She Walks in Shadows (11 page)

The ruin was different in daylight, less hostile but no more welcoming. I expected to see footprints upon the steps, but while there was evidence of my tussle with Edgar, there was no sign that anyone else had been in the ruin.
¹⁷
I pulled Edgar down the hallways I had dreamed and we found the door, the terrible door, and Edgar —

Edgar’s hands closed over my own, forcing me to hold the doorknob. It burned like ice and fire, as it had in my dream, but opened easily enough under our combined strength. I gasped as the foul stench of the room rolled out to greet us. I could not withdraw, for Edgar nudged me in.
¹⁸

The crypt was vast, vaults lining the walls, rats skittering across the floor. Some were inscribed with names, but most were not. Each was locked tight, flowers turning to dust on the ground before three of the vaults. Edgar left my side to trace the few names he found, as if he would recognize some of the dead.
¹⁹

The floor vibrated with anguish. It was as strong as anything I had ever felt, pulling me across the floor and down another set of stone steps. Into the heart of the priory, the lowest cellars where the worst things lingered. I did not question then what I saw, took it only for what it was, endless torment that Margaret Trevor had a hand in both then and now. How could it be that such things continued long past their points of origin? Or was it that everything was a circle,
²⁰
moving outward before curling under and down to return through the middle and move back out? There was no end to anything begun here.

The worst thing was, despite the horrors around her, Margaret Trevor was something to be worshipped, a glory even in the blood and ruin that streaked her. The stories said that she loved the old cults well, but had taken a passive role beside her husband. But here, in the horrible cellar with its collapsing girders, she was a gold-and-silver goddess while her husband cowered. He held his hands before his face, as if he could not bear a magnificence such as she, while she opened the bodies
²¹
laid on an altar before her to welcome the oldest things anyone in the world might ever know.

What emerged beneath the guidance of her hands was something my memory has forced into a locked box. When I think on it, the world shutters to black and it feels as though iced water runs through my veins.
²²
My blood does not exactly stop, nor does my heart cease, but I do not think overlong on the things we saw. I cannot, because the box is locked.

When we emerged, the clouds had broken and thin sunlight dribbled onto our faces. A backward glance
²³
showed us nothing whatsoever amiss. Edgar laughed and wrapped an arm around my aching shoulder as we walked back to the car.

“I would have sworn ....” He trailed off, as if unsure what led us here.

And I frowned, because I almost couldn’t remember, either, but then it was night and we slept, and — Only dreamed.

Lady Margaret whispered from Edgar’s mouth and I know the heat of the ancient sands parting, as if I, as if
we
, are stretched upon that altar in offering. She laughs and when I wake, I cannot wholly remember because I have placed that in the box, too.

When Edgar tells me he has to help friends move, I think little of it. He remains friends with people he knew before we even met and some do not know he has a lover. I nod, because I have my studies and there is always a paper in need of writing, so it will be good to have the nights. I think on the week that was and cannot fully place everything we have done, until Edgar returns, pressing a kiss against the corner of my mouth —

(the gleam of fangs

and he’s coiled in the cradle of her hips,

waiting to be born,

waiting to be loosed —

unspoken words in the corner of his mouth, his maw.)

He got foolishly lost, he laughs, and there was no house, but there was still a place I needed to see. A place he wanted to take me.

Edgar always knew. And I —

Not yet.
²⁴

There once was a ‘ho liked to murder

Adept with both knife & stray girder

She hiked up her skirt

Put the men in the dirt

And nobody talked shit about her.

— The Lady Daemon (1992)
²⁵

1
We may debate exactly
when
Edgar knew at length, but I am not convinced there was ever a single, discernable point one can reference; as the notions herein are circular,
²⁰
I feel so, too, was Edgar’s knowledge.

2
I have often been asked if there was an event at all; I cannot prove the existence of “the event,” only that Edgar did leave, around 6pm on a Friday evening, and did not return until 2pm the following Sunday. He told me friends he’d had longer than he’d had me were moving and needed his help, but Edgar’s hands never betrayed a lick of work.

3
Had been sunk
, he phrased it so, as if some hand had pulled the abbey down with great intention.

4
If one cares to look, the reasoning for this can be found in my chapbook,
Terrible London,
Meridian (2012). Everything but the food, dear reader; I found great comfort in warm beer and dry potatoes — No.

5
Edgar did not possess any religious leanings, which made his discovery of the abbey all the more curious. It wasn’t something he would have made up, even to gain favor with me — and being that he already possessed much more than my favor, this only lent credence to the story he told me. It is a terrible thing, to understand the limits of storytelling and be drawn in even so.

6
Was he? Or was this merely part of the story he was telling?

7
In my coursework, I had studied the rumors of Exham Priory at length and they were simply not to be believed. There were terrible things in this world, to be certain, but I refused to believe in the numerous atrocities that were said to have taken place at Exham Priory. Inbreeding, people confined within cages, one body sewn to another to create a third thing entirely. Elephantine forms, long in places and bloated in others. Myths and legends, happenings that existed only within the fragments of ballads, ghost stories. Imagination has a way of shaping all things, including culture and politics. Perhaps especially these.

8
We drove approximately two hours south, though I would be hard-pressed to pinpoint our location beyond this. Indeed, the River Tyne was nearby and we passed through a wood that was surely the Whitelee Moor National Nature Reserve, but I can recollect nothing more specific.

9
Reader, forgive my indulgence. I would banish this cliché, were it not true. In trying to keep to the facts at hand, I must include my infatuation for Edgar.

10
I cannot recollect the name of the town or the B&B, but my memory of each is otherwise intact: small, historical, charming. The woman who claimed ownership of the B&B is one Mrs. Baird, but without a location to search, I have been unable to find her. Baird is often as common a name as Smith.

11
Given the nature of dreams, perhaps this account should not be present, but to eliminate it also eliminates a truth I feel to this day. I have been unable to forget the feel of that silk between my fingers or that sickly yellow light.

12
If need be, I would compare what I saw to something pilots experience: sensory illusions when your eyes grow tired of an unchanging, blank landscape. It was not that I believed myself to be flying, but seeing these spirals made me waver and stumble as if drunk. We had not, however, been drinking.

13
Lady Margaret Trevor of Cornwall. She married the second son of the fifth Baron Exham. Fourteenth-fifteenth century, though I, like so many before, have been unable to establish any firmer dates for her. She refuses to be pinned to any single point, looping through the histories of as many as eleven distinct cultures, but none so firmly held as those along the Welsh border. Children still fear she will take them from their beds, into the priory’s cellars where she will bend them, cut them apart, breed them.

14
Fragment of “The Lady Daemon,” a ballad, collected within E. Drake’s
Ballads of the Welsh Border (1650).

15
Druidic and Roman origins, but nothing so dramatic or simple as HELP or GO BACK carved within the wood. Trying to draw them the following morning led to the strange sensation of having written these words before. Magna Mater — oh, Great Mother.

16
To this day, the shoulder aches. I have been subject to all manner of medical examinations, each of which shows no injury. Edgar mentioned Frodo Baggins and the ache of the wound sustained on Weathertop. I could not laugh, for yes, it has become that, an injury that draws me into the memory of an occurrence I will not fully explain.

17
How easily my mind explained
this
, for Margaret’s dress had been long and surely, it swept all evidence of her steps away. Childer bound and … freeman, the ballad goes. Alone among the horrors, only I walked free. Only I.

18
We tell ourselves that nothing awful happens in the light of day, true terrors reserved for night and night alone, but daylight hides nothing. People still vanish under the light of a noon sun. Daylight strips the comfort of blackness away and we were not dreaming when we saw what we saw.

19
When I later asked, Edgar could remember no names. I asked if any of them were De la Poers or Shrewsfields, but he did not know and the more I asked, the more it drove him mad. He had always known and then did not.

20
Eternal return/recurrence, with its roots in Egypt and India both, further deconstructed by Blanqui (1871), Eddington (1927), Black Elk (1961), Hawking (2010), and certainly, yes, Pizzolatto (2013). Had we been here before? We had, but tell me not.

21
Bodies. Those they had fashioned in their breeding experiments, made to summon the utterly divine. I — Cannot. Not even here.

22
Would that it were so easy; a
locked
box and ice water — dramatic, Harry — but of course, I hold the key to this box. Margaret placed it within my skin so I can always find this place, where she calls the deepest horrors of the universe into our very own world. She opened the body as if parting sand, and I felt the warmth of an Egyptian desert. The scarabs whispered as they flowed up Lady Margaret’s arms, into her very skin. She turned blue — the way Egyptians had painted the ceilings of their tombs or the Greeks their roofs, bright as the twilight sky. Each and every scarab became a star upon her. She glowed like the heavens and from her body, and the dead before her, vomited new, strange life. Forms I had never seen entered this world, on eight legs and more, and made everyone bow, everyone but Margaret. These strange creatures bowed to
her.
When Edgar did not bow in worship, they seized him, in hands horrible and deformed. I thought they would press him to his knees in the bloody dirt, and perhaps they meant to, but he resisted. His eyes met mine and he knew, he
knew
, and was taken into that hideous maw, consumed whole. Margaret stood as round as Cybele, swollen with the life to come. Edgar,
my
Edgar. When he was spat back out, it was from Margaret’s distended mouth, and he was made different, made
knowing
of things others cannot, yet.

23
Always a mistake, reader. We did not turn to salt and yet, we turned.

24
Not yet.

25
Posted by user “daemon-marg” on the Her Story BBS, uk.history.myths.legends.wales (11/1/92)