Page 10 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

‘Tomorrow it is then,’ I murmur. ‘Never a truer word spoken. All right for some, all right for some.’

Author’s Note

When I started ‘Duet’, I had in my mind to write a doppelgänger story. Literally meaning ‘double walker’ in German, a doppelgänger is a shadow self – a living ghost – supposed to be someone’s double. In traditional ghost stories, it is only the owner of the doppelgänger who can see this phantom self and is often – usually – a harbinger of death. In stories of bilocation, a person can either spontaneously or willingly project his or her double, known as a ‘wraith’, to a remote location. This double is indistinguishable from the real person and can interact with others just as the real person would.

However, during the writing process, things went their own way and it became a story about conscience. Like Lady Macbeth being unable to wash her hands clean of Duncan’s blood or the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – who imagines he can hear the heart of the old man he’s killed beating under the floor and so gives himself away – guilt exacts a heavy price.

The story also seemed to belong in the 1960s, an era of landladies and oddball misfits living in a seaside town where events might go unnoticed for some time.

RED LETTER DAY

Montségur, the French Pyrenees

March 2001

Red Letter Day

And Something’s odd – within –

That person that I was –

And this One – do not feel the same –

Could it be Madness – this?

Poem 410

EMILY DICKINSON

It was a mistake to take the mountain road into the Pyrenees. On the map it had looked more direct and, having made up her mind, Claire wanted to take the quickest route, before her courage deserted her and she conjured up an excuse not to go. To put it off again.

This journey had been more than three years in the making. Claire didn’t want to cause any more distress and upset to those friends and family who’d done their best to look after her and help her get through things. It would get better, they told her. She’d never forget him, but it wouldn’t always feel this bad. Perhaps she’d have another child. Time, they said, was a great healer.

If anything, the passing of one year to the next had made her grief more acute, her sense of loss more profound. Memories of the tiny, lifeless body in his cot, the weight of her son in her arms, the look of him. She knew things would never get better. Her heart would never heal and nor did she want it to.

With that acceptance had come relief, then a sense of purpose. All she wanted was not to feel anything, not to think anything, to close her eyes and see only white space. There was no point going on.

The decision made things easier. The place had been harder to choose. Claire wanted it be somewhere away from her everyday life, so as not to burden her family and friends, and somewhere remote.

Then, it came to her. Years ago, they’d gone on holiday to south-west France, the Ariège, where her mother’s family had originally come from. Holed up in her tiny hotel in Carcassonne, guide book in hands, Claire had been captivated by the story of the Cathars. Had fallen in love with the tragic history of Montségur, the mountain citadel in the Pyrenees where a generation of rebels and heretics had made their final stand nearly eight hundred years before. One of her own ancestors among them.

Why not there?

According to legend, Montségur was the Holy Mountain of Grail legend. Or maybe the inspiration for Wagner’s Parsifal, Munsalvaesche. Or a blueprint for the Mount of Salvation, Mons Salvationis. A place of hope and revelation and salvation. A place to live and to die.

It was a place of myth, certainly. The ruined fortress perched impossibly high above the village of Montségur, three sides of the castle hewn out of the mountainside itself. Many different citadels, different strongholds had been constructed on that same inhospitable spot, their rise and fall testament to the turbulent history of the Ariège. Mont Ségur, the safe mountain. The spirit of place, however, remained constant.

The idea took root until Montségur was the only place Claire could imagine feeling at peace.

Today was Thursday, 16th March. She’d picked the date deliberately. It was the anniversary of the day in 1244 when the defeated inhabitants of the citadel finally came down from their mountain retreat. Two hundred Cathar believers – heretics in the eyes of the Catholic Church – had chosen death by fire rather than to recant their faith. Ordinary believers and their priests, men and women both. Their remaining friends and families were brought before the Inquisition to bear witness to the horror of the times. Forced to listen to the screaming as those they loved died, to see the poisonous black cloud rising from the pyre. Covered their noses and mouths to keep out the sickly sweet stench of burning flesh.

Claire shook her head. Today was not the day for such violent images, she’d lived with those long enough. Today was a red letter day, the sort of day to be picked out in gold leaf and crimson ink on parchment. Today, she would stand in the place where – in the poet’s words – prayer had been valid, and make her choice. Many times over the past three years she had pictured herself climbing the mountain, her feet steady on the flat slippery stones, her breath white in the chill air.

Time, now, to make the journey.

As Claire left Carcassonne, driving south towards the mountains, the air was soft and the dawn sky a gentle pink. A perfect spring day, though the hotel proprietor warned her that it would be winter still in the mountains. The clock on the dashboard of her hire care blinked out the time: 8:00.

She had headed first for Limoux – beautiful in summer with its central square and rocky river winding through the town – then on towards Couiza. The sun grew weaker, less definite. At Puivert, the pale spring mist turned to rain. Now, as she turned off onto the mountain road, following a signpost for Montségur, the rain was turning to sleet.