White Darkness

Darkness snarled, “We must have blood.”

Abigail quivered. Her mind was a battleground of emotions. Had the doctor’s diagnosed it wrong? Was she finally cracking beneath the strain of the being bipolar? The voices, the voices were so strong. She simply didn’t know how to tune them out.

Looking down at the gun in her lap, a strangled blubbering moan escaped her. Like a sequence of bad decisions, cataclysmically colliding and exploding, she was going to break. Emotional tolls and feelings be damned and shot down to Hell! There was no one she could count on…no one who cared anymore. And it was all her stepmother’s fault. The woman had destroyed her life. Her father had committed suicide, leaving her alone, and for what? For a woman who could no more love anyone?

Her cheeks were wet with angered and tired tears. Her day had been so aggressive, she just didn’t care about the outcomes anymore. Her husband had left her in a fit of frustration. He couldn’t help her deal with the bipolar depression anymore than she could help herself. Tears spilled down her cheeks. First her father, now her husband…everything had been taken from her because of the darkness within.

Her stomach was clenched harder than she imagined for her to not be puking. So many different things were running through her mind. Which one would finally be the one that ended up with her in a straight jacket?

Should she carry the weapon back to work, where the epitome of anger remained in human form? Or should she take it to the woman who had ruined her life by creating such jealousy, anger, and hurt? Or should she turn it on herself? The darkness whispered sweetly to her. The woman, yes, the woman who had created this hurt, the woman who had broken the girl child would do.

Mindless and numb, she grabbed her coat and settled it on her shoulders. Tucking the gun into her left pocket, she reached up with her right hand to wipe her face. Yes, the darkness was right…her stepmother would do, and then she would be free. Then the voices would be quiet.

~

There was a familiar ‘crunch’ of gravel as she took a deep breath and set one foot onto the gravel driveway from her car. Sickness ached in her stomach, followed by the bile rising in her throat. When her second foot hit the ground, she took in a deep breath, letting the weight of her decisions settle on her already aching shoulders.

She had intentionally parked at the end of the driveway, blocking other cars from driving up to the house. Trees ran the gauntlet on either side of the driveway, basking the yard in darkness and shadows. It was a strange and chilling feeling creeping up her spine, numbing her feet and hands, spreading a sense of fear and excitement along her nerves. For too long, she remembered the dark feelings that this house and this property had left her feeling.

The old Tennessee Southern Belle home was the last of the old Civil War homes in town. She hated this place, almost as much as she hated the woman living inside. Each step of the driveway felt like the darkness was deepening into her soul. That was the way of the curse. Deep riveting rivers of pain and sadness settled on her, as the family curse attached to the land and the house reached out to engulf her.

Stories, that’s what her stepmother had told her, so many damning stories about the house and the family who had ruled over it. There were stories of deaths in the family, of those people dying in the house, their souls trapped and unable to leave; stories of her great-great-great something or another grandmother signing her life over to the devil, cursing her family through the ages. Those stories had been true…every last one. She had seen the devil. She had heard him whisper sweetly in her ear, and she had suffered from it.

Her eyes focused on the old brick columns, baked in white, and perfectly circular, hand crafted by the slaves that the family had owned during the Civil War. Four white columns, one for each letter of hell, she thought. For a long moment, she waited at the end of the brick walkway that curved to meet the gravel driveway. She stared at the peeling color of the old plantation house. No doubt, it had been painted white so many times before, but time continued to weather the paint and the wood. Pieces of its majesty had begun to crumble with time. It needed to be torn down. It was just as dead as the flowerbeds. Nothing could survive here. Everything that had ever set foot on this land or set foot in this house had suffocated and died.

The ache increased, her chest swelled with pain, and she struggled to catch her breath. She didn’t want to be here. Too many nights, she had harmlessly spent the night with her elderly in laws to help aid them. Too many nights, she had spent wondering if the Devil would come to collect her soul just by acquaintance of her stepmother’s family. Too many nights she had looked upon the devil’s face and cringed.

It hadn’t been dreams or nightmares that had allowed her to see the ghosts there. She had been fully awake when she had seen the man walking the halls of the upstairs bedrooms, his spirit too restless to notice her quivering beneath the covers of the guest bedroom. As a child, she’d not seen a moment’s peace in this god forsaken place. The dead were very much alive in this place. Ghosts roamed the old halls.

She took another deep breath. She felt her nerves jolt as the old wooden door creaked open. The air seemed to drop. The hot muggy summer day now freezing against her skin. It was no mystery why she was here. She had to release herself from the cursed family. Her stepmother had not seen her in over ten years. Tamara had been the one to divorce her father and break his heart into a million pieces. Abagail blamed her for her father’s suicide, as if she had held the gun to her father’s head.

Vibrant red hair walked into the sunlight peaking over the porch. Tamara’s skin bristled. Seeing her stepmother was like seeing the ghosts of her past emerge from the house. For a fleeting moment, the questions returned, had she ever loved the child who had come with the man? A look of shock and surprised filled her stepmother’s face. Was she genuinely surprised to see the young woman? Then the scowl filled her face and Abagail remembered how the woman had despised her. What could she possibly accomplish by being here?

The ache spread from her chest. It was a stabbing pain at the base of her skull, now. Her stepmother crossed her arms. She could see her mouth moving, but her mind was drowning out the noise. They stared at one another for another long moment. Like a switch turning on and off, her feet began to move again. She didn’t want to hear the lies the woman would spew any longer. She no longer cared about what the woman had to say.

The brick path ended at the solid block steps, leading up to the porch where her stepmother waited. The plants had all died around the porch, adding to the sourness surrounding her. Even the dirt took on a black depressing look compared to the vibrant fertile browns the summers had provided her. Pulling her hands from her coat, she removed a small 9mm handgun. She had been gripping the handle steadily since she had exited the car.

Her stepmother’s face saddened as if somehow, she had expected this out of the difficult child, long before it had ever happened. The woman’s face pulled taunt, solidifying into a smooth mask, as she raised the gun, cocked the trigger, and aimed. This had not been what she had expected of her day, and yet she was strangely settled with how it would end.

We must have her blood, the voices whispered to Abagail. Tears filled her eyes. She wasn’t the monster. No, her stepmother was the monster. She had broken everything loving within the girl child.

The young woman, no longer the frail disturbed child, feet settled, gun aimed and ready to fire, took one more long and deep breath. She stood there for what felt like an eternity. Isn’t this what the darkness had been begging of her? Wasn’t this what was expected of her? The evil lingering in this house, in this land, whispered sweet nonsense to her, and her nerves trembled something fierce.

The bullets had been wiped clean; gloves used to handle them as she had loaded the gun. She’d not had contact with her stepmother in nearly ten years, why would anyone suspect her? Her phone had been left at home, where she had also left things running on her computer like her Facebook account, her email, and other things. She had thought this down all the way to the disposable clothing that would be burned.

Her heart seemed to calm, her breathing extending, taking deeper and deeper breaths, until she pulled the trigger. A blink, a breath, a solid second of shock before all was silent once more. There were no birds, no insects, just the breeze whistling through the dense wooded driveway. There would be no one after her stepmother to claim the house or its contents. She had done what she had sought to do.

Turning away from the red splattered against the white exterior, she returned to her car, and carefully backed out of the driveway, and left the property. It had just taken long enough for someone to have stopped and asked for assistance or directions. There was no traffic for someone to notice the type of car, and there were too many trees for anyone to notice the dead body lingering on the porch.