Death Stopped for Miss Dickinson

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Poet Emily Dickinson writes about death like one who knows it well. But how she knows it proves a mystery to most who know her.

Most, but not all.

One knows her secret. One who loves her. One whose meeting she might come to regret for an eternity.

"A darkly beautiful story featuring the poet Emily Dickinson. There's more than a taste of Charlotte Bronte in this evocative work."

—Marvin's Bookish Blog

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393219255

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

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Death Stopped for Miss Dickinson

Death Stopped for Miss Dickinson

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, Inc.

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Death Stopped for Miss Dickinson

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Death Stopped for Miss Dickinson

January 26, 1863

Near Township Landing, Florida

The air smelled of pine trees, a scent Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson associated with home. Here, in Florida, where dark, spindly trees rose around him like ghosts, Higginson never imagined he’d be thinking of Massachusetts, with its stately settled forests and its magnificent tamed land.

Nothing was tamed here. His boots had been damp for days, the earth mushy, even though his regiment, the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, had somehow found solid ground. He could hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of hundreds of feet, but his soldiers were quiet, well trained, alert.

Everything Washington D.C. thought they would not be.

Even in the dark, after days of river travel, Higginson was proud of these men, the most disciplined he had ever worked with. He said so in his dispatches, although he doubted Union Command believed him. They had taken a risk creating an entire regiment of colored troops, mostly freed slaves, all of whom had been in a martial mood much of the month, ever since word of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached them.

A strange clip-clop, then the whinny of a horse, and a shushing. Higginson’s breath caught. His men had no horses. They traveled mostly on steamers, and hence had no need of horses, even if the Union Army had deemed such soldiers worthy of steeds—which they did not.

He whispered a command: It was all he needed to stop his troops. They halted immediately and slapped their rifles into position.

He had a fleeting thought which made him smile—a Confederate soldier’s worst nightmare; to meet a black man with a gun—and then waited.

The silence was thick, the kind of silence that came only when men listened, trying to hear someone else move. Breathing hushed, each movement monitored. No one wanted to move first.

Then Higginson saw him, rising out of the trees as if made of smoke—a black-robed figure, face hidden by a hood, carrying a scythe.

Higginson’s breath caught. What kind of madness was this? Some kind of farmer lurking in the woods, killing soldiers?

The figure turned toward him. In the darkness, the hood looked empty. Higginson saw no face, just a great, gaping beyond.

His heart pounded. He was forty years old, tired, overworked and overwrought; hallucinations should not have surprised him.

But they did, this did.

And then the hallucination dissolved as if it had never been. One of his men cried out, and a volley of shots lit up the night, revealing nothing where the hooded figure had stood.

All around it, however, horses, men, Confederates—white faces in the strange gunlight, looking frightened and surprised. They surrounded his men, but could not believe what they saw—for a moment anyway.

Then their weapons came out, and they returned fire, and Higginson forgot the hooded figure, forgot that moment of silence, and plunged deep into the battle, his own rifle raised, bayonet out as, around him, the air filled with the stink of gunpowder, the screams of horses, the wild cries of men.

The battle raged late into the night,