The Child in Red

She shan’t stop ‘til I’m dead.

My lion-hearted Hamish,

I fear that this shaky collection of ink strokes may be the last product of my sound mind. I feel it dissolve in this brick coffin, any sense of the familiar or lovely dispelled by a gale of darkness. My dear Mr Keats could not see what flowers were at his feet, and now I cannot see what lights are at mine in this clinical sarcophagus. Lift me up, for I am dying! My every nerve shatters!

They say my sanity is to be restored through order, through polite conversation, cleaning fireplaces, the taking of tea. These brutes believe that this hideous routine will cure me, what is good for one simply must be good for all, rendering us bound for domesticity, factories, balls, unhappiness only dimly perceived — for their warped version of a life. They do not let me outside, besides in the fenced garden, a place of trees trimmed to not break windows, and flowers the shades of diluted watercolour.

Any trace of the wild, the natural, the wonderful, is unwelcome here. The mountains of ink that hide all their danger in their sinuous curves on the horizon… The lakes of glass that reflect only a warped version of oneself, so mesmerising it seems more correct than any mirror… The forests dim, labyrinths embroidered with God’s every treasure… they do not see these things! These men of morals, they keep me from precisely what I ache for most! They cannot comprehend the church of the earth, altars of roots, communion of clear streams, choirs of the nightingale. And so I only deteriorate in the name of their pure science, my swimming sense and vision no longer able to conjure anything but the most torturous apparitions to worsen my entrapment. Hamish, you said you never believed in hell, but I know now that I have found it.

Here I must stay, here I must die, as others bewitched of the same magic enjoy it. I feel we have wrought real change, real freedom for our fellow man. No more will the lone wolf or the poet be dismissed as mad or a drunk — they can hear our voices, and know we write what we feel, what they feel too, but have never found words to express. We are the messengers, those blessed with senses attuned to the heart’s every ache and song, and the twisting of words that allow these impossibilities to live on pages. Slowly but surely, the world is waking up… But I cannot bear witness! Here I must stay, refusing tea and brooms, waiting for them to bring out the leeches again for my punishment.

I have screamed such that these walls now hold misery in their bricks. I flail and thrash until my iced sweat flowers in pools on the flagstones. They do not know how they torture me, revoking all the bittersweet mysteries of the world in the name of verdant health. I shall choke on all this virtuosity. My thoughts rot to black, and I no longer know what is real. There is one only that shall not leave, one of these waking nightmares that stalk my shadow. A girl. In crimson.

She is always present, but never there. I know not if her gown is blood-coloured, or whether life’s elixir actually stains her. I close my eyes and see her face, only to open them and feel as though she is with me, always out of sight. I am too tormented to sleep, and too exhausted to stay awake. Am I seeing her because I cannot sleep, or can I not sleep because she haunts me? In vain have I tried to make sense of her, and still she stays. This is why I lose my mind.

She is one child and every child. Every little girl lost to consumption and filth and misery in noxious factory smog. Every little boy asleep across the tracks down the mine greeted by an iron cart-wheel into the skull. Every baby born and smothered to take up one less share of food. The blood that slithers from her hair is the blood of the world — colonial soldier’s swords dripping rubies onto Asiatic sand, the slit throats of French and American revolutionaries. Her blood is our blood. She bleeds chaos, misery, hunger, poverty, war, murder, opium — all that is dark about this world forms her torment. And as I lie here locked away from my nature, my friends, my mysteries, my light, she is all I have now. Her empty eye sockets. Her puppet’s fingers as she draws the breath from my soul.

It is here I must leave you, my dear friend. As you may observe. I already am so shaken that I can barely steady my hand long enough to form a single word on this parchment. She as taken my sanity, my body, my happiness, it will be only a matter of time before every sense shuts down, and I will be left all but a living corpse, a riot of shrieking from tepid lungs. This is my parting gift to you, my friend: the last poem I shall ever write. Farewell mother Earth. You have been a beautiful mystery.

At purple bruised sunset, there’s a breath in my ear

A mind-splintering sigh, that tells me she’s here.

They say she is the doll of my evanescing health,

That this torture and madness is sprung from myself.

What she wants is unknown; she shan’t stop til I’m dead.

That dark wraith of madness.

The child in red.

John

(Original ghost story, written at age 17 during study of Romanticism)