Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

CXIX. The Third Conversation: When Angels Would Cry, There I Would Die

27
THE THIRD CONVERSATION WITH DEATH
The Habsburg Catacombs
Reina
Vinci, Louisiana
October 31st, 2013
__________________________

    Where the angels cried, that damp, dark place of hell, stars of ice and oceans of fire met a dying, decaying land.

    Angus had blinked once, blinked twice, blinked a thousand times over just to get a sense of the Catacombs. There was a palpable blackness in the air, one you could rip with the edges of your teeth, and yet, he had felt this place before.

He had felt the sting of the wind, howling in Gaelic, he had felt the primitive nails of the earth, the roots clinging onto his feet so desperately. He had felt the abusive lightning and snarling thunder overhead, and yet, the Catacombs felt new to him somehow. Nightʼs thousand eyes that his Scotsmen had whispered about, etched into the rolling clouds of the midnight purple skies.

The desolate, eerie beams of moonlight that crested into a hellish bay, like shattered pieces of molten glass charring the rocks black. A candlelit memory of France, a dead shipyard in the distance, framed under the crepuscular, smoky air.

    And then, where the snow met the smoke, in the distance, he felt the cold thread of needles carve into him. Ice cold shards sucking the blood out of his bones, crucifying him in the snow. The needles created thread, a distant memory, and his raw, naked body fell to prey, a frost-ridden raven's feast. His muscles jutted out of his skin, veins wrapped up around the needlesʼ teeth, and when he screamed, crying into the ether, there he remembered the dead.

Pale shapes, hunched shadows, with flesh as pale as a motherʼs milk – corpses dressed in thick black, boneless beasts with sullen eyes and ghostly bodies. Blue Men of the Minch. Water spirits that haunted the Minch Strait, frozen by the cold of Scotland and the sands of time, soldiers that fell into the ruin of the infamous Battle of Glamis, a memory that haunted him over-and-over, choking him from the Witchesʼ whispers...

Ice and fire,
Fire and ice,
The blood of Arabia drips,
with Scottish hunger tonight.

    "Donʼt touch him," a voice warned. "Or I will cut you from head-to-toe."

    Where the angels cried, a veiled woman cloaked herself in nightʼs satiny embrace. As the story had once said, time-and-time again, the woman never knew the time; she simply sat, eyes closed, listening to the rustling of the wind and the groans of the earth.

Her senses fed on the vibrations that shook the prison late in the evening, psychoanalyzed the monotony of the Catacombsʼ decay. The hand of eternal darkness choking her out, killing her hearing. Now, she was a mistress of darkness, accustomed to every shudder, nursing the wombs of her mutilated uterus, her defiled body, the v*rginʼs blood that dripped from her body.

    The veiled woman was a cold figure, skin of brass bruised from the cracks of a whip, her smouldering right eye blinded by a butcherʼs knife, an oriental mystery. And yet, to Angus, this woman – in her dark, covetous nature, dark as the spider – was the most beautiful he had ever seen.

Ice and fire,
Fire and ice,
Why donʼt we let fate wrap you
Up tight?

The Witches kept speaking, their voices distant.

    "Who...who are you, lass?" Angus asked, breathless.

    The veiled woman winced at her bleeding womb, choking, biting back the pain, before returning to her meditative state. The angels cried, the cold would take, and again-and-again, she would remake, remake, remake.