The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red Read Online Free

didn’t know the effect it
    would have on one. The ?nality. The awareness that I too shall
    follow Mr. Williamson to that place. Heaven. Hell. I don’t have
    the vocabulary. Those two offerings don’t help me. I believed in
    Heaven and Hell before to-day. Now, I’m not convinced there
    are only the two places, the black and white of afterlife. I’m of the
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    opinion that gray must exist. Mr. Williamson convinced me. I
    can’t imagine a man with that foul disposition in Heaven as I
    write; but what man who dies at the hands of another deserves
    Hell? And what of Mr. Corbin? Where will the afterlife place
    him?
    Did I tell you where they found Mr. Corbin? At the Merchant
    Café, of course. His beer. They found him bent over that beer,
    nursing it. They say he didn’t know where he was, or what he’d
    done. Didn’t remember any of it. They say he must be crazy.
    “Half out of his mind,” John said to me. But of course he means
    fully out of his mind. There are many of us walking around with
    only half a mind. They don’t lock you away for that. You need to
    lose it all before they take you, and Mr. Corbin lost his. And they
    took him. Off to jail, still wondering what it was he’d done.
    I’ve heard the term “possessed” before. I’ve heard it used as an
    explanation for someone “half out of his mind.” A Christian
    woman, I have never given such claim much weight. Possessed by
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    what? I wondered. But—dare I write this, when writing seems so
    ?nal an act?—now I better understand the term, now I am
    inclined to accept it. It pertains to the gray in the afterlife. It pertains
    to tragic people like our Mr. Corbin. Not empty, as “half
    out of one’s mind” implies, but instead ?lled, but with the wrong
    element. The bad. Evil. Filled with tainted ?sh, the stomach is
    already informed but has not yet signaled the brain to retch.
    Filled with the gray. The other side. Possessed.
    Mr. Corbin was possessed. In this regard, who do we blame
    for the vicious act perpetrated upon poor Mr. Williamson? The
    possessed, or the possessor? Was Mr. Corbin merely an instrument
    of the gray?
    It won’t matter now. He’ll never be back among us. He will
    hang. Possessed or not, he will hang. And he will die—legs twitching
    in the wind.
    The grand house will never be the same, of course. Mr.
    Williamson’s blood is spilled upon the earth, is mixed with the
    mud and the mortar, is part of that place. And I can no longer
    think of it as I have. The blood is spilled. I saw it with my own
    eyes. Someplace between Heaven and Hell. Some color between
    black and white. And I ?nd myself wanting a name for the place,
    seeing Mr. Williamson lying there. He can’t have died at the
    grand house. He died someplace more lyrical than that. I will talk
    to John about this, for it is his house. But the color I remember
    so vividly is the color rose. Rose red. Blood thinned by a falling
    mist.
    On the way home in the car, John pulled off the road, came
    around and opened my door. He apologized for all that had
    gone before us that day, as if we’d encountered a delay or bad
    service at a restaurant. I recall being amazed by his apparent
    indifference to the fate met by Mr. Williamson. He begged my
    forgiveness for the “aggravation” of that day, whereas I certainly
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    bore him no blame for it whatsoever. Then he dropped his right
    knee into the mud, and I knew what was coming, and I must
    admit to both elation and revulsion. John is pragmatic. I told
    you that, didn’t I?
    This was on his schedule, and he refused to allow a small murder
    to derail his plans. As he explained it, he regretted very much
    the events of that day, but his heart and passion would not allow
    another minute, not another second to pass without voicing his
    intent.
    He asked for my hand in marriage. Clouded in rose. Clouded
    in gray. I am to be a wife. John’s wife. (For I quickly said yes!)
    But truth be told, he picked the wrong day to ask, the