Read To Make Death Love Us for Free Online Page B

fantastic retreat from the world, came crashing down around his ears. The world around him suddenly became evil, cold, and
unforgiving.
    His marriage had
taken on the evil aspects of the doomed in the tales of his beloved Edgar Allan Poe.
    Enoch saw himself
somehow trapped in a tale more macabre than any his idol, Poe, had ever created. In his despair,
he took to drink.
    And passed
eventually into a madness deeper and more terrifying than any Poe had ever dreamed of. Awake or
asleep, he lived in a phantasm, a living hell eating at the edges of his being. He became
aware—suddenly, it seemed—that his white family, his milk-white girl, were living in a sea of
black faces. One night, drunk, he left the house and walked through the neighborhood, hair
dishev­eled and eyes wild.
    He stumbled down
the mean streets, his mind aflame with tormented images, made all the more hideous in the garish
neon-lit streets of the century he had too long de­nied.
    Serena's second
gift awoke in her. It was in the shape of a dream. She lay on a coverlet of light silk and
dreamed. Her father's madness, his pain filled the dream.
    Enoch moved among
the blacks, screaming, "Get back to the plantation!"
    Hostile eyes
impaled him, conversations halted, and a silent storm of faces turned to consider this strange
appa­rition from the past walking before them.
    The madness was
upon him full tilt. The old hates and prejudices of another century swam in his brain like blind
cave fish. Enoch waved his arms at them, screaming, "Don't you darkies know your masters will
take good care of you? Don't do this foolish thing! Where will you go? What will you
do?"
    A black child tried
to take his hand and lead him back home. She did not understand this strangely dressed white man's rage or his madness. She only knew
he be­longed, somehow, to the magic child in the house, and she thought he might be
lost.
    Enoch, with
misguided zeal, stooped down and tried to embrace the little girl.
    "Ginny Mae, you
come here! Ginny Mae!" the little girl's older sister yelled from the stoop of an old house. "You
stay away from that crazy white man!"
    "He's okay. It's
only Mr. Pratt," said Ginny Mae.
    The sister came
down off the stoop and swept the little girl aside, putting herself between the white man and the
child.
    Enoch cried out and
stumbled toward the black girl, his arms outstretched to take her to his breast.
    "Lord," he cried.
"Don't talk like that to your master, Mandy. I'll save you!"
    The girl slapped
out at him as his hands touched her. She shoved him back, more embarrassed than frightened. "Get
away from me. Crazy-ass Honky!" she screamed at him, figuring if the shove didn't keep him away
the shout would.
    A well-dressed
black man, sitting in his flashy Cadillac, a stranger to this neighborhood, slammed his car door
open and strode out into the street. Say, who that bastard think he is, anyway?
    "Hey! Hey! What you
doing, you white bastard? Raping this sweet girl, now?" said the well-dressed black
dude.
    Enoch whirled
around to face the deep voice, the threat at his back. "I will save her from the mistake of
freedom!" he cried. "She'll go home or know the taste of the overseer's whip!"
    The dude punched
him in the mouth, busting out Enoch's front teeth, smashing him to the pavement. He hadn't meant
to hit him so hard. It was that edge of madness in Enoch's voice that had thrown him, scared him
even, made him swing so hard at what frightened him.
    Serena jerked in
her sleep. Enoch's madness whirled through her own mind, the pain and rage and terrible loss.
Mixed in with these things was something deeper, a drive more demanding. Guilt. Shame. Enoch had
sinned, sinned in a way only death could cleanse. I must die. I must be punished. I want to die.
Yes, those were the inner­most thoughts tumbling in his mad brain.
    These thoughts were
as clear in Serena's dream as if they were printed on a page for her fingers to