The Veil Of Uncertainty (Deleted Stories)

“Why now, of all times, should it choose to haunt me?”, I thought, “that dark, cowelled figure”.

As if I didn’t have enough to give me nightmares, what with final reminders from the electricity company and the phone company; threatening calls from debt collection agencies and bloody bailiffs banging at the door; a wife too ill to look after our children or the house; no pocket money and no chocolate Easter Eggs for the kids plus the threat of redundancy hanging over my head.

All I had were worries and all I could picture in my mind was where I and my family might be a month or a year down the road. What if I couldn’t keep up the mortgage repayments on the house? Would me and my wife be out on the streets and what would happen to the children?

Then, to cap it all, I thought , I’d started going funny in the head; started seeing that shadowy thing; that thing whose face I couldn’t see, bloody following me about like the grim reaper waiting for me to drop dead from nervous exhaustion .

I saw it as I was coming home from the office. It just seemed to appear by the gates of the old playpark on Woodburn avenue; a slender, tall female figure dressed all in some black, prim Victorian dress with a black, knitted shawl over its shoulders and a large black poke bonnet shading its phantasmal face from view.

It had scared the bloody crap out of me, I can tell you, the way it seemed to just appear, almost like a black blur coming into focus.

But I hadn’t read too much into it that time, “It must have been a daydream or a hallucination or something else that only looked like a woman in a bonnet”, I’d thought, logically, though I could scarce think what else it might be.

Then, just as I was starting to shrug it all off with a laugh and a shake of the head, it appeared again
as I was getting out of my parked car outside my front gate. I saw it standing on the pavement on the opposite side of the road beneath a cherry tree covered in pink blossoms.

I didn’t wait for her to cross over. “Assuming that she has human legs under that long black skirt and not cloven hooved goats legs or a black mist”, I thought as I rammed my key in the door and got inside as quick as I could, slamming it shut behind me.

Then I ran upstairs to my wife and dragged her to our bedroom window which overlooks the road
at the front of the house, “Just look outside and tell me if you see an old woman in a black dress and one of those big bonnets like a lampshade”, I raved.

She must have thought I was a right loony, especially because of the frantic way I was acting; pacing up and down infront of our bed and messing up my hair with my fingers the way I always did when
I felt under pressure.

And then she looked outside and turned back to me with that look in her eyes as if she was sure I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, “I can’t see anyone or anything outside”, she said, “Are you sure that it wasn’t just a woman with an Easter Bonnet on?”.

I looked outside myself then, but she was right. My mysterious old woman in black, her face hidden by the canopy of that enormous coal-scuttle bonnet, had disappeared.

“Perhaps you’re just stressed out a bit”, she said kindly, stroking my forehead , “Why don’t I look after the kids while you have a rest?”.

And so I did or atleast I tried to but who could rest with so much going round in their heads like a bloody great ferris wheel.

I took off my jacket and lay down on our bed with my shoes still on, staring up at the growing crack on the ceiling and starting to worry that the ceiling might collapse and wether the house insurance
that we’d taken from our bank would cover its repair if it did.

Then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs towards the bedroom door but they weren’t my wife’s footsteps. I could hear her downstairs talking to the children and “who else could be in the house besides her and them?”, I thought.

Then I got a startling vision in my head of that old woman without a face slowly climbing up the stairs towards my room.

And then a numb, cold feeling started to wash over me as I heard those footsteps growing louder
and closer and my eyes became transfixed upon the handle of the bedroom door, waiting for it to turn, waiting for the door to creak open and for that woman in the black bonnet to enter and turn and seize me in those dark gloved, long fingered hands.

“Don’t fear me”, said the woman in black, not entering by the door but already standing at the foot of my bed and unfastening the ribbons that tied the large black bonnet to her head and pulling it off.

“No!”, I said, terrified to look at what might be hidden beneath the shadow of that bonnet, black as the cave mouth at Golgotha, but it was not a skull or the pallid face of a crone beneath that hat, it was the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, after my wife ofcourse, and the moment
that she removed the bonnet her long, blonde hair came cascading down upon her shoulders, her blue eyes sparkled like clear water in the sun and she smiled and even her black dress and shawl did
not look black now but dark blue or dark green, I wasn’t sure which.

“What are you?”, I asked, my fears falling away as I looked into those pure, radiant blue eyes.

“I am the future”, she said, “And the black clothes that I wear are only the veil of uncertainty”.