Original Fic: I Ain't Afraid of Emily May (1/?)
Title: I Ain't Afraid of Emily May
Author: Me, ladychi. Otherwise known as K.J. Stueve
Summary: Ten years ago, Nate Hannigan's cousin Callie was brutally murdered by a force he didn't understand. Now the ghost of the vengeful Emily May has been summoned again, and Nate will sacrifice anything and everything to keep her from killing another member of his family.
Author's Note: I have no intention of trying to go the traditional publishing route with this story and I'm pretty well out of motivation to write, so I thought... I'd post the chapters of this story that I have, and keep writing until it's complete, and give it to you all as a holiday gift.
I Ain't Afraid of Emily May
The fog hung low and thick, coating the hills that sheltered my grandfather’s house. The sky was starless, the night my cousin Callie died. We sat facing each other, kneeling across the floor in my grandfather’s attic. Her hand clasped in mind, we breathed heavily with the rush of doing what was not allowed.
Callie took the silver dollar in her hand. She flipped it up, and we both watched it flip over itself three times. It landed with a thump on the hardwood floor.
I tasted blood in my mouth, and her hand squeezed mine so tight I thought she might break a bone. But she was the one who whispered the words.
“I ain’t afraid of Emily May.”
She’s the one who paid the price.
Chapter One: Return To Bent Fork
Driving back into Bent Fork wasn’t really in the game plan. Actually, coming back to Bent Fork at all wasn’t in the plan. It wasn’t a decision I’d made in some tortured moment of teenaged angst in the wake of Callie’s funeral. It was a well measured, time-tested decision I made over the course of several years, and it had mainly to do with the fact that I was scared shitless.
In general, I don’t think we trust fear enough. Everyone in my family has the “blessing” of being able to deal with the supernatural the way most folks won’t, and so I’ve been around the block a time or two, and I can tell you this much: It’s not the Freds and the Daphnes of this world that make it through a real-life horror show. It’s the Shaggys and the Scoobys: those people that have enough common sense to go, “you know what? It’s really not worth dying over the spooky sound in the cave. I think I’ll split”. A good healthy sense of fear will save you from poking the bear, from awakening the monster under your bed - from summoning the demons from the floorboards.
I wouldn’t have come back at all if it hadn’t been for a phone call from my other cousin, Annie. Annie’s the cute one in our family. Painfully normal. She missed out on the shocking red hair, the height, and the ability to see dead people. On second thought, maybe that normality’s not so painful.
Annie did the usual right after college. Well, usual for Bent Fork, anyway. She married her high school sweetheart, Ben, and popped out a few kids, and she tried to keep them away from the Hannigan side of the family.
Until, apparently, two nights ago, when her daughter Beth found the silver dollar.
I’ve always liked Beth. She was precocious but not overly-so, persistent, interesting, willing to listen to all of what Annie calls my “tall tales”.
See, I’m a professional, uh - well, I don’t know that there’s a good terminology for what I do. I like to think of it as “ghost education”. I don’t do exorcisms, mostly because ghosts are really hard to get rid of. I mean, think about it. These are former people who held on to this world through death, which is, you know, only mildly traumatizing. Ghosts are hard to get rid of, and I’m lazy.
No, I’m much more interested in helping people learn to adjust to the presence of their permanent guests - how to avoid all of those little snares that can lead to you being possessed, or having to protect your stuff from a vengeful poltergeist. Unfortunately, another large part of my job is disabusing people of the notion that they have a ghost - that they’re being haunted by former spouses, lovers, or, and these are the worst… children. Ghosts are rare, you see - remember what I said earlier about death being usually traumatic enough to put someone away for good in the spirit world - and dangerous ones are even rarer than that. Even poltergeists are usually only after attention.
So why, then, you ask, would I rush home to Bent Fork, a town I’ve been pretty successfully avoiding for ten years over a silver dollar?
I said violent ghosts are rare. I didn’t say they don’t exist.
**
My grandfather kept the silver dollar in the top right drawer of his desk. We weren’t supposed to know about it, the grandchildren, just like we weren’t supposed to inherit my grandfather’s gift. But it wasn’t a hard secret to discover - it belonged in the only drawer Grandfather ever locked. It was the only thing in his life he wouldn’t discuss. And therefore, it was the only thing that Callie, Annie and I ever cared to try and discover.
It took us a whole summer of searching for the key, and an extremely large bottle of whiskey (which, admittedly, it was not hard to convince my grandfather to drink), a concentrated effort to lift the keys from the pocket where he kept them, and then… the drawer was opened while my grandfather slept.
“You should open it,” Callie said to me, holding the key flat in her palm without closing her hand around it, as though it were slightly hot to the touch.
“No.” Even then, I was chickenshit. “This is your… quest. You talked me into this.”
Not precisely true, but then the precise truth doesn’t really matter all that much to sixteen-year-old boys.
Callie rolled her eyes at me. “You’re chickenshit.”
Callie was, on the other hand, a master of precise truth.
“No. I just don’t feel like being horrifically murdered by Grandpa.”
“Please. Grandpa won’t kill you,” Callie said, throwing open the door to the study. “Three days in the stocks, tops.”
I
shook my head. “Drawn and quartered, at minimum.”
“What do you suppose is in here?” Callie asked. This was the start of an old game - one we’d been playing since the first time we were scolded never to touch the drawer.
“Pirate treasure map,” I said. My default first answer - I’m not creative by nature, and I appreciate routine and ritual. Callie - eeeeh, not so much.
“Nate, I’m going to shove this key up your ass. Come on, be creative.”
I shrugged. “Fine, then. Confederate gold.”
“I should disallow that answer,” Callie said, fitting the key inside the lock, “since it’s complete historical crockery, but at the very least, it’s a deviation from the norm.”
“Maybe we should focus more on breaking and entering, rather than speculation,” I said.
“Trying to throw attention away from your abysmal failure, I see,” Callie said.
“No. Remember what I said earlier, about not dying? The longer we hang around, the higher the likelihood of imminent death gets.”
“Fussypants,” Callie said. She pulled the drawer open and we peered at the contents inside: at first glance, more than a little disappointing, even in hindsight; a velvet pouch, covered in dust; a flask, yellowed and dirty; a stack of letters, ancient and cracked. Callie reached for the letters with greedy hands and I took the velvet pouch.
I studied it for a long moment. “You know how sometimes, you just get a really bad feeling about something?”
“Just open the pouch,” Callie said, flipping through the letters with interest.
“Hm.” I loosened the tie on the blue pouch and peered inside. “Nothing too exciting here. Just some loose change.”
Callie took it from me. “The coins might be old, though. We could go to the library, look them up.”
“Or use a computer. I know, they’re fancy new devices…”
“Shut up, asshole.” Callie removed the coins, peered at them in the light. “Some of these are actually old.”
“How old are we talking?”
“American-old,” Callie said. “1861 silver dollar.”
“Could be worth a lot of money,” I hedged, “or it could be worthless.”
Callie reached in her pocket and pulled out a notebook, scribbling something quickly. “I think I hear grandfather knocking around. Put it back.”
I nodded, putting the silver dollar back in the pouch. We shut the drawer and Callie locked it. I thought that was the end of it. I was, of course, wrong.
**
I pulled into what had been my grandfather’s driveway with a mix of dread and… well, yeah, mostly dread. Like I’ve said previously, I’m not what you would call a brave guy. I feel like this point can’t be emphasized enough, and if there’s one thing not-brave guys like me hate, it’s direct conflict with the past we’ve spent our whole lives running from.
And here it was. White-washed picket fences and tired plank board siding. Terrifying, really. All that… normalcy. Is it deceptive, yes? But aside from the crazy homicidal ghost my second-cousin has unwittingly called down from herself, there’s something just as scary inside that house.
All the women I’m related to, who think that I should settle down, produce children, or come out of the closet already.
I turned off the exhausted engine of my 2001 Ford pick-up and sat there in the driveway, trying to remember the last time I’d been here. It had probably been for Callie’s funeral, an event which remains mostly blurred to me, in the way that intense emotional experiences sometimes are. I rested my head on the steering wheel for a long moment, trying to gain composure, to prepare myself for what lay ahead. Time we could have used, Callie and I, if we’d realized what it was we were up against.
**
“So, I’ve been reading those letters.”
Callie made a couple of mistakes when she approached me with this statement. The first was that she tried to talk to me while I was laying on my borrowed bed in Grandpa’s house, listening to Death Cab for Cutie (I went through a phase. Get over it.) and the second was that she removed the headphones from which I was listening to the music. So I might have been a little testy with her.
“Jesus, Callie, you’re such a fucking bitch.”
She blithely ignored me. “I’ve been reading the letters we found in Grandpa’s drawer.”
“I thought we put all that stuff back.”
Callie shook her head. “Yes, but I wanted another look, so I got them back.”
“Callie.”
“Scold me later. There’s actually some really cool stuff in here.”
“Callie, I would love to listen to you geek out about historical crap or whatever…”
“Nate, shut the hell up. It’s cool.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your definition of cool and mine are so separate.”
“Focus, dork brain.” Callie shoved the letters in my face. “This is a series of letters between a girl who lived here, in this house, and her cousin in Philadelphia.”
“Yeah, so what? It’s an old house, Callie. People have lived here for a long time.”
“Don’t be deliberately ignorant, Nate, you’re better than that,” Callie snapped at me. She was always a bit impatient with my efforts to appear cool.
“Okay, okay. What’s in the letters that has you so riled up?” I turned the MP3 player off and gave Callie my full attention.
“Read them.” She tossed them on my bed, and walked away.
**
January 19, 1861
My dearest cousin:
I, of course, miss you every moment that you are gone. The house is dreadfully empty without. Every thing here is much the same. Father gets in his moods and Uncle runs and hides from him in the barn or in the cellar, and Mama is left trying to pick up the pieces. I am not much help, as I am now the only girl and I find my wiles are not much use against Father without you.
I wish you would write to me and tell me of the things the fashionable ladies of Philadelphia are getting into, for I need a good laugh which could only be provided by their absurdity.
I miss your laughter. I find this house is unbearable without it.
Yours -
Emily May
*
February 19, 1861
My Dearest Cousin,
Father got in a frightful mood last night. There was much shouting and then together, he and Uncle consumed a whole bottle of whiskey, which only compounded the problems. Mother remains in bed and she weeps all the day long. I think perhaps now it would be best for you to remain in Philadelphia. Persuade your employer to keep you on. It will do no good for you to come back. I shall endeavor to escape, myself, and will perhaps join you in a few months’ time.
Yours,
Emily May
*
I tossed the letters down on the bed and looked up at Cassie. “So?”
“So I handed you the last two letters,” Callie said. “Doesn’t it sound like whoever this girl was, her father was dangerous?”
“Yes, but it was also more than a hundred years ago,” I said - a pretty valid point, to my mind.
Callie shifted on her feet. “Come on, Nate, you can’t tell me you don’t feel it.”
“Feel what?” I started to fiddle with the MP3 player in my lap, avoiding her eyes.
“You know what I’m talking about. You’ve felt her before.”
“I haven’t.”
That was a lie.
“Then how do you know what I’m talking about?” Callie climbed on my bed, invading my space. “Nate, come on. We used to talk about her all the time.”
“The ghost in the walls.” I rolled my eyes. “That was a story we used to tell each other, Callie, it’s not a real thing.”
“Okay, fine.” Callie got up from the bed. “Whatever, Nate. Don’t believe me. But I’m going to figure this out. I’ve got a feeling about Emily May. I think she could be our girl.”
“And I think you should leave it alone, Callie.”
That, at least, I was right about.
Author: Me, ladychi. Otherwise known as K.J. Stueve
Summary: Ten years ago, Nate Hannigan's cousin Callie was brutally murdered by a force he didn't understand. Now the ghost of the vengeful Emily May has been summoned again, and Nate will sacrifice anything and everything to keep her from killing another member of his family.
Author's Note: I have no intention of trying to go the traditional publishing route with this story and I'm pretty well out of motivation to write, so I thought... I'd post the chapters of this story that I have, and keep writing until it's complete, and give it to you all as a holiday gift.
I Ain't Afraid of Emily May
The fog hung low and thick, coating the hills that sheltered my grandfather’s house. The sky was starless, the night my cousin Callie died. We sat facing each other, kneeling across the floor in my grandfather’s attic. Her hand clasped in mind, we breathed heavily with the rush of doing what was not allowed.
Callie took the silver dollar in her hand. She flipped it up, and we both watched it flip over itself three times. It landed with a thump on the hardwood floor.
I tasted blood in my mouth, and her hand squeezed mine so tight I thought she might break a bone. But she was the one who whispered the words.
“I ain’t afraid of Emily May.”
She’s the one who paid the price.
Chapter One: Return To Bent Fork
Driving back into Bent Fork wasn’t really in the game plan. Actually, coming back to Bent Fork at all wasn’t in the plan. It wasn’t a decision I’d made in some tortured moment of teenaged angst in the wake of Callie’s funeral. It was a well measured, time-tested decision I made over the course of several years, and it had mainly to do with the fact that I was scared shitless.
In general, I don’t think we trust fear enough. Everyone in my family has the “blessing” of being able to deal with the supernatural the way most folks won’t, and so I’ve been around the block a time or two, and I can tell you this much: It’s not the Freds and the Daphnes of this world that make it through a real-life horror show. It’s the Shaggys and the Scoobys: those people that have enough common sense to go, “you know what? It’s really not worth dying over the spooky sound in the cave. I think I’ll split”. A good healthy sense of fear will save you from poking the bear, from awakening the monster under your bed - from summoning the demons from the floorboards.
I wouldn’t have come back at all if it hadn’t been for a phone call from my other cousin, Annie. Annie’s the cute one in our family. Painfully normal. She missed out on the shocking red hair, the height, and the ability to see dead people. On second thought, maybe that normality’s not so painful.
Annie did the usual right after college. Well, usual for Bent Fork, anyway. She married her high school sweetheart, Ben, and popped out a few kids, and she tried to keep them away from the Hannigan side of the family.
Until, apparently, two nights ago, when her daughter Beth found the silver dollar.
I’ve always liked Beth. She was precocious but not overly-so, persistent, interesting, willing to listen to all of what Annie calls my “tall tales”.
See, I’m a professional, uh - well, I don’t know that there’s a good terminology for what I do. I like to think of it as “ghost education”. I don’t do exorcisms, mostly because ghosts are really hard to get rid of. I mean, think about it. These are former people who held on to this world through death, which is, you know, only mildly traumatizing. Ghosts are hard to get rid of, and I’m lazy.
No, I’m much more interested in helping people learn to adjust to the presence of their permanent guests - how to avoid all of those little snares that can lead to you being possessed, or having to protect your stuff from a vengeful poltergeist. Unfortunately, another large part of my job is disabusing people of the notion that they have a ghost - that they’re being haunted by former spouses, lovers, or, and these are the worst… children. Ghosts are rare, you see - remember what I said earlier about death being usually traumatic enough to put someone away for good in the spirit world - and dangerous ones are even rarer than that. Even poltergeists are usually only after attention.
So why, then, you ask, would I rush home to Bent Fork, a town I’ve been pretty successfully avoiding for ten years over a silver dollar?
I said violent ghosts are rare. I didn’t say they don’t exist.
**
My grandfather kept the silver dollar in the top right drawer of his desk. We weren’t supposed to know about it, the grandchildren, just like we weren’t supposed to inherit my grandfather’s gift. But it wasn’t a hard secret to discover - it belonged in the only drawer Grandfather ever locked. It was the only thing in his life he wouldn’t discuss. And therefore, it was the only thing that Callie, Annie and I ever cared to try and discover.
It took us a whole summer of searching for the key, and an extremely large bottle of whiskey (which, admittedly, it was not hard to convince my grandfather to drink), a concentrated effort to lift the keys from the pocket where he kept them, and then… the drawer was opened while my grandfather slept.
“You should open it,” Callie said to me, holding the key flat in her palm without closing her hand around it, as though it were slightly hot to the touch.
“No.” Even then, I was chickenshit. “This is your… quest. You talked me into this.”
Not precisely true, but then the precise truth doesn’t really matter all that much to sixteen-year-old boys.
Callie rolled her eyes at me. “You’re chickenshit.”
Callie was, on the other hand, a master of precise truth.
“No. I just don’t feel like being horrifically murdered by Grandpa.”
“Please. Grandpa won’t kill you,” Callie said, throwing open the door to the study. “Three days in the stocks, tops.”
I
shook my head. “Drawn and quartered, at minimum.”
“What do you suppose is in here?” Callie asked. This was the start of an old game - one we’d been playing since the first time we were scolded never to touch the drawer.
“Pirate treasure map,” I said. My default first answer - I’m not creative by nature, and I appreciate routine and ritual. Callie - eeeeh, not so much.
“Nate, I’m going to shove this key up your ass. Come on, be creative.”
I shrugged. “Fine, then. Confederate gold.”
“I should disallow that answer,” Callie said, fitting the key inside the lock, “since it’s complete historical crockery, but at the very least, it’s a deviation from the norm.”
“Maybe we should focus more on breaking and entering, rather than speculation,” I said.
“Trying to throw attention away from your abysmal failure, I see,” Callie said.
“No. Remember what I said earlier, about not dying? The longer we hang around, the higher the likelihood of imminent death gets.”
“Fussypants,” Callie said. She pulled the drawer open and we peered at the contents inside: at first glance, more than a little disappointing, even in hindsight; a velvet pouch, covered in dust; a flask, yellowed and dirty; a stack of letters, ancient and cracked. Callie reached for the letters with greedy hands and I took the velvet pouch.
I studied it for a long moment. “You know how sometimes, you just get a really bad feeling about something?”
“Just open the pouch,” Callie said, flipping through the letters with interest.
“Hm.” I loosened the tie on the blue pouch and peered inside. “Nothing too exciting here. Just some loose change.”
Callie took it from me. “The coins might be old, though. We could go to the library, look them up.”
“Or use a computer. I know, they’re fancy new devices…”
“Shut up, asshole.” Callie removed the coins, peered at them in the light. “Some of these are actually old.”
“How old are we talking?”
“American-old,” Callie said. “1861 silver dollar.”
“Could be worth a lot of money,” I hedged, “or it could be worthless.”
Callie reached in her pocket and pulled out a notebook, scribbling something quickly. “I think I hear grandfather knocking around. Put it back.”
I nodded, putting the silver dollar back in the pouch. We shut the drawer and Callie locked it. I thought that was the end of it. I was, of course, wrong.
**
I pulled into what had been my grandfather’s driveway with a mix of dread and… well, yeah, mostly dread. Like I’ve said previously, I’m not what you would call a brave guy. I feel like this point can’t be emphasized enough, and if there’s one thing not-brave guys like me hate, it’s direct conflict with the past we’ve spent our whole lives running from.
And here it was. White-washed picket fences and tired plank board siding. Terrifying, really. All that… normalcy. Is it deceptive, yes? But aside from the crazy homicidal ghost my second-cousin has unwittingly called down from herself, there’s something just as scary inside that house.
All the women I’m related to, who think that I should settle down, produce children, or come out of the closet already.
I turned off the exhausted engine of my 2001 Ford pick-up and sat there in the driveway, trying to remember the last time I’d been here. It had probably been for Callie’s funeral, an event which remains mostly blurred to me, in the way that intense emotional experiences sometimes are. I rested my head on the steering wheel for a long moment, trying to gain composure, to prepare myself for what lay ahead. Time we could have used, Callie and I, if we’d realized what it was we were up against.
**
“So, I’ve been reading those letters.”
Callie made a couple of mistakes when she approached me with this statement. The first was that she tried to talk to me while I was laying on my borrowed bed in Grandpa’s house, listening to Death Cab for Cutie (I went through a phase. Get over it.) and the second was that she removed the headphones from which I was listening to the music. So I might have been a little testy with her.
“Jesus, Callie, you’re such a fucking bitch.”
She blithely ignored me. “I’ve been reading the letters we found in Grandpa’s drawer.”
“I thought we put all that stuff back.”
Callie shook her head. “Yes, but I wanted another look, so I got them back.”
“Callie.”
“Scold me later. There’s actually some really cool stuff in here.”
“Callie, I would love to listen to you geek out about historical crap or whatever…”
“Nate, shut the hell up. It’s cool.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your definition of cool and mine are so separate.”
“Focus, dork brain.” Callie shoved the letters in my face. “This is a series of letters between a girl who lived here, in this house, and her cousin in Philadelphia.”
“Yeah, so what? It’s an old house, Callie. People have lived here for a long time.”
“Don’t be deliberately ignorant, Nate, you’re better than that,” Callie snapped at me. She was always a bit impatient with my efforts to appear cool.
“Okay, okay. What’s in the letters that has you so riled up?” I turned the MP3 player off and gave Callie my full attention.
“Read them.” She tossed them on my bed, and walked away.
**
January 19, 1861
My dearest cousin:
I, of course, miss you every moment that you are gone. The house is dreadfully empty without. Every thing here is much the same. Father gets in his moods and Uncle runs and hides from him in the barn or in the cellar, and Mama is left trying to pick up the pieces. I am not much help, as I am now the only girl and I find my wiles are not much use against Father without you.
I wish you would write to me and tell me of the things the fashionable ladies of Philadelphia are getting into, for I need a good laugh which could only be provided by their absurdity.
I miss your laughter. I find this house is unbearable without it.
Yours -
Emily May
*
February 19, 1861
My Dearest Cousin,
Father got in a frightful mood last night. There was much shouting and then together, he and Uncle consumed a whole bottle of whiskey, which only compounded the problems. Mother remains in bed and she weeps all the day long. I think perhaps now it would be best for you to remain in Philadelphia. Persuade your employer to keep you on. It will do no good for you to come back. I shall endeavor to escape, myself, and will perhaps join you in a few months’ time.
Yours,
Emily May
*
I tossed the letters down on the bed and looked up at Cassie. “So?”
“So I handed you the last two letters,” Callie said. “Doesn’t it sound like whoever this girl was, her father was dangerous?”
“Yes, but it was also more than a hundred years ago,” I said - a pretty valid point, to my mind.
Callie shifted on her feet. “Come on, Nate, you can’t tell me you don’t feel it.”
“Feel what?” I started to fiddle with the MP3 player in my lap, avoiding her eyes.
“You know what I’m talking about. You’ve felt her before.”
“I haven’t.”
That was a lie.
“Then how do you know what I’m talking about?” Callie climbed on my bed, invading my space. “Nate, come on. We used to talk about her all the time.”
“The ghost in the walls.” I rolled my eyes. “That was a story we used to tell each other, Callie, it’s not a real thing.”
“Okay, fine.” Callie got up from the bed. “Whatever, Nate. Don’t believe me. But I’m going to figure this out. I’ve got a feeling about Emily May. I think she could be our girl.”
“And I think you should leave it alone, Callie.”
That, at least, I was right about.