sherbonita

With this short story, Second to Ligeia, I tried to create another perspective on Poe's own Ligeia. Please post any comments, critiques or anything else worth noting about this piece - I appreciate them all. And for the record, I apologise for any formatting problems that may have occurred.

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Present - England, year A.D. 2003

Her name, Rowena Trevanion, that beautiful and virginal title her father most likely gave her, was chipped into the stone. The marker knelt unobtrusively in the grass, its pale and foreboding pink granite color pleading for sympathy.

The name enticed me and I stood mesmerized by its own elegant but petrified beauty, the owner perhaps long since forgotten by distanced family.

I bowed respectfully, murmuring an offbeat prayer to its owner who was, no doubt in my mind, buried below where I dallied. Before leaving, I peered once more at the headstone as a flash of scarlet light streaked behind my eyelids. A sudden chill darted through my chest and unexpectedly, yet instantaneously, I felt tiny pin-pricks on the tips of my fingers as if someone were drawing blood.

And yet, a cool rush settled on my feet and passed through the soles of my shoes allowing me to forget the eerie sensation with which I had just been afflicted, and I saw an illumination of a trim, porcelain doll with the most exceptionally polished black hair I’d witnessed in my life. But as abruptly as it appeared, it vanished and I only had the gravestone to gaze upon.

The attached flower pot that most likely stood once so gallantly now only spewed weeds and decaying foliage. I had no sympathy to offer up to this perhaps
elegant young woman, but only the spoiled pity I carried for every other neglected headstone I encountered. But before I left, I found myself murmuring a name I had never come across in my wanderings.

“Ligeia,” I spoke softly to the wind that purred against my neck, “beautiful, beautiful Ligeia.”
***
Past - England, year A.D. 1838

The nightmares never went away, I always thought about her preternatural body resting in that sepulcher that was never meant to encase her soul.

But you bartered that away when you begged me for Ligeia back, didn’t you? You cursed me every night at the stroke of midnight, insanely begging and pleading for your Ligeia back and into your coveting arms. You needed that black-eyed beauty and slowly I began to realize that I could never compete with a dead woman.
I, Rowena Trevanion, would never quench your passionate thirst. I was only the remnant of your most feared supernatural being, the Conqueror Worm. That’s what you called me, that what you wanted me to be, perhaps it helped ease the pain of your loss of Ligeia.
Ligeia, Ligeia, Ligeia. I cursed that name for days.
***

Our bedchamber was a crypt. The nightmares never subsided when I nestled next to you for needed warmth that was always returned with your clammy, emotional nothingness. The dampness of our room saddened and maddened me at the most inappropriate times. I always felt either a chill or a fever when I entered that catacomb.

After Ligeia’s death, you told me, you remodeled that room, the sacred of all sacred rooms in a house, to quench an abyssal throbbing in your head that never quite went away. I never really understood your reasoning behind the Egyptian sarcophagi that stood upright, watching over us every night - how were they to desiccate your raw longing that you obviously still had for Ligeia? Those tufted gold carpets, the Arabesque furniture, why? And the large portrait of your fair Ligeia that hung above our bed - was it that you never wanted to forget or was it so I knew what I would never be? The curtains that would have forbid her from the rest of the world, those curtains always drawn, made of her old bed linens now stained with her blood, were always open. She, unlike Brown’s Duchess, would always be available to any eye that had the satanic desire to look upon her. But at that time, she was to me only a painting and a figment of your obsession.

You wanted it that way. It never made any sense and I suppose you never wanted it to. I think you knew you were going mad and that your non-prescribed “pills” never really helped.

But still, curiously my mind wandered through your opium dreams of your Ligeia, that slender, porcelain angelic demoness you kept tucked away in your head.

You let her out when you had your fits, those malicious outbursts that I always tried to avoid. A triple dose of morphine would always send me to my own personal Hell where I could wait for my melancholiness to regain hold of my drug-induced hysterics and send me back to Purgatory.

And Purgatory was all I really ever was to you. I was lukewarm for you, never quite enough, always just a little short in every thing I could have possibly done for you or to you. You never wanted me, that fiery-arctic temper of yours flaring any time I slyly mentioned your love, Ligeia. She was an obsession not only for you, but for me as well. How could I survive without Ligeia? That woman, that personae, resided in me whether you chose to admit it to yourself.

But still, on searing nights that you swore would thaw the Undead in their tombs, I always tried to believe I could mesmerize you with my bejeweled and petrified eyes, when I sprouted diamonds instead of tears. But I watched your body instead seduced by that ambrosial and diabolical liquid that I produced from her every year. Diamonded tears were no match for her own coagulated crimson ooze. You wanted it, needed it, fed on it to save you from shedding your own suicidal, innocent blood every night when your own thirst became too much for you. You were nothing without your bloodlust. Back then I could not offer you a whole Ligeia, I could only offer you her unnatural blood. And shamefully, once a year on the anniversary of her demise, you took it, you devoured it and sold your soul to her imps. She was Ligeia no longer, her blood and my blood were entwining to create her within me; to your dismay, Ligeia was in fact becoming me.

But your need for your beauty, for your Ligeia, eclipsed your conscience.
***

As you lethargically handed me the chalice, I felt a sudden icy grip that could only belong to you. My lips curled upwards and I forced a wintry smile of gratitude.

The puddle of wine that resided in that cup was a dark, bloody red that swayed back and forth. The crystal, glistening in the meager candlelight that you allowed me to set aflame, and its smooth texture astounded me. The wine trapped in the chalice was like a calm lake, languid and untouched, awaiting its depurification. A reflecting pool it was, but instead of seeing my own personable face in the surface of the drink, I saw yours.

Your pale, glimmering skin shown even in the glassy liquid, your mysteriously sinister eyes staring from out of the mirrored image that bore an ache into my head, sending impaling shudders down and into my limbs.

Innocently I glanced up at the portrait that hung grotesquely on the wall and saw the calm, collected and pale face of Ligeia simply disappear. It meant nothing to me at the moment when I saw the transformation of her drift into absent black.

But shortly thereafter, there came a trivial and then destructive tremor from inside the realm of my body, I knew not where, that forced my hand to collapse its grip and release the chalice. It descended towards the floor, that striking cup that meant everything to you, that cup that your Ligeia herself had drank from. And although I knew that that really was the only reason you would be cautious of me, I could only stand like a sentinel as the wine churned and sloshed amidst the demolishment of your cherished cup.

Shards were thrown chaotically, encompassing a great deal of the diameter in which we sat. You scoffed at me, then scowled, your face not like a man but more like that of a demon, and you clenched my arm.

Again I shot a fleeting look to the portrait and to my astonishment, Ligeia’s portrait flickered back into the picture, fading in and out. Her polished hair grew longer and lighter but very quickly, shifting from black to brown to blonde and back again.

I reached for the candle, the flame which could be, on all accounts, the only cause for the changing of the picture.

“The candle!”

I saw its fiery blaze in your left eye that, as always, had a chilling effect on my fever. I erupted into shivers as you smiled sadistically and commanded to see Ligeia.

“Ligeia, Rowena; I need you to fetch Ligeia.”

Of all nights in the year and you had to ask now. You obviously didn’t understand the transformation that was taking place. Your desire for your dead wife -- well who’s to say that wishes don’t come true? You certainly wanted it too; you never wanted me, I was only your means to your morbid metamorphosis to indeed get what you really desired. You wanted nothing of me and perhaps only now I can understand that.

I tried, by Lucifer, I tried to love you, I sought nothing but to calm your head and turn your fatal obsession with a corpse into a relationship with me, your new wife who wouldn’t leave you.

But even then I was fooling myself. You’d never love a blonde haired, blue
eyed normalcy like myself - you wanted your gothic, tragic dead wife. No mortal could
take away the love for an immortal.
***

Midnight. Ligeia was awake, I knew, I felt it like a whisper of wind along my neck, even if you hadn’t felt it. It did seem to me almost ironic that I knew this ghastly woman, this woman who I visited and tended to every night of the year, more than you did now. I knew when she was there, I knew when she wasn’t and you - you hadn’t any sense for when she would arrive. You, I thought I realized, were in love only with the idea of the perfect Ligeia.

But I digress.

There was a slight fear in my eyes because really, I knew Ligeia was stronger than the year before and had, after every year went by, more power over my own movements, over my entire bodily actions. There was blackness a few minutes later, the candle must have gone out, and when I saw the bedchamber again, you were sitting uncomfortably next to me and, of all things, holding my hand, outstretching your other to feel the temperature of my forehead.

Eerily enough, I never felt your touch, that touch I’ve been waiting all these
years to feel and despite everything, still cannot.

I felt nothing, a swirling mass of nothing except for the rhythm of a heart encased in my ribcage that was not my own.

Thump, thump. Thump. Thump.

“Ligeia,” I heard you echo, a shadowy call from out of the cave of your mouth, “Ligeia!”

Your eyes were playful, joyous, nothing like the piercing homicidal, opiate eyes I was normally accustomed to. You repeated her name again and throwing your now tender arms around me, I saw myself arise from the bed. I glanced toward the oval portrait unconsciously and again, she was gone. The painting was black. But hypnotically I watched as only nanoseconds went by that were like hours, only to witness the portrait transform into my own.

A mirror sat on the vanity between your Egyptian coffins and stone gargoyles where I hastily shot a glance, only to shriek.

There was no sound from my lips and for the first time in our marriage, I knew you’d accept who I’d become. Because as my tresses grew longer and blacker before your eyes and my skin paled to a porcelain shade not unlike a doll, I knew that you really had seen the ghost of your dead wife. Only this time, I was not the one who saw her ghost as well - I indeed was her ghost.

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-sherbonita