Two little old ladies have a very strange hobby...
The Delacey sisters carried the porcelain tea service into the parlor and set the matching tray atop the fake butler's table. I'd seen the same flat, sprayed-on cherry stain on the principal's desk at the all girls' high school I once attended, and I had a thrift shop mock-up at home just like it. The sides lifted into a vertical position on brass-finished hinges, but the top did not unlatch. No butler of breeding would shuttle the whole table back and forth. Not that the Delacey sisters could afford a butler, from the moth-eaten looks of the place. It must have been this kinship of shared taste and modest budget that automatically endeared the spinsters to me.
Although I cringe at deception, I gained access on the pretext of courtesy, feigning distress over news that another member of the rapidly dwindling Delacey clan had died. These two were the last of their line, and they lived pretty much in seclusion from what they would have called polite society. The girls, now in their eighties, had not always been antisocial. In town, I'd heard of the days when the Delacey twins had double-dated the Bartoe boys, who weren't twins but were only a year and a half apart and shared the same build and tawny-colored hair. They'd been seen hand in hand at the ice cream parlor and the Methodist church, kicking up their heels at the high school dance and rumor has it, skinny dipping at dusk with the catfish and tadpoles in a dubiously secluded swimming hole...
For the rest of the story, see Outer Darkness magazine, issue # 32.
Pray for the light. Pray that you last that long. The Long Hour Before Light is a classic collection of Horror tales, re-mastered by Champagne Book Group
Grab those side-irons, saddle up and join former Civil War sharpshooter Luther Henry for a ride into pure terror, western-style…think ‘Wild Wild West’ meets ‘The X-Files’.
