The Cemetery Diaries
The Lich Gate
A human smear, my anatomy wiped across the beach, wiped across the pillows of a fevered dream, wiped out. I dream of sailing, of moonlight kissing the sand, each and every night. The shore seems so close by twilight. The candles with their long tongues taste the evening’s silent vigil, but I’m no longer in a coastal place. I have come inland, to where the silence is eternal; where dry pinecones and the sundried skeletons of trees fill the air with a pungent aroma, and carpet the ground with needles. Pines grow humungous and gnarled, the gravestones in their shelter crooked as teeth where the roots have pushed them. My body was carried among the guardian trunks, in a shroud on a bier, two hundred years ago. My family bought the plot in advance. They were inland people. They brought me back when the wave destroyed me, carried me all this way into the arid, rural centre to rot.
I rot, you rot. The only difference is that I rot on the other side of mortality. We intertwine in a dance macabre, yielding to the temptation of the night. I don’t care how the nightmare is packaged. Fiend and friend, friend and fiend. You’re the worst kind of person. The flesh is sloughed from your bones, but it’s not for death that you hunger. It’s attention you starve for, you pretty, false thing. You don’t yet know what I am. You buy my lies, and the churchyard is lit with fireflies. The party fills the loud tombs, and you’re with the kind of people who drink for a living. I drink instead of living. Tread carefully, I advise you. They call it a wedding, but you’re immortal now, trespassing in a timeless world; in my world. I see it in your smile and your marble-white skin, the kind of skin that endures through the ages. You think you’re indestructible. Well, I can show you what destruction is.
We whirl with the wind that rushes over the sunken sun, out where the corpses nourish everlasting rose beds. I pick myself a blood red blossom ad pluck from its array two silken petals, the twins of your painted lips. Nobody else is going to pick flowers for me, not even cheap ones bred for their colour over their scent, so I have to steal them for myself. I even thieve from churchyards if I must. I take your hand, a lily like so many others, and drag you out to where lilies become ghosts. You touch parts of my body, but my anatomy has known all kinds of bodies. Young bodies, old bodies, bodies that have felt familiar and bodies that have felt foreign. To survive death is to be transformed. There’s a reason people fear stepping through the veil, and through the lich gate.
I lead you to the little arched house with the shingled roof and no walls. There are recessed seats, shady wooden benches, set into the ancient and cold stone like pews for lovers. You fold your legs and your delicate hands when you sit. I feel my lips bare, revealing the pearly, diamond-sharp points death has cut. Fear hits you like a blast of ice. I hear it in your chest, your poor heart beating in a birdcage, all laced up in corsetry, ribboned like a gift. I tug at the bow, loose where your cold sweat has wilted it. I inhale, and I feel the giddy nausea of longing, as though it is my life force being pumped out of those tender chambers.
There is a pattern to drunkenness, and it always ends like this. I go to bed full of heavier liquor than alcohol. I wake up numb. I don’t handle my drink well, which is why I choose it to be my poison. That’s why I go to human parities, especially the kind that feature fairies and vampires beneath cloudy skies. I pursue intoxication because the world doesn’t want to see what I am without watering down, but alas, today I have not been in luck. I feel myself getting leader and meaner, becoming more phantom than man.
My fangs are thorns in your side, your cry an instant piecing of the night, muffled by velveteen pain. Your eyes are wild and round as silver coins. The contact lenses fall out, just as your whiteness is wiped from your cheek. You’re not a real monster. I am. That’s the end of it. You’ll lie forever on the threshold between life and death, where your spirit was sucked out to join the smoke of the guttering candles. Perhaps I’ll take the opportunity to introduce your wandering essence to the wonders of history laid under thick dust and stone, bearing dull inscriptions.
They’ll carry you through the lich gate, maybe, and I’ll be waiting.
I rot, you rot. The only difference is that I rot on the other side of mortality. We intertwine in a dance macabre, yielding to the temptation of the night. I don’t care how the nightmare is packaged. Fiend and friend, friend and fiend. You’re the worst kind of person. The flesh is sloughed from your bones, but it’s not for death that you hunger. It’s attention you starve for, you pretty, false thing. You don’t yet know what I am. You buy my lies, and the churchyard is lit with fireflies. The party fills the loud tombs, and you’re with the kind of people who drink for a living. I drink instead of living. Tread carefully, I advise you. They call it a wedding, but you’re immortal now, trespassing in a timeless world; in my world. I see it in your smile and your marble-white skin, the kind of skin that endures through the ages. You think you’re indestructible. Well, I can show you what destruction is.
We whirl with the wind that rushes over the sunken sun, out where the corpses nourish everlasting rose beds. I pick myself a blood red blossom ad pluck from its array two silken petals, the twins of your painted lips. Nobody else is going to pick flowers for me, not even cheap ones bred for their colour over their scent, so I have to steal them for myself. I even thieve from churchyards if I must. I take your hand, a lily like so many others, and drag you out to where lilies become ghosts. You touch parts of my body, but my anatomy has known all kinds of bodies. Young bodies, old bodies, bodies that have felt familiar and bodies that have felt foreign. To survive death is to be transformed. There’s a reason people fear stepping through the veil, and through the lich gate.
I lead you to the little arched house with the shingled roof and no walls. There are recessed seats, shady wooden benches, set into the ancient and cold stone like pews for lovers. You fold your legs and your delicate hands when you sit. I feel my lips bare, revealing the pearly, diamond-sharp points death has cut. Fear hits you like a blast of ice. I hear it in your chest, your poor heart beating in a birdcage, all laced up in corsetry, ribboned like a gift. I tug at the bow, loose where your cold sweat has wilted it. I inhale, and I feel the giddy nausea of longing, as though it is my life force being pumped out of those tender chambers.
There is a pattern to drunkenness, and it always ends like this. I go to bed full of heavier liquor than alcohol. I wake up numb. I don’t handle my drink well, which is why I choose it to be my poison. That’s why I go to human parities, especially the kind that feature fairies and vampires beneath cloudy skies. I pursue intoxication because the world doesn’t want to see what I am without watering down, but alas, today I have not been in luck. I feel myself getting leader and meaner, becoming more phantom than man.
My fangs are thorns in your side, your cry an instant piecing of the night, muffled by velveteen pain. Your eyes are wild and round as silver coins. The contact lenses fall out, just as your whiteness is wiped from your cheek. You’re not a real monster. I am. That’s the end of it. You’ll lie forever on the threshold between life and death, where your spirit was sucked out to join the smoke of the guttering candles. Perhaps I’ll take the opportunity to introduce your wandering essence to the wonders of history laid under thick dust and stone, bearing dull inscriptions.
They’ll carry you through the lich gate, maybe, and I’ll be waiting.