Original Fic: I Ain't Afraid of Emily May (8/8 + BONUS EPILOGUE. Because I am nice.)
Title: I Ain't Afraid of Emily May
Author: ladychi, or KJ Stueve if you're here via Facebook
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 | Two: The Ghost in the Wall | Three: The Silver Dollar Dilemma | Four: In Through the Window | Five: Things Which Kept The Door Shut | Six: The Pentagram in the Attic | Seven: The Witch on the Backroads
Acknowledgements: The biggest acknowledgement must go out to those of you who have read and commented diligently. If you've ever published original fiction on LJ, then you know what a yawning gap of silence is, and how disheartening it can be. Thank you, also, to those of you who just read and enjoyed. I am confident there are at least some of you out there -- I hope the occasional long wait was worth it.
This chapter is for my Aunt Meg. Because she's been ever-so-patient.
This Is The End
I have no illusions about how I’m going to die. From the moment Annie called me, I’ve had a pretty good idea how this is all going to go down. If I had any sense at all, if I didn’t feel like I still owed Callie something, still owed her the life of her sister, at the very least, I’d be turning tail and running right now. As a matter of fact, I’ve got one foot on the gas pedal now. Blood rushing through my ears makes it hard to think. There’s a chill in the air. Emily May is coming for me.
**
I’ll never forget the few seconds we had before Hell descended upon us. It’s a feeling, like suddenly being dunked in ice water, dropped from a thousand feet - it makes you want to piss your pants and rattle your teeth at the same time. It’s an inescapable, unavoidable feeling of doom and dread, for no rational reason. It’s the primal human inside of you shouting that you’ve left the herd unattended on the open plains, and the fury of Nature herself is about to come down on you.
Callie’s eyes widened.
The window blew open, and we saw her. Unlike the first time I had seen her in the hills, she had form, substance. I felt that, if I had wanted to, I could reach out and touch her, grab a fistful of her clothing and pull her down to me.
Not that I would ever want to.
She seemed to be walking on air, until she touched down lightly on the ground. For one terrible long moment, I was taken in by her beauty, the unearthly way that she seemed to move, as though in water, and the cold and obvious insanity in her eyes.
And then I saw the knife.
“Be afraid,” she said. And then she lunged forward.
**
My grandfather had been many things in my lifetime: a drunk, an embarrassment, a source of family lore and local legend. Some of the stories that were whispered about him were too much to be believed, or so I thought until that night. I watched him with Calista, the ease with which they worked together, and I wondered.
“The witch-hazel,” Calista muttered, and my grandfather handed her an herb packet without even thinking. He marked the floor in the traditional pentagram of magic, and sprinkled the outside with salt. Obviously, he knew what he was doing, even through the haze of losing one of his grandchildren.
“I can’t get the fire hot enough to melt the coin down physically,” my grandfather said. “We’re just going to have to count on your ability to sever its ties to Emily May.”
Calista raised her eyebrows. “That’s a hell of an assumption.”
“It’s the best we can do for now, and the best we can do is just going to have to be good enough.”
Calista nodded and moved forward. “I’m ready to begin now.” She stepped into the center of the pentagram. “I’m going to need some blood from the boy.”
I balked. I thought I had been exposed to quite enough knives that evening, but my grandfather didn’t give me a choice, pulling me into the star and exposing my forearm for her.
“Be careful, Calista.”
“I always am. The blade’s clean.”
“Wait. Why are we doing this? Why do you need my blood?”
“Because you’re the last one she got a piece of,” my grandfather said gruffly. “She’s linked to this world through you and the coin. We’re going to need to sever both connections.”
**
I look down at my arm now. There’s still a faint scar from where the witch had bled me. I’ve found it many times in the dark, tracing it over with one finger. I can’t help but think Emily May’s determined to get me - the reason she’s tried so hard to come back has something to do with me.
Call that narcissism. Call that… well, whatever you want. I’ve just got a feeling. I reach inside my back pocket and get my knife - which is a lot less clean than the one Calista used ten years ago, and grit my teeth.
It’s time to reopen the wound.
**
Calista held my bleeding arm over the pentagram and let a few drops rain down before she covered the wound with a clean cloth.
“Quiet now,” she said when I started to ask more questions. “I’ve got to concentrate so that I don’t blow your head off.”
I was a little surprised, but grandfather nodded at me. Apparently she was capable of that colossal a mistake. I kept my mouth shut, hovering on the edge of the room, my arms crossed across my chest.
She started to hum, swaying back and forth from her hips like she was some young sapling tree caught in a breeze. The tune wasn’t melodic, and if I weren’t weak and exhausted, I would have sworn that eventually I heard harmonies, as though multiple people had picked up on her intent and carried the tune with her. Up and down the music slid over a pentatonic scale and soon the very hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.
Everything in me was screaming to run, but I held my ground, watching through narrowed eyes.
My grandfather paced around the outside of the circle, crouching low, occasionally tapping the ground in rhythm with Calista’s song.
In Calista’s hand, the coin seemed to catch fire and she nearly dropped it, but grit her teeth through the pain as the coin burned but did not melt. I wanted to rush forward to help her, but my grandfather gestured me back. “She’ll be fine!” he shouted.
I took him at his word because I felt I had little other choice.
There was a flash of light and the smell of sulfur and something else I couldn’t identify - and the coin disappeared. Calista stopped humming. My grandfather stopped pacing.
“That’s it?” I asked, after a long moment of silence. “That’s all it took?”
“No,” my grandfather said shortly. “That wasn’t it. That - that was much worse than what I was hoping for.”
“It’s gone, right? It’s destroyed.”
“Perhaps,” my grandfather said. “But then again - perhaps not.”
“It’s gone,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s not coming back.”
“Okay,” my grandfather said, avoiding my eyes for the first time that night. “It’s destroyed, Nate, and it’s not coming back.”
I wiped tears I hadn’t even realized I’d started to shed away. “Good. I - I want to go say sorry to Aunt Nora now, if I can.”
I left the shack without stopping to hear what my grandfather said in reply.
**
“Don’t you melt on me,” I tell the coin in my hands seriously. “I can’t do all that magic shit, so… it’s just gonna be you and me, bitch.”
My arm lingers over the coin for what seems like ages while the precious blood leaks from my arm, in no hurry to do what it has been asked. As soon as the liquid touches medal, the coin starts to hiss and to burn.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” I mutter, and put the truck in drive, heading out into the hills away from the house. I drive until something in me tells me to stop, and then I get out.
I can feel her presence before I see her.
“Be afraid,” she tells me, ominously.
I’m not a seventeen-year-old kid anymore. I smile wryly. “Oh, lady, I am. You’ve got no fucking clue.”
**
I would like to tell you that I stepped in front of Callie, that I tried to take the blow that started it all, but that would be a lie, and here, at the end of my life, I don’t feel like lying. I took a step back. I stepped back and away. Callie did not.
She took the brunt of the brutal insanity in Emily May’s eyes, and all I could see was blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.
**
She seems a bit taken aback by that, as much as spirits can be. “Why do you seek me?”
Retribution. Vengeance. “Parlez.”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “Here we are, talking, Nate Hannigan. What more do you want before I kill you?”
“I don’t object to that bit of it,” I said. “Kill me however you like, just - this stupid feud you’ve got going with my family, it ends with me.”
Her eyes flash cruelly. “The men in your family all deserve to die.”
“Yeah, sure,” I agreed. It’s not a good idea to disagree too much with crazy when one is trying to negotiate with it. I’ve learned this from several ex-girlfriends and a memorable 48-hour blessedly annulled marriage. “Just - call it good with me. I’m sorry that your life sucked, but… tell ya what. We’ll just cross over the bridge together. Leave this cruel world behind, eh?”
“Uncle Nate!”
Everything inside me goes cold.
“Get back, Beth!”
“Uncle Nate, she’s going to kill you!”
Yes, I know that bit. Can’t you leave me to my self-sacrificing nobility in peace? “Go back home, Annie.”
“I’m the one you want,” Beth says, stepping forward boldly, in a way I wouldn’t have before.
I want to shout at her to stop being such a goddamn Fred and get back in the Mystery Machine, but I can’t trust her to get the reference and I’m too busy trying to distract a psychotic ghost from a willing victim. Or rather, two willing victims.
“I asked for help!” Emily May screeches. “I asked for help and you denied me!”
“I’m sorry,” Beth says, her hands spread wide in the universal ‘it’s not my fault’ gesture. “I’m so sorry, Emily.”
“You all deserve to die.”
Here comes the bit, I think, that I hadn’t really thought through - at least, I hadn’t really thought through beyond me sacrificing myself and dragging her with me. Now I’ve got to negotiate this without getting Beth killed, too.
“Me first,” I say, and take the knife, and plunge it in my stomach.
**
Death. It’s not so bad, really, when it comes down to it. There’s the stereotypical dying of the light, the clouds at the edge of your vision that slowly, slowly rob you of your sight. The dark narrow tunnel, and the path to the other side.
Normally you would walk this alone. But Emily May is a spirit inflicting corporeal harm on a corporeal being. She’s vulnerable to me in this moment.
I tug at her - physically, spiritually.
“Come with me,” I say. If I can get her past the Void - then she will sink into the Ether.
She resists. “I have work to do!”
I don’t have time. I yank. “You. Are. Coming. With. Me.”
And then - then…
Epilogue: Okay, So That Wasn’t The End
“Nate Hannigan, you colossal idiot, you wake up right this moment or I swear to God, I’m gonna beat you senseless.”
“Jesus, Mom, he’s just been stabbed.”
This is what I wake up to. It takes all the energy I’ve got in me to open my eyes and look around. “So - this is what heaven looks like? The trauma room at St. George, huh.”
“I told you he would respond better to vinegar than honey!” Annie looks triumphant, and then her eyes start to water. “You scared the living crap out of all of us, Nate.”
I shrug. “Well - uh. Sorry.”
“I’ve got to call… well, everyone. Let them know you pulled through. …Benny’s going to owe me some money.”
“Jesus, Annie!”
“What?” she winked at me. “I’m kidding. Mostly. Beth - you make sure he doesn’t get any more brilliant ideas, okay?”
Beth nods, and Annie leaves us.
There’s a long moment.
“Your friend, uh… Calista? She was by, earlier.”
I raise my eyebrows. I haven’t seen her in - well. A very, very long time. “What’d she say?”
“A lot of babble, mostly. But uh… she said that wound’s not going to heal properly. Ever.”
I sighed. “I figured as much. Which was why I was hoping that…”
“And… she said some other things, but… I wanted to ask you something, before Mom gets back.”
I swallow. My throat is dry. I wonder if I’m capable of drinking water. “Yeah?”
“Take me with you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You do this, right? Like - all the time. You go to people who have messed up and got involved in something they shouldn’t have, and… you fix it, right?”
“Well - sometimes. Yes.”
“Good. That’s what I want to do. Take me with you.”
“I think - that’s at least six kinds of a bad idea. For one thing, you have to graduate from high school.”
“Which I will, in six months.”
“For another thing, there’s college.”
“I’ve told Mom I want to take a year off. She’s cool with it.”
“And then there’s the small matter of how you almost died because you didn’t listen to me.”
“You almost died because you didn’t listen to me,” Beth shoots back. “You’re going to take me with you. You watch. I’ll wear you down.”
I chuckle. “I don’t know about that.”
**
…And on that score, it turns out… I should have known. Beth was right. I was wrong.
Author: ladychi, or KJ Stueve if you're here via Facebook
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 | Two: The Ghost in the Wall | Three: The Silver Dollar Dilemma | Four: In Through the Window | Five: Things Which Kept The Door Shut | Six: The Pentagram in the Attic | Seven: The Witch on the Backroads
Acknowledgements: The biggest acknowledgement must go out to those of you who have read and commented diligently. If you've ever published original fiction on LJ, then you know what a yawning gap of silence is, and how disheartening it can be. Thank you, also, to those of you who just read and enjoyed. I am confident there are at least some of you out there -- I hope the occasional long wait was worth it.
This chapter is for my Aunt Meg. Because she's been ever-so-patient.
This Is The End
I have no illusions about how I’m going to die. From the moment Annie called me, I’ve had a pretty good idea how this is all going to go down. If I had any sense at all, if I didn’t feel like I still owed Callie something, still owed her the life of her sister, at the very least, I’d be turning tail and running right now. As a matter of fact, I’ve got one foot on the gas pedal now. Blood rushing through my ears makes it hard to think. There’s a chill in the air. Emily May is coming for me.
**
I’ll never forget the few seconds we had before Hell descended upon us. It’s a feeling, like suddenly being dunked in ice water, dropped from a thousand feet - it makes you want to piss your pants and rattle your teeth at the same time. It’s an inescapable, unavoidable feeling of doom and dread, for no rational reason. It’s the primal human inside of you shouting that you’ve left the herd unattended on the open plains, and the fury of Nature herself is about to come down on you.
Callie’s eyes widened.
The window blew open, and we saw her. Unlike the first time I had seen her in the hills, she had form, substance. I felt that, if I had wanted to, I could reach out and touch her, grab a fistful of her clothing and pull her down to me.
Not that I would ever want to.
She seemed to be walking on air, until she touched down lightly on the ground. For one terrible long moment, I was taken in by her beauty, the unearthly way that she seemed to move, as though in water, and the cold and obvious insanity in her eyes.
And then I saw the knife.
“Be afraid,” she said. And then she lunged forward.
**
My grandfather had been many things in my lifetime: a drunk, an embarrassment, a source of family lore and local legend. Some of the stories that were whispered about him were too much to be believed, or so I thought until that night. I watched him with Calista, the ease with which they worked together, and I wondered.
“The witch-hazel,” Calista muttered, and my grandfather handed her an herb packet without even thinking. He marked the floor in the traditional pentagram of magic, and sprinkled the outside with salt. Obviously, he knew what he was doing, even through the haze of losing one of his grandchildren.
“I can’t get the fire hot enough to melt the coin down physically,” my grandfather said. “We’re just going to have to count on your ability to sever its ties to Emily May.”
Calista raised her eyebrows. “That’s a hell of an assumption.”
“It’s the best we can do for now, and the best we can do is just going to have to be good enough.”
Calista nodded and moved forward. “I’m ready to begin now.” She stepped into the center of the pentagram. “I’m going to need some blood from the boy.”
I balked. I thought I had been exposed to quite enough knives that evening, but my grandfather didn’t give me a choice, pulling me into the star and exposing my forearm for her.
“Be careful, Calista.”
“I always am. The blade’s clean.”
“Wait. Why are we doing this? Why do you need my blood?”
“Because you’re the last one she got a piece of,” my grandfather said gruffly. “She’s linked to this world through you and the coin. We’re going to need to sever both connections.”
**
I look down at my arm now. There’s still a faint scar from where the witch had bled me. I’ve found it many times in the dark, tracing it over with one finger. I can’t help but think Emily May’s determined to get me - the reason she’s tried so hard to come back has something to do with me.
Call that narcissism. Call that… well, whatever you want. I’ve just got a feeling. I reach inside my back pocket and get my knife - which is a lot less clean than the one Calista used ten years ago, and grit my teeth.
It’s time to reopen the wound.
**
Calista held my bleeding arm over the pentagram and let a few drops rain down before she covered the wound with a clean cloth.
“Quiet now,” she said when I started to ask more questions. “I’ve got to concentrate so that I don’t blow your head off.”
I was a little surprised, but grandfather nodded at me. Apparently she was capable of that colossal a mistake. I kept my mouth shut, hovering on the edge of the room, my arms crossed across my chest.
She started to hum, swaying back and forth from her hips like she was some young sapling tree caught in a breeze. The tune wasn’t melodic, and if I weren’t weak and exhausted, I would have sworn that eventually I heard harmonies, as though multiple people had picked up on her intent and carried the tune with her. Up and down the music slid over a pentatonic scale and soon the very hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.
Everything in me was screaming to run, but I held my ground, watching through narrowed eyes.
My grandfather paced around the outside of the circle, crouching low, occasionally tapping the ground in rhythm with Calista’s song.
In Calista’s hand, the coin seemed to catch fire and she nearly dropped it, but grit her teeth through the pain as the coin burned but did not melt. I wanted to rush forward to help her, but my grandfather gestured me back. “She’ll be fine!” he shouted.
I took him at his word because I felt I had little other choice.
There was a flash of light and the smell of sulfur and something else I couldn’t identify - and the coin disappeared. Calista stopped humming. My grandfather stopped pacing.
“That’s it?” I asked, after a long moment of silence. “That’s all it took?”
“No,” my grandfather said shortly. “That wasn’t it. That - that was much worse than what I was hoping for.”
“It’s gone, right? It’s destroyed.”
“Perhaps,” my grandfather said. “But then again - perhaps not.”
“It’s gone,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s not coming back.”
“Okay,” my grandfather said, avoiding my eyes for the first time that night. “It’s destroyed, Nate, and it’s not coming back.”
I wiped tears I hadn’t even realized I’d started to shed away. “Good. I - I want to go say sorry to Aunt Nora now, if I can.”
I left the shack without stopping to hear what my grandfather said in reply.
**
“Don’t you melt on me,” I tell the coin in my hands seriously. “I can’t do all that magic shit, so… it’s just gonna be you and me, bitch.”
My arm lingers over the coin for what seems like ages while the precious blood leaks from my arm, in no hurry to do what it has been asked. As soon as the liquid touches medal, the coin starts to hiss and to burn.
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” I mutter, and put the truck in drive, heading out into the hills away from the house. I drive until something in me tells me to stop, and then I get out.
I can feel her presence before I see her.
“Be afraid,” she tells me, ominously.
I’m not a seventeen-year-old kid anymore. I smile wryly. “Oh, lady, I am. You’ve got no fucking clue.”
**
I would like to tell you that I stepped in front of Callie, that I tried to take the blow that started it all, but that would be a lie, and here, at the end of my life, I don’t feel like lying. I took a step back. I stepped back and away. Callie did not.
She took the brunt of the brutal insanity in Emily May’s eyes, and all I could see was blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.
**
She seems a bit taken aback by that, as much as spirits can be. “Why do you seek me?”
Retribution. Vengeance. “Parlez.”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “Here we are, talking, Nate Hannigan. What more do you want before I kill you?”
“I don’t object to that bit of it,” I said. “Kill me however you like, just - this stupid feud you’ve got going with my family, it ends with me.”
Her eyes flash cruelly. “The men in your family all deserve to die.”
“Yeah, sure,” I agreed. It’s not a good idea to disagree too much with crazy when one is trying to negotiate with it. I’ve learned this from several ex-girlfriends and a memorable 48-hour blessedly annulled marriage. “Just - call it good with me. I’m sorry that your life sucked, but… tell ya what. We’ll just cross over the bridge together. Leave this cruel world behind, eh?”
“Uncle Nate!”
Everything inside me goes cold.
“Get back, Beth!”
“Uncle Nate, she’s going to kill you!”
Yes, I know that bit. Can’t you leave me to my self-sacrificing nobility in peace? “Go back home, Annie.”
“I’m the one you want,” Beth says, stepping forward boldly, in a way I wouldn’t have before.
I want to shout at her to stop being such a goddamn Fred and get back in the Mystery Machine, but I can’t trust her to get the reference and I’m too busy trying to distract a psychotic ghost from a willing victim. Or rather, two willing victims.
“I asked for help!” Emily May screeches. “I asked for help and you denied me!”
“I’m sorry,” Beth says, her hands spread wide in the universal ‘it’s not my fault’ gesture. “I’m so sorry, Emily.”
“You all deserve to die.”
Here comes the bit, I think, that I hadn’t really thought through - at least, I hadn’t really thought through beyond me sacrificing myself and dragging her with me. Now I’ve got to negotiate this without getting Beth killed, too.
“Me first,” I say, and take the knife, and plunge it in my stomach.
**
Death. It’s not so bad, really, when it comes down to it. There’s the stereotypical dying of the light, the clouds at the edge of your vision that slowly, slowly rob you of your sight. The dark narrow tunnel, and the path to the other side.
Normally you would walk this alone. But Emily May is a spirit inflicting corporeal harm on a corporeal being. She’s vulnerable to me in this moment.
I tug at her - physically, spiritually.
“Come with me,” I say. If I can get her past the Void - then she will sink into the Ether.
She resists. “I have work to do!”
I don’t have time. I yank. “You. Are. Coming. With. Me.”
And then - then…
Epilogue: Okay, So That Wasn’t The End
“Nate Hannigan, you colossal idiot, you wake up right this moment or I swear to God, I’m gonna beat you senseless.”
“Jesus, Mom, he’s just been stabbed.”
This is what I wake up to. It takes all the energy I’ve got in me to open my eyes and look around. “So - this is what heaven looks like? The trauma room at St. George, huh.”
“I told you he would respond better to vinegar than honey!” Annie looks triumphant, and then her eyes start to water. “You scared the living crap out of all of us, Nate.”
I shrug. “Well - uh. Sorry.”
“I’ve got to call… well, everyone. Let them know you pulled through. …Benny’s going to owe me some money.”
“Jesus, Annie!”
“What?” she winked at me. “I’m kidding. Mostly. Beth - you make sure he doesn’t get any more brilliant ideas, okay?”
Beth nods, and Annie leaves us.
There’s a long moment.
“Your friend, uh… Calista? She was by, earlier.”
I raise my eyebrows. I haven’t seen her in - well. A very, very long time. “What’d she say?”
“A lot of babble, mostly. But uh… she said that wound’s not going to heal properly. Ever.”
I sighed. “I figured as much. Which was why I was hoping that…”
“And… she said some other things, but… I wanted to ask you something, before Mom gets back.”
I swallow. My throat is dry. I wonder if I’m capable of drinking water. “Yeah?”
“Take me with you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You do this, right? Like - all the time. You go to people who have messed up and got involved in something they shouldn’t have, and… you fix it, right?”
“Well - sometimes. Yes.”
“Good. That’s what I want to do. Take me with you.”
“I think - that’s at least six kinds of a bad idea. For one thing, you have to graduate from high school.”
“Which I will, in six months.”
“For another thing, there’s college.”
“I’ve told Mom I want to take a year off. She’s cool with it.”
“And then there’s the small matter of how you almost died because you didn’t listen to me.”
“You almost died because you didn’t listen to me,” Beth shoots back. “You’re going to take me with you. You watch. I’ll wear you down.”
I chuckle. “I don’t know about that.”
**
…And on that score, it turns out… I should have known. Beth was right. I was wrong.