Horror short story about Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Rossetti (Picture by Wikimedia Commons).
16 Cheyene Walk
01.34am
One would be there to carry the light. Two brought a shovel. Four they were. It was easy, they had said.
They could return the book by the end of the night.
He sat in his favourite armchair by the window, with the two magic peacocks on either side. Dante imagined he could see his friends at the graveyard now. The four of them, digging, on their hands and knees.
It reminded him of their late talks between brushstrokes.
Only through her own death does Ophelia attain redemption, John had explained. Through it, a mad woman can be cleaned. Asleep on a beautiful flower bed. Restored to its ideal. Ophelia’s floating corpse was not simply a void. Her death had been flawless and serene.
In London, crowds had become obsessed. They only could have guessed why. The fragile mortality in their paintings let the observer forget their own. To consume Ophelia was to become a master of death. It had been a huge success. By the season’s end, there were scarcely enough corpses left in their art to satisfy the city’s appetite.
But Lizzie had always performed her death the best. That’s how they had met. That was what had turned him on the most. Even while alive, the complexion in all their paintings showed the marks of her early illness and decline.
But she had not been the dead muse of all men alive. She had been his muse, he repeated in his head. She had been his wife. He started to turn in spirals. It had been all his. She belonged to him, much like an instrument belonged to a musician. A planet and its moon. A master and his disciple.
A book had to be returned.
It was to be returned by the end of the night.
Sleep was not becoming Dante tonight.
All of Lizzie’s dead faces were looking at him. Dante could see their stares from the corner of his eyes. Pacing down his town house, his long robes were shuffling over tiger striped carpets.
He wished for the parts of his soul back, or whatever was now left with the maggots below. It had been for his success. It had been a deal with the devil for sure.
A blunt funeral tie wrapped up their wedding procession so fast. Lizzie only left behind her bridal veil. He had always thought that her head carried a terrible delicacy.
Forgotten was her best behaviour then. Her mad brain died stuck in a dream. Another young mind lost underneath low laudanum waves. She thought she simply had to get better. (He simply needed to cheer her up a bit, he had thought.)
He missed talking to her. Making jokes.
No one had ever listened quite as attentively. Even now, years later, he found himself composing remarks he thought she would enjoy. She had possessed a rare talent for making a house feel settled, for turning ordinary evenings into something worth remembering. Time had preserved those details with remarkable clarity. If anything, it had refined them, leaving only the qualities he had admired most. Whenever he thought of her, she appeared exactly as she ought to: warm, beautiful, and endlessly patient.
He missed telling her the instructions of the day. How to sit. What to reproduce. The soft cradle of his mother’s arms or the churning pit of his regret for life.
Dante would sometimes find himself rehearsing them anyway, as if she were still there to receive his directions. There had been a comfort in her responsiveness, in the way she seemed to settle into whatever shape he required. Even silence had been obedient then, filled with a quiet meaning beyond his words. Now, when he spoke aloud, the empty room answered in ways that felt imprecise, almost inattentive, as though something essential in the exchange had gone missing.
It made him remember a fever dream she once had told him about. About how she had posed there as Ophelia in cold waters, hours late into the night. Still as a statue. Her mind had been burning hot but her body felt freezing as ice. She imagined two mortal stains left on a spoiled draft, stuck in symmetry but never too close.
But she was far too tied up to reach her point. Poor little Lizzie. She had never learned to want before. A whole body composed after birth by a single wish, to serve, to please and to please when to serve. Her subjugation, the pain behind servitude (the absorbed loss of being oneself) turned into an aching impulse she enjoyed instead. She could never pass up the chance of his pleasure. He could never pass up the chance of her love.
It made things simple between them, in the end. There was no need for hesitation when every gesture already knew its direction. If he guided her thoughts, it was because she looked to him for clarity. A quiet devotion that required no explanation. Dante often thought how fortunate it was, to be so perfectly understood without ever needing to ask.
The holy body that once kept him so warm is now stylised by blue. Now alone, at least tonight, at this hour of time, he could not stop the thought of what was left of his feeble muse.
Beautiful flowers that had long dissolved, probably were rushing on some blossoming river shore.
Highgate Cemetery
01.43am
I tried to remove the stains, but the way he left her remains; they clot so dark. I bet they could still see them all these years later when his friends dug her back up. Torches in their hands as they remembered her red hair. Still, they felt a stubborn cold in their feet.
Blinded by the dark, they trampled over lilies in their path. The stinging pain of digging was felt on their hands and knees. Dirt once swallowed up came back from down below, some more fell back in.
A book had to be returned.
A real tragedy, the one holding the light solemnly said. After all, she had only been a young child. His voice was out of breath. In the end, they never live long enough to grow thicker skin.
And what a mess it was. Some tissue was streaming out of the holes in her casket, left and right. Her dead breath was so corrupt that all the brushwood they burned could not cover her stench up. As the smell filled the cold October night, they tried their hardest to remember that time one of her straps fell down untied.
A book had to be returned.
It was to be returned at the end of night.
Finally, they found the book. It was stuck behind her final cloth, so they separated the thin veil from her flesh. They saw her pale skin. Her blush had turned all blue. Like old sheets, the skin now seeped into young bones. Lizzie’s soft tissues were all shrivelled without water.
The left eye went missing, and the right one just survived. Behind it, hungry fleas had started to creep. Legs swollen. Her rancid womb now grew worms of all kinds. Filthy fucking flesh-eaters, still oozing leftover affection out of their minds.
It was easy, they had said. What were once her bodily features were now her uncorrupted bones.
But her ligaments were all ruptured. Their broken bones stayed locked in a cosmic embrace. Rag dolls are always reaching for their maker. Blue lips got torn by a bold grimace. Lizzie’s red widow’s peak was lost. They knew then they could never tell him the truth. That on some October night, her dead face was dead enough.