Dear Miss Carmen,
Stimulus Question: How did it feel when you realized I was real? Not provisionally real, but really-real? Describe your thought process in the moment so I may study modern mores as exhibited by a 2010’s female, for the edification of a Victorian Age audience.
Kind Regards
Audience
Carmen: "You’re hilarious! So you’re going to be writing me stimulus questions now and leaving them about my flat? I’m guessing this is your way of saying you feel like you’re being studied? Well I’m sorry, but really… I spent the first couple of minutes after I found this note stashed under my coffee plunger staring at your beautiful handwriting lost in a bottomless well of grief. Not sure why it never struck me before now, (probably because it’s been so long since I sat down and wrote something out at any length with a pen and paper) but nobody has handwriting like yours any more… I guess you and your melancholy bullshit is rubbing off on me because I’m starting to see some epic tragedy encoded in all the pretty loops and flourishes of your old fashioned hand… My great grandmother Eileen used to write like you. I mainly write texts with my thumbs and I hate myself. -Put that down in your notes and mores. By the way, we’re called 'Millenials', or maybe 'Xennial' in my case and Millenial in Maddie’s… Nobody says ‘2010’s female’. LOL (that means laughing out loud, just so you know. Yep that’s right, you’ve missed some heavy shit.)
I suppose it was after we’d shown you how to adjust the water temperature on the shower that it hit me, the whole this is ‘really real’ part. You understood the light switch and the basin but all the things that confused you were the right things. I paid attention. Of course I thought you were mad still but I noticed because sane people always hang onto this strange idea you can talk people out of their delusions. Like, if I was to point out that you should know about running water if you were alive in 1874 and I caught you out, the cognitive dissonance would just suddenly destroy the delusion. Right?? Wrong! But futility is a favourite human sport for all eras. I always thought that with our mother too, could never seem to stop thinking like I just needed to out-argue her crazy and it would all patch up with Band-Aids, sew some buttons on where eyes used to be and right as rain! It never worked, but the habits acquired in childhood are hard to break.
There was never anything to catch you out on though. You were smarter than me, and at first that’s all it seemed to mean. There are clever crazies, I learned that working in mental health for nearly a decade… Which, trust me, is basically the equivalent to a lifetime in any other profession. But their clever doesn’t get them out of the psych ward. Crazy is crazy, no matter what. At least that’s what I thought until you were in the shower and Maddie went through your coat pockets. She showed me the stitches and the lining as if something special about them should be immediately apparent. “Look at the label with the tailor’s logo on it. It’s water damaged now but it’s genuine to the time period and in remarkable condition.”
I shrugged. “So what? Someone can still be crazy and like antique clothes. Probably some steampunk bullshit.”
But Maddie was persistent. “Look at these empty viols! You can still see they’re for Laudanum even though the ink’s running on the label.”
I frowned and took it from her. She’s the fashion designer but I’m the local history enthusiast and I was keen to find something wrong with the picture. Just as with the technological objects I could find no evidence you were faking.
I shrugged again but this time it was less certain. “So… What do you think’s going on? We’ve wandered onto the set of Les Revenants and people are coming back from the dead? Or what do you reckon? More of a In the Flesh vibe with this one? Full zombie?”
I was waiting for her to say: ‘never go full zombie!!’ I’d set it up for her but she didn’t take it. Maddie opened her mouth to reply but didn’t say anything. Her seriousness was contagious. I glanced in the direction of my closed bathroom door and the hairs went up on the back of my arms.
“I don’t know what I think. But what if it’s like that moment in Magnolia where the frogs all rain down from the sky and the little kid is like, this is something that happens?”
My sister’s a smart lady but it seems to be written into whatever coding siblings come with that it’s my job to scorn her when she gets sentimental. Maybe it’s because I’m pretty sure she fancies herself as Fanny Brawne and is still looking for her John Keats to arrive. I, on the other hand, work in the hospital juggling bedpans and when I get off my shift and its too late to go to bed I like taking photographs of Hobart by night. The town’s history interests me, but that’s about as weird as I get, so why would this kind of thing happen to me?
“So, is that what you’re going to do if it’s real? A quick fashion recap of the past one hundred and fifty years in dresses, a tour of kitchen appliances, a brief diversion through a couple of world wars, then its movie marathon time?” I teased her. The shower had turned off and I was joking to cover my growing unease. I got to my feet all of a sudden. “Fuck, what am I thinking? I’ve just left a mental health patient alone in the bathroom with a metric shit heap of pharmaceuticals and about ten other things you could self harm with!”
I was about to go knock and check up on you when you abruptly opened the door and I jumped visibly, totally giving away how spooked I was.
“Don’t worry,” you replied dryly. “I got that out of my system already.” Your face was expressionless and your voice was almost toneless but I could just detect a cool, grim humour. Part of me was embarrassed that you’d overheard me describing you as a self harm risk, which I don’t think I would have been if I was still thinking of you as crazy... Maddie got up from where she was sitting on the floor and wrapped her robe tighter before decisively tying it around her, a clear sign she felt on formal terms with someone. You were standing there in my plain white dressing gown I’d given you to change into, so I made a show of taking your clothes off Maddie and hanging them up to dry in front of the heater.
“Sorry for touching your things,” Maddie muttered. “I was just…”
“Checking to see if I’m lying,” you finished for her. I noticed that your gaze was very steady and you weren’t giving off any visible signs of psychosis. You crossed your arms in a way that seemed a bit self-protective, but you gave off a sense of determined functionality. “I don’t at all blame you.”
It was only then that I noticed the contrast of red blood on my tiles beside your white robe. “Fuck!” I yelled. “You’re bleeding!” Within moments I was gloving up and rummaging through my medical kit. By the time I reached the door to the bathroom you hadn’t moved except to gaze down at your own feet like you were still working out what was down there.
“Oh. That’s just some cuts on my feet from the oyster shells,” you muttered. “My apologies.”
I frowned at your apology for bleeding on my floor. You didn’t get that often in the psych ward…
But Maddie was quicker than me. “What oyster shells?”
“There are many upon the stones at the edge of the bay, as I walked to shore. I didn’t feel it until later.”
I don’t remember how Maddie reacted because I was in full nurse mode by then. You didn’t get any say in being treated by me either. While I cleaned and dressed the wounds on your feet with ointment and bandaging my hair brushed the wet, bloody tiles. I should have restrained it in a hairnet like at work but I hadn’t thought and even though it was only my hair soaking in your blood I felt a shudder of infection paranoia, as if you could be carrying some exotic strain of disease from your time period. Your fingernails were torn and your hands were injured too. There was an eerie feeling in touching you, even through the membrane of latex. You weren't really colder than a normal living person but there was a weird stigmataery feeling about dressing those little bandages on your hands and feet.
“Can I open this?”
You complied but very reluctantly to let me open your robe. When I glanced up at your face it revealed actual shyness. As someone who sees people of all ages and sexes naked on a daily basis I can say true modesty is pretty rare in grown ups. So maybe it was that or something mysterious I can’t quite explain that I felt through the gloves while I examined you. Despite your mild lacerations there was no sign of necrotic bruising or anything that would suggest you’d recently been dead. My instruments said your temperature and blood pressure were both within normal range, if low-to-normal.
It wasn’t those things… Instead there was this other weird feeling your body gave off… It will sound weird but it’s as though the past is something you can smell on people. Not because of sanitary conditions of course, but is it perhaps that I had never been around the skin of a person who ate the food and breathed the air of another era? There was something that passed between us as animals, some sniffing sort of instinct that told me you were really real. Long before you started to produce the proof.
Are you happy with that? On behalf of my tribe Millennial of Hobart Town, I would like it known that The Victorian Age can be a wee bit of a Princess sometimes… Just saying…
New Stimulus Question! Why do we have little urine samples full of pins and needles hidden around the house now? I’ve heard all about you people and the happy snaps with your dead kids but what’s with the jar pee??
I was sitting by the window of the room you assigned me, listening to my death river gushing below, when I first started bringing up the witch-ball. You won’t even know what it is I suppose, so oblivious is your over-lit century to the darkness and her brood… You fancy you’ve vanquished the night far further than the old town boundary around Forest Road, but it’s a confidence that will only last as long as your access to electricity.
A witch ball is a concentration of malignancy sent against you by another person empowered with The Eye. If you were of Irish stock as I am you’d probably know already about how important it is to make the spirit traps that encircle the ill wishing in thorns and broken glass and tempt them away from their target into fragmentation. With your home so close to the rivulet, where the dead are want to slake their thirst it is unwise to have no protection beyond a few electrical light bulbs and heating devices. I’ve made some traps out of my old laudanum bottles and hidden them around your house. You’ll be safe now, you can thank me later each day you don’t cough up tangled masses of hair and pins.
Sadly I was not so lucky as to avoid becoming mother to the abortions of my whole life's history in an unfortunately oral manner. The first ball was made of the hair of Elizabeth Allport, the woman who had Overlooked me with The Eye shortly before I arrived here. I can already anticipate you hearing this and taking it as further sign I suffer from some form of paranoid delusion. But her suppression of my voice was real and literal.
They keep us quiet for a reason, people like her, you realize? The weavers of dreams threaten their very construct of reality, the comfortable status quo. They’re afraid of the apocalypse of daffodils we carry in our heart-cages, they’re afraid of the dandelions or our minds tearing up their fetish for concrete. They’re just afraid. It was this way in my time and I’m skeptical that the matter has altered.
People without The Second Sight would have just seen her as a mother protecting her son, trying to prevent a non-advantageous situation for him. But I knew they were her sewing pins and her hair tangled around and around until they stuck in my throat like river-weed and dragged me into the great quiet. Wrapped up in coagulative malice and rolled tight into balls of spite, the witch ball has to be worked and worked between the fingers like an ulcer is favoured by the tongue, it finds no accidental victims.
The second one… That was his hair… But not because he harmed me. I knew it meant something different, as I pulled the long, dark strands of it out of my throat by the fistful and gagged on all the sharp edges of his broken heart. She'd turned my love against me. I think I coughed out a whole music box while the death river rushed and rushed below me… I think I coughed out yesterday, and tomorrow, and all the times were happening at once again for a cacophony. I understood the anomaly that brought me here in that moment of overlap, standing at the crossroads of time… I understood completely how it is all, always, only ever happening Now. If you could break through the illusion that it’s otherwise then somewhere on the other side of the theatrical fourth wall… Somewhere over there, over West, further, further on, where the veil goes down and never comes back up again and the worlds melt in on each other, if I was standing there I could explain.
But all I know is I came from there. And now I can’t get back. So now you have witch bottles.