The thin veil between worlds

As I have pointed out in earlier posts, Halloween very likely originated with the ancient festival of Samhain, at the end of the harvest and at a time when winter was beginning to take hold in the world. Ancient people considered it a very mystical and magical time, set at it was between seasons.  It was thought, and many still believe, that it is at this point that the veil between the corporeal world and the spirit world is at its thinnest.  

For those who believe that spirits can be contacted and that news of things that are yet to come can be received - divination - it is a perfect time for delving into the past to find out unresolved issues and find solutions for them, and for thinking ahead and finding out what the new year is to bring.  For those less spiritual, the natural course of the weather and daylight patterns tends to result in a need to slow down - crops have been harvested, the animals are being prepared for the winter, school and universities are back to a routine from the hectic days of summer activities and the weather is not always conducive to being out and about.  So it is a good time for taking stock and planning ahead - maybe that's why people tend to look to buy a new house in the autumn or buy their next summer holiday.

But keeping with the spiritual theme of Halloween, because that is the nature of the festival, there are certain times of day, and certain places where that veil between the spiritual world and the earthly world can become thin.  This thinning of the veil allows spirits to wander through.  Through this thin veil, the ghosts of the dead return to haunt the living.  It is thought that the sun is especially connected to the spiritual realm as the giver of eternal energy.  It is symbolic of unity, oneness, and connection to truth.  

Sunset and moonrise over Santa Margarita, Spain

Every morning, a renewal of the day takes place and the day ends each twilight - there is a cyclical ending and beginning, symbolised by dark and light, both governed by the sun.  As the sun touches, embraces the earth each dawn and each twilight, the spiritual world and the earthly world are brought into contact.  Thus dawn and twilight are both special, spiritual times and the veil between the living and the ghosts of the dead is lifted.  Ghosts and other spirits can pass into and out of the earth, visiting during the hours of dark and returning to their world as the light returns.

By lakeshore and at the edges of the forest

It was also believed that in places where there is a meeting of worlds, the veil is also especially thin.  So for example, where earth and water meet, or water and air, such as at a waterfall, or between forest and field, so a clearing in a forest was often thought to be imbued with the forces at play when spirit energy and earthly energy meet.  To take this thinking a little further, people also believed that where you crossed from one land to another, for example over a bridge from one river bank to another, or at a cross roads, where travellers were neither where they set out from nor at their destination, were special places where the veil between realms thinned and spirits could wander.

Thrusting from sea to sky, Rock of Gibraltar

Gibraltar is thought of as an ancient sacred space, where pagan gods were worshipped deep in its caves, where the sea penetrated the land, where rock thrust up towards air and where the mountain was only thinly attached to the mainland by a narrow strip of dust that had been built up by the drifting of sand with the tides over millennia.  It is across that narrow strip of land that a man-made border has been created over the past three hundred years, a border symbolised by a gate and guarded by men with guns.  It is a place of seething anger which sometimes boils over.  It is a place which must, by its very nature, attract spirits of all sorts, good and inevitably, evil.

Gibraltar - border with Spain.

"Chilling Tales for Winter Nights" bases some of the stories on this idea of border lands between the living and the dead.  The manuscript is now ready, the cover has been designed.  We are waiting to see whether we will include further illustrations, and to check the proofs.  It will be on book shelves very soon.  Meanwhile, enjoy the start of one of the stories, one which contemplates just what might happen if a ghoul walked through the border, and you looked it straight in the eye..........

Ghoul at the Gates

I have trained many a young officer, prepared them for their jobs and passed on every ounce of knowledge and experience I gathered in my thirty years in police work and security and customs.  That year before my retirement was no different to the others, except that I was especially anxious to make sure they all made the grade.  It seems an easy job, being on duty at the Gibraltar to Spain border, checking who goes in, who goes out, who’s carrying what.  But it has its complications.  You have to look out for passport frauds, people without proper documents, traffickers of all sorts and of all sorts of things, from tobacco to girls.  So I always made sure that the new recruits had the best possible training.  Yet even so, being a border guard could be a cold and dangerous duty.

     Martin lived in the same block of flats that I did.  He had always been a good lad.  He played football twice a week, did his Holy Communion and Confirmation, just as all good Catholic kids did, kept an eye on his kid brother when they were out playing and gave his mother a hand at home.  Perhaps he had to grow up a little quickly after his father had left home, but the boy took it all in his stride.

     He left school at a time when jobs were few, and I felt worried for him, so I did what any good neighbour would do, and I put a good word in for him with my boss.  I don’t know how much that worked, but Martin was recruited, his mother was grateful and I felt rather pleased with myself.

      I gave him a lift to work on his first morning.  We made a bit of an odd pair; me with my uniform on, smart and pressed and shining, and Martin, neat and tidy in his best shirt and trousers that were just a tad too short, looking pink and scrubbed, his face sporting the marks of passing adolescence and the scrape of the razorblade.

      “I guess you’re pretty nervous, this being your first day,” I said.  Martin sat in the passenger seat of my car and snapped his seatbelt into place.

      “Definitely,” he said with a grin.  I glanced at him now and again as we drove, and I kept his mind off his first morning meeting with his senior officer by chattering about the weekend’s feast of football.  He was taller than me these days, his hair cropped tight to his head.  He was still a bit skinny, like young lads tend to be before they fill out into grown men, but with the training he would broaden at the shoulder, round at the chest, become a strong, handsome young man.  I remember thinking that morning, that if he stayed focused – not an easy thing for any young man – if he continued to work hard and apply himself, he had a good future ahead of him.  I think all his teachers must have said the same at one time or another.

     But, despite the relaxed conversation of football, I could tell that there was something bothering him, something more than just first day nerves, and that was darkening into stormy grey his usually bright, sky-blue eyes.

      “So, are you looking forward to the job?” I asked, not finding conversation easy.  I rolled the car into a parking space.

     “Yes…yes, of course I am,” he said, his eyes looking out through the windscreen but not focusing on anything.

     “But?” I pushed him as gently as I could, intrigued.

     “Look, Mr Gonzales, I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful for the job, because I really am, and trust me, I’m going to work as hard as I can…”  He paused, searching for words, as most lads his age would.

     “But…I get the feeling there’s more?” I pressed on, “don’t forget, I’ll be supporting you right through your training.”

     “It’s not the training that worries me,” he said, “it’s just that…”  He hesitated again, but this time continued without prompting, “It’s just that the old lady who lives on the ground floor, Constancia, she’s been coming every day to have a bit of supper with us since she heard I got the job at Customs.  Mum’s getting a bit fed up to be honest, because it stops her getting on with things, and strangely enough, she eats a lot for a little old woman.”

     “Martin, you’re waffling, get to the point,” I said, “it won’t do to be talking too much, it’s your eyes and brain you need to use in the job.  The mouth is for eating.”

     “Sorry,” he blushed, “Constancia says the border is haunted.  Worse than that, it’s not just any old ghost that lurks about there at night, it’s some kind of demon that sucks the soul out of its victims.  I know it sounds daft, but she says this demon or ghoul, or whatever it is, sucks the life energy from young men, once a year on Halloween, and it fills itself up enough to not come back for more till the following year.  The whole thing has unnerved me a bit.”

     The worse thing I could do, I remember thinking at the time, would be to laugh at him and mock his fears, which is what any other guard would have done.  But I really could not make light of it.  I had heard that old story before, many years earlier, when I had just started off as a border guard and I knew Constancia when she was a wife and mother.  I knew the truth of the story of that ghoul.  Constancia had lost her older brother to it, and then one of her sons, and she had never recovered.  I had been there, and just touching on the memory made me shiver.  It could so easily have been me.

      “The important thing is not to be scared, not to allow fear to dominate you, to get in the way of you thinking straight and doing the right thing,” I advised, using the same words that my training officer had used when I was just a rookie recruit.  There were ways to stay safe, except it meant learning when it was right to turn your back, to not look in the right places, to avoid challenging someone who would try to creep through without showing his passport.  
     The ghoul could take many forms – sometimes male, sometimes female, often old, and at other times deceptively young.  The one that got Constancia’s brother had come across in the guise of a kid on a bicycle who tried to ride through the guards.  I hade been lucky and had been knocked off my feet, but Constancia’s brother had managed to stop it.  And within seconds, he was lost, left collapsed in a heap on the ground, his heart burst in his chest and the doctors said it as an aneurism, a feebleness of the arteries.  Those of us that had seen him squirm under the grip of that boy, his skin grey as if he had been dead for decades, knew other wise, but who would believe us when we barely believed it ourselves?  
     There would be time for Martin to learn.  Us older officers made sure we told them, off the record, when the bosses weren’t listening.  They all learned in the end, even the ones who scoffed at the whole idea.  They all learned the little tell-tale signs that the figure approaching you was not quite human.  They learned to turn their backs at just the right moment and avoid the doom that waited for whoever stared it straight in the face and met the haunted gaze in its dead eyes..........