Chapter 3 Lady Macbeth
I did what any queen would do.
I drank the witches’ poison before bed – and now the forest comes to claim us all.
When I wake up in the early hours of the night, I know nothing is all right. The wrongness is palpable and growing. The tangy remnants of the brew still smear my mouth, but when I try to raise my hand to wipe my lips, I find it trapped in something cold. Gritty.
Dirt! Who dares soil the Queen of Scotland’s bed –
But the feeble moonlight streaking through my chamber’s window reveals a scene too uncanny to have been a human’s work.
I’m buried in my bed from the neck down, packed earth where my soft sheets should be, insects unseen crawling up my calves.
A lesser person surely would scream; they’d call for help.
But I have seen my husband grasp for things that weren’t there, grapple with ghostly visions in our banquets past. This must be the witches’ meddling, to test us, humble us.
Determined, I turn to my side, shaking dry leaves and branches off me – the indignity.
I try to grasp my bedpost, but find wet, silky moss in its stead, coating a porous surface.
The canopy of decay continues when I rise from my bed, feet searching for my slippers but finding mushroom caps instead.
The forest has swallowed our castle whole.
Enough of this nonsense! I make my way from my chambers to the corridor, sagging under ceilings half-devoured by dense foliage.
My naked feet stumble through thick roots.
Some of my maids are gathered there, holding on to the mossy walls, exchanging worried glances by candlelight.
Do they also see what’s happening, worry that they’re turning into trees themselves?
They should be. The shadows they cast are long and thin, no longer resemblant of human limbs so much as the famous towering canopies of Dughall Mor.
I try to tell the maids about this witchcraft – but my tongue fails me.
My words come out erratic, senseless. I bite my lips, trying to stop the salty tide of vowels and consonants.
I have worried these poor women further, I can see that.
Not that it matters much now, when our whole world is being engulfed by an advancing woodland.
But losing control of my speech scares me.
Must be that brew the witches gave me. I should have known better than to trust their malevolent ministrations.
What havoc has it wrought on my body? Will my mind be next?
And where, pray tell, is my husband, the King?
‘My dearest partner of greatness,’ he called me, back when our plans were still as young as the first swallows of spring.
Back when our hands were clean. I scrub my offending palm now, coated in old blood and fresh dirt, finding some solace in the pain’s quick sharpness as my nails scrape the skin.
The smell of blood still stifles my breath; no matter what I do, I can’t get rid of it.
My once so white hand, forever branded with a claret streak.
‘Thunder met and thrice a threat, yours is the path of claret,’ the witches had said.
They should have said something about this invading forest; about burying me alive. They will regret their half-truths, when I get to them.
If this forest of a castle lets me.
Making my way through creaking branches and needle-like leaves, I reach the upper west turret, the one that overlooks the Glamis Burn.
Here my husband’s chamber remains empty, as he’s off to wage his war – empty, but equally conquered by the snaking branches, the creeping moss.
I cast a glance at his dirt-laden bed, so reminiscent of mine, before I turn to the big balcony doors.
The night is thick with fog, yet I can still make out the fires of the witches’ cauldron through the glass, near the silver river’s end.
It burns like treason; both theirs and mine.
What further horrors have I brought into our home, in my eagerness to give our stubborn fate the push it needs?
What wicked trap have I laid for my lord?
My outrage fizzles out. Like a puppet whose strings have been severed, I feel the lead of tiredness sinking on my shoulders, on my knees.
My hand, my bloody hand, grabs the iron handle of the balcony doors.
Perhaps the foggy night air will wrap my soul in cotton.
Perhaps it will grant me some reprieve from this infernal forest.
The doors burst open.
White light attacks my eyelids. The last thing I hear is the three witches singing somewhere far away; the last thing I feel is tree roots reaching for me as I fall.
I float in silence, for a while.
I have no way of telling how much time has passed. It may have been the fleeting moments from one heartbeat to the next; it may have been the aeons it took our Earth to give birth to us. All I know is that after some unquantifiable amount of time, I feel corporeal again. I can move.
Slowly, hesitantly, I open my eyes. There is no castle any more; no forest. The world is white. White sharper than snow, more finite than a shroud.
I shiver, although the air is not exactly cold.
It’s not exactly anything. There’s an absence of all things tangible in this white place I’ve found myself in.
If it can indeed be called that: a place.
It looks so different from any hall I’ve ever been in.
A blank page that the scribes have yet to bend into submission with their ink.
The room that cannot be a room is long, extending like a serpent on both sides, as far as my eyes can see.
But I am still myself. Am I not?
I touch the tips of my fingers, counting the fleshy pads to soothe my mind.
My hands are no longer coated in dirt; my skin is clean as if I’m fresh out of the bath.
As if I didn’t crawl my way out of a bed turned into a grave.
I touch the silky swathe of my nightgown next.
Its raven colour is the oddest stain in this static world of white.
I am the oddest stain, my bloodied hand more out of place than ever.
If this is Heaven, I must be some miasma soon to be cast aside.
I start walking, picking a direction at random, my hands stretched out on either side of me like cat’s whiskers to alert me to threats hidden in alabaster, my feet walking on surfaces I cannot see. It’s a bewildering sensation; like walking on air and expecting it to lift you.
How do I even know what is up and what is down when all is colourless, unchanging?
This can’t be Heaven; Heaven cannot be so empty, so silent.
But this can’t be Hell, either. I’m neither in excruciating pain nor dreading being tortured – merely disoriented and unsure.
How long has it been since I was in my castle, evading the ever-growing greenery?
How long since I put three wishes to the sisters three?
Perhaps this is some kind of trial, a spell to test my character.
See if I am strong enough to be the Queen.
I straighten my shoulders, hold my head high.
Despite my naked feet, my steps become more sure, the surface under my soles more reminiscent of thick carpet.
I keep walking, casting careful glances around, trying not to look too bewildered in case spirits are observing me.
After a while, the faintest traces of colours and shapes begin to form amid the white, like afterimages when staring at the sun. There, but not firmly there.
I blink several times, and this new reality settles.
I am indeed walking down an endless corridor, but not one as empty as I thought.
There are arches and markings on either side, as if to denote the possibility of doors – yet when I turn my attention to any specific one of them, it vanishes from sight.
I sigh, frustrated. There must be some point in all this wandering.
Every story has a moral. What would mine be?
I think back to the witches’ words, lest they held some hints on how I could escape this unearthly realm.
What was it they chanted in their senseless rhymes?
Something about thunder … and a threat, and ‘… Claret,’ I say out loud, my voice barely deigning to collaborate.
The strain of speaking after what feels like forever brings an unladylike cough, which I do my best to stifle with my hand.
But my cough chokes me when I see it: the bloodstain on my hand, that filthy witness of my wickedness, shimmers.
Alarmed, I push it aside from my face, as if I can disinherit my own limb.
And then I feel it. A magnetic pull. The little drops of dried blood have a will of their own, it seems, stretching my skin and tugging at my hand, my arm, towards an unseen spot to my right. Baffled, I follow.
My hand points me to a door frame that wasn’t there before, one that doesn’t vanish as I approach it. Rather, it turns more solid. The white splits into strips, which in turn acquire weight and texture, not unsimilar to bleached wood. Colour suddenly blooms, so fierce it hurts my eyes.
Claret.
My breath hitches – this could be it, my way back home. My way back to my crown. I grab the bloodstained doorknob with my equally bloodstained hand, turn it, and push.
The door opens. But what greets my eyes is not the grey of castle walls, not the soothing green of any forest canopy. It’s blood. A hot, oppressive gust of air assaults my face as I take in a room formed out of fumes and melting walls, adorned with bizarre monsters, reeking of blood.
How wrong I was! This must be Hell.
Standing proudly at its centre, so drenched in claret only teeth and eyes shine in stark contrast, a female demon stares at me. And she wields a knife.