An Incident At Ashcliffe

Chapter One

An Incident At Ashcliffe

Black clad, pale face, the sister of the moon; Blanche Gillespie sat amongst the populous of Ashcliffe, a deprived and desolate swampy town on the fringes of St. Lucy’s Bayou.

  Years ago, back when rumours of witchcraft and satanic worship never truly concerned travellers, Ashcliffe’s economy was booming. If you were to pass through on your way down to New Orleans or head up north across the border into Mississippi, Ashcliffe was where you stopped off. Be it for a rest at the Maris-Broudstein Hotel or for a bite to eat at Giuseppe’s Haven. Ashcliffe had everything the weary traveller could ever want.

  Though its trees; which culminated the belts of forests around the small town seemed remarkably tall, in comparison to the rest of the area’s surrounding flora and it’s swamps, which were frequent and sprawling, would whisper to the odd character that passed by. They’d whisper to them nightmarish melodies that had the possibility to drive a man insane, though they seldom did as few dared to venture into the treacherous swamps. Even the townsfolk would never deign to journey far into its gaping jaws.

  The people of Ashcliffe were particularly idiosyncratic. The last three decades had seen almost ¾ of the population move on out of the decrepit town once particular rumours became far too prevalent and concerning for any one “noble” family to remain in the town.

In the decades after what the townsfolk came to call “The Great Exodus” many of its already mentally incapable people took to veracious interbreeding which rendered most physically and mentally disfigured. The local flavour also began to harbour a bitter resentment for any outsider that would stumble through the town. The last visitors that graced Ashcliffe were a band of travelling circus performers. They stayed for a mere seven months in 1954 before being chased out by the xenophobic inbred hillbillies that called the place home.

  The Gillespie family, who almost three centuries ago helped found the town of Ashcliffe, remained a prominent figure within the community. Its matriarch: Blanche was perhaps the most intellectual person in Ashcliffe, she bore no physical deformities worthy to note, though the same could not be said for her children. Blanche Gillespie was a pearl nestled amongst the shit that was the townsfolk.

  Ma Gillespie had always been a presence in the town; she had also never married, despite being the last remaining female in Ashcliffe the local country folk knew well enough to stay away from her. Local legend tells of her being a creature of horror, a succubus, who’d seduce the spellbound with her feminine charms and take their life in an instant. Another paints Blanche as a witch, of incredible age and power. There were many incarnations of the story, as it’d be heard differently according to whom one would ask, however, she allowed the region to speculate as widely as they chose – which they did.

  Blanche, indeed, had always been a presence in Ashcliffe, though not always as Blanche Gillespie. Some centuries ago, she was Madeleine de Longpré and before that she was Edith Proust. She was once squeezed from the labouring cunt of some prehistoric beast, into a world of debauchery and degeneracy.

  She was about to experience it again.

 She could feel it; as she sat against the porch of a ramshackle farmhouse, she could feel it for herself that her time of transfiguration was at hand. It came to her in the damp night air of Louisiana that left an unsavoury taste in the corners of her mouth. It came to her in the strumming of each insect around her and in the calling of the ominous swamplands that lay behind her.

  But who would usher in her metamorphosis? It was true and widely known in fact, that she was the last woman in Ashcliffe. There had not been a female since the odd passing of one young Lolita Calvert a good while back. So who would be the one to initiate the throes of labour this time?

  She did not know, so, she waited.