The Bloodied Dandy

The hotel had been running since the Middle Ages and did a roaring trade in kitsch tours for people wanting to experience a little of the horror of murders that had happened there. Although the proprietors were innocent (tour guides employed by the hotel were at pains to emphasise) there was a conspiracy of highwaymen, as the 18th became the 19th century, to lure travellers and then kill and rob them in their rooms. One young Pink of the Ton (meaning a fashionable young man) was lured by the promise of elopement with a woman with whom he thought he had been in correspondence.

I was staying in the hotel with my husband when I found a book on this bloody era in a drawer of the nightstand dividing our beds. (Having grown up in slightly less tolerant times, were still in the habit of requesting rooms with separate beds.) Arthur was keen on making love, but I didn't fancy straining my back either pushing the beds together or trying to manage two bodies in one single. He settled for a cuddle as I read to him about how our room had probably hosted some young dandy slaughtered for his finery and coin.

'Oh, Michael...' he said in the girlish voice he liked to use when trying to seduce me, rubbing his back against my front as he unwrapped another chocolate, 'you're going to give me nightmares.'

'For you, camp lad, just being alive in those days would have been nightmarish enough.' A sound of revels came through our window from the street below. A gaggle of girls braying and squealing. Our room overlooked the slanting high street, at the bottom of which was the castle that in the Middle Ages would have dominated this town. These days it's dominated by pubs, clubs, and food outlets. My niece had shown me a video making fun of how an upscale "champagne bar" is closed in on either side by Burger King and KFC.

Arthur and I were in town for the reading of his mother's will, and this hotel because Arthur's a nut for all things paranormal. To be honest, I was terrified he'd make us go to the pier in the next town and see a psychic stationed there. This same woman had predicted two of his mother's three marriages. 'But not how to avoid the trouble' I'd remarked.

We went to bed. In the hours past midnight, however, I awoke, a terrible chill stealing over the room. I wondered how my roommate could stand it and was inclined at first to check his pulse, before dismissing this idea as ridiculous. I went to the cupboard whose door came up to my waist and which had been introduced to me by the landlady as containing extra linens. When I opened it, however, only solid blackness stared back. A blackness so solid it was like an invitation to the curious.

I looked to the window beside me and saw the full moon staring down at the city, a distant clatter of people falling about and fighting drunkenly. I saw in the distance what looked like two peaked caps clashing in an alleyway. I looked back at the solid blackness and some irrational, ancient part of myself saw fit to bring me to my knees so I could crawl through the aperture and see what the blackness contained.

I felt like Alice in Wonderland as I crawled across the black terrain, whose floor was of dirt and grasses. At last another moon shone down and I found myself on hands and knees like some pathetic drunk, outside a timbered inn, from one of whose upper windows there shone candlelight. I rose to my feet and looked at the palms of my hands and my knees through my pyjama bottoms. Both were caked in mud. I disgustedly did what I could, wiping my hands on the flanks of my dressing gown and beating my knees like they were dusty carpets.

The air around me became heavy somehow, pressing, seeming as though it had hands that were bearing me upwards now, towards the candlelit window. I saw a row of horses snorting in the dooryard and men dismounting them, ignoring or maybe not seeing me at all. You're a ghost, I thought, but from the future rather than the past...

I came to hover outside the window, through which could be seen a young man in dandified clothes primping himself in a vanity glass. He had a birthmark below his left eye, I saw as he looked to the window and the moon just as I had in the present day. And in this very same room, I thought.

He started talking to himself. 'No more will the Burgess name be drowned in servitude and blood' he muttered to himself, adjusting his boutonniere, a small rose. He picked up a sheaf of scented letters and held them to his nose, sniffing indulgently. He then took a lambskin purse from his coat and rested it on the table. He looked, I thought, like a young Beau Brummell, the Regency man whose name still implied both taste and looks. Brummell, I recalled, passed raving mad with syphilis, in penury. This young man before me, I realised with sickening clarity, wouldn't have even the chance to die thus, so soon would the goose be walking over his grave.

'My love' he said, releasing from his ruffled shirt a miniature that hung from his neck. He opened and studied its contents, a portrait of a maiden with thick russet curls. He showed it to the moon. 'At last, tonight, I'll have you in my arms and we'll elope, and Lord Morton will have to agree. It's not as if he's dim enough to forever be bound to peasant superstitions.' He snorted. 'A witch who cursed my forefathers... we've just been unlucky, is all.'

There was a knock at the door. I looked down and saw the ground far below me, but was sickened not by this sight so much as the prospect of witnessing what would happen when the door was answered. I felt those invisible hands in the air again, lifting my head so I was forced to witness. Before the young man could even reach it, his door was flung open. Revealed was a man in highwayman clothes; he wore a high collar, a domino mask, and a tricorn hat, most of his face concealed by these garments. Before love's young dream could even react, the devil pulled a blade from his belt and flung it with the grace of a circus artiste, to land not in the wheel beside his assistant's head but squarely in the victim's throat, or through, impaling him. I thought of a spout stuck into a wine butt, dispensing dark red liquid like the blood now spouting from the dandy's throat.

I fell. The last I saw of that room at that time was the highwayman's hand snatching up the lambskin purse.

***

I woke to the sound and feel of ministrations as my tearful husband and a couple of paramedics kneeled over me. I was lying on the floor by the window and the linen closet. 'Oh, thank fuck' said Arthur as I rose to consciousness and started to thrash a little like a turtle on its back. The medics helped me to a sitting position and leaned my back against the closed closet door. It was daylight now, the moon outside the window changed to a blinding sun that scoured the slanting rooftops above their narrow back alleys.

Over the next few hours, many tests were taken but it was decided that my collapse had merely been an "episode" of something or other, perfectly natural, if inexplicable. I was given pamphlets about sleep apnea, somnambulism, etcetera, booked in for more poking and prodding, and sent on my way with leave to return should other episodes occur.

But it was as I was in the waiting room, with Arthur on his mobile eating from a punnet of grapes as he shared the gossip, that a strange and non-medical light was cast on what happened the night before. The TV in the upper right corner was broadcasting a news programme on which it was revealed that a young man had died in the city that night, stabbed in an alley not far from a pub that had stood at its post since medieval days, and that was now a popular hotel.

An image flashed up of the victim in a peaked cap and football shirt, his arm around the waist of a girl. His family were said to be devastated, he lit up the room, etcetera. However, what struck me most of all was a birthmark just below his left eye.