On Emma's Bluff by Sara Elizabeth Rice, edited by davebccanada (audio ebook reader txt) 📕

had picked up, causing leaves to fidget across the open patches of grass. Caring not about shoes or the cold he unbolted the door and stepped upon the frigid wood floor of the porch.

For an instant he wished he were back in bed with Liz nuzzling close. But then he remembered that Liz was not the same Liz anymore. Her touch did not even feel the same to him. "Maybe that's what is really bothering me," he thought, "I can deal with Barbara Lee's death, but I cannot live without Liz." He shuddered and leaned to rest his hands on the railing that encased the screened cubical. "What kind of man am I? Why can't I make my wife okay again?" Theses thoughts seemed paramount over the cold that attacked him so he did not even notice a colder brush of air that raced across his back.

Thoughts of Barbara Lee bubbled up in his mind's eye; Barbara Lee as a little girl, Barbara Lee as a sassy adolescent. He almost recoiled from the images of Barbara Lee right before her death. She had not become a kind or gentle person. Her pettiness had often hurt a lot of feeling. Roy had never been blind to her over bearing nature. He had always just hoped that she would grow out of it. Now there was not chance of that.

When the light hit him on the porch he had his head bowed and his eyes on the palms of his hands. His first thought was that a car had some how managed to pull around into the back yard and had just turned its headlights on him. But as soon as he looked up he knew that was not the case.

His back yard was lit up like a campfire around a circle of people. But of course, there was not a campfire. And the people all looked very out of place. Their stances were stiff and their bodies awkwardly spaced. Like children separated for a game of ‘Mother May I’ they stood very still in their spots all facing toward Roy. No faces were visible. It was as if the ground beneath them was aglow. Their shadows loomed long and large in the trees behind them.   All told there were seven of them filling the night in Roy's back yard.

He could not think to speak. Roy walked to the screen door and opened it. Still none of his visitors moved. Roy took two steps down the stoop. The damp cool night coughed up a stench of rotting flesh.

"What's going on here?" Words finally escaped from Roy's clinched mouth. "I said, what's going on here?" He took yet another step and directed himself to the person nearest him.

"Just a little tea party, Daddy." There was no mistaking the lilting voice that had called out to him from the other end of the group.

"Barbara?" Roy could barely get the name out. His skin crawled up his legs, chest, and arms.

"Yes, Daddy." The shape stepped from the ranks and haltingly approached him.

"No, no, don't come over here." He scrambled for a backward step. His weight slipped sideways beneath him and he fell to one knee. "Please!" He was screaming now.

"I have to Daddy." The voice was petulant. "You see that I have to." She was coming closer.

"Noooooo!" He drug out the one syllable into a plea.

"Yessssssssss," she hissed back.

He could see her. He could see her clearly now. The face was Barbara Lee's face. The smile was even Barbara Lee's smile, but her expression evoked something far worse than anything Roy had ever seen. The expression was cold and wild and obscene. He threw his hands to his face as if he had been touched by something foul and repulsive. "Noooooooo!"

"You want to help us Daddy, don't you?" The sickly sweet breath of the voice assaulted his senses. "You want to save us don't you, Daddy?" The voice was now more guttural, more strident.

"I can't help you," he yelled. "You have to go away now. You have to go away, Barbara Lee. You have to go to your rest."

A low, soft, almost girlish chuckle started deep down in her throat. A chuckle that grew to a cackle and then to a shriek, "Go to hell, Daddy? Why don't you say it? Go to hell!" Her cries stirred the others. In sharp syncopation they all moved in toward the porch. A metallic buzz replaced the last notes of Barbara Lee's scream. The buzz rattled Roy's teeth in his mouth all the way up to his ears. "Nooo," he sobbed.

"Kill the witch. Kill the witch. Kill the witch," began their heavy refrain.

He could see them all now Angela, Billy, Lucille and Red. Next to Red moving slower and in shackles was Eddie. And then at the far end carrying something that he held in front of him, like a crown bearer's pillow came a small black child. As they took over the steps in front of Roy, he could see the object that lay on the satin pillow. It was the head of his niece; the head of his wife's sister's girl. The head which now stared up at him lifeless and mute was Emma's.

Roy awoke screaming in his bed. Liz was standing looking out the bedroom window into the back yard.

"Shhhh, nothing to fret about," she told him, "just a bad dream, that's all. That is all it was. I don't think they will come back." A content smile played about her lips.

 

 

Chapter 26

Emma figured that she was just about the luckiest girl in the whole world. Overnight her status had evolved; no longer was she the ‘shy, new girl’, she was Bill Simmons's new steady, one of the gang. Her immediate acceptance into the inner circle of the Bluff's high school elite was nothing if not startling.   Her relationship with Cindy suffered for it.

"So Carla, what 'divine' thing happened to you this past weekend?"   Cindy's voice just dripped with malice as she spoke to one of Emma's new companions.

Carla, who was sitting on one side of Emma while her long time friend, Sara, flanked the other side, only lifted her nose higher in the air and said, "Cindy, it's your own fault that you didn't join us. You were invited." Carla emphasized the last word by stabbing her fork into her salad and spearing a piece of lettuce.

"Oh, yeah." Cindy shot back, "That would have been just groovy." She had been invited to accompany them to the game, but not to stay the night in Carla's suite as the other guests had been done.

Emma was becoming very uncomfortable with her old friend's attitude.   The last weekend had been a lot of fun for Emma. Bill and she along with two other couples had driven to Jackson to see the emotion packed game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State; the two biggest rivals of the state.

Bill and Emma had lined up on the Mississippi state side. Lately their plans had included going to college there together. They, with the other two couples from the Bluff had stayed in the home of Carla's aunt Rose, a cheerful homebody who could have easily been mistaken for a widow except for the fact that her husband was still alive. This husband strictly avoided his wife's activities and remained mute at the periphery of their vision the whole weekend.   Deep in the spirit of the collegiate rivalry, the group had chanted, "Go to hell Ole Miss" all the way home.

Now, three days later, Emma sat in the Yazoo Pizza Hut and looked across the table to see the bitterness that marked her best friend's face. "Cindy," she had started hoping to say something to lighten the mood, but upon seeing Cindy's glare, the words just dried up in her mouth. Coming to Yazoo with Carla and Cindy had been a bad idea, a real bad idea. They just didn't hit it off and they never would. Emma guessed that since Cindy had grown up around Carla and her gang and had never bonded that she wasn't about to now. And on top of that something that Cindy had said still rang in her ears. Cindy had said, "Hey Emma, think about it, if these people found it so easy to dump their long time friend Joy, what makes you think that you can really count on them for any loyalty?"

It had been amazing how the same couples who had just a month back been doubling with Bill and Joy were now welcoming her into the dating fold with open arms. It was just a matter of substituting partners. No one seemed to care that their old buddy Joy was now out of the cliché. Emma was in. It was enough to make ones head spin. This topped with the fact that Emma was ‘in love’ made her blind to any insincerity in her new pals.

Joy had not gone to school for the last two days and no one had seemed to even notice. Not one friend called her to see if she were ill. No one had stopped by to check on her. Joy Hutchinson felt bad. She felt real bad. She hoped and prayed that she was pregnant.

The worn flannel nightgown that she had on since Monday night was beginning to itch. She had not bathed. She had not eaten. She had barely left her room at all. Her mother was beyond worried. She was now some where in the realm between angry and disappointed. Mrs. Hutchinson knew perfectly well what was bothering her daughter, the gossip had reached her, and she was embarrassed that Joy was showing such a lack of self-control. It was humiliating.

"For Heaven's sake, Joy Anne, don't you even care what people think?" she had burst out at Joy the night before. "You better pick yourself up, young lady, and stop this. Show some self respect."

Joy did not bother to respond.

________________________________________

 

Elizabeth Wilson turned the sleek envelope over in her hand. Six times today she had taken the letter from the drawer intent on destroying it, only to find herself mesmerized by the long white letter and unable to do anything more. Now it was close to three o'clock and time for Emma to be returning home from school. Liz sat at the kitchen table balancing the envelope on one corner and studying the spidery handwriting on the outside for a clue to its contents.

While never questioning her strange compulsion to burn or shred the offensive missive, she finally began to consider just opening the letter and reading it. "Well, why shouldn't I?" she said out loud as the thought dawned on her. But once again she felt the unusual inertia.

She rose from her seat and moved to the kitchen sink. A colander of peas sat to one side waiting to be washed and prepared for supper. Liz ignored them and carefully began to wash her hands under the tap. She stared out the back window as she did this, her mind heaped in thoughts.

"Who could be writing to that girl? What is going on here? This is still my house and I have the right to know what kind of mail is coming into my house." She concluded this thought