THREE DAYS AFTER HE WAS MURDERED, RICHARD PRATT BEGAN TO FEEL MUCH BETTER...
A seemingly random act of violence propels Professor Richard Pratt into The Hereafter. It is a strange, muted, netherworld of the dead-a world in which he is forced to bear...
What the Dutchman didn't see, as he smashed through the doorway with his knife in his hand, was that he had a passenger.
Billy Travers clung to Dutch's back and screamed and pummeled at the cowhand's head with blows so hard that Billy's hands would have broken. He tried to sink his teeth into the man's neck until he felt his jaw crack.
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Billy had watched the two strangers arrive earlier that day and had known instantly that they were harbingers of death. There was something about the older man that radiated hatred and violence, and Billy could see it clinging to his silhouette like deep red flames.
There was nothing he could do, of course, other than watch as the two men talked with Thomas Sowersby—feigning kindness at first, but then with a growing level of malevolence. When the men had finally left, Billy followed them from the cabin.
Over the weeks since his death and return, Billy had only fallen more deeply in love with Francis Sowersby. And the illusion that they were married and beginning their lives on the frontier had become an obsession. He sat with the family during their evening prayers. He slept with his cheek on his beloved's breast. And he sat with Frances and Mattie as they played Pat-A-Cake on the dirt floor of the newly built cabin. He would mimic their movements, and later, when Mattie would practice the moves by herself, Billy sat there before her. She couldn't see him as he went through the motions with her and chanted the song. But it was easy for him to pretend that she did. They would reach up to clap their hands together silently.
And now two evil men had come to threaten Billy's new family. They threatened his wife, his niece, and his in-laws. They threatened the fragile illusion of normalcy he had created since his death.
Under the Cottonwood tree, less than a mile from the Sowersby's cabin, Billy had watched and listened as the man called Dutch talked about returning to steal their pigs, and then threatened his family as well.
Billy had raged at the two men. He screamed and screamed at them. He summoned every curse word he had ever heard in his life. He called on God to damn the men to hell and rip them body and soul from this world. But the men just talked as if he was not even a wisp of smoke. Finally, Billy kicked and punched at the men, and even tried biting them, until finally he collapsed in the dust. He looked into the eyes of the younger man and saw compassion and fear there. But could find no shred of hope.
He followed them back to the cabin that night, and watched in helpless horror as they tried to raid the homestead, and as Thomas Sowersby fired his first shot. He stood helplessly as the Dutchman severed the throat of the man he loved as a new father.
And then he saw the door open, and he saw Frances standing there, her eyes wide in horror, as she looked upon the scene, her father bleeding out into the dust in the moonlight.
"I'm sorry, my love!" He screamed, falling to his knees in horror and helplessness. But as the Dutchman rushed past him, his hand grasped the man's arm, and he swung onto the man's back as easily as if he was swinging up to ride his father's favorite mare. After Dutch smashed through the door, Billy sailed over the man's head, crashing into the stone hearth across the one-room cabin, missing the crackling fire by mere inches. And he laid there, moaning. There was a buzzing in his head, as if he would pass out, or as if his true death was just a heartbeat away.
