The Homecoming Bride

Chapter Twenty-One: Evergreen

CHAPTER SONG: "Evergreen" by Roy Orbison

Emmy dreamt that afternoon while lying in her husband Will's arms, her body exhausted from alleged food poisoning after their luncheon.

She drifted off into slumber with his strong and safe arms around her in a protective embrace, though another feeling protruded in her gut other than the illness she was enduring.

When she opened her eyes this time in her dream, she felt a twinge of fright, coiling within her organs into a twisted sense of dread that something was looming close by.

Foreboding and elusive, a shadow following her that she couldn't see, a feral beast waiting to pounce and obliterate her and those she loved...

Emmy was in her 2020 apartment in Richmond, Virginia...

She was in modern day clothing, wearing a Joan Jett & the Blackhearts t-shirt and black leggings which she did miss while living in the 1910s with the itching petticoats and stockings she had to wear every day.

It was nighttime and she couldn't shake the sensation that someone or something else was in the same dwellings as her, hiding from her sight and stalking her for whatever reason she couldn't fathom.

Was it Erik...?

She had thought about him hardly at all in the many weeks since returning to her true home in 1918 Surrey.

Or was it something else her mind was conjuring up?

She heard nothing but the thunderous pounding of her heartbeat and her shaking breaths rattling her lungs as she took each step of her bare feet carefully.

There was a huge steak knife on the kitchen counter, the silver blade shining in the light.

Her fingers reached out and grabbed the handle, clutching onto her weapon and staying in the limbo of fighting back or running to the nearest door to hide in another room. She noticed the aching absence of her gold wedding ring from her scarred finger along with her engagement diamond...

She felt for nonexistent pockets sewn into her leggings, desperately trying to grab her phone...

But she didn't have one.

Emmy looked around her, seeing nothing through the windows, only the dark night sky devoid of stars.

She felt like a woman possessed, moving not of her own free will, as though someone outside her periphery was directing her to take one step forward, two steps backward, look this way and that.

Like she was an actress playing a role on a fake green-screen film set, being instructed by somebody else to be afraid of an imaginary manifestation...

Only this felt entirely, frighteningly real...

All that was missing was an ominous musical score to increase the effect.

And Emmy saw the invisible threat, her greatest fear coming to claim her soul.

A bloodcurdling scream of horror erupted in a painful burst from her throat as she opened her mouth in wide agape...

And everything faded to black to give an unsatisfactory cliffhanger ending.

.

A nightmare within another dream it was...

The displaying of what terrorized her most...

Not a single person that she needed to be protected from, but something else completely out of hers or anybody else's control.