Have you ever been so scared you simply reacted without thinking? Or maybe terror gave you wings and fear sharpened your senses, adrenalin driving you to super human sharpness of thought. I remember fleeing a tornado, as a child, and my heart beat so fast I couldn’t get down the cellar steps fast enough.
In 1961, when President Kennedy confronted Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs, I felt sure we were headed for disaster. I expected at any moment to be told to take shelter because we were under attack. Terror!
In fiction, I try to put those feelings into words when Darcy and Flora face threatening and fearful situations. These situations arise fairly often because, for some reason, they frequently find themselves in the way of people whose intentions are murderous.
“Faster, Darcy, faster!” Mom yelled as I rammed the car into reverse, backed out of the driveway and, tires spinning on the wet gravel, aimed for our bridge.
In the few minutes since the murderer’s arrival, the creek had risen. It now poured across the bridge. Saying a prayer that the raging water would not wash us downstream, I pressed on the accelerator and drove onto the planks. Thankful that I knew it so well, I could only guess where the bridge ended and the stream began. The swift current caught us like a giant hand, pushing us sideways. The tires lost traction.
“Dear Lord,” I prayed aloud, “don’t let the engine drown.”
Trying to cross Lee Creek was a living nightmare in which we ran from a pursuer in slow motion. I stomped the accelerator. The struggling engine revved, but our speed stayed the same. We were being swept ever closer to the edge of the bridge and the thundering current of the creek.
It seemed an eternity before we reached the road.
“Oh, thank God. Thank God,” Mom breathed.
With the bridge behind us, I concentrated on the flooded road. His truck would surely be on our back bumper.
Mom’s head swiveled from front to back. We both expected at any second to see headlights gaining on us.
Wind-lashed trees bent toward the road and reached out for the car. Windshield wipers did almost no good; the deluge pounded us. We skidded sideways and slid helplessly toward overflowing ditches. —Excerpt from Grave Heritage
“I thought this was a cozy mystery,” you say. “Where’s the coziness in all this terror?”
The coziness comes later, in the safety of friends, around a crackling fireplace, cups of coffee in hand. Coziness is a sharp contrast to fear. Kind of like light and dark, good and bad, sad and happy, storms and calm. From time to time, we all experience terror but it’s a lot easier to deal with when it’s only on the pages of a book and we have the comforting feeling that everything will turn out all right in the end.
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