Bess

Bess is a story about a man and his beloved horse sharing the same fate. The story appears in Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill your Bones.



The Story
John Nicholas raised horses. He had many horses of all kinds. But his favorite was Bess, a gentle old mare he had grown up with. He no longer rode her, for all she could now was just amble along. Bess spent her days grazing peacefully in the meadow.

That summer, for the fun of it, John Nicholas went into a fortune teller's booth. The fortune teller studied her cards. "I see danger ahead for you," she said. "Your favorite horse will cause you to die. I don't know when, but it will happen. It is in the cards." John Nicholas laughed. The idea that Bess would cause his death was nonsense. She was as dangerous as a bowl of soup. Yet from then on, whenever he saw her, he remembered the fortune teller's warning.

That fall a farmer from the other end of the county asked if he could have Bess. He had been thinking that the old horse will be perfect for his children to ride. "That's a good idea," John said. "It will be fun for them and it will give Bess something to do."

Later John told his wife about it. "Now Bess won't kill me," he said, and they both laughed. A few months later he saw the farmer who had taken her. "How's my Bess?" he asked. "Oh, she was fine for a while," the farmer said. "The children loved her. Then she got sick. I had to shoot her to put her out of her misery. It was a shame."

Despite himself, John breathed a sigh of relief. He wondered as if some crazy way, through some strange accident, Bess would kill him. Now, of course, she could not. "I like to see her," said John, "just to say good-bye. She was my favorite."

The bones of the dead horse were in a far corner of the man's farm. John knelled down and patted Bess' sun-bleached skull. Just then a rattlesnake, which had made its home inside the skull, sank its fangs into John Nicholas's arm, and killed him.