From his unshorn hair dripped clear water, clinging to the tip of a pointed ear and rolling, rolling down its curve. The hem of his trousers hung soaked through above bare, fine-boned feet. The smile that curled leisurely across terrible lips was sweet, nearly blissful. Perhaps it is not the house itself but rather those that live inside it that make it something to be feared.
Don’t listen. The music in the night; it calls. Through dreams it whistles, sharp and shear. Through stone hewed walls, over the heavy waves that crash against them. It comes from a mouth of salt lips and sharpened teeth, from the depths of the sea below, and it echoes with the sound of forgotten underwater caverns.
Turn away. He drinks from the fountain in the pillared courtyard, the liquid bubbling up to lovingly touch the rise of his mouth, trailing curls break its surface from over the top of his otherworld ears.
“Are you thirsty? Surely, you are cold. We provide for all God’s children here, there is no need to drink from the fountain.”
I said it to his neck, to his back, to stretch of spine and slip of skin.
He did not hear. He would not. His eyes were lost in the water, the colour of its depths, rippling with the currents of its shallows, hungry as the sea below and violent against the placid waters of the fountain.
Don’t touch. His fingers are the ice of frozen waters, the chill of the winter seas holding sway of the bones inside. I have felt them on my cheek. A soft thumb, fighting a war of sensation across my skin with the chill of it, touched at the bow of my mouth.
The drownings have begun again. They wash up on the rocks. Or they do not. This Brother, my Brother, all of them my Brothers; he had drowned too, face towards the sky. A puddle of water and a puddle of blood, blood and water from his head to his hands, pooling between the sprigs of grass in one of many gardens. Blood and water spilling over like rivulets down a rock face from the cavity in his chest, down his chin from his swollen stomach and the red of his bite-shredded lips. He was heavy with dark waters, his lungs empty because they were stolen. The sea that had come to the mountain to take this Brother’s life, had taken its trophy too. And eaten it.
Go to sleep. The music in the night; it whispers now. It doesn’t call, it haunts and it leads. Issuing from between old sharpened teeth, slipping like sea spray across rocks and stone, over heathen lips.
Water bubbles behind both teeth and bowed lips and with fine hands of terrible strength, like all things about him were both fine and terrible, he takes the jaws of men and lovingly gives his mouth and lovingly pours his dark waters down, down, and leaves them at the bottom of the ocean. His creature-toothed grin leaves biting kisses on the dead man’s lungs.
Forget. The blood of God’s children swirled across the placid waters of the fountain. He took his heavy waves and dark waters of forgotten monsters, his whistles and whispers and siren’s songs, his fine-boned bare fingers and fine-boned bare feet, the softness of his skin and its winter’s cold, his lips and his teeth, and padded away, leaving damp imprints on a cold stone floor. And the dead men said the sea that had come to the mountain had tasted of salt, before he tasted of nothing at all.
Inspired by the folklore of the Nix/Nixie and a visit to Mont-Saint-Michel.
Photo by
on
It really does look like this! More photos available on Unsplash.