Beyond the Wall of the Dead

Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work,you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.

I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.

From the greater space beyond that mound of bones, I heard on the exhaled air the sound of swamping waters; the noise shifted subtly until the blast and harry of invasive winds grew from the original sound and this in turn, changed, slowing into the sucking collapse of sodden earth and each noise seemed to convey meaning, as if inhabited by a malicious awareness. The drowned remains of the vicar gaped its mouth, as if its dreaded demon were to burst through the bones and I knew at that moment, that the empty graves above us, the crude desecration of the dead, the wall of bones, were the cleric’s crude attempts at binding the thing which terrified him into the depths of the hill.

I found myself wondering whether he had he succeeded in trapping it with such offerings or if, as he had pulled recent burials from their graves to slice away at their flesh and as he offered his own blood to the darkness, whether he had actually fed it, or if such actions may have been driven by that unseen presence which now massed against us beyond the remains.

‘He cut things up, bodies, some form of sacrifice,’ Aquinas called out but I ignored him, for I found myself half-imagining, half –remembering a drowned body I had witnessed in a river in India. I could almost see it, bobbing in shallow water and yet I felt that somehow it could now be clambering beyond the wall of bones, seeking me, even though the hungry waters had long since gorged on the mouth and lungs and gut of the man.

Aquinas seemed to sense that we were in the presence of something awful, even though he had, at that point, perceived only the shadows emerging from the bones. As he spoke, sweating and anxious and disrupting my concentration, I might have lashed out at him, I could even have hurled him into the bone shield, into the mercy of the elemental force that seethed beyond it.

Indeed, animated by an impulse beyond my control I found myself standing and walking toward the table, my eye upon one of the blades deposited there.

‘Blood, living blood...’

The voice of the dead Reverend scratched inside my skull and I picked one of the tarnished blades from the table. As I examined it, finding some bite to the blade, despite the years down here with the dark and the damp, I became conscious of three spectres stood against the mound of boulders. I could see little that distinguished the spirits save for the transparent silhouettes luminous against the stark stones. I was aware that they looked beyond me and I imagined from what little of their features I could perceive, their expressions were grave. As one, they appeared to beckon me back and then pointed toward the bones opposite.

‘I shall save your father...I will unyoke his soul from this cavern, from the demon he dreads,’ I cried out.

My voice prompted Aquinas to spin, his torch-light banishing all trace of the ghostly beings.
‘I should have struck but I could not strike my pretty ones, my chicks, I should have, yet I am repulsed by the very notion; they fled me, they fled the nest...’ the voice groaned through me, setting my limbs shivering and my skin crawling.

‘They came back, your young came back and they remain still; they warn me of what lurks beyond the bones. It was not weakness, it was mercy that stayed your hand and you gave yourself instead...’ I called out, wishing desperately that my imagined narrative were correct and with these words I teased the blackened blade across the back of my hand. Its scratch drew a weal of blood which I squeezed onto the floor.

‘I follow you sir, in spilling my blood, but I offer it to the Dark Goddess, for Kali, the raw energy of Eternal Nature; for all the vileness of nature, it remains an expression, frequently a wonderful, beautiful expression, of a subtler reality; it is Light made flesh, woven into existence by a loving word; I face willingly the Mother of Darkness and Devouring Death, I prostrate myself before Her and She ushers me into a world of unending light!’

The words flooded from me and I witnessed a vision of the power which released them in the form of a sudden flowering - a rose of light - growing in the air above me. The stone ceiling vanished beneath it and within, I perceived the youthful female face which had smiled from the jewel of light on the staircase; whilst that vision had been indistinct, this one radiated a vivid, unrelenting light as if the jewel had opened, freeing the presence within. Around me, the pulsing sounds returned, rising into a sacred mantra and all was unlocked, returning an unyielding radiance back to that rose and the Goddess within. A sudden glee filled me and I indicated to the spirits that they should seek a passage from their darkness into that light.

‘Leave this place, whatever bound you here, your terror, your revulsion, the presence of the demon that haunts the hidden caverns below, you are freed of it all! Feel the loving word within you, feel the light wound around it, rise on that radiance, draw back to the source, reunite with that light!’

Around the cavern, the stone that enclosed us, the human forms, living and dead, the mildewed items, all flickered, as if they were reflections upon water, or painted on walls enclosing dancing flames. From the depths of the gaping skulls, from the corners between the stone, slips and shreds of shadow drifted like dust into that light, where they flamed and then vanished. Buoyed by this apparent success I turned to my companion.

‘Let us see what manner of foe draws near,’ I said, dragging at the corner of the sheet and handing one edge to Aquinas, indicated that it should be held vertically before the heap of bones. All became a palimpsest, pencilled across that light and with the pulse still flowering into distinct, sacred words whose sound thundered through me, it seemed that nothing could harm us.

For a period we both stood calmly, the sheet held taut before it too succumbed to the disorientating effects of the light and the sound. For my part, I became unaware of that sheet until my arm was dragged violently and the fabric was sucked into a concave shape.

The pain yanked my awareness back toward the cavern, where the bones were toppling outward toward thus. They feel, shattering around our feet as the sheet hung thus for several seconds or longer before a force pressed violently back through it toward us. I was cocooned within the rapture of my true self -I cannot say what state Aquinas was in - although I think his scream was not one of joy as the sheet contorted around some unseen thing composed of ridged contours pitted with cavities that inhaled and then exhaled, releasing bulging, wriggling protuberances.

This vision persisted only briefly before the sheet was snatched away from us, leaving Aquinas babbling incoherently until I pushed at him, ‘back to the others.’

I heard him scramble through the stones and as I turned, the sheet clamped around me, crunching against me, with a violent animation. I heard a snapped growl at the back of my head and then I was ripped back and forth by a mighty force whilst fabric was pushed against my eyes, twisted into my nose and down my throat.

My body was wound within the sheet and flung from side-to-side, although I was spared the horror in its entirety as both the radiance and word of enlightenment shielded my mind and awareness, casting me adrift on their ancient immensity and I plunged into them, finding myself in a sudden place of stillness away from that ghostly ossuary.