The Madhouse Seeress
The soil of the Hart Island potter's field is ashen with memories. The gray earth seem to crumble beneath the soles of my shoes, seemingly pliant under my feet, although I am aware deeply inside that there will be no trace of me. I'm never going to leave footprints again- there shall be no imprint of mine on the body of the living breathing earth, no echoing trail of letters on the pulpy whiteness of the paper, no fingerprints on the smooth edge of the porcelain or in the tender crease of somebody's palm.
Through the crisscrossed nakedness of the advancing woodlands Pavilion asylum waited, its old marble walls seemingly alive with the green death moss that grew upon them. It was easy to forget that the devouring green monster that had clutched the walls in its eternal embrace, that symbol of eternal decay was invisible in the world of the Quick, for no Quick were around and the world of the living seemed nonexistent here where the Veil seemed thinner than the morning mist. World of earthly joys and earthly horrors, world where Scarlett O' Hara roses bloomed in early June its scarlet faces reflecting the twilights of insane and hopelessly romantic. A place of summer heat and blue skies, where dogs and newborn children still exist and the things which can hurt your soul stay intangible and out of reach. World where music never means death and death is a welcomed repose, endless sleep devoid of dreams; sweet refuge from the razor sharp touch of morning's featureless palm.
Wasn't that world a distant dream, a place of myth and fable, a childhood memory woven from endless summers and kite's wavering flight?
After stashing Archie's car in the middle of the forest that seemed reclusive and unpopulated by the dead population of Hart Island I went towards the Pavilion asylum, across the barren field that used to be New York's greatest pauper's bone orchard.
The graves, invisible in Skinlands, still gaped open like wounds in the sickly grey earth's flesh. As I walked between them I paid no mind to the faces of wraiths that housed that valley, most of them still clinging to some old rotten bone their last material memento of the life. Their faces wanted no conversation, no greeting. Their eyes diverted themselves with the unerring swiftness of the well prepared gesture. There were soldiers of Confederacy, grey tatters of their uniforms clinging to their scarecrow corpora, clutching their useless relic muskets with bony crow-fingers. There were homeless ones, derelicts, drowned sailors and victims of murder with no name, all of them standing there, aimless their gazes tracing the fine gray dust that covered everything. In their minds they drew symbols in the ash; arcane drawings that questioned their destinies.
Don't ask me how I knew it. I simply did, because every passion touches you, when you are nothing but a emanation of your living sorrow, dressed in a mirage of Legion's business uniform, but actually for the first time bared before your Peeping Tom- heart.
The Pavilion madhouse stood before me, and I could see stiff masculine cold emanating from its walls. The wall, grey and ruinous, but still painfully hard in its claustrophobic reality circled the building and its adjoining courtyard, overgrown in faded foliage. Rusty brown plaque on the wall's broad chest honored the good enlightened men who have commissioned the asylum; and two of them, dressed in their best turn of the century cloaks stood before it harvesting pleasure from the crumbs of this pitiful remembrance. For a moment there seemed to be music; a light melody of the flute or bagpipes filling the old graveyard and everyone seemed to listen for a while; even the cold wind blowing strait from the Tempest's freezing gullet stop listening to the cheerful melody. The two men woke from their meditation of self-indulgence their hollow eyes rendered dreamy with sudden eerie melody. I stopped, my body thrust halfway through the heavy gate of the asylum's courtyard. I forgot myself momentarily (Remember Syv, let me give you the edge. You head hurt and the car was going down the driveway, yes Sylvia it's tattoo slowly tattooed itself into deeper parts of your brain like a lesion, a slow tumor of awareness…), the music making me lift my thin porcelain hands with chewed up fingernails in front of my eyes. Lie of music was cut short by the moan that came from within the old red bricked building. Everything went silent, only thing that I felt was the sobering thorn of compassion causing jitters all over my body, overflowing me with a fresh and rarely felt joy of my own emotional realness. Walking into the courtyard I noticed that the pale vegetation was coated with a fine film of the same gray dust that seemed to be everywhere on the island. Leaves and blades of grass seemed to be choking under the grave dust, its tender touch returning everything to one true beginning. She stood on the other side of the arched gate, behind the old, almost crumpled admissions desk. Her wild hair covered the torn nightgown, her nervous fingers toying with the ivory comb. It was impossible to tell her age; she was somewhere in the realm of the angels and the insane, sexless and ageless in her hospital terrycloth frailty.
"Have you heard the song, lady?" she asked me, doll-eyes skittering wildly between me and the comb. "He played for you. He blew gently because he wanted to take you with him."
I regained my composure. I didn't wanted no mention of the music. I was paranoid enough as I was and I came here to get some information. I didn't wanted this conversation to head towards the cuckoo-zone too soon.
(Isn't it a bit hypocritical of you after they refused to listen to you, thinking you were crazy. Although you knew everything about it, girl)
I am sorry, I didn't seem to hear a thing." my voice grasped that perfectly calm how-can-I-help-you-could-you-please-help-me tone. "I came here to see the Seeress. Is she here?" A gentle nod, her eyes floating side to side as if reading my words materialized in the thin air before me. "Can I speak to her?"
There was no audible answer but her face focused and her finger, thin and trembling pointed upward. Another moan was heard.
"Are those stairs to the left leading to the Seeress?" Courtly nod again. "Thank you very much! If you need someone to take care of your inner voice, I can do that. No charge will be necessary, just look me up sometimes, will you?" No answer whatsoever. Fingers gently stroking the ivory teeth of the comb. I hurried along the stairway, and found myself in the narrow, dark hallway. I traced it carefully. On both sides of me, cells of the asylum inmates gazed at me. In some of them were the poor women, many of them still tormented by the very same demons that had landed them here in their breathing days, still pressed and harrowed by the isolation and silence that had descended upon their minds when society took their words away from them and turned them into the army of nightgown Ophelias, disheveled sentinels guarding that dusky realm populated by creatures of Almighty Reason's nightmares. Now dead patrol was lost in their kingdom of screaming delirium and blank-eyed catatonia, the last platoon of hearts that still clung to the bloody walls despite owl's talons of despair carrying them away. Hallway went on and on, endless and dreamless, rasping sharp cough of those withered by consumption mixing with the moans of those dying, depressed and insane. On its end a room yawned, littered with thousands of leather shoes. Plaster was scraped of the walls. Three wraiths were inside, and I needn't ask twice, Kismet be damned which of them was the fabled Madhouse Seeress.
She sat on the throne made of discarded shoes, made by troubled, empty eyed inmates and then forgotten. I could not say which of them were the abandoned relics, destroyed and then resurrected here as the objects that represented somebody's last anchor to the slimy bottom of late Victorian sanity and which of them were intangible material shoes, still whole in the Skinlands. I realized it was impossible because Veil here was virtually nonexistent- if a mortal stood here, he or she could hear echoes of our voices, could feel the grey winter of death freezing his nerves like pipelines froze in London winters.
Her frame was heavyset, eyelids drooping, lips full and stretched into eternal grin. It was not grin of insanity, but of foreboding wisdom that strikes one with raving madness and sharp sanity at the same hour. Hear white hair was raised and stiff fin de siècle bun, and reclining there, naked columns of calves stretching underneath her hospital gown, she looked like a demented caricature of some old Victoria Regina's portrait. There were two other woman in the room and by the expression of bare admiration and servility on their faces I could tell there are her thralls. Soul slaves were usually privilege of the Stygian aristocracy and how did she got them I didn't know, but I remembered my conversation with the old gentleman aboard "General Slocum" who warned me that being indebted to the Seeress was a bad idea.
"You came." The pudgy flesh around her mouth shivered as she spoke. "Before you ask I must hear the screams of your money. One Obolus will grant you three answers. Half of one will grant you one. Pay and ask, Miss Plath."
I stifled my impulse to recoil in surprise at the sudden mention of my name. It was probably a parlor trick, smoke and mirrors employed by Oracles to inspire awe. I opened my small pouch and drew one Obolus out:
"I have only two questions Seeress."
She nodded lazily, reminiscent of a huge spoiled cat waiting for her meal. There was something deeply repulsive in that nod; as if she thought that she could bend entire world to her will if she wanted but the world isn't worthy of her time. One of the thralls, frightened blonde girl no older than sixteen crossed the room on worried feet and took the coin from me. My smile of compassion went seemingly unnoticed by this poor soul. The Seeress brought the coin to her ear. Behind her widening grin, there were fanglike teeth, wolfishly white in their clear cruelty. I could smell the stench of her domineering Shadow through those teeth
"Three you paid and three you're gonna get." A slight southern drawl was coiled in her voice and I asked myself, with curious disgust who was that slave-driving fortune-telling matron in her breathing days? Was she some rich tobacco Queen from Georgia brought to insanity by the destruction of '65? Did she remember fondly, as she withered here, the bright antebellum summers, when she sat parasol in hand on the porch of her mansion, listening to the sharp cry of the overseer whip and turning her teacup over to read her future? I struggled to bury my hatred for her deep, to strangle it before it distorted lines of my mien, but if she had sensed it, she didn't react. She probably didn't care much; the bullwhip was hers to crack.
"I want to know where is the spirit of Sarah Emma Smith, daughter of Isaac Smith, who currently haunts Christopher Street eleven in Greenwich Village."
"Tell him that he is going to find her daughter when she finds out why is she here. He should keep in mind, however, ", she slowly brought each of her words forth as if she was measuring them, looking them from every side and scaling them (A pound of flesh; no more nor less) before actually articulating them. " that she no wish of being found. She si engrossed in mystery of her own demise."
"Alright. I have one more question. Who is Cleo? She was big in Stygia in the times before Charon disbanded the Guilds. What can you tell me about her."
"She is a fool!", the large woman thundered, echo of her voice making me shudder in spite of my efforts. Mostly because I saw black spittle of her Shadow flying from her fat lips and realized that it was her inner darkness that she used to draw upon her prophecies. I remember Mr. Smith calling her generally "good natured" and wondered if he was sorely misguided or had he met the Seeress before her Shadow grasped control of her. " She names herself the Voice of hope in her pitiful ignorance but she doesn't know that despair has its own knights- an old rhetoricus, a young cavalier, and a boy with seven headed snake. Her madness sires children that are going to be her own undoing, for Chronos himself couldn't eat all of his spawn." She calmed down, her face again the very picture of lazy satisfaction. "There is your answer, miss Plath. I must say that you have managed to surprise. You didn't ask the question everyone with your sign asks of me. But you still have one more."
"Thank you for your answer." I hated myself for letting my voice shudder & become low and scared. I backed into the wall and started passing through.
(A frightened girl shutting herself into her room. Really? You came back to this? You disappoint me, girl.)
"Wait!" Her voice stopped me in my tracks one of my legs disappearing into the wall, other rested uneasily on the carpet of cast away shoes." You paid for three and three you are going to get, Miss Plath! I never cut anybody short."
There were eyes, small eyes peeking through the heavy eyelids like an implied insult that somehow manages to hurt more deeply.
"Remember Miss Plath," the Seeress whispered. "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…"