Original Fic: I Ain't Afraid of Emily May (2/?)
Title: I Ain't Afraid of Emily May
Author: Meself, ladychi. If you're here from Facebook, I'm K.J. Stueve
Rating: Mature, for violence and language
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.
Previous Chapters: One: Return to Bent Fork |
Author's Note: Sorry that it's been a while since I've updated this story. I hope you enjoy it!
Chapter Two: The Ghost in the Wall
For two days after Callie came to me about Emily May, nothing happened. Callie seemed to have forgotten about it like I hoped she would, and I did my best to put it out of my mind, but the truth of it was that it was hard to ignore what Callie had said. The ghost in the wall had been our favorite story when we were kids - our favorite mutual fantasy.
We agreed on few things about the ghost in the wall: she was female, she was lonely, and she was real. Everything else was up for grabs. Callie claimed that the ghost in the wall watched her have tea parties with her dolls. I thought she followed me down hallways while I played with army men and practiced gun sounds.
She also seemed confined to the house - only a whisper of a presence, not really there, only a shadow in the back of our minds -- like if you turned really quick you would see her out of the corner of your eye. I never once thought she was dangerous. I never once feared her, or felt uncomfortable.
Not until I turned thirteen.
That summer I came back, and the warm presence that had watched me play now had gone cold and unfeeling - almost hateful. That was also the year that my parents got divorced, and at first, I dismissed the feelings outright as the fantasies of a child. But soon it was unavoidable. I got the sensation that I wasn’t welcome in certain areas of the house anymore - a house in which I had once had free reign.
Callie came late that summer, and she noticed it too - not that whatever it was had changed its attitude about her, but that it had changed its attitude about me.
That was when I started to deny that the ghost existed, a trend I continued as long as I could.
So like I said, for two days after Callie told me about Emily May, nothing happened. Callie disappeared into her room, a not-unusual occurrence, and I focused on doing nothing with the intensity that only a teenage-boy can do nothing. I read magazines about nothing, played video games about nothing, and had no substantive thoughts about anything.
Except for this: It’s like when you’ve never heard a word before, and then suddenly, everywhere you go, there’s that word. Or a song. Or a book that you’ve never heard of, but then everyone you know has suddenly read it. Everywhere I went, I could do nothing but think of the ghost in the walls, and what Callie had said.
I became preoccupied with every little bump. The slightest noise in the hallway would cause me to startle. Every cold wind I attributed to some foreign spirit. Even my grandfather noticed my unease, offering me a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves the second night.
I didn’t take it, which is a shame, because I remember the events of what happened that night far too well. Twenty-seven-year-old me has no problems coming to grips with my complete lack of any heroic qualities whatsoever, but when I was seventeen, I had all the usual delusions that come with that phase of mental ineptitude - fantasies of myself running around in some sort of cape, saving damsels in distress from the monsters lurking in the shadows. So the night that it happened, the night that I first saw Emily May, the night my life changed - I firmly believed that I had the situation well in hand.
**
I wasn’t allowed as long as I would have liked in the privacy of my own truck. Annie had seen me arrive, and when I wasn’t hopping enthusiastically out of my vehicle at a speed she deemed appropriate, she opened the screen door and came out onto the porch herself. I didn’t see her. I was too busy pressing my forehead into the steering wheel.
“Hey!” A series of a few quick knocks at my window and Annie’s piercing voice was enough to startle me out of my reverie, and I jumped, hitting my knee on the steering wheel.
“Motherfuck,” I muttered. “Jesus, Annie.”
She pointedly ignored me, the way mothers of teenagers do when they hear profanity, as if to deny the words could possibly be spoken at all. “Welcome back to town, stranger. Aren’t you going to roll down your window so we can talk? Or, you know, get out of the truck?”
“I really hadn’t made a decision yet,” I said, rolling down the window. “There’s still time to hit the gas and not look back.”
Annie shot me a look that told me she didn’t believe I’d ever be capable of such a thing, and I allowed her the illusion because I may freely admit that I’m no hero, but if you want to be naïve enough to assume I am, well… assume away. Right up until the moment of danger. And then all of your hopes will be crushed like so much glass.
“Get out of the car,” she said. “You can’t hide out here forever. Beth’s really excited that you’re here.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked, pushing the door open and cautiously putting my feet on the ground, my muscles stiff and sore in a way they wouldn’t have been even a year ago.
Annie looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t know how much to tell her, or what to tell her, you know… I just… Honestly, I lost it a little bit. I think she thinks I’m insane.”
“Well, then, there’s two of us of that opinion,” I teased her.
“Nate, seriously, though.” Annie grabbed my sleeve, her grip pinching the cheap cotton into a point. Now that she was closer to me I could see the stress and the worry in her eyes. “How bad is this? I mean - Callie…”
“
Callie didn’t have the benefit of the wealth of my experience,” I said, with as much bravado as I could force in my tone.
“Nate.”
“It’s bad, Annie.” I tried to be as gentle as possible, but there’s just no good way to break “we’re completely fucked” to a worried mother. “I thought grandfather had managed to completely contain her ten years ago… the fact that she’s back…” I shrugged. “I think Emily May is a whole other animal than what I’m used to dealing with, and I’ll give it my best shot, but I’m not making any guarantees, Annie. Except this one.”
She looked up at me.
“If she tries to kill Beth, she’s going to have to kill me first. The way it should have been the first time.”
Annie’s eyes widened, but she didn’t disagree.
**
I had just begun to get comfortable. Just begun to relax, to let myself think that what I wanted to believe was actually true - that the ghost in the walls wasn’t real, that Callie was over-reacting to imagined stimulus, when Emily May blurred the lines between dreams and reality and made her presence known.
My grandfather had a dog, a tired old bloodhound named Beauregard, and when I stayed with him, I often was tasked with taking him outside at night and feeding him in the morning. That night, I took the dog outside just as the evening fog was descending on the hills. It had quickly gotten cool as the sun went down and I remember thinking I should have grabbed a jacket as old Beau limped and tripped his way around the yard. He’d finally found a good place to do his business when he perked up, in the way hounds will do when they sense something is out of place, and threw back his head and began to bay.
I pulled on his leash and hissed at him. “Jesus, Beau. Pull yourself together, man. There’s nothing out here.”
He took off like a shot, pulling me towards the house. As a matter of principle, I dug my heels in and tried to get control of the dog. “Stop it! Beau!”
And then I heard it: the whistling I would come to associate with seeing her -- it was a lilting Irish melody I’d heard my grandfather sing before about a young girl who pushed a wheelbarrow through the streets of Dublin, even after her death. It sent a shiver right through my spine and drew goosebumps to my arms and made me nauseous.
Beau was urgently pulling at my arm now, and I dropped the leash. The fog grew until I could not see my hand in front of my face, so I trusted Beau to pull me to the door. But he stopped, too, as if he could not find his way either.
I heard wagons rolling over the hills - a sound I’d only heard in movies before, and the unmistakable thunder of hooves pounding over the ground of the hills, shaking the earth beneath my feet.
Beau whined and yanked me to the side just as a mirage passed me by: an old man on a wagon pushing a horse to its limits. The mare was heaving in air, foaming at the mouth, her eyes too white to be just right. I could not see the face of the man, because he wore a hat low on his brow and leaned forward, urging the horse on, cracking a long whip intermittently. He did not seem as though he could see me.
Beau was insistent now, nearly taking my arm out of my socket as he tried to find the door back into the house and safety. But - like I said. I didn’t know I wasn’t a hero. Yet.
I held my ground and thought it was over when the wagon disappeared - that I had maybe just woken up from a nightmare I happened to have while awake.
I turned to look behind me and I saw a girl in a white nightgown - then it became clear, not just a girl but a young woman. There was something strikingly beautiful about her. Something in her eyes, maybe, or the glow of her skin. As she walked towards me, I felt my mouth go dry and my palms started to sweat. I feared I would say or do something stupid that would make her hate me - this apparition in front of me. Looking back on it, I can see how illogical it all was, how manipulative the whole image was, but when then, all I saw was an attractive girl walking towards me.
An attractive girl covered in blood - a fact that escaped my initial survey, but I caught up quick enough. Beau was pulling me back towards the house, and I stopped resisting him.
“Help me!” The girl shrieked, but Beau didn’t give me time to try and change my mind. He was more insistent than ever about returning to the house, and given what I’d just seen, I was more than willing to let him take me in that direction.
And good thing, too, because the docile, appealing expression on her face did not last long - in fact, the way her face changed is something I will never forget. Her face had been beautiful. As I stepped on the porch, her face collapsed, the bones disintegrating to nothing, and her skin seemed to sink into itself, the pigment going darker by the minute.
And then she screamed - a horrific, bone-chilling scream that spurred me forward into the safety of the house, Beau and I slamming the door behind us, our chests heaving with the effort it took to breathe.
**
As I’ve stated previously, I had no intention of ever coming back to Bent Fork, and I had vowed publicly and loudly never to step foot in my grandfather’s house again, and the sensation of stepping over the threshold, Annie’s footsteps behind me, made my heart race the way it did all those years ago when I got my first hint at the truth of Emily May - the darkness that hid under the white mask. Annie put her hand on the small of my back to propel me forward into the foyer. I fought back my irritation to inwardly acknowledge that without the impetus, I might never have done so on my own.
It was like stepping back into a memory really. Annie had done her best. None of the décor was the same as it had been when it was under my grandmother’s thumb, and it obviously had been scrubbed within an inch of its life: hardwood floors gleamed, the grout between the tiles was as white as I’d ever seen it, and I could see the indentations where the carpet had been professionally cleaned and vacuumed. But she couldn’t get rid of the sense memory of the architecture of that place. I recalled with clarity the little alcove under the staircase where I had hidden during the wake, the sound of the creak in the stairs that I climbed to the bedroom to shake and shiver and try to persuade myself to sleep at night.
Still. I did my best to smile, and choke down the bile that rose in my throat. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
Annie shook her head. “No you don’t. You would prefer this place burnt to the ground.”
She had me there. “Well. Some things can’t be changed, no matter how much money you pour into therapy.”
Annie coughed. “Beth’s upstairs. If you, uh, want to talk to her.”
I shrugged. “What does she expect me to say?”
“She doesn’t expect you to say anything. I expect you to go in there and tell my daughter that she’s not going to die.” Annie’s eyes were fierce. “Because she’s not going to die, Nate. I don’t care what spirit I’ve got to send back to hell. She’s not going to die.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to say what I really thought - which was that surviving was a pretty simple thing to hope for, and a complicated thing to achieve.
**
Author: Meself, ladychi. If you're here from Facebook, I'm K.J. Stueve
Rating: Mature, for violence and language
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.
Previous Chapters: One: Return to Bent Fork |
Author's Note: Sorry that it's been a while since I've updated this story. I hope you enjoy it!
Chapter Two: The Ghost in the Wall
For two days after Callie came to me about Emily May, nothing happened. Callie seemed to have forgotten about it like I hoped she would, and I did my best to put it out of my mind, but the truth of it was that it was hard to ignore what Callie had said. The ghost in the wall had been our favorite story when we were kids - our favorite mutual fantasy.
We agreed on few things about the ghost in the wall: she was female, she was lonely, and she was real. Everything else was up for grabs. Callie claimed that the ghost in the wall watched her have tea parties with her dolls. I thought she followed me down hallways while I played with army men and practiced gun sounds.
She also seemed confined to the house - only a whisper of a presence, not really there, only a shadow in the back of our minds -- like if you turned really quick you would see her out of the corner of your eye. I never once thought she was dangerous. I never once feared her, or felt uncomfortable.
Not until I turned thirteen.
That summer I came back, and the warm presence that had watched me play now had gone cold and unfeeling - almost hateful. That was also the year that my parents got divorced, and at first, I dismissed the feelings outright as the fantasies of a child. But soon it was unavoidable. I got the sensation that I wasn’t welcome in certain areas of the house anymore - a house in which I had once had free reign.
Callie came late that summer, and she noticed it too - not that whatever it was had changed its attitude about her, but that it had changed its attitude about me.
That was when I started to deny that the ghost existed, a trend I continued as long as I could.
So like I said, for two days after Callie told me about Emily May, nothing happened. Callie disappeared into her room, a not-unusual occurrence, and I focused on doing nothing with the intensity that only a teenage-boy can do nothing. I read magazines about nothing, played video games about nothing, and had no substantive thoughts about anything.
Except for this: It’s like when you’ve never heard a word before, and then suddenly, everywhere you go, there’s that word. Or a song. Or a book that you’ve never heard of, but then everyone you know has suddenly read it. Everywhere I went, I could do nothing but think of the ghost in the walls, and what Callie had said.
I became preoccupied with every little bump. The slightest noise in the hallway would cause me to startle. Every cold wind I attributed to some foreign spirit. Even my grandfather noticed my unease, offering me a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves the second night.
I didn’t take it, which is a shame, because I remember the events of what happened that night far too well. Twenty-seven-year-old me has no problems coming to grips with my complete lack of any heroic qualities whatsoever, but when I was seventeen, I had all the usual delusions that come with that phase of mental ineptitude - fantasies of myself running around in some sort of cape, saving damsels in distress from the monsters lurking in the shadows. So the night that it happened, the night that I first saw Emily May, the night my life changed - I firmly believed that I had the situation well in hand.
**
I wasn’t allowed as long as I would have liked in the privacy of my own truck. Annie had seen me arrive, and when I wasn’t hopping enthusiastically out of my vehicle at a speed she deemed appropriate, she opened the screen door and came out onto the porch herself. I didn’t see her. I was too busy pressing my forehead into the steering wheel.
“Hey!” A series of a few quick knocks at my window and Annie’s piercing voice was enough to startle me out of my reverie, and I jumped, hitting my knee on the steering wheel.
“Motherfuck,” I muttered. “Jesus, Annie.”
She pointedly ignored me, the way mothers of teenagers do when they hear profanity, as if to deny the words could possibly be spoken at all. “Welcome back to town, stranger. Aren’t you going to roll down your window so we can talk? Or, you know, get out of the truck?”
“I really hadn’t made a decision yet,” I said, rolling down the window. “There’s still time to hit the gas and not look back.”
Annie shot me a look that told me she didn’t believe I’d ever be capable of such a thing, and I allowed her the illusion because I may freely admit that I’m no hero, but if you want to be naïve enough to assume I am, well… assume away. Right up until the moment of danger. And then all of your hopes will be crushed like so much glass.
“Get out of the car,” she said. “You can’t hide out here forever. Beth’s really excited that you’re here.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked, pushing the door open and cautiously putting my feet on the ground, my muscles stiff and sore in a way they wouldn’t have been even a year ago.
Annie looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t know how much to tell her, or what to tell her, you know… I just… Honestly, I lost it a little bit. I think she thinks I’m insane.”
“Well, then, there’s two of us of that opinion,” I teased her.
“Nate, seriously, though.” Annie grabbed my sleeve, her grip pinching the cheap cotton into a point. Now that she was closer to me I could see the stress and the worry in her eyes. “How bad is this? I mean - Callie…”
“
Callie didn’t have the benefit of the wealth of my experience,” I said, with as much bravado as I could force in my tone.
“Nate.”
“It’s bad, Annie.” I tried to be as gentle as possible, but there’s just no good way to break “we’re completely fucked” to a worried mother. “I thought grandfather had managed to completely contain her ten years ago… the fact that she’s back…” I shrugged. “I think Emily May is a whole other animal than what I’m used to dealing with, and I’ll give it my best shot, but I’m not making any guarantees, Annie. Except this one.”
She looked up at me.
“If she tries to kill Beth, she’s going to have to kill me first. The way it should have been the first time.”
Annie’s eyes widened, but she didn’t disagree.
**
I had just begun to get comfortable. Just begun to relax, to let myself think that what I wanted to believe was actually true - that the ghost in the walls wasn’t real, that Callie was over-reacting to imagined stimulus, when Emily May blurred the lines between dreams and reality and made her presence known.
My grandfather had a dog, a tired old bloodhound named Beauregard, and when I stayed with him, I often was tasked with taking him outside at night and feeding him in the morning. That night, I took the dog outside just as the evening fog was descending on the hills. It had quickly gotten cool as the sun went down and I remember thinking I should have grabbed a jacket as old Beau limped and tripped his way around the yard. He’d finally found a good place to do his business when he perked up, in the way hounds will do when they sense something is out of place, and threw back his head and began to bay.
I pulled on his leash and hissed at him. “Jesus, Beau. Pull yourself together, man. There’s nothing out here.”
He took off like a shot, pulling me towards the house. As a matter of principle, I dug my heels in and tried to get control of the dog. “Stop it! Beau!”
And then I heard it: the whistling I would come to associate with seeing her -- it was a lilting Irish melody I’d heard my grandfather sing before about a young girl who pushed a wheelbarrow through the streets of Dublin, even after her death. It sent a shiver right through my spine and drew goosebumps to my arms and made me nauseous.
Beau was urgently pulling at my arm now, and I dropped the leash. The fog grew until I could not see my hand in front of my face, so I trusted Beau to pull me to the door. But he stopped, too, as if he could not find his way either.
I heard wagons rolling over the hills - a sound I’d only heard in movies before, and the unmistakable thunder of hooves pounding over the ground of the hills, shaking the earth beneath my feet.
Beau whined and yanked me to the side just as a mirage passed me by: an old man on a wagon pushing a horse to its limits. The mare was heaving in air, foaming at the mouth, her eyes too white to be just right. I could not see the face of the man, because he wore a hat low on his brow and leaned forward, urging the horse on, cracking a long whip intermittently. He did not seem as though he could see me.
Beau was insistent now, nearly taking my arm out of my socket as he tried to find the door back into the house and safety. But - like I said. I didn’t know I wasn’t a hero. Yet.
I held my ground and thought it was over when the wagon disappeared - that I had maybe just woken up from a nightmare I happened to have while awake.
I turned to look behind me and I saw a girl in a white nightgown - then it became clear, not just a girl but a young woman. There was something strikingly beautiful about her. Something in her eyes, maybe, or the glow of her skin. As she walked towards me, I felt my mouth go dry and my palms started to sweat. I feared I would say or do something stupid that would make her hate me - this apparition in front of me. Looking back on it, I can see how illogical it all was, how manipulative the whole image was, but when then, all I saw was an attractive girl walking towards me.
An attractive girl covered in blood - a fact that escaped my initial survey, but I caught up quick enough. Beau was pulling me back towards the house, and I stopped resisting him.
“Help me!” The girl shrieked, but Beau didn’t give me time to try and change my mind. He was more insistent than ever about returning to the house, and given what I’d just seen, I was more than willing to let him take me in that direction.
And good thing, too, because the docile, appealing expression on her face did not last long - in fact, the way her face changed is something I will never forget. Her face had been beautiful. As I stepped on the porch, her face collapsed, the bones disintegrating to nothing, and her skin seemed to sink into itself, the pigment going darker by the minute.
And then she screamed - a horrific, bone-chilling scream that spurred me forward into the safety of the house, Beau and I slamming the door behind us, our chests heaving with the effort it took to breathe.
**
As I’ve stated previously, I had no intention of ever coming back to Bent Fork, and I had vowed publicly and loudly never to step foot in my grandfather’s house again, and the sensation of stepping over the threshold, Annie’s footsteps behind me, made my heart race the way it did all those years ago when I got my first hint at the truth of Emily May - the darkness that hid under the white mask. Annie put her hand on the small of my back to propel me forward into the foyer. I fought back my irritation to inwardly acknowledge that without the impetus, I might never have done so on my own.
It was like stepping back into a memory really. Annie had done her best. None of the décor was the same as it had been when it was under my grandmother’s thumb, and it obviously had been scrubbed within an inch of its life: hardwood floors gleamed, the grout between the tiles was as white as I’d ever seen it, and I could see the indentations where the carpet had been professionally cleaned and vacuumed. But she couldn’t get rid of the sense memory of the architecture of that place. I recalled with clarity the little alcove under the staircase where I had hidden during the wake, the sound of the creak in the stairs that I climbed to the bedroom to shake and shiver and try to persuade myself to sleep at night.
Still. I did my best to smile, and choke down the bile that rose in my throat. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
Annie shook her head. “No you don’t. You would prefer this place burnt to the ground.”
She had me there. “Well. Some things can’t be changed, no matter how much money you pour into therapy.”
Annie coughed. “Beth’s upstairs. If you, uh, want to talk to her.”
I shrugged. “What does she expect me to say?”
“She doesn’t expect you to say anything. I expect you to go in there and tell my daughter that she’s not going to die.” Annie’s eyes were fierce. “Because she’s not going to die, Nate. I don’t care what spirit I’ve got to send back to hell. She’s not going to die.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to say what I really thought - which was that surviving was a pretty simple thing to hope for, and a complicated thing to achieve.
**