Steve Brill did not believe in ghosts or demons. Juan Lopez did.

So begins “The Horror From the Mound”, a favorite weird western of mine written by Robert E. Howard. It opens with the dichotomy of doubt and belief personified in the American Steve Brill and Mexican Juan Lopez, yet both are Texans, and each is the type of average enough individual Howard could have spoken with.

Howard’s prose has just the right amount of poetic description and raw action that grabs me by the lapels and forces me through the story just like the characters. A favorite method of his storytelling is also the use of little-known history, or at least the appearance of actual history, in this case playing with the very real expeditions of both Coronado and Cabeza de Vaca (albeit at differing times). I postulate that the fictional Hernando de Estrada and Don Santiago de Valdez have more in common with Cabeza de Vaca and his wild sojourn across the Gulf Coast than may have been previously considered.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca is considered the first European to cross the North American continent.

Not that he wanted to.

The story goes that Cabeza de Vaca’s unusual surname – Cow’s Head in Spanish was a noble title bestowed upon an ancestor by King Sancho for assistance in fighting the Moors at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in central Spain in 1212. This could be an apocryphal story for a shepherd using the skull of a cow as a marker along a particular path. We may never know.

In any case, Cabeza de Vaca came to the New World in 1527 as part of a Spanish expedition to conquer the regions north of the Gulf of Mexico. The commander Narváez had grossly misjudged how far they were from Mexico and yet proceeded in his goal to take Florida. At some point his company became separated from their ships and they were forced to continue their explorations on foot across the coast heading west. Starvation and fights with the natives took their toll. They attempted rafts to further their journey, but storms also caused men to become separated and die one way or another.

Cabeza de Vaca himself survived by becoming a trader and a medicine man. He eventually made his way back to Mexico and completed a book, La relación y comentarios (“The Account and Commentaries”) in 1542.

Robert E. Howard would no doubt have been aware of this first account of Texas and the adventures it told. One instance, in particular, makes me think of the pseudo-historical account told in “The Horror From the Mound”.

Juan Lopez writes his message (which can only be told to a son, albeit Juan has no son) on how his ancestor Porfirio Lopez spoke of the original expedition picking up the lone survivor of a plague ship, one Don Santiago de Valdez, and having the same accompany them on their exploration of what would become Texas.

This fits well with the true account that Cabeza de Vaca gives us of the grisly end of the Narváez expedition which was whittled down by starvation, sickness and Indian attacks. Of the original three hundred men that began the expedition only four survived to tell of it. The idea of the lost shipwreck is great storytelling material and Howard gets to play with the timelines in his own fashion for the sake of the story. Just as the old tales Bob’s nursemaids told him coalesced into “Pigeons From Hell”, perhaps a day at school learning about early Texas history inspired this other classic of western horror.

In his long eight-year survival trek through what would become Texas there is only one supernatural tinged story related by Cabeza de Vaca. He came upon an Indian village that had been beset by some supernatural antagonist that was called Mister Bad Thing, or Mala Cosa.

Mala Cosa had visited the tribe around fifteen years before Cabeza de Vaca heard these tales. Mala Cosa was said to be a small man and had a beard, but they could never see him distinctly, as if he had that blurry effect upon him like so many other reported creatures these days. The natives would know he was approaching at night because the hair on their arms would stand on end, as if an electrical effect was related to his coming. A blazing brand would shine on their doors as he rushed inside and seized whomever he would. He would then use a peculiar mystic knife of some kind and slash open their entrails and take a portion that he would cast in the fire. He would sever arms and then a short time later miraculously rejoin the limb and heal these same terrible wounds.

At times Mala Cosa would mysteriously appear dressed as a woman and other times dressed as a man. He would pick up a an entire hut and toss it up in the air until it came crashing down. The natives would offer him food as a means of appeasement, but he would not eat their food. They said they never saw him eat. Once Mala Cosa was asked where he came from, and he pointed to a crevice in the ground and said his home was below the earth.

Cabeza de Vaca did not believe any of these wild stories until many of the natives showed him the scars they bore from Mala Cosa’s vicious attacks.

At best all Cabeza de Vaca could do was declare that Mala Cosa was a servant of the devil and give them the signs and tokens of his Christian faith to banish the devil should he return.

I’m not a big enough scholar of REH to know if he actually read Cabeza de Vaca’s account, but I am very inclined to believe that Howard was aware of it and that it fired his imagination to play with the what ifs and produce his own story.

Roy Thomas’ adaptation with a classic Gil Kane/Tom Palmer cover.

Today many of the natives’ stories of Mala Cosa sound closer to what we might think of as Alien abduction and experimentation, something akin to Skinwalker ranch and cattle mutilation and so on, but in Howard’s day that was not spoken of in the same light, so such a strange account might play better with what was only a thirty-four-year-old story of vampirism. Dracula is also an epistolary tale and a key point of “The Horror From the Mound” is the last letter written by Juan Lopez that reveals the crucial backstory of the vampire and his weird history.

I love this narrative method because it’s the only way for the main character to find the historical truth, short of the vampire telling the story himself, which would lose the urgency of eerie conflict.

All said and done, this piece is a favorite yarn of mine as it merges so many aspects of what makes REH my favorite writer. The poetic descriptions coupled with raw-boned action, historical blending of the past and present, because what happened before matters in the now, and of course the indomitable spirit of a Texan cowpuncher down on his luck.

David J. West writes dark fantasy and weird westerns because the voices in his head won’t quiet until someone else can hear them. He is a great fan of sword & sorcery, ghosts and lost ruins, so of course he lives in Utah. You can find his books and short stories on Amazon and Audible.