Cybil, a stranger now

Cybil was not going to be disappointed. She sensed that, and the warm glow that had started only as a mere suggestion somewhere in the pit of her stomach was encouraged to continue. Earlier, she'd sat through the Sunday evening entertainment on TV while her husband, as usual, had enjoyed the rather mundane fare offered. They were opposites in the matter of what was acceptable in some things, but their life was well-compensated in others.

What went on between them in their little nest in Avondale, Auckland, would have surprised their neighbours had they but known. The plain and ordinary looking Gilbert had something of a robust freshness in his performance of things conjugal, aided and abetted as he most certainly was by Cybil. It left their neighbours’ Hollywood-type froth and bubble relationships far behind when it came to mutual sexual satisfaction. But enjoyable as their moments together were, Cybil's nocturnal journeying, at first only of the mind, was in considerable danger of spoiling everything.

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.

In their front room, an embroidered text from St Matthew's Gospel, chapter 12, verses 43-44, warned of dangers from unclean spirits wandering around seeking somewhere to rest. It had never been given serious consideration by Cybil. A New Zealander by birth, she'd little time for the superstitious leanings of her mother, originally from Hampshire in England. She was keen, however, to know more of the village of Yately, where her mother was born. It held a certain fascination for her.

Later that Sunday evening, 12 October, when Gilbert's breathing indicated he'd settled into a deep sleep, she opened the door in her mind and slipped through to begin another journey in Hampshire. She'd achieved the rare and uncanny ability to accurately pinpoint a particular period in time and the district she wished to visit.
It was now Monday morning, the day it all started. As expected, the air in Yately was invigorating and country fresh. The scent of flowers mingled with that of trees and the clean composting material on the earth around them. From close by came the call of a curlew, and from further in the distance some wild ducks. Over the hedge on her right several men on stilts were picking the yellowish-green cone-shaped clusters of the hop vine, their voices mellow as they called to each other in the soft breeze.

The lane ended at the village green where a few trees dotted here and there around its perimeter set the scene for the children playing there. A small stone church with its graveyard peeped out from a grove of trees on a slight rise over on the opposite side, while on her left stood a tavern, with a sign which told her was the ‘Post and Chaise.’

Moving forward she came across a road sign pointing in three directions. One arm to the Beaulieu River and Buckler's Hard, another to the New Forest and a third to Bath. Just around the corner was Maher Street. Her mother had been born at number four which she'd seen before on previous ‘visits’, but only from the outside. This time she entered.

Back in their bedroom, Cybil’s husband Gilbert slept on, unaware that only the shell of his wife remained beside him. At that very moment, with wildly-thumping heart, Cybil's true being was staring at the white-washed wall in front of her. Hanging there was the same texts of Scripture her mother had embroidered for her and which now set alarm bells ringing in her mind.

As that realisation dawned, she found she couldn't move, as if some connection between her abstract thought processes and her physical body had been broken. Just a few moments before she'd been a kind of invisible spirit, free to see and hear, think and move. Now she was in dreadful danger and in the midst of the terror that had seized her she also knew that while she couldn't alter history, perhaps history could alter her. A feeling of panic took hold of her. If she couldn't leave Yately, she was trapped in time and that knowledge almost sent her out of her mind.

Gilbert, meanwhile, had woken up, and concerned at the total lack of response from his wife beside him had called the doctor. Half an hour later, seated beside her on the way to hospital his mind grappled with the fact that the doctor was unable to offer any explanation for Cybil's comatose condition. Nor was any medical or scientific explanation given for what had happened to her at the hospital where Cybil's body lay for the next forty-eight hours. When she finally awoke she seemed none the worse for her loss of consciousness.

But as Gilbert held her hand in his and looked into her eyes, he knew it was not his wife. Cybil's body was there, but as succeeding days would reveal, the tender human spirit he'd known and shared had gone. In her place there now existed some cold, unnatural soulless being not of this world, and Gilbert's life from that time on was so beset with misery and hate that he died of a broken heart just two months later.

If you should visit Yately, go to the graveyard of the church on the small rise by the village green. You may find the stone steps which lead into the meadow by the far wall. On the other side of that wall, in unconsecrated ground you'll find a gravestone. It's very old. The inscription was almost impossible to read when I was last there, but it reads:

Cybil, a stranger. Died, October 1822, of unsound mind

Dennis Crompton © 1997
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)