after dinner, which was what we’d call lunch nowadays. Apparently every day she’d go upstairs and sleep for an hour, then come back down, and that was that. Except that one day she didn’t come back down.”
“You mean she died?” Elizabeth asked.
“No, Jack said.” She didn’t die. When she didn’t come down from her nap, they went upstairs, I imagine expecting to find her dead, but she wasn’t. She was still asleep.
“To make a long story short, the legend has it that she slept for two days and two nights, solid. They tried to wake her up, and couldn’t. They called a doctor, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with her at all. I suppose she might have had some kind of stroke and gone into a coma, but at the time they didn’t know much about such things. Anyway, she eventually woke up, and she didn’t seem to have anything wrong with her.
“I suppose the family would have forgotten about it, except that a couple of days later one of the old lady’s sons, who would have been my great-uncle, I think, walked into the house carrying a dead rabbit. Then he proceeded to jump off the cliff behind the house.”
“You’re kidding,” Elizabeth breathed.
Jack shook his head. “If I am, then your grandfather kidded me when he told me the story.”
“But why did he do it?” Elizabeth asked.
“No one ever found out” Jack shrugged. “Or if they did, they never told anybody. Anyway, when the old lady heard about it, she wasn’t surprised. Apparently she said she’d been expecting it. And from then on until she died, she told everybody who was going to die, and when. She said she had gotten all the information in a dream she had while she’d been sleeping those two days.”
“And she was never wrong?” Elizabeth asked doubtfully.
“Who knows? You know the way stories grow. She could have been wrong most of the time, but the only thing anybody would remember and pass along would be the times she was right. She probably predicted everybody’s death every day, so sooner or later she hit the nail on the head. It’s like astrologers. They say so much that some of the things have to be right.”
“Then what’s the big deal?” Elizabeth said.
“Well, the last straw came just before she died. She claimed she’d had a vision.”
“A vision? You mean like angels or ghosts?”
“Not quite. A vision, but not of angels. She claimed that in the vision she had been taken to a cave in the embankment. Inside the cave, she was shown a shaft that led straight down. Her ‘angel,’ or whatever it was supposed to be, told her that the shaft was the gates of hell. According to the old lady, all sorts of awful things were supposed to happen if anybody ever went through the gates of hell. Or, I suppose, down the shaft. Anyway, she told the family that she had seen visions of horrible things in the future, and that the only way to keep them from happening was to see to it that no one went near that cave. She made everyone in the family swear never to go near the embankment where the cave is supposed to be. Then she died.”
Elizabeth stared at him silently for a minute before she spoke. He could hear incredulity in her voice.
“Is there really a cave there?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“You mean they believed her?” Elizabeth said. “You mean nobody ever even went to look for it?”
Jack licked his lips uncomfortably. “Someone did,” he said slowly. “My grandfather.”
“Did he find it?” Elizabeth asked eagerly.
“No,” Jack said. He hoped he could leave it at that, but Elizabeth wouldn’t let him.
“Well, what happened?” she demanded.
“No one knows about that, either. He announced one day that he was going to find the cave, if there was a cave, and headed off by himself. When he didn’t come back, a search party went to find him.”
“Did they?” Elizabeth asked. “Find him, I mean?”
“They found him. They found him at the bottom of the embankment. His foot was wedged between two rocks, and he had apparently drowned when the tide came in.”
An expression of horror came over Elizabeth’s face. “What an awful way to die,” she said softly.
“Yes,” said Jack, “it is. The odd thing was that they couldn’t figure out exactly what happened. His foot was caught, but not tightly. He should have been able to get it loose without any trouble.”
“Maybe he fell,” Elizabeth suggested.
“Maybe,