Dead Echo

  Chapter 28: Introductions

  Elizabeth Tanksley gingerly lifted herself out of the recliner and thumbed the television off. Her arthritis was terrible today, even with the pills. That and the headache had her in a deathgrip. Or so it seemed. Deep inside she knew it was anything but, but still…at least this gave her something else to consider. Because she really didn’t want to recognize the thing she knew had brought on both of these minor inconveniences.

  Her neighbor. She would go over and meet her come hell or highwater. Today…soon. And that, in a nutshell, was what was causing everything else. Her body was in rebellion over the thing her mind refused to ignore. Besides, she honestly feared now, that if she didn’t at least get this part over with, she’d never sleep again.

  Not until the Big and Final One.

  A shiver passed along her frame and she steadied herself against the table, gripping its edge in a claw-like grip. It’d now been twelve days since she’d slept a wink. Crazy, yes, but true. A new record. There’d been nothing like it since her teens. And she still remembered that, yes sir: her first real boyfriend. Johnson Teal had been his name. He’d come from a nice little family from right down the road. They used to walk those same roads, holding hands, and on more than one occasion she’d let him get a little randy, even though they’d never gone all the way. Oh, even then, back in the mists of time, some girls she’d known had let the boys have their way but it was really never something she’d seriously considered.

  And now it brought bitterness. Partly because she’d never let him; mostly because she’d never married; ultimately because even now she was as chaste as the day she’d entered the world. A virgin. For her gift, she’d always led herself to believe. The visions, the things she’d always been able to see. She’d felt that this thing would depart if she were ever to let a man have her. She never knew where the feeling originated, only that it had always been there.

  She looked across the room at one of the several pictures she’d hung on the wall. All of them black and white, most of them her over the years. She’d even been vaguely pretty once and now…well. She felt like crying. Oh so long ago, remembering those walks and Teal’s entreaties to step across the ditch, to wind back into the high grass…. But he’d failed. And now she had to wonder if she’d somehow been party to his death, had somehow caused it by not relinquishing as she should have. But she shook her head. That time it had been eight straight nights without sleep, her mind a vast, empty shell of disquiet. Johnson had hooked on with a construction outfit and told her he’d be gone for three months, at least. She cried and pleaded with him not to go, but times were tight and good money was not something that could be thumbed down. Besides, there’d been no visions up to that point. The first night she’d slept, but dreamlessly. Which was strange. Up till that time she couldn’t remember a night without dreams, and perhaps, in retrospect, that’s what had disturbed her initially. There had been no portent of disaster. Only dreamlessness.

  And then the eight straight sleepless nights.

  After that she’d slept. Not good, but she’d slept.

  Her mother told her of Johnson’s death two days later. She called Elizabeth into the dining room and grabbed her hand in both of hers and told her. There’d been an accident with the rigging. Something had slipped. He’d been hit in the head. There was nothing anyone could have done.

  Elizabeth had taken the news in silence, feeling the grip of her mother’s warm hands on her own. She’d felt something slip inside her then, some telling, intricate piece of her own machinery, and she’d left the table without a word and went straight to her bedroom. Her mother had not followed, knowing enough about the gulf of broken hearts to remain apart. Elizabeth had entered the room, closed the door, turned off all lights and lay down on the bed. Cried for a few minutes and then, inexplicably, slept twenty-five hours straight through.

  For just a moment the events of those long years past floated before her eyes like things seen through a frost-paned shower stall. She was lost in some deep maze of strangeness made ever more so by the nostalgic bitterness of familiarity. She shook her head and blinked her eyes. She cocked her head left and right as if getting a bearing on her surroundings. She breathed out softly and looked down at the table, at her hands. They were old now, deep lines running a gamut of directions, all of them going nowhere. She’d studied them often and long over the years. It had always seemed that whatever power she had originated there, not in her head. Why this would be so she could not say, call it intuition. But for long years she’d watched them and they’d told her many things, but all in all those lost years they’d never shown her anything she could change. And still she’d persisted. Waiting, waiting. For what she’d never known.

  But now she could feel it coming.

  Another shiver rammed through her and her hands twitched violently as if from electric shock. Something was on the way. She’d known it earlier; it must have been the better part of three-four weeks now, since she’d felt it creeping on, but never more so than right this minute. She thought of her neighbor again, coming to her unbidden like a memory brought on by a song on the radio. Relentless.

  She thought back to the night and could find nothing much on which to hang her hat. Just a brooding unease, and mind snapshots of the woman she knew by look alone. Up until now she’d never spoken the first word to her. The smell of the biscuits brought her a step closer to reality. Time, it was time. The biscuits called. Her nose was like that, in over sixty years of baking, she’d never burned them once, her timing always impeccable. But now it was close; her nose told her so, and really, this morning, something told her she’d never make another batch of more importance. Get up before you burn the sonofabiscuits, she thought.

  She hurried over to the oven, picking up the pot handlers by the sink as she went. Pure ridiculousness, she chided herself. Here you go getting all loosy-goosy over---what? That was the thing. Nothing. Only a persistent sense of dread. She didn’t think meeting her neighbor would do much in the way of stopping that either, but again, intuition must be followed. And she didn’t know what was worse, the dread of meeting the woman or the dread in not meeting her. Both prospects were equally grim.

  She opened the door of the oven and reached inside, pulled out the tray of biscuits and set them on the burners of the stove to cool. There, now, it was okay. Her nose told her so, and she felt better, but only for a moment. Because now she knew, looking down at the things she’d made, that there was no turning back. Whatever mysterious, undefined thing that had steadily been whittling away at her lately, well that thing was ready to break into the light. God help her, she could feel it coming. She tore a few sheets of paper towels free and placed them over the cooling biscuits and stepped back, her hands on her hips. She nodded and smiled grimly.

  Oh yes, and even now, in her mind’s eye she could picture herself and Johnson Teal stealing away from the road into the shadows of the tall grass. And right now, this very minute, over all time and place, her old mind ticked with the knowledge that she should have let him do that thing they’d both wanted all those many years ago. She was suddenly irrevocably sure it would have saved her from whatever was flying up from the darkness of the future.