Last Dance of a Black Widow
BRADLEY CONVISSAR
Smashwords Edition
This book is a work of fiction.
All characters, events and situations in this book
are purely fictional and any resemblance to real
people or events is purely coincidental.
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Copyright 2011 Bradley Convissar
Cover design by Bradley Convissar
The cover photo is a derivative of the photo “green bed” by 28misguidedsoul at Flickr, used under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28misguidedsouls/5595270199/
The background is “Iron Plate by Eky Studio, 2011 used under license from Shutterstock.com”
Abbey Whistler stood at the window of her hospital room, looking wistfully at the outside world. Everything she saw was painted in black and white and delicate shades of gray. A bird, a cardinal she believed, its color stripped from its body, was frozen in mid-flight only feet from the window, its graceful wings outstretched and poised to beat the air if time ever resumed. The handful of people walking across the courtyard were likewise stationary, their bodies frozen in mid-stride and mid-speech. It was like God had pressed the pause button on the world and then peeled away all of the vibrant colors that gave life and beauty to the earth.
Abbey was aware of her corpse behind her, the frail, cancer-ridden body covered by a sheet. But she preferred not to think of it. She was also aware of the two dozen or so black filaments that stretched from her back and found purchase, through the sheet, in her body. But she preferred not to think of this, either. She wanted to admire the world, her world, for as long as possible despite its static, lifeless appearance.
Sudden movement caught her attention and, for a brief moment, Abbey caught a flash of her reflection in the window’s glass, the woman looking back at her fifty years younger, a vibrant young creature full of beauty and potential, not the older, broken woman she had been at death. Lush brown hair instead of her current thin, iron-colored locks; wide blue eyes full of life and promised instead of the watery, half closed eyes she owned now; full lips that, when pursed, could bring a man to his knees, instead of the dry, cracked and pigmented mouth she possessed; smooth, perfect skin, the blank canvas of youth, instead of the wrinkled mask she now displayed to the world.
Trembling, Abbey reached out to try and touch that reflection, as if by touching it she could reclaim something of what age had stolen from her, but the reflection was fleeting, gone before her hand touched the glass. But there was no disappointment in the sigh that followed, just resignation. There was no recapturing of youth.
Even after death had claimed you. Especially after death had claimed you.
The sound of a door creaking open filled the silent room, followed by a gust of frigid air that made Abbey shiver despite herself.
“Time to go, Abbey,” a quiet voice said, a voice that Abbey recognized but hadn’t heard in almost sixty years. She turned around slowly, noted that her room was defined by the same static, black and white quality as the outside world.
Her father stood before her. She had been just fifteen when he had died of lung cancer, but his face had been burned in to her memory, and he looked just as she expected he would: dressed in the customary garb of a West Virginian coal miner, his overalls, shirt and gloves covered with a thick layer of charcoal-colored grime and soot. Loose strands of graying hair peeked out from under a gray hard hat perched on top of his head. His face, aged well beyond what his years should have demanded, was also coated with a thin layer of ash and sweat, giving him the worn, tired, yet prideful look of a man who knew he had a hard job, but one he did well.
“Where are we going, dad,” she asked, all of sudden feeling like a little girl in his presence instead of an elderly woman older than he had been when he had died.
“I think you know where, angel.” That had been his name for her. Angel. Because all of the doctors believed that she, devastated by a debilitating respiratory infection shortly after birth, wouldn’t survive her first three days on earth. But by some grace of god, she had not only survived but thrived.
“Oh,” Abbey said, the reality of her situation finally hitting home as she stood before her father. “Don’t I at least get a trial?”
“Oh Abbey, you had one. The moment after you died. And He… He found the quality of your soul… lacking.”
“I don’t understand,” she said meekly.
“Sure you do, Abbey. The Alzheimer’s, it may have screwed around with your memories towards the end, but you’re dead now, and you know full well what you did.”
Abbey looked at the clock hanging on the wall opposite the bed. What cruel place to hang it, she thought, and had thought previously while she still lived, perched in a perfect position so that the dying could watch as the seconds of their life ticked away. The hands were frozen, like everything else in this gray place, and it would be four twenty-five and thirty three seconds forever here. She didn’t want to look back at her father, didn’t want to see the disappointment in his eyes, but she did, and it was with a sharp retort on her lips.
“It’s all your fault, you know. If you hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have turned out as I did.”
Abbey’s father chuckled, but the stern expression never left his face. “I think… I think if I hadn’t died, you may have killed me as well, Abbey.”
Abbey felt something horrible well up within her. “How can you say that?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“The infection… I’ll forever believe it did something to your brain. My presence wouldn’t have changed anything. You were hardwired to be a sociopath, Abbey, and if I had lived, nothing would have changed. You can deny it all you want, but the truth is the truth is the truth.”
“They all deserved it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No?” her father asked, and he suddenly wasn’t her father anymore, the older, dirty features replaced by the resplendent, aristocratic face of a much younger, much more handsome man. “Then explain David Jackson, your first husband, the man you murdered after five years of marriage by poisoning his tea.”
“He was an adulterer,” Abbey said, her voice suddenly a hiss.
“Hardly a damnable offense,” David said with her father’s voice.
“The Bible says it is.”
“And even if it was, it was not your place to enforce the Lord’s justice.”
“He was sleeping with his secretary,” Abbey argued. “In our marriage bed.”
“No, Abbey. He wasn’t. And you knew he wasn’t. You just knew that you were done with him. Had grown bored. In fact, it was you who were having an affair. So you poisoned him, chopped him up, buried him and convinced the authorities that he had run away with another woman.”
Abbey opened her mouth to speak, then snapped her jaw closed. Hatred flared in her eyes.
“And what about Charles Winehouse, Abbey?” David’s youthful features melted away, replaced by the older, more mature, fatter face of Abbey’s second husband. “What did he do to earn your wrath? What did he do to earn death at the end of a knife?”
“He abused me,” Abbey said. “He beat me, he raped me, he ruined me. I defended myself.”
Charles shook his head sadly. “He did none of those things, Abbey, and you know it. You had your lover at the time beat you and assault you, just in case you were caught. In truth, you hated your husband’s miserly ways. Worth millions, he chose to live a humble life, a life of virtual penury compared to what he earned, spending little and giving most of what his company earned to charity. You couldn’t stand it, so you murdered him. And when he supposedly ‘disappeared’ on a business trip, his fortune transferred to you.”
The face transformed again, Charles’s elderly, obese visage giving way to a classically handsome face with a broad smile and perfect teeth, a face that belonged in the movies. “And Jack Malone, Abbey? He loved you so much. He worshipped you, even though you were twenty years his senior, and you drugged him and took him apart with a hatchet. And once again, the remains were never found.”
“I knew the truth of Jack Malone,” Abbey seethed. “He and the little whore he was fucking were planning on murdering me for my money. MY MONEY!” The irony, the hypocrisy, of her word’s failed to touch her mind, or if they did, she cast them away with impunity.
Jack gave harsh chuckle. “He had no eyes for your money, Abbey, and you know it. Nor was he having an affair. You made him happy. You completed him. He wanted nothing more than to grow old with you. But as with the previous two men, you quickly grew tired of him, tired of his obsequious nature. And instead of talking to him, explaining what you wanted, or even divorcing him, you murdered him in the shower. One would think, Abbey, that you had developed a taste for murder, an addiction to blood. A need to watch people who loved and trusted you die.”
The elegant features of Jack suddenly gave way to the wrinkled, cracked and worn features of a bald, elderly man. “And Mason Cartwright, Abbey? Some would wonder why a woman, seventy years old, would search out another husband, especially one as debilitated and sick as Mason. What was there to gain for another round of nuptials? The conclusion that most people would come to is that she simply didn’t want to die alone. Or that marriage made her happy.”
“It was an accident,” Abbey returned quietly, turning her eyes to the ground, as if the sight of Mason, dead now only two years, caused either pain or guilt to blossom in her. “I bumped into him and he fell down the stairs.”
Mason, still wearing Abbey’s father’s dirt-stained body, walked over to his daughter and lifted her chin with a single finger.
“You pushed him, Abbey. And there was a mad glee in your eyes as you did so. You watched him tumble down, your heart swelling with the sound of each bone breaking. And then you walked down and squatted over him and watched him as he died slowly and painfully from massive internal bleeding. He loved you and you laughed as his last breath fled his body.”
“It was an accident,” Abbey said again, slapping her father’s hand away and looking back at the clock, which still read four twenty-five and thirty three seconds.
Her father grabbed the lower part of her face and twisted it back so she was looking at him again. “You married him because he loved you, and you loved to kill people who loved you. You loved to watch people who worshipped you bleed and suffer. You were a black widow, with no compassion, no empathy, and very little human quality inside of you.”
“Would it help if I said I’m sorry?” Abbey asked.
“You tried that already. And He found your apology wanting.”
“You know,” Abbey said defiantly, “I am as He made. He gave me these urges, he gave me these desires, and I can not be held responsible for my actions.”
Mason Cartwright’s broken features fell away, replaced once more by the rough, grimy features of her father. “A fallacious argument, Abbey, and one you already made. Urges are one thing- all people have them- but you were not delusional. You always knew the difference between right and wrong but considered those moral dilemmas below your notice. You could have stopped with a little restraint but chose not to. Displaying sociopathic tendencies is not the same as being criminally insane, and I don’t believe a jury of your peers, given the evidence, would have believed your claims of being the latter.”
Abbey looked around the room, at everything except her father. “I am what I am,” she finally said.
“You are what you chose to be,” her father corrected. “And now it is time to go.” He held out a hand to his daughter. Abbey lifted her hand tentatively, prepared to place it in her father’s, then hesitated.
“Is there music down there, dad?” she asked. “Is there dancing?”
Her father offered a small smile. “Maybe a little polka,” he said with a chuckle.
“Can I ask for one thing?”
“And what is that, Abbey?”
“One last dance.”
Her father’s features hardened. “And what makes you think you deserve even that, sweetie,” he asked, though not unkindly.
“I… I don’t, I guess. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.”
The smile returned. “The first honest thing you’ve admitted to in a long time, Abbey. And for that, you can have your dance. What would you like? And with whom?”
Abbey thought back to her life, her mind tripping over the years as it scurried back to the fifties, when she had been a state dance champion in ballroom dancing. Faces of the men she had danced with, of the men she had slept with, paraded through her mind’s eye, and when she finally spoke, it was with a slight tremble in her voice. “I’d like to do a waltz,” she said. “To Al Joplin’s ‘The Anniversary Song’. With you, dad.”
“Excellent choice,” her father said, and the grubby outfit was suddenly gone, replaced by an exquisite black tuxedo complete with bow-tie and cummerbund. He took her in his arms as music filled the dull and timeless space and they began to move around the room in a slow waltz. Abbey was worried that those black filaments anchoring her form to her body may prove an impediment to their dance, but both of them passed through them as if they weren’t there.
The music swelled as they moved around the frozen, drab room, and Abbey reveled in the feeling of grace and freedom she experienced in this spectral form. She hadn’t been able to dance like this for over fifty years and she found it exhilarating. She closed her eyes and allowed the music to carry her over the floor, and her father matched her movements perfectly, as if he were born to the role.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when the music slowed and finally ended. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, but when she finally opened hr eyes and looked back at the clock, it still read four twenty-five and thirty three seconds.
Abbey sighed. She tried to disengage from her father but found herself unable to escape the man’s grasp. She turned from the clock to her father, but instead of her father’s coarse face, she found herself looking into the black depths of a hood. She glanced to her left and to her right and found skeletal hands emerging from the cuffs of a black robe on her body. She knew she should have been frightened but she wasn’t. She looked back up, back into the shadows of the hood, and for a moment thought she spied a naked skull staring back at her.
“I’m not sorry for any of it,” Abbey admitted.
“The second truthful thing you’ve said today,” the voice from within the hood responded. It wasn’t her father’s voice anymore, but the voice of the dead, a hollow, sorrowful crooning.
“I lived my life as I chose, my only life, and I have no regrets.”
The figure in the black robe nodded. “I know. And now it is time. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” A pause, then: “Will it hurt?”
“Oh yes, Abbey. Oh yes. More than you can imagine.”
“I understand.”
“No. You don’t. But you will.” The robed figure disengaged his left hand from her right and a scythe, horrible and cruel in its form, appeared in his grasp, the black blade shimmering in the air despite the lack of any true light. He lifted the instrument as Abbey watched, then delivered a single swift blow to the binding threads that trailed behind her. The fibers didn’t snap or tear violently in response to the blow, but parted eagerly under the delicate kiss of the blade
Abbey screamed as she was severed from her body, the sound that erupted from her spectral throat almost inhuman in its quality. The pain which accompanied the scream was equally as keen, washing through her body and settling into every aspect of her soul, an inferno which raged continuously within her. She dropped to her knees, planted her hands on the floor, and clenched her teeth against the agony which wracked her body, waiting, waiting, waiting for it to subside.
But it didn’t.
She lifted her head to the shrouded figure. “I regret nothing,” she hissed.
“And that is why you are going where you are going, Abbey.” The robed form reached down and drew Abbey Whistler’s trembling form into his arms, lifting her as if she weighed nothing. He turned and walked back towards the door he had entered through, leaving the room that defied time, defied life, carrying the black widow towards the eternity she had justly earned.
I hope you enjoyed Last Dance of a Black Widow. If so, please consider reading one of my other works wherever you purchased this one, including:
Pandora’s Children: The Complete Nightmares Book 1
Pandora’s Children: The Complete Nightmares Book 2
(new versions of both available end of October)
Dogs of War: A Ghost Story
King of the Merge (available soon)
Blink (a free short story)
And, as always, follow me at the following places:
www.pandoraschildren.com
www.darkestdayspublishing.com
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