She Walks in Shadows(24)
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)
HAIRWORK
Gemma Files
NO PLANT CAN thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always, be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it.
These are all simple truths, one would think, and yet, they appear to bear infinite repetition. But then, history is re-written in the recording of it, always.
“Ici, c’est elle,” you tell Tully Ferris, the guide you’ve engaged, putting down a pale sepia photograph printed on pasteboard, its corners foxed with age. “Marceline Bedard, 1909 — from before she and Denis de Russy met, when she was still dancing as Tanit-Isis. It’s a photographic reference, similar to what Alphonse Mucha developed his commercial art pieces from; I found it in a studio where Frank Marsh used to paint, hidden in the floor. Marsh was Cubist, so his paintings tend to look very deconstructed, barely human, but this is what he began with.”
Ferris looks at the carte, gives a low whistle. “Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”
“‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”
“Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected — you know, high yaller? Same as me.”
“Oh yes, une métisse, bien sur. She was cagey about her background, la belle Marceline, liked to preserve mystery. But the rumor was her mother came from New Orleans to Marseilles, then Paris, settling in the same area where Sarah Bernhardt’s parents once lived, a Jewish ghetto; when she switched to conducting séances, she took out advertisements claiming her powers came from Zimbabwe and Babylon, darkest Africa and the tribes of Israel, equally. Thus the name: Tanit, after the Berber moon-goddess, and Isis, from ancient Egypt, the mother of all magic.”
“She got something, all right. A mystery to me how she even hold her head up, that much weight of braids on top of it.”
“Mmm, there was an interesting story told about Marceline’s hair — that it wasn’t hers at all but a wig. A wig made from hair, maybe even some scalp, going back a long time, centuries ... I mean, c’est folle to think so, but that was what they said. Perhaps even as far as Egypt. Her mother’s mother brought it with her, supposedly.”