Skeletons in the Cupboard

Castle of Forgetting

October 2016, April 2019

There was a castle at the end of the world where those about to die offer themselves to the voices in the well. They come alone in their rowboats, carrying their most precious possession to be traded with a clean death, free from any form of afterlife. I was one of the five priests who manage the castle. We receive their offers, we bless their journey, and then we send them to the well. In return, we are told the truest stories possible from those about to die.

We do not make friends; we do not make allegiance, but I’ve acquainted myself with a bird who made nest at the top of the castle. Sometimes it tells me stories that can only be lies, but stories that I still listen to because it sounds like a truth.

The man told us he lost his ship, his wealth, his wife. With the little sanity he had left, he nearly lost his own daughter, the only one that he had left. The procession was quick: the body given to the well, the voice satiated. But the child stayed, wild-eyed, with a streak of understanding that shouldn’t be possible in a face so young.

A priest may come and goes, but we’ve never had an acolyte so young. We gave her a room far from the castle, we taught him parts—only parts—of the stories we’ve heard, we watched her as she searched for life.

The pendant was the shape of a heart, made of twigs enjoined. I knew what it meant without her having to say it. It’s one of the things we had to give up to live in the castle. I thanked her—how could I not?—even though I did not know what to do with it.

The child did not belong here, but he lived well. She wrote down the stories she’d heard; that was not something we do. Sometimes she wrote down the stories that we didn’t tell her; not what she had heard, what she had lived through. Her own stories.

On the second week that she had been here, the bird who nested at the top of the castle came down to greet her, and the two told each other stories that the other did not know.

As the days and years went on, as the almost-dead came and told their stories and went down the well, I saw her less and less. Sometimes I’d seen her on the cliff where one could see the ocean around us, talking to the bird. Sometimes I saw her listening in when a true story was told, when I had told her not to.

One day a man came in a rowboat, carrying only a meagre offering: a ring made of wood. Even this, we can accept, but as he stood in front of the well his tongue came tied. The voices in the well require a story in return for a death, but the man could not bring himself to speak.

We stood there and waited and waited and still the man could not speak. And then all of a sudden came the girl, a young woman now, a priestess in her own right.

She told us a story.

She told us about the man who was silent. Of his many adventures, of how he suceeded and failed and all the things in between. She told of us of the high court he was flirting with, of the underground he was running from. She told us of the wooden a ring, a mark of respect in one circle, dishonour in the other.

She told us of how he lost his voice, a curse from a spurned lover. She told us of why he had come, carrying the weight of his regrets.

She told us the story as if she was the man himself, as if she was there in flesh and blood and her own two eyes and a heart.

And the voices in the well lap it all up.

The man went, a clean death for him. The other priests left, accepting his offering and back to their duties. The girl smiled, and the smile reminded me of the bird who tell lies.

“Not a word of the story you told was true,” I said to her, as we strolled on the hill away from the well in the castle.

“Not a word,” she confided to me. “But a tale is a memory. And even the truest memories tell lies.”