Elizabeth felt the shaking and gasping coming to an end. There was a small quiver and then the young naked woman in her arms was still. Stillness seemed to surround the entire valley. Elizabeth felt her eyes begin to feel heavy and soon she was fast asleep. She was asleep and at peace… and then the dreams came.
When Elizabeth's eyes opened, she was staring down at her feet, except they weren't her feet, or at least they were too small to be hers. They were the dirty, bare feet of a little girl. She looked up and realized that she was standing in the middle of Berry Bridge, the twisting Iktomi running beneath her. She could hear the sound of the locusts chirping in the weeds along the river bank, underneath the bridge, and she immediately was transported to her young summertime memories. Her first kiss… Tom Benridge, when she was only 12. She remembered the many freckles on his face, how she would smile when he called her “Lizzy,” and also how he had turned so red after their lips first parted. Looking out past the end of the bridge she could see her family's white house, and the chicken coop, and the barn. Misty, her favorite horse was being lead out of the barn by some woman. Mom? She thought. No. Mom's dead. Wondering who had her horse, she ran down the dirt road toward the gravel driveway. The unknown woman was leading Misty by her reins down towards the river. As Elizabeth got closer she began to shout.
“Hey, what're you doing with, Misty? Whatcha doing with my horse?!” The woman, however, did not respond. In fact it seemed like she hadn't heard Lizzy at all. “Hey, lady! What's going on here?” Lizzy shouted, but again there was no response and the woman just kept on towards the river.
Now Lizzy was angry. She began to run towards the horse thief, shouting as she went. As she got closer to the woman, she noticed that things were starting to change out here. Starting to slip, if you will. The woman's outline wasn't quite there. It was almost blurred and bordering on transparent at the edges. Lizzy slowed her strides, but did not stop and soon she was in front of the horse thief, staring directly into her face. Lizzy stopped, took a step back, tripped on an old tree root, and stumbled onto her backside. Shockingly, she now realized who the woman was.... it was her... Elizabeth Abigail Bayard. But this Elizabeth had greying hair, and growing wrinkles. This Elizabeth looked like she hadn't slept in weeks. And this Elizabeth's face was covered in blood. Pulling herself up off the ground and regaining some composure, little Lizzy followed Elizabeth down to the water's edge. The memory of what she had done only moments before falling asleep, was now replaying itself in her mind. The image of the sparkling knife blade popped into her mind as she saw the two naked dead bodies and the blood stained grass.
Lizzy watched as the older version of herself somehow lifted the bodies, one by one, onto the back of the horse. Then she followed as the grey woman lead Misty up towards the old house. When she reached the outside cellar door, she stopped for a moment and looked out towards the road. Coast is clear, Lizzy thought. Then the woman went into action again, opening the sloping cellar door, pulling the bodies off the horse, and dragging them, one by one, stair by stair, down into the pitch-black cellar. Lizzy strained her eyes and peered down into the darkness.
A lone light bulb lit up, and Lizzy watched as the woman carefully wrapped the bodies up in black trash bags. She then disappeared from Lizzy's view for a few moments, but then returned carrying a mop bucket and what looked like cleaning supplies. The woman marched up the creaking cellar steps, right past Lizzy, and continued out towards the barn. As she walked away, Misty let out a loud neigh. Little Lizzy turned towards the horse and saw that Misty was now staring out towards the road. Was someone coming? Was she going to be caught? Then Misty turned her head back to Lizzy. Her huge left horse eye staring deep into Lizzy's eyes. Lizzy got lost in that eye. The huge black pupil growing larger and larger. Everything began to slip again. The colors were drowning out of this world, as the sound of running water grew louder and louder. Lizzy shut her eyes.
When she finally opened them, she was again sitting by the river with her arms wrapped around a dead naked woman. She looked down at her toes. She wiggled them. They were the right size again.... no more little Lizzy. Sticky, drying, blood covered her chin and lips. Elizabeth's tongue moved back and forth over her bottom lip as she attempted to regain her bearings. Then she remembered her dream. It came in a steady wave and all at once she knew what she must do, and that she must hurry. As the thought crossed her mind, her eyes jumped up to the dirt road that lead away from the house, across the bridge and over the hill. I must hurry, she thought.
Elizabeth worked fast, repeating what she had seen in her dream. After she finished bagging the bodies in the cellar, she grabbed the cleaning supplies, climbed the stairs, and then closed and locked the sloping door behind her. From there she led Misty back to the barn, took the garden hose, and scrubbed Misty down, never missing a spot. When she had finished with the horse, she went down to the river and began to clean the blood-stained grass. The blood-soaked towels, she threw into a black garbage bag. The ground she covered in bleach and bubbles. Washing the area clean with buckets of river water. The couple's backpacks were the next item to cross off her list.
At first, Elizabeth was going to throw them in the garbage bag with the bloody towels, but then she noticed that one of the bags was completely free of blood. No stain- not a drop. Without wasting another moment, she grabbed the backpack by its blue strap and tossed it into the river. She watched it float away. People drown all the time… unfortunate, she thought, and then she tossed the other backpack into the trash bag and sealed it with a tie. Elizabeth then climbed into the river herself and began to wash the sticky dried blood from her body. She sat down in the water and let it run through her hair and over her face. When she finished, she carefully double checked the area for anything she might have missed, grabbed the trash bags and cleaning supplies and headed back to the house. Her mouth was dry after all her hard work. It is time for some afternoon tea, she thought, tea sounds nice.
When the sun finally set over the valley, Elizabeth again ventured down through the sloping cellar door. In her hands, she carried a cardboard box that was marked on the outside with black sharpie. Two words were legibly written...”canning supplies.”
The basement below the Bayard House was filled with old odds and ends that were collected and forgotten over the years. There were a couple of broken dirt bikes, 6 or 7 of Grace's sewing machines, an old desk, that had probably been Jason's at one point, and an broken organ that Eli had always planned to fix. He never got to it. The ceiling was somewhat low and the concrete foundation was cracked and broken in some spots, exposing the cool dirt from below. Three wooden support beams connected the floor to the unfinished floorboards of the ceiling. The pillars ran down the center of the room, and when looking out from the stairs, seemed longer and narrower than they should.
The antique treasures and broken and forgotten memories were lit up by three hanging light bulbs that ran parallel to the support beams and cast shadows along the cracked walls. Exposed wires hung from light bulb to light bulb and seemed to intertwine with the large variety of undisturbed cobwebs that called the basement home. Two sets of stairs connected the basement to the ground level. The indoor steps, which extended down from the kitchen, ran along the north wall of the basement. At the back of the narrow basement was the second set of stairs. These steps rose up from the floor and extended to the outside sloping cellar entrance. To the right of these stairs, was the crooked door jam that lead down to the old canning cellar- the below below. And on the west wall of the cellar, there was another door- the odd little door, which lead to the unfinished and for the most part, forgotten escape tunnel. It was still nailed shut.
Elizabeth made her way from the bottom of the kitchen steps, carrying her box, and crossed the basement floor. She ducked beneath a large cobweb near Eli's organ, and then stopped to adjust her hold on the large cardboard box. At the back of the basement, still lying near the bottom of the south steps, were the two bagged bodies.
> Elizabeth set the box down next to the garbage bags and pulled the flaps open. Inside were a number of old glass canning jars. She seemed to smile for a moment as she glanced into the box. Her mother, Grace, had been an avid “canner” and had taught her daughter Lizzy all her secrets. Elizabeth felt a warm feeling of pride sweep through her chest. Her eyes began to water, glistening even in the dimly lit cellar. She wiped a hand across her eyes and got back to work. She quickly set up a small card table, next to the box, and placed the jars on top. To her left, near the organ, was an old horse trough. It was heavier than she expected, but she was still able to drag it over to her “work station.” Then she pulled open the trash bags from around the bodies, exposing their white lifeless faces to the dusty cellar air.
She looked into the blank eyes of her victims and for a brief moment, a feeling of remorse rose up from her belly, and then it was gone. In its place was the dark thirst. A thirst for that feeling of power she had experienced earlier in the day, beneath the bright afternoon sun.
She bent over and using all of her strength, lifted up the lifeless young woman's body and rolled it into the horse trough. Elizabeth took a jar from the table and set it directly beneath the woman's dangling right arm. Then, taking her knife from the canning supplies box, she silently moved the sharp blade across the woman's cold wrist. The blood quickly spilled down from the wound and into the glass jar. She continued the process, until all the blood from the woman was drained and then, she repeated the ritual with the man. As one jar was filled to the top, she would quickly replace it with an empty one and fit it with a lid. By the time she had finished, she had twelve full jars of her new “medicine”. She carefully placed them back in the box and carried it back up to the kitchen. On the stove, was her mother's pressure canner. Elizabeth placed the jars, one by one, into the canner and then covered it with the lid.
At the same time, she turned on the stove in order to boil the water that would allow her to seal the jars up airtight. After the sealed jars cooled, she returned them to the canning cellar where she placed them up on a wooden wall shelf. The shelves had been used for years by her mother, Grace, for the exact same purpose. Well, almost the exact purpose.
The following morning, Elizabeth used a small sharp-toothed hacksaw, to carve the bloodless bodies into a more manageable size. She placed the pieces back in the black trash bags, and burned the trash bags in the old burn barrel behind the barn. The stench was horrible, and at one point Elizabeth thought she couldn't help but vomit. The feeling passed, however, and soon Elizabeth was back in her kitchen enjoying a cup of hot tea. Now I can sleep, she thought, now I can finally go to sleep. And sleep she did. A restful, dreamless sleep. And when she finally opened her eyes, four days had passed, and only one thought resonated in her head. I'm thirsty, she thought, I need a drink.
In the years that followed, she found other ways to quench her growing taste for blood. Stray dogs and cats became easy pickings for Elizabeth. The sensation that came from the first drink wasn't the same with the animals, but it was the only choice she had. Drifters were one thing, but making someone from town disappear was another thing altogether. It was too risky. No, she would wait. She decided that she could sustain her thirst with the animals for now, and when the opportunity presented itself for her to obtain “real” medicine, then she'd take it.
In 1999, the opportunity finally presented itself. That opportunity came in the form of Nick Fielding. The former high school football star- turned town carpenter, was just what she had been waiting for. A young, strong, able bodied- but impressionable- man to help her get what she needed. It was good timing, because a year later, Elizabeth was diagnosed with cancer. Over the next eleven years, she fed more often than not on the “real” stuff. Nick was good at what he did, that was for sure. Not only did he fix things around the house, and finish her father's tunnel, but he provided for her too. It sometimes worried Elizabeth how many girls Nick was able to find, but as the cancer spread, there was only one medicine that truly seemed to help, and that outweighed her fears of getting caught.
In the beginning, Elizabeth had charmed Nick into helping her with tales of her beautiful niece, Sarah. As the years went by, it seemed that Nick developed a passion for his work and a dark thirst of his own. He started to believe that he was a “Blood Prince” and Sarah was his destiny. Elizabeth undoubtedly planted this seed in the young man's mind, as in the later days of her life, she began referring to herself as the “Queen.” But alas, even Queens don't live forever. And on April 17, 2017, the Dark Queen of the Iktomi finally moved on...
The dark thirst however, remained.
Peripheral Vision: A Supernatural Thriller Page 16
