Once the transformation was finished, the ghost began to fade away and Susan again heard the strangely soothing disembodied voice. “Be brave, my dear, you will be safe.” She closed her eyes as the ghost disappeared completely, but when she reopened them, Susan gasped in shock at the scene before her. Laying upon the bed, her face a distorted image of agony, Emma labored in pain while her deranged husband stood watching with a smile upon his face.

While Susan watched in disbelief, Archibald moved over to his young wife, grabbed a fistful of her sweaty hair and yanked her head back. “You are only prolonging the inevitable by delaying the birth of this bastard child,” he growled. Emma spit in his face before screaming as another contraction overtook her. The unmistakable crack of flesh striking flesh rang through the small room as she was backhanded across the jaw.

As Susan stood just inside the door, the terrible events of that day flowed around before her like a sadistic play. While she watched, Emma delivered a baby girl, who Archibald took away the instant after her birth. He left the room saying, “You will have to live with the knowledge that you will never see your daughter!” With a crash the door slammed shut behind him and Emma was left in silent solitude to worry about her child’s future.

The next few days sped past in a dizzying blur; Susan tried not to blink, afraid she would miss something. Before she realized how much time had passed, they had arrived at the day of Emma’s murder. Archibald entered the tiny room one sunny morning, untied Emma’s hands and jerked her upright. Steering his young wife by a fistful of her filthy golden hair, he forced her to walk through their ‘home’ and out to the greenhouse. Once inside the glass and wrought iron building, he shoved her toward a hole in the ground next to another rose bush, right beside where Jebediah was buried. “Get in there and lay down, now!!” he ordered.

Emma meekly lay down in the hole without any sign of struggle; the will to live or put up any sort of fight had evaporated when her child had been taken away. Resigned to her impending death, she stared up blankly at the older man from her bed in the shallow grave. Meeting her husband’s unblinking gaze, her eyes were emotionless, sapphire pools.

Appalled at what she was seeing, Susan gasped when Archibald started filling in the hole around Emma. Even as the soil became an ever increasing heavy blanket around her, the young girl refused to utter a sound, denying her demented husband the pleasure of pleading for her life. When he had placed the last shovelful of soil atop her body and patted down the loose dirt, Archibald left the greenhouse. Her gaze blurred by moisture at what she had been witness to, Susan stumbled over to the grave and lay on the ground next to Emma, her tears falling unchecked onto the rich earth.

§ § §

To Be Continued …