Nightcrawlers

45

In a lonely, weathered farmhouse on Bellac Road, Elena Blasden was dying and in her mind she could see the faces of her children and hear their singing voices and it was a melody that would carry her higher up into the fields of the Lord. She was not frightened. At the edge of death, there is no fear. Emotions and fears and anxieties that keep the human animal chained to the bedrock of its insecurities are cast off. As the eyes close, an inner eye opens briefly that sees all and understands and looks forward but never back. So Elena did not fear death because she saw the reality of it now in her dimming mind, which was rooted to her fading body like a dead oak to soil leeched of nutrients.

She saw death not as a horrid Grim Reaper cutout taped to a Halloween window, but as a bandage that covers the wound that is known as life. The dying do not fear and the dead do not bleed.

Death had been coming for many hours now and as darkness took Bellac Road, holding it tightly and grimly in its fist as it always had, she remained slouched in her old rocker by the window, watching through eyes bleary with the years as the sun set for a final time in her life. It was beautiful and nothing could take its image from her.

Her bones were like a precarious structure of straw that held her together in one piece but would not hold her much longer. But by then, the true weight of Elena Blasden would be long gone and she looked forward to the journey.

She heard a fumbling at the back door.

Was it them? Had the ones from below come for their feeding on this night when she could no longer offer them anything?

The idea that they might come in and feed on her made a girlish laughter erupt somewhere in her head. Me? Me! Ha, a bag of withered sticks and threadbare jerky tough as pine bark! Let them come! Let them go away with indigestion and loose teeth! The laughter echoed into nothingness and she remembered her girlhood and the precious, lost days of youth. She remembered what her mother had given birth to and how Midwife Sterns took it away into the night to be planted like a fat seed in Ezren’s Field. This was all she could think of.

The door?

Yes, it creaked open and hesitant footfalls came into the house along with a smell of dying things thrown up on dark beaches. Shuffle-shuffle-shuffle, came the feet and she sensed rather than saw a crooked figure in the doorway. It breathed hard and things dropped from it.

She felt no fear of it.

“You’ve come then?” she said in a dry, cracking voice. “Is… is that you, Edwin? Is that you, Eddie?”

The footfalls came closer and a shadow fell over her.

“Eddie,” she said. “My dear brother… I’m so… tired… I’m so very tired…”

The figure scooped her up in its arms very gently and not without love, clutching her as she closed her eyes and vanished in the dreams of childhood that claimed her in her final moments.

The figure held her like a precious antiquity and took her away, down into the darkness where there was no pain and there was no fear.