IF NOTHING ELSE, remember this: Edgar always knew.1
He found the ruin by mistake, a wrong turn down a street that fizzled out and turned into a rutted dead end choked with undergrowth. Housewarming, helping friends move, whatever the event2 would have become over the course of a sloppy October night, there was no house Edgar could actually see, until — he said with a dramatic pause — the ground crumbled under his feet and he found himself standing within the shattered remains of what he first called a cathedral. It was, he said, as if an entire abbey had been sunk3 into the ground and buried over for a hundred thousand years.
Everyone gave him shit — said he was taking our course on Gothic literature a little too literally. Had he seen any old gentlemen with forty-yard beards? Thomas wanted to know. Were there women weeping upon the moors — No moors, you imbecile, and not a single solitary soul, nor any of the others who had been invited, Edgar said and then his eyes fell to me. The way his mouth slanted up, I knew what he was thinking, that we would go and have each other within that desolate ruin, out where there should have been a house, but there was only a buried ruin that no one could even name.
But I was less careless than he and wanted to know more about this nameless, sunken place before we made to go. I had known Edgar for three years — it was our last year at University, the last year before we were to part ways, unless I followed him to London and I hated London4 with all my heart, no matter how much I loved Edgar. He was decisive where I was not, disruptive — the kind to run shrieking through a church service, daring those amassed to consider matters outside their quiet circles of contemplation. 5
Surely, I said to him as he watched me with the infinite patience of a man in love,6 the ruin possessed a name. Everything in the world was named, controlled, precisely defined. We spent afternoons in the library poring over every ancient tome we could lay our hands on, asking the librarians if they had ever heard of such a place and they said no — but I saw it in their eyes. I heard the unspoken words clawing at the corners of their closed mouths. I didn’t ask more of them, fearing they could not say. Edgar and I propped ourselves against the hard walnut shelves in a tangle with books of old, large maps spread across his loose-thighed lap. No matter how close I was, Edgar drew me closer, long fingers guiding mine over the lines that marked the pages. These were original maps, bound into a book for what had been deemed “safer keeping,” and I could feel the difference between smooth ink and rough paper. Coupled with the heat of Edgar’s hand atop mine, I thought the maps would smudge beneath our fingers, lost to anyone who came after. When Edgar leaned in to kiss me, I felt the line of the River Tyne on the page beneath my middle finger and drew back from both boy and map.
“Exham,7” I breathed.
“Possible,” Edgar said and I couldn’t tell if his expression of annoyance was over the broken kiss or the accuracy of my guess.
As stories went, Exham Priory had housed the worst of the worst; the most depraved creatures had called those halls home and surely, it could not be that which Edgar had found in the ground. It could not — and if it was? Oh, I could not deny the way my heart quickened at the mere idea. If I — If we were to discover the ruins of Exham Priory and prove every single thing about the place true — It couldn’t be possible and yet, I wanted it very much to be.
“Was it an aunt you had in that region?”
His question to me required no actual answer. Edgar tangled his hand into my necktie and pulled me closer, to forestall all dialogue but that between lip and tongue. The ruin didn’t exactly matter then — it was an aunt I had near Exham, widowed and alone for more years than anyone wanted to count — and Edgar seemed to put the place out of his mind, until the end of the week when he looked at me over a stack of fresh books we had been perusing and asked if I wanted to go. Its name didn’t matter, he insisted, but he wanted to show me the ruin; he wanted me to see the way the setting sunlight would fill the depression the ruin made in the ground, a pool of gold draining away as the evening descended. We could also call upon my aunt, if I wished, but thoughts of her made me more uneasy. How that was possible, given our potential destination, baffled me. Something about women wandering alone, unseen.
He bade me pack my camera and we drove south, until Edinburgh was far behind.8 Here, the land was untamed, streets turning to dirt before they fizzled out altogether. The idea that a wrong turn had brought him here in the first place seemed unlikely; it had perplexed me, his disappearance over the weekend, the claim of seeing friends into a new house, but when Edgar parked the car and took my hand to draw me out, I said nothing, captivated by what spread before us. It was as he said, like nothing you might imagine when a person explained it. It seemed a whole city submerged, drawn into the guts of the world where it held the last moments of sunlight from the rest of the land.
Within the dry and crumbling earth, walls made themselves known as dwindling sunlight caressed them. I picked out windows and doorways, even the remains of a sloping roof. Edgar grasped my hand and pulled me down a set of crumbling stone steps, into the building itself, and from there watched me was I wandered. The great hall rose around us to frame the twilight sky. I saw each piece of the wreck in turn, through the camera lens as the light faded and faded. Then it was Edgar’s mouth lighting up the ruin, against my cheek, my ear, as he held me from behind, buckled my knees, and pressed me into the dirt. Here, the earth smelled like eternity. I watched in some measure of amusement as Edgar caught my camera as it tumbled from my hand. He set it carefully aside, showing less care with my jacket, my trousers. He was insatiable, the ground strangely warm beneath my splayed hands, as if with spilled blood, though it crumbled dry between my fingers when hands turned to fists. When we walked up that long staircase later, as if we were drunk on the world and each other,9 the moonlight glossing the stone made each step seem whole once more. Each was solid beneath my feet in a way they had not been upon our descent, no crumbling debris but only smooth and worn from centuries of feet moving across them.
I could not put the ruin from my head and wanted to return. Even in sleep, which we took in a small B&B in town proper,10 the sunken building invited me to wander its halls. I returned to that crumbling staircase and found, not Edgar there but a woman, draped in what seemed shadows, but under my fingers was vintage silk. Under my fingers — she stood that close, looking down at me as if she had seen me once upon a time, but now needed a nudge to remember. She did not seem quite real and I presumed her to be my aunt with her silver hair until her lips parted, until she took a breath and drew the world into her lungs.
This, she said in a voice that was not my aunt’s, is not right.
Her mouth did not move, but I heard the words even so. I could not tell dream from reality, then. I meant to ask her which it was, but it seemed ridiculous as she moved past me, down the stairs —
The night stairs, she said as she passed, the silk of her gown evacuating my grasp as though it were running away. It flowed behind her as a black river down every stone step. I turned to follow, unable to do anything else. My feet would not carry me up and out of the ruin, so down it was.11
A sickly yellow-green glow illuminated the underground passages we traversed, as if glowworms congregated somewhere above our heads. No bit of light touched the lady. She seemed cut from the world, only a paper silhouette cameo in front of me, the absence of all things. But the longer I looked at her, I began to see shapes within even the shadow of her. The air seemed made of great, dark whorls, as if many-limbed creatures moved inside her. No matter how impossible this also was, I went with it. I followed the passage of one such creature down her spine and into what should have been the cradle of her hips. There it curled, as if making a nest, and bared its fangs at me, fangs that gleamed like anthracite. Black on black and blacker still.12
Come, now. Women are not made of such things.
She turned down a corridor and vanished from my sight. I gasped at the loss of her — the sensation was terrible, as if I had ceased to breathe, the whole of the world crumbling atop me.— I increased my stride, but around the corner, she was still gone. Screams rose in the near distance.
Margaret!13 I wanted to cry, but the name lodged in my throat.
She was as the ballad said:
Here roams the lady daemon, between childer bound and freeman.
Hair of silver, eye of gilt; soft of foot, through blood she spilt.
— The Lady Daemon (1512)14
At the corridor’s end stood a door, a sliver of that sickly light visible beneath it. This light shone so clearly upon my shoes that I could see where I had scuffed them the first day I’d met Edgar — I had kicked a stone unknowingly into his path, putting a similar scar on his own shoe. I pressed my hands to the door and it was like touching ice and fire both. From beyond the door, screams like you would find in your worst nightmares — as if people were being disassembled while they yet lived. There were letters carved into the door, worn by so much time they were mostly illegible15. I imagined a knife held in an unsteady hand, each cut into the wood drawing forth a fresh scream from the room beyond. The latch was cold beneath my hands, but would not be freed, no matter how I tried. It was likewise steady beneath the thump of my shoulder, refusing to give.
My fall from the bed woke me, shoulder thumping against floor and not door. I had no good idea where I was until Edgar reached down, fingers stroking my bare shoulder. I cringed at his touch, retreating into the tangle of blankets. My shoulder ached. When I looked, it showed a bruise, which of course could not be. Even Edgar’s face betrayed surprise at this and I felt the emotion genuine — there were things he knew and could not yet tell me, but this mark upon my skin surprised him as much as it did me. He touched me again, the bruise warmer than the rest of the arm, angry with blood and injury.16
The ruin was different in daylight, less hostile but no more welcoming. I expected to see footprints upon the steps, but while there was evidence of my tussle with Edgar, there was no sign that anyone else had been in the ruin.17 I pulled Edgar down the hallways I had dreamed and we found the door, the terrible door, and Edgar —
Edgar’s hands closed over my own, forcing me to hold the doorknob. It burned like ice and fire, as it had in my dream, but opened easily enough under our combined strength. I gasped as the foul stench of the room rolled out to greet us. I could not withdraw, for Edgar nudged me in.18
The crypt was vast, vaults lining the walls, rats skittering across the floor. Some were inscribed with names, but most were not. Each was locked tight, flowers turning to dust on the ground before three of the vaults. Edgar left my side to trace the few names he found, as if he would recognize some of the dead.19
The floor vibrated with anguish. It was as strong as anything I had ever felt, pulling me across the floor and down another set of stone steps. Into the heart of the priory, the lowest cellars where the worst things lingered. I did not question then what I saw, took it only for what it was, endless torment that Margaret Trevor had a hand in both then and now. How could it be that such things continued long past their points of origin? Or was it that everything was a circle,20 moving outward before curling under and down to return through the middle and move back out? There was no end to anything begun here.
The worst thing was, despite the horrors around her, Margaret Trevor was something to be worshipped, a glory even in the blood and ruin that streaked her. The stories said that she loved the old cults well, but had taken a passive role beside her husband. But here, in the horrible cellar with its collapsing girders, she was a gold-and-silver goddess while her husband cowered. He held his hands before his face, as if he could not bear a magnificence such as she, while she opened the bodies21 laid on an altar before her to welcome the oldest things anyone in the world might ever know.