* Author : Jeanna Mason Stay

* Narrator : Valerie Valdes

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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PodCastle 905: The Next Dead Wife is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for coercive control, domestic violence, and murder





Rated PG-13

The Next Dead Wife

by Jeanna Mason Stay

 

Every time a new wife crosses my husband’s threshold, I tell myself this time will be different. This time I’ll go free.

As her body falls to the floor, I’ll seize my opportunity. As her soul rises from her body, I will snatch what should be mine — no cliched tunnel of light, just a doorway into the afterlife. But it will be my turn this time, my door. I’ll take it before she can.

Not that I’ve been able to yet. When the moment comes, I am frozen in place. I can only watch as she enters the door and disappears. And I hate her for it.

But my plan is not impossible. It has worked before. It was done to me. I remember staring down at my lifeless body sprawled across the carpet. I remember seeing a door appear. Feeling it beckon to me with a promise of peace. Then before I could respond, a ghostly form — the wife before me, I assume — threw it open. She looked at me a moment, shrugged in half apology, and slipped through the door. Which disappeared after her. Leaving me stuck here.

But not for much longer. When he murders his next wife, I will steal her way out. It’s only fair. That’s what I tell myself, at least. Every time.

I hear him now at the door, the regular kind. He opens it and carries her across the threshold.

“Here we are,” he says, his script old and tired to me but fresh for each new wife. “Your home, Mrs. Blake.”

I notice her elegant dress and her black hair curling around her face, the ring sparkling on her finger — and I freeze. I’m right, this time is different. Because it is my ring, the one he took off my hand before it was even cold.

I imagine how she felt as he slid it onto her finger, like he did with me. She probably smiled as it glittered in candlelight. Neither of us knew what was coming.

Her gaze sweeps the room as I stand there, anger roiling through me. And then, something else is different. Because her eyes suddenly stop, widening almost comically.

She is staring directly at me.

She looks away immediately. She turns back to her new husband, her future murderer, and begs him to show her around the house. She has never been here, no wife ever comes here before the marriage. Maybe if we had, we would have sensed the wrongness of this place. Or maybe not.



 

I know she sees me — know it because of how she stutters to a stop when she enters a room I am in. How her eyes flick to me and away again whenever I appear. But she pretends I don’t exist, and I pretend nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter that she sees me, since she’ll be dead before long. And I cannot make friends with someone I mean to betray.

I wonder how I look to her. Does she see the last dress I wore, the way I’d done my hair so carefully? Does she see the wound in my chest? It is unsettling to know she sees me at all.

At least he continues oblivious to my existence. He would otherwise find some way to torment me still.

She settles in, unpacking clothing, tucking her toothbrush in the holder next to his, washing her morning coffee cup. I roam the halls as I always have, bound to this place and this man.