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It was a long time coming, and Elizabeth lived another fifty five years. But death eventually finds us all and so it was with her.
Hers had been a good life. She had been married twice, the first time for only a couple of years, the second time for thirty five. Her second husband had gone to his reward some five years ago, leaving her with four grown children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
Each year, on Halloween, she would awake to find, weather permitting, a single rose etched in frost on her bedroom window. It always melted before anyone else saw it and she kept that secret to herself. She never felt she was being unfaithful. Richard had loved her first- he might even have loved her best- but he had been robbed from her by cruel fate and there was no way to know. Aside from the frost rose, he had been as good as his word. She had never seen him again.
Now, lying in bed alone, she tried to ignore the sundry and numerous aches and pains from an undiagnosed cancer that wracked her aging frame. Her hair was gray, her skin parchment and crepe. An ill-considered tramp stamp on her lower back was pruny and faded and the breasts of which she had been so proud donkey’s years ago were now grapefruits in athletic socks. Her eyesight was at par only with the aid of glasses and her pink and ivory, plastic teeth floated in a cup beside her lonely bed.
She looked around her room. There were pictures of her late husband, lots of other pictures of her children and grandkids. A lifetime of memorabilia was packed away in the attic and garage and hope chests.
It was all coming to an end as she felt the ticking of her life’s clock slowing, the weakened springs running down. It was just something she knew. She would be found dead in her bed the next day when one of her kids came to check on her. Natural causes is what her obituary would say, and the funeral would be held, and the tears would flow, and that would be the end of her.
But there was a final piece of unfinished business, and that would be attended to tonight.
She knew he would suddenly just be there, standing by her doorway in the lightless bedroom. And he was, standing by the door as he had five and a half decades ago. He was exactly the same, the same clothes and hair, now terribly out of style and anachronistic after the passage of fifty five years.
She didn’t get out of bed, but smiled her toothless smile at him, her dry eyes sparkling one last time.
She knew what he wanted even before it came to her.
Come with me.
For the first time ever, she felt a little frightened around Richard. Not frightened of him, but of what he offered.
Will I be young again? Will I be beautiful?
You always have been.
Richard looked around the room with his ghostly eyes, seeing the memories of a lifetime and knew what her answer would be. Of course he had known it, hadn’t he? He couldn’t have loved her if she had been any other way. She didn’t even answer before her heart beat its last and she passed away from him, forever gone, the tiny smile still frozen on her lips.
And as she had all those years ago, Richard bent and gave a final kiss to her cold lips and squeezed her cold hand with his spectral one.
Perhaps he could let it go now, both their fates decided, but he didn’t know for sure.
Some things were just graven in stone.
Some things were eternal.
Liner Notes...
Death on the Tombigbee
Some thirty years ago I had a girlfriend who was a student at The University of West Alabama (which at that time was known as Livingston University) in -naturally- Livingston, Alabama, which is almost on the Mississippi border. At the time I was working in Sumter, South Carolina, and I would frequently take my weekends and drive across two and a half states to visit her.
As luck would have it, one of the guys I worked with had relatives in Tuscaloosa and he was agreeable to driving the sixty extra miles or so if I would help him foot the gas bill and roll his joints for him, which freed me up from the actual driving. I was always intrigued by the gloriously named Tombigbee river which we had to cross just before we got to Livingston, and which I always used as a welcome marker that the nearly twelve hour trip was nearing its end. Strangely enough, Larry was happy to drive sixty miles out of his way, but he would always drop me off at the exit ramp for Livingston rather than driving the last few miles into the town proper. Go figure. So I was left to walk the, I think, about four miles into the town itself, usually around three or four in the morning, on a road with no streetlights and few dwellings, with the wind blowing the Spanish Moss through the heavy stands of trees along the road. Pretty creepy. Even then, once I got into the town itself, I would have to hang around out of sight of the cops for another hour or two until the motel opened and I could get a room.
Given the direction my mind usually turns, it wasn’t too hard to conjure up a story, given the circumstances. However, the story in this book is not the one that originally went with the title.
As a young writer you write your short stories and send them out, hoping to sell them. When they come back with rejection notices after six or eight submissions, you kind of wonder what to do with them. In my case I would many times take bits and pieces of them, even the whole of them sometimes, and incorporate them into the books. That’s what I did with Death on the Tombigbee. Just took the whole story and shoehorned it into a book. No, I’m not going to say which one.
But I always liked the title, so I just made up a whole new story to go with it. In the new story, I took some artistic license with the rituals and symbols of Baphomet and Moloch. For example, Moloch is usually described as an owl or a man with a bull’s head, but in the story the idol has the head of a goat. But when you’re writing fiction, sometimes you have to bend the facts a little to fit the story.