Chain of Empathy
The first link in the chain of empathy that would eventually bind Berthe to an obscure and fiery plane was forged the instant she spied the blacksmith’s nail that had been stabbed into the trunk of an oak tree.
She’d been taking advantage of the first temperate day since October by riding her bicycle, pressing her way across the sucking mud of the lanes near her parents’ farm. Berthe was a free woman with no interest in suitors, and as a consequence she had no prospects of security, nor did she truly wish to have any. She had grown inured to simply mimicking the shiftless existence of her parents. She occupied the same narrow chamber where she’d been birthed. Her adult life had truly been little more than a protraction of her adolescence. There were the same daily chores to be accomplished, the same perfunctory conversations to be had around the supper table. Of late, Berthe began to find these rituals stifling. What had once brought comfort now caused her to inwardly cringe, whether it be her habitual laughter at her father’s jokes or her singing ballads with her mother whenever the two of them hunched over their spindles to pull wool for the loom. Today, she yearned to feel something of her genuine roots.
It was as if there were two distinct souls dwelling in her skin: one obvious; dutiful and calculatedly naïve and performatively virtuous; the other, a latent yet sharp yearning for something Berthe could never quite define. It constantly tested her, allowing her only a few stolen moments of contentment now and again before once again filling her mind with briars.
Berthe had been happy to allow her superficial self to steer her. Life was much steadier this way; the lulling pattern of chores and family and rest and church on Sundays. But her latent self was forever giving hints of itself, teasing her with not only its grand scope but also how inextricably bound to her it was. Berthe could feel it stirring at the base of her spine, at the back of her skull; an iceberg showing glimpses of its drowned base when the waters are tossed. Its influence upon her had become so strong that in her private diary Berthe had begun to refer to this second self as ‘the Master.’
Today, as she pedalled over the mud, the Master felt nearer than it ever had before. When she spotted the oak with its strange nail, Berthe was convinced that it was the Master who’d led her to this spot.
The blacksmith’s nail had appeared to Berthe peripherally at first, insinuating itself into her field of vision, faintly but persistently, the way haints are rumoured to appear to unlucky folk in these parts. She slowed her bike and turned her head to better study the jutting black thing. The nail (which she first mistook for a sailor’s marlinspike, akin to her great-grandfather’s, which still hung by the chimney to ward off Hearth-Eaters; angry spirits who are said to crawl down the chimneys of unprotected homes and devour all family ties) had been driven into the trunk.
Everything about the scene made Berthe morose. The oak was still weeks away from budding, so its naked limbs appeared arthritic and feeble. The way the nail had been plunged in suggested something sinister.
She stared intently for a time. Her shallow self knew that it was best to leave things as one found them, but the presence of the Master was welling up inside her, filling her, washing away all the internal fences Berthe had always relied upon to compartmentalize her life. The Master was rapidly becoming her all.
Entranced, Berthe was able to watch with icy detachment as her physical body dismounted the bicycle, marched to the tree, and quickly pulled the nail free. It popped out with such ease that for a moment Berthe was shocked by this hidden reserve of might. Only after she’d deposited the chunky black peg into the pocket of her trousers and had begun to pedal away did it occur to her that the nail may have been there not to punish, but to keep something contained…
Something that had helped her pry the nail loose.
Something awful.
Berthe’s stomach felt foul and she feared she might pass out. ‘What have I done?’ she thought.
She pedalled as fast as her strained legs would allow but could not place what felt to be a safe distance between herself and the punctured oak. The urge to start sobbing was strong, but she fought it nobly. After the road had placed enough twists and valleys behind her, Berthe began to feel reasonably secure. She was homeward bound now and was excited by the notion of returning to that womb of familiar walls.
A sharp popping noise startled and momentarily confused her. The realization that it was the sound of her front tire being punctured registered only after her bicycle began to wobble and pedaling became all but impossible. She dismounted. Her heart sank as she studied the ruined wheel. Although she was no more than two kilometres from the family farm, Berthe felt like a castaway. She allowed herself a brief cry before wiping her cheeks, righting herself, and commencing to walk, dragging the useless bicycle through the clay.
Somewhere on this journey she began to sense—palpably, undeniably—a legion of perdu companions moving at her sides, her back. The sensation outwardly scared her, summoned gooseflesh and shudders. Yet inwardly, at some remote nerve-end where she imagined the Master might be enthroned, there burned an ember of excitement, of unspeakable pleasure. Were these haints or Hearth-Eaters, Berthe wondered? Whatever they were, they infused the breeze and the fields and the empty lanes with fullness, as though the Earth itself was ballooning up, swelling to the point of bursting.
Berthe reached a hand into the pocket of her mud-flecked trousers and squeezed the concealed nail, pressing it like a winemaker would a grape: in quest of its juice, its essence.
“May this nail ward off the stalking fey and all sprits foul,” she muttered desperately.
But the ghost parade remained in-step with her until the main road met with a nameless lane that curved southward, in the opposite direction of her farm. The hopelessness Berthe had felt only a moment ago was suddenly replaced with a fresh, delicious sense of everything around her becoming larger and more textured. It enthused her, made her more daring. She now wanted to explore, to do something (no matter how small) that she had never done before.
She rolled her bicycle toward the nameless lane down which she’d never ventured. Titillated by the novelty of it all, she followed the compelling slope.
In all probability, what Berthe saw and felt while she crept along was purely romantic, but the sky did seem to darken with her every step, and the wind did pick up and cause the gnarly tree limbs to cluck like scolding tongues. In time Berthe would come to accept that many of these impressions could have all been in her mind, but she might never, even in throes of a crisis of faith, question herself once she reached the end of that lane and witnessed the gravehands labouring in the tiny cemetery.
Berthe had known the burial ground was here, or she’d heard tell of it at least. Her parents always referred to it as ‘the pioneer cemetery’ or ‘the founders’ graves.’ And if the headstones were any indication, these plots were very old indeed. The markers were pale and wind-smoothed, jutting up from the soil like rows of misshapen teeth. The fence of woven wire sagged and was brittle with rust. The grounds themselves were shamefully neglected.
Why then, in a place so obviously lapsed, would there today be a trio of gravehands, wholly engrossed in their labours?
The figures (Male? Female? Berthe could not exactly say) went unwaveringly about their task. One worked the land with a pitchfork, stabbing and turning the soil, their actions more akin to a gardener’s than a gravedigger’s. The other two walked silently in and out of the stout vault that had been built into a hillock at the rear of the grounds.
Berthe’s grandfather had once told her that this vault had long ago been used to store the winter’s dead, when the early villagers had to wait until the spring thaw before they could bury their loved ones. Until that time the cadavers would be wrapped in linen shrouds and piled inside the vault like cut logs in a woodpile. The account had given Berthe nightmares when she was small, ones in which she would find herself trapped inside a cabin whose walls were not logs, but shrouded corpses that wriggled and moaned inside their linen cocoons. But today, standing in the vicinity of the actual vault, whose doors of corroded iron sat open like the covers of a holy book on a pulpit, Berthe experienced a sensation beyond fear. It was something richer. (Later, Berthe would struggle to accurately name this sensation in her diary. The nearest word she could conjure to describe it was ‘fascination.’)
The two gravehands emerged from the vault’s black interior. They carried a body between them. It resembled a great mealworm, until one of its arms slipped out of the ancient shroud, flaunting its humanness, its mortality. The fingernails were black, and the flesh was livid, with blotches of pooled fluids forming a multicoloured map on the surface. The gravehands lugged the corpse toward their partner with the pitchfork. The dead arm swung like a pendulum with their every step. Berthe wondered if the body was waving at her, perhaps even beckoning her.
Berthe’s next motions were drowsily executed. Her head felt foggy. Pins and needles coursed through her arm as she once again gripped the blacksmith’s nail and freed it, holding it up so the gravehands might see it. Though she had no idea the reason, it was very important for her to reveal what she had found.
The instant Berthe held out the blacksmith’s nail to the moving shapes in the burial ground, a profound shift occurred. It passed through her like a wave, bringing wonder and dread in equal measure.
The shift, Berthe then came to see, was the Master liberating Itself from her skin.
For the Master suddenly stepped out from the shadowy trees. He spoke to her in a voice as plain as any man’s she’d ever heard.
As to the exact nature of their exchange, Berthe could only remember faint traces. She was too fixated on trying to convince herself of what she was seeing. The Master was a protean thing, shifting in amazing ways whenever Berthe’s analytical mind attempted to pinpoint just exactly what this apparition looked like. One moment the Master was a fit young man dressed in finery, the next, a stooped vagrant propped up by a pair of crutch-style sticks. Always though, a luminous sty gleamed in one of his eyes, like an ember in a stove.
The only aspect that remained fixed was his masculinity. He was a male soul, a counterpoint to her feminine flesh. When he spoke, his voice raised the hackles on the back of Berthe’s neck and warmed between her legs. The Master told her that he had much more to teach her and that this was only the beginning. He promised her that this entire day, from her freeing of the nail to the gravehands to his whispered counsel, would be sewn up for her in a soft pouch of dreaming. This, the Master assured her, was the safest way, for it would place the truth at a necessary distance, enabling her to return to the ordinary world, where she must hide until she was ready to experience their full union.
II.
The Master fulfilled his promise. Berthe awoke to find herself in her own bed. It was late afternoon, and the day had grown blustery and grey. She rose and rushed to the barn where she found her bicycle resting against its pillar, both tires in perfect condition. The only indication that the encounter had been anything more than a midday dream was the blacksmith’s nail, which remained in the pocket of her trousers. Though Berthe found this article of clothing clean and folded crisply inside her dresser drawer, as if new.
This was all the proof she required to purge doubt from her soul. Not once would she regret the oath sworn that day to the Master, in the watchful presence of the gravehands, while she stood on that nameless path.
As a reward for her allegiance, Berthe had been granted fulfillment of a desire she’d harboured for as long as she’d known about haunted places: to move without her body, to experience the world as a ghost does. She was told that such a feat would require a trio of tasks, which Berthe was only too eager to execute.
First, she slipped out of her room and travelled to the place where four roads met. Under the light of a full moon she temporarily buried the blacksmith’s nail at the crossroads, along with a sprig of parsley and a phial of her monthly blood.
Next, she stole the money from the family coffers and sent away for a fine new diary from a bookbinder overseas. It took weeks to arrive, but when it did it surpassed her expectations. The vermilion cover had the stink and texture of genuine leather. Its spade-shaped clasps were burnished bronze. The first time she opened its covers Berthe hearkened back to the open vault in the founders’ graveyard, which summoned a mad grin to her face. Properly weathering the journal was a matter of spritzing the leather covers with rubbing alcohol, then scouring the book’s surface with a bundle of copper wire. She then painstakingly stained each page with soggy tannin leaves and the heat of a beeswax taper.
By the time the tome was ready for her third precious task, a harvest moon was brightening Berthe’s bedroom window. On the appointed night she ignited a fresh candle, slaked her fountain pen with ink, and switched her writing tool from her dextral hand.
She began to write.
As to the nature of the message, Berthe had only dim intuitions. She willed herself to remain aloof, to allow the words to flow solely from the cold, airy appendage that had closed over her own and now guided it. She recalled the rotted arm dangling from the shroud and wondered if this hand had now closed over hers in order to guide her.
Day was nearly breaking by the time this phantom limb slithered back from wherever it had come. By the last guttering flits of the candle’s stump Berthe scanned the stained pages. Upon them a new pledge had been offered, which, through written by her hand, Berthe knew had come from the Master. She vowed to whisper these words into her pillow the following night, which would allow her to come to him.
The next night her mouth struggled with the bizarre charm, and in the end she shed her body like worn clothing and drifted into the night.
The experience of caroming from treetop to treetop, of having the bats sensing her skinless presence with their sonar and accepting her as one of their own, of passing nearer to the moon than she’d ever thought possible; all these sensations were, for Berthe, beyond description, beyond feeling.
At midnight she again met the Master. He was in the founders’ cemetery. His afflicted eye gleamed and winked at Berthe like a shoreline fire guiding her inland. She went to him, dazzled by the playful way he had reconfigured the brittle headstones, presumably just for her. Each marker had been lifted from the soil and made to balance with unnatural grace in a new structure, one that seemed to change depending on Berthe’s vantage of it. From one angle the headstones were arranged like a great marble rose that bloomed from a stem of dense shadow. Yet a mere step to the left transformed them into a cloister, the kind Berthe had seen in books about the great cathedrals overseas.
It was while the gravestones held this latter formation that the Master regaled Berthe with revelations about the Kingdom that sat beneath this world. His voice ran across Berthe’s ears like silk.
It was all too much for her. It was not nearly enough. She swore to do whatever was required to experience the hidden world he described. The Master proceeded to instruct her in whisper.
The chain of empathy that bound the two of them together grew stronger.
III.
Berthe was awoken by a persistent jabbing against her back. She opened her eyes to find herself lying, dressed but dishevelled, in a horse stable.
“Why you restin’ in my pappy’s hay, Berthe-girl?” The voice had the squeak of male adolescence and the tarry drawl of the region. It was an unharmonious mix.
Snapping upright, Berthe saw a rail-thin silhouette standing on the opposite side of the stall. The young man held a pitchfork. Was this one of the gravehands come to watch over her, she wondered?
No, this was the Abban boy. She must have ended up on their property. Berthe struggled to sift memory from dream. Clearly, she had spirited back to her body sometime in the wee hours, but how had she ended up in the Abbans’ barn? The Master had warned that until she grew accustomed to moving out of body, things could easily go awry. She must have drifted back to her bedroom after the Master’s lesson at the founders’ graves, then somehow slept-walk out of the house, across the meadows, to here.
Berthe pulled herself to a standing position and sputtered a blend of apologies and ill-conceived explanations. Rushing from the barn, she turned back to see the Abban boy pointing a stubby finger toward her.
“…ain’t right,” he hollered as Berthe ran. He was a simpleton whose thoughts moved like poured molasses. Nevertheless, Berthe was panicked.
IV.
Time passed, moving in its cyclical way, but a cycle so vast it can give one the impression of forward movement, of progression. Berthe grew older and her folks grew frailer and died in quick succession. She tended to them in their ailing days as best she could, but her thoughts were constantly elsewhere; on honing the skills the Master continued to teach her nightly, on learning to sustain her awareness for longer periods while disincarnated, on caring and keeping safe the blacksmith’s nail (which she now kept inside a mangled wooden pulpit, which she’d rescued when the local chapel had been struck by lightning and burned to charred ruins), and finally on doing her utmost to avoid the Abban boy and his kin at all cost.
Her nocturnal lessons with the Master advanced. He taught her not only how to travel, but also the vital properties of certain rare and toxic plants, which, once she inherited the farmhouse outright, Berthe dutifully planted and tended in the root cellar. She built a tidy little box-garden and filled it with deadly flora. One of her greatest pleasures became to survey the oleander, the starry mountain laurels, the regal purple blooms of monkshood, the plump baneberries, the full trumpets of datura that seemed ready to burst into song, and of course the fine and sacred belladonna.
Though grown and tended in their own unique beds, each plant maintained a hidden connection with its bedfellows. Berthe somehow simply knew this to be so. Joined like threads in a spider’s web, together these toxic blooms formed a veil, formed the veil that distinguished one plane of being from another. And when the time was apt, this veil might lift for her. But for now, discretion was key.
Since the day he’d discovered Berthe in the stables, the Abban boy had grown increasingly obsessed with her. In the beginning this addiction had taken the form of clumsy flirtations, but when Berthe refused his advances the Abban boy grew embittered, spiteful. Rumours of witchcraft soon after began to circulate through the village, which forced Berthe to become intensely cautious, even during her most innocuous comings and goings. She kept her implements (nail, diary, ruined pulpit) secreted in a storage hatch above her father’s old desk, removing them only under cover of darkness.
Her life as a spinster only increased local speculation about her innermost nature and raised questions as to exactly how her folks had passed away. Fortunately for Berthe, her neighbours’ loathing was weaker than their fear of witches. In fact, only the Abban boy ever showed resolve enough to stand at the edge of her field where, in better times, her family’s cattle had grazed. He’d lean on the frail wooden fence and stare at the house. The few times she’d glimpsed him doing this, the simpleton was concentrating so fiercely it was is if he could see through the stone walls of the farmhouse, through the flesh and bone of Berthe’s brow, into her psyche.
It was after just such a fierce visitation from the Abban boy that Berthe (who’d been spying on him from behind the frayed and yellowing cloth of her bedroom drapes) saw him produce a penknife from the chest pocket of his overalls and scratch something into her fencepost before he finally went tearing off down the road.
When she’d gone out to investigate, she found that a symbol had been crudely gouged into the wood. It was the kind of sign Berthe had grown up seeing, usually above the barn doors of superstitious farmers. It was a sigil of exorcising, of purification. Berthe knew that it was only a question of time before the Abban boy managed to convince enough of the locals that it was she that needed to be purified, purged.
All the pieces were falling into place. It could be made no plainer that the time had come for her final departure. This world had nothing to left to offer her. One by one its pleasures had lost their vigor, and its trials lost their joy when conquered. For years now, all the things with which Berthe felt empathy seemed to radiate from another world, or at least from a hidden sector of this world that few people ever sensed.
The time had come to pass through the veil.
Deep down it bothered her knowing that the Master had extended this invitation to Berthe at the very beginning and that she’d naively resisted it. There had always been some promise or glimmer of potential that kept her clinging to worldly life: her relationship with her parents, her duties on the farm, and so on.
Convincing oneself of not needing human company in order to make isolation more tolerable was one thing, willingly writing oneself out of the Book of Life was another thing entirely. Now Berthe felt prepared for a full and final departure.
Hurrying away from the marked fencepost, Berthe worried whether she had the gumption to see this through. But by the time she entered the kitchen, she was prepared to do whatever needed to be done.
V.
At twilight she opened the hatch above her father’s old rolltop desk and retrieved her implements.
She’d cleared a space for herself within the root cellar.
Discerning all the scribbled entries she’d made with her wrong hand was a chore, particularly in flickering candlelight, but she spoke the impossible words and executed the gestures the Master had taught her. Then, with gloved hands, she plucked her box garden barren and ground toxic petal, berry and bud into a rich dust. She removed her gloves to prick her index finger, and then fed just enough blood to transform the powder into a paste.
All around her Circle, the darkness thickened, as if a crowd was gathering to bear witness and their shadows were stretching across Berthe’s sacred space.
Then it came time for her to perform the final tasks, the ones she’d witnessed being done by others when travelling astrally with the Master, but she herself could never bring herself to do. Until now.
With unsteady hands she unfastened and removed her nightdress. The cellar’s dirt floor felt clammy against her flesh as she stretched out before the charred pulpit.
She could sense him now, standing in the blackness just beyond the candleflame’s reach. He was watching her, possibly encouraging her, or assessing her true worth. Would she see this through?
Perhaps to spite the Master, Berthe felt for the pouch and tugged its drawstring. The blacksmith’s nail felt cold and heavy when it landed on her belly. She warmed it by rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger, then took up the mortar and pestle. She smeared the tip of the nail with the poisonous unguent before forcing it between her legs. Wincing, tears streaming down the sides of her reclined head, Berthe plunged the nail into her cleft until its poisoned tip punctured her maidenhead. The unguent seeped into her bloodstream, swam through her circulatory system until it found her heart and loosened her soul from this nest. As this process unfurled, the darkness rimming her Circle was banished by a strange milky light. The Master was now elsewhere, if he had ever truly been in the cellar at all.
Pain and toxicity freed Berthe from her body. She revelled in the dizzying spin of her liberated shade. Frantic as a Saint-Vitus Dance, her fleshless self scaled plane after plane.
The agony of gradual poisoning spore Berthe into a new level of existence.
Her psyche left her body twitching down there in the filth and the shadows. She was free, expanding outward, in every which way. She was moving across the night-time meadows and farms. The leaves of the trees looked like ivory carvings that gleamed in the blackness. Everything appeared softer, more malleable. Berthe had no direction in her flight, she was simply drinking in this fresh liberation.
But no form of existence can be eternally without boundaries, and after a time Berthe began to feel her fleshless self being tugged, like a hooked fish. Had her chain of empathy really been yet another form of tether?
No…He was beckoning her. She followed, toward the only place the Master could meet her.
The founders’ graveyard sat bathed in a scintillant sheen; a glow akin to freshly jostled coals. Drifting nearer to it now, Berthe could see fully (for her entire spirt was now soaked with sight) that the vault in the knoll once more sat open, but its interior held none of the hopeless darkness she’d seen on that fine spring afternoon so many years ago. Tonight, the vault was alight, a roaring furnace. Smoke billowed out of the angled entrance like a black river flowing skyward. The vault mouth seethed with flames of crimson and orange and blue.
Berthe then saw him. He was standing on what she first took to be a platform of black marble, but the closer she went it became plain that the Master was waiting for her at the head of a long black stairway of shimmering black stone. The stairs cut a zig-zag path down deep into the Earth, into the sunken kingdom where the Master held dominion.
And she was going to be with him completely, at long last.
The Master opened his arms to her. He was a silhouette against the backdrop of flame.
Berthe had nearly reached him, when a second figure leapt out onto the crossroads.
Confusion warbled Berthe’s flight. She became momentarily disoriented.
It was the opportunity the Abban boy had been praying for. Screaming a quote from Scripture, he swung at the air. Something glinted in his fist. Too late, Berthe discovered that it was a nail, newly forged by the Abban boy’s father.
Berthe, still a novice at travelling without her body, did not know how to resist him.
He drove the nail into the trunk of an ash tree that grew by the crossroads’ edge. Berthe found herself pinioned. The airy feeling that had enveloped her was pressed out. She was now smothered, stifled. The Abban boy then carved his cherished symbol of protection into the bark of the ash.
In an instant, the subterranean fire was extinguished, the vault door was shut and sealed. The Master was gone.
VI.
Berthe remained outside of her body, outside of time, but trapped. The nail rusted and the Abban family died out. Still, Berthe remained.
Her voiceless beckoning to the Master proved useless. Yet she remained.
There was nothing else for Berthe to do but strive to somehow touch that rare loner who might wander this forlorn path. Most passersby would perceive her Call as nothing more than a chill running down their spine, a symptom of daring to visit a haunted place.
She must be patient. Eventually one would come, one who is as she herself had been; the kind of person sensitive enough to perceive the plea of things unseen. The kind of person who might have empathy enough to pull out the nail and free her, the kind who is willing to forge a new link in the chain.