Last Will and Testament

Samantha cruised down the sidewalk, passing by the old Victorian homes that lined the street, stepping over cracks that spread across the aged cement, and past the “For Sale” signs that littered nearly every yard. Children could be heard playing from the next street over, but this block was rather silent; except for a scratchy tune that played from somewhere down the way. The sun was shining brilliantly when she left the apartment that morning, but now a cloud waltzed with the sun, keeping Samantha in a perpetual shade and putting a nip in the air. But Samantha barely registered any of this as she absentmindedly pulled her cardigan shut, her face kept buried in her phone, switching from emails to the map application to make sure she was heading in the right direction, and back to the emails again to re-read the checklist the attorney’s office sent. All whilst ignoring the pestering texts from her boyfriend that popped up on the phone like errant mosquitos vying for attention.

Samantha was going over the confusing email for the 5th time when the phone pinged with a notification; she had arrived at the destination. She turned to the right to see the home of her recently departed Great Aunt. In all her memories, Samantha could not uncover one that involved coming to this house, or for that matter, even meeting Great Aunt Penelope. Which made it more confusing when she received an email from an Attorney’s office stating that she was named the sole heir on Penelope’s will. Sure, she had heard of the woman; she was estranged from the family (by her own doing, not by any act of aggrievance towards the family). She had seen pictures of a young Penelope sitting next to her sister - Samantha’s Grandmother - on the same couch that occupied childhood memories at her Nan’s. Yet other than the soft whispering that ran through the family, no one really knew too much about Penelope. For that reason, Samantha had no expectations of what she would find when she came to the house.

The home in question told a story of long-lost grandeur. At some point, it must have stood tall and haughtily over the neighborhood. Its raised foundation gave it a regal height, yet it was the three-story turret in the front that loomed over its neighbors, casting them in a deep shadow. The community must have marveled jealously over the many dormers that were scattered about the steep, gabled roofs. The round angles and decorative woodwork giving the building a robust elegance and its many shapely windows - some decoratively adorned in stained glass - were the peepholes through which the neighbors would hope to get a glance inside; the grand bay window in front the center of all the interiors action. But time had not been kind to the structure. The whole building sagged slightly in towards the middle; its foundation cracked. It set the bay window on an upward curve that should have looked like a smile but seemed menacing. The stained glass was now truly stained with grime and grit, even cracked in some places. The round turret settled into itself and bulged around the middle, an overworked middle-aged housewife who seemed ready to collapse with the weight it had put on over the years. Worse yet, the conical dormer - that perhaps once sat pertly on the highest point of the house - was now partially caved in and haphazardly covered with a mottled old tarp. The shadows it once may have draped upon its inadequate neighbors now turned traitorous and set the house in gloom. Samantha took this all in with her mouth slightly agape, clutching her ice blue cardigan closed as the chill sank in farther.

Scratching its way into the reverie came the sound of creaking wheels on cement, screech-thudding over the broken pavement in a slow progression. With it came the music that previously played adrift from farther down the block. Samantha only just noticed someone was approaching as a shopping cart on broken wheels bumped lightly into her thigh. She yelped in surprise and turned to see what appeared to be a homeless woman wearing a shroud of old, dirtied lace, which sat askew and blocked out most of her face. The hag gently pushed the cart again, unperturbed by Samantha’s presence and perhaps thinking if she just kept pushing, she would eventually clear whatever obstacle currently blocked the path.

“Oh, excuse me.” Samantha barely whispered as she stepped back onto the lawn, the stilettos of her black heels sinking an inch into the weed-strewn grass.

The old woman (as she so appeared to be, behind the dirty lace) found the way unblocked and continued her screech-thud advance. As she passed, Samantha got a look into the cart where the music was coming from. It was filled to the brim with an eclectic assortment, mostly household items like tarnished candlestick holders, stained table linens, books missing large chunks of pages, picture frames whose glass were milked-over with age, tattered clothing from a bygone era, and even a pair of pumps that looked oddly like the ones Samantha was wearing. On top of it all sat a large silver disk - which Samantha at first mistook for a grand silver charger plate - where the music seemed to be emanating from. On second glance, she realized it was the bell of an old phonograph. How it could be playing that creepy music, as most of the device was buried under the heap, Samantha could only guess. As the vagrant passed by, Samantha heard her mumble what she assumed to be the words to the queer song that bumped along with the cart.

“It's me… you…… only look……...see…….” The crone squeaked beneath her breath.

Samantha stared as the old woman continued past. She got a good look at one of the woman’s eyes through a scalloped pattern that circled the shroud. While it was clouded with cataracts, it was impossible to miss the lunacy that lived in the large, wide glare. The one glance behind the veil startled Samantha, sending a shuddering chill down her spine, and she tried to take a step back, forgetting that her heels were buried in the muck of the lawn. She stumbled out of one shoe and landed barefoot on the lawn; the cool dampness wetting her foot. She huffed in dismay, now distracted from the odd encounter just a breath ago, and grabbed the heel. With no other choice, she slipped the shoe back on and felt the wetness squish into the leather insole. She made a mental note to find something to clean the mess when she got in the house and made her way up the walk.

Trying to dismiss the odd appearance of the old woman on the street, Samantha nearly forgot about the crumbling Victorian manor. She stopped short at the foot of the porch steps to take another look at the towering behemoth that awaited. In the distance, the entrancing melody of the music and the screech-thud of the cart both disappeared down the block. She shook her head in dismay and huffed out an exasperated breath, thinking, thanks for nothing, Aunt Penelope.

Having not broken through the cracked porch steps and fallen to her death, Samantha was a bit more relieved after entering the grand foyer and finding the inside much more habitable than the exterior. It was immediately homelier: the elaborately wallpapered hallway crowded with eccentric art, abundant console tables intricately carved from wood and covered with knick-knacks and statues of converging ethnicities, a grand chandelier of true crystal, and a large staircase that reached up into the unlit floors of the mansion. Albeit, everything was covered in years of dust and layers of shadows cast by the dull light entering the windows that hugged the entryway door. She found a light switch next to the front door and flipped it on. There was a brief lag, but the electricity sizzled to life and sent dull golden light into the sconces and chandelier.

Samantha sat her bag down on the table beneath the chandelier, which held a large vase filled with flowers dried to crisp perfection. Bringing the phone out again, Samantha paused at the 15 missed texts from her boyfriend. Tempted to read his blabbering and pleading, she instead swiped them off the screen and pulled up the email the attorney’s office had sent. Scrolling through all the legal jargon, she came to the part which was the most interesting: a checklist of things Great Aunt Penelope had requested in her will. Most were rudimentary - like saving her picture albums and clearing out the safe (combination included) - but a few others caught Samantha’s attention, like covering all the mirrors - which she believed was a Jewish tradition, another odd trait about Great Aunt Penelope, considering the rest of the family were devout Christians - and saving Penelope’s wedding dress to have it passed down to someone in the family. All in all, the whole list was peculiarly sentimental for a woman who had spent most of her adult life as a loner, with no children of her own.

Samantha felt a bit odd about honoring Penelope’s request to cover the mirrors, considering she was Catholic herself, and because in the foyer alone she spotted six mirrors. The chill of the day and encountering the madwoman outside was still settling in her bones; she didn’t want to be here any longer than necessary. So, she started down the hallway in search of Penelope’s bedroom. The email stated it should be on the first floor near the kitchen, sharing a door with the library, and in the closet would be the safe and wedding dress. Searching the walls for more light switches along the way, Samantha quietly - save for the deep groans of the aged wooden floors - illuminated the lustrous home of the peculiar Great Aunt Penelope. She opened door after door, eventually finding a large reception room that may have, at one point, welcomed illustrious guests swathed in regal garments and luminous jewels. The shelves were adorned in grime-encrusted crystal decanters and once plush lounge chairs were covered with bleak canvas tarpaulins.

Through to the next door was the formal dining room. A table long enough to seat eight centered on the floor; the chairs nowhere to be seen. Another gigantic piece of khaki canvas cloth was thrown haphazardly over the table and draped onto the floor. The room also featured a chandelier similar to the foyer, but many of the dangling ornaments were missing and only one shivering light pulsed through the sad display. It was clear to Samantha that Aunt Penelope hadn’t entertained many people in quite some years. On the opposite wall, a pair of sliding doors stood slightly agape; two lips parted in bated breath, a swirl of dust dancing in the air that escaped between them and illuminated by a ray of muted light that spilled through an open window over a sink. When Samantha slid apart the doors, it created a vacuum that sucked more air through the partially opened window. In a shuttering gasp, the glass panel flew open completely, smacked against the tiled walls, and shattered into a dazzling plume of sparkling confetti. In response, a cupboard under the sink thumped and squeaked, emitting the shrill cries of a rat that bolted out in surprise from the loud noise. Samantha sent out a cry of her own - both from the shock of the shattering glass and the appearance of a foot-long rat - and jumped back into the dining room. One foot caught on the canvas that draped onto the floor and sent her sprawling backward. The shoe still squelching with bits of morning dew and slimy mud, slipped underneath her and the heel broke. Victim to gravity and physics, Samantha continued falling; the table broke her descent as it smacked into her lower back, her head whipped back from the impact and slammed into the table. She fell the rest of the way down to the floor, pulling along the table covering and sending the ramshackle contents above raining down. The shocked rat scrambled past, giving Samantha a look of disdain from being awoken so abruptly, but Samantha did not notice the burning comical glare, for the world was spinning in front of her and going fuzzy. Darkness crept in around the edges of her sight, slowly converging till her vision was a pinpoint, then swallowing her whole as she blacked out completely and collapsed onto her side.

A picture of two young women on a couch; her boyfriend calling out her name as she finally walked out for the last time; a lawyer telling her she won a lottery; mirrors looking back at her, expecting their ceremonial coverings; the sound of a familiar tune warbling from a distance; a mouse walking on its hind legs with a cane, blabbering insults and shaking a spindly paw in contempt; a crazed eye peeking out from the scalloped opening of a dirtied head covering…

Samantha stirred awake from the dreams that weaved in her mind and laid still for a while longer, feeling hungover as her head pounded and body ached. A chill spread through her, so she reached for the blanket that lay hanging askew. She tried to pull it up to her chin, but the movement sent about a clattering of objects. Samantha opened her eyes at the sound and tried to sit up, but her head went spiraling and she had to steady herself on an outstretched arm and let her head hang heavy, taking deep breaths to calm a kaleidoscope of images. Strewn on the floor were broken bits of a rusted candelabra, smashed pieces of some clay sculpture, and random objects Samantha had never seen before but reminded her of Nan. Samantha realized then that she was also strewn on the floor; it all came snapping back into place.

She reached back to feel the spot where her head collided with the table and winced at the goose egg that was already rising. She was happy to see that no blood came away on her fingers but was equally displeased upon noticing the stem of her high heel sitting a foot away from the rest of the shoe. Samantha slowly collected herself off the floor, taking a moment to stretch out aching muscles. She looked through to the kitchen window and was surprised to see the sun had almost gone down beyond the horizon. How long had she been out, she wondered? Samantha’s watch reported nearly five in the afternoon; four hours since she arrived.

“Shit.” She said perfunctorily.

Samantha gazed around at the mess she made, then back at her watch, and decided just to say fuck it. She would empty the safe, grab the wedding dress from the closet, and call the attorney’s office tomorrow to set up a company to come in and take care of the rest before the estate sale. Slipping her foot back into the broken pump and pocketing the useless stem, Samantha hobbled her way into the kitchen, keeping a hand on the wall to continue steadying herself from the slight sway that distorted the walls and pitched the floor at odd angles. For a moment she worried about a possible concussion and decided it was even more reason to get everything done and get out of the creepy old house. She would stop at urgent care on the way home.

Making her way through the tilting kitchen proved to be difficult, as the house was swathed in even deeper shadows now that the sun was nearly setting, and the old coppery filaments of the lights did nothing to illuminate the way ahead. Yet Samantha steadied herself and dispelled the worst of the dizziness. Once on the other side of the kitchen - which had been the cleanest room so far, clearly used more frequently than the other discovered rooms - she passed through a swinging door. One lone arched stained-glass window near the top of the wall offered the barest minimum of blue light to sift over the many surfaces of the room. Samantha could just make out the spines of books that blanketed the nearest bookshelf. She slowly scanned the space, looking for a lamp to supplement the dark blue light of the window. Her eyes landed in the far corner and locked onto a long craning neck that arched over the back of a chair; a large bulbous head was turned in her direction, staring at her arrival. Samantha’s heart kicked into an adrenaline-fueled staccato beat, the coursing blood pounding into the growing welt. Breath caught in her throat, as did a shrill scream, and she pulled open the swinging door from the kitchen to let the brassy light crawl into the room. Where she expected - for no explainable reason - the hag from the street to be hiding, was the bell of a phonograph peeking over the back of a wingback chair. Samantha let out the captured breath in a throaty rattle.

Relieved she was not about to have a staredown with an intruder, Samantha was still perturbed that her initial instinct to suspect the old woman of breaking and entering now collided with the eerie presence of a phonograph similar to the one the crone carried in the broken cart. There was a tall lamp standing next to the wingback chair, so she pulled out the flashlight from her phone (thinking to herself, a little too late, how helpful it would have been from the beginning) and used it to guide the way over. While the caustic light of the phone cast long, careening shadows from everything else in the room, the illustriously clean horn of the phonograph emanated a spectral glow; fragments of silver spears reflected onto the walls of the room. Like the rest of the lights in the house, the lamp held a copper filament bulb, that - when turned on - changed the crisp silver of the bell to a muted gold. Samantha peered at the music player before fully approaching; it was a grand machine. Sitting on the table it reached well above Samantha’s 5’6” frame. Even without the table it perched on, it must have measured three or four feet in height, with the ornately detailed horn most of its build. The turntable itself was made from deep mahogany, polished to glistening perfection. On the front panel, etched into the wood and plated with gold lettering, was the word “Victrola”. Samantha assumed it was the brand, but she was unfamiliar with the name. A record was already set to play, the needle hovering delicately above, waiting for a guiding touch to turn the hand crank and set it into motion. Samantha was awed by its beauty, so much so she didn’t realize she was reaching for the hand crank until she was already turning it. The needle responded immediately and gently touched down on the spinning record. From the bell, a throaty bass spilled out like liquid gold. Its rich tone coated the room and sent a warmth into Samantha’s body. The music began to build with a full orchestra: the many string instruments were the branches of a lively tree that gently swayed in the light whistling breeze of the flutes and oboes, tympani thundered in a distant background, chimes and a xylophone chittered in response to the promise of a summer’s night rain. It was a lullaby orchestrated by Mother Nature, recorded on a night of perfection when one is cradled softly into sleep by the rolling rumble of a cloudy sky and the pitter-patter of rain on a roof.

Samantha noted the comfort of the music and let it gently calm the nerves that had been building since her arrival on the block. She took a moment to sit in the chair, which must have been set up to enjoy the music just as she was deciding to do. An ease settled over the room, dulling the pain in her head and softening the aches of crashing into the table and sleeping on the floor. Her gaze wandered around the room, seeing the cleanliness of it all in stark contrast to the dirty and aged parts that Great Aunt Penelope must have neglected for a decade or more. Samantha imagined Penelope sitting in the same chair, listening to the Victrola, perhaps sipping a brandy, reading one of the many volumes stacked on the surrounding shelves; it was a comforting idea. Her eyes fluttered closed as she sank into the plush softness of the chair. Samantha could see Penelope as well, letting her own eyes close and drifting off to a nap. The image played out for a moment: the imaginary Penelope releasing a relaxed sigh as she drifted into sleep, her chin drooping down and coming to rest on her shoulder. Then the tone of the music began to change.

Its quality aged around the edges and took on a scratchiness. An unfamiliar instrument steadily worked its way into the evolving cacophony of sounds. Soft at first, but then echoing in the small room at a steady tempo. Screech-thud, screech-thud, screech-thud. The soft gold of the lamp intensified with a singing buzz; it shone brightly over the imagined Penelope whose face began to rapidly sag with age. Her skin turned a mottled brown and hung limply from the bones of her face and her hair tarnished into a listless grey. The light shone brighter, whistled at a higher pitch, the screech-thud intensified in the background, and Penelope aged at an increasing rate. But then, no, she wasn’t aging; she was decaying. It was clear then that she was dead. Body stiffening from rigor mortis, skin shrinking around her frail body as it dried up with a quickness, and hair falling around her in clumps. The filament of the bulb began to fray and pulse, strobing the room with golden bursts of light. The skin around Penelope's body was so tight she looked mummified. Finally, it crisped around her body and pulled in against her hollowed cheeks. With one last strobe of intense sepia light, the shrinking lids of Penelope's eyes snapped open, revealing the watery crazed eyeballs of a lunatic; the hag beneath the shroud. The light snapped out with a crackling pop.

Samantha’s own eyes snapped open. She flung herself from the chair, whipped around, and - even knowing she was just sitting there - expected to see the decayed corpse of her Great Aunt Penelope. But it was empty, except for the small impression her own body left behind. The music player skipped softly in the background, echoing the tempo of the pulsing light from Samantha’s dream. The record had played to the end and Samantha had slept through it all. She put her hands to her forehead and forcibly calmed herself. Not only was she trembling from the vivid nightmare, but Samantha was furious with herself for falling asleep when she could very well be suffering from a concussion. At that point, she wouldn’t have been surprised if a tumor had dislodged in her brain, causing delirious lapses into a demented dreamland.

From her pocket came the soft buzz of a phone, Samantha jumped a little and a blush rose to her cheeks as she admonished herself. As feared, it was her boyfriend Josh, again. She didn’t even feign interest in the message, assuming it said he was standing outside her apartment, waiting to talk. Samantha simply put the phone back and pinched the bridge of her nose. Heartbeat coming back to a normal pace, so came the throbbing in her head. Samantha swayed on the spot as a wave of nausea rolled in. She rocked back and forth involuntarily on off-kilter shoes and braced herself against the nearest bookshelf. She was loath to touch her bare feet to the floor, but the stability was needed, so she kicked off the mismatched heels. Once on solid ground, Samantha’s mind found its center and steadied; the nausea passed. She looked at the once comfy but now nightmarish winged-back chair, then to the door that most assuredly led to Penelope’s bedroom, and then down to the pocket where promises of Josh’s presence at home still buzzed for attention.

“Just a quick peek in the closet, grab the dress, and empty the safe,” Samantha said to the empty room. “And forget about the subway, you can take a taxi home, and get Chinese delivered.”

She smiled as her stomach grumbled. She omitted voicing it to the room, but Samantha also hoped the delay in arriving home would mean Josh would take the hint and leave the stoop. Abandoning the shoes where they lay on the floor, she reached out to the cloudy, glass knob of the door and entered Great Aunt Penelope's bedroom.

The room itself was small - perhaps a maid’s quarters at some point in the past - but was dominated by a large window that took up most of the far wall and looked out into the backyard, making the space feel bigger than it was. The window was made up of many small panels and covered outside in twisted knots of vine. The moon had the upper hand over its daily fight with the sun, rising bright in the sky and sending strong rays of bone-white to scatter through the gnarled vines and into the room. The middle of the floor was filled by a gigantic four-poster bed, each side ribboned with sheets of pearlescent silk which were drawn closed. Moonlight pierced the breath-thin fabric, making it shimmery and translucent. Samantha’s eyes grazed over the fabric but didn’t dare to look deeper, as an innate fear worked its way up her spine, saying that she would find the dried, crackly corpse of Aunt Penelope behind the silk. She knew this was nonsense, but avoided the bed anyhow, turning away the images from the fall into lunacy just moments ago. Samantha flipped the light switch on the incoming wall and waited as nothing happened.

“Great.” She muttered.

Stepping into the room, Samantha activated the phone light. The contrast of its stringency against the pureness of the moon brought back the feeling of vertigo, so she kept the light down by her side and decided to use it only when necessary. Taking slow steps, she made it to the bifold doors of the closet and slid them apart; the space was filled to burst. Clothing was so tightly packed onto the hanging rod it was hard to tell where one garment ended, and another began. The shelf above dipped under the weight of its contents; mostly shoe and hat boxes (probably filled with neither shoes nor hats, she imagined). A couple of shoes spilled out from below when the doors opened and Samantha grabbed at a pair of house slippers that looked about right, slipping them onto her bare, cold feet. The floor of the closet was absolutely drowning in shoes. She feared the safe was somewhere down there and would need to be excavated from the rubble of clogs, boots, slippers, espadrilles, kitten heels, and orthopedic sneakers.

Then from the corner of her eye, caught in an errant ray of milky moonlight, came the shimmer from a glistening sheath of fabric. Samantha investigated the interior of the closet and discovered a plastic dry-cleaner bag sandwiched against the wall. Pushing with all her might, the heft of clothing moved a half-inch down the rod. Arm stretched out full-length, reaching with her fingertips, shoulder cracking as it extended a few centimeters more, Samantha grasped the hanger and pulled on the garment. The piece was tremendously heavy and bulky, which made it even more difficult to tug past the limited space the closet offered. Finally, it said its goodbyes to the place it inhabited for more years than Samantha could imagine and slipped into her embrace.

The bag heaved its weight onto Samantha, and she fumbled to keep it in her arms. With a grunt, she flung the hook of the hanger over the middle of the closet rod and let it hang against the bulk of clothing behind it. This offered an unbroken view of the dazzling wedding gown, but the effort sent pain shooting through Samantha’s battered body, and sparks of lightning through her neck and skull. Sparkling motes danced in her vision and nausea returned on an incoming tide, but she waved off the display of lights and swallowed down the bile, and instead focused on Aunt Penelope's pristinely maintained gown. Knowing almost nothing about Penelope, Samantha wasn’t privy to when she married, but by the look of the still snow-white fabric, it could have been last week. A gigantic train, folded many times over and pinned up onto itself, created a wide bulge in the bottom of the thick plastic bag. Sequins and rhinestones glittered in the wash of the moonlight, yet Samantha kept her eyes trained on the billowing wedding veil that hung over the front of the dress and covered most of the bodice. It was a piece of delicate lace, painstakingly detailed in its beauty, clearly done by hand, and in a semi-circle that seemed to lay around the eye line of the veil was a scalloped design that Samantha immediately recognized, but her mind refused to place. Her ghostly hand floated through a stream of spectral lunar light, looking detached from her arm. It might as well have been, for Samantha was in a trance and had no control over her body's need to see the lace. Plucked delicately between her forefinger and thumb, the zipper slowly parted; its jagged teeth sent a sawing squeal through the silent room. With both of her hands, Samantha lifted the wedding veil from the garment bag. It was as light and delicate as a spider’s web, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she worried it would shred in her grip if pulled too hard. And with the thought still floating distantly in her entranced consciousness - the scalloped pattern coming closer to her eyes – Samantha’s mind slipped off-kilter and sent imagination in collision with reality as she hallucinated a black-widow spider the size of an eyeball crawling from behind the lacey-web and onto her hand.

The blackness of its body was startling against the pale, moonlit white of her skin. A part of her screamed to smack it away, while another said look closer. The moment froze for eternity and Samantha was at the will of her brain-addled mind as it slipped into madness. She stared with wide, lunatic eyes at the black widow's back, looking to see the infamous hourglass etched emblem, but instead saw the blood-curdled red shape of a phonograph's horn. With a searing jolt, the spider’s fangs pierced her skin.

Samantha’s trance was finally broken. With the snap of pain bringing about reality, she was aghast to find the spider was as real as the bite. She screamed out, flinging her hand about wildly and smacking into the poster of the bed. Her aim - though done blindly - was true, and the black-widow flattened into a jellied mess of limbs. Samantha screamed again, whirling around, looking for something – anything - to help. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought and continued turning in a circle, looking for her phone, looking for her bag, for her shoes, her apartment keys, for anything.

Samantha stopped and looked at the dress, and grabbed for it, wrenching it off the closet rod. She dragged it on the floor as she made her way back into the library. The world was a tilt-a-whirl again and her vision took on a blur. She came upon the broken shoes and reached down, but continued forward and spilled over onto the floor. Picking herself up on the swollen hand caused another jolt of pain to spark down her entire body; the strongest one yet. She retched once, and then vomited on the floor. Standing, she stepped over the pile and continued forward, not realizing the dress dragged through the mess. Samantha stumbled out the swinging door and into the kitchen, the dress caught on the frame as the door swung shut. She pulled and the dress came flying, sending her sprawling onto her back, and once more knocking her skull, this time into the marble kitchen floor with a deep thud. The room swam in and out of vision through a dark pool of light. Laid out on her back, Samantha vomited again. It filled her mouth and settled in the back of her throat. She turned on her side and violently coughed it onto the floor, the hacking causing her back to spasm in pain. Samantha’s vision swam back to clarity and she saw the kitchen rat staring from the cracked open cabinet door. Its beady black eyes looked over her, its nose twitched once, sending its whiskers into a dance, and disappeared into its abode.

Samantha’s phone - forgotten in the ordeal - chimed in the bedroom; a spirited tone alerted someone was calling.

Yes, she thought, my phone, I need to call for help. Samantha’s legs were jelly and useless for standing, so she pulled her body along the floor in a military crawl, not letting go of the wedding dress as it dragged along with her. Reaching to push open the swinging door, a cranking sounded in the next room, followed by the whir of something spinning, and finally a needle setting down and scratching along hard vinyl. From the Victrola came a different tune than the rumbling night storm Samantha remembered from before. Yet it was a melody she was just as familiar with because it played in the background of her fever dreams on the dining room floor, and in the wingback chair that she watched Penelope die in, and - in a sudden moment of piercing understanding - the melody she heard echoing down the empty block when she arrived, its origin the filth covered horn drowning in the shopping cart collection of the homeless woman.

“No. No, no, no, no, no.” Samantha whimpered. “This isn’t real. This isn’t real.” She turned about and started crawling toward the dining room. “You’re having another dream, Samantha. Wake up!” She shouted at herself.

She continued through the dining room, crawling over the broken bits of clay debris left from before. They crunched under her weight, digging into her arms and breaking open the skin. Samantha screamed in anguish, her head responding with a sizzle of liquid hot pain that threatened to split open the skull, and she realized she had never felt so much pain in a dream before.

Samantha continued crawling, but her breath was labored. Each pull on an arm sent fresh agony through her skin, down into the spasming muscles of her back, up into the volcanic pounding of her skull. She could no longer tell if her eyes were open or if she lost her vision completely, she just blindly kept on. The music continued its creepy cadence, sounding old with static. The phone stopped chirping in the bedroom and was replaced by the slink of curtains being drawn back, then bed springs squeaking, small but solid footsteps across the floor, the squeal of a glass doorknob, the footsteps louder as they slowly progressed and then hushed, the emptiness filled with the singing of rusty hinges from a swinging door.

Samantha had backed herself into a corner; crawling blindly led her astray. Her mind raced and wobbled on an unsteady axis. She cradled her bitten and swollen hand - now twice the size - to her chest, the arm completely numb to the shoulder and useless. Her legs were pins and needles and completely out of her control. She couldn’t move, couldn’t see. Whimpering, tears spilled down her face as consciousness swam circles around her.

The footsteps continued over the marble floor of the kitchen, pausing briefly as the crinkly garment bag was searched, and then ever more slowly progressing toward Samantha. Clay bits crunched under the approaching steps. Samantha blinked out for a second, praying for her mind to take her away, and then the entity was next to her, the presence palpable. The world dissolved and slipped from reality's grasp. The last thing Samantha felt was the spidery lace of the veil being draped over her head.

~ ~ ~

She sensed movement first: a slow, halting progression that carried her body along. While she began to understand that she was walking, she also sensed it wasn’t her body that was doing the walking. She felt cradled in another, a passenger along for the ride. In a progression, her senses came back: smelling the wet earth of outside, seeing dull light burn its way through the haze in her eyes, and finally, hearing a scratchy tune accompanied by the offbeat screech-thud coming from a broken wheel. Samantha tried to rouse herself quicker, she wanted to clear her gaze and ready her legs for running. Although she didn’t want to admit it, Samantha knew exactly where she was. But unfortunately, her body wasn’t responding to demands. She continued to be body-less; a floating consciousness being carried along by something she couldn’t control. With stuttering blinks, her vision cleared to see a world covered in white shadowy lines. Then to her left was a woman whose back was turned; familiar height and dirty-blonde hair in a rough bun, blue cardigan over a somber red blouse that peaked around the bottom edge, tapered dark blue jeans, and black pumps with thin stiletto heels.

The woman turned to excuse herself and Samantha’s sanity severed its last thread. She tried to scream out, but all she was able to croak was: “It's me… you…… only look……...see…….”. Samantha tried to stop walking, to control her mind and body. But how does one command a body that isn’t theirs? The feet that carried Samantha kept shuffling along, and the head she looked out from turned at the last minute, where her vision was given a brief glimpse of the world through a scalloped clearing. Samantha screamed, pleaded, but the cry only presented itself in the wildness of her gaze as she locked eyes with herself from earlier in the day. The music played on.