campsite – covered in cuts, surrounded by bullet casings, no blood or tracks around that weren’t their own. This was worse, though – men, women and children had been slaughtered in their homes, with all the doors and windows boarded up. Whatever we were dealing with, it didn’t need to knock.

We did a pretty thorough search of the town, looking for survivors. There wasn’t a one. Every house, every jail cell, the same scene – they’d shot off everything they had, but it hadn’t done them a damned bit of good. We found some personal effects and such that seemed to say this had been going on for about a month, and that a Texas Ranger had been called for – we didn’t see no sign of him, though. There was a little crawlspace underneath the mayor’s house that seemed to belong to some kind of wizard, like Pete says he is – only this fellow claimed to wrestle with demons for his power. I don’t know as I take kindly to that – we’ll have to talk about it later, me’n Pete.

Anyhow, the last body we found was poor Orville’s, holed up in the bank. He’d made it a good three or four days longer’n anyone else, and it didn’t take long to see why – every damned torch, candle, lantern and stick of wood in the whole town was there, every one of ‘em burned all the way down. The message was clear – whatever we were dealing with, it’d left him alone till the lights went out.

We decided to take some of the torches and lights and make a big camp in the middle of town, and hope we lived out the night. Me, Ms. Sontag, Jesse and the Doctor stayed awake – a little afeared of the dark, good Dr. Whiteman. Pete and Ms. Osten decided to call it a night, and told us to wake ‘em if we heard anything interesting. Well, midway through the night we heard something interesting, alright – it sounded like a child whimpering, only it was coming from one of the houses we’d already checked; the houses where there wasn’t anything alive.

Well, I wanted to check on my own, and Doc Whiteman was all for it – did I mention he’s none too fond of the dark? But nobody else was having any of that. Ms. Osten would stay with the Doc, but the rest insisted they were going with me – whether I agreed or not. I grumbled about it a fair bit – why should all of us get killed? – but they weren’t for listening, and so we set off to the house where the noise had come from.

It was a house like all the other one’s we’d seen, but there was a trapdoor in the center of the floor, leading to some kind of basement; that’s where the noise was coming from. Knowing we couldn’t be dealing with anything human, I pulled out Arbiter, opened the trap door and went down cautiously into the dark, torch in hand. It was pitch black down there, except from the light of our torches, and we were knee-deep in water as soon as we hit the bottom of the stairs. A splashing came from the far end of the room, and me and Ms. Sontag walked forward to check it out; Jesse hadn’t had room to get all the way off the stairs yet. We walked forward and checked every corner of the room, but we didn’t see a damned thing; just then, the trap door swung shut, and we were trapped.

Figuring it had to be near the trap door to close it, wherever it was, I took a shot with Arbiter, but hit nothing but air. That made me wince; if I survived this without anything to feed Arbiter, I was in for a nasty surprise. Still, it’s my fault, I suppose, for thinking Arbiter could hit something no other gun could touch. We all started up the stairs, trying to get back into the light and regroup, especially since Pete was still out there. Ms. Sontag propped open the trapdoor with some rope, but before anyone could make it out the creature slashed me in the back, and the fight was rejoined.

Well, we wasted a few bullets on it before we were convinced, but not as many as the people of Aurora – we learned quicker than that. We figured it must not like fire, otherwise why would it have spared Orville, but none of us had any torches left – only Pete, and he was upstairs, past the trap door. As though realizing this, the creature, still invisible, pulled out Ms. Sontag’s rope and started trying to yank the door down. This was where we made our first peakthrough – Pete, thinking fast, tried to pace the door with his torch; in doing so, he must have thrust the fire into the creature, because we heard a shriek of pain and anger, and for just a moment, something dark and gaunt was silhouetted against the stairs.

Well, I have to say, I like to think of myself as a pretty pave sort, but I thought real hard about running when I saw that thing. Jesse did try to take off, though the creature blocked his way, and from the look of things so did Pete, heading back to the campfire as fast as he could go. By this time, however, Ms. Osten and the Doc had arrived with new torches, and then I realized something: we could hurt this thing. It wasn’t over yet.

I pulled out the bottle of Kerosene that I carry around for my lamp and tossed it towards the creature on the stairs, hoping it’d catch on Jesse’s torch along the way. Sure enough, the whole set of stairs caught fire, and we heard an even worse shriek than before. Seeing his chance, Jesse leapt up the stairs and out, and it was left to me and the Misses Sontag and Osten to finish it off. I could feel it clawing at us, trying to do some damage, but we ignored it, striking it left and right with our torches, navigating by its screams. Finally, I leapt forward and struck it one last blow, and it gave a final, horrible shriek and expired on the spot. It was over.

So I hope You’ll let this one slide, Father, because this wasn’t an innocent creature, and it certainly wasn’t human. We were too late to save Aurora, but now the area is safe, and this thing won’t have a chance to move on to greener pastures – or warmer bodies.