It has been three days since I read aloud from the book I found in the locked closet, and Bersheba will not stop visiting me. For this I can only blame myself, since I summoned her and must therefore take at least some responsibility for my actions.
For clarity, what I call 'the locked closet' was in fact freely openable when I stumbled upon it while exploring my newly rented holiday apartment. Having unpacked for a week's stay of recuperation following the incident, I required somewhere to stow my empty valise, that I may feel more at home during my time here. The gap between the bed and the floorboards was, alas, too slim for this task, and so I sought storage elsewhere.
The back corner of the bathroom at the rear of the apartment featured a full-length closet which appeared ideal for my needs. A padlock hung closed around half of a clasp under the handle, the corresponding half folded back against the frame, leaving the chamber accessible to prying eyes such as my own. Ordinarily one would assume this space was for the arrangement of cleaning products to be employed between clients' stays, and indeed those were present. But there was also, on the head-height shelf, a weighty hide-bound book of indeterminate age, clammy to the touch and filled with intricate illustrations and indecipherable glyphs on thick, mottled pages that smelled of a disused cellar. Because naturally, I looked through it. To say the heavy, oddly formed and textured cover had 'a face' would not be fully true, and yet I swear this tome looked at me. Furthermore, while I could not consciously translate the streams of symbols therein, I quickly found myself reading aloud without thinking - and in a language I had never before heard, let alone spoken.
I put all of this down to my tiredness and overwrought circumstance, and endeavoured to settle in as best I could. Not an hour later, I first heard the voice.
~ ~ ~
There is a painting above the bed in the front room. A shorescape of the local town. Rough-hewn whitewashed buildings and the sea-wall of the harbour, uninhabited there in its frozen moment of time. The painting is rudimentary in its execution (at least not bearing the fierce movement and detail of its accompanying seascapes), but it nonetheless captures the humble beauty that has drawn mankind to the sea since time immemorial. Including myself now, I suppose. But catching reverse-sight of this painting in the large mirror on the opposing wall, I could see a face. A face in the small darkened upper window of one of the fishing cottages. Lit as if to be some way back from the glass, but there all the same. A face loosely rendered with a great artist's innate ability to have their living subjects transcend all time and medium. A still face, looking - undoubtedly - at me.
You have doubtless guessed, dear reader, that when I turned to examine the visage in the actual wall-hung oils behind me, this was nowhere to be seen. Turning again to the looking glass, the miniature figure was indeed still there, stock still as would be expected. Staring - glaring - out of the surrounding frames and directly to me. And so, without movement, it spoke.
I cannot directly translate what the face - what she - said. Once more, it was in no language I had ever heard, yet one I understood implicitly. The voice was a low, hollow rasp, but female in its intonation. It promised no distinct personal threat, and yet an ominous tone of foreboding suggested this moment had been long awaited by my interlocutor... that this address was the recommencement of previously unfinished business. I do not recall verbally replying - certainly there was nothing I might realistically ask in this absurd situation, and yet there was a connective interactivity between us. The figure responded - somehow - to my feelings, if not my questions. When the... the 'exchange' ended, it was dark outside. I slept on the couch.
My slumber was, as one might imagine, fevered that night. My visitor was once again present, and this time in the dreamed apartment itself. She did not introduce herself but I knew her now to be Bersheba, a healer or sage of some sort as anciently familiar with this town as its sand-blasted harbour and the rolling hills which surround it. She had been waiting for me, for more years than she could describe. Again I felt no actual malice to myself personally, but instead the unspoken knowledge that Bersheba's goal - whatever that may be - would somehow use my very essence as one would use coal to keep warm on the coldest of nights.
~ ~ ~
My dreams, it seemed, had broken the seal. The next day, Bersheba was - at various intermittent points - very much outside of the painting and in the apartment with me; a shape I could not define, a sight I cannot describe, murmuring indefinable words of dark intent that held no distinction. I paced the floor, somehow afraid to leave as morning turned to afternoon turned to dusk. Finally tending to myself with reluctance, food had no flavour and my books no meaning - and so I determined to avail to a local hostelry in the vain hope that company would at least drown out my companion, if not drive her away.
Some hope. The Sloop Tavern held little comfort, surrounded as I was by local groups of varying sizes who seemed not to notice me. The crowd did not so much go out of their way to make me feel uncomfortable, more that their collective weekend jollity benignly annulled my sombre presence without embracing it. That is, my presence and that of Bersheba, who hovered around the corner of my sight at the door, judging me and the saloon bar with wordless utterances. I left after two shots of the local liquor and slept on the couch.
~ ~ ~
The next morning I woke alone, by which I mean my spectral companion seemed not to be present. I admit that my first port of call was to look at the painting in the bedroom and then the reflection of that same in the mirror. Nothing. I felt no heaviness in the air, no voice in my ear, no eyes on my back. Could it be that I had imagined my torment of the last thirty six hours? That this had been a surreally concocted dream of some sort?
Nonetheless, after a light breakfast I made myself proper and endeavoured to research local lore at the town's library and museum, if anything to hopefully disprove my fancies rather than expound them further. Curators at both institutions were initially reticent at my enquiries, although their interest was piqued somewhat when it became apparent that I was not merely some tasteless tourist with a penchant for the ghoulish. That said, their actual help was minimal, with Bersheba's name appearing but three times in more threadbare volumes of localised mythology than I could count. Her life was alluded to rather than documented, and two of the notes could easily have referred to anyone with her - admittedly unusual - moniker. I retired to my apartment little the wiser, with a sense of dread, and with a darkly brooding visitor once more. Bersheba was in the corner of my vision again, watching me intently and murmuring her inaudible commentary.
By this point I was close to my wits' end with the numb acceptance of some ill-defined, pencilled-in fate appearing to be the only palatable option and path of least resistance. It was in this state that I found myself in the nearby St. Barnoon's chapel, overlooking the rugged shoreline where countless ships had run aground over the centuries, and I myself feeling like one more of their number. My presence in the stone building soon attracted the attention of its attendant, Father Inglis, and our ensuing conversation was in equal parts of no help whatsoever and also the closest to comfort I have been able to find.
While he has no knowledge of Bersheba herself, the clergyman tells me tales of this sort are not unheard in the town. He is unable to be any more specific, to tell me who or what might be trying to return and from where, or to tell me what later happens to those who reported these events as they occurred. But he is fascinated by my experience, to 'have a live one' so to speak, and is endeavouring to make further researches when he is not with me. He appears quite taken with my case, for which I am grateful.
Himself an apparently outspoken local folklorist - if not quite an historian - Father Inglis has been very supportive in his time with me since, although his friendliness soon took on the air of a hospital chaplain visiting a terminally ill patient. After repeated explanations of my time here, he says there are no easy banishments for that which has been openly invited into the world, and I am inclined - reluctantly - to believe him. I do not share the priest's ecclesiastical devotions, and he assures me in the politest possible way that it would make little difference if I did. How odd, that solace can be found in the encircling arms of oblivion.
~ ~ ~
And so I wait. I wait for the return of Bersheba, knowing full fell that I shall not be fully here to see whatever form that may take. I grow weaker by the hour. The bells of St. Barnoon's chime for evensong, breaking the silence of a day where the gulls seem to have completely abandoned their usually plaintive cries. Below, a small, lone trawler putters out of the harbour at the start of its nightly excursion; nets cast, harvesting life indiscriminately so that others may happily gain sustenance. The fate of each individual fish caught this night is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to not even understand its part in the grander scheme, but ultimately just accept a thread unravelled to its end and the grim accident of happenstance. This is the way of things.
So tired, now. Bersheba has stopped talking.
She sits inches away from me, waiting.
Bersheba is smiling.
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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• Short stories © WorldOfBlackout.co.uk, all entries are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Y'know, mostly.
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