My Dear Fiona

Chapter 16 - Marwick's Hole

You couldn't have been a tenant in that hole in the wall, Fiona! The cathedral was built at the beginning of the twelfth century, and Marwick's Hole was added four hundred years later, long after your time. How on earth did they bring the prisoners up there?

"They walked them up a ladder," a familiar voice whispered from behind me, and I didn't have to look to know whose it was.

I couldn't help my fascination with that strange stone birdcage, probably designed to keep the heathens' feet as far from the ground as possible, which ended up metaphorically elevating their status to that of winged creatures, who dwell high above the crowd.

Life is poetry, that's what people fail to notice, poetry that writes itself gathering inspiration and meaning from the mundane, and turning it transcendent in the process.

It's a feedback loop, outside the grasp of reason and authority, which delights in creating riddles and stirring awe, and scoffs at logical consistency and our comical attempts to make sense of it.

"Maiden, awake! | wake thee, my friend,

My sister Hyndla, | in thy hollow cave!

Already comes darkness, | and ride must we

To Valhall to seek | the sacred hall."

"Chilling, huh?" Denise whispered, a lot closer to dread and farther from fascination than I was. "Well, you found your bones. Can we get out of here?"

"Sadly, those bones had nothing to do with my Fiona. The grant doesn't cover seventeenth century wise women. I'm back to square one."

How do we go through life like that, ignoring the wondrous and unexpected in order to chase after the carrot du jour, whatever that is? We discount context, that's why we can't make any sense of living.

If you came to a place to unveil its secrets, look at what it shows you, listen to the stories it wants to tell you, even if they are not what you expected to hear.

Context is everything. It informs the deeper layers of your quest for meaning. It contains the spirit of a place, the scars it bears, its unique patterns. We act as if everything was created in a vacuum and placed on location after the fact. Every act, every event, every custom, is imbued with the character of its context.

Marwick's Hole is relevant to your story, Fiona, even if it happened far into your future.

Where else in the world would someone hold the condemned in such regard, as to build them a secondary altar of sorts, raised up high on consecrated ground?

The irony of the fact the cathedral was dedicated to Saint Magnus' martyrdom reverberates in this stone metaphor through the centuries: life poetry at its finest.

Denise was quiet on the way back home, fending off my attempts at conversation with monosyllabic answers. She looked ill at ease with all of this, and her homeless night didn't improve her mood. She cracked eventually, bursting like a broken dam.

"Do you ever get used to it?" She looked at me, eyes welling up with tears. "This gift, or whatever you want to call it. Don't you want to be normal sometimes?"

"I am normal, Denise. I've never given it any thought. This was the way I always was. This is normal for me."

"I do. I want to be normal, and young, and live my life! We only have a few short years before we cease to exist, you know? Why would I waste it talking to the dead?"

I paused to admire the spectacular flouting of logic on which Denise had built her argument.

Explaining to my distressed sister why her comment was hilarious would not have benefitted either of us.

"You're tired, Denise. You didn't sleep, it's cold. I'll take you home. You need to rest."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I'll go to the Archive, or visit the stones again."

"Don't go to the stones without me. It's not safe."

"What?" I replied, perplexed, because that comment, so out of character for Denise, sounded as if it came from someone much older, much wiser.

"What?" she repeated, as if she had no clue what I was talking about.

We all live pampered lives now, compared to those of our ancestors, and rarely experience the threshold states which allow unconscious knowledge to bridge across to reason and manifest in words.

"Let's go to the stones together tomorrow. My friends couldn't believe I haven't seen them yet. And the cairns. And the underground homes."

"Denise, there's plenty of time. We don't have to go everywhere tomorrow."

My sister had reached the state of exhaustion, which usually prompted her to blabber incoherently and make irrational decisions to be regretted and repaired later, so I was relieved when we finally turned the corner onto our street.

She went out like a light the moment she hit the sheets, and I spent the afternoon browsing the shops, sipping latte, and taking a stroll alongside the seawall.

I visited an art gallery, where large-scale photographs hung next to oil paintings and art embroideries and, between the puffin pictures and the crewelwork flowers, I lost track of time.

The sun was still up hours later, and I couldn't figure out why I was so tired until I looked at the time: it was ten at night, and I'd been up since four.