The Western Gate

Foreword

Facing the shadows of our childhood fears.

There are inherent in my psyche a number of items from my childhood that have embedded their influence upon me. All of them supposedly transitory and illusory but as any dweller upon the Orphic path knows, that which is born in the world of the imagination, regardless of whether it is manifest or just lives in dream, is as much tangible to the effects of the spirit as surely as bricks and mortar that are seen in the real and animate world. The experience wrought by dream has as much effect upon the psyche as a real world quest or pilgrimage.
One experience that I hereby relate was as I remember watching a programme one Sunday afternoon. I must have been five or six. It were as I recall one of those ‘play for today’ type programmes though I’m sure it probably wasn’t, things lost in memories seem much grander and spectacular.
The only snippet that I can remember was a woman crying on her bed which was surrounded by sheer silk curtains, the transparency of them providing a view outwards to the vision of a wailing ghost bemoaning the loss of her hand or was it an arm.

To seasoned  aficionados of folk horror and the stories of the Fae I’m sure many are outstretching their, present and correct, arms and waving to this author invisible to shout “It’s the golden arm!”
Equally sure perhaps in hindsight it wasn’t the woman on the bed crying for her arm but it was she who entered the room wailing for her lost limb. Judging by the timeline and probable likelihood…. the screenshot below may well show the correct info’ on that cursed programme,

Of course, that night in my bed I dreamt much the same story. I can still recall that ghostly figure wandering in to my bedroom, and also see her behind a thin gauze sheet that draped over the bed, she was writhing and clawing out with her good arm, “where is my other arm !!! Give me back my arm!”
Her hand seemed to reach out of the dream and into the here and now like a 3D movie where an arrow flies towards the screaming viewer wearing red and blue spectacles.
Even now, 50 odd years later, the thought of that image that haunted me as a young boy still sends the unequivocal shiver up my spine.
I have been unable to locate the damned programme on all the usual sources, YouTube, BoxofBroadcasts and all the streaming sites, I need to revisit the bedevilled TV show that I can rend it from my psyche, and stop my spine shivering like a cobras tail rattle.

In the meantime, as time is mean,….. I write the following in the hope it provides at least some respite to the respective horror, some appeasement and as psychologists would testify, facing the shadow to enamour it with the light of reckoning.

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The Golden Arm

Retold by David Wenborn

It began somewhat as any tale that were told in the olden form, of a man and a woman whose eyes met and hearts sung a familiar tune, whose stomachs knotted when in embrace and bile rose when apart, discord and confusion apart and yet, together, each in perfect harmony, the world seemed complete. Happily ever after would be the summary, but life and its woes will not yield to complacency nor contentment. The woods and the Fae dance with nature and everything shifts and is alive and loved, and all we love, and watch grow by nature and by nurture….we will surely and absolutely watch die.

Our fair lady in this weaved plot, full of grace and charity, and all that crossed her path were left with sublime radiance and comfort from her greetings, her genuine interest in their affairs. She dressed immaculately not from riches, but from the way she carefully selected her clothes, and how they fell over her body, how each piece complimented each other. She ate healthily and often wandering or exercising throughout the land she had a body that nature designed to reflect such a woman that could rise to any struggle with ease, each muscle and limb and posture, the model of a princess, she were, perfected not by subjective allegiance to the trend or society’s perception but by natures natural mould. She were a bride of nature.
  Our Male protagonist of this awful story, let him be the woodcutter, for those that strike the sentinels of the forest, surely are damned, the hackers of the lungs of nature whose out-breathe feeds us.
It were, in those days, such that people lived an austere life and matters to hand rested upon the next meal and the requisite to be warm, it was only next that came… play and affairs of the heart.
Our fair maiden, and the woodcutter, by chance met, and who knows what energy or dynamism stirred between them, what attracted whom to whom and why or where, but they did, and that was that.
Now fate peculiar lead a different dance of view looking at this arrangement…, a fair maiden perfect who wandered through the woods and forests, ran as with the hare, danced amidst the invisible Fae, surely the least that would compliment her would be the destroyer of such a fair abode, and Fate that governed nature saw this. A woodcutter indeed? As a lover and not adversary?
How would she, full of grace and charity and welcoming to her fellow folk, feel if she, alike the Oaks and Ash, Beech and Elder had her limbs wrought or splayed, hacked and yes, severed at the hands and axe of that foul wretch she had abased herself to marry! Such were the thoughts of the Fae when this dalliance began. And fate and Fae are both as every wayfarer knows intertwined.
(The husband let us emphasize whose occupation is husbandry is but a fool, and can no more cultivate and nurture nature than abide by his bride, so sayeth the stuttering Fae of the F-F-Forests.)

So it was when the courting was courted and when the romance was danced and when the rings were exchanged and the life as one was set upon its course we think ahead and recall what happens next.

It came about one ordinary day, despite her initial concerns she accepted, this one, and only time to help him in a much needed felling of the Old Oak that crossed the path hampering the journeys of carts and traffic, God forbid slowing down the progress of travellers time by seconds, those busy hurrying termite people who care not for the beauty of the world but intent on reaching their next drama as quickly and hurriedly as possible, to wander past nature without so much of a care or thought.
The Oak must go.
All She had to do was steady an overhanging branch that he needed to first cut away, before beginning the hard slog of felling the gnarley old oak at its thick and ridged trunk.
Steadying the branch was fine, it was gangly but obeyed for the moment as she restrained its clawing arm, the woodcutter took aim, his first initial test chop realised the branch would ‘bounce’ somewhat, recoiling the blade of the axe and our fair bride needed perhaps to just inch a little closer to the branch such that the recoil was not so great.
She smiled at him, shirtless and sweating, his muscles glistening in the glade of the forest. He smiled back taking aim with his eyes and the axe fell forward at the same time the woodcutters foot slipped upon the Oak Root that hitherto supported him, the axe had veered away from the branch and instead found a new and easier limb to sever.
How she screamed and cried when the arm fell upon the floor with muscular spasms, fingers twitching, clawing at the Earth, before the nerves realised they were no longer a part of the web, no longer home, but quite cold and dead.
It needs not be printed here what followed, as well as anyone can guess, life changed. The children she had greeted once with song and cheer and joke recoiled at the ghastly one armed lady who in turn at her rejection now turned bitter and full of malice.
She resolved to make anew her arm and demanded, as recompense from her husband that he fashion her a replica of the felled arm, and yet, it be fashioned in gold.
And, that’s what he did, it required him to sell of most of his property, of working every hour that his body could suffer, of lending amounts of money in lieu of work, of lending money with promise to repay at interest, of selling goods he had collected over the years from industry and heirlooms, of stealing goods to sell for money, of stealing money, in so much as we can see, the woodcutter prostrate before his one armed bride stooped low to enable her new found vanity, and at the end of the quarter of a year since our bride made demands of grandeur in receipt of tokens of guilt, the Golden arm was made.
The ages of woman such were written in lore as maiden, mother and crone, though here in this short time, we have the Fair, the Pariah and now the Duchess. Indeed, such was the opulence as she swanned her way through the village becoming one of the most talked about in the area. The children gawped in astonishment, the young maidens, mothers and old ladies of the town whispered their astonished exclamations, neither scorn nor praise but more bewilderment.
Our Golden Armed Duchess, the Diva of the village, of the surrounding towns, the talk of the county, and as she flaunted that illuminating limb to all who could not un-see it and….the less she cared for the woodcutter, who, himself, now was stricken with poverty and weakness. The jobs began to dry up as village folk steered clear of the ever egotistical golden armed duchess and her debt-ridden woodcutter, the odd job man imprisoned by the want of she who no longer were named, but known, yes, as the golden armed duchess.
The tax collectors, the lease holders, the shops and stores soon however came knocking upon the door, at first in curiosity to see the object of all the gossip, then to insist on payments owed, then at last to threaten…
The Golden armed duchess cared not, so enamoured were she with that limb, she would stare at it, position it such that sunlight would glisten across its frame, sparkling as diamonds. She loved it more than anything, more than her feral woodcutter whose touch at night caused her now to shudder and move away, her solace and pleasure came in the dead of night from stroking the smooth and beautiful arm.
At the beginning of the story we imagined how dynamism played a part in the motive of love, how opposites as opposites do in magnetism hurtle towards each other and rest thereof. It would be easy to say that one size fits all, that this is the common aspect into all relationships, let us now cast our enquiring minds onto the scene as we now can see it, there is a man, desperate, weak, poverty, in need of love and recognition. There is a woman, content, narcissistically in love with her own self, in mind as rich and opulent as the arm she parades?
Are they not opposites? Should they not still find equanimity and polarity within each other?
Again!
 There is a man, ever maddened by his situation, that woman, blind and deaf to that environment around her, and he, once proud and strong, and her once humble, fair and loving?

In the heavens Saturn ruled the heavens that night, the scythe of father time cuts to start anew, the moon itself full, the rage of the lone wolf rises. Our woodcutter, with nothing, and even less than nothing when debt is taken into the equation, and she, laying upon that bed, clutching and holding that vile greedy arm.
The mind at full moon cannot rest, nor can it dream but wavers in a myriad of thoughts and hunger, unappeased, continuously agitating the mind, and things must change as surely as Atropos cuts the twine of life or else there will be no respite from maladies and strife.
He stood over her as she slept.
Down came the axe !!!
At the last moment in a flash of mercy he flicked over the blade but still the handle came crashing down, and not at the arm he had in his sights but deftly it fell, to the cracking skull of the Duchess, who never woke nor screamed, but at once dispersed, her soul detached, lifeforce stilled and. ….From this world, was gone.

The gossip over the next few mornings was a riot of conjecture, of horror and of quiet melancholy. The Woodcutter, so the whispers and bar room tales said, had fought off two brutal thieves intent on stealing his beloved’s golden arm, he himself covered in wounds, and his dear, dear bride, with one fatal blow was murdered. Many of the villagers said it was bound to happen, the way she flaunted that arm, the way she ambled around the villages as if she were above anybody else.
How soon they forgot that they, themselves, had outcast her, for nothing more than having lost a limb, perhaps first in pity and then simply that it were better to be silent in her midst than engage in some petty trivial talk, that was not warranted or wanted. Indeed, our golden armed duchess had merely acted as she had mimicked others, and yet now, Now! they condemn her for doing as they did? How cruel is polarity, how damned is duality.

The woodcutter alone now, the intensive police interviews, the magistrates and the medical men had finished their inquisition, he was shaking almost from fatigue at the onslaught of lies he told, the wounds he inflicted on himself knitting furiously together causing acute pain and discomfort. All said he was, as believed by all, still in a state of shock, “grieving.”
The silence and peace did not last long. The gentle funeral-like rap rap rap on the door bought forward the coroner to deliver his verdict, the verdict and summary that were now so commonplace he needn’t have bothered to bring the known to the door of the grieving.
“And another thing,” finally the coroner said, “I have in my office the last will and testament of your wife.”
The woodcutter immediately startled looked to the coroner, first as if he had not heard correctly and then in quiet shock that his wife, had indeed wrote a will without his knowledge not least his deliberation.
“… has expressed, beyond, above and as the most important requisite within this will, I being of sound mind and judgement declare that I will, without argument or enquiry be buried in my green gold braided dress, and that my golden arm is to be buried with me, this I insist upon and sign in the witness of the coroner and his secretary this day…. “
The rest of the particulars mattered not. The woodcutter had no right over the Golden arm, and what’s more was still indebted to those whose provisions enabled its creation in the first place. He was as broke and bereft as before her death.
There was only one recourse, one way out of the quagmire he found himself within. A deed as dark and devious as the brutal manner in which he took her life.

    Now over the coming days, there was much progress, the woodcutter had managed to lie to his creditors of incoming wealth from the will, had secured, so he said, work in the city that would more than pay for the interest and in fact clear the loans from the money lenders. All the while he visualized his plan to retrieve that arm, the cause and appeasement of his troubles and once again be solvent, perhaps, dare he say it, rich.

Guilt is a terrible thing, a judgement that walks each moment with the perpetrator, each minute of peace the spectre of the exploit arises. It festers and grows, each moment of silence the mind recalls the cracking of the skull, the silent almost whimper as she drifted into the world beyond wherever that may be. Each closure of his eyelids projects those final moments, the face, the arm, the axe. Each nightly terror and in dreams from which the guilty cannot run, she walks abroad and calls after him, “why ? ” The pillow pressed harder to his ears no more block out the sounds within that recalls those moments than the re-lived images that illuminate within his mind.

It was on the dark moon. Visibility was lowest and, that the winter nights were drawing in, the woodcutter replete with shovel and crowbar, woodsaw and a baggage of rag walks the path towards the outlying cemetery, it was a walk that he had tirelessly lived within his mind, when the images of the crime began to rise, he would think only, only of the cause, and here the finale to it all. The retrieval of that golden limb. That limb that became her true love, the cause of all this tragedy.

It mattered not exact what time it was, it was too cold for straying villagers to take a fancy of night air, to walk hand in hand with lovers, and certainly a cemetery was no place if such a fool and their folly did venture out.
The woodcutter dug. The temporary headstone, a cruel wooden block and burnt into it with a red hot poker the words, “my beloved, my beautiful wife,” like a sad and cruel joke.
Down he dug.

The owls wondered perhaps of the strange nocturnal activity below but certain that activity would stir the mice and rats and other easier disturbed pickings. The crows gathered about the ever growing spoil of dirt to peck at any morsel or glistening slime that moved of its own accord. And down he dug through the sticky and claggy and muddy and coarse and THUD! to the lid of the coffin.
The drumming in the temples of his head grew louder and faster, his breathe exhausted frantically grasping for refuel from the misty night air.
That coffin lid was not of Oak or Pine or any other woods that, well, the woodcutter could have laid his hands upon, but cheap particle wood, it were mentioned by many that attended the funeral, the woodcutter with all his cuts of tree meat from the forest, would choose to use perhaps the cheapest of all materials?, it was not understood, but it was not mentioned again. It is only of consideration to mention here in the story because,
the wood cutter no sooner had put the gentlest lever of the crowbar into the lid than it buckled and sprang forward snapping into shards of splinter wood pulp and a thin crack of a laminate, it were the sound of a door being forced open from a liminal world.

She lay there decayed and putrid, and only the murder of crows peered over the edge of the grave with lust and hunger in their hearts for the body that lay beneath. The woodman retched, and retched again, and did all he could to not vomit onto the pile of rotting flesh below him, hidden by the green and gold braided dress that in the still of night looked grey and black and a noose upon the neckbone protruding through the taut and splitting skin which were a gold braided rope necklace.
The arm!
He reached above to retrieve the saw, but knew at once it were not needed. A gentle twist and a gentler tug and the golden arm with one last kiss upon the stump and the tendons now breaking through the perished skin withdrew from the body it had married.
The wood cutter hurled the arm to the ground above and the crows gathered around the gleaming artefact that magpies would invade in vain the territory for.
The woodcutter backfilled in haste the pit, stamping upon the ground, the area dipped where all the earth had fallen into the open coffin and compressed onto the carcass below, it mattered not. To him.
That night hunched and bruised the woodcutter slowly creeped through the cemetery, across the woods, and onwards to his cabin on the edge of the greater forest.
The arm? was slid under the bed wrapped in a shroud of the rags. Our woodcutter now showered, his clothes into the embers of the fireplace roared anew to flames.

The ghastly deed was done.

When the candle was snuffed and the last glowing embers of the fireplace dimmed the hut was black as pitch, as claustrophobic as a coffin, it were only the feint light of the myriad of stars that offered hope. The bright Dog Star near the horizon was at the right angle to offer a feint glow through the window to the bedroom casting shadows of a dance macabre.

When one sense is stunted the others are exalted. His sight was near blind in that cabin, just sparkles cast by the Dog Star, creating patterns that merged and crafted objects and figures, the imagination creating a world inhibited by its normal sense of sight. The ears however, hearing every creak from every swaying tree, every crafty footprint from the mouse in the house, the nocturnal birds outside and far into the woods were, it seemed, a riotous cacophony of outrage from the fauna and the swaying protesting flora in that still night.
His nose! at the loss of sight, alike his ears now exalted and sensitive, could smell the ash in the fireplace , the winter foliage outside, and also, as smells do, the mind recreates memories born of smell, and the putrid and decaying flesh of his wife became stronger in his mind and seemed to manifest as a real scent overwhelming the winter greenery and spent ash.
The smell seemed ever stronger and imagination being what it is created augmented reality, each creak and tap and knock and rap became the slow and determined footsteps of a maddened corpse shuffling its way towards the woodcutters bed.
The woodcutter forced air out of his nose to rid the mind of the olfactory noxious burning, but still it remained, and in that resistance to be rid of, and to be eliminated it seemed the ears defied his want, it would not rid this growing fear, and now those creaks and snaps and knocks and shuffles became louder as the smell increased in spirit.
With fear, much happens to the body, the senses, those that are satiated by sensory fulfilment, become sensitive, heightened and almost merge together to form an outgoing radiance seeking danger. And where there is danger, intuition broadens towards the direction of that predatory adversary, the mind turning outwards, the nose drawing in more clearly the scent, the ears listening for its approach, the skin itself feeling change in temperature, the breeze of movement, and the woodcutter knew now his imagination and augmented distortion were not false, there was something out there.
The shuffling footsteps were real, the smell of ever increasing decay was evermore overpowering, and his skin shrivelled alike a corpse succumbing to the earth and its devouring hunger, the blood rushing to his heart from his arms and legs in a reaction to shock to protect that overbeating muscle, and at once he could not move. Just witness as the sound became more tangible, and synchronous with his quickening heart.
His eyes at once dilated bringing forth every particle of diminished light into a nebula of radiance as the door to his bedroom flew inwards and there she stood surrounded by a ghostly light as flames of emotion breaching the material world with anger, rage and hate.

“Where is my arm!” she screeched in voices of a grotesque choir, spitting forth the insects and larvae that had made her decaying corpse their home.
“Where!” again she cried sliding towards him, “Is my ARM!!”
The woodcutter frozen as her bony arm raised itself above his head, the nails as curled and gnarled as a badgers claw which in a swift swoop ploughed through his throat to the neck bone and his scream but a muffled gurgled bubbling sound of pathetic reticence.

  

Afterword
Dear reader, I can leave now knowing the story is told, and back into the normality of life you can digress your mind to the matters so concerned with your life as a traveller passing by the Old Oak with no care for its station nor the nature which surrounds it. But know this.
At night in your bed you will awake, in the still and dead of night. Your ears will listen outwards pass the rumble of distant trains, the breeze of trees swaying in motion, the animals afar. You will feel your spirit enlarge and envelope the environment of all that your ears inhabit, your eyes will condense that emotion, and before you manifest your fear before you.
I write this on the last day of this year, as the disobedient swifts overhead have told me, they have remained haunted and condemned to the harsh winter, as the Robin has stared into my eyes to bring me its vision from the dead, as the Wren has without fear approached and flown headlong into any adversary. And more, the Crows see me not as superior, but a quirk, a folly and ignorant. There is no more to tell. Each squawk from the crow is mockery. We live but to die.