Page 57 of Once Upon A Haunted Castle
“I will remove him from this chamber for now,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Pallas. “Where can I put him?”
The old servant gazed down at the man he had grown to both hate and depend on. It had been an odd relationship but one he could still hardly believe had ended.
Was it really so?
“Put him?” Pallas repeated Jamison’s question. Then, he snorted, as if something was funny, perhaps a joke only he understood. “He always threatened to throw me to the waves below. Mayhap that is where he belongs now; in the waves below. There is no other place that would want him. Give him to the sea and let the sea digest his evil.”
Jamison glanced at Havilland, who seemed to agree completely with the servant. Such a wicked soul didn’t deserve a proper burial and tossing him into the sea, denying him that rite of burial which he had denied his victims, somehow seemed right.
As Jamison was dragging the host from their small chamber, following Pallas as the man directed him to someplace to store the body until the storm passed, the raven flew out of the shadows and landed on the host, right on his shoulder, and began pecking at the man’s face. Havilland shooed the bird away, helping Jamison put the host’s body near the keep entry, and Pallas ended up throwing a dusty length of wool over the cooling corpse, covering it until it could be removed in the daylight.
There was no sense of dread or horror any longer, but now a tangible sense of relief. Relief that the evil of Whitecliff Castle was finally over with; the wickedness of a man who had been driven insane by his own jealousy and hatred.
Perhaps in the end, justice had been served for the dead, after all.
As they settled the body against the wall, away from the front door that was still emitting wind and lashings of rain, Pallas chased the bird away again who seemed to want to pick the corpse’s eyes out, and the sassy, noisy bird sat in the rafters of the entry chamber all night, watching its latest quarry below, hoping to feast on the flesh of yet another dead body.
All through the night, the bird waited and watched, preening its feathers, plumes of darkness falling to the floor below and littering the ground near the host’s body. But the bird never had the opportunity for a tasty meal because, in the morning, Jamison cleared the body away and threw it into the sea.
Finally, the evil was finished.
A few days after Jamison and Havilland departed to continue on their journey, Pallas went to bed one night and never woke up. He unexpectedly passed away in his sleep, a man without fear and reasonably content for the first time in his life. Unfortunately, he hadn’t yet made it to Cullen to see the priests, so no one knew of the dead in the underground vaults or the tragic story of Lenore and her murdered lover. All of those legends, however, ended up in the lore of the Clan Munro as told by Jamison and Havilland, who had experienced the situation first-hand, and the stories became a very big part of the storytelling that was passed down from generation to generation.
The story of the lost lady of Findlater.
Far away from the Clan Munro lands, centuries went by and Findlater deteriorated further and further, the earth taking back the bones of the dead and the elements weathering down the ancient stone of the derelict castle. It was abandoned for centuries until a traveler passing from Cullen to Inverness saw through the fog one night what he thought to be a white, ghostly figure dancing on the ruins, and the story of the lost lady of Findlater found new life.
Of course, the lady was searching for her lost love– what else could she possibly be looking for?– so it was natural for people to assume that it was verification of the old Clan Munro legend of the lost lady of Findlater. It wasn’t until the Victorian era, with the curiosity so exclusive to the bold Victorians, that someone came up with the name Lenore in an ancient bible in a church in Cullen. No one knew how the Medieval bible from Clan Munro got there, or why Lenore and Findlater were mentioned in the same sentence, but the Victorians decided that the delicate specter witnessed on that foggy night must have been the woman named Lenore.
Now, the legend had a name.
A rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.
In death, Lenore lived on as she never did in life.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting,stillissitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamberdoor;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that isdreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on thefloor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on thefloor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
