Loretta Moore

Loretta Moore died in 1912. Over one hundred years later, school children sing rhymes of her that I dare not repeat.

Loretta is my curse. She haunts my dreams and has every night since my birth. She lifted me from my crib every night and rocked me in her cold gray arms and sang a lullaby that can be translated into no earthly tongue. When I was a child, Loretta would sit on my window sill, watching.

In my teen years, I'd see her haunting the shadows of trees when I left a party late or out the window of my boyfriend's car.

I have not seen her since I inherited the manor. I believed until tonight that I'd imagined her in my youth. But an hour ago something called to me out of my warm bed.

Under the moonlight, my feet guide me toward the family plots. I go there often to kneel by my mother's grave. This time, a figure standing in the center of the graves stops me.

Now I stand. Staring at Loretta's back.

The grass is high and brushes the back of her knees. And her long dress sways to a wind that does not caress the plants, or move the distant trees surrounding this lonely place. The moon is the only light, but not even its forgiving glow can add luster to her gray skin.

She is beauty twisted round to the hideous and then around again.

I can't look away?

Gazing at her is like gazing in a hazy mirror. I resemble her, my great-great-great grandmother. I have her pert chin, her graceful neck and her willowy waist.

I do not have the knife she holds behind her.

Mist rolls in at the graveyard's edge and seeps past the family grave markers, simple wooden crosses.

Loretta killed five men on the day she died. They say she sliced their throats open and drank their blood.

Her daughter killed six men on the eve of her twenty-first birthday. She chewed on their flesh before slitting her own throat. This line went on, always a single girl child who grew into a killer after giving birth to the next girl-child.

My mother hung herself the moment she knew she was pregnant. She survived. The day I was born, she killed two people.

My mother swore that she had never known a man in any carnal sense.

I have. But not recently. No. There is no logic behind the life growing inside me. It is part of Loretta's curse. And that is why she stands in front of me, her wedding veil, gray and filthy dances in the wind to outline her beautiful face, so very like mine. Identical to mine.

I should be scared.

And yet...she is so sad. I don't want to run. I want to take Loretta in my arms and cradle her as I will never cradle my child.

I step toward Loretta, touching her elbow where her once elegant gloves slouch.

Loretta turns. Her eyes are wells of misery filling with blood.

I see. I see for the very first time.

***

Loretta bound up her ash blonde hair, looping it into a loose bun and letting curls fall down her back and frame her face. She glanced behind her at a bouquet of white roses sitting on a table by the church's back door, but didn't move to fetch them. In another hour or so she'd let her hair down again, an empty pastime as she waited for him.

For the man who'd made her promises of the world.

For the man who'd brought her out into the woods and made love to her after he put a simple gold band on her finger. She waited, even though all others had left the church. Only her mother, weeping in the pews remained and the sound filtered through the door to Loretta on occasion.