She Walks in Shadows(22)

I could not put the ruin from my head and wanted to return. Even in sleep, which we took in a small B&B in town proper,10 the sunken building invited me to wander its halls. I returned to that crumbling staircase and found, not Edgar there but a woman, draped in what seemed shadows, but under my fingers was vintage silk. Under my fingers — she stood that close, looking down at me as if she had seen me once upon a time, but now needed a nudge to remember. She did not seem quite real and I presumed her to be my aunt with her silver hair until her lips parted, until she took a breath and drew the world into her lungs.

This, she said in a voice that was not my aunt’s, is not right.

Her mouth did not move, but I heard the words even so. I could not tell dream from reality, then. I meant to ask her which it was, but it seemed ridiculous as she moved past me, down the stairs —

The night stairs, she said as she passed, the silk of her gown evacuating my grasp as though it were running away. It flowed behind her as a black river down every stone step. I turned to follow, unable to do anything else. My feet would not carry me up and out of the ruin, so down it was.11

A sickly yellow-green glow illuminated the underground passages we traversed, as if glowworms congregated somewhere above our heads. No bit of light touched the lady. She seemed cut from the world, only a paper silhouette cameo in front of me, the absence of all things. But the longer I looked at her, I began to see shapes within even the shadow of her. The air seemed made of great, dark whorls, as if many-limbed creatures moved inside her. No matter how impossible this also was, I went with it. I followed the passage of one such creature down her spine and into what should have been the cradle of her hips. There it curled, as if making a nest, and bared its fangs at me, fangs that gleamed like anthracite. Black on black and blacker still.12

Come, now. Women are not made of such things.

She turned down a corridor and vanished from my sight. I gasped at the loss of her — the sensation was terrible, as if I had ceased to breathe, the whole of the world crumbling atop me.— I increased my stride, but around the corner, she was still gone. Screams rose in the near distance.

Margaret!13 I wanted to cry, but the name lodged in my throat.

She was as the ballad said:

Here roams the lady daemon, between childer bound and freeman.

Hair of silver, eye of gilt; soft of foot, through blood she spilt.

— The Lady Daemon (1512)14

At the corridor’s end stood a door, a sliver of that sickly light visible beneath it. This light shone so clearly upon my shoes that I could see where I had scuffed them the first day I’d met Edgar — I had kicked a stone unknowingly into his path, putting a similar scar on his own shoe. I pressed my hands to the door and it was like touching ice and fire both. From beyond the door, screams like you would find in your worst nightmares — as if people were being disassembled while they yet lived. There were letters carved into the door, worn by so much time they were mostly illegible15. I imagined a knife held in an unsteady hand, each cut into the wood drawing forth a fresh scream from the room beyond. The latch was cold beneath my hands, but would not be freed, no matter how I tried. It was likewise steady beneath the thump of my shoulder, refusing to give.

My fall from the bed woke me, shoulder thumping against floor and not door. I had no good idea where I was until Edgar reached down, fingers stroking my bare shoulder. I cringed at his touch, retreating into the tangle of blankets. My shoulder ached. When I looked, it showed a bruise, which of course could not be. Even Edgar’s face betrayed surprise at this and I felt the emotion genuine — there were things he knew and could not yet tell me, but this mark upon my skin surprised him as much as it did me. He touched me again, the bruise warmer than the rest of the arm, angry with blood and injury.16

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 bodies21 laid on an altar before her to welcome the oldest things anyone in the world might ever know.