Arianna Rose: The Gates Of Hell (Part 5) - Plot & Excerpts
First edition: January 2014 Cover design by Indie Designz http://www.indiedesignz.com This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Chapter 1 “You will die before night’s end,” the woman who’d just sat down beside Suzette Fontaine announced. Wearing a draping black cloak with the hood pulled over her head so that only long cords of wiry gray hair peeked out and framed one milky eye that drooped lower than the other brown one, the woman was truly frightening to behold. Little did she know, however, Suzette did not scare easily. Suzette refused to respond. She simply stared blankly at the old woman, allowing her eyes to roam the side of her face that sagged significantly. “Hmm,” the old woman emitted an odd rumble from somewhere deep in her throat. Still, Suzette remained unfazed, partly because she was too exhausted to react, and partly because the threat of death had shared her bed for more than a decade. She knew that monsters existed, but the human kind, not the supernatural kind. She didn’t believe the old woman before her possessed any special powers to predict her demise. So she turned away from her and leaned back, allowing her head to tip backward, the events of the day weighing on her with leaden heaviness. An eight-hour shift during the busy week leading up to a holiday had sapped every ounce of her strength. Her feet throbbed in time with her temples and her lower back complained. Physically, she was drained. Being on her feet all day long while manning her check stand at the local supermarket had taken its toll on her body. But that was the least of her complaints about her occupation. The work wasn’t backbreaking in and of itself. The people were another story entirely. They were taxing on her patience, on her morale. The stares, the heads cocked to one side when someone realized who she was then Googled all the details. The tight frowns, the whispers and the occasional inappropriate question truly tested her spirits. She thought she’d be accustomed to it by now, the typical chain of events that led to others realizing where they’d seen her, grasping who she was. But she wasn’t, and did not feel as if she ever would be. Though years had passed, and she’d begun and walked away from more jobs than she could count, the process never got any easier. Hearing the hushed tones with her name mentioned among them in the break room, being actively ignored or avoided altogether by coworkers, and eating lunch alone, always alone, grew unbearable no matter the city or the position. She had not been at Jack’s Pick and Pack for long, and already she’d started experiencing that all-too-familiar feeling, the sensation that something inside her was stretched so thin it threatened to snap. Of course, she knew she’d never snap in either the violent or dramatized sense of the word. She wouldn’t contact her local television studio affiliates and urge them to do a human interest piece on discrimination in the workplace, and she certainly wouldn’t plant bombs or buy a gun and shoot the place up. She would simply walk away, leave as she always did. Leaving, though enticing, was not an option just yet. She still had three months left on the lease agreement for the apartment she rented. It also didn’t solve much of anything as each place she moved to and each job she held invariably led to the same thing. Furthermore, she really liked her current apartment. She couldn’t wait to get there. She wished she could teleport to it and avoid the awful bus ride. Most days, the constant jostling, the roar of the engine, and the incessant chatter of passengers on the bus went unnoticed. Most days she did not sit beside a woman who just forecast her death before the night ended. Most days, she was unaware of the potpourri of body odor, stale cigarettes, exhaust fumes and fried food. Most days, she rode oblivious of it all. Then again, most days weren’t the anniversary of her husband’s execution. Perhaps that was what was making a bad day worse. Perhaps. Movement in her periphery ripped Suzette from thoughts of her husband’s life and death and caused her to turn her head, a flurry of black material accompanied by a puff of decay tinged with Chanel No.
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