Disclaimer: I don't own rights to 13 Ghosts. I just wanted to write some ghost stories in my free time.
Nyaa.
=^'.'^=
The West was supposed to be different for people like him.
George Markley was the town blacksmith. He was a tall man with a strong jaw, and his occupation gave him the body of Samson and Achilles combined. His curse was that he was black, which for nameless reasons was viewed as a crime against humanity in America. Even in the West, even in 1890. Slavery was gone but certainly not forgotten, no matter how far away from the South and their rage from the Civil War a person moved.
"That's him! He's the one who stole from me!" The local troublemaker and town drunk had stormed into the smithy, followed by a crowd of curious onlookers. "Markley! You give me back the $100 you stole from me, and my family silver!"
"Your family ain't never had any silver." George had fixed him with a stern look. How dare the man accuse him of such a despicable act – he broke his back to provide for his family, and teach his two little girls the meaning of pride in working hard.
The accuser took a step back as the large man stepped forward, intimidated by the deep baritone of George's no-nonsense voice. But he became aware of the crowd once more, turning to them for support. "He's a liar and a thief! We don't need his kind in our town!"
"My kind?" George's blood chilled into ice momentarily. "I think you need to crawl on back to the bar, friend. You don't wanna make trouble with me."
"You see? Now he's threatenin' me!" The crowd started murmuring as the drunk laid on the razzle-dazzle. "He's just like every other one of them! Lies! Steals! Now he's fixin' to strike me down for demanding some honesty!"
Then the man said an awful word. The only word that could pull a reaction out of the burly blacksmith.
In an instant, George grabbed the liar by the shoulders of his shirt, lifting him a good foot or so off of the dusty ground. "Let me show you the way out." he growled, doing all that he could to stay the urge of punching the sniveling coward. He marched over to the nearby saloon and threw him into the horse's trough.
He had been standing up for himself, his family and his forefathers. No one deserved to say that word, that ugly, six-lettered word.
And no one deserved to do what they'd done to his family.
George stared up at the nightmarish scene. His wife and his daughters were strung up in the tree outside their home, flesh and wood scorched from what he knew to be a horrible hate crime, cleverly disguised as their so-called Frontier Justice.
He was beyond words. A storm rolled inside him, flashing lightning anger and raining unfathomable anguish. Never again would he know the smile of his lover's warm, brown eyes, never again hear the laughter of his girls as they played outside with their dolls. They had been stolen from him by the true thief in this whole mess and a posse of other cowards hiding behind a sham that the rest of the town would turn a blind eye to.
He couldn't turn a blind eye, though. The warm, slowly-rising tears kept his vision clear before it turned malevolent and red.
Before he knew it, he had returned to his smithy and his sledgehammer was in hand. It felt his painful anger and pulsed back its own as though it were a living creature, equally outraged at the loss of its family. Just like that, he felt the affirmation he needed to carry out his own Frontier Justice, and he took the hammer along to help him do it.
The three posse members were still there when George kicked in the front door of the drunkard's house, and the homeowner was the first to go. The man grabbed his victim by the front of his shirt. The sledgehammer nailed him right between the eyes, making blood projectile out in all directions as the force knocked him to the floor.
That was where the real hollering began, as the other three men jumped away from their liquor. It didn't sway George in his rampage; he continued on like a bull, grabbing one man and using his sledgehammer to rip off another assailant's jaw. As that one fell to the ground, gagging on his blood, the third man stared in horror at his friend's wildly-lashing tongue.
George swung the hammer against the arm he held in his hand, causing the elbow to bend the wrong way with a sickening crunch. The captive howled in pain as bone protruded from skin. Another swing to the skull silenced him for good.
Now the last one recovered his ability to speak, and he used it in the worst way possible. He screamed at George for being a murderer, said that word which had started the dark scheme that the night had taken on, called his wife and daughter whores and recanted how they had shrieked about being raped, and then again as they were lit on fire.
The father's stomach turned. His older daughter was only 8 years old.
A single swing to the groin wasn't enough for the final killer. He endured several, each blow making the junction between his hips flatter and flatter. George didn't have time to put the disgusting creature out of his misery – in retrospect, he probably wouldn't have anyway – as a mob of men ran into the house, grabbing at the black man's arms and shoulders, pulling him down and ripping the weapon out of his grasp.
In fury, he screamed curses at them all. "They killed my wife! They raped my children in front of their mama! They set my family on fire still screaming for God to save them!"
His accusations fell on deaf ears. After all, he was a healthy, well-built black man, and he had just killed four shorter men, all four of them either under- or overweight. In a single act, he had turned from the victimized minority to a monstrous example of his people. Yet he had been in the right! He had tried to turn the other cheek once, and he had lost his family!
For what? For a drunk white man with no money, angry and jealous of a black man who took pride in the work he had to the point that he would call Markley a thief and a liar, and tried to make him seem like nothing more than a dumb animal? It was action that separated man from beast – and George Markley was no beast.
They chained him to a tree with the posture of a scarecrow. He cried out as a hatchet buried itself into his left wrist; it took four or five for the attackers to hack their way through the bone, since many of them made money off of each other and not with their hands. The two bones stretched in different directions as they wedged his sledgehammer into the bloody stump.
"This'll teach you, you monster!" someone yelled.
Another cried, "May God forgive your soul!"
But George didn't hear any of what they were saying to him. His mind was drowning in pain – they had begun to drive railroad spikes into his body while he was still breathing. Worse yet, they were railroad spikes that he himself had been working on that very day when the accusations had first flown out of a liar's mouth. The irony was not lost on him; it burned like salt in the wounds he was being given.
Not a single railroad spike killed him, not even the ones driven into his skull and torso. Instead, he was left to die in the elements, chained to the tree just outside of the town. The townspeople tried to position him so that he was staring at the church, but the last thing he saw at the end of three days were his wife and daughters, still hanging in a tree outside their home.
=^T_T^=
I hated writing for the Hammer with a passion, I'll admit it. He was my favorite ghost in the movie, and his story destroyed me the most when I read it. Racism is an ugly, ugly thing, and it's painful to know that it was most likely a very strong factor in 1890, even in the West where it was supposedly less prominent.
Of course, that made writing the parts about him killing his family's murderers all the sweeter for me.
Nyaa.
