IN THE NIGHT I can hear them, the tiny, whispering, tearing noises as they rip themselves free from their wallpaper and fold themselves to slip through the gaps under the doors, behind the skirtings, between the floorboards; folding and unfolding, folding and refolding as they scurry through the sleeping house, touching, exploring, testing, feeling. When I get up to turn on the light and catch them in their foldings and unfoldings, the soft, secret rustlings, they press themselves against the walls and become paper patterns again; they slip under the carpets. And by day I see them everywhere, and nowhere—a flicker of movement; a swift, sudden darting in the corner of my eye that freezes into immobility whenever I turn to look; a looming shadow over my shoulder that, when I spin around, is only a pattern acid-etched into a glass lamp globe.
I know what it is they want from me. They want me to embrace the old magic that has come out of the wood searching for me. They want me to take the hands they reach out toward me, and lead me away. And that both terrifies me and thrills me, because I know there is a part of me that still cries out, Yes, yes, take me away with you. I have had enough of being human. Dress me in Chantilly lace and creme organdy and sweep me away into whatever you will for me and the baby.
Now I understand why, when I first saw that dress, I did not try it on; to have put it on would have been to accept them and their will for me. To put it on would have been to make myself the Maid of the Flowers, the Queen of Morning. I dared not take more than a passing glance in a mirror for fear that She would be waiting there for me, the wedding dress filled with dried flowers. But She is no longer confined to mirrors. She has grown strong, broken free of Her constraints. Looking out the french windows in the drawing room I have seen Her floating, mist-hidden, in the sunken garden. Another time, I saw Her in the summerhouse and the sense of beckoning that overcame me was so powerful that without a thought I was out in the early December drizzle and rushing down the rhododendron walk toward the summoning figure. It was a vain pursuit, of course. I found only cobwebs, and dead moths and the dry woody scent of ancient summers. After stern warnings, Mummy and Daddy forbade me to go outside again until after the baby has come. I do not need to go outside to be in no doubt about where She is beckoning me; from attic to house to gardens to summerhouse, She is leading me, step by step, toward Bridestone Wood. Just before dark yesterday I glanced out my bedroom window and saw Her by the stile across the demesne wall into Bridestone Wood. This morning, looking again, I glimpsed Her through the cold grey mist, a half-seen phantom gliding between the nearer trees at the edge of the wood, beckoning, calling.
This is the essence of my dilemma. Do I accept that call or do I reject it? Dr. Orr and his clinic convinced me of one view of the world; my memories and experiences tell me a different view is true. They cannot be at peace under the same roof—oh, sometimes I feel I am going mad! Everywhere I hear voices, shouting—a voice in every wall, every door, every piece of furniture, shouting, “Decide! Decide! Decide!” Which is it to be, the world or the wildwoods? Choose the world and I dissolve all the magic and mystery and beauty into a foggy limbo of delusion. Do I want to think of myself as a person visited by delusions? Choose Otherworld, and I leave all that Dr. Orr taught me about myself lying discarded, like outworn clothes, on the floor. Decide! Decide! Decide!
The old servants’ rooms are no longer the safe and magical sanctuary I once rejoiced in. The time before last I went up they were filled with a sense of watching, of waiting, of hungry anticipation so menacing that I could progress no farther than the Room of Forgotten Memories, torn between attraction and repulsion. Louder the voices called: Come away, oh human child, to the water and the wild— Louder, the voice of my denial thundered back at them, until I could bear no more, and in a frenzy I picked up the nearest object to hand and blindly smashed it to the floor. Glass shattered— and it was as hushed as the great silence before creation. Broken on the floor lay the framed photograph entitled: Caroly: Wood Nymph: The Time Garden, August 1881.
I had won one small tactical victory, but the inevitable conflict could not be long postponed.
And it was not.
For a week after the smashing of the photograph I had resisted returning to the attic—a week in which the supernatural forces about me seemed to double and redouble their assault as Craigdarragh prepared itself for a final, desultory Christmas. The flicker-shimmer of the Wallpaper People in the edge of my vision was a constant, distracting blur and I was subject to continual headaches. The magic mounted like approaching thunder as the token tree went up, hung with candles. The token streamers were stretched across the drawing room ceiling, and the hall decked with posies of ivy and mistletoe, the door with its holly wreath. In the deep night the entire house would tremble and shudder, as if shaken in a slumber. I knew it would only end when I finally confronted the decision and made my choice. I wondered about the broken photograph in the Room of Forgotten Memories, how my mother had chosen Caroline the toast of Gaelic Literary League over Caroly with the Wood Nymph in the Time Garden, and came to understand why she had left those attic rooms locked all these years. More than anything, I would have loved her to have shared that time with me, but I knew she could not for fear that she might find those doors she had thought so firmly locked and barred had in truth been ajar all these years. So it was that, after long and painful deliberation, I found that there was no choice to be made at all, and, long after the house was asleep, climbed the narrow staircase to the old servants’ quarters, oil lamp in hand.
It was strong in those rooms that night, stronger than I have ever felt it before—a riptide that would sweep me away if for one instant I ever lost contact with the sure foundation of reality. It took all my physical and mental strength to slow its inexorable attraction to an advance of one cautious step at a time. The face of my mother looked through splintered glass at me. Suddenly feeling the need for some defence, I stooped and picked up a long shard of glass, my dagger. The door into the next room opened before me. A mad moonlight, shivered by racing clouds, patterned the floor. Step by step, I was drawn through the room of the discarded clothes into the Room of the Floating Flowers.
Beyond the door, the mirror awaited me. I looked within. There was the Maid of Flowers, in the empty doorway behind me. I whirled, quick as thought, and this time it was no illusion. The folds and pleats of chestnut silk rustled in the softly moving air; the flower heads whispered among themselves. I could have touched it— I almost did. My fingers were reaching out, and then I saw what I was doing, realised the consequence of my action, and lashed out with the dagger of glass from the broken photograph. With an almost human cry, the fabric ripped from breast to thigh. Inside the torn bodice I saw white roots, tangling, twining, moving. I started back in alarm, and out they came. Out of the rolls of wallpaper and the borders and friezes and covings where they had been trapped, the Wallpaper People came, strands and whorls of printed foliage, tearing themselves away from the paper—the sprites, the hobgoblins, the dragons and basilisks and salamanders. They flocked about me, mobbed me; like bats they flittered in my face, caught in my hair. I tried to pull them free and tear them into pieces but they were too many. In desperation I slashed and cut with my glass dagger. I will never forget the horrid, squeaking cries they made as I cut and slashed them with the sharp glass. I cut and cut and cut my way toward the door and into the Trunk Room. I tried to slam the door shut on the Wallpaper People but they were too sprightly, too thin; the few I trapped in the hinge writhed and flapped most horribly. I winced—something had grazed my cheek. A paper hobgoblin flapped away from me and I realised that it had cut me exactly as a sheet of paper, carelessly handled, will lay open flesh. I snatched at the hobgoblin and tore it to pieces but the Wallpaper People were swift to learn this new and dreadful tactic and they mobbed me with renewed vigour, cutting, slitting, gashing. I could not sweep them away from me. I lashed out futilely with my blade and all the while the room beat like a wolf-skin drum as the trunks in which the clothes were stored rattled and thumped impatiently on the bare wood floor. I fled, hiding my face in my hands, into the Room of Forgotten Memories. Scenting blood, the Wallpaper People came after me. Blood ran from my lacerated hands down the sleeves of my nightdress. I could not close the door or they would have been at my mouth and eyes. I stumbled blindly across the room, scattering piles of old photographs. Above and beyond the insistent drumbeat and bat chatter I heard voices calling, the voices of the people in the photographs, those voices from long ago, all calling the same words—Choose— choose— choose— choose— choose— I found myself again looking at the broken photograph of my mother. She regarded me with a terrible look of accusation. The storm of voices and flapping wings peaked to a crescendo around me. For a moment I thought I had tumbled finally, exultantly, into insanity, and she was there, before me, the Maid of the Flowers, in the doorway to the servants’ staircase.
The riptide of panic, confusion, shouting voices, and flocking, snapping paper demons tore at me, tore away the underpinnings of reality to which I had anchored myself. In an instant I was swept away, into the Otherworld. Suddenly everything was clear, everything shone with a tremendous light. I knew what I wanted more than anything in this world or the other. I lunged forward and embraced the Maid of the Flowers in my arms. At my touch all the false life went out of it. It fell in folds around me, and I felt that I was drowning in cascades of flowers and wet, black, smothering earth. The stench of humus clogged my lungs, unclean soil filled my mouth and cheeks so that I could hardly press past it the words, “Yes! Yes, I will, yes.”
I was in the Room of Floating Flowers, before the mirror that stood in the middle of the bare floor. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, the glass skylight admitted a wind-driven moonlight, and all were covered with Wallpaper People. I stooped to touch one, apprehensive that it might leap for my eyes. It was inanimate and immovable, as if it had been painted there. I looked into the mirror. I beheld myself, the Maid of the Flowers, the long-expected Queen of the Morning, dressed in this garment which had been prepared for me from beyond time. I traced the edge of the gash my blade had torn, and the beautiful fabric hung away, baring me from breast to loins. My pregnant belly bulged through the ripped taffeta. I posed, I turned, I spun and wheeled, glorying in the sight of myself in my wedding dress, its folds soft against my skin, scented like spring, like sky. A giddy exultation, almost a drunkenness, burst over me. I raced to the skylight, threw it open, leaned out to bask in the warmth of the moonlight and survey my domain. To the left the land fell away toward the dark sea in parcelled farms and holdings. To the right Ben Bulben rose like a stone dragon breaking from beneath the surface of the sea. Before me, the garden twinkled under frost, its boundaries with the woodland soft, indistinct, as its designer had always intended. And beyond them were the woods. I gasped. Suddenly the house and the gardens became a small ark lost in an ocean of treetops. To my amazed vision, the woods broke the boundaries of the demesne, the land, and even the ocean. They stretched on forever into another country, another landscape. As I beheld, I heard, far off, the horns of the Wild Hunt and the baying of the red-eared hounds of the Ever-Young. I knew what it was they hunted, what it was they had always hunted, through Rathfarnham Woods, through Bridestone Wood, across the slopes of Ben Bulben and the hillsides of my dreams. Soon, very soon, they would come to take me from the dross and drear and ashes of this world into the endless light of Otherworld. Soon, very soon, I would, I will, break apart and cast off my human shape and name and history and all their limitations, and, a current in the sea of dreaming, ever moving, ever changing, immortal, inhuman, become legend.
December 28, 1913
Glendun
Blackrock Road
Blackrock
County Dublin
My Dear Connie,
At last, the hour of synthesis! Months of hacking my way through the jungle of false leads and speculations surrounding the Craigdarragh Case have finally ended; I am at last emerging from the general murk, and may even be able to proffer a tentative hypothesis.
Recent research in England into supernatural activity has uncovered a close relationship between emotionally or sexually troubled adolescents and psychic activity—phantom noises, the odd poltergeist, strange lights in the sky, bizarre changes of temperature in different parts of the home. I don’t think it would strain the definition of supernatural activity too far for it to include the faery manifestations of the Craigdarragh Case, and it seems appropriate for them to be expressions of Emily’s repressed sexuality lashing out from her subconscious.
This was the point I was striving to draw out in the interviews in inquiring about the regularity of Emily’s periods. Many thanks for the copy of the transcripts. This whole endeavor would have been sunk without trace if not for some documentary foundation upon which to build them. Menarche can be a most disturbing time. For some girls, it may be so alarming that it leaves a permanent psychological scar. My intention was to establish a link between Emily’s periods—those times of emotional, sexual, and physiological stress—the faery manifestations, and the electrical disturbances. These latter are far from the insignificant irritations the Desmonds made them out to be. More about them later. For the meantime, the correlation between these elements is exact enough to be extremely significant, though as with everything in this uncertainty-dogged discipline, a fraction short of the incontrovertible. Further, the fact that her periods coincide to an abnormally high degree with the New Moon (in all religions and mythological structures, a time of enormous symbolic and mystical significance), only reinforces my conclusions all the more.
The blessed Yeats would no doubt have us believe that County Sligo (for that matter, all Ireland) is aswarm with faery warriors and mythological heroes only waiting to be discovered, have their photographs printed on the front page of Stubb’s Gazette, etc., etc. My approach would be less literal. Whereas he would maintain that the faeries already existed and were only observed by Emily, I would argue rather that the faeries had no existence at all until Emily observed them; that is, that she in fact created them. The power of will over matter has long been attested to by our navel-contemplating mystic cousins on their snowy Tibetan mountainsides; their contorted psyches can apparently create material, living objects purely by force of will. If they are merely exercising for their own amusement a talent latent within all of us, perhaps it is not so surprising to find it hiding out in deepest County Sligo.
So far so good? Right. Then I shall lead you a little further into the realms of speculation. Taking all the above into consideration, I wonder, is it possible, at a deeply subconscious level, far beyond any yet tapped by hypnosis or even theorised by the good Dr. Freud, that the human mind is in direct contact with the intimate fabric of nature? That there is an underlying mental structure to the universe with which certain individuals, at certain times, under circumstances, can come into direct contact? (Pardon the purple prose, Connie, but the King’s English has yet to devise expressions adequate for expressing this primordial structure.) If, as philosophers insist, reality can only be what we perceive it to be, is it possible that, in contact with this subjective sea of being, the very nature of it, and thus of our reality, may be changed?
By now (I hope), my reasoning should be becoming clear to you, Connie dearest. Emily’s frustrated sexual desires and fears touched upon this ancient reality-shaping consciousness deep below any sentient level of her mind and that power, acting through her personal symbolic mythology, gave the ultimate shape of her fancies and fantasies. I cannot help but wonder, would the Olympian Yeats be fair tickled to learn that he was, in a sense, responsible for the creation of his own symbolism? Or would he be horrified? Rather the latter, I think.
Yet there are inconsistencies in applying this theory as a universal panacea. This is the problem with research in this damnable field. Nothing is ever cut, dried, and pickled in formalin. It is like fighting the sea—you think you have one bit pinned down, and up pops another. Nothing plays by the rules, if, indeed, there are any rules to play by. The most glaring inconsistency is this: if the faeries were the wish shapes of Emily’s repressed sexuality, why then did they turn on her and rape her? (I am convinced that, popular press notwithstanding, the perpetrator was not of earthly origin. The timing of the incident is too pat; the location, the entire symbolism, is too appropriate to be coincidental.) I do have a plausible offering. Tell me what you think. Back to the deep levels of the preconscious mind, if Emily was capable of giving form and shape to her subconscious desires, could she not also be capable of giving shape and form to her subconscious fears and dreads? For in the deep levels of the mind, fears are as uncontrollable as desires. So I would argue that at the moment of her greatest desire, for sexual, romantic fulfillment, all the fears, dreads, and guilts she learned from the Sisters at Cross and Passion (I am under no illusions about even “enlightened” convent schools) transformed her dream lover, the Lugh figure from the interviews, into her nightmare violator, punishing her for her sins.
I haven’t forgotten about the electricity. Things really start to become outré here. Please bear with me. I have no evidence for what I am about to say, nor even know whether it is scientifically allowable, but I believe that Emily generated her mythological forms out of electricity. In this world, or Otherworld, you cannot get something for nothing. Something must power the transformation. The scientists tell us that matter and energy can neither be destroyed nor created; but may they be mutually interchangeable? Improbable, even impossible, in this level of reality, but at the preconscious level, the primary level of the universe, this might be more easily achievable than one would imagine. Mere unconscious reflex could cause Emily to draw upon whatever source of energy was convenient to generate her faeries.
Indeed, she may have been unconsciously drawing upon this power to create faeries for quite some time. For your delectation and delight, I enclose this rather intriguing cutting from the press:
May 27, 1913
Irish Independent Morning Edition:
MYSTERY POWER FAILURE STRIKES DUBLIN!
The Dublin Electrical Company has still to provide an explanation for the mysterious current failure that plunged the entire south side of the city into chaos between the hours of six and seven o’clock yesterday evening when domestic supplies were cut off, causing widespread public consternation.
Transportation was brought to a standstill. The electrical failure immobilised trams, which then created further congestion as other road users and vehicular traffic piled up around the stranded cars. Adding to the general chaos, telegram and telephone services were suspended for the hour, effectively isolating South Dublin from the rest of the country and the Empire.
As of yet no explanation has been received by this newspaper for the power failure. Scientific opinion is utterly baffled, and a spokesman from the Dublin Electrical Company has stated that during the period of the failure all the Company’s generators at the Ringsend plant were operating at full capacity and the gauges in the plant registered that full voltage was being supplied. The Company engineers are at this moment checking and rechecking the transformers (which reduce the voltage supplied by the generators to a level safe for domestic usage), and though it is assumed that the cause of the failure will be found in the transmission system, Mr. Norman Parkinson, the Company spokesman, says that he has not ruled out sabotage by some extreme nationalist group.
Intriguing, no? And how similar to the notices a few months later when a massive electrical failure coincided with the disappearance of Bell’s Comet. Which leads me to my most outrageous observation of all. If Emily could generate a host of the Sidhe out of stolen electricity, she could as easily have generated the astronomical object Dr. Desmond maintained (and still maintains) was an otherworldly space vehicle. It is only a matter of scale and projection, after all, and the scientists tell us that energy is many, many times more plentiful in the void than upon this earth. There are just too many coincidences between the faery and the astronomical for any other conclusion to be tenable. In the words of Conan Doyle’s admirable Holmes, when we have exhausted the possible, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth. Emily created both faery host and Altairii, the former to fulfill her own emotional and sexual needs, the latter to punish what she clearly saw as her inadequate father—the father whose work came fair and square first and foremost in his life.
So, what now? Is there an end to the Craigdarragh Case with the conception of the baby? (Further thanks for keeping me so well informed as to the goings-on over there in Drumcliffe. More direct inquiry would be impolitic, given the turn of events.) I think not. From what you have told me, Caroline Desmond fears that the faery manifestations may be returning, though it must be noted, without the attendant electrical disturbances. The child in Emily’s womb may be responsible for this. What she is carrying is, in a sense, half human, half mythical, and I feel it may be acting as a kind of taproot into the energy of this preconscious symbolic domain. It may be utilising the energy inherent in all things animate and inanimate on the earth—living things, growing things, stone, sea, sky. (Did you know there is a potential difference between the bottom of the atmosphere where we poor humans grub out our existences, and the outermost layers, of some twenty-five thousand volts? Power enough, and to spare, to generate whole legions of the Sidhe—power being constantly siphoned and shaped through Emily’s unborn child.
So, in closing (this letter has, I fear, like Topsy, just growed and growed), the final question must be, what of the child Emily Desmond bears within her? Be it mortal, be it god, I can only say that it will stand forever before her as a haunting reminder of that Otherworld which, for one single, searing second upon that hillside, embraced her, and which she has irretrievably lost.
Yours,
Hanny