Dear friend,
My dead wife’s ghost has been circling under my bed ever since she defiled our bed and broke her bond. Each night she begs my forgiveness, shameless spirit that she is, injecting my dreams with visions of love for her.
The antlered crone with the cloak sewn from cranes said I must gather her bones and bury them. That I should lay food and drink before her mound, uttering a prayer, and that then I should cover it up, sealing the door under heaps of earth, that she may cause no further grief.
The sneaky little thing provokes me to laughter, that I may cherish her when she comes. She flatters me, knowing I am not eager to decide untruth of flattery.
Every man, woman and child knows that amor non vincit omnia. My wife is dead, but she is also the starved dog that tears open my rubbish and scatters it about, and the worm whose name is Error. But love does not care for such things, and again I am reluctant to offend her, or to do what is right, that is putting her to sleep. Dear Wilhelm, if you knew where I’ve been!
I have been to the cellars of the brain, where we keep what we must not touch. In the dusty stores I found a black box that crumbled in my hands. There was nothing in it, or there had been -- whether taken or with its vessel obliterated I don’t know. This metaphor, should I nourish or deny it? If the answer is “deny it”, will it grow monstrous with my back turned to it, fed on pride and suspicion? Will it grow fat enough to rise and demand my love and my attention? For this box, like the others, is a child of mine.
Then I stood in a green field that grew into a hill, cool with the mist of morning. The yellow moths fled the dew into the seams of my clothes, and I loved them, as I loved the yellow birds, the brown, and the black. I wept for the deaths of their sisters, and I wept for myself, who could have asked them to be spared but did not.
One of them I had met before, but did not recognise until he told me so.
He was the one that had slipped into Alastor’s collar, the night that we met so he could take my message beneath. It was the night that his eyes shone brightest. It was the night that, hiding his bloat under foxfur, he announced his final descent.
Did he do what is right, and leave this letter in my friend’s hands, said I. He had not. The messenger found love halfway down the pit, in the form of a bird that had once perched upon his shoulder, when he was young and found disease in all that was not holy. So he went back and, fearing me, did not inform me. I am not angry at him, for the Wildcat has many attendants, lovers and officiants both. I am not required at his flowery court.
The moth said as much.
"You met my servants on the road, but none ever spoke your name to me.
"Your life's blood will be wood pulp and damp. And the roses of your garden will bloom, and wither at their stalks.
"Yet your stores will be full of rose and clover honey, and honeyed-rose and sweetwine will be your fill, and you will sleep well.
"Like the Sun-child you will see the glint of the knife from the corner of your eye, and you will offer your neck to be born, for there is a limit to what can be known without being cut.
"It is your wife I see with a knife over her head, bent before a cup that is empty but for a drop. You will marry a barbarian. She will bear you no sons. A fever of clouds rolls overhead, cracking and moaning. They have come but will give no water."
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