The Last Herd of the Salt Flats

I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada, where the alkali flats stretch like bone-white oceans and the town of Drywell huddles against the interstate like a hitchhiker who lost hope. There was always something wrong with the land out there, something that made the coyotes howl in harmonies that didn’t quite match, something that made the few old-timers spit three times when they mentioned the ‘old ones’ who had carved their faces into the cliffs before vanishing into the dust. I’d heard the stories as a kid, about the nightwalkers and the things that traded in souls, but I figured they were just tales to scare us away from the abandoned mines. I was wrong.

My name is Ethan, and this happened when I was seventeen, the summer my father left for the second time and my mother started talking to the walls. I was sleeping in the back room of our trailer, the one that faced the empty lot where the last gas station had burned down in ’99. The air conditioner had died, so the window was open, and the only light came from the moon through the torn screen. I woke up with the feeling that I wasn’t alone, not the kind of jolt you get from a nightmare, but a deep, primal certainty that something was watching me. I turned my head, and there was a shape at the foot of my bed, darker than the dark, a hole in the world that no light dared to fill. My first thought was that my brother was playing a prank, but the shape moved, and it was bigger than any man I knew. It stepped closer, and the darkness around it seemed to drink the moonlight, making the room feel smaller, suffocating.

When it got to my side, I saw it had a face, or rather, the suggestion of a face, with features that shifted like smoke and never settled. It reached out a hand that was too long and too thin, and placed it over my mouth and nose. I couldn’t breathe, not because of pressure, but because the air itself turned thick and stale, as if the thing had sucked the oxygen from space around me. I felt a cold that wasn’t temperature, but a loneliness that went to the bone, and I heard a sound like a thousand dry reeds rubbing together, not words, but a rhythm that seemed to say, ‘Give me your last breath.’ I tried to fight, but my limbs were lead, and my mind felt like it was being erased. The last thing I saw was its eyes, if you could call them that, two milky crescents that held the reflection of a landscape I’d never seen, a place with black trees and a river of salt. Then there was nothing.

I woke up to my mother shaking me, her face as white as the sheets. She said I’d been screaming, but I had no memory of it. She also told me something that chilled me to my core: she had seen the same shape, standing in the corner of my room, just before I woke. She said it wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time it had come for me. That morning, we found the coyotes dead in the yard, all five of them, arranged in a circle, their mouths open as if they’d been screaming, but with no sounds. The old-timers in town later said that was a sign, that the thing had taken a piece of my soul and left the coyotes as its payment. They warned me not to sleep with the window open anymore, and to keep a small pouch of salt near my bed. I laughed it off, but I was scared.

For weeks after, I felt a presence everywhere I went. It was worst at dusk, when the shadows lengthened across the salt flats, and I could swear I saw a figure standing on the horizon, just out of focus. My mother started sleeping with the lights on, and she would whisper to the air, begging whatever it was to leave her boy alone. I tried to ignore it, but the feeling grew, and I started to have dreams where I was walking across the salt flats, following the tracks of an animal that had no rear feet. In the dream, I always came to a dried-up lake bed, and in the center was a tree, leafless and black, with a single rope hanging from its limbs. And standing beneath it was the thing, and it was waiting for me.

One night, I decided to face it. I took a flashlight and a pocketknife, and I walked out onto the flats, following the lines of cracked earth that seemed to pulse with a faint light. The moon was full, but its light seemed dim, as if something was eating it from the inside. I walked for what felt like hours, and the town lights faded behind me, and I was alone in a vast, pale desert that hummed with a low frequency that felt like it was coming from the ground itself. I finally reached a spot where the salt crust was broken, and there was an opening, a dark crevice that went down into the earth. And from the crevice came a sound, like the lowing of cattle, but wrong, like the moans of creatures that were in pain. I knelt down, and I saw a herd of animals moving in the darkness below, but they were not normal cattle. They were pale, like the salt, with eyes that glowed a sickly green, and they were headed in a slow, endless circle, their hooves making no sound. In the center of that circle, on a raised mound, stood the thing from my room, and it was looking up at me. It raised its hand and beckoned, and I felt the pull, the urge to jump down and join them.

I don’t know what stopped me. Maybe it was the memory of my mother’s face, or the pouch of salt in my pocket that I had, ironically, brought with me. I pulled out the salt and threw it into the crevice, and the herd let out a unified bellow that shook the ground. The thing recoiled, and the opening began to close, the edges of the salt crumbling like a wound healing. I scrambled back, and I ran, not stopping until I collapsed at the edge of the flats, with the town lights like a distant promise. I never told anyone what I saw, but I know it was real. The next morning, I found a single hoofprint on my doorstep, but it was not from any animal I knew. The print was shaped like a hand, with five fingers, and it was filled with salt. My mother said nothing, but she slipped a small jar of salt into my jacket pocket before I left for school. I’ve never slept with a window open since, and I always keep salt on my nightstand. And whenever I hear the coyotes start to howl in a way that’s too harmonious, I know it’s not them. It’s the herd, still circling down there, waiting for someone to answer their call. And sometimes, when the wind blows across the flats, I swear I can feel their breath on my neck, and I pray that it’s just the wind.