here’s the long and short of it: your mom died when she was 16, only, she didn’t–not in any way that mattered. for the next few decades she travels, she loves, and she lives. eventually you come along, unplanned, and reality sets in. the years can’t touch her, but she knows time will soon take its toll on you. it’ll happen in the blink of an eye, and the thought terrifies her. so she does the only thing she can–she runs.
you’re eight years old when she leaves, twelve when your father decides to go after her. to make things easier on you both you gave him permission, told him it was okay, but you both knew it wasn’t. you’re stuck in a foster home until you’re 15, when someone you’ve never met before claims to be a long lost relative. you don’t really care that you don’t believe them.
turns out, you are related–in a way. it’s hard to believe the woman pushing 80 before you could’ve once been your mother’s lover, but for some reason you believe her. she teaches you forgiveness; she understands how hard it is to be left behind. she opens your eyes to the strange world around you, and soon you’ve made it your mission to document the stories of those who’ve been cast aside; the ones who were given a taste of immortality, but nothing more. the ones who had to pick up the pieces of their lives and keep going.
you’ve sat by many bedsides, holding hands until last breaths were taken. you listen to them–to their stories, their lives, their hopes & dreams–the voices of those who weren’t gifted with immortality but were unfortunate enough to cross paths with those who did.
“slowly i dance out of the burning house of my head.”
— MARK STRAND, from the compete poems; “the way it is,” wr. c. june 1975
like most of her memories, those of her mother only come in flashes; incomplete fragments that paint a dark picture of things to come. she remembers a figure yelling at shadows, a knife brandished at the darkness. she remembers red blotches on white walls, the sick wet sound of her mother’s head beating against plaster. she remembers words that had no meaning, the desperate pleas of a madwoman who was descending into insanity. she remembers finding her mother’s body swinging from the attic rafter, a symbol of a snake eating its own tail, her final cryptic message.
what she does not remember is the night that they bonded, mother and daughter, a muse and her darling poet. ynez crane had told herself not to–that she would never do this, that she had long ago consigned herself to live and die a normal life. in the end the temptation to know her daughter in such an intimate way was too strong, the curiosity burning, a mother’s need to know that her child was good and loved and happy. nothing could have prepared ynez for what she saw in her daughter–somehow glimpsing the hurt that was meant to be lived through, the betrayals and abandonment that were yet to come. it was terrifying and bizarre yet in a way she knew what she saw was not only real, but inevitable. she had not just seen her daughter’s life, but an echo that would be lived over and over again: there would always be a girl, there would always be tragedy.
CHAPTER I.
morrigan would never think of her father as a cruel man, but she would not remember him as a kind one either. he had no patience for the world of make believe that his wife had appeared from–no time for muses and fate, sacred bonds that were not meant to be broken. he was a hardworking, level headed man. he worked two jobs, raised four daughters, and loved his wife despite her moments of hysteria. he didn’t ask for much in return. ynez’s suicide and the months of hell she put him through before had been more than he’d bargined for; and the subsequent rescemblence between his daughter’s behavoir and that of her mother’s did not go unnoticed. when a car crash came later the same year and took the lives of three of his daughters, benicio crane decided to abandon the forth at the gates of lennox hill mental asylum.
she doesn’t remember when the voices started, doesn’t remember the last time she lived without looking over her shoulder for fear of lingering spirits. female hysteria, schizophrenia, sickness of the mind. whatever the name, it was clear to the staff that morrigan had inherited her mother’s insanity–though the reality was nearly the opposite. the voices that whispered to her, that opened her mind to hidden pieces of the world, were neither ghosts nor a product of an ill mind: they were just echoes. things that had been, things that would be.
there will always be a girl. there will always be tragedy.
lennox hill was not a good place, and the man that ran it was not a good man. already of a peculiar mind, morrigan found herself becoming an unwilling participant in doctor hans lada’s experiment to create a muse–an experiment that had already claimed the lives and minds of many others in his care. he utilized every form of depravity at his disposal–sleep withdrawal, electroshock, morphine drips, metrazol therapy, and regular injections of blood from a true muse. her childhood was long and bitter, but in the end doctor lada had gotten his way. he’d created the perfect little pet, a woman torn apart and put back together just to his liking, a muse like no other.
CHAPTER II.
too proud of his success to simply let her slip through his fingers, hans lada found a way to ensure she would never leave his side, adopting morrigan months before she turned eighteen. lada took morrigan back to his home in the country, simply trading one prison for another. the abuse morrigan had come to expect from the doctor continued, but there was something else–a hand lingering too long on her shoulder, his grip on her waist too tight. sooner or later he’d realize that while he’d twisted morrigan’s mind into something new and pretty, she wasn’t really a muse. and when he did, when her mask slipped and he realized it had all been a delicately played-out act, she was certain that he’d throw her back into lennox hill for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER III.
summer came and with it, morrigan saw a way out.
hans lada had a son. he lived in europe, studying abroad. she began writing to him, in secret, first out of desperation and then out of something… even needier. morrigan had hoped he would be kind enough to free her from her cage, surprised at the ache she began to develop for his words, his gilded promises. the signs were clear enough from the start, of course. he was his father’s son, and all that it included. erik lada had anger issues and control issues and many more issues that there may or may not be terms for. he was manipulative and dishonest, had no qualms with raising either his voice or his hand. morrigan’s not even sure if he ever really loved her–not like she had loved him–but in the end he’d done as she asked, he’d come for her in the middle of the night and eloped states away. she would be thankful for that. and if she had to, she had enough love for the both of them to make things work.
they were married for three years before erik gave up.
she thinks the last straw was the baby–the baby that she doesn’t talk about. her time with erik bleeds together, she remembers it like one long, neverending day. crying and laughter, moments of fear intercut with bliss, promises made and broken seconds later. she’s in love, she’s scared, she’s bleeding. the baby’s not breathing. little boy blue.
she remembers going back to lennox hill one last time, she remembers she didn’t fight when they strapped her down on the surgical table. she wanted to forget, wanted to sleep and not wake up. erik was just so angry with her, she could just die!
CHAPTER IV.
things are muddy after the lobotomy. long stretches of time lost, uncertainty marking what little memories she can find in her broken mind. she knows she got out of lennox hill, she knows that she didn’t go back to erik. instead, morrigan sought atonement for her greatest sin in every bad decision she made, so ashamed by the secret that she can’t even remember it.
an aristocrat born with an appetite for violence, columbia elizabeth marlowe would torture and kill no less than 40 men and women–earning themself the title the werewolf of essex–before being caught and sentenced to death for their atrocities.
it was to their family’s surprise when the day after their execution columbia returned, unable to grasp that where their family had seen the remnants of unspeakable evil, columbia had seen something else entirely; something raw and powerful, something that spoke to them in a way that nothing in this world ever had before. columbia had no way to describe the transformation that had brought them back to life, not fully understanding it themself, only aware that this desire that burnt within them to do terrible things was meant to be embraced–beginning with the very people who had betrayed them in life.
with their family dealt with, columbia joined the english settlers in founding ipswich, adopting the moniker of their last name as they found new and daring ways to sate their growing thirst for chaos.
immortality only seemed to raise the stakes, to make it harder to satisfy the gnawing hunger for artistic destruction. murder became too simple, too small scale. their displays of depravity became more grandiose, always chasing the fleeting high that came from such acts. they’ve killed presidents, they’ve planted bombs, they’ve disturbed the peace and panicked the masses.
yet, their greatest accomplishment may be their most recent:
‘head in the clouds’
– a club that towers above the new york skyline, catering exclusively to the desires of muses, ranging from the perverse to downright immoral. muses who come to the club are encouraged to to satisfy sexual perversions including torture, or pleasure killing of artists; artists who have been led to believe that they would die and be reborn as muses. in reality, most who die… simply die. and those who do return as muses are given to sebastian steele.