Benediction, sweet benediction. False hymn and words of death. Oh, forsaken child...
The landscape, grey-green and shaped like eternity, hills as smooth as Tir Na N'og from this distance, closer, imperfection comes out, visi8ble, ime is almost visible in these hills like a four-dimensional landscape. And these hills have been so much to so many people for so long. Slowly a river the colour of lead twists round the hills as a fragile, invisible ghost. These hills are empty now, nearly, and it's sad, humans stumbling through them out of place and practise, no more do these hills run through anybody's blood. And if they do, it's only as an idea.
And they cradle their beloved wound Nemeton, a resting, healing place turned dark and rotten, offering up to the sky a hypocritical call to God, black and repulsively ugly and eternally beautiful and the most extensive, elaborate way of saying memento mori that could ever be devised by human hands. The air there, cold and damp and sorrowful, you can feel it all around you, but you don't know...
And she, undeniably unpretty but decidedly, strangely beautiul. She isn't part of this landscape, isn't born into it, but isn't born into anywhere of this world really. She has felt less welcomed than she does here, with this grey, with the eternity of ocean threatening below the jagged ripped-up cliffs and the sky the colour of death.... Nemeton rising like a memeorial...
And one way of looking at is as dawn pushes thin light as far as it dares to go is that today is just another turn of the earth, dark-light-dark and nothing is any different at all because the dead are still dead and the living are still alive, and while it's easy enough to cross that border one way it is useless to even try to geet back again. Or you could look at it the suspicious kind of way, superstitious, today the air in some places is different, today reality is wearing a biit thin and sometimes you can almost maybe reach through life or reach through it from death. It's a Sunday, melancholy and empty and holy, and it's Hallowe'en, and if Hallowe''en falls on a Sunday it maybe doesn't mean anything but it's a nice coincidence. 31 October, just names and numbers, but then, why anything, if everything means nothng? She lets it mean soomething to her, believes in all this with a quietly unconventional dependance that gives her comfort, and it hasn't let her down, not exactly, not that it promised anything.
Still if there's nothing there except belief, what was there in the voice, calm and sorrowful and yet a little afraid, concerned for the living like a best friend and so far away from them too.
She heard this voice, did not call her Koudelka, called her by her old name. Not her real name. Her birth name. (By now she has no real name. Koudelka, and the name she was born with, and the others she's used, all just labels and mean nothing on their own, nothing without her person underneath them. Like 31st October is just a number and a name; the time, the air, the day and night, that's a feeling.)
She heard the voice, Elaine.
Once upon a time, maybe, Elaine was a heartbreaker, once she was young and in love with a different man every day and though she didn't know, how different this could have been! Elaine found herself in love with Patrick Heyworth but involved with James from Ireland; mysterious, he's seemed at first, someone she needed to figure out, but after not so long she realised that what it was was he was uptight, not just on the surface, but right down to his soul, a true Christian, all Calvinism and hypocrisy. And Patrick was open, he fell in love easily, completely; and yes, she probably broke James' heart, not that anyone'd notice there was anything there to break until it was far too late.
And after Patrick finished university, they lived in an old monastery, like a twisted fairytale.
So they lived happily ever after, until suddenly one day Elaine was alone on the cold marble floor, sputtering blood everywhere, and being so aware, from far away, of this pain and her life ending, and yes she knows it's a cliche but it did, it all happened so fast, facelessly, a break in, and she is in the way, really, this is where money gets you. Her blood, warm and soaking her, soothing in this last moment until she remembered what it is, it doesn't look like she imaagined a lot of blood would and it's all she can think as Death comes before she knows, now, there's a story to tell yourself into the afterlife with, Elaine, but if it had only ended there, if only...
Patrick, with his open intense love and fragile heart, this could have killed him, it didn't but it would have been better if it had. he was desperate and he believed, too, in spirits, afterlives, the possibility of crossing back one way. Elaine has a stone in the graveyard at Nemeton but a body... her body by now... her body was never buried, riight from her death Patrick, deep inside, had no intention of letting her go, letting her die. Not forever.
So with a book a thousand lifetimes old, Patrick followed all the instructions and he gathered up life to put back into her body, he harvested people he didn't know, blind to any consequences except seeing her again, alive, and he carried on, building up life from more deaths, all this time Elaine's body grave-cold and rigid, then softening, melting back into itself, decaying and the prospect of her further from him every day.
It was raining when he finally said the words, these magic words, such a sick fairytale, and yes it worked. Elaine was back, Elaine in that it was her body, in a label, in a name, in that it was her body with life in it. But the life, the feeling that makes a day a solstice or land a place or a moving body a person, it's not her, it's too late for that. This immortal being, this thing, that took her corpse and assimilated the body into itself, that grew, feeding from the soul of the place , the feeling of Nemeton, stronger than anything else.
And this, now this did break Patrick inside, and he killed himself, feeling more and more wretched, lonely and lonely, worse than he ever could have been if she'd only just died and he'd accepted that. Had he killed himself in the sorrow after her death, he'd have been mourning less than this, less would have been lost.
Two hundred lives, Elaine. Oh, it's not her fault but still she feels.... Someone has to do something....
(Incedentally, James' take on this, years later, willl be that even in death they will not be together for Elaine is in heaven and Patrick is in the corner of Hell reserved for suicides; and Koudelka will say to him is suicide really what you find the sin in all that, killing two hundred people and taking it upon yourself to redefine the boundary of life and death and... ylour religion would send him to hell for killing himself?! Then James will call her a godless harlot, like always, and there are going to be a lot of conversations like this, dear Elaine....)
And while this is happening how come no one knows about it, how did they all live and die this out alone and nobody noticed. Look to this monastery, resplendant in dank invisibility. This heap of meaningless stone. It's in the air, this cold sad edge, only autumn brings that kind of sorrow in the air. Maybe not as bitterly cold as winter can be, but something else makes you feel ill, that shiver through your bones and soul. That ending, that''s been here since this place was built, since before. The hills and the cliffs around here, there is this terrible, wonderful finality in dusk, the earth reclaiming itself, knowing that whatever humanity does, it'll never have these hills, we'll never have this place to keep. Like life, it's lent to us, we are permitted to have this as existaance, but where the real control always is, is in time, is in the stone of the cliffs and the earth of the hills, it is older than anything. And eventually people will decide to take over places that don't wear impermeability so clearly on their sleeve. Flat plains hidden under cities, but no, it's never ours to keep. The earth takes over...
...Creeping plant tendrils, quiet dark malevolant. So powerful, breathing death.