The Shades of Willow’s Creekby Wayne C. Peake, Jr. |
Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
Chapter Two: The Draining
My Mother’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Fearfully she stared at shadows and mumbled to herself about the child she’d lost and long-dead relatives, some of whom I’d never known. Sometimes Mother would jerk suddenly as if she were being cruelly pinched. Through many a long night, I sat beside her bed, too worried about her condition to leave her alone. Heartsick, I watched as her life slowly drained away before my eyes.
Amelia took care of her during the daylight hours, feeding her with a spoon and wiping her chin as you would for a baby. She changed Mother’s sheets every day and bathed her with kindness. Amelia never complained. She was always cheerful and pleasant even under the most trying of circumstances. My respect, my love for her grew stronger with every passing day. But the strain on her was all too apparent: dark circles formed under her once bright eyes, and her silky rich hair became frayed and brittle.
Between the dismal tolling of the long case clock and my Mother’s bouts with delirium, my life became a nightmarish vigil. With dawn my mood would lighten, but to rest, to sleep was only a forgotten dream. In the afternoons I would find myself nodding off, only to be awakened by that accursed clock. I began to despise it, but it was a family heirloom.
One cool and misty afternoon I looked from the window of my room and saw the doctor’s carriage in the yard. A quiet, humble man, he greeted me with an earnest handshake at the door and we went upstairs. I watched quietly as he examined Mother. Afterward we sat in the kitchen and chatted over a pot of hot coffee.
He told me, sadly, that the village was plagued by consumption. I will never forget his words: “It’s the damnedest thing.” He sipped his coffee slowly, put it back down on the table and resumed. “Never thought I’d be attending the funerals of three children in one blessed week! There’s talk of digging up corpses!
“There was a case though — I remember reading about it. Mercy Brown I believe, in New England. When they dug her up she was still fresh as a daisy. The consumption had stopped, but that was a hundred years or more ago. Damn strange. Well, all this crazy talk is getting to me.”
Several days later, I saw Amelia sitting on the stairs with her head in her hands. I sat down beside her. She looked up and said, “She’s gone.” My sister cried as I put my arm around her and she buried her head in my chest.
It was a small funeral. The few mourners there talked about my Mother’s charity and whispered secretly about the years of suffering and heartbreak she’d endured at my father’s hand.
It was on the morning of the third day after the funeral that I began to notice signs of infection in my sister. Amelia was weak and lethargic. She tried to hide it, but I could tell she was developing a serious cough. I can’t tell you how the anguish tore at my soul. How could I watch my dear sister waste away...
In less than two weeks she was almost completely bedridden. It was only then that she began to confide in me. I would sit at her bedside and listen to her simple dreams, dreams of a kind husband, a warm home, and lots and lots of children.
We both knew she had very little time left, but we pretended. The doctor came whenever he could, but really, there was nothing he could do for her other than to deaden the pain and suppress the terrible cough.
Then one night, with a weak and trembling voice Amelia whispered that Mother stood before her bed at night. Mother was trying to drive our father away, but she just wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t make my sister understand that it was impossible, that they were both dead and buried.
Amelia put her hand gently to my face, looked into my eyes and sighed: “The spirit lives on, dear brother.” I wanted to believe it was only the influence of my Mother’s delirious rambling and my sister’s obviously weakened condition that made her say such things, but I feared she was losing her mind.
The following evening I must have dozed off in the chair beside Amelia’s bed, when an ominous tolling of the long case clock awakened me. I heard her desperately crying out, “Get off me, get off me!” I leapt from my chair. Her arms beat the empty air, her hips ground up from the bed.
I stared in helpless disbelief. I tried to wake her by shaking her shoulders, and her eyes flashed open with an unbelievably harsh anger in them. “Oh, I’m sorry, “ she said, the anger fading from her eyes, “hand me my bottle — will you?” She gulped the powerful sedative desperately as if it were a glass of cool water.
“Do you love me?” Amelia asked with her head turned away, setting the bottle down gently.
“Of course I do, you know that.”
Amelia turned her head back to look at me and said, “Then you must do something for me.”
“Anything.”
“Mother says you must stop him and there’s only one way.”
“What?”
“You must open the coffin, cut off his miserable head and burn the body.”
“Amelia... I can’t.”
“I’ll die if you don’t! What harm could it do, if he’s already dead? But if I’m right, you can end this.”
“No harm? You want me to desecrate his grave and burn his corpse!”
“I want to live!” Then she asked with an edgy glare so unlike her. “You can’t? After all he did to you! You hated him!”
“It’s insane,” I pleaded helplessly.
Amelia sat upright in the bed and grabbed my arms forcefully. “If you really loved me, you’d do it!” The strain was too much for her, and she began to cough convulsively and spit up blood; it spilled slowly over her lips and down her chin. She lay back, squeezing her eyes shut hard against the pain and whispered, “You said anything. Anything — please, you must... soon.”
Chapter 3: Golgotha
I needed to get out of Willow’s Creek. The atmosphere was abysmally thick and heavy. Medusa and I spent the late afternoon in the hills. As I rode back Amelia’s words played over and over again within my mind. So I decided to visit the family cemetery.
As Medusa and I neared the little white picket fence that enclosed the graves she began to neigh and retreat, tossing her head, half-bucking. I couldn’t get her to go anywhere near those graves.
Feeling a little betrayed and angry with Medusa I rode her back to the stables and unsaddled her. She gave me a guilty look then, and nuzzled my shoulder. I stroked her neck as she ate an apple from my hand. I couldn’t stay mad at her long.
* * *
I heard the long case clock toll as I climbed the lonely stairwell. Something in those reverberating chimes played eerily upon my nerves. The tolling grew more and more unbearable with every beat of my quaking heart. As I stood at last at the top of the stairs it tolled again with a final heavy note.
Suddenly desperate, panic-stricken, I ran down the hall to Amelia’s room and threw open her door. I saw her lying on the bed with her head and arms draped over the edge. Her eyes’ were cold and frozen, staring reproachfully at me. Blood stained the sheets and the delicate ruffles of her white satin gown.
I pulled my dear Amelia up from the bed, cradling her there in my arms, rocking her back and forth. “Forgive me, forgive me,” I wept. How long I held her, I couldn’t say, but then a squirming queasy feeling arose from my belly and the thought of holding her became abhorrent to me. I stood and wiped the tears from my face.
The moments dragged on agonizingly, as I tried to touch her again. Reaching out my hand then withdrawing it quickly, like a child testing the heat of the flames until it’s burnt. I should have been stronger. I’d seen untold numbers of the dead, nearly twenty thousand at Fredericksburg alone. But this... this was immeasurably different: this was flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, the still warm body of my lifeless sister lying before me.
Then cursing myself, ashamed of my weakness. I grimly set my jaw, steeling myself for what needed to be done, out of respect, out of love for her. I slowly drew near and gently touched her body, carefully arranging it there on the bed, folding her arms over her chest and lightly closing her eyes of cold fire.
Madness seized me then like some rough beast, and in the grip of monstrous insanity I vowed to dig my father from the dank and dismal earth. I strode angrily to the barn, grabbed the wheelbarrow and threw in an axe, shovel and kerosene.
As I walked up the hillside to the family cemetery, gray clouds boiled in the angry sky and the ancient oaks swayed darkly overhead. I stared at the silent graves of my long-dead ancestors. Opening the white picket fence I walked irreverently over their graves. Hour after hour, I dug in the rocky root-bound soil, until at last my shovel hit the coffin lid.
The sun set just as I began scraping dirt from the dark surface of that oblong box. The lid groaned as I pried it free with the tip of my shovel. A sudden realization of what I was about to do swept over me, a last twinge of rationality. I laughed with mirthless abandon and tore the lid from the coffin.
Thunder rolled tempestuously across the heavens. Lightning speared the dizzying skies, momentarily revealing the cadaverous face of my father. The skin was a ghastly pink, stretched tightly over the sharp contours of his skull, accentuating the angular harshness of his features. His hair, always cropped short in life, was now long and snaky, the nails grown long, curling and claw-like. A cruel smile twisted his thin lips. Fear, hatred, loathing, regret, a dozen emotions plagued me at once, but none so powerful as my insatiable desire for vengeance.
I dragged his remains from their resting place, slipping in the mud, struggling recklessly in the growing darkness. Grabbing the axe from the wheelbarrow, I stood over the corpse and, placing the edge of the axe on his throat, I measured my stroke. Lifting the axe back, I swung down with every ounce of my strength and the stroke fell with a sick thud, the force driving his now broken and half-severed neck deep into the earth. I swung again and the axe cleaved through.
I stood in the storm staring at the grisly head, as it lay half-buried in the mud, with the rain washing dirty rivulets down over his morbid features. Was it over, was it finally over, but what did it matter? My mind wavered precariously on the brink of utter lunacy. I knew I would never be well, never whole again. I would never escape the memories, the shades of Willow’s Creek.
I pushed the corpse-laden wheelbarrow through the mud to the edge of the char-blackened pit and wearily dumped its grisly contents. The headless corpse rolled down over the scorched earth to the bottom. I stacked firewood over it and poured kerosene on it.
As I lit the blaze it woofed loudly, sucking the oxygen from the air. The stench of burning flesh was horrific, yet I stood there for hours in the rain, feeding the flames as if it were a living thing until only white-hot coals and bones remained.
Then I tossed in his miserable head. I watched as it cooked in the glowing coals of the pit. The tongues of flames licked at it, blistering and peeling flesh from bone.
Tired, wet and coughing, the mud clinging to my knee-high boots, I staggered back to the house. Willow’s Creek waited breathlessly: empty, still and cold. Wearily I opened the door and crossed the threshold. I climbed the winding stairs, pulling myself ever upwards by the strength of my will alone. With great relief, I finally reached the top of the stairs and walked slowly through the darkened hallway.
With a palatable dread that shook me to the very core, I suddenly realized I’d forgotten to close the door to Amelia’s room. I wanted only to absolve my mind of the memory of her death! Not to relive the nightmarish vision, the spectre of her lifeless form. And yet, my head turned... and I saw her lying there so still, like sleeping beauty waiting to be awakened by a lover’s kiss.
An abysmal chill ran along my spine at the thought. I turned quickly away, stumbling over my own feet, and scrambled down the corridor desperate to reach whatever sanctuary my room might afford.
My endurance had been driven to its limit; I barely had the strength left to stand. I fell heavily onto the bed in my drenched clothes. I slept, really slept for the first time since my return to Willow’s Creek.
The brassy tolling of the long case clock awoke me. I bolted upright in bed, wild-eyed and trembling. It was then I saw it, an unnatural wavering in the corner of the room, a deeper shade waiting among the encroaching shadows. There before me was a dark and misty vision of my own beloved sister, Amelia.
Blood stained the lacy ruffles of her satiny white gown and a scarlet trickle spilled over her moist and pale, rosy lips. Her raven black hair stirred restlessly, flowing softly about her head. But I felt not the slightest hint of a breeze. How I prayed that I was still dreaming or insane. Even insanity was preferable to the nightmare reality that confronted me.
My heart beat heavily within my chest till I thought surely it would burst asunder. And yet as the blood thundered in my ears a strangely curious hope awoke in me. Had I been wrong? Was she still alive, still breathing? Her body had been so tensionless and chill, like a puppet without supporting strings, a wineskin sans the wine.
Amelia moved slowly, languidly, catlike. I noticed that her bare feet hardly seemed to touch the floor; gliding as if she rode those same strange currents that played so freely, so wantonly, in her dark curling hair. Now she stood at the foot of my bed with a reproachful, hungry look in her eyes. She smiled eerily and spoke in a chill, hollow voice. “The spirit lives on, dear brother.”
Copyright © 2009 by Wayne C. Peake, Jr.
