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Chapter One

On this humid Arizona night, along with the occasional diamond of a star, the waxing moon sat proudly in the night sky. She wept sprinkling tears of warm rain, which pattered the branches above like wet bullets. It took some time for their leafy basins to fill to the brim, but each time they did, rainwater came crashing down on my soaked head. I pulled up my hood and shuffled closer to the large log cabin.

"Printed Oddities: Haunted Bookshop and Museum," The letters painted on the door sign read. "Come for the sights, stay forever!"

I slipped my spirit box out from my coat pocket. It's nothing special, just a piece of junk for a radio, but the haywire tuning knob works wonders - the constant static produces white noise, a medium in which ghosts can speak.

The name's Ryan Bergara, age twenty-four. I've been a firm believer in the paranormal my entire life, whether it be aliens or Bigfoot. I've tried to find something out of this world, or from another dimension altogether, for years. The problem: I haven't found shit.

"Long Legs Madej, are you here?" I asked the infamous gunslinger of the West.

Born as Alexander Madej, Long Legs Madej was an infamous figure of America's Old West throughout the 1870s and '80s. He was raised as a poor miner and rancher from my hometown, Rockslide, a boomtown that popped up surrounding the ore-filled mountains in the 19th century.

Madej came to be known for a towering height and pernicious greed. He had built himself up from rags to riches with a power that he called luck, but I think it was probably something more along the lines of stealing. One day, he claimed to strike it rich from a secret cave that only he knew about. However, no records of this mine have ever been discovered, let alone actual remains of it.

While I flipped through the stations on the spirit box, along with misty rain droplets, a bat flew under the oil lantern hanging from the wooden post. I screamed and ducked, nearly losing the broken radio to the puddle my feet frantically splashed around in.

Yeah, I'm not what you'd call a brave ghost hunter.

Even worse than my cowardly nature, I can never sell anyone on my theories. Every attempt turns up fruitless, evident when the investigation ends with an uproar of laughter from a skeptic. If one of my partners were to be grabbed by the leg and whisked right to the floor by a ghoul, I wouldn't be surprised if they blamed the wind.

Anywho, the reason I believe that Rockslide is such a hotspot for the supernatural would be the fate of Alexander Madej. Once a powerful figure of the Old West, Long Legs Madej was taken out in a matter of seconds by four bullets to the chest. A domino effect of countless bloody and unexplainable occurrences have popped up ever since.

These woods get their fair share of weird all the time - reports of cold spots, patches where plants don't even grow, and circles where sound completely dissipates is a daily occurrence. Aliens even roam around, apparently. The investigators in Rockslide have simply credited the reports to bands of teenagers smoking a bit of grass, but the number of separate accounts and consistency between them still doesn't add up to me. I've got a nagging fear that somebody else, or something else, is pulling at the strings which puppeteer the course of normality. In fact, tonight was the 100th anniversary since the crimes of Long Legs Madej were put to rest.

So my mission tonight: to speak to the man that I believe responsible.

"Are you scared? Don't be afraid of me. I'm not afraid of you," I lied to the absent sound.

Besides me, that damn bat must have been the only creature awake tonight. Haunted Oddities had closed hours before I arrived, so I was trying my best to communicate with the outlawed cowboy my town was known for.

"You sure are a chatty one, Mr. Long Legs Madej. Call me Ryan. Can I just call you Legs?"

Nothing.

"It's been quite a bit of time since you rode through these parts, Legs..." I continued. "A hundred years, to be exact. In case you didn't know since you're dead and all, the year is 1987. We don't have flying cars yet. Just the Russians to worry about. Sorry to disappoint."

Drowning out the static of the spirit box, I focused on the wind, calm and collected. And watch out for any more bats.

I waited. Not a sound.

"Good talk," I sighed, disappointed but not surprised.

After I had said my goodbyes, about two seconds from packing up, I expected the silence to be unprovoked. If anything, maybe another bat would swoop down and startle me, but truly, I never thought another voice besides my own would ring in the lonely woods.