Unlike my father Henry, who had grown up during harder times and thanked God everyday for his hard earned fortune and happy life, my mother had never really been a woman of faith of any kind. It wasn’t until after we lost my dear grandmother in the Cholera Epidemic, which had claimed so many, that my family started attending church regularly.
We weren’t the only ones to have suffered the loss of a loved one, though I was too young at the time to remember, and to have turned to God for mercy and comfort. Personally I enjoyed church. Like many of the other children my age I didn’t really understand the priest was saying, though he seemed very enthusiastic about it to which the adults often responded with quiet but strong attentiveness, but where other children where bored and would sometimes fall asleep in their seats on their knees, pressed against their parents’ sides, I was fascinated. The old Roman Catholic churches of England where beautiful in my opinion. Stern, stone faces where carved into every wall so that solid, black grey eyes followed you no matter where you stood, portraits of God’s angles lined the ceilings, and it seemed just about everything was inlaid with brass or gold. Even the people where beautiful, dressed in their finest as if they were attending an evening dinner party instead of taking mass with Christ. The Father and Sisters always wore black and the children, with such lovely high voices, in white. My favorite piece however was the chandelier which hung in the entrance. This chandelier was not gold or brass or silver but pure, stark white. It was made of the bones from victims of the Black Death during the 1400s by a half blind monk. My mother said it was disrespectful to the dead, but I thought it was beautiful. What better way to be remembered than to have your earthly remains made into art rather than hidden away in the ground or burnt to ash. If I were to die…I would want my body made into art to. Beautiful, even in death, if such a thing was possible, I’d want it.
I looked up at the many skulls which held the gold or silver candles, the decorative wax gliding across their smooth heads in glittering trails to be caught in the cups of knee caps and breast plates, and wonder if perhaps their spirits could still see us through those empty sockets. God’s spies, looking down on us as we prayed, keeping tentative watch over shepherd, flock, and house. Perhaps that was why I could never nap while the priest was speaking, because I was afraid the dead would see me and tell on me. I’d spend the entire sermon staring into the none-eyes of the dead.
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Blood Journal
The Diary of the Vampire known as Lolita.
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