Devil In A White Dress

Thirty-Seven

                               

"Who's Emma Woodburn?", Austin inquired.

"Emma Woodburn was a writer. I used to read her books back when I was sixteen and desperate to get back at my ex-best friends who did some terrible thing to me. After I read Boyz in the Hood, which was one of Emma's books, I wasn't afraid to confront them anymore even though I was completely grossed out by its content."

"What was it about?"

"Boyz in the Hood was full of messed up shit. It's basically the most violent, goriest, brutal and savagely written horror flick ever to be listed amongst the New York's bestsellers. It was so strange. As I got into the book, my heart was telling me to stop but my head just kept skimming through page to page. Word after word. I mean, Emma Woodburn was such a talented writer. The way she wrote the words were just beautiful, and I didn't even care how messed up and gory the story was.

Oh, and there was this other one. Emma from the Block. You must have read that one."

"Yeah. Yeah. I saw it in an ad on some newspaper years ago," Austin replied.

"That one was more of a biography. It spoke about a lot of things concerning her years as a thirteen-year old. How her foster parents pampered her. Showered her with love, gifts and stuff. And then how some obnoxious girl got her under her influence."

"How old was she?"

"Oh, her. According to the book, she said she was really mean to her. But not physically mean. Psychologically, she hated Emma. Seventeen-year old. But the more you dived into the story, the more tragic it got. She started some doing heavy drinking, running away from home, bullying underage girls, turning against her foster parents. And then when she thought everything was well, the obnoxious girl abandoned her after they came across a dead body down the Victorian Lake.

She put the blame on poor Emma. And then in the Epilogue, she talked about how she hated humanity. She swore in her life that if she ever found that girl, she'd eat her arms and legs."

Austin plugged the dirt from his left ear before taking a gulp of his beer. It was as though he had gone deaf the moment Chang uttered out those last words.

"She'd do what? Emma actually wrote that in her book?"

"Damn serious," Chang replied with a non-humorless tone that began to scare Austin, "She said if she found her again in the future, or even the afterlife, she quoted, 'I will sneak into her home at night and she won't see me wearing my WHITE dress. As she slumbers, I will drug her. Tie her up on her bed in her own home and eat her arms and legs as I listen to her screams and deny her forgiveness.' But that's not all, she talked about her maid when she was five.

Emma grew uncomfortable with the way her Mexican nanny kept eavesdropping on her conversations and stuff."

"What, you mean talking to herself? All dumb kids do that," Austin grinned.

"No, Austin. It was different. In the book, Emma talked about her fantasies. She said anytime she woke up at dawn, there was a WHITE wolf with blood all over it standing there and watching her. And Emma spoke to it. And she said it spoke to her as well. And together they talked about fantasies."

"What kind of fantasies?!", Austin exclaimed, feeling disturbed and interested all at once.

"Dark, creepy shit. What else do you wanna know?"

"Be specific, please," Austin begged, etching a forced grin of innocence. Chang sighed as she sat on the table with the teenager and took a bite off her Asian pizza slice.

"Ruling the world. Humanity. How it sucked. How she hated everyone living in this world and wishing that when she grew up, she'd just kill everybody. Blah blah blah. Satisfied?"

"Hardly," Austin teased, gulping down beer and slicing his Asian pizza with his fork.

"Oh, and that story with the wolf. It was after that when she wrote The Day the Devil Turned..."

"WHITE", Austin completed, "The Day the Devil Turned White. That was the book my sister's boyfriend Keith read, I remember. I heard them talk about it. She was telling Keith to stop reading it 'cause it was full of messed up shit."

"Emma wrote that she actually believed she wasn't human. The WHITE Wolf spoke to her at the age of five. It came to her in the form of a dream or some hallucination, and told her she was actually a Devil. When the nanny heard her, she made plans with the WHITE wolf to kill her. But then days after that, her foster parents fired her. So, she wrote The Day the Devil Turned White to openly view her conversation with the wolf to everybody, so that the nanny won't have anything to expose her with."

"The Day the Devil Turned White was the last book Emma Woodburn wrote right after it hit New York's bestsellers."

"Due its gory and violent content, it turned out to be one big fucking controversy because a lot of parents spoke against their young adult children getting under the influence of the book."

"So, from then onwards, all publishers refrained from releasing Emma's books because they didn't want to get involved in the same controversy again."

"So that's when she quit writing forever and turned into some useless housewife. And her hatred for human life grew."

"Bingo," Chang exclaimed, excited that they both bought the pieces of the puzzle together.

"So why kill her husband and son?," Austin continued, gazing at the ceiling of the 90's style apartment that probably had more tiny, perforated holes which leaked more water than their own home, "What did drive Emma Woodburn to the point of insanity, that she would actually kill the only two people in the world that loved her crazy?"

" This might sound like 'bs', but The Day the Devil Turned White was actually dedicated to Peter and Willie. Her husband and son. The last books I read, they were all dedicated to her only best friend aka, WHITE wolf'. Her main character Trish killed and tortured fifty-two black law enforcers, sixty-five Mexican nannies, forty Caucasian nurses, twenty-nine Indian-American social-workers and then in the end, broke the fourth-wall by talking about how the story was inspired by love.

The love she had for Peter was what made her write that twisted and violent racist fiction novel."

"Classic way to express love," Austin marveled.

"It doesn't add up at all. The murder doesn't make sense. Unless someone talked her into doing it. It had to be that."

"WHITE Wolf? I'm guessing. Maybe she still had these hallucinations and her only best friend talked her into killing Peter and Willie."

"You know that's hardly logic, right?", Chang voiced out clearly.

"Hey, whatever. You know this reminds me of the Swedish footballer from 1980's. What's the name again?"

"Lazarus. Lazarus "Five" Dubois."