Visions
They led me blindfolded through the fetid alleyways of London. Strong hands pushed me this way and that until all direction was lost.
Then, at last, we stopped.
A light rapping upon a door, a bolt scraping from its hasp, and a whispered, “Step forward two paces, sir,” then the door slammed shut behind me.
The blindfold was removed.
The hallway flickered by the light of a single candle held by a tall, hollow-cheeked man who said, “Are you sure?”
I scarcely comprehended the question. “Sure?”
“Are you sure you want to meet her? You may turn back now, if you wish.”
“No, no. I’m quite sure,” I hastily assured him. “It is of the utmost importance that I meet her. It is … my sanity I seek to save.”
“Then come this way,” he said, apparently unmoved by the gravity of my admission. He strode briskly along the corridor and up a creaking stairway.
Hurrying after him, I said, perhaps too loudly, “Is she expecting me?” But he did not reply, only proceeded upward, two steps at a time, so that I was forced to trot, panting, after him.
Presently he stopped.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “These are the rules: Do not touch her, discuss no one but yourself, consider your questions carefully. And though it is not a rule, I advise you to pay no heed to her appearance. It is her wisdom you seek.”
He slid a large key into the lock of a wooden door and pushed it open barely wide enough for me to enter.
“Proceed,” he said. “She awaits.”
When the door closed behind me, I took stock of my surroundings. The room was dark but I discerned the outlines of furniture: a bed, a dresser, a small table, all faintly illuminated by gaslight seeping through the window from the street far below.
A woman sat by the window, her back to me, hair draped about her shoulders, her full skirt extending to the floor.
“You are here,” she said, her voice high and lilting, almost that of a child. “Come to me.”
I had waited so long for this moment, this opportunity to pose my question to …
To whom?
The Lady of Masks, Dark Cora, Seeress, The Other Queen (as if Victoria, herself, had a rival).
Or was she, as I heard one drunk and smug reporter comment in a pub, “A poor, cracked woman who’d be better off in Bedlam.” Still, he said it quietly and with a glance over his shoulder.
It was said of Cora Lovelock that she saw other worlds and other times, that the commonest objects were, for her, a window to another place. And people came to her for wisdom. No, not wisdom, but insight. It was said of her visions and prophecies that they could transform your life or destroy it.
I approached softly and stood beside her. At first, her face was in shadow, but then she instructed me to draw up a chair and sit beside her, and when I’d assumed my place, she turned to me.
I had been warned not to look directly at her, but she turned so suddenly I found myself staring at a pale, smooth face, full of sweetness, save for the eyes which were still in shadow.
“You are troubled,” she said. “As are all who come to see me.”
She leaned forward and her eyes caught the light and they were brown and sympathetic.
“It is a feeling that haunts me,” I said, staring into those soft, wide eyes. “Since ever I was a child. Worrisome, gloomy, skittish, my parents called me. But it is not worry that troubles me. It is …”
I looked beyond her to the faint outline of the city.
“Good,” she said. “Choose your words carefully. Sculpt your question, for answers crowd about you, some dark, some terrible, some shining with the ice-pure clarity of Truth. Do you see them?”
I saw nothing except her face and the streetlight’s faint glow in the window.
“The feeling is this,” I said. “An unease, a disturbance of tranquility, a sense of imminence as if something clamors always to break through, to transition from some other realm into our own. It is, I think, malevolent.”
She laughed, and her laughter was gentle and reassuring. “Not malevolent,” she said. “Merely different.”
“You know of what I speak?”
Ignoring me, she turned toward the window, a shadow passed across her face, and when she turned back, she was changed. A woman of middle years, I would guess. Still beautiful, but somber.
“And the question that brings you to me?” she asked, her voice crisp and full of weight.
“My question is this: what is the source of the unsettled feeling that has haunted me all my life and deprived me of contentment and that lightness of heart a man of my wealth and position should enjoy?”
“The source,” she said, her face slipping back into shadow, “is the denial of your own visions, your insights and imaginative wanderings within the symbols that underlie existence. They are repugnant to that part of your mind that values logic and the unbending path of the ruler’s edge. But they are wild and free expressions of your soul, and the shadows of those lands that lie beyond what men are pleased to call reality.”
My perplexity must have been obvious, because she added, “But those are words — such poor messengers of the infinite. Would you have me show you?”
Sitting with that strange woman in the deepest night, for the first time in my life the unsettled feeling eased.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
She reached across the space between us and set her cool hand upon my cheek.
“Then see,” she said. “Bid your visions welcome.”
I turned again to the window where the night was suddenly illumined with a fierce white light, as if we stood at midday beneath the bright October sun. In the park across the street, the shed leaves of sourwood trees were rust and tinder, circling the unwary in whispering swarms that turned to flame.
A scarlet bird startled and was gone.
And where iron railings once stood, the bristles of some subterranean creature shivered in rows.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “What do these visions mean?”
Again the shadow passed across her face, again she changed.
Now stern, thin-lipped, she said, “The answer to that question is your life’s work.” She fixed me with her gaze. “And that is what unsettles you — the comfortable life you have constructed must now be abandoned in pursuit of this obsession.”
She waved me away, and when I asked, “What do I owe?” she laughed again.
“You have paid the men who brought you here, have you not?” she asked. “As for me …” Again her face changed until there was such slyness in it, I could not help but tremble. “My payment is your visions, for I have seen where they will lead you.”
I fled that room and left London within the week and travelled to the Lake District where I made my home and painted those peculiar visions that now fill my days and nights.
Marvelous creatures on tall, thin legs step through clouds and stride across the hills, trumpeting their pleasure.
Clear blue lakes become the eyes of angels blinking wildly beneath the sun.
A breeze speaks the names of generations dead and long forgotten, and writes those names with dark, spattered rain upon the grey bark of trees.
These visions I drew and more; rendered them truly and with courage — for only thus will our truest self yield to brush or pen. And if some thought me mad, others bought my paintings for princely sums and spread my fame until I was forced to flee to the farthest reaches of the hills to preserve my solitude.
But a question soon disturbed my equanimity and grew with each passing year until I knew I must return to London, to the Lady of Masks alone in her attic room.
Tell me, I would ask: these apparitions — what visions do they see?
