Kelsa wanted her bridal veil to be the best in the land, and she'd have no bones about it. The thing was done, so she said. She'd trailed lodestone in the brook back of her house every month on the new moon since she was sixteen, and now four years later she'd caught the man, and now she wanted a marriage - a proper one.
He himself was a pleasant sort, named Sebastian. He'd been a tramp, by choice, for four years - which his bride to be thought a very important sign because of the timing. Sebastian had never had a job of any real kind, but he liked to do odd jobs for folks and he was good at them. He'd been in the Peace Corps for a while working in New Orleans - but he wasn't in the Corps officially; he just wandered in one day when they needed help and they didn't deny him. He'd likewise worked in St. Louis in a food pantry on the east side of the city where the poor folks live, and they hadn't denied him work either. But he rarely worked for money, or if he did nobody knew where he kept it. He was short and stocky, muscular in the right places from doing so much manual labor, and he liked to sing all the time.
Kelsa was figuring that she'd never marry, when she met Sebastian coming up the road one day in March. Like all teenage girls, she thought she'd be all alone whenever she wound up single. That was entirely the girl's fault in this case, since whenever Kelsa dated someone she became clingy after the fourth date. Called the poor guy all the time, at four in the morning sometimes, and wanted him over to her house constantly. She would have made it worse if she didn't herself have a small job working at McDonald's. But the instant the girl got home, she rushed to the phone to leave whoever she was dating twenty messages. Young men in Topeka tried their best to stay away.
"Howdy," she said to him at their first meeting, batting her eyes. Compulsive, the parents called her and tried to keep the girl on a short leash. But Kelsa had just got off of work that evening and she was sitting outside doodling in a sketchbook. She was yet again drawing the man she'd marry. So "howdy" it was, soon followed by "would you like to come in and have a rest?"
That'd been six months before this. Six months was all it took the manipulative girl to get the stranger to ask her to wed. So now she wanted a veil. She figured she deserved it; Sebastian had traveled so much, so he'd told her, and she figured he must be rich from doing that. He must be famous. So she'd wrangled him into odd jobs for the house in exchange for living upstairs, and she dreamed every night of what the wedding would be like. And there must be a veil. She'd wear her mother's whitish slip-dress that was what they could afford, and she'd get herself a veil.
Kelsa looked at her money and knew she didn't have half enough for a proper wedding, so she started in on Sebastian. "Please, dear," she'd say to him, batting those eyes, "please get me a veil. I don't mind much if you don't end up with a wedding ring, but a veil is proper for young ladies. Please!"
He looked at her with his dark eyes, one slanted differently than the other. Sebastian had the darkest hair anyone in town had ever seen; the local girls all cooed over him. "What would you give in return?" he asked. It was the question he always asked when he did a bit of work, and folks always figured he was one of those New-Age Hippies who believed in bartering everything. So they gave him food and shelter for his pains, and he went on his way after a while.
Kelsa, foolish girl, said instead "Oh I'd give up my soul for a wedding veil! I would too, though I know it's sinful to say it. But mother and father can't afford a new dress for me, let alone a veil, and I can't afford one neither. Just once, I'd love a wedding veil."
Sebastian smiled. "Then, you will have it, my dear one." He always spoke in this way; nobody knew where he came from for sure but everyone figured he was an immigrant - probably a northerner too. Canada, most like. "You will have a wedding veil fit for a princess, my dear, with tiny pearls all along its hem and the sweetest lace that will look as if you have foam upon your face, your body. . . "
She blushed at that. Kelsa had up till then only read such talk in romance novels, or heard snippets of it on the TV when her parents weren't watching. Certainly didn't come from the vague fumblings of the boys in her town, when she could get them before this. "I - better get in, and get ready for dinner," she said, rising. "Wash your hands."
He only grinned at her, wider than before.
Kelsa caught the flu. She started sneezing one day while hanging up the dull, dingy sheets that had been used too many times. She came inside with a fever and chills. "Well," the doctor said, "it did rain all last week. Lots of folks coming down with this - spring fever." He smiled at his own joke and patted the girl's hand. "Not to worry."
But, she didn't get better. Not even after she'd been flooded with chicken soup and the rest of the town got better. Sebastian, who'd only had the sniffles - said he had a constitution of iron - sat properly worried by her bedside when he couldn't be torn away to help with something. When he could be torn away, the young man said sadly that he'd better work on something to help him ease his pain.
Kelsa meanwhile was fading away. Every night, worse, she started hallucinating. She was seeing the ocean, she thought, a dark, mystical place where the waters flooded her senses. She could hear bubbling, and she saw her lodestone coming down - so maybe it was the brook where she'd been every full moon for four years. Maybe. But eventually, nights later, or was it days? she saw pearls. They rained down upon her, they covered her. . .
She screamed and woke. "Oh, such a fever!" her mother would cry, holding her. Forcing soup, tea, everything she could find, down the girl.
But Kelsa dreamt on, and her body seemed to be taking all nutrients and doing nothing with them save feeding the vile force that had attacked her in the first place. The town doctor had to admit that she didn't after all have the flu, that he'd call on a specialist - that it could be any number of things after all. He explained to the distraught parents about chronic illnesses and maybe it was even worse, that it could be cancer. He gave Sebastian, who looked properly distraught, sad looks.
"This cannot be true," said the young man, and shut himself up in Kelsa's room, locking the door. "He's upset, poor poor thing," sniffled her mother.
Once he was alone with Kelsa though, his aspect changed. The young man smiled again at the dying girl on her bed. "You will dream," he said to her, as he'd been saying for so many nights now. Because it had been he who had caused the nightmares about her drowning in pearls.
"Why?" she rasped. "I - don't understand. . . "
He laughed quietly. "But you said you'd give your soul for a proper veil, dear, and so you shall. You shall have the best veil in the world, once you yourself have crossed the veil." He hummed a bit. Kelsa tried to scream, for her part, but the words would not come.
They buried her on a Monday in October, six months after Sebastian had come. He wore his tuxedo that he'd bartered from the dress shop, and he insisted she wear the gown she'd intended to wear to their wedding, because he insisted that had been Kelsa's dying wish. Blasphemous, said some, but that was the way it was.
Upon her body, though, floated a lovely veil that Sebastian had made himself, with pearls all around the hem and the lace so fine it was as if the sea itself had come to pay a visit to the grave. After the funeral he disappeared, saying there was nothing more for him in the town, and he was never seen there again.
But sometimes on nights in October, when a person passes by the home where Kelsa lived, he or she hears a sound like a scream, and seems to see the ocean rushing in. For her house was destroyed by the river in a flash flood two nights after her funeral.
END