Door of Bruises (#4)

The final Thornchapel installment.

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Chapter One

Auden

Eight Years Ago

Once upon a time, when I was seventeen and full of crimson misery and livid hurt, I came upon a flower in the thorn chapel.

It was a rose.  A rose so darkly and deeply red that it looked black in the weak light of the frozen midwinter day.  And all around it was stone rimed with frost and dead vines caught with small, cheerless snowflakes, and it shouldn’t have been there, roses didn’t bloom in midwinter outside, roses didn’t bloom surrounded by ice and snow.

Certainly not roses that looked like that, like a freshly turned bruise.

We’d arrived at Thornchapel the previous night, and already my family was miserable without the necessary distractions of London.  My mother was drinking, my father was at turns distant and beastly, and I missed St. Sebastian so much that it felt like someone had cinched my heart with razor wire and doused it in petrol.  I burned alive for the boy who’d left me.

The boy who left me after I quite literally bled and broke for him.

So I hated him, and my parents, and I hated the world, the entire world, and everything in it, Thornchapel and St. Sebastian most of all.  But hatred for me has never been simple, just as love has never been simple—at least not since I kissed two people in front of the grassy forest altar and grew a heart of thorns to replace my heart of flesh.  My hatred looked like this: a fervor that would have rivaled a saint’s, an antipathy akin to worship.  A reverence—a vengeful carnality that bordered on the sacred.

I hated most of all that he wasn’t here. 

With me.

Where he belonged. 

I hadn’t meant to go to the chapel that morning; I hadn’t meant to go anywhere at all.  I just knew I couldn’t endure another moment inside the house with my unhappy parents, with my newly healed bones that still twinged sometimes, with the knowledge that there was no beautiful, dark-eyed boy waiting for me in the village.  And so even though I despised this place and everything it represented, I put on a coat and scarf and a battered pair of boots, and thought maybe I’d kick along the kitchen garden paths for a few minutes, just until I was too cold to remember how much I didn’t want to be inside.

But once I stepped out onto the terrace, my choice was made for me.  The maze, shrouded with snow and a hazy morning mist, beckoned, and then once I was in the maze, the center beckoned, and once I got to the center—once I saw Adonis and Aphrodite in their doomed embrace, dormant rose canes crawling over the base of the statue and twining over their feet—I knew I had to go to the chapel.  I didn’t want to, I didn’t even decide to, truthfully.  It simply happened.  One minute I was staring up at Adonis, who seemed blissfully unaware that he’d soon be mangled by a boar and his death commemorated with broken pots and dead lettuce, and the next I was walking down the stairs and into the dark tunnel that led out to the woods.

The chapel looked much as it had when I was twelve and I was married by the altar.  Although the grass was no longer emerald and the roses were no longer blooming on the walls, thorns still crawled everywhere.  The altar still huddled at the far end of the ruins and the broken walls remained broken, remained home to blackthorn clumps and the lingering sloe berries caught in the frost and now quite dead. 

But unlike then—when the clearing had been full of happy summer sounds, birds and bees and the distant chatter of the river—all was silent.  The birds gone, the river choked with ice, the blooms for the bees long since withered and rotted away.  If in summer the thorn chapel was a flowering and a festival of life, then in winter it was a tomb.  A church of hush, a chancel of lack.

Mist clung to the standing stones and drifted through the arched opening where a window had once been.  It gathered around the snow-powdered altar, and it swirled around my feet like water as I pushed deeper into the clearing. 

I had the strangest feeling that the chapel wanted me to come inside, that I was meant to in some way.  Like the mist and the snow and the silence had all been waiting for me, that it had all arrayed itself in solemn panoply for me, and now I was supposed to receive it and to participate.  To take it into myself somehow.

Which was a translucently ridiculous idea.

And yet I couldn’t seem to test my own scorn by stepping inside. 

I wandered around the outside of the chapel instead, hearing only my own breaths and the crunch of my boots in the frozen grass, and heard nothing either to dispel or inflame my unease. 

It wasn’t that I was afraid to go inside, I told myself.  It was only that I didn’t want to.  Why would I?  The fallen walls of the chapel hid nothing of its insides from view, I already knew everything that was in there anyway.  There was no point in standing in there and remembering the day I’d never forgotten in the first place, the day when I changed.  When everything changed.

A heart of thorns to replace a heart of flesh.

And that’s when I saw the rose.

It was growing from inside the chapel, its vines twisting up from someplace right behind the altar and up the back wall.  And here, where the stones had crumbled down enough to see over, the rose peeked above the edge, impossible and alive.

It was midwinter today, it was cold enough that even the hills seemed to shiver under the merciless December wind.  All the other roses were dead—along with the flowers, the trees, the grass.  Everything was dead.  Everything except for this.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d seen since I last saw St. Sebastian’s eyes.

I was curious.  I was compelled.

Again, my feet moved without my willing them to, and again I found myself drawn onward, as if I’d been meant to take these very steps from birth.  I walked around the walls and standing stones to the front of the chapel and—knowing both my resistance and my eagerness were equally contemptible impulses—went inside.

It was not as if a veil had been drawn over the world outside the chapel; it wasn’t as if I stepped inside the chapel and the silence deepened or the mist thickened.  No, the chapel wasn’t like that, it wasn’t a discrete and bounded space the way it ought to have been.  It was more like a cathedral, like a Levantine temple, with a diffusion of holy spaces branching and expanding from one central, sacred locus.  The temple in Jerusalem had its Holy of Holies protected by an outer sanctuary, which was protected by courts, which were protected by chambers, which were protected by walls and gates, and so too did the thorn chapel have an altar protected by walls, which were gated by standing stones, which were guarded by the snow-dusted trees. 

And so I cannot say that any one threshold made a difference to what happened next, and I cannot even claim to know what thresholds I crossed and what they meant.  But I do know this: all of Thornchapel is a threshold of sorts, and when one is there, one is part of this.  I became a gate, a tabernacle and an altar.   A holiness of lanky limbs and angry lust, a hallow of ink-stained fingers and unmet needs.  A threshold.

A door to somewhere else.

The mist seemed to part for me as I approached the altar and the impossible flower behind it, and I skirted around the spot where I once kissed Proserpina and St. Sebastian, I skirted around the snowy heap of the grass-covered altar, and I came before the wall.  If it had been a proper chapel, a proper church, the entrance would be at the west and the altar to the east, but the thorn chapel was not a proper church, and so the entrance was at the south and the altar was to the north.  Which meant this early in the morning, the rose was not only framed by the old stone but also by the morning-dark woods to north.  The rose seemed to draw shadows to itself, seemed to be in a light all its own, which was not a light at all, but a sort of murky umbra that made me think of graves and thunder, of walking alone in the fog-laden dark and hearing something move behind me.

It was fear that I felt, but it was an awakening too, a thrill and a recognition, like I’d been waiting for this, just as it had been waiting for me.  Like I was about to complete something I’d started five years with flower petals stuck to my face and St. Sebastian and Proserpina’s mouths on mine.

I tugged off my glove and reached for the rose.

There are many fairy tales that begin like this, with this moment right here, and perhaps I should have known better, perhaps I should have stopped myself.  Perhaps I should have waited, come back on another day when the light was less strange and the mist was gone.  Perhaps I should have understood that the need and hunger throbbing in me were only fed by this place, and nothing here could ever, ever soothe me—at least not until I had my St. Sebastian back.

But I was seventeen and I didn’t want to be soothed.  I wanted to hurt, and I wanted to throb, and I wanted every possibility in the world to lay itself bare to me, to come running and kneel at my feet, heads bowed and begging forgiveness for staying out of my reach.

It was not the first time I’d ever felt possessiveness—no, Proserpina and St. Sebastian had made sure of that—but it was the first time I’d ever felt possession. 

Dominion.  Imperium.  Command.

I was entitled to whatever grew, crept, or slumbered at Thornchapel, and it would reveal itself to me.  My fingers found the stem of the rose and followed its thorny tether up to the heavy, tightly furled head of the bloom itself.  I pulled it, meaning to pluck only the bloom, but registered my mistake an instant too late.  An unseen thorn sank into my thumb and bit into the skin, sending pain right down to the bone, up my wrist, up my entire arm. 

I swore, but I didn’t let go, twisting harder and tearing the bloom right off the plant, until it was mine.

I looked down at my prize—a whorl of bruise-colored petals, a scroll of silky impossibility.  Blood from my pierced thumb—a bright and shocking red against the dark, shadow-scarlet of the rose—was smeared over the petals and sepals, over my palm and my wrist.  It dripped onto the snow below.

The back of my neck crawled with awareness, a feeling of not-aloneness that superseded the usual watchfulness of the chapel.  I turned with the rose still in my bloody hand and then took a step back.

A woman, beautiful and feral looking, with pale skin and eyes as green as a cat’s, was staring at me from the other side of the altar.  She wore a long dress—a near-white, with the kind of shapeless fussiness that spoke of Victorian origins—and a slender torc of gold around her neck.  Her hair, a dark, dark brown, hung loose around her shoulders. 

I was reminded forcefully of Proserpina—those cat eyes—but also of Proserpina’s mother, who’d gone missing here at Thornchapel five years ago.

I was reminded of something else.  A painting.  But that was an impossibility.

As impossible as a rose blooming on Midwinter Day, maybe?

The woman didn’t step forward, she didn’t move.  She only tilted her head.  “You are a Guest,” she said. 

I suppose it was a testament to how thoroughly my manners had been bred into me that I answered a ghost.  “Yes.” 

My bloody hand continued to cradle the rose.  My thumb hurt.

“It was the Kernstows first,” the woman said, “before the Guests.  But it was always a king.  It has to be a king.”

Her voice was pure Devonshire, big vowels and bigger rs, and shockingly loud.  Unnervingly present.  I could have been talking to someone from Thorncombe, talking to one of the gardeners who came in to tend the grounds.  That’s how here she was. 

But she couldn’t be here, she couldn’t.  Either my conception of reality had to bend or I was finally succumbing to St. Sebastian-leaving-me-without-a-word-induced insanity.

“You’re not real,” I said, pointlessly.

“And you’re not a king,” she replied.  “Yet.”

I could only stare.  I used to pretend to be a king as a little—and for a brief time last summer, I made myself the king of one St. Sebastian, and he would be mine to kiss whenever my royal heart desired.  But I knew better now.  I knew that boys like me didn’t get to be kings, kings of pretend or kink or otherwise.  Boys like me went to Oxford or Cambridge, they married girls like Delphine, they found respectable careers that had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being quality, with furthering the undefinable but all-important Guest-ness that had been assigned to me by my birth.

The woman touched her cheek—a mirror to the place on my own cheek where a deep cut had healed into a bright pink divot.  “That is the scar of a king,” she said, nodding to the healed wound.  “A someday king.”

She closed her eyes as her hand dropped, her fingertips settling on the curve of the torc around her neck.  “You must remember,” she said, “because it will happen again.  Who is John Barleycorn, little Guest prince?”

John Barleycorn.  It was a Burns poem, a folk song.  I stared at her.

“John Barleycorn is a memory,” she said, opening her eyes and answering her own question.  “A memory of the kings who walked to the door.”

I was utterly lost now.  “The door.”

“It has to be a king.  A true king would never let anyone go in a king’s place.  That is the price, you see.”

Fear, not cold but hot—hot and sticky like the blood dripping off my thumb—was all over me when I spoke.  “The price of what?”

There was a kind of tender pity to her words when she finally answered. 

“That too, you will learn.” 

And then she nodded at my hand, as if all the answers were there.

I looked down too, and when I looked back up, she was gone, with only the swirl of the mist to testify that she’d ever been there in the first place.

With a sharp inhale, and long-delayed panic, I bolted from the chapel, and tore my way home as if every ghost in England was on my heels.  And when I got home, I slammed the crumpled rose into the biggest book I could find, stripped off my clothes, and then stood in the shower for as long as it took for me to believe that I’d hallucinated the entire thing.  I’d hallucinated Estamond because of my childhood games, I’d hallucinated the part about John Barleycorn because…well, because who knows why.  I’d hallucinated the part about loving with thorns because my St. Sebastian was gone and I hated him and because all I wanted was for him to be back in my thorny embrace once again.

So it hadn’t been real.  None of it had been real.

Except for the rose. 

The rose which sometimes I’d open the old, heavy book to stare at. 

The rose which dried and grew brittle but never, ever lost that distinctive bruised hue.

The rose…if nothing else, the rose had been real.

It has to be a king.  That is the price.

Years passed, and I never told anyone what happened that day.  Why would I?

Maybe if I had, Proserpina and St. Sebastian would still be here at Thornchapel, maybe Delphine would still be curled at Rebecca’s feet, maybe Becket wouldn’t be enduring a sinner’s exile in Argyll.  Maybe we would all be together; maybe all would be as it should be. 

Then again, maybe not.  I’ve learned caution when it comes to Thornchapel, to predicting how this place moves through people’s minds and bodies.  I’ve learned caution about a lot of things. 

But I’ve learned too late, it seems.

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