April 10, 2024

A Wake
By S.E. Will

Photo by Kaja Sariwating on Unsplash

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“Over my dead body.” That’s what Orla had said, her pale gray-green eyes boring into mine. I had been determined to match her glare, force her to blink first, but my eyes had already begun to burn, then water. She must have noticed the slight change in intensity on my end—sensed her victory—because her eyes shifted over to her son, my fiancé. “Or yours, Brendan dear.”

Those had been her precise words the first and only time I had met her, when Brendan had dropped the bomb that he intended to marry me, while simultaneously asking for the family ring. We had been sitting in the parlor adjacent to the grand foyer as Orla talked down at us, whereas now Brendan and I stood in the grand foyer, looking down at her. 

Wanting her to sense my ultimate victory, I rested my left hand on the edge of her casket. The eight-carat morganite surrounded by a diamond leaf motif—a gift from the gem’s namesake to the Donovan family matriarch, Orla’s great-grandmother—dangled from my ring finger mere inches above her waxen face. Brendan turned to greet a guest, but I remained, my hand still perched on the satin edge like a vulture. I leaned forward. “Looks like you were right, Orla.” 

If I hadn’t seen a copy of the death certificate myself, I would have sworn her blue tinged fingers tightened ever so slightly around her jade rosary beads, the same way they had that day in the parlor.  

But the morganite was mine now. And there was nothing Orla could do about it. 

As if in response, a cold breeze greeted me from behind, chilling my bare legs and forearms. I looked over my shoulder, half expecting to see her standing there, with that same intense glare, but there were just more guests clad in black, shuffling around the Christmas tree. They mumbled their admiration for the decorations (“Orla has such great taste…” they all said, in the present tense, just in case she could still hear them) while waiting to pay their respects to Brendan. Others were just curious to see the evil strumpet who had sent the great Orla Donovan, by all accounts seemingly invincible only a few days ago, to an early grave. 

Beyond the staring guests, most of whom weren’t even bothering to hide their gawking, let alone their whispering, something else caught my eye. Something out of place on a cold December afternoon. To one side of the entryway, a rather large window was cracked open several inches. 

I glanced back at Brendan, who was still caught up in conversation and likely would be for the rest of the afternoon, then started walking toward the window. I was making better time crossing the room than I had during my first visit, when I had scraped my way across the marble floor, my oversized pumps leaving black streaks behind me like a jet trail. I had bought the shoes the day before without any idea how to buy high-heel shoes or how I would learn to walk in them in less than 24 hours. 

“Don’t worry, dear,” Orla had said as her eyes followed the scuff marks from the entryway to the center of the room where I stood. “Those can be buffed out.” I had switched to an awkward shuffle the rest of the way to the parlor, silently cursing the writer of the article I had read about how the royals always buy their heels one-half size too big, for comfort. What an embarrassing crock of shit that had turned out to be.
 
If only Orla could see me now. As it turned out, I had actually needed a full size smaller than the ones I wore at our first meeting. I was no gazelle, even with the correct size heel, but the proof of my triumph was on the pristine floor in my wake. “Look, Ma’! No scuff marks!” I thought as I arrived at the window. 

With two hands on either side of the wide frame, I pushed down, but halfway to closed, I felt a hand on mine, spinning me around. It was Brendan. He leaned forward and kissed my cheek. I thought his hands were heading for my waist as I wrapped mine around his neck, but instead I felt them reach beyond me. I looked over my shoulder. The window was once again several inches from being closed. 

“It’s an old Irish superstition,” Brendan whispered in my ear. “It’s to let the soul out.” 

“Seriously?” I asked, but beyond Brendan, I noticed a woman Orla’s age whispering to herself as she clutched her rosary beads against her chest. 

“Someone will close it after everyone leaves,” Brendan said as he ushered me in the direction of the parlor. He sat me down on the couch closest to the fireplace, which happened to be the same one we had sat on mere days ago, when Orla was still alive.

As I warmed my hands by the fire, I wanted to ask Brendan why he couldn’t have waited to tell her about the engagement until after she got to know me better, after she had had an opportunity to realize that I wasn’t some gold-digging upstart. And why he couldn’t have waited until I wasn’t in the room before asking for his great-great-grandmother’s ring. And how that really hadn’t helped the situation; in fact, it may have contributed to Orla’s demise. 

Instead, all that came out was, “Do we really have to stay here tonight?”

“Darling, we’ve already been over this. It’s nearly Christmas. The hotels nearby are full of people traveling home for the holidays. We just have to make it through tonight. We’ll leave tomorrow right after we’re done at the cemetery.”

“But the thought of her, lying here, and us, just up the stairs…”

Brendan lifted my left hand to his lips and kissed the knuckle near my ring. “By Christmas day, we’ll be on our own private island in Fiji, getting married.”

I half-smiled at the thought, yet Orla’s words still hung heavy in the room, even after the last guest went home. My almost mother-in-law was still lying in state in her casket at the heart of the grand foyer, yet neither of us seemed willing to pass by one last time on our way to the double staircase just beyond. Instead, Brendan led me to a narrow, nondescript set of wooden stairs tucked away behind the parlor as an employee of the family closed the casket. By the time I turned the corner to mount the first step, the window was also being closed and the chandelier switched off. Only the soft glow from the lights on the Christmas tree illuminated our path to the guest room located at the top of the stairs, the furthest point away, Brendan assured me, from Orla.

                                                                        ***

Everything was just as I remembered it, at least at first. Brendan led me by the hand down the hall to a mahogany-walled room on the first floor of the house that looked to be an office. As Brendan crossed the room, I glanced down at the monogrammed stationery and pile of addressed, stamped envelopes on the desk. Her desk. 

“Are you sure it’s okay to be in here?” I bit at the skin on the inside of my lip. “It just feels, I don’t know, like, wrong or something?”

“Her lawyer already showed me the will, Jenna. It’s my office now.”

He pulled at the frame of a painting that bore a striking resemblance to the work of Diego Rivera. I was just about to ask, and simultaneously point out the irony of Rivera’s work hanging in Orla’s palatial estate, when the painting, frame and all, swung clear away from the wall, revealing a hidden safe.

“And it’s your ring now,” Brendan said as he pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and keyed in the combination. 

Even the soft click of the safe unlocking was just as I remembered, but when Brendan pulled the door open, instead of papers and metal boxes, which I now knew contained the literal family jewels, dirt came tumbling out onto the marble floor. A strong gust of frigid air, originating from somewhere deep within the safe, blew past the remaining soil, forming a dust cloud that temporarily obscured my view of the safe’s contents.
 
All I could see was movement. 

The mouth of the safe was teeming with thousands of tiny, individual, pitch-black movements—like a spider’s brood erupting from an egg sac—going out, up, down, left, and right until the dust cloud itself was overcome by creeping darkness.

Then the darkness consolidated, in the shape of a man. Brendan, except not Brendan anymore. Just the shadow of the man I had recently promised to stand by forever, no matter what. He opened the dark pit where his mouth had once been—to scream, I assumed—but all that came out was an icy gale.

I turned to run but instead felt myself begin to fall. My knees, then forearms hit the ground hard, and the darkness closed in. I shut my eyes…and waited.

But nothing happened. 

When I finally worked up the courage to open my eyes, I did not expect the darkness to leave me, but it had. Not completely, but I could make out some of my surroundings. The bed I had been sleeping in, which I had apparently fallen out of. Moonlight streaming in through the window. The steady rise and fall of Brendan’s blanketed chest.
I pulled myself up from the floor and climbed back into bed, burrowing deep under the covers and pressing myself against Brendan. But the chill did not leave me. If anything, I was becoming more and more aware of it penetrating the room, like a probing ice pick. 
I shook Brendan by the shoulder. “It’s freezing in here.”

“Huh?”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“There is blankets in the hall closet,” he mumbled. The bad grammar was a dead giveaway that Brendan was not fully awake and likely would not be, if history served, until it was fully light outside. I sighed and climbed out of the bed, wincing as my bare feet made contact with the stone floor. Then I grabbed my phone off the bedside table, turned on the flashlight, and made my way out into the hallway. 

It had seemed like such a simple thing: grab a blanket from the hall closet. But as I shined my phone light down the hallway, the task now seemed impossible. The hallway stretched out beyond my light, with door after door after door, and no telltale folding doors or differentiating handles in sight. So I opened one, shining my light inside, but it was only another bedroom. I shut the door and redirected my light back down the hallway. I couldn’t be quite sure, but it seemed that it was colder out here, and growing colder still the further I went. Beyond where my flashlight could reach was darkness, but past that, I could just make out the soft glow from what had to be the Christmas tree. 

I tried the next door, another bedroom, and had pretty much made up my mind to just suffer through the night when I heard a dull thud, followed by some shuffling, coming from somewhere down the hall, beyond where my light could reach. It had to be one of the employees, getting things ready for the next day. And they would know where the linen closet was located and why the house felt like an icebox, even more so now than when I had been in the guest room.

I quickened my pace down the hall and switched off my flashlight once I came within the sphere of light emanating from the tree. But once I reached the balcony that branched off into the double staircase, I stopped dead in my tracks. I hadn’t thought things through. 

I didn’t look, but I knew what lurked below. Her. 

“Hello?” I called out, hoping to draw the attention of the house staff.

No one answered. I didn’t dare drop my chin low enough to see everything in the room. Instead, I scanned the horizon. And that’s when I saw it. The damn window. Open. Again. 

My feet did not want to move, but I forced them down the staircase, my eyes locked on the window in front of me. I even lifted my hand up to the side of my face to mimic blinders, as if I were some skittish racehorse, that’s how bad I didn’t want to see her, even with the lid closed. 

At the bottom of the stairs, my feet shuffled rapidly across the floor to the window, and this time, I pushed it all the way shut, and locked it myself. 

I let my hands rest on the frame for a moment, trying to summon up the courage to turn around and face her. I’d have to at some point, I realized, whether it was her closed casket or the memory of her. And if I couldn’t face the former, how could I possibly expect to endure a lifetime of the latter? Some memories fade with time, but Orla was different. If I didn’t deal with this now, her presence would loom over every conversation Brendan and I would ever have, infect every decision we would make as a couple. I needed to show her, right now, like I should have the first time we met: She didn’t scare me away then, and she wouldn’t scare me now. 

I used the force of that thought to propel myself into action. I spun around and started marching straight for the casket. 

My steps slowed. Then came to a grinding halt.

The casket lid was open. 

I reached for my chest as if I were the one wearing rosary beads then forced myself to take a deep, cleansing breath. Maybe the staff had realized that the lid was supposed to be left open after all? I tiptoed slowly toward the casket, then stopped several feet short.

She was gone. 

That much I could be sure of. She had been wearing a black dress, and there was nothing but white satin in the box. I looked from side to side as if she might suddenly appear and say, “Just needed to stretch my legs, dear!” And for whatever nutty, stressed out, sleep-deprived reason, that thought made me laugh, hysterically, so much so that I doubled over.

This couldn’t possibly be the casket she was meant to be buried in. Orla struck me as the kind of woman who would demand a last-minute switcheroo if even a stitch of satin had been snagged during the wake or a hairline scratch had been discovered on the mother-of-pearl inlay. Surely that’s where she was now. And the funeral home had taken her back to their facility on a gurney instead of in the casket because…because?

It was while I was doubled over, with tears blurring my vision, that I first noticed it—the long black scuff mark on the floor. My eyes trailed the dark streak, then made the jump from that one to the one running parallel to it a ruler’s length ahead. Then another parallel to that. 

Without realizing what I was doing, I followed the markings, from their origin in front of the casket, across the room, behind the parlor, to the staircase Brendan had led me up just hours before. And there, at the foot of the stairs, lay the jade rosary beads. No longer in Orla’s clutches. But what was?

On the day of our first meeting, the thought had occurred to me that although Brendan loved me and I loved him, our love might not be enough to overcome the titanium grip Orla seemed to have on everyone and everything within her orbit, Brendan included. For a fleeting moment that had managed to endure for the past few days, I had tricked myself into believing she was the one who had been overcome. 

But here I stood now, at the bottom of the stairs, unable, or unwilling—which of the two, I was not sure—to rush up the steps and face them. 

“Over my dead body…” That’s what Orla had said.

Brendan screamed, a high-pitched screech, like a pig being stuck through. But I turned from the stairs. 

He shrieked, “No! Oh God, Mother, no!” But I walked in the direction of the casket. “Jenna, please!” 

But I slipped the ring off my finger and chucked it in on the satin pillow, then made a beeline for the front door. 

“Or yours, Brendan dear.” And she had meant it.

                                                                  💀💀💀
    
    
    
​S.E. Will lives in the Midwest, where she writes about the things that keep her up at night. Her most recent work can be found in Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder.

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