Ep. 8 Van Demonian Supernatural: The Sea Maid

Sophia’s Testimony (-requested by Carmen after the fact) 

My original training was in archeology and I’ll admit people are a kind of dig to me. Right from the first moment I see them. I start dusting back earth carefully, sorting through rubble, collecting samples, bagging and tagging… Some of the samples I take through observation skills, the rest… Suffice to say, with Henry I knew he was for real from the moment he greeted me on Criterion Street. When you talk to the dead all your life you get a sense for the feel of a historical period. People from different places and times smell differently, move differently, sound differently, to you and I today. Such as the way there was no self-consciousness to his attempt to pull out my chair. He did it on reflex and then tried to prevent himself just in the manner of someone with a long-standing physical habit.

When you really pay attention to other people you start to notice things like that. But today most everyone's too attention starved to learn how to be powerful. All our most cherished secrets are like that, hidden in plain sight because no one can be bothered really doing them. Henry wasn't like that though. Which was another signature of his era. He was watching me just as closely. In my memory I was back in in a prattishly middle class home in West Kennett, years ago now, where quite unexpectedly I met other people like myself… We come in all sorts you see, sexes, social classes, ethical temperaments... Until that day back in Wiltshire, I hadn’t known there were other people who wanted to see what lies beneath the silt and dust strata of things. 

“Thank you for meeting me today, Miss…”

“Don't stress yourself, Dickens,” I teased him with a little punch in the arm to loosen him up. "Sophia's cool with me."

My practiced eye saw more than his apologetic head ducking. It was clear to me from small nuances in his body language and grey-to-pale-blue eyes that here was someone who usually learns very fast. Someone who makes tremendous demands upon themselves and gets irritated quickly when he doesn’t immediately correctly master a new skill. I could also tell he was used to struggling to fit in and that the fear of not doing so went down to the self preservation level. 

“My apologies. It is always the interaction between the formal and informal aspects of modern socializing where I trip up. Usually just when I think I have it all under control!” 

I smiled as I watched him thank the waitress as she filled his water glass and took his order for a pot of loose-leaf black tea (Milk, no sugar). The stitches on the cuff of his shirt, which showed by about half an inch at the end of his grey suit coat as he extended his hand for the glass, were elegantly hand-stitched. The material was high quality linen. I wondered if this was Madeleine's work? I had already noticed her noticing me noticing her clothing!

His hands were long-fingered and fine boned in the way we palmists read as indicating a sensitive and artistic temperament. The fact his fingernails were very closely manicured to the finger, and his hands untoughened by hard work anywhere except around the fingertips led my guess that he was a musician. 

“It must be difficult for you, adapting to all this.” My sympathy was genuine even though I could not truly imagine his predicament. An old friend of mine back home who is of the blunt sort, would have grunted at me: ‘enough with the small talk’, but Henry had a more gentlemanly style of frankness.

“I can see you’re very good with people, Sophia. It seems you have kindness in you, which is rarer still. I’m told you have The Sight like I do?” 

Although he appeared to dodge my question I felt I learned about him from the fact he didn’t answer. There was a feeling of firm emotional discipline around this young man that held in check a brewing storm. At the moment I thought this a glass shattered in the kitchen and someone cried out in shock. Everyone in the café stopped talking for a moment. 

Henry didn’t jump like everyone else. He looked back at me when I stared at him and raised one of his eyebrows faintly, but almost defiantly, as if to say ‘what?’ I sensed that like poltergeists, the ghosts of the young ones who had never spent the energy of their heart and sex, he had probably felt the swell and pop in his chest right before the sound. It wasn't the first time this had happened to him.  Of course I didn’t take the bait by mentioning it. I’ve always found it best when in the presence of strong preternatural activity, the full capacity of which you aren't sure of yet, to never let them see surprise or fear.

“I do. Did you ever hate it, being Sighted? When you were growing up?”

“Indeed. My mother believed I was a changeling. Whenever I was disagreeable she would threatened to leave me out on the hill for my real family to come and get me. Now, you say you’ve seen a lot of things, Mi… My apologies,” he cleared his throat. “Sophia. For some reason I went to call you some other name and I can’t for the life of me think what it was now?”

It was my turn to raise my eyebrows but my expression was more on the sceptical side. I wasn’t buying his attempt to pass his ability off as a slip of the tongue. I figured he was trying to hedge his bets in case he’d guessed the first letter incorrectly, which he hadn’t. 

“Well, I’ve had a few names over the years. Not many people know what they were though…” I left the words hanging in the air to see if he’d take the bait. He pretended not to notice, like a proud peregrine falcon that won’t take landed meat from your hand but must chase the lure. "It's kind of a 'I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you' sort of deal."

“Oh. Well seems best to steer away then. Perhaps instead, you could answer for me what I find to be my most burning current question? Why do you imagine I was sent back when so many were not?”

I wanted to tell him I wasn’t the Oracle of Fucking Delphi and I was over people wanting big universal answers to the meaning of things! After some of the bad calls I'd made in the past it was a wonder I was still practicing at all. Sometimes when a seer makes a mistake people get hurt. But sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and be the priestess you were looking for as a younger woman. Table the fact you don't have all the answers. Deliberately assuming that mindset I found myself thinking mythically. “I suppose you were able to make all of Hell weep for you or something, hon.”

He frowned as he sipped his tea and glanced up at me over the rim of the cup. “What do you mean?”

I smiled to myself. I felt so old under the weight of the piled up meanings around that story… That moment when you realize you’ve made a reference that only two humans left alive would have understood the exact significance of and neither of them are present. With a melancholy sigh I relied on explanation in the place where I missed understanding. “In the myth of Baldr, the Norse shining one, he was slain by the finest projectile, a little piece of mistletoe. Hel agreed to return Baldr on the condition that all the denizens of the Underworld would all weep as one for his sad tale. Everyone did except for Loki, if it hadn’t have been for Loki then Baldr would have been resurrected.”

He nodded to himself slowly. “Rather fitting,” he muttered. “I was slain by something very fine indeed. Mere words... I cannot imagine though why I would be wept for by so many. There are an ample number of tragedies in this world after all. Mine was but one drop of salt in the ocean.” He shrugged gracefully, as if the weight of excessive self-importance were something you could slip off the shoulder’s like an old coat, even at his age.

“Why did you kill yourself?” I asked. 

“What makes you think I killed myself?”

“The air felt like a held breath when you walked up to me. Suicides feel like that. Suicides used to make me claustrophobic until I got used to it.”

“Fear,” he sighed. “Fear that if I refused to do so the man I loved would fall victim to state sanctioned murder for the crime of loving me. His mother made it clear to me that such an outcome was on the cards, and let me know what I needed to do to protect him.”

“Wow… Nice mother! And did your man get any say in this, whether he wanted this grand sacrifice in the name of his protection?” I was probably a bit sharp with him, but his story hit a nerve for me. It hit somewhere far too close to home.

Pain flashed into Henry's eyes that reminded me of sheet lightning, partly shielded and diffused by clouds that obscure the view of the thing itself. Curtly he shook his head and swallowed uncomfortably. “As to his mother, I imagine she felt she did what she had to.” Quite suddenly he looked back at me. “She had reason enough to be afraid for her son. Times were different then. May I now in turn ask you something personal?”

“I guess…”

“What brings you to Hobart?”

 “Dark MOFO primarily, they paid for my flight.”

“Yet you’re here for something else. Looking for something… That’s what having the Sight is about, don't you think? The Noticing? Who are you hiding from and why does it scare you that you know I'm real?”

The hair was standing up on my arms as if I was afraid he somehow knew everything.          “Pardon?”

“I was too frank, let me try again," his tone was calm and carried a cool, understated type of kindness which I first mistook for mere politeness. "What I mean to say is this: what you are and what I am puts us in league. You can tell me the truth safely.”

Stimulus question: Henry, please explain your thought process after meeting Alma up until the moment you solved his riddle?

One question obsessed me utterly. What kind of fairytale were we in? It was a question I'd lived with all my life but now Arthur had brought it to a head. I had assumed a love story. Yet the genre of the love story, ending with a marriage as they usually do, had never really made a lot of sense to me. My early demise had, in fact, been a result of the world convincing me that tragedy was the only kind of narrative where someone like me appears. So I guess I didn’t really look at Sophia immediately and think of her as someone who could help me. What was there left to help with? Everything I half-lived after he wasn't there anymore was an after thought. A postscript of sorts. Surely? It seemed too late for everything. Now was just about picking through the ashes of a vanished flame, trying to make sense of it, and speaking aloud my silenced tale. 

I already knew the way I wanted to write about love wouldn’t be like your conventional love story. It would be serpentine, winding, crooked, and intricate full of quiet contemplative retreats where he and I would meditate on the mystery of one another from afar. Where we would shed skins and don new ones for each other’s fresh delight. Where we would only seek each other’s company again once we had watered the flower of our longing, only when we were aching for it, so that the sight alone of each other ravaged the senses.  This is how he and I had begun on instinct alone, but we we had never arrived… It seemed as though perhaps we never would.

Love as an art form, with all the usual discipline you’d expect from art, rather than a gorged-down, unconscious biological imperative, was something I was born knowing the way I was music. I knew stories about love that didn’t wrap up with a happy ending, but instead bore it out through the trials of life its glory and bravery both untarnished by the corrosion of time. Already I knew how to begin it, and perhaps even how to live it, given the chance, I just didn’t know how to write it yet. I suppose nothing deemed unspeakable easily knows how to speak of itself, until suddenly it does, and the world rearranges to make room for a fresh influx of guerilla narrative.

           “What’s the saddest fairytale you can think of?” You asked me while I was sitting in your lounge room with my notebook, trying to crack Arthur’s code. I see now that you weren’t far off leading me to the answer in that question, but clearly this was not the way I was meant to find it.

            “It isn’t going to get solved this way,” I replied, getting to my feet and walking to the window. I leaned against the casement and looked out. The window didn’t face the street as those on my family home had done and I felt the loss of it. The front window was where I sat waiting for his arrival to repeat itself, as I had a feeling it would, time after time in different contexts, different streets, different eras. 

            “Maybe this is something Henry has to do alone,” Madeleine suggested tactfully. 

            If displeasure had been read into my comment it wasn’t present. I was merely in a state of deep concentration, the type that comes right before settling into the calm at the eye of the storm where all good ideas body forth from. Arthur knows me. This I must have faith in that if nothing else. He would know me anywhere, no matter what, and I would know him. And if that is so then he would have picked something that would fall into line with my most natural impulses, the things I would do if I was just acting normally…. 

            “Research,” I suddenly said aloud to myself. “If I couldn’t solve it off the top of my head, I would do research! Carmen? May I borrow your internet machine?”

This is the way fairytales happen in the 21st century… They start with words like: I entered “Fairytale +Sea Shell +Mill wheel” on Google and the top hits were ‘The Little Mermaid’. And they finished with... I still don't know how they finish.  He and I are history's suspension dots.

          My heart began to gush a glut of ocean water into my throat. It stung but I swallowed hard. Without needing to elaborate I knew the story. Released in the 1840’s ‘The Sea Maid’ by Hans Christian Anderson was childhood reading material for Arthur and I. But which was the part that had contained an image of both a sea shell and a water mill? I searched for this and found in them in the part of the tale that deals with the sea maid’s journey to the dwelling of the sea witch, where she must pass through water mill-like swirling and over the skeletons of drowned men.

Drowned in a flooding Hobart rivulet, which contained multiple mill wheels, through which my battered corpse had to pass, I had gone full fathoms five to the sea witch’s depths where the skeletons of whales lurked. So this imagery brought the hairs to a stand on the back of my neck, to the tune of the pouring rain outside. But that was just only the beginning of my friend's ingenuity and subtlety. 

As I continued the research I could feel his mind dancing with mine. I was on the blood trail the story was leaving. Finally it was truly pungent with truth! In the story Ariel was a fae creature fallen in hopeless love for a human man. The man hears her singing voice and greatly admires her. Later she rescues him from drowning. She is so enamored of him that when the sea witch offers to trade her two human legs to walk on land in return for her voice, she accepts. The sea witch cuts out her tongue, in later versions her voice is stored in a seashell. The sea witch tells her she can only earn a human soul if she is given the kiss of true love by her prince, otherwise she will simply turn into sea-foam. She agrees to these harsh conditions and the sea witch adds her voice to her ‘collection’. 

As I read my fingers that itched to play but had not the quality of music in them twitched and burned. What if, as for the sea maid, I find him only to be unable to identify myself without my music? In the story Ariel gets her chance to be human and perhaps earn a soul but the prince will only ever love the owner of that beautiful voice he once heard, and Ariel has cut out her tongue so she cannot sing... This is the central wrenching tragedy of this saddest of the faerie tales…

She is locked out from receiving a human soul because he can love no one but the owner of that voice she no longer has. Given an option to save herself by doing harm to her beloved she prefers death to betrayal, and as the reward of an amoral universe is forced to watch him marry another. 

Keeping her love silent the mermaid turns into sea foam, but her spirit is lifted up by the faeries of air who tell her there is still a chance for her if she spends hundreds of years doing good deeds. In later versions of the story the little mermaid gets her voice back from the sea witch at the end, the sea witch has been collecting voices in sea shells. 

            As soon as the thought of voices in seashells occurred I thought of the image of the shell inside the ear that Arthur had showed me. It had always been the way he skin-rode people, after-all, going in through the ear… I looked up seashells and ‘collection’ down the rabbit hole of the hidden Allport collection.

Suffice to say there’s a whole Huon Pine 'cabinet of curiosities' of which a large part is devoted to a sea-shell collection, probably started by Cecil’s mother and continued on by him and his son Henry… The idea of Cecil’s mother as the sea-witch who stole my voice and prevented me declaring my love made sense. And the idea that Arthur would secret this virtue he meant to support my work with, this magical packed punch he'd brewed in our denial, into something associated with giving me back my stolen voice unwords me utterly.

             Wrapped up in the layers of meaning is Hans Christian Anderson’s own unrequited love for a young man, and his pain when forced to keep his love that dared not speak its name silent whilst watching his beloved marry someone else. Tears rolled down my face as I read. Arthur didn’t just know indeed how I think, it seemed to me he was saying: I see you. I know you. I knew you before I knew you. I know and see your silent pain that none other witnessed. For the first time since I’d come back the oyster-cut pain in my feet stopped smarting. As if in the simple act of witnessing the knives I walked over for him Arthur had miraculously closed up the stigmata of it.

Tears gushed a raw flood of life over my face and I dropped back my head. At that moment in my mind’s eye I saw a beacon light go up from my chest, parting my ribs into the night-sky. The intensity of the feeling made we gasp because it was black hot shot with silver and smelt of burning whale fat. I felt the lighthouse I had become and let even the light tangled into my bones erupt towards the heaven in offering with one message. 

I’m here. 

Ep. 7 Van Demonian Supernatural: Love's Riddle and the Priestess

Because: Nothing is ever so hard to recover from as the things that haven’t happened yet… 

So much of life is holding one’s breath for the brief hour we are given to breathe and shine. So comparatively brief. What else then is art but an attempt to shout out over the distances between those moments? To say:  here I am still! This is what I felt! This is what I loved. This is what I lost… Knowing that Arthur’s tendency to collect things was his art-form made me approach with reverence. I wanted to make sure I paid adequate attention to detail. 

The Allport Collection being just down there at the library made me afraid to break the seal on the moment. To let out all that old dust that had been holding it’s breath for a century. After all, it was possibly the last of his living communications with me, whatever hidden message had been left encoded for me alone to hear speaking, among those mute objects.

            His riddle walked with me everywhere. I wanted the answer to it the way I’d always wanted him. This riddle means something beyond finding the answer and getting to the destination of his message. It means congruence of affection and it means story collison. It means his mind rising to meet mine against the backdrop of eternity. I had not expected to be met so completely in this manner, life as I had learned it, was not kind, and the most I had hoped for was his affection. Why should I be the recipient of such an extravagant act of memory and devotion, whilst others died at the end of a rope or froze huddled and forgotten in someone’s doorstep? 

Yet now here it was, offered to me… What if I failed it? To be worthy of it? When so few are ever given half so much regard? What if I couldn’t answer his question and proved that we didn’t really understand each other at all? After all this time it would hardly be surprising… My mind is still young and his grew and deepened to the age of almost seventy in my absence. Young as we still were in those days… Such things as unexplored love affairs are a great breeding ground for Romanticised notions and illusions…That’s what older people usually say anyway. And one is given to believe they’ve learned something in their extra time in this world, beyond how to be bitter.

In short, during this time, doubts crowded in around me in hyena skin, snapping and slavering at the blood trail I was still leaving behind me on the oyster shells.  I knew it, I smelt them on my trail, but I couldn’t will myself to stop bleeding.

So I’m writing again… See? Happy? I thought it would have been best for Henry to tell it. I can imagine his atmospheric description of the streets at this time of year. Through the eyes of someone so alien to our way of life, it would fascinate me, plus he’s the real storyteller. Not me. Isn’t that what writers are for? They carry the burden of telling all our stories like a goat with a ribbon tied around it's neck? 

It was Dark MOFO when I found her. I thought maybe she wasn’t for real at first, just another tourist trap. [Carmen’s edit: that’s the Museum of Old and New Art’s, MONA’s, midwinter festival, for our international readers. If you want to understand what MONA is you just have to imagine that Willy Wonka was real, lived in Hobart, and was more interested in dark, twisted artworks than chocolate] There were fires burning in forty-four gallon drums around the streets and the whole city had started to feel like a giant art installation. 

A beacon light reaches up into the night as if to send a signal from our strange little city to get the attention of the darkness. There is a huge hand-fish where people stuff paper with their hidden fears inside before it is burned and sent out into the sea. I tried to get Henry to participate in the ceremony, but he was unsettled by the idea of any fish that contained Hobart’s collective fears.

He spoke of a hanging he’d witnessed as a child, one of the last public hangings in Hobart. His father told him that ‘such were the wages of sin in this world’ while the man’s body (to quote him): ‘jerked like a marionette whose strings are in the hands of a brutal child.’ That was his first shock of what he called man’s inhumanity to man. To know that men kill other men in violence was one thing, but to see the way the crowd jeered the dying man’s fear was another. 

I told him that in our era if a child witnessed people hang a man by the neck until he was dead we’d put them in post-traumatic counselling! He just shrugged and said that he’d had nightmares about it all his life. Of course I pointed out that is indeed a sign of posttraumatic stress. He laughed. “If that is a disease, Madeleine, then everyone in my world must have been suffering from it.” 

“Why don’t you write down the nightmare and put it inside the hand fish?” I suggested.

“Oh I’m not afraid of it anymore so I don't have it,” he replied with little sign of emotion. “Fear is a reflex response to hope.” 

 I didn’t poke anymore, as it seemed a tender point. The feeling I couldn’t do anything else to help him without guidance from someone of greater experience led me on to find someone who was more knowledgable in these areas. 

When I found the fortuneteller she was sitting on red velvet cushions and animal skins, behind colourful curtains. I noticed her dark eyes, the tattoos on her hands, and the cut of her clothing. I always see the quality of stitching, fabric and the lining in clothing. In this case it was odd, as you don’t often see people wearing designer clothing who also have tattoos on their hands and beads in their hair. I remember trying to work out how old she was for some reason, -like it really matters but what society trains into us can become knee jerk… My guess was she was in her thirties, but I wasn’t fully sure. Sometimes in different lights or with different expressions she appeared much older or younger. 

“Hi, my name’s Madeleine, -Madeleine Allport.” I’m not sure why I lied about my last name, beyond a general pride in being descended from Cecil, because of course his daughter Eileen hadn’t passed us his name. It felt important to do it though.

“I’m Sophia. Can I see your palms?” she asked me. I was pretty sure she was English from her accent but I’d be guessing if I tried to pick which county.  When she touched my hand I felt a charge of electricity from her hot skin. I was really awake in the human contact all of a sudden and it felt weirdly intimate, as if by some magic in her touch she had drawn me down into my womanhood. 

“Hello there,” she said, acknowledging the fact I was only just settling into my body. I saw the deep old wisdom in her eyes and the warmth in her smile. She was in no hurry with anything and suddenly neither was I. 

“Hi,” I muttered nervously. I had the feeling I was sitting in the presence of some ancient temple priestess whose warm self possession alone made me feel like she must be judging me infinitely inferior.

“You’re here about this aren’t you?” she asked, turning over a card with a heart on a rose bush on it. “There’s an important matter you’re caught up in the middle of, something to do with an interrupted love affair.” Even though she consulted my hands and the cards it seemed more like she was listening to something I couldn’t hear than really looking, much the way Henry appears to sometimes when he sits and rocks back and forth. 

“What else do you see?”

She closed her eyes, which didn’t seem to suggest she was considering the lines on my hand at all. “Love that was interrupted by untimely death, possibly a suicide or even… even a murder… Suicide, accident, murder, all…  It’s weird, twisted threads,” she looked up at me. “There’s multiple repetitions of the same story, all in slightly different ways, rippling out from a sleeper murmuring code, vomiting amanitas… Always close but not quite… The Tower is coming down, apocalyptic change rides in on four coloured horses, brewing storms, a great fire... You’re here on someone else’s behalf but this is about you too… You don't see that yet.”

“How can you see all that?” I whispered in awe, because I was already convinced. In any other context ‘accident, murder, suicide’ could sound like psychic arse-covering and guesswork but in this one it was a perfect description of Henry’s three-fold demise. 

“The heart and the hand have their own archeology, leaving traces and echoes... Someone I used to know told me it’s a rag and bone shop, -the heart…”

I jumped at this reference because I was sure that I’d heard it in a poem Henry had read us only recently, or that perhaps he had compared himself to a rag and bone man in some way? Either way it further convinced me of her power.

“You’re good,” I said leaning forward and speaking more quietly. “This is going to sound crazy…”

“Ha! Oh honey… You don’t know who you’re talking to!” she laughed with gusto suddenly, slapping her knee. She reached out and touched me. “Trust me, I’ve seen some shit.” Looking into her eyes at that moment I believed her.

So I took the leap and just said it. “Is it possible for the dead to come back?”

“It happens all the time. People just don’t notice.” 

I felt like I’d heard Henry say something very similar and I was becoming increasingly spooked but the fierce lady crush I was developing on her kept me staring at her. “But I mean… actually come back. Like the kind of end days resurrection stuff Catholics believe in kind of ‘come back’?”

She put the cards down then, ordering the cardboard to line up in the deck before sighing as if getting involved in something like this was way against her better judgment. Looking up at me she wore the expression of one world weary of miracles. “You don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you? Because I have a feeling I'm going to need one. when I hear what you’re going to tell me."  

I like what you’ve written about the meeting with Sophia. Take it from one of the dead: what you don’t say in life will haunt you in death. It is not the dead who haunt the living so much as the life unlived haunts us. It itches under our illusion of skin until we have to dive back into one to unravel the knots we're choking on. For what else am I here again, I wonder? With all that I loved dead and gone and a new world before me? If not to tell from the other side of the cold, to speak of the urgent life in me, in all of us, that chases the sun and only shows its power on the edge of the dark? 

            The fact I am good at this, this ordering of signs, this pleasing of the inner ear, needs have no bearing on the matter of who writes what. You and I, Madeleine, are not a competition, not a jostling for space, if we but breathe from the still point of grace inside us, -we are a dance. We are two parts in a symphony who must both learn to play together at the urges of the conductor. This way of thinking was taught to me by a master in the art of Harmony. Your great great grandfather taught me to think of human interaction as one of the arts. Of all of them it is the one most potentially exquisite, why should we not make it, above all other things, beautiful?

Words are such despots by comparison to music. This is both why they don’t really matter as much as some other things, and why you must master them at all costs. What is silent is what is victimized in this world, it is the same today as it was in my time. In this world silence equals death. When I made music nobody on the street could refuse me, even if they wanted to. It spilled out into the road, infesting the gutters and the alleyways with a guerilla act of beauty. Had a mob been organized to purge my perceived immorality from the town. those who liked to listen to me might have spoken against them because of it. My piano and my cello spoke for me when I was silent. My skill provided me with beauty currency. Writing is not like that, it’s quiet and humble seeming by comparison and people have to work harder to eke its beauty out, but it is a far more tyrannical business under the surface. After all, we are making each other ‘repeat words after me’ in our heads! 

 I used to think that because I could see and hear the dead I had to carry the responsibility to tell all their lost and forgotten stories. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Now I see that nobody has to carry anything heavier than their own story, which is usually more than enough to shoulder. I am not the sin-eater of Hobart narrative nor do I pretend to be. I am but a confused young man with a gift for shuffling adjectives. Take it from someone whose silence was forced on them by the destruction of their life’s work, you will regret it if you don't fight hard for your voice.

                Just as in my day a man like me had no right to his own story, was told by every single tale and parable, in fact, that I didn't exist, could never be the protagonist in my own adventure or morality tale, this used to be the case for women also. At least in conventional literature anyway. When Bronte dared to make Jane Eyre the hero of her own narrative this was a revolutionary act in the nineteenth century. Empathy is engendered through stepping into another’s stream of consciousness. Men of letters of the day were made to become Jane and they all went ahead and married Mr. Rochester with her! At this moment people very unlike myself are reading these words in countries all around the world and for a moment they too are Other. 

            Without this ability we are all quite self-involved creatures at the bottom of it. Walking around cocooned in our own storylines… Such is the nature of basic survival. What choice do we have? There is no one else we can rely on to fully body us forth on our behalf, to walk our path for us. Yet still I think we have some obligation to enlarge our sense of self. That is what true friendship is, surely? That moment when you realize that someone else’s narrative has collided with one’s own? When the collision is deep and hard enough you can no longer fully distinguish where their tale ends and yours begins. In this way, when my life has intersected with those of women their stories are mine also. Their liberation is my liberation, their oppression is my oppression. If we could extend our story wider, to include cities and mountains, rivers and trees, whose stories are also part of the myth of ourselves, then surely we would be closer to our native human condition?

            Such a moment of atavistic surging happened to me when I went to the cafe to meet Sophia. I’ve always known that not everyone you meet wearing human skin is truly what they appear. Mythic beings jostle everywhere with the illusion of mundanity. When I saw her she was sucking down a cigarette like it contained her true love or her salvation or both. She was standing outside a café on Criterion Street preoccupied with her phone. She was dressed in red and purple and upon her forehead was written Mystery. 

            Brazenly she looked me up and down. The way she exhaled her smoke reminded me of the manner in which Arthur’s ghost had done it in the cemetery. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” she said. No greetings or ‘are you Henry?’, just straight to the point. She had the kind of features and complexion that one might associate with the Mediterranean, or even perhaps Middle Eastern origin, but her accent marked her out as English. 

            My quizzical eyebrow twitched in response to her words but I don’t think my face showed much more expression than that. “Did you like this person I remind you of?” I asked, because it seemed good information to have. 

            Her smile was partly wistful but her warm dark eyes glimmered with something of experience and its bitter sweets. Although I couldn’t have pinned her to a numerical age I knew by that look in her eyes she was older than I had ever lived to. 

            “He and I had our moments.” I could hear a lot more gurgling under the surface of those words and I knew instinctually, the way they say the Tasmanian devil can smell death from mile away that it was a story I was part of. My heart accelerated as it always does during a powerful collision of persons. 

She butted out her cigarette and we went inside. When we approached the café table I pulled out her chair for her and she laughed. Realising I’d drawn attention to myself with the antiquated gesture I felt flustered and quickly sat down across from her trying to regain my composure. 

“So…” she said, still looking me over, scrutinizing my body language and my clothing. “You’re the boy who came back from the dead then?”

Ep. 6 Van Demonian Supernatural: Down the Rabbit Hole

I’ve heard it said that the first people of this land sometimes wore about themselves bone relics of their beloved dead. Some might think the idea of wearing human bones uncivilized, and I won’t dispute the charge with them. I’ve seen what people believe civilization looks like... I would that I could take no part in it again, and keep my heart’s native territory girt round by the beautiful barbarism of love. 

As I approached his grave the primary urge wasn't a million miles from grave robbing. While we walked you seemed uncomfortable with my obvious desire for this strange reunion of the bones. Dread was indeed mixed in with my wanting too, but I doubt it showed. 

“So… am I getting the right end of the stick from your writing that you and great great granddad Cecil never actually… you know, did it? I mean, made love, or whatever sex was called in the olden days?” 

            The question should have stung like lemon juice in a fresh cut, but for some reason I was taken by a sad, poignant smile. A soft old longing tugged at my belly, an antique ache as old as the hills. It belonged to something bigger than both of us. Its bone-deep bruise was too far below the surface for a sting. “Not in the conventional sense, no,” I replied quietly, my voice almost a whisper, as I watched the lonely path of a gull in the talcum-smelling-blue of the sky. 

I sensed when I looked back at you that you felt a cultural gulf between us you couldn’t cross, Carmen… As though I was strange to you because of the year of my birth. And indeed it is still strange to me, the openness with which you ask questions around this topic. But in reality it was something different that lay between us in that conversation. A seer of visions has no mortal age, belongs properly to no era, nor country, for we are but hollow bones with stops upon which the devil plays tunes to himself. Transients pass through, setting up tent cities in the arches between the ribs of people like me. If I seem unfamiliar in some way have no doubt I did so to my contemporaries also. 

            “How many other ways are there to do it?” You asked, looking down at the map to try to locate the Allport’s gravesite as if the paper itself might solve all love’s mysteries. 

            I smiled to myself the secretive type belonging to those who have arcane joys in their lives undreamed of by most. There are things that pass between two sorcerers that cannot be spoken. Additionally, when the more immediate method of gratification is suppressed, the energy of the erotic is never fully quelled, it rises like a silent revolution, seeps back up like a blood stain of a murder victim through a carpet. The energy of sex pervades every little curl of hair pressed into our poetry volumes we passed to each other. Out into sound, as I would play while he watched me from behind, the very back of my neck feeling his gaze like a burn. 

I am always confusing the emotions with the feeling senses and colours with smells, so perhaps it is my personal peculiarity that eye contact itself was eroticized, conversation conjugal... The colour saturation of every sex-stained thing like this is hyper intensified in my memory, the pitch of reality turned right up. Repression is inhumane, but like all sacrifice it holds a terrific power that crouches waiting in the shadows for when its moment has come at last, ready to burn the world to the ground. 

            “A few.” I didn’t mean to be smug or enigmatic in this answer, I just didn’t know how else to answer your question. The black shapes of text on page place a membrane of ink between my viscera and your gaze that makes a full explanation more bearable. 

            I knelt down on the edge of the tomb he shares with his family and lay down above him. How good it felt… there was less of sorrow in the gesture than sensuality. Love tumbled from me in a white water gush, love washing out of me for every tiny thing, every creeping thing that had consumed him in his tomb and whose tiny legs he’d walked with, every bird he’d flown as and the mice he’d skin-rode who had eaten those crawling things that ate him, every graveyard skulking cat who had eaten those rodents... The love that I had secreted inside his skin popped free from the holes between his now exposed bones and gushed in a terror of universal overflow that manifested as peace.  

            It was only when I let my edges go until I had blurred out into the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, and the grey of the stone and the heavy wet of the grief and the light green-to-gold of the new growth, that I realized I was feeling his presence. Ecstatic tears and a smile of irrepressible beatitude took ownership of me. The world outside went down the drain backwards (like they say it happens here at the bottom of the world where the seasons are reversed and all is doubly inverted by our island of madness and rainbows) and my inner sight came on with a sound like the old school camera flash. 

            When Bronte had Jane Eyre say ‘reader, I married him’ far more is said of her and her Mr. Rochester than any explicit description of their happiness and its consummation.  For this reason part of me wants to say ‘and I saw him’, and leave it at that, poetically understated and breathless. Yet the me who enjoined our dear Madeleine to tell her story until she became as transparent as beach glass knows better. Every word of this telling is punched and kicked out while I scrabble with my enemy upon the edge of the void. My enemy wishes to subdue me and stuff my nose and mouth with seaweed so I may not name names, but this time I will never stop fighting. You might say I'm staging a late come-back. 

They tell us all life comes from the ocean and it makes sense. The oceans are the tear ducts of Grandmother Earth. It’s in the same wet place within the human eye socket that holds the salty seed of future life joy. I don’t think I really understood that until I saw him again, after having survived the Riga Mortis of grief, -what Elizabeth Barrett Browning termed ‘the hour of lead’… Just how much joy is possible to a landscape of the heart carved out deep through grief like the land torn up by retreating glaciers. 

            Arthur was leaning against his mother and father’s headstone casually, 

-despite his black three-piece suit, top hat and begloved elegance. He wore a great coat lightly and unselfconsciously, as though he’d known when he put it on how good it looked on him, but since forgotten. As always he owned the look of our period as if it was designed for him. Yet the way he smoked his cigarette had a cocky quality to it that I associated more with the wharf men. He blew his smoke in my direction while maintaining eye contact in a way that among the riff raff might have indicated sexual interest or threat. Under the surface of the perfect gentleman in Arthur there was an animal confidence that lurked, biding its time, feral and sniffing, dirty in all the places hearts were meant to be clean, clean in all the places Victorian hearts were usually dirty, still waiting for its moment to set the ridgeway and the Thames on fire. Still holding all four aces... 

            Before I could recover from the gut punch of the sight of him he pulled out his fob chain and consulted the pocket watch. “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” The words were not delivered in the breathless, timorous tones of the rabbit in the story, or the way my father might have said them, but with the tone of the wolf that waits and salivates.

            “Arthur,” I think I whispered his name, taking a step or two forward and hesitating. Even though no words clustered I noticed how powerful he’d become. I knew I was in the presence of a strong spirit, a conjurer of note, because all the air was sucked away from my lungs when he entered. The black hole hidden under his buttoned down waistcoat, a force that drew all eyes and wills in his direction, the air that fizzed with electricity around him, as if reality was ready to take a different form at his whim, each told me a story. 

            “Hello Hen.” 

He moved from leaning on his parents to standing before me without having taken a step. I didn’t startle at his speed, but I did grab him the way someone starving might accost victuals. For a few moments, where planetary-sized forces seemed to collide, it felt that I clasped flesh to flesh. He did not ask me why I had disappeared so long ago or where I went. He didn’t ask anything and yet a dozen or so questions howled between us. Instead, with fierce mutual pressure, it seemed we tried to stuff each other back in through the hole we’d left in each other’s hearts. 

            I wept in his arms and I believe I told him ‘I’m so sorry’ many times over and over again and that he kept saying ‘no’, forbidding me sternly to apologize. ‘You have nothing to apologize for’… I can account more certainly for everything he said next. Because these words were slow, distinct and clearly articulated like a speech that someone has long planned to give and finally got the chance to deliver. He gripped me hard while he spoke lest I get away before he finished. 

            “Don’t explain! Not yet... I just need you to hear me in this first.” He held me back with his arms to force me to make eye contact. “I loved you all my life, Henry. It was always you. Always. I never felt that way before, or again. I wanted to grow old with you, to cherish and protect and bestow all my worldly goods upon you, to have given you my last name, for God’s own sake… But that wasn’t allowed to us of course… That sort of thing… So I had to put that feeling somewhere. I’ve hidden something away for you. There’s an object that I’ve put my family’s magic into. You will know which one as soon as you recognize what fairytale we’re in. When you find it you will know. Even after all these years, sweetheart…” he whispered with a tenderness that gutted me open like a freshly landed fish. “I still know you better than I know anyone or anything.” 

            I tried to press my forehead to his but he redirected me. Instead he took off his hat and placed the side of his head against mine until our ears touched. 

            “Blood of my blood… You awakened me to the darkness within me, and then you left me alone in it…It's not going to be easy to find my way home...”

            My heart broke apart for him. Drawing back I opened my waistcoat as if it were ribs and reached inside myself. In my hands I drew out diamonds, crystal bright shattered things. “There are some things we can give each other that are ever renewable, but not this… these are truly something of myself,” I explained as I pressed the light inside my bones into his hands. 

Arthur was ever one to return a gift for a gift. As though from his ear into mine the image of a shell within an ear came into my mind and then the image of a turning mill. I knew that I had received the clues to his riddle. But they were more than clues, they were distilled sadness. I could taste in them the complexity of years of quiet dedication.

I bit my lip hard with the knowledge. I was truly human then, not a faerie changeling that my mother had always called me because of my lack of obvious outward emotion. I was human to the core, for I knew utter regret. There was red blood flowing from the places I’d picked out from myself the diamonds to give him. I would turn that blood into a ointment to salve the wounds I’d left in him, that I vowed to myself.  

He touched my face. Though his smile was sad and gentle his eyes had a lupine spike under their old warm twinkle. “After you left silence grew inside me like a cancer. What started out as unwillingness to share became inability. All of us tasked with suppressing out deepest truth require our outlets, yours was your opium and your music… mine the act of collection... Objects are silent like I became, you see? A thing encoded for me with intricate layers of meaning and memory… To another it is but a pocket watch or a cigarette case. To me the doorway to another time, another way of being, a flurry of sense memories…  If you follow me down the rabbit hole into the worlds within things, down here you can hear my silence roar.”