Tears of Blood

In the first few months after her death I shed not a tear: the thought of her not sharing her life with others seemed incomprehensible and almost blasphemous, for her vitality, innocence and wilful determination (which sometimes bordered on single-minded stubborness) seemed to capture the very essence of a human, and a human child at that.

As many months and years slipped by, the shock and sorrow faded and she slipped throught the time-worn crevices in my mind so that I almost completely forgot that she had lived, until some image or phrase of music would suddenly light up in my mind like the embers of a dying fire. My beautiful fly in amber would appear before me: a smiling child with hair as golden as her soul curling wildly to her jaw (it was too curly to grow, or so her mother said).

It took days before I could sleep again.

I believe that it was the 7th Samhain after her death, by which time I found that I could forget her for months on end. The lights had fused and, as I have no fear of the dark, I decided to pass the evening beside the warmth of the fire, with only candles for light.

The evening passed quickly and as the brass carriage clock chimed ten I found myself yawning - an event in itself as I have been an insomniac since childhood. I once read in an old leather-bound volume of my grandfather's that coal fumes caused a pleasant feeling of faintness after several hours. I rose, smiling at childhood memories and had started snuffing out the candles when a sudden urge to look in the large mirror cut through me like a stab in the chest. Then a laughing voice - her laughing voice - resounded in my head:

"Look, look if you dare!"

Her spirit was with me in the room, I could tell by the strange feeling of peace in my heart, and the subconscious relaxation of my shoulders which only occurred when she entered the room. I closed my eyes and let the sweet sensation flow through my body like a fine wine.
“Dare you!” she cried again in her sing-song voice.
“I can deny you naught, my angel.” I breathed, scarcely audible, for fear of her presence vanishing if I made too sudden a movement.
“Then go and see!” and I turned as though she had physically reached up and pulled me around to face the crackling fireplace. My knees clicked audibly in protest as I moved towards the over-large mirror which grazed the ceiling and made the room appear double its size.

A split-second before I opened my eyes I found that I had half steeled myself against the inevitable disappointment which only reality can bring. My heart, which for so long had yearned for this moment, seemed to freeze in my breast, and I found myself screaming:
“Leave me! You are just an illusion – a nothing – the worst daemon of the mind!”

Opening my eyes abruptly, I started as I looked into the mirror: it was her face staring back in place of mine- the sweet face of my beautiful child. And yet it was not hers. She appeared before me as she would have done if she still lived, with her golden hair tumbling freely like that of a medieval damsel, past her slender shoulders, and her mouth- soft and kissable as a rose petal- arched in a teasing curve.

It is my belief that a smut must have escaped the grate and flown to my eye, as I found myself in pain- a strange pain which started in my eyes and worked down to my jaw in the way that the freezing winter wind of Durham tends to. Reaching up to touch my eye, I realised that I was crying- shedding every tear which I had never allowed myself to shed for her before.

She was gone, hope was gone, and I remember feeling that numbness within the mind, which comes only with the death of the soul’s illusions. Then there was nothing and I was falling, falling…

The brass carriage-clock chimed ten as I lay on my back, eyes glued together with the remnants of last night’s emotion. Blinking sleepily I rolled on to one elbow so as to help me stand up and heard a cracking sound from underneath me. Looking down, I saw a porcelain doll’s arm sticking out from underneath my chest and gingerly rose in such a way that would not cause further damage to it.

As I bent down to touch her shattered child face I realised that the torso was shaped oddly, and clothed and wrapped with ribbons as a parcel would be. More from a desire to further destroy it than out of curiosity I crossed to my writing desk and drew out my ornate letter opener in order to slit open the bodice.

I stabbed the thing in the place where the heart lies in its living counterpart and started to drag the tip down when I was stopped by a blood-freezing screech which came from, or seemed to come from, the doll itself. In terror I stabbed the thing wildly with my own crazed laughter ringing in my ears and around the room like church bells across a street.

Only the chiming of the carriage clock (a quarter of an hour had passed) managed to bring me back to my senses. I dropped the knife and the golden hair of the creature, which I must have shorn off with the opener, and started to pick up the pieces of my momentary insanity: the destruction of a mere doll, when my fingers found something in the seemingly hollow body of it. Lifting the strangely warm, smooth object to the light I realised what had made the screeching sound when I had dragged the letter opener through the doll. As I examined it more closely I could make out a deep line etched through it diagonally by the knife. It was a piece of amber as wide as a thumb joint is long, shaped like a concave disk, and there suspended in the centre so precisely that it could have been inserted with a fine needle was a small, black fly.