My name is Thomas Grimes. I was born on the last day of March, 1855. As I write this, I am 55 years old, and so should, in theory, have more adventures to look back on than I have to come. However, looking back is, for me at least, much the harder to do. I approach this task with the utmost trepidation in my heart.

It is traditional, I believe, to begin these things with one’s earliest memory, in a bid to find out if that imprint has remained all those long years for a reason. Perhaps it is a formative moment, a key experience. Certainly it must have had some importance or resonance to etch itself so completely onto the mind's slate. Here then, for what it is worth, is mine.

A storm rages outside; one of those casement-rattling, tree-bending, roof-drumming storms that hit the south-eastern coast with a fury that threatens to tear the house from its foundations, cast it out into the North Sea and dash it to pieces on the cliffs at Rockmount. Whatever age I am at the time, and I can be no more than three years old, the wail of the wind and the roar of thunder is enough to terrify me. I seek my mother’s bed.

She comforts me and murmurs in my ear. I can feel still her warmth, and smell her smell. She smells of soap, and sweat, and her breath smells of peppermint. And what she says is,

“Have no fear, mummy’s here.
Don’t you weep, go to sleep.
Never roam, stay at home.”

And she rocks me to sleep, while the storm rages outside. I know while I am cradled in her arms, the storm cannot hurt me. Nothing can hurt me.

Now that I write it down, I can see that it is does mark a watershed. It was to be the last time in my childhood that I was able to find such comfort.

If you believe in such things, the storm also presaged what was to come. My cosy world, which I believed would last forever, was about to end.

Another, less pleasant, early memory: The look on the face of a young girl in town when she sees my face. A pretty girl, golden curls of hair beneath a green bonnet, bright eyes and rosy cheeks. She recoils in shock and begins to cry, as her mother gathers her up and shushes and hushes as she hurries away. It is the first time I realise that my face is not normal.

Ugly. Deformed.

That is a more defining point for my life, I think. The ugliness certainly remained with me. Which is more than can be said for my mother.

I never went to school, so I was spared that at least. But I attended church to hear my father’s sermons, while the good people of the Bay stared or averted their eyes. Some even crossed themselves.

God made Man in his own image, apparently. Out of clay. Well, he crafted a sorry mess when he moulded me. A very wise man told me once that God plans things carefully, that nothing happens by accident in the universe. It was my destiny to look the way I do. I believe this to be true.

But to a child, God’s plan can be very cruel.

But I digress.

I know where I wish to begin my tale, but much of what I did makes no sense without knowledge of what went before. I can only throw some details at the canvas, mix them as an artist might mix paints on a palette, and hope you get the colour of my mind in those days.

The early colour was light, the colour of the sun. My mother was there and love surrounded me. But that was all too brief.

The colours begin to darken, into purples and deep browns. If light is love and hope, then the absence of light is the absence of either. By the time I was fourteen, the darkness had very nearly engulfed me. My mind was colour of the deepest part of the forest at night. Or the barely lit cellar under the house outside Pysketon. I did some terrible things there, which I am going to tell you about. I want you to know what I did, and, although I do not seek your forgiveness, it would help if you could, at least a little, understand.

Perhaps I ask a lot. I am seeking to understand it all myself, even by writing it down. Perhaps we will make sense of it together.

I will begin my tale as I arrived at that house for the first time, and try to fill in other details as I go on.

I sat, shivering under a blanket, on the wooden seat of the carrier that bore me from the railway station. Initially, the journey had taken us through fields, still lit green and brown by the late afternoon sun. As we progressed further towards our destination, and the sun sunk out of sight, trees had sprung up. Soon we had been barrelling, faster than before, down a lane where the trees crowded up to, leant over, even reached for us with branches and twigs that seemed like limbs and fingers as we sped by.

My first impression of the house was that it was a castle, huge and forbidding as any ogre’s fortress. Castellated walls and narrow windows. A path that girdled the body of the house like a moat. Most of all, the huge barricaded oak door, that in the gloom looked like a raised drawbridge. The house looked to me as a prison might look to a condemned man, or an asylum to a lunatic.

A place, to which I had been sent.

The carriage churned up the loose stone path and came to an abrupt halt, punctuated by a curse from the driver and whinny from the horse.

“You just wait there a minute, lad!” The cabbie sounded peeved, and his voice was gruff. It was the first time he had spoken to me since he had set eyes on my face at the station. “I’ll get your bags down for you.”

I ignored him, and crunched through the stones towards the main door, where a woman was silhouetted in the rectangle of light from within. She was short and plump, with arms folded across a large bosom covered by the white apron of a domestic servant.

Her eyes flickered as they settled on mine, before they went blank. I was used to it by then.

“I am Mrs. Hardcastle.” Her aspect was stern and forbidding. “You must be young Master Thomas. Your father asked me to stay and meet you. I expect you’re exhausted and hungry. There’s bread and jam waiting, and fruit cake if you eat your bread.”

“Where is my father?” I asked, as shortly as I could.

“He had business to attend to, with the Bishop, I believe. He will in very late. But you shall see him in the morning.” She spoke it as "marning".

I went into the house. The hallway stretched into a long panelled corridor ending in stairs that climbed upwards. Doors led off on each side, and beneath the stairs more light spilled from an open door beyond. Mrs. Hardcastle had gone out to negotiate with the driver of the carrier, so I went forward to explore. The walls were decorated with paintings of warships.

Ships always thrilled me.

I recognised the Victory, of course, but not all the others. Time enough to inspect them later, I decided. I reached the room beyond the stairwell, and walked in.

It was a kitchen, with a small wooden table set out with bread and jam, just as Mrs. Hardcastle had promised. Brass pots and pans hung on stone walls, and a stove, blackened with age, stood in against one wall. I hurled myself upon the nearest chair, and started on the food. I was halfway through a doorstep when Mrs. Hardcastle appeared in the doorway.

“Well, now, lad. Not stopping to say Grace? What would your father say?” She was frowning, somewhere between tolerance and annoyance.

“I said Grace.” I lied, through a mouthful of bread. “I always say Grace.”

“Did you now?” She looked at me for a long moment. “Oh well. I dare say you were hungry after your journey.”
She doesn’t believe me, I thought. Who cares what she thinks anyway?

I carved another thick slice of bread. Where was my father? I had hardly seen him since my mother left and I was stuck with my ghastly maiden aunts in Norwood, clucking over me like I was made of china. Not allowed out of the house unaccompanied, not even into the garden. At least I was rid of them, for now at least.

Mrs. Hardcastle was clattering around at the great porcelain sink, filling a kettle and hoisting it onto the stove.

“I’m going to warm you a stone for your bed. The room hasn’t been used for a good while now, and I’ve had the window open to air it a bit. Do you want a cup of tea? Are you old enough to drink tea, Thomas?”

“No thank you, Mrs. Hardcastle. But, it’s extremely good of you to go to all this trouble.“

“Hmmph! I should think so. Mr. Hardcastle has had to make do on his own tonight, and he’s not very well at all. I’m only supposed to work mornings, you know.” She brushed invisible crumbs from her apron with both hands. “Still, I could hardly leave you to fend for yourself, could I?”

I could tell she was mollified, and figured it might do me some good in the future. I turned my attention back to the bread and jam.

Later, I gripped the cold metal railing as I followed Mrs. Hardcastle up the stone stairs and along another darkened passage to my room. As soon as I was alone, I opened the window shutters and looked out at the view behind the house. The moon was bright enough to see the great mass of trees of the forest that started to thicken barely a hundred yards beyond the low brick wall at the end of the garden.

After the suffocating captivity of the ghastly aunts, I felt an urge to be out in those woods. For the first time in a long while, I found myself wondering what tomorrow would bring, and smiled. Then weariness took over, and I crawled between the unaccustomed roughness of the sheets, and slipped into sleep.

My last thought was, I wonder what I’ll find in the woods.

******
My first morning at Pyske Cottage began with the ferocious, guttural sound of crows battling outside my window. I had no idea of the time, but it was bright and cold and I lay under the rough sheets and listened to what sounded like a crow version of the battle of Waterloo.

Was I anxious, waking up in a strange place for the first time? Did I wonder where I was? Did I come out of the Land of Dreams slowly, struggling to re-impose sense on the ramblings of my subconscious mind, or did I snap awake, fully alert and aware of where I was, ready for the new world I was in?

I cannot remember. Suffice to say, I awoke and I remember the cacophony of Crow Armageddon. It might have been Magpies, or even Great Auks, but I supposed them to be crows, at the time. My memory is good, but selective. I cannot recount for you the passing of each hour of my time there, but I will try to give you the flavour, the essence of my time there. They say that all experience is filtered through the five senses of the person involved, so that all stories and memories are selective and coloured by the world-view of the narrator. So be it. I will try to tell you, as truthfully as it I can, what happened, what I did, and what I felt. But the mind retains things oddly, and is an interested editor anyway, so that what I relate can only hint at the empirical truth of events. That wise mentor of mine suggested that truth is not absolute, but is always relative. As bizarre a theory as that sounds, as I get older it seems to explain the world better than searching for absolutes. After all, in the great holy war between Rome and Islam, who has God (or Allah) or his side? Does either soldier fight more furiously, or die more easily, because somewhere a divine figure sits on his throne and supports the army of Truth?

But again, I digress.

I awoke to the sound of crows, and, bare feet on the on the rug that stretched across creaking floorboards, tiptoed to the window and looked out at my new world.

By day, the trees seemed less menacing, less crowded and huddled on the edge of normality. The feeling I had experienced the previous night, the sense of whispered voices sighing in the wind and watchful eyes deep within the dark shadows, was gone. They were just trees, tops hidden by a light mist, holding nothing more sinister than squirrels and foxes.

I expected to resume my struggle with Mrs Hardcastle, or perhaps see my father, but when I went downstairs the only person I could find was a sharp faced girl in a maid’s apron who avoided my eyes as she asked if I wanted porridge for breakfast. As I sat eating I was aware of her standing at the sink stealing glances at my face. Finally, I looked up and stared at her until she reddened, dried her hands on a dishcloth and hurried from the room. Then I ate alone.

In the next few days, I saw the sharp-faced girl again, and Mrs Hardcastle, but it was not for another week that I saw my father.

He was sitting in his study, his face hard and unsmiling. The study was full of books and dust. He had a book open in front of him, a pen held in his hand carefully, as though each drop of ink were as precious as life-blood. He looked at me long and hard when I entered, before finally putting down the pen and letting out a long slow breath.

“You look no better than you did a year ago,” he said. “I can see no trace of myself or her in your face. I can see very little that is human at all.” He looked at the book in front of him, pressed blotting paper down on whatever he had been writing. “Perhaps your face is an outward manifestation of her soul.”

This was the father I feared. What had become of that other father, the smiling father who had once lifted me high into the light and embraced me with joy?

“I am pleased to see you, Father,” I said.

“Are you?” He looked at me searchingly again. “Then you can demonstrate your pleasure to me by remaining as quiet as possible when I am in my study. I have important work to do here. Profound work.” He glanced at the book in front of him, and then turned his eyes back toward me. “I have engaged a tutor for you, to show you the rudiments of study. He will not be here until the Autumn. In the meantime you will keep out of my way as much as possible.” He looked back at the book, and took the pen up and filled it at the inkwell.

I moved uneasily from one foot to the other.

He looked up again.

“That will be all, Thomas.”

My relationship with Mrs Hardcastle was not much warmer. She appeared before I rose from my bed from Monday to Saturday, and usually left early in the afternoon, “to take care of my Fred.” She treated me with a sort of suspicion mixed with tolerance, which was preferable to the way the sharp-faced girl, Kate, avoided my eyes, and where possible my company. Once I saw Kate cross herself as she left the room where I ate, as though she had escaped the presence of a demon, or wanted to ward off an ill omen.

There’s a fantasy children have, if they are unhappy or orphaned. The dream is that somebody will discover that a mistake has been made; a child has been lost, that somebody unloved is, in reality, loved and wanted elsewhere. Perhaps a long-lost prince or princess, with a cosy throne waiting to be filled. A kingdom where children are not ignored, or scorned or even feared. Orphans discover that their parents live, and are rich and kind. Abandoned children find that their mothers and fathers have been searching long and far afield, and are overjoyed to find their long missed offspring. Finally, one way or another, they are sent for, and return to safety.

My mother had gone, and I had dreamt for her return to transform my father and myself back to the happy creatures we had been. Instead, I had seen her buried. Then my fantasy had been to return to my father; a father who loved me and cared for me and wanted me back.

Now I was back in the house of my father. But he was not the father I had lost.

I was fourteen years old, my mother was dead and part of my father had died too. The part that loved me, it seemed. I had spent five years in the care of father’s sisters in Penge. They fed me, and gave me shelter in their huge, gloomy terrace. The front door to their hall was coloured the strange reds and blues of the stained glass in the windows.

The Aunts, Dorothy and Diane, were twins, I think. Not identical: Dorothy had a flatter face and smaller version of her sister’s hooked beak of a nose. Both were thin, emaciated even, all flesh stretched over their bones like canvas. Both tended towards extravagant hats that cast their faces into shadow when they ventured outdoors. They wore bustles, the only women I saw in London who still did, and these made them appear to stoop forward even more than their natural inclination. They were, and I believe always had been, unmarried. To me they were sexless, too: female only by default, in that they had to be one sex or the other. My overwhelming memory of their house, and of them, remains a memory of cobwebs, desiccation and dust.

Their conversation revolved around the royal family, whatever lurid murder was in the press at the time, and their brother Daniel. They doted on my father, and considered taking me into their house a duty, “the very, very least we can do to help poor Danny.” There had, I recall, been another brother, but he had gone overseas with the Army and never returned.

I spent those five years after my mother’s death reading the eclectic mix of books from their abbreviated library. They had some Dickens, naturally, but I found reading about orphans particularly galling at that time. The book that provided me with escape was, “The bloodthirsty escapades of the notorious pirate Blackbeard, and his eventual downfall.”

I sat in my Aunties’ empty house, bereft and powerless, and read about a huge monster who tied firecrackers in his beard, walked his enemies off the plank to their watery doom and sailed from port to port sinking ships and drinking rum. One particular plate showed him grinning horribly, pistols stuck in the huge buckled belt round his waist, eyes huge and mad above a beard black and unkempt, cutlass held aloft.

He looked ugly, yes; but he did not look alone or scared.

It seemed simple to me then. If you were big enough, and you were unafraid, you could take what you want and keep it. Your enemies could not catch you, and if they did, you would broadside them with cannonball, blast them with guns and slice them with steel. And then, make the survivors walk the plank.

The men, that is.

Capturing women, now that was something different. Women meant ransom. Normal, landlocked people would pay large sums of gold to get their women back. Besides, captured women could not leave, as my mother had, until the captor decided to let them go. And, in the meantime, you had them in your power.

I found that exciting, in a guilty way.

It was the search for pirates, in particular Blackbeard, that took me to my father’s library that first time.

The library was lined with books. I do not know from where my father acquired them all, but they were gathered from every corner of the globe. Dust coated many of the spines, suggesting ancient tomes of long-lost wisdom, possibly stretching back to biblical times. A few looked as though they had been flood damaged in the Ark.

Initially, large books with pictures of ships caught my eye. Carefully drawn, with cross-sections showing the holds and cabins, the rigging and even the names of the sails and flags. I was able to imagine walking down the centre aisles past cabins full of sailors and passengers; I could hear the sound my feet made on the wooden floor of the boat. I wondered what it would be like to ride such a vessel in a storm in the Caribbean. It was to be a few years before I found out.

Other books caught my eye. A book with a winged horse etched on the cover told stories from mythology. A thousand and one Arabian nights. A strange bestiary showing exotic and possibly fantastic creatures from around the world. A drawing of the Sphinx and the Pyramids in a book about Africa. Pygmies, Zulus and Cannibals. The Odyssey, with a picture of a Cyclops clutching some of the ill-fated crew.

And, on another page, a rear view of Nausicca bathing naked in the river transfixed me. I returned to that page, again and again.

It was a bright Tuesday, with dust floating in a beam of sunlight from a window high above, when I found the book. I did not remember seeing it before, which was odd, because it was large and distinctive and standing on the tall shelf at the bottom, where I had come to think of the books as the “Giants” (as opposed to the Pygmies, which occupied a narrow shelf just below eye level beneath the window. My classification also included “Monsters” and “Women,” as I recall. I had a vague idea that I might re-arrange the books according to my own classifications, to make finding them easier. There was, unfortunately, some overlap between the classifications, which might have made this difficult.)

The book was bound in what seemed to be flaky leather, and the pages were soft and yellowing, with brittle edges that required the most delicate handling. There was nothing written on the spine, nor, when I had heaved it out and lowered it to the dusty floor, was there any writing on the cover. Inside, the frontispiece was an illustration of what might have been an angel, certainly a winged man, imprisoned in a glass bubble. His head, replete with long yellow hair, was bowed; his arms stretched out with hands pressed against the glass walls of his cage. It was only later that I noticed that the bubble rested on the palm of a giant, black hand.

The next page was the Title page.

The Grimoire of Ebenezer Bliss. Being a Miscellany of Spells, Tales, Thoughts and Invocations.

At the bottom of the page the printer was identified as:

Bedlam Press,
Woodend, Norwood, London

I knew where Norwood was, as the Mad Aunts had taken me on an outing to visit the Crystal Palace, and I remember seeing the signs high above the streets. It seemed odd that somewhere close to the cobwebbed world of those two sisters, such works were being made. I wondered if the Bedlam Press were still there. The book looked old – ancient, in fact - to my inexperienced eyes.

I turned the page. The first page, written in tiny letters on a dry, yellow paper was entitled “In the First Garden.”


Before men walked upon the earth, the first man dwelt in a garden. The man had been formed out of the rich red earth of the garden, and was kindred to the garden.

At first, when the Creator chose to walk the garden, he would walk with the man. The Creator would tell the man the names of the other creatures, and plants, and many other things. Then the Creator made the woman from one of the man’s ribs.

“She will keep you company,” the Creator told the man. “I will not be visiting the garden again.”

The man was upset and frightened. “But Lord! You have not yet told me the names of all the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea!”

“There are many things in this world that that I have not shown you. You must find these things for yourselves, now.”

“What shall I do then, Lord? How should I worship you?”

“Worship me? You are a creature of this world, and this world is yours. I leave it in your charge, to do with as you will. What use would it be to worship me when I am gone?”

“Perhaps you will return, if I worship you long and piously enough, Lord.”

“I shall not return. Waste no time in worship.” And the Creator was gone.

The man was keen to know what things were called. If an object or a creature had a name, then he felt that they must have a place in the larger scheme. Once he knew the thing’s name, he could start to unravel its purpose. Perhaps the man felt that he could sense of the world, if only he knew the essence of a thing.

The serpent was a being of fire, and therefore not of the garden. The form of the serpent did not yet contain the capacity to smile. But, inwardly, he enjoyed the idea that the man could unravel the purpose of the Creator. That would be hard to do even if he knew the real essence of things, rather than just giving them names. So, the serpent watched the man without much interest until the woman arrived.

She was far more diverting creature altogether.

The woman accepted that all things were, including the man. She did not seek to exercise control, or seek meaning. At first, the serpent thought this meant she had even less understanding than the man. After all, all the other creatures did not seek to comprehend their place in the Garden. But she was also aware of other things. For instance, the woman knew the serpent was not what he seemed.

She warned the man to keep away from the serpent. Once, seeing him slide close, she had sent him away. She shouted at him as he vanished into undergrowth:

“Do not come creeping round me, snake!”

After that she watched out for him. But she had no hope of seeing him if he wished to remain hidden. The serpent knew that Time had barely begun, and he could wait. It was the woman he required.

One day the woman was alone, seated beneath an apple tree. She hummed to herself, a tune to which she did not know the words. The serpent discovered his voice, and sang aloud.

Beneath the green tree, I wait for thee
I wait for the ripe fruit to fall
But all my desire
My unspent fire
Is not satisfied at all

Won’t you confide the secret you hide?
What seed do hide in your fruit?
I can’t wait much longer
Such is my hunger
I will pluck you out by the root!

Beneath the green boughs, my heart waits to rouse
And my body yearns for the Spring
But Winter is long
It goes ever on
Alas! The queen wants a king!

“The words fit the tune.” The woman smiled at him. “Do you know the meaning of the words?”

“Do you wish me to show you?” The serpent coiled rapturously round her waist and her legs, and she allowed him to do so. She closed her eyes as the snake slid slowly up between her thighs.

When the man returned, he found the woman asleep in the shade of the tree. It was noon, and the sun was warm, so he lay down beside her in the shade. The woman awoke and smiled a secret smile. Then she started to show the man the things that the serpent had taught her.

He learnt quickly.

From a distance the serpent watched with satisfaction as the man and woman entwined. The serpent knew that the man’s seed of solid red clay would soon take hold in the woman’s womb. But he had ensured that a seed of pure fire had reached there first.

And so, the serpent learnt to smile.

****
It puzzled me.

The story was obviously based on the Biblical story. Opposite, a sumptuous picture of a naked woman writhing in the embrace of an enormous python drew attention to the erotic content. To a boy of 14 years, on the threshold of manhood, the picture opened up a window to a mystery that involved growing up, marriage and the absence of my mother. It also made my pizzle as huge and as hard as a tree trunk in my breeches.

I promised to be honest, so now I will keep that promise. No doubt as an example of the sort of weakness and poor character that beset me, much of my time was spent in the practice of, what I came to think of as, “yanking”. The sin of Onan. Not uncommon, I now suspect, in lads of that age, but nevertheless, it is difficult for me to admit, as the son of a man of the church, that so much of my time and thoughts was spent in such an introverted and unproductive habit. Unsavoury, perhaps, but it is the truth. I felt some guilt, but never enough to prevent me returning to the pursuit.

More than guilt, though, I felt regret. A terrible pervasive all-consuming sorrow that I would never know the pleasures that such congress with a woman would bring. I knew by then, without any consolation of doubt or hope, that I was ugly. More than just plain; my features repelled others, made me an outcast. Looking back now across the long corridor of time, I can feel again that certain knowledge of my own unwantedness; that awful hollow longing that, mixed with the natural drives of a young man, snarled me up inside. It demanded release in some way.

I cannot blame the book. I have no memory of the exact date or occasion when I started the shameful habit, but it was well established long before my arrival at Pyske House. Suffice to say, the Grimoire led me down some strange paths to some strange thresholds, but I chose the doors I passed through. For a while later, for a long time in fact, I was confused about the role of the book, and of Ebenezer Bliss, in later events. I blamed him, as one would blame a dark angel, for corrupting both others and myself; for putting our feet upon the Primrose Path to doom. But monsters create themselves out of their own delusions; - if anything the mysterious Mr. Bliss lit the candle that I eventually followed from gloom back to sunlight.

But I jump a long way ahead.

The story of the garden played on my mind. My memory of the Bible story was of an Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and had ended in expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Essentially, both the stories were the same. But there was no expulsion in this new version. God had left the Man and Woman to do what they wished. The Serpent had come from somewhere else, like God.

What was it supposed to mean? Why did God leave the Serpent there?

It was the picture that kept me returning to the book.

I turned the pages of the book at random.

A ritual to conjure up a demon called Mabook. It seemed to involve a mandrake root, for which I had no idea where to look, so I turned again.

A treatise on the alchemical transmutation of blood into wine, and vice versa. That began with the “usual ritual to change air into fire and water into earth.” I turned again.

“The Awakening of the Sleeping Beauty,” which was an epic poem. I had no patience to decipher poetry, despite the beautiful illustration of a barely covered princess asleep on a raised dais. The plate was entitled, “red lips awaited parting…”

And so it went on.

***
There were two forests behind Pyske House. Both occupied the same space, but at different times.

The first forest was the daytime forest. This was the wood of squirrels and pigeons, horse chestnuts and stoic trunks with bark that you could break off to reveal woodlice and ants. The earth was made of clay, or mud, depending on the weather. A solid place, where sounds were linked to mundane causes like deer or birds or whatever other creatures went about their lawful business of rooting or stalking. A place where I could wander and collect pine cones or acorns or polished pebbles just as I wished.

But then there was that other forest, the one that emerged as twilight neared. The sounds changed, became more mysterious. Leaves whispered instead of rustled. Trees guarded or hid, or frowned down at me, where before they had merely stood. Night creatures stirred, and crawled or slithered or howled. Shadows grew and things changed their very essence. The forest became malign.

Which was the real forest? The mundane wood of wet leaves and snails, or the eerie, whispering wood that came so menacingly alive as the sun sank in the sky?

Both forests were real to me. Do things have a reality other than our perception of them?

The wood had a definite attraction for me, and I suppose it was the mysteriousness of it that attracted. Without that other, darker place of Owls and God knows what else, I think it would have been just a lot of trees to me.
Looking out of my bedroom window at night, I got the distinct feeling that the forest was looking back at me.

Perhaps hungrily…

But it was mid-morning, and the forest was sane enough, when things began to really change again. This happened: I heard a fairy singing.

There are perhaps other explanations, both of what happened then and later, but I cannot find them. I’m sure there will be Alienists and Professors who will explain it all as the Phantasms of the mind in distress, or the delusions of an inherited brain disorder. All these things are possible; - even I suppose, rational. But such an explanation would mean that my whole life as I have lived it, and live it still, is a mirage constructed in my mind. I cannot accept that. The things I relate happened, as best I can remember, exactly as I set them down. Accept or explain away, even disbelieve, as you prefer.

It was bright and autumnal and the wind had become colder. Leaves were beginning to pile up along the paths and form heaps against the trunks of the trees. I do not remember anything specific about the morning before I ventured out, probably I ate porridge with Mrs Hardcastle, perhaps we spoke or, more likely, I ignored her as I ate glumly at the table. My father was in his study or away somewhere else; I have no recall.

What I do remember is the quality of bright light streaming down through the trees, dispelling the earlier mist and reminding me of the light streaming into my father’s gloomy church from the narrow windows high above. At first, my breath appeared in plumes before my face, but the sun quickly drove that away too. It was one of the days when summer revisits after autumn has arrived.

I was dressed in a pair of outdoor boots over long stockings, breeches and a long jacket of the darkest green. I had a woollen scarf and a pair of mittens to keep the cold at bay. I stuffed these in the pocket of the jacket as the morning warmed up.

When I first heard the voice, I could not make out any words, nor could I work out from which direction it was coming. It was a distant, lilting sound.

The first snatch stopped as soon as I started to listen for it. At least, that was how it seemed. Unsure whether I had heard anything, I stood, not breathing, ears straining into the forest around. Only the rustle of wind.

Even the birds were silent. Everything was silent.

Then I heard it again.

Here’s my heart, ’tis yours to keep
For its loss, I’ll never weep

Before, ‘twere hungry and cold
Scared of life, not proud or bold
So deep it hid, its eyes tight shut
An unborn rose, still yet a bud
Waiting for your kiss to wake
Now my heart is yours to take

So, here’s my heart, it’s yours to keep
For its loss I’ll never weep

Oh here’s my heart, please keep it warm
Once it’s given, forever gone
Goodbye to my childhood cares
Goodbye to all those nursery fears
Farewell to stories at the hearth
No more infant’s gurgling laugh
My heart is ready now to flower
To bloom, to blossom, unleash its power

So here’s my heart, keep it forever
Through sunny days and stormy weather
Every lass must take a chance
On fortune, doom, or merry dance

Take my heart and wrap me tight
Now at last the time is right
Here’s my heart, ’tis yours to keep
For its loss, I’ll never weep

I moved as stealthily as I could over the treacherous leaves and betraying crack of twigs and sticks. I could hear her clearly now, singing in a high, ethereal voice like choirboy sent from heaven. A sort of sick excitement roiled my stomach.

I peered out through a gap in the nettles and prickly bush at the sudden widening and slowing of the river into a large pool or small lake. Only her head and shoulders were visible above the water, and my first thought was, she must be freezing.

Then I thought, she is naked in the water.

Her hair was white, but as a rose is white, not drained of colour like Mrs Hardcastle’s frosted grey. Even wet, her white hair clung to her milky shoulders like a flash of sunlight in the grey water.

My heart pounded like a war drum in my ears.

I have no memory of how long I watched before the moment when, as sudden and graceful as a tigress, she sprung out of the concealing water onto the far bank and stood in a patch of bright sunlight, as careless as Eve before she met the serpent.

That vision of her, standing with her head arched back and fingers stretching the tangles from her long white hair, will stay with me until the day the Lord Himself returns to sit in judgement for our sins. And, if not averting my eyes from the rounded symmetry of her hips, the pointed darkness of her nipples and the strange absence below her round belly, if it were a mortal sin to gaze as I did that day, then all I can say is that I would suffer an eternity in hellfire rather than lose such a memory.

I had never seen a naked woman before, except in the illustrations in the Library. Even so, I knew she was in the first bloom of womanhood, perhaps no older than me. Fairies reckon time differently, of course. My own body responded to hers exactly as a thirsty horse would respond to water. My body yearned for hers.

I shifted slightly to ease the trapped hardness in my breeches.

I do not know exactly how I knew she was a fairy, but I knew straightaway. She had pointed ears and a nose that was pointed slightly too, but I think it was more the ethereal quality of her voice, and the way she was so relaxed in her nakedness that convinced me. Perhaps fairies have no taint of original sin as we do, and no need to cover their flesh so jealously from the eyes of others. Whatever it was, she was there, she was naked, and she was beautiful.
I do not know how long I watched, scared to move a muscle lest she sense me there. All the weight of my longing, for lust and love, bore down on me as I stared, awed, at a creature out of dreams.

She put her clothes on after a while, a green and golden dress that shimmered around her like mist and sunshine. I wondered where she had come from and whether, if I watched for long enough, I would see where she went. The route back to fairyland!

I wish I had watched long enough to find that route, now.

She sang another song, this time in a language I did not understand. Then she laughed, joyful and musical, like water dancing over pebbles.

If it possible to be in love with a stranger, heart over head in love, against all reason; then I was in love with her. Perhaps there is such a moment for everybody, a glimpse of perfection destined to haunt them through the dark imperfect steps ahead. A dream of what might have been.

I determined to keep my eyes on her constantly. If I could watch her without breaking concentration, track her every move without loss of concentration, then I could find out where she came from. Where she lived. If I took my eyes off her now, I might lose her forever.

Like all such plans, it was doomed to failure.

I think it was a fox that disturbed me, and her. Something came upon me anyway, and, startled, disappeared in a flash of red and white. I think I saw its tail as I turned my head to see where it went. My eyes were off her for a second or two only. I looked back at the riverbank, and then scoured the bushes and trees on either side. It was no use.

She was gone.

***
I do not really remember getting back to the road. It was a large patch of forest, stretching as far as East Moor, and I could have easily got lost in it. But I found my way back to the path somehow.

There was nobody I could talk to about the singular event that had just taken place. I did not think Mrs Hardcastle would take kindly to talk of naked fairies, and my father barely seemed able to speak to me about anything. In any case, would I have discussed it if I had had a friend, or a sibling, or a mother to confide in? I think not. This was a secret that involved violent feelings and emotions, reactions I needed to think in private before I could have confided in anybody.

Not that there was anybody.

Besides, I urgently need to yank myself.

***
Over the next two days, I wondered whether the fairy had bewitched me. The thought of her sprang unbidden into my mind repeatedly. Whatever I was doing, peeling potatoes with Mrs. Hardcastle, reading the books in my room, or lying in the front field, her image would jump fully formed into my mind, like the goddess who had leapt fully grown, and to my mind fully formed and voluptuous, from the thigh of Zeus. The pictures in the Grimoire and the yanking no longer sufficed.

It was her breasts, and her legs, or more specifically her thighs ... and her lips. And the grey eyes…

Sometimes the whole picture, sometimes a delicious detail. I spent most waking hours in a state of uncomfortable tumescence, shifting carefully to adjust the inconvenient swelling in my trousers, or surreptitiously shifting the head of my pizzle from whatever impossible tangle it had embroiled itself. More and more (more than can be healthy, I thought), I would take myself off to where I would not be disturbed, take out my pizzle, and fondle and yank myself to temporary relief. But each “yanking” session just seemed to imprint her image more securely at the front of my mind.

Two things concerned me. Would I see her again, would I be able to find her again? What if she had returned to whatever fairy mound she emerged from, never to return? And the other thing was - if I did find her, how could I avoid losing her again?

I did not have much to offer a fairy, after all. I was repulsive to look at. I only had to look in the mirror to see that, even if I had not already learnt it from my mother and father. I was just a boy, with nowhere to live apart from a room at the top of my father’s house.

It was a story in the Grimoire of Ebenezer Bliss that gave me an idea.


The Tale of the Rhine Maiden

By the banks of the Rhine, there lived a beautiful maiden, called Lamya. She was descended from elves and sirens, and was fair to look at, and she sang with the voice of her ancestors.

It came to pass one day that a young prince called Vladimir was travelling in the land. He had ridden far that day, so he led his horse down the banks to drink from the clear water of the river. As he splashed the cold water on his face to wash off the dust from the road, he heard the sound of a girl’s voice singing. It was unlike anything he had before, and he had travelled widely.

Leaving his horse tethered to a tree, Vladimir crept along the bank, concealing himself behind the trees and bushes. Through the branches he saw Lamya. She was naked as she bathed, and Vladimir had never seen a girl so beautiful. For a moment he considered seizing her immediately, but he decided to wait and see what she would do next.

When she had bathed and sang, Lamya went to a tree and cloaked herself in a garment concealed in its leaves. It was a scarlet cloak and hood, and covered her completely, hooding her eyes so that just her scarlet lips could be seen. Once attired, she spun around three times, and disappeared.

Vladimir waited for some time, but the girl did not reappear. He went back to his horse, but his mind was occupied by the beauty and grace of the girl he had seen. How could he have her for his own?

Now it happened that there lived a wise woman but a few leagues from that place. Vladimir rode his horse to the cave where she lived. She lived in rags, on a meagre diet of bread and water, and she greeted him with a toothless grin.

“I will pay you any price to obtain the thing I want, for she is my heart’s desire,” Vladimir said to the old witch.

The Witch cackled. “Any price? Perhaps, we will see. For my advice I will charge you one piece of gold.”

He paid his gold and asked her:

“How can I have the Rhine maiden as my own?”

The wise old hag chewed like a cow with cud. “Tell me what you have seen, and I will advise you.”

So Prince Vladimir described exactly what he had seen to the wise woman. When he had finished, and she had chewed for a while, she said:

“My advice is to forget this stolen vision. Go back to your golden palace in your honeyed lands and take a wife from a neighbouring Kingdom.”

The prince became angry. He put his hand on his sword hilt.

“You have my gold already. Tell me how I can have the maiden!” he cried.

The crone cackled. She was not afraid of his sword. She spoke again:

“I will tell you two ways. You can woo her, as a man woos a woman. You have many charms: wealth, youth and a handsome countenance. You could win her heart and take her off to your golden palace. That is the way it has ever been”

The prince looked into his own heart. He did not think such a beautiful maiden would love what he found there.
“That way is uncertain,” he said. “What is the other way?”

“The other way will cost you, as I have said. Bring me a lock of her hair that she has plucked from her own head, and a lock of your own princely hair. Bring me both, and I will work a spell that you will live long in each others’ company.”

So the prince returned to the River. He thought hard of how he could obtain a lock of her golden hair, willingly given. For a while he considered wooing her, opening his secret heart and winning her love. But again, doubt took hold of him. At last, he came up with a plan.

The next morning, as the sun started to rise, Vladimir hid himself again amongst the bushes near the River. Soon, the beautiful Lamya appeared, and took off her hooded cloak. Vladimir gasped at her beauty as she hung the cloak carefully in a small willow tree. The maiden descended into the water to bathe, and sing.

Quickly, Vladimir crept to the willow tree, and found the cloak. He put on the cloak, spun himself round three times, and became invisible. Vladimir had seen many marvels around the world, but still he was astonished. Cloaked against sight, he walked down to the water’s edge, and watched Lamya swim, and listened to her sing. He was deeply moved by her beauty and grace.

As the morning drew to a close, Lamya finished her swim, brushed her golden hair and returned to the willow tree in search of her magic cloak.

“Alas! Who has taken my cloak, and left me naked and cold?” She cried out. Vladimir, who stood nearby, was moved by her plea.

“Do not fear, I have your cloak,” he said, softly. “I am prince Vladimir of the golden palace, and I am enraptured by your beauty.”

“I am Lamya, of the Silver River,” she replied. “Will you give me back my cloak?”

“Certainly, I will,” said Vladimir. “But how can I be sure that you will not don the cloak, and vanish? Then I would never see you again, and that would break my heart.”

“That is certainly possible,” Lamya said. “But I will stay while you tell me of your golden palace. If your words are sweet enough, and your face is kind enough, I will go with you there.”

Vladimir considered this. He could speak to her of the grandeur of his throne-room, and of the songs of a thousand different birds in the lush gardens. Of the mirror-like lake, full of giant fish of every colour. Of the cellars filled with wine from every corner of the world. Of the mountains that stretched so high that they wore helmets of snow. He could describe his stable containing the swiftest horses in the realm, and the woods with the finest game. He could tell her of perfectly cut gemstones, the finest woven material, sculptures hewn from the whitest marble…

“I will give you back your cloak,” he said, finally. “But first you must pluck a hair from your head, and give it to me.”

Lamya bowed her head, as though in shame or penitence. Silently she pulled a golden hair from her head and held it out towards his voice. Vladimir took the tress. Then, still invisible, he put his hand upon her breast, and kissed her lips.

“I will leave your cloak upon the tree,” he whispered in her ear. Then he left her.

Leaving the cloak, he rode his horse at full gallop to the Wise Woman’s cave. The vision, scent and softness of Lamya filled his senses.

“Old hag!” he called into the cave. “I have obtained what you asked. Hurry, for I must possess her immediately”
The old woman came out of the cave and cackled as she looked upon him. “So you have returned. Did you bring me both locks of hair?”

Prince Vladimir pulled a black lock from his head, and put it with Lamya’s golden hair. The hag took them both and went back into the cave. He waited impatiently.

The day was over before she came out. He leapt towards her. “Is it done?” he asked. “Is she mine?”

“The spell is done, at last.” The witch sighed. “The maiden will come here tomorrow, and dwell with you forever.”

“Come here? Then I must wait the night here with you?”

“I will not be here. I have lived here for more than a hundred years, and I wish to go back into the world. You will live here with your princess, and I will live in your golden palace, and grow young again on the land’s fruit, while you age slowly in your hole in the ground. That is the price of the spell. ”

The prince knew then that he had tricked himself, and all his arguments did not sway the Wise Woman. She took a sturdy staff, and the prince’s fine horse, and left Vladimir to wait for his new wife.

The next morning, Lamya came to live with Vladimir in the cave. And after many years, Vladimir forgot his palace, with its stables and statues, and his lands with its orchards and livestock. He forgot about the different lands that he had visited, and the marvels that he had witnessed. For the rest of his life he dwelt simply in the cave with Lamya.

But Lamya never forgot the River, and mourned for its waters each day. She waited patiently for her husband to die, so that she would be free.



Tommy's story...TO BE CONTINUED