CW: violence, murder, Poe
If
I know one thing for certain, it is that I will not be alive when I finish this
story. I wish to say that at the beginning. But this is no cheap horror and there
will be no sudden drop off mid-sentence, the last word collapsing into some
scrawling mess, as if dragged off the page; there will be no easy mystery, explained
and summed with reason. If there is any change of tone in this writing, you will
know that is some other hand at work than mine. Likewise, if this story is
paired with anything other than a happy ending.
Did I know my betrothed had been married before? Yes, of
course. That sort of thing is acceptable in Men of Good Society, at least. But we
women, we are not offered that freedom cheaply, any more than we may choose not
marry at all. For myself, I surrendered to wear none of that shame, dutiful
daughter of a modest family, and while the circumstances of our courtship
seemed unremarkable enough to anyone auditing them, I knew even then that much
of the man I was marrying was not all there. No, I am not calling him stupid,
and clearly, he was a man of means (which is why my family so pressed me to
accept his vague and nervous courtship). So, with such finality as I imagine
one who has resigned themselves to the gallows should bear—I said yes. And so,
he carried me over the threshold of his house, but not his heart. Never his
heart.
He did not live in a house, as such, though a grand former
abbey, it was. But I felt no more at home, no more welcome, no more included, than if he had carried me
through the door of a museum. Everything about the place felt sterile and
severe; that it was unacceptable for me to touch anything, or even look at it
too closely, or question too deep. I never felt more removed from my beloved
family as at that moment I first beheld the monstrously over-stuffed silence that
had every object and shape in the house in talons quiet, but no less fast or
merciless.
As I realized my husband was a man I would never truly
love, I knew my death lay within these walls. Its quiet shroud loomed over
everything, much like the Venetian glass that covered the south wall of the
marital bed chamber. Where the former oppressed all sound of joy in the, the
latter seemed to poison the very air, day and night. Even calling where we
slept “the marital bed” is misleading. He never touched me. At first, I assumed
he might be nervous too. I didn’t yet suspect another woman was part of the
picture. Much less that she was, in fact, the entire picture.
The first time he mentioned her name, Ligeia, I was the
compassionate wife, bringing succor to my grieving husband as he murmured the
beginning of what would become his dull and repetitive chant. He spoke with a
passion that was truly surprising. I honestly did not know he had it within
him. He certainly showed none of it in the bedroom of our sexless marriage. I
even forgave him the constant perfume of opium that rose off him, like the
vapors of a ghost, for had not my love been tormented by ill fortune, so? I
suppressed a shivering fit as an unearthly chill ran straight through me. At
the time, I thought I was just imagining it, a by-product of my emotional
reaction to his tragedy.
But the silence was haunted, as was the house, and not
simply by his adulation of Ligeia’s memory. I often felt a presence behind me,
in a room, or hall, or staircase, only to turn around and behold nothing but the
empty air. Often, while falling asleep, I would startle awake, sure I had heard
my own name whispered into my ear. Again, no one. Unless you count my husband, upon
whom, for reasons of opium and otherwise, I increasingly did not. The first
time this happened, I was truly startled and perhaps can be forgiven for
leaning on his attention and entertaining his reassurances. That was when I
still thought of his as a husband, and I was still something that could be
called his wife.
But that presence that woke me from sleep remained, and
the hauntings continued—if they could be correctly called hauntings. The next
time I was woken, I did not cry out, even as I beheld the sight of her
standing, pale and transparent, by the side of the bed, her spectral form shot
through with moonlight. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I
had no fear of her. More than anything I have ever felt before, I wanted to be
moonlight with her. I loved her, and wished for her, with everything I had and
that was the truth of it.
In wordless exchange, she described to me the how, and I wept to her that the when could not come soon enough.
Though we moved forward with our plan with patience and
craft manifested on both sides of the mortal coil, I was amazed that my husband
could sense as much of what was going on as he did. Perhaps it was the opium
that allowed him some dim awareness of Ligeia’s presence and movements, but as
I have said before, he was always a self-obsessed dullard. I’m sure he thought
he knew what was going on and that it was about him.
There are stories, both colloquial and those portrayed in
Myth, of people dying from simply losing the will to live, often after the
death of their soulmate. I guess that is how it was between Ligeia and I,
though I had not known her in life, and I did not move towards death from a
broken heart, but rather one grown full to bursting. She would come to me and our embrace would
leave me pale and shivering, but that was just my body. My soul would swoop to
dizzying heights under her invisible caress, and she would leave me shuddering
and sobbing from the pleasure.
Once, in his absent attendance to my appearance of
suffering from a wasting disease, he brought me medicinal wine, and for a
moment, I thought Ligeia and I were betrayed to him. She kissed me and her
phantom, happy tears dripped into my glass, crossing over from the ether into
this world. Did he see? Did he suspect? No, he only beheld with a stupefied
look on his face and murmured something about “drops of blood.” My idiot
husband, no doubt, believed Ligeia was returning from the other side. And while
he was correct in this, he was entirely wrong about why.
Tonight, for one last time, she will walk to me from her
side of the veil and I will move towards her from mine. We will meet, and my
soul will become her flesh and I will see through her eyes. We will be made One,
I, who was once a mortal woman, and Ligeia who, even when my dear husband met
her in that decaying city on the Rhine, was always something… else. We will be
beautiful and terrible, and nothing of what he expects.
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