Death in all the houses of Knorwood. Death in the cloister, death in the open fields. It seemed the Judgement of God—I was sobbing, begging to be released—it seemed the very end of Creation itself.
But as night came down over the dead village he was alive still, stumbling up the slopes, through the forest, toward that tower where the lord stood at the broken arch of the window, waiting for him to come.
“Don’t go!” I begged him. I ran alongside him, crying, but he didn’t hear.
The lord turned and smiled with infinite sadness as the young man on his knees begged for salvation, when it was damnation this lord offered, when it was only damnation that the lord would give.
“Yes, damned, then, but living, breathing!” the young man cried, and the lord opened his arms.
The kiss again, the lethal kiss, the blood drawn out of his dying body, and then the lord lifting the heavy head of the young man so the youth could take the blood back again from the body of the lord himself.
I screamed, “Do not—do not drink!” He turned, and his face was now so perfectly the visage of death that I couldn’t believe there was animation left in him; yet he asked: “What would you do? Would you go back to Knorwood, would you open those doors one after another, would you ring the bell in the empty church—and if you did, who would hear?”
He didn’t wait for my answer. And I had none now to give. He locked his innocent mouth to the vein that pulsed with every semblance of life beneath the lord’s cold and translucent flesh. And the blood jetted into the young body, vanquishing in one great burst the fever and the sickness that had wracked it, driving it out along with the mortal life.
He stood now in the hall of the lord alone. Immortality was his, and the blood thirst he would need to sustain it, and that thirst I could feel with my whole soul.
And each and every thing was transfigured in his vision—to the exquisite essence of itself. A wordless voice spoke from the starry veil of heaven; it sang in the wind that rushed through the broken timbers; it sighed in the flames that ate at the sooted stones of the hearth. It was the eternal rhythm of the universe that played beneath every surface as the last living creature in the village—that tiny child—fell silent in the maw of time.
A soft wind sifted and scattered the soil from the newly turned furrows in the empty fields. The rain fell from the black and endless sky.
Years and years passed. And all that had been Knorwood melted into the earth. The forest sent out its silent sentinels, and mighty trunks rose where there had been huts and houses, where there had been monastery walls. And it seemed the horror beyond all horrors that no one should know anymore of those who had lived and died in that small and insignificant village, that not anywhere in the great archives in which all history is recorded should a mention of Knorwood exist.
Yet one remained who knew, one who had witnessed, one who had seen the Ramplings come in the years that followed, seen them raise their house upon the very slope where the ancient castle had once stood, one who saw a new village collect itself slowly upon the unmarked grave of the old.
And all through the walls of Rampling Gate were the stones of that old castle, the stones of the forgotten monastery, the stones of that little church.
We were once again back in the tower.
“It is my shrine,” he whispered. “My sanctuary. It is the only thing that endures as I endure. And you love it as I love it, Julie. You have written it . . . You love its grandeur. And its gloom.”
“Yes, yes . . . as it’s always been . . .” I was crying, though I didn’t move my lips.
He had turned to me from the window, and I could feel his endless craving with all my heart.
“What else do you want from me!” I pleaded. “What else can I give?”
A torrent of images answered me. It was beginning again. I was once again relinquishing myself, yet in a great rush of lights and noise I was enlivened and made whole as I had been when we rode together through the forest, but it was into the world of now, this hour, that we passed.
We were flying through the rural darkness along the railway toward London, where the nighttime city burst like an enormous bubble in a shower of laughter and motion and glaring light. He was walking with me under the gas lamps, his face all but shimmering with that same dark innocence, that same irresistible warmth. It seemed we were holding tight to each other in the very midst of a crowd. And the crowd was a living thing, a writhing thing, and everywhere there came a dark, rich aroma from it, the aroma of fresh blood. Women in white fur and gentlemen in opera capes swept through the brightly lighted doors of the theatre; the blare of the music hall inundated us and then faded away. Only a thin soprano voice was left, singing a high, plaintive song. I was in his arms and his lips were covering mine, and there came that dull, zinging sensation again, that great, uncontrollable opening within myself. Thirst, and the promise of satiation measured only by the intensity of that thirst. Up back staircases we fled together, into high-ceilinged bedrooms papered in red damask, where the loveliest women reclined on brass beds, and the aroma was so strong now that I could not bear it and he said: “Drink. They are your victims! They will give you eternity—you must drink.” And I felt the warmth filling me, charging me, blurring my vision until we broke free again, light and invisible, it seemed, as we moved over the rooftops and down again through raindrenched streets. But the rain did not touch us; the falling snow did not chill us; we had within ourselves a great and indissoluble heat. And together in the carriage we talked to each other in low, exuberant rushes of language; we were lovers; we were constant; we were immortal. We were as enduring as Rampling Gate.
Oh, don’t let it stop! I felt his arms around me and I knew we were in the tower room together, and the visions had worked their fatal alchemy.
“Do you understand what I am offering you? To your ancestors I revealed myself, yes; I subjugated them. But I would make you my bride, Julie. I would share with you my power. Come with me. I will not take you against your will, but can you turn away?”
Again I heard my own scream. My hands were on his cool white skin, and his lips were gentle yet hungry, his eyes yielding and ever young. Father’s angry countenance blazed before me as if I, too, had the power to conjure. Unspeakable horror. I covered my face.
He stood against the backdrop of the window, against the distant drift of pale clouds. The candlelight glimmered in his eyes. Immense and sad and wise, they seemed—and oh, yes, innocent, as I have said again and again. “You are their fairest flower, Julie. To them I gave my protection always. To you I give my love. Come to me, dearest, and Rampling Gate will truly be yours, and it will finally, truly be mine.”
Nights of argument, but finally Richard had come round. He would sign over Rampling Gate to me and I should absolutely refuse to allow the place to be torn down. There would be nothing he could do then to obey Father’s command. I had given him the legal impediment he needed, and of course I told him I would leave the house to his male heirs. It should always be in Rampling hands.
A clever solution, it seemed to me, since Father had not told me to destroy the place. I had no scruples in the matter now at all.
And what remained was for him to take me to the little railway station and see me off for London, and not worry about my going home to Mayfair on my own.
“You stay here as long as you wish and do not worry,” I said. I felt more tenderly toward him than I could ever express. “You knew as soon as you set foot in the place that Father was quite wrong.”
The great black locomotive was chugging past us, the passenger cars slowing to a stop.
“Must go now, darling—kiss me,” I said.
“But what came over you, Julie—what convinced you so quickly . . . ?”
“We’ve been through all that, Richard,” I said. “What matters is that Rampling Gate is safe and we are both happy, my dear.”
I waved until I couldn’t see him anymore. The flickering lamps of the town were lost in the deep lavender
light of the early evening, and the dark hulk of Rampling Gate appeared for one uncertain moment like the ghost of itself on the nearby rise.
I sat back and closed my eyes. Then I opened them slowly, savouring this moment for which I had waited so long.
He was smiling, seated in the far corner of the leather seat opposite, as he had been all along, and now he rose with a swift, almost delicate movement and sat beside me and enfolded me in his arms.
“It’s five hours to London,” he whispered.
“I can wait,” I said, feeling the thirst like a fever as I held tight to him, feeling his lips against my eyelids and my hair. “I want to hunt the London streets tonight,” I confessed a little shyly, but I saw only approbation in his eyes.
“Beautiful Julie, my Julie . . .” he whispered.
“You’ll love the house in Mayfair,” I said.
“Yes . . .” he said.
“And when Richard finally tires of Rampling Gate, we shall go home.”
ANNE SEXTON
(1928–74)
Best known as a brilliant poet, Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and grew up in Boston. In 1967, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 1966 poetry volume, Live or Die. Among her collections of poems are To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), The Starry Night (1961), Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), and The Book of Folly (1972).With Maxine Kumin, she coauthored four children’s books, and in 1978, her daughter, Linda Sexton, edited Words for Dr.Y.: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories. She was hospitalized on a number of occasions with mental illnesses that have been described as bipolar disorder, hysteria, and depression. Sexton lost her battle against the voices’ calls for her death, taking her life at the age of forty-five by carbon monoxide in a locked garage.
The Ghost
(1978)
I was born in Maine, Bath, Maine, Down East, in the United States of America, in the year of 1851. I was one of twelve (though only eight lasted beyond the age of three) and within the confines of that state we lived at various times in our six houses, four of which were scattered on a small island off Boothbay Harbor. They were not called houses on that island for they are summering places and thus entitled cottages. My father, at one time Governor, was actually a frustrated builder and would often say to the carpenters, “another story upwards, please.” One house had five stories, and although ugly to look upon, stood almost at the edge of the rocks that the sea locked in and out of.
I was, of course, a Victorian lady, however I among my brothers and sisters was well educated and women were thought, by my father, to be as interesting as men, or as capable. My education culminated at Wellesley College, and I was well-versed in languages, both the ancient and unusable as well as the practical, for the years after Wellesley College I spent abroad perfecting the accent and the idiomatic twists. Later I held a job on a newspaper. But it was not entirely fulfilling and made no use of these foreign languages but only of the mother tongue. I was fortunately a maiden lady all my life, and I do say fortunate because it allowed me to adopt to maiden heart the nieces and nephews, the grandnieces, the grandnephews. And there was one in particular, my sister’s grandchild, who was named after me. And as she wore my name, I wore hers, and at the end of my life she and her mother and an officious practical nurse stood their ground beside me as I went out. Death taking place twice. Once at sixty-four when my ears died and the most ignominious madness overtook me. Next the half-death of sixty shock treatments and then still deaf as a haddock—a half-life until seventy-seven spent in a variety of places called nursing homes. Dying on a hot day in a crib with diapers on. To die like a baby is not desirable and just barely tolerable, for there is fear spooned into you and radios playing in your head. I, the suffragette, I of the violet sachets, I who always changed my dress for dinner and kept my pride, died like a baby with my breasts bared, my corset, my camisole, tucked away, and every other covering that was my custom. I would have preferred the huntsman stalking me like a moose to that drooling away.
There is more to say of my lifetime, but my interest at this point, my main thrust, is to tell you of my life as a ghost. Life? Well, if there is action and a few high kicks, is that not similar to what is called life? At any rate, I bother the living, act up a bit, slip like a radio into their brains or a sharp torch-light going on suddenly to blind and then reveal myself. (With no explanation!) I can put a moan into my namesake’s dog if I wish to make a point. (I have always liked to make my point!) It is her life I linger over, for she is wearing my name and that gives a ghost a certain right that no one knows when they present the newborn with a name. She is somewhat aware—but of course denies it as best she can—that there are any ghosts at all. However, it can be noted that she is unwilling to move into a house that is not newly made, she is unwilling to live within the walls that might whisper and tell stories of other lives. It is her ghost theory. But like many, she has made the perfect mistake; the mistake being that a ghost belongs to a house, a former room, whereas this ghost (and I can only speak for myself for we ghosts are not allowed to converse about how we go about practicing our trade) belongs to my remaining human, to bother her, to enter the human her, who once was given my name. I could surmise that there are ghosts of houses wading through the attics where once they hoarded their hoard, throwing dishes off shelves, but I am not sure of it. I think the English believe it because their castles were passed on from generation to generation. Indeed, perhaps an American ghost does something quite different, because the people of the present are very mobile, the executives are constantly thrown from city to city, dragging their families with them. But I do not know, for I haunt namesake’s, and she lives in the suburbs of Boston—despite a few moves from new house to new house. I follow her as a hunting dog follows the scent, and as long as she breathes, I will peer in her window at noon and watch her sip the vodka, and if I so desire, can place one drop of an ailment into it to teach her a little lesson about such indulgence and imperfection. I gave her five years ago a broken hip. I immobilized her flat on the operating table as I peered over his shoulder, the surgeon said as he did a final X-ray before slicing in with his knife, “shattered,” and there was namesake, her hip broken like a crystal goblet and later with two four-inch screws in her hip she lay in a pain that had only been an intimation of pain during the birth of two children. A longing for morphine dominated her hours and her conscience rang in her head like a bell tolling for the dead. She had at the time been committing a major sin, and I found it so abhorrent that it was necessary to make my ailment decisive and sharp. When the morphine was working, she was perfectly lucid, but as it wore off, she sipped a hint of madness and that too was an intimation of things to come. Later, I tried lingering fevers that were quite undiagnosable and then when the world became summer and the green leaves whispered, I sat upon leaf by leaf and called out with a voice of my youth and cried, “Come to us, come to us” until she finally pulled down each shade of the house to keep the leaves out of it—as best she could. Then there are the small things that I can do. I can tear the pillow from under her head at night and leave her as flat as I was when I lay dying and thus crawl into her dream and remind her of my death, lest it be her death. I do not in any way consider myself evil but rather a good presence, trying to remind her of the Yankee heritage, back to the Mayflower and William Brewster, or back to kings and queens of the Continent who married and intermarried. She is becoming altogether too modern, and when a man enters her, I am constantly standing at the bedside to observe and call forth a child to be named my name. I do not actually watch the copulation because it is an alien act to me, but I know full well what it should mean and have often plucked out a few of her birth control pills in hopes. But I fear it is a vain hope. She is perhaps too old to conceive, or if she should, the result might be imperfect. As I stand there at that bedside while this man enters her, I hum a little song into her head that we made up, she and I, when she was eight and we sang each year thereafter for year
s. We had kissed thirteen lucky times over the mistletoe that hung under a large chandelier and two doorframes. This mistletoe was our custom and our act and tied the knot more surely year by year. The song that she sang haunted me in the madness of old age and now I let it enter her ear and at first she feels a strange buzzing as if a fly has been caught in her brain and then the song fills her head and I am at ease.
She senses my presence when she cooks things that are not to my liking, or drives beyond the speed limit, or makes a left turn when it says NO LEFT TURN. For I play in her head the song called “The Stanley Steamer” for Mr. Stanley’s wife was my close friend and we took a memorable ride from Boston to Portland and the horses were not happy, but we disobeyed nothing and were cautious—though I must add, a bit dusty and a little worse for wear at the end of the trip.
It is unfortunate that she did not inherit my felicity with the foreign tongue. But not all can be passed on, the genes carry some but not all. As a matter of fact, it is far more unfortunate that she did not inherit my gift with the English language. But here I do interfere the most, for I put my words onto her page, and when she observes them, she wonders how it came about and calls it “a gift from the muse.” Oh how sweet it is! How adorable! How the song of the mistletoe rips through the metal of death and plays on, singing from two mouths, making me a loyal ghost. Loyal though I am I have felt for a long time something missing from her life that she must experience to be whole, to be truly alive. Although one might say it be the work of the devil, I think that it is not (the devil lurks among the living and she must push him out day by day, but first he must enter her as he entered me in my years of deafness and lunacy). Thus I felt it quite proper and fitting to drop such a malady onto a slice of lemon that floated in her tea at 4 P.M. last August. It started immediately and became in the end immoderate. First the teacup became two teacups, then three, then four. Her cigarettes as she lit them in confusion tasted like dung and she stamped them out. Then she turned on the radio and all it would give at every station on the dial were the names and the dates of the dead. She turned it off quickly, but it would not stop playing. The dog chased her tail and then attacked the woodwork, baying at the moon as if their two bodies had gone awry. At that point, she sat very still. She kept telling herself to dial “O” for operator but could not. She shut her eyes, but they kept popping open to see the objects of the kitchen multiply, widen, stretch like rubber and their colors changing and becoming ugly and the lemon floated in the multiplying and dividing teacups like something made of neon.
Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves And Ghosts - 25 Classic Stories Of The Supernatural Page 39
