Jill Manor, Part II: Reclamation

The rain pelted over the grassy cliff in sick and twisted drops of icy doubt. It did not fall calmly or with an ounce of love. It hung in the air, cold, deafening, and eternal, like a shroud of impending death blurring the lines between earth and sky the way her kisses melted his being and pulled him back through time to a place he had never been, but couldn’t leave. Not even in death.

The house of Jill-Manor stood shadowed and ruddy against the rolling gray wall of fog that trapped the echo of empty rooms as the howling wind blew in from those same northern cliffs. In the years following the untimely deaths of Catherine and Thomas Wilke, it would seem they haunted the same hallways, cursing all those who would never pass, two ghosts moving through a burial chamber of ivy and sprouting willows as the ground reclaimed its rightful place, burying their bodies amidst the blooming flowers and eternal haze, peppering the wind-whipped bricks the roof so desperately clung to.

Each cracking, decrepit shingle exposing bitter eyes of the world to a place that could never exist again.

Thomas Wilke had loved Catherine with such a ferociously desperate passion. It terrified him to be born with such a curse to love as deeply as they had. To know no other could suffice; their deaths would bring no peace, no relief, no awakening. Only the strongest, brightest despair.

To have loved under a cursed moon, a waning sky, and a tepid rush—they formed the stars and the trees and the waters that fell to ruin with their demise. The world their coffin, their mausoleum, their final resting place. Where no visitors would ever know they existed, no hot tears of mourning would ever crest eyes of those that had lived, or loved and also died.

For to have half the love of a stranger would pale in the face of their self-possessed existence. No sympathy here, amongst those beloved few. She was there, Catherine Wilke, in spirit. She stepped through the shattered French doors, but the house refused to let her pass quietly. The parlor belonged to the forest now. A thick, hairy cable of old ivy snagged her frayed hem, anchoring her to the rotting threshold with a heavy, unyielding jerk. Even in her ghostly form, her thickly layered skirts brushed the cold stone floors. The house reached out. A wet, heavy tugging hand of dried moss tickled her ankles, tangling in the snaking tendrils of ivy as if to grasp her back into the earth, while scattered drops of dew dried in the baking sun.

She was completely, utterly unreachable. Her heart belonged to the dead, to him, to Thomas. Forever.

It was a life, even in death, he could never, ever give her. He knew every single line of her pale, decaying face. Her sweltering lips, her cold eyes, still ocean blue hung in their orbit.

“You were mine,” Thomas whispered into the empty space of which she had just left. His ghost and her ghost hadn’t crossed paths in ages—“and I was yours, forever, still. I will do whatever it takes, cross time, to show you.”

It was the only lie he had ever uttered her direction. It kept him sane, it made him mad, crazy, angry.

Futile attempts to gain her love back stretched miles into the vast eternity.

She never uttered a word back, not to him, not to herself, not to anyone.

Her affection, her loyalty, her love had become its own tepid phantom, scoring the edges of death with determination, salting his wounds until they hung over him like weighted clouds on the hottest day.

She only passed a fleeting look as she pulled away into the shadows, watching, waiting, sulking.

She belonged now to the wild edges of the northern cliffs, she made herself up of rolling storms and battering winds. She became anything but his.

He had kept her caged for so long, that she refused to stay in his walls.

His obsession was now met with blank, hollow, aching absences. So now he felt in death as she had in life. Silenced, forgotten, lost, incomplete.

They lived in two worlds where unrequited devotion rotted inside the house that love and time both forgot. Only his ghost would recall what she had long forgot.

Until she finally vanished forever from his sight, into the cold winters fog under a full moons tide. No note, no trace, no lingering gaze. She simply ceased to be.

Ceased to be his, for him, or for anyone else, ever again—and with that, he ceased to look for her. He knew she had never truly been his, never truly been there to begin with. Their love was not something built to last, built for time to deconstruct. It had never been there at all, ever.

Constructed merely upon a void, with the ghostly ruin of a man musing over the spirit of what could have been but was never his. Prisoner to a love he had long lost, before it ever began. Blossoming lightly, slightly, against the mottled grass. Listening for the voice of a woman whose lips would never, ever touch his again. A name he would never know, forevermore.