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. 4 Van Demonian Supernatural: Oisin of Hobart Town

That was when all the clocks stopped again. 

The rivulet was in full gush as it rained and rained. The dead have membranous feet you see, leaving behind the translucent mucous trails like snails, silvery footsteps that last only up until the nascent dawn. It’s easier for them to move around along wet tracks. Martha taught me that, many years ago and it made sense of what I’d always observed around the rivulet and the sea mist. 

            When you saw I had really stopped all the clocks in your house like I told you I used to, (both the clockwork and digital therefore ruling out an electrical surge) you started to really believe in me. -Not to contradict your earlier assertion about timing. Merely to say that our experience of belief has layers, like being slowly stripped by a lover. It’s one thing to accept the proposition that I have come back from the dead, in absence of another explanation. Quite another for a woman of a time that has grown so very modern to believe the whole story I bring up out of the Bridgewater Jerry with me… 

Belief has its own apocalypse wrapped up in it. Once people know something is possible it doesn’t take long before it must happen. The mustness gathers pace behind all possibilities like the early stages of an avalanche. Once you start to believe you can… It’s as if people cannot bear to sit with the tension of the uncreated, of the not-yet-come-to-being… To be honest I don’t blame them, my whole body for so long has been made up of not-yet and maybe-never, and who (given the chance) wouldn’t release one’s true soul song in a spasm of apocalypse? This urge in us, it comes from a place so deep morality has never been there.

I went outside in the rain after the ticking stopped for good, and walked through the deserted streets. With my fingers I reached out to touch old buildings that I recognized with my eyes closed, dragging my pink tips along the wet rock, reading the wear and tear of a century and a half of wind and rain in the surface like a brail message from the elements. The wind seemed to play music on my exposed ribs as I walked, even though I was fully clothed for the weather. Where once I was the musician I had become the instrument. This city is the artist, out of whose dark imaginings and underbelly I’ve come forth, slouching my way up out of the sludge of forgotten things. 

I longed savagely to play music. I think the wanting was what always made the clocks stop. But even as I delicately palpitated my fingertips against the stones I could already feel it was gone. The delicious tremor of music that used to thread through my muscles and tendons, starting somewhere in my hips and rising, had been sucked away by the retreating wave as I left the water. The sea will have her sacrifices, after all. I smiled softly, sadly, because I knew in that moment, passing through the curtain of rain, what it meant and why it was worth it. Later, as you know, when I first sat in front of a piano and tried to play and felt the stump of my cut out tongue flap uselessly against my mouth’s roof I reacted somewhat less gracefully… 

Nonetheless I’ve learned that its not about where you reach at your lowest that defines your courage, but it’s what decisions you make about how you will go forward from there. The purity of the decision I would make for him again and again, will outlive and outlast the memory of that graceless tantrum, where I kicked my feet about, flailing at the great binding of the Old Woman Fate. 

When you’ve had someone you love grow old while you were away, you slow your step even in the rain. I didn’t care if I couldn’t play anymore, only that  I would find him and with whatever art was left to me I would at last find expression, in some way that would reflect the fineness and intricacy of the feeling itself. Nothing else of who I was or what I could do mattered to me by comparison to that one dread wanting… The one I had broken my body against, inside the gullet of the rivulet in flood. 

I watched for his slower moving shade to keep pace. I lined our steps up so that they came into rhythm. I had wanted to grow old with him, after all, and so sometimes now, I do... The moisture in the air makes my old man joints ache and I am forced to shuffle. My feet are made of whatever the hands of frogs are made from. This is why no one can hear the dead when we’re walking beside or behind you. We move when you move and stop when you stop. Our patience is infinite. There are no ticking clocks where we come from, that’s why when the part of me that is Other arrives there are no ticking clocks around me either… Nobody can watch you sleep quite like us. My mother died in our rocking chair and whenever she would watch me sleep afterwards she would always rock back and forth just the same, as though caught in some eternal loop. 

If one could be as the dead whilst still alive the power one would have! There are some crooked paths I’ve walked, and know of, where feral visionaries meet you with meadowsweet in their hair and wormwood on their breath, they will tell you that such a thing is termed ‘initiation’ among the hedge-wise.  

If I’m still here does this mean I’ve achieved initiation?

All I know is that my mind tries to fill the blanks in, to catch up with the life lived while I was away. My love has become a dead man while I was gone and now the wind and the rain that sleet my face become eroticized, even with their moss-bleak taste. The feelings that once belonged exclusively to the shiver of his hand grazing my skin, diffuses, in the forever-absence of that touch, into the old stone, into the thick soul of our city… Don’t think I mean an easy letting of the edges, where grief just pop goes and weasels away... No…. This is a grim, cold joy-sorrow in the pit of the gut, a cutting elation. Our city caresses me with his many hands made of wind currents, rain running down the back of my shirt, jagged bird flight, and the way stone holds the sorrow salt and the tremors of shroud-muffled voices. 

I wanted to go with him where he’d gone. I suppose I only didn’t because you cared for me... Rather than sending me to the insane asylum as would have likely been my fate if I turned up in my time from yours, you have sheltered me, tended my wounds, cooked me strange and fascinating new foods... You showed me how music could be immediately conjured which seemed to suit any mood or taste, even my eccentric ones. Soon I found songs on your machine that gave voice to the music I could no longer make with my hands but had spilling out of my heart. Maddie worked for hours on repairing as much of my clothing as could be salvaged and you brought me home replacements in the modern style for what could not be fixed. With great gusto you dressed me up in this hybrid costume, much like my own mind, straddling two eras. 

            Instead of killing myself again I walked to his old house, because you cared. As I stood outside his home on Upper Davey Street that night in the rain staring up at the windows, I was on the outside looking in again. Never to be invited inside, a stray of sorts, part of time’s beach rubble and jetsam, floating in and out of the picture with too much agility for history to get a lock on me. The type of uncatalogued item he never could quite collect... The name that gets omitted, the part of the journal torn out, the letters confiscated... A watermark here, a scrawled name there but nothing that would stand up in court...

The wind that caught my clothes, blowing through the bone tunnels of me, spiked a longing so savage I heard a wolf’s howl echoing out over a frozen tundra inside me. So stark was the desolation of this feeling-sound that I shuddered as no returning cry answered. I had thought longing to be a hot, pulsing, palpitation of sound something thick and percussive that made me sometimes wish to hit the body of my cello with my open palm and hit out a beat. But instead perfect-want is a thing of stark, cold purity. Colder than the low-soft-ache of the cello, like a violin made of ice, lupine sharp and nuclear bright. 

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y7TAZtbqzI

You found me about dawn. I should have found it strange you knew to come to Fernleigh... It suggested a bit of knowledge about the Allports, but at the time I thought nothing of it and of it nothing... I was sitting in the gutter trying to hold so as not to fall off the surface of the world. 

            “Hey, look at me. That’s better… You’re doing so well, you get that?” Forcefully you made me hold your gaze as though with pure force of will and persuasion you could convince me I was all right. “What you’re processing at the moment… It’s huge. How many people have ever had to process something like this?”

            These words, said to fill the silence, in themselves seemed to mean very little. But what was more important was the certainty in your warm brown eyes. You seemed to believe I deserved to live, not everyone had always shared your opinion, and so I trusted you.

            “Indeed,” I replied.

            “Who are they to you?” you asked, looking up at the house.

            “You know of them? The Allports? You had heard of their family before I mentioned the name?”

            You smiled oddly at me, kind of ruefully. “I hope you’re not going to hate me when you find this out…. But when you mentioned Elizabeth Allport, Maddie and I went back through our family tree to check we were right… She was the grandmother of my great, grandmother Eileen Allport.” You came out with this all in one breath. “You don’t hate me now do you? Am I, like, descended from your arch nemesis or something?”

            “Who was your great, great grandparent?” My voice a husk of sound. “Which of the Allport children was Eileen’s parent?” 

            “Cecil Allport.” 

I swallowed down hard and closed my eyes. 

“Who was Elizabeth to you?”

“The mother of my dearest friend,” I replied quietly. Those words stuck thickly in my throat like I’d swallowed glue. “She did not wish me well, in a way, you could say... there was an action of hers that caused me much misfortune.”

Understatement sticks me together with sticking-plasters, always a sign you’ve hovering over a deep bruise. 

            “She’s the one you were setting out the witch bottles against? To avert her evil eye? Was my ancestor a witch or something? But… So… does that mean her son Cecil was your… friend?”

            I jumped at the mention of his name as I always do, even though it was the one his family called him, not the one I did, or even the one on his birth certificate. My friend was, you might say, a man of many faces. “Yes.” The fact you knew of him left of me nothing but an ache that harrowed up my lungs with its sucking power. I wanted to ask all the questions immediately, about what he did with the rest of his life, but the grief was still too near for words. 

Those moments outside his home were of the leaden hour. For focusing on the next breath that must be taken without him, and then the one after that. Grief is an endurance run and I am more of a sprinter... People depict the Victorian Age approach to mourning as hyperbolic and melodramatic but there is a discipline expressed in it that was part of our love language. To lose well and deep is part of loving what is mortal, part of holding it with no guarantees, knowing your life depends on it, and having it ripped away, or suddenly granted back, with no real understanding possible of why.

             “Are you just finding out that the love of your life married someone else, hun?”

The unexpected understanding I read in your words degloved me. Normally I’d not have confirmed it but I nodded. What was to be lost now?

“He named his son Henry, if that helps?” 

            “Lovely,” I murmured, because there weren’t really any words, but custom demanded I make a response. I was thinking through the pain of knowing there was a woman who did for him and gave him all that I never could. I was pushing through it to how this shrieking pain meant your skin and hair cells carried part of him alive into the future, so therefore it was worth it.... I found myself gazing into your face like it was a skrying ball, trying to see something of him still echoing up to the surface of manifestation and joining me in the world of the living.  

            “Your eyes are somewhat like his.”

“There’s something I want to show you,” you said getting to your feet and offering me your hand as if you were the gentleman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSmrryfxGM

When we arrived at Parliament lawn you showed me the textual public monuments worked into the pavement there. The first of them said: ‘In the wake of your courage I swim’ the other: ‘Sorry for not holding you in my arms.’ Upon reading I closed my eyes for a moment and they misted with tears. I didn't yet know it's meaning to its creator, but I knew what it meant to me. 

 “What do they mean?” 

You came and put your hand on my arm. “They mean the city is saying sorry to you, Henry.”

It took me some time to understand what you meant, and after that what it meant, even once you explained about the Stonewall riots and the civil rights movement. I was coming to understand that I wasn’t a deviant deserving of death in your eyes, but a fellow human carrying the albatross of a story around my neck. Because you were his flesh and blood it was important to me that you knew. “He was a good man,” I said in the tight-lipped way that people use to gloss over the raw choking power keg of life when its gets stuck in the throat of their narrative. “A kind and decent man,” I continued, gaining courage in my convictions as I used that word I was told was off limits to me. “With a beautiful soul. If anyone spoke ill of him… well… evil be to he who thinks evil of it.” 

Episode 3. This is something that happens

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. 

Episode 2. Of dolls heads and demons

You really want a story about what I did next? Walked down to the corner of Argyle and Collins Street where the rivulet tunnel opens and climbed down inside to hide from people, is what I did. But I contend that part was quite unremarkable. Luckily it was only an hour or two from dawn on a weeknight and the city was quiet. So I was able to duck and weave. 

I walked at first down an avenue of cypresses that seemed to commemorate some great and terrible war I’d not yet heard about, but did not approach the monument in fear of seeing the date. I came to a place where I could watch the wide, empty eyes of the horseless, carriages. Instead of headless horseman the night streets of Hobart now bore headless carriages. 

            Also in my favour was the my feverish imagination has always been balanced by a streak of cooler reason. Observing everything from the trees, I steeled myself into a state of calm. I reasoned that these vehicles were run by some type of engine in the front, one more advanced than steam, but nonetheless non-magical. When the noisy things stopped for the red lights (moving away again at the green signal) I was able to see people inside them operating the controls, just as with a normal carriage, but with engines. Inside something was combusting other than coal. I discerned the safe way to cross the road and went about doing it.

What was far louder in me at the time than the cars or my heartbeat was the queasy autogenesis of fear. The dread that I had indeed been away longer than twenty or even thirty years... My earlier surge of faith where I’d told Arthur aloud I was coming for him was greatly rattled by this doubt that edged and thorn-needled its way into the back of my brain. Witch-pin like it gave off subtle venom, that doubt-demon. I knew all I had left going for me was the power of my determination, the pin-cushion poppet of my body endured these regular bone-deep injections, whilst on the outside I effortlessly negotiated the changed world around me. Below the surface I was still drowning, on the surface I am… well, good at things, I suppose. You will think me arrogant for saying so, but it’s true. It’s also not a choice for me whether to believe this of myself, because for me the other alternative to self-value is always death. 

            As I write this I fall again into the semi-stupor in which I wandered those nighttime streets… A functional stupor, of course, because one’s worth to this world must always be re-demonstrated, for humans forget past services very rapidly when made comfortable and complacent. Last time I stopped being functional something terrible had happened to me that I didn't fully understand as yet. So I was avoiding other humans like the concrete-spreading plague animal it seemed they had become. 

Or should that be that we have become? After what I had done I felt more human than ever somehow, up against the stark background of this miracle that tasted clean-bitter like the pith of the blood orange... I was ever so much more human than this world, ever so much more fragile than the current Spirit of the Age, I guessed from the start. Time it appears, the lineality (to coin a word) of experience is also quite deceptively delicate. It folds in like treacle and the distinction between its layers is quickly lost. This is what is important about my story. I hope you didn’t expect I was going to leave all the analysis up to you, did you? I didn’t come here to let you study me, together we will study what has occurred and together draw the conclusions. 

            A brief observation of the system for regulation of traffic and spying on another late night pedestrian allowed me to cross the highway without incident. Running where possible and walking when I fatigued I generated sufficient body heat to partially warm and partially dry my clothing. So there could be no doubt I was quick with life.

            Next I discerned where best to jump the very serious looking fence that seems to bar our descent down into the darkness. There is no sign to say it’s explicitly not allowed for citizens to crawl down into the Hobart Rivulet Tunnel but there’s a fence. As if the dark bowels of our city, seething with memory, are not quite forbidden by the rule of modernity, just strongly discouraged. A mild prohibition was never enough to prevent me finding my way into the guts of Hobart. It was where I belonged after all, was I not something that ought to have been digested by her long ago? Was I so uniquely unpalatable that of all Hobart’s dead only I had been coughed up, phlegm-covered and wriggling like a raw nerve? 

            The walls of the rivulet tunnel hissed and wriggled with voices. You could smell the history down there as strongly as you’d have smelt rot around the water in my time. History is buried into the foundations of Hobart, the skeletons of cottages of convict-hewn stone rise like stone ghosts to the sight of the late-night wayfarer. Deeper into the arteries of the city the air smelt like the effluence of well advanced capitalism. Just from the way they vented into the Undertown my nose wrinkled and I knew I wasn’t going to like what the living had been up to above. 

The rest you know. How you say I froze, like a ‘deer in headlights’, when you flooded me in torchlight. You were standing there with your modern camera, a girl who was to my perception dressed in boy’s clothes, right beside the place with the baby’s heads. You pointed at the numerous plaster castes of boneyard-white doll faces that looked out eyelessly from the walls of the tunnel. You didn’t seem worried by them or by me. 

            “My theory is that this is here to commemorate the high infant morality in Hobart during the nineteenth century. Did you know they used to call part of South Hobart ‘shadow of death valley’ back in the day?” You addressed me.

            “Yes,” I whispered, still caught staring into the bright light you wielded in your hand and forgetting to lie.  

            You turned the direction of the light on the baby head art next, so I was able to think more clearly. 

            “Well aren’t you the current reigning Smartypants of Smartypants Town?” 

            I wondered if I should agree it was likely, but I sensed you were perhaps facetious. "Well answer me this one then if you're so smart." You said this shining light on a gold painted plaque of a demon. "Whose this ugly, fella?" 

             "He looks like Typhon the many-headed monster of Greek myth, or perhaps his spawn Gorgon." I said it very quietly, as someone well aware that I wouldn't always be rewarded for knowing things. You nodded as if you were genuinely pleased to know. But all the learning in the world wasn’t going to help me out of the fix I was in, and I knew it. There was a question that would come to mean everything and it was going to hurt less to answer it now than when I would later find myself standing outside Lebrena and seeing the physical evidence.

            “When you say… the nineteenth century… what… which year would that… make it today? Please?” Even cold and injured as I was it pained me not to use my manners in a proper introduction, to say my name and ask yours, as two humans ought. But the imperative around my question had become stronger even than my good upbringing. 

I watched the motion in your eyes from incomprehension to growing fear, and who could blame you really? When some lunatic in a tunnel looking like something the ocean regurgitated asks you what year it is, it’s reasonable to feel unsettled. But you didn’t run, thanks be to Our Lady…. You stayed and told me how many years it has been. I don’t want to write about that… About what I felt. About realizing… No. I’ve got nothing more for now. Give me a different stimulus question. 

Episode 1. Out of the bridgewater jerry

Have you ever been in the grip of an instinct so total there is nothing else? Like when you’re trapped under water and kicking for the surface, your whole being sharpens into desire. Your body becomes a single raw nerve of will to live and nothing more. Even the sound of your own name is less familiar than the taste of air. Nothing before the absoluteness of it seems to exist. 

It is like this when I try to remember what happened before I came back. 

Only the white noise of the tide above pressed in and down on my senses as I strove for the light. I could hear the steady roar becoming sea girls singing to me, or perhaps to each other, which is always a far worse sign of one’s impending doom... Was that the light above that I must reach to breathe, or did that growing whiteness blanching my vision salt-white mean I was going under? There shouldn’t have been such well-being, such rising peace, at the same time as the water was pushing up my nose like wet cotton wool. I knew all about drowning, after all. I do it with an easy grace. I take in water like a creature designed for penetration and gushing.  

The temptation to surrender to the spreading opiate of death was intense. Surrender is all through the thing I am, but so is this fight, this implacable determination… Fighting and kicking felt like cold wet hell is bearing down on you, and you nothing but a single thought of love in the grip of darkness. I. Will. Never. Stop. Fighting.

But is this the biggest lie I tell myself? This sinking, this letting of the sea girl’s frigid hands… This was a cool, unraveling shiver of ecstasy, what was the point in saying no to it anyway? When everything beautiful in the world is heading West, out into the mist and further, further… The feeling of this potential surrender smelt like formaldehyde and felt against the skin like the sound of the word ‘syringe’. I could feel my legs membraneing themselves together and turning into a marine tail in one big numb fuzz. Soon someone would force me to wear oyster shells. The peonies that grow on the bottom of the ocean are unlike other peonies. We will pick them together in the sea gardens, nestled in the guts of shipwrecks. Take my hand. We’ll walk straight across a moonbeam.

I called my song out into a thousand shells that trapped the echoes and sent them all back on themselves like a love making. This is your realm, I came here on purpose. Your many hands tore my clothes off. Sullivan’s Cove had me in a gang bang full fathoms five, my brains fucked out with ambergris and mankind’s lies. But before it could end without beginning strong hands lifted me skyward, skittering towards the choking light sluicing amniotic. I cannot truly account for the power of those arms. No mortal man I’ve known possessed such a strength as the one that plucked me from the water in the teeth of all probability. 

The next thing I remember is the way the oyster shells fossiled into the rocky edges of Hobart town cut my feet as I walked towards the shore, my wet clothes clinging to my ragged breath. It took me some time to realize it had happened, in truth, those deep lacerations. At first I couldn’t feel it, but then as the salt worked in it seemed all too natural that every step I took back onto human ground felt like walking on broken glass. This is the deal after all, is it not? When you want to take something that belongs to the ocean? It is the condition, after all, for people like me who seek what I seek.

As I walked an undulating sea mist parted around me. I'd lived in Hobart long enough to know I was in the middle of the Bridgewater Jerry. Some countries have the Wild Hunt, here our spectral horsemen are of the marine variety, riding horses made of mist. It gave me weird clammy shudders to have it souping its way around me and pulling at my clothes. I felt I heard echoes in the silent white cavalcade as though through he mouth of the bay the dead were gathering up their bones from Cornelian Bay, under the burial ground and constructing ghost horses from them. 

It is the one great outrage to the order of things that nobody is ever expecting, when the dead come back. Of course they do it in all kinds of way, every day, but mostly no one notices. At this stage all I remembered was falling into the floodwaters and then the reason why I was now fighting so hard for the shore. The reason was a man, and the man had a name, a number of names… But could I have told you my own name at that moment? I don’t think so. Could I have told you that the year was 1874 at my last recollection? Unlikely. 

When I reached dry land I fell down. Even after rest against the familiar grit of my home I was not able to frame the questions that were already eating at me like sea lice. I'd woken up swimming hard for the surface, full of all the drama of life and love and ready to fight like hell, only to realize that I can never make that last assay across the final abyss of night without him lifting me. No matter how many different angles we try it from throughout the centuries, this part of the outcome is always the same. I can jump so far that I go close to crossing, but at the last minute I am always there with my hand out. If he doesn’t grab it I can’t do the last bit.

 The knowledge of our perpetual triumphant defeat was a kind of soft surrender all its own. To lie half broken with fatigue and bruising on a nighttime shore, devoid of the knowledge of time and space… It was liberating. The bloodlessness of refusing the struggle...  

But the cold of a Van Diemen’s Land autumn wouldn’t allow me long to contemplate who had lifted me and the poetry of it I still half knew, or how I’d come to find myself water buried in our deep port harbour. Unsteadily I got to my feet and looked down at myself. I wasn’t sure at what part of my ordeal I’d lost my shoes. My clothes were torn in several places but it was too dark to see if I was injured. The imperative of the cold was far more urgent. 

It was then that I mounted the bank and was blinded by the most intense light I’d ever seen. Staggering back I shielded my eyes from it whilst at the same time trying to investigate. I was of the type to see visions and spirits, had been since early childhood, but this was a corpse light of a new magnitude. Once my eyes adjusted a little I went further up the bank to investigate, as this intrusively bright illumination was not getting any dimmer. I was shivering and hugging my body and as the harsh white light bathed me in its cold gleam I saw my bluish-white flesh and wondered if I would frighten someone when they came upon me. It was too overwhelming in the first instance to try to understand the source of the light. Something was wrong with Hobart, or perhaps something was just wrong with me? That had always been the fundamental question, after all.

As I walked barefoot up the embankment towards the regatta ground I decided that it was the latter. I’d hit my head in the initial fall that had somehow terminated in the depths of the bay… I shuddered at the thought of the sharks and other marine monsters that moved in the dark there and the blood and intestinal sludge I must have passed through around the abattoir. 

It was only then, with the thought of dirt that I paid heed the open cuts on my feet. They didn’t simply mean, as I had previously imagined, that walking back into the world of man to find the man I loved would be like every step was cutting my otherworldly feet with knives. No, they also meant I was at great risk of infection. 

Stumbling at the first notice of the bloody footprints I was leaving, I sat down on the grass in the severe floodlight that was doing such violence to the night, and tried to get my bearings. If it was something altered about my perception rather than my surroundings why were the steps different? How long could it reasonably have taken my body to make its way from Strickland Falls to where the mouth of Hobart Rivulet gave itself up to the bay? Not long enough for someone to have put in this ugly new railing… Getting to my feet I ran my hands along it, checking to make sure it was indeed objectively real. 

It was while I was confirming this that the first surge of panic began to set in. My heart started hammering, forcing a new heat out to my extremities. Something was gravely wrong. I got to my feet unsteadily. My palms were now wet with sweat as well as seawater as I tried to use the strange new railing to stay on my feet.

“Arthur,” I whispered into the brazen night air. It was as though through invoking his name with the vibration we call sound, I had somehow conjured to quivering every bloody rooted heart wound that had brought me to my current predicament. Needless to say the sudden memory gush, strong as a main artery, forced me back down into a sitting position. All the blood had gone out of my face and my legs wouldn’t work for a moment. “No… Our Lady… no… what have I done? I must… I must,” as I muttered aloud I made another attempt at standing. “He must be frantic…” I whispered. My breath was turning to anxious spurts of vapour in the crisp night air as I slowly turned in an arch to look backwards upon the direction I had just come. 

With a start as strong as a shove in the chest I stared and frowned at the sight before me. The other side of the bay was awash in pinpricks of distressed light, each so concentrated as to make up the power of five gas lamps. “I must have hit my head.” Yet even as I spoke these words I began to run up the hill in the direction of the town. It didn’t matter that my feet were cut or that I was half frozen and bathed in confusion by the orange glare. My body was possessed by something greater than these forces. Fear for the one I love, and the power of this emotion drove me without mercy. 

It was only when I crested the hill and saw all the metal carriages without horses that lay still and quiet like sleeping monsters stinking of chemicals that I retched and stopped. For a while I stood with my hand reassuringly wrapped in the green branch of a she-oak, which for a time seemed the only familiar thing left. The waves of nausea were accompanied by a sickly sense of growing understanding. What happened to Oisin and Thomas the Rhymer has happened to me, I managed to word to myself. But if I had been in Tir nan Og why hadn’t I turned to dust yet when I first stepped foot upon the land of man? It must mean I haven’t been gone too long… Otherwise I would be dust... Dust. 

After Fear came the rampaging scavenger Hope. How much more did that particular demon wish to ring from me yet? Had I not been squeezed out like an old dishcloth over and over and never yet known water? How long could it have really been that I’d been away? I looked at the backs of my hands, which were still those of a twenty year old who had done only moderate physical labour. Worst-case scenario? Ten years? No. Though my hands don’t show it, it must be longer for all this change to have occurred… What are these things here? Twenty years? Thirty years? 

It wouldn’t matter, I told myself desperately, I wouldn’t care how old he’d grown while waiting for me all that mattered was finding him. What made me pause to be physically ill was the thought of the not-knowing he had lived through, the anguish he must have known in my absence... I thought my heart wouldn’t stand it, yet somehow, like the diamond bright thing it was, it took it. Carbon doesn’t end up adamantine from being unable to withstand intense pressure, after all.  However long it had been I must make it to his home as rapidly as possible to put a swift end to it, no matter how long he’d been forced to live with the mystery of my disappearance I could still make it all better and there was no question in my mind that he would remember and miss me bitterly. 

Before I could find my way to Davey Street and rush along it to the richer end of South Hobart, it appeared I would have to do some purging. My legs shaking I leaned for strength against the she-oak. Ocean water came out of me at first, and then a long, thick sludge with the appearance of wet bladderwrack, soggy written-on paper, laudanum-blue with running ink, heaved together with the seaweed in a gelatinous mass, tangled all together in hair and fish bones. The disgust I felt in voiding this ocean junk via the mouth was much dwarfed by the relief I felt in ridding my system of it. I wanted to poke with a stick that which had come out of me, as though it were the embryo of some monstrous oyster-bodied young I’d miscarried onto the Regatta Ground. 

There wasn’t time for that or to try to understand how such things got inside me, I had to find Arthur. I had to tell him I was sorry… I had to put things right. Whatever pain I’d caused when, like an injured cat, I’d stumbled into the wild looking to take myself off with myself and slipped into the faerie mists, I would pull it clear from his body through sheer force of will and take it into my own. “Hold on, my love,” I whispered to myself aloud as I headed for the lights. I blinked several times as I tried to come to terms with what had happened to my city where only so recently had been cobblestones were now hard endless cement without evidence of natural providence. “You have to be out there,” I said my chin set with stubbornness, pulling my torn shirt closer around my chest. “I know you do. Because without you, not me... It’s that simple. If I am here in this strange place, then so are you. And I’m coming to find you.”