The second day of the challenge is a very short story, originally in German and translated into English, in which a plucky girl decides to run away with her lover using the night that ghosts haunt her troubled castle as the perfect cover. Horror-comedy! All’s well that ends well.
This is set in Castle Lauenstein, which looks so lovely and not haunted at all:
October 2nd – Johan Karl August Musaus – ‘The Elopement’ (1801) – Read it here. The link is to a translation of “Die Entführung” from Volksmährchen der Deutschen volume 5 (1787). This translation is slightly modified from its first publication in The German Museum volume 3 (1801).
For my creative response today, I’m going to focus on the procession of burning nuns, and that image of a phantom procession only a travelling seer can handle. I have tried to retain the comedy aspect…
I found this image of Orlamünde Hall, and I think a blazing procession of ghostly nuns would really work with the decor.
He did not have to wait long. Night had fallen on the benighted hall, throwing its vaults and pillars into arched and rounded shadow. What in daylight appeared as silver foliage climbing over the rich blue vaulting now seemed to writhe about overhead in a sinister, serpentine tangle. The stout round pillars bore none of their regal stamp in this evil light, but rather squatted menacingly in their row, goblin-like and leering.
The door at the far end of the hall slid open. At first, he could see nothing, but the gloom gradually gave way to a sombre orange glow playing on the stone, and then to the soft-soled steps echoing around the silent space, and then he saw them.
The burning nuns processed with habits smoking and flaming with tongues of fire, two abreast, although the door could not support two living people to walk through side by side.
Their habits blazed like torches, throwing light around the room in twisting, agonised patterns.
The air was stifling, his lungs burning with the stink of charred flesh and fibre, and the woodsmoke smell of rosary beads.
It was no wonder that bell, book and candle had not sent these ladies to their rest, he thought. They were already fired with holiness, clay vessels now glazed firm with martyrdom, and they were not for moving with further evocations and prayers. What could be spoken over them that they themselves had not already said in the furnace of their purgatory, in the solemn meditations of their earthbound, heaven-turned hearts?
No, the seer thought reflectively. This would take more than holy men were equipped for.
He stood in the way of the procession, bracing himself, and took a long, slow breath, filling his whole chest, and trying not to choke and gag in the process. Then he addressed the burning nuns in a great, booming voice, in all the expletives and insults he could contrive to hurl against them, never repeating himself, but uttering every colourful curse he had ever heard.
The nuns stopped their procession, and smouldering hands flew to their crosses, glazed eyes wide beneath their phantom wimples, a whole nunnery of ghosts utterly aghast.
“F— off and be damned, you ragged mischief of magpie-garbed c—s!” screamed the wise seer, finally out of breath.
The nuns, scandalised beyond measure, retreated with burning hands over smoking ears, overcome with such horror that the castle was quiet for seven years while they recovered.
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