Thrones & ghosts

It is a late afternoon sleep that brings her to the cathedral once again, and he’s there, she knows. The winter wind blows relentlessly, touching the most hidden spaces. Frosty fingers like those of a thousand phantoms follow her through the structure’s heavy wooden doors; she shakes on the inside from a chill that originates in her heart and dances with the music of nature’s unkind bellowing.

The church is abandoned, but consistent; she knows every stone and unearthly whisper — every blasphemous thought that brought it into being. The cavernous interior is perfumed with the reminiscence of holy incense that still clings to the rafters. There are recessed niches on two sides of the space, inset with gothic-style glass panes, and at the far back of the structure, an altar is carved into the very rock of the foundation, framed in the chancel area by three slender oblong windows, and crowned with a simplistic rose window of clear flower petals that filter the sun’s rays with muted textures to give the sensation of a slowing of time that one could feel deep within the core of the chest. Misplaced in its perfection, the altar’s sentinel takes the shape of a bright white throne upholstered in black velvet. Its high back is flanked by two matching points topped by shimmering golden orbs that seem to sparkle from within as though stars are suspended there waiting on celestial cues from their creator.

She pulls her coat around herself more tightly and paces cautiously into the nave — the soles of her boots connecting with the granite floor, each step like a slow heartbeat reverberating into the bones of the old structure, threatening to waken it from sleep. There is no warmth in the space, but her palms sweat, and her face feels hot. She is anxious and a bit afraid. Consuming the air here feels like sinning; the scene represents legions of noisemakers in her mind, only some of which are rooted in the real world.

This is a dream space — one that’s becoming increasingly difficult to decipher. She can feel the physical sensation of her reality, but there’s a headiness about the air and what seems like a veil over her eyes as though she’s seeing with her lids closed. He’s never been around her like this in such a visceral way — the greatest fiction that her mind has ever conjured.

Toward the altar, the shape of him appears from the shadows of the vestry. He pauses inside a ray of sunshine that filters through the rose window and she adjusts to the slender mass of the man he is. The pale flesh of his face reflects the light and throws a bright sheen onto his hair, and as he rests casually on the side of the altar, she can see the glint of his hooded eyes and his rounded nose and petal lower lip, which he draws up to the side in a lighthearted manner. He looks freshly new without wear or fading, but she knows better. She knows what he is, or she thinks she does.

He is her lord of pain, a sinister lover who embodies the anxiety that floods her veins, the fear that hammers at her heart’s container; the insecurity that her mind whispers relentlessly to her ears. He is fueled in her blackest moments; the greater her despair, the more radiant he becomes. He is her ghost, her devil in the pit of her guts. His haunting is an elixir that keeps her from knowing herself, ever obedient to the crushing weight of the world.

“Why are you here?” She asks, her voice breaking the silence of the space and cracking in her throat. She frightens herself with the volume of her own voice and the carelessness of her thoughts.

He wears no vestments – this mighty orchestrator of her innermost thoughts – just black with splashes of white. His long coat hits gently at the back of his knee and glimmers slightly with silver at the wrist. He advances toward her with footfalls matching the heartbeat of her earlier pace. The air seems to waver about him as though he’s pressing through a barrier between their worlds; as though he’s a fiery thing threatening combustion.

The rose window catches her eye behind him and the seconds slow. He is fixed on her, but she notices a pane of glass missing from the window, through which a gentle snow intrudes. She watches as it swirls within the space and falls against the stone wall and toward the floor, ever downward as he persists onward, and she swells with emotions long hidden, forgotten and lost. A sacred chant begins to echo from the recesses of the cathedral as he comes to stand in front of her — disembodied voices filled with reverence or grief and so much longing.

He reaches a gloved hand to her face and, squeezing her eyes shut, she leans toward his front.

It is indisputable, the way she loves him. The way she needs him.

“You should know,” he replies. “You made me.”

His voice is so soft; it sluices over her with its tenor tones and gentle resonance. She can hear it even after his words are done. The sound of him persists at the back of her mind, groping and gnawing in the way a painful memory thrums in perpetuity, haunting and unchanging.

He motions for her to take a place on the throne, but her feet are so heavy; each step is labored agony. Her vision tunnels with the stress of the effort and her exhalations are ragged; they force crystalline mists before her as though to lead the way.

Please, help me.

Her innermost pleading fills the air as she traverses the aisle of this place, which she recognizes as a creation of her chemical malfunctions. She has been here many times before to reconcile the ways in which her brain diverges. If only she could reach the throne, maybe she would finally understand a way to escape this crumbling dirge — a cage she’s made for preservation, but a web it’s become for damnation.

She stands before the seat, recognizing that this is the furthest she’s ever come, and now, faced with the newness of the experience, she trembles. The chanting voices ebb away and it’s only her breathing now and the hollow sighing of the wind.

“Today is the day,” he says. He startles her with the shroud of humanity he wears, and she turns to face him. He extends his hand, which she accepts tentatively. Their gazes entwined, she eases onto the velvet cushion, the blood forcing hard in her ears and a lump rising at the back of her throat.

Tiny fires alight atop the old wicks of candles long extinguished against the cathedral’s cold stone walls. With the growing warmth of the space, she knows for certain. This is the final test to shed her ghost — the demon of her spiritual self, perfuming her experience with fictitious mysticism, stifling her under the weight of his sweet addiction.

As she watches him, he seems to undergo metamorphosis, becoming more akin to flesh and blood. Something in her rises then, and a desperate urgency overtakes her.

He eases her legs apart with the push of his foot and descends before her, between her knees. He watches her face intently with the clarity of mountain ice, and she slips against him, stumbling, as ever, to find her way. He holds onto her hand, and she presses against him, allowing her fingers to feel along his face. He is simultaneously frigid and burning, but she doesn’t retract; she craves the touch of his lips and the ecstasy she knows he can bring. Her whole body yearns for the way he manipulates her — the control he enacts to adeptly stay her here, in these dreams that layer themselves one over the other, until she is rendered numb and useless in the mortal plane.

He releases her hand and, placing it behind her neck, he encourages her face down toward him. His mouth brushes hers as he speaks. She can feel the full decadence of him now — the thick richness of his looming presence and the buttery pleasure of his touch.

“The untamable beating in your chest betrays you,” he strokes her cheeks with his gloved thumbs. “Only you know what happens next.”

She squeezes her eyes so hard that halos appear before her in the darkness. The ringing in her ears only subsides once she wakes, but despite the silence of the room, she can hear the echo of her voice in the cathedral’s lonely chamber, like a haunting … like a ghost:

I’m lost without you. I am.