Pricky Rose and Creeping Periwinkle

By L. M. Beyer

Four short stories:

"Prickly Rose and Creeping Periwinkle" ~~ Something haunts an abandoned barn on the land that Tony bought.
"Endless Night" ~~ Should she open the door?
"To the Place Where I Belong" ~~ Someday the road will lead me home.
"Why Mama Bought a Telescope and Looks at Stars" ~~ Maybe Mama should not have yelled at Elsie about the good-for-nothing boys. At least those boys lived nearby.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Temfield Books
• Release date: Nov 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386223139

Book preview

Prickly Rose and Creeping Periwinkle

There was no moon. If there were stars no one could see them. Cool air and a warm wet earth raised a mist that hung as thick as moss from the old willow trees, and the night should have been black as the pits of hell, and it was, at least most any place else. But not here. Here was a very bright light streaming from a small farmhouse of log and stone, shining out into the darkness from every window, every one of them ablaze with it. People were in there, too, inside with all the light, laughing in loud voices, and talking and touching each other and unaware of anything that moved through the cold fog.

The fog thickened and stirred. Something prowled within it, hidden by it, and watched the people inside, drawn by the light.

There was so much light, a light that did not burn.

Pulled by the light, the emaciated wraith in the fog pressed her face to the glass and stared at the tiny suns that hung from the ceiling on cords or sprouted like flowers from the tables.

She wanted to touch the light, all of it, to hold it in her hands and carry it away to hang in the branches of trees, to scatter it over the ground in the fields, to light up the night.

Then she smelled someone nearby and turned around.

His eyes widened. He fumbled with his cigarette and dropped it. For one terrible moment she considered killing him, and chose to run instead. Here was not safe. There were too many inside the house.

She heard him call out, Wait!

He could not know where she had come from and where she escaped to. No one did. If he followed her he would find the abandoned barn on the other side of the road, but that was not where she went. She passed close by its moldering boards and headed for a small graveyard so overgrown with prickly rose and creeping periwinkle that its five tumbled headstones were invisible to anyone passing even within a few feet. He did not follow her. She would have heard his feet in the dry weeds if he had.

Her path into the old family cemetery was no wider than what a rabbit might need, and it was all that she wanted. She crawled through the tangle of wild rosebushes and under the fallen branches of a dead tree, down into the hole that was her bed. If she had known how, she would have sighed with relief, but her lungs had withered long ago. She could only relax her limbs, close her eyes and slide into the dreamless state that was almost, but not quite, death. There was a time when she had resisted that cold sleep, but now she welcomed it, the only escape from an existence that had no purpose and no end.

She did not open her