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The Eidolonpterist

by Elizabeth Guilt

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I was climbing through the window of a ruined castle the only time the police ever caught me. I turned out my bag to show them everything I carried: a torch, pencils, notebooks. I flipped through one book, holding up sketches: the Convolvulus Hawk-moth, the Swallow-tailed moth, the Light Grey Tortrix – Cnephasia incertana, you know, just look at the cross-bands on the forewings…

The police sniggered, and let me go with a warning not to trespass again. I am white, and educated, and well-spoken; I hated myself even as I played up the accent. But they let me go.

I was patient, and polite; it was just a matter of waiting until they grew bored with questioning me. I was used to waiting.

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I spent my teenage years trapping moths against a lit sheet, sketching them again and again, trying to catch the delicate translucency of their wings. Moths come in a wider variety of colours than you think, but my favourites were always the greys. There was something mystical and moonlit about them – almost magical – but capturing that gauzy quality with a pencil was hard. My drawings were solid; dead and still. I ripped them up in disgust and tried again, and again, until eventually I sketched moths that could, almost, almost, quiver into life and fly from the page.

In truth, the sketches I showed the police that night were old. I had spotted a Grey Pug flitting about in the June air, but I had not drawn a moth in years. I was still a collector, still filling up the other sketchbook I carried – but the moths were an easier story than the truth. Sometimes I longed to find someone I could exchange stories with, compare pictures.

Especially on nights like that one, when she had been so very beautiful.

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I dated women when I was in university: everyone expected it, and I was still trying to slide along the grooves of society. I enjoyed the conversation, the shared experiences, the sense of being the focus of someone’s attention. I always admired beauty. But the touching… even women who were initially delighted to find that I was, as they put it, “a gentleman” would eventually begin to move too close to me.

I went instead on dates with other men and found the experience identical: I enjoyed the company, and would delight in the way light shone on the curve of a face, or through someone’s hair. But I still flinched away from a face too close to mine, from the wet, rubbery intrusion of a kiss. Even the prospect made me feel tense and uncomfortable.

Dating was not for me, and as I got older, friendships in other contexts seemed less and less available. Women did not trust a lone man in search of companions. I had never been a big drinker, or a sports fan, and without those my routes to new friendships with other men seemed closed. Little by little, anything other than the occasional, brief drink with colleagues slid away.

I lived alone, and so there was no one to ask me where I spent the hours when I drove my little Fiat away after dark. Very occasionally someone would remember that I was “the moth guy” and ask about it. It was viewed as a harmless hobby so long as I didn’t fill up more than a sentence or two answering their enquiry. There were, of course, other moth enthusiasts – but no one with whom I enjoyed more than the occasional technical conversation.

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I found my new interest some years ago, on a long-overdue visit to my parents. Weary of my father’s constant needling about my marriage prospects, I escaped to the local park. I took with me a light box, and my sketch book, and a thick coat and settled down in a folding chair. There was no moon – or perhaps it was cloudy – and for a while I enjoyed the peace of the thick night.

When a thin, silver glimmer caught my eye, my first response was irritation: I didn’t want to share the quiet, chilly park. Whoever it was – trysting lovers, bored teenagers, a petty criminal – would doubtless disturb both me and the moths. I closed my eyes, hunched into my coat, and breathed deeply as whatever-it-was went about its business. A few minutes later, surprised by the silence, I looked around.

A few feet away there was a teenage boy. He was iridescent against the dark sky, sublime in his perfection. He was, despite the curves of his face and the Afro that haloed his head, a pale silver. He shone, motionless, and he took my breath away.

I stared at him, my pulse racing and my breath stuttering in my throat; the light that rolled off him flooded my eyes, and my mind. He stared back, his eyes huge and sad. Then – slowly, slowly – he drifted away. I watched until the last of the luminescence that trailed behind him had faded, until I was completely alone again.

I reached automatically for my sketch book. In the harsh glare of the torch, my pencil lines were a mockery of his transcendent grace. The outline I drew was an insult to the luminous being who’d stood before me, and I tried over and over to capture that sense of light and delight. I didn’t wonder who he was, or where he’d come from; I was completely lost in the vision he’d laid out before me.

I spent a second night, and a third, shivering in the park, but I didn’t see the beautiful boy again. He threaded in and out of my dreams, and for weeks I continued trying to replicate on paper the way he’d appeared to me. Then my father, whose rants I had learned largely to ignore, grumbled into the phone about “that coloured boy who got himself murdered”. I winced, but swallowed the argument because I wanted more information. Not that he had much more information: a teenager had been murdered in the park a few months ago, and there had been police vans and yellow tape for days, and finding somewhere else to walk the dog had been extremely inconvenient. The teenager had been black, and male, and had fallen out of the news a few days later.

I fought my way through the splashy adverts and pop-ups of the local paper’s website. Stephen, his name had been, Stephen Drake. Seventeen, studying maths and physics, keen to become a pilot. Popular in school, liked by his teachers, something significant in under-18s rugby; no one seemed to know why he had been stabbed to death in a park on a September night. I counted carefully: he had died 28 days before I saw his likeness rising in glory in the October darkness. I counted again, and reorganised my Christmas visit to my parents’ house.

He – Stephen – was there again in late December. Not on the day I’d calculated, but it was just a matter of waiting. A day later, on a freezing, clear night, he drifted in from the trees, and hung there, and then left me. His face fixed itself in my mind, and as the boring hours passed with my parents, my thoughts drifted more and more often towards the few moments that I had basked in his glow.

As a child, I had tried to explain to people that I wasn’t a “moth guy”, I was a lepidopterist. Now, privately, I began to think of myself as an eidolonpterist.

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I started reading. I started buying a local newspaper. I even wondered about getting something that would enable me to listen in on police calls.

I began following up old stories, paying attention to urban legends, and spending time browsing websites that I once would have dismissed as utter nonsense. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of it was nonsense, and I soon realised that the people who posted there were, by and large, awful. In the early days I reached out, excited, to others on forums then found we had no common ground. But there were threads I could follow, stories to hear, tales and rumours to chase. I enjoyed it. Sometimes I wondered if the research, following the strands of a legend or picking apart the details from a brief local news item, excited me in the same way others enjoyed flirting. It felt, to me, like a chase – and then the waiting. Waiting to see if they would show, if they would be as beautiful as I hoped.

A year later, Stephen himself was fading. He would always be special to me, and sometimes I believed I saw recognition in his eyes, but soon he was no more than a smudge of light against the trees. Not everyone appeared quite as he had – sometimes all I saw was a faded glimmer, vapour against the night. Some appeared spitting and snarling, their fury shedding in sparks around them; others erupted with a wailing howl that almost tore the darkness apart. No two were ever the same. On a delirious hot week in Spain, I saw a pair of lovers plummet from a bridge every evening, and they were scintillating and different each time. I abandoned my plans to visit museums and churches, and instead spent my days filling up page after page with drawings of the doomed couple. By the end of my stay, I could already see their outlines blurring and knew that, even if I returned, I would not see them again.

Why did they appear daily, yet Stephen came only once with every cycle of the moon? Why did some individuals fade so quickly, when others returned year after year? I had no answers. But night after night, I went to parks, and suburban streets, and desolate cliffs. Once you knew what to look for, it was always just a matter of waiting.

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In a crammed and dusty second-hand bookshop, I found a pamphlet of local legends. It had been printed – possibly even typed, from the looks of it – in the 1960s, and veered in style from academic to frankly lurid. Between a headless horseman and a rumour of a Wiccan coven was the Tudor Lady.

The pamphlet didn’t give her name, it simply described how, once a century, she could be seen on Midsummer’s Eve. No exact dates were mentioned, but from the author’s earnest assurance that she had been seen “shortly after the Great War” I guessed that the anniversary might be due. Perhaps it was wishful thinking; it was mid-June already, and the prospect of seeing the Lady, upwards of four hundred years later, filled me with delight. I bought several books of local history, and began combing them for details, for dates, for the precise site of the house in which she’d lived.

I broke into the house’s grounds, now part of an extensive garden centre, just before midnight on the 21st, and spent a pleasant, warm evening with a flask of coffee. I saw nothing of the Lady. What had I expected? I chided myself as I sneaked out at dawn. The chances of hitting on the right year were low, and I had still not managed to pin down the precise date of her execution. I would just have to wait for her; if she really came from the Tudor era, she would be worth it.

I went back the next year, and the next. I established almost a routine: dinner in the same pub beforehand, the same ivy-choked low wall behind the garden centre, a few hours’ sleep in a layby on the same A-road.

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In the pub, as I finished my lasagne and chips and waited for darkness to fall, I doodled an imagined outline of a woman in a gabled hood.

“Nice drawing,” said a voice behind me. “Someone you’ve seen?”

A man perhaps ten years older than me, bullish and heavily built, was looking down at the picture. He had a half-drunk pint of bitter in his hand, and a mischievous smile that made my heart leap to a delighted conclusion.

“Sadly, no. Have you?”

“Not yet,” he said, sitting down uninvited beside me. “Maybe tonight, eh?”

I had found my fellow collector.

I was guarded at first, still wary that this was somehow a trick and suddenly the man would be laughing at me. But no, he seemed as serious, and as dedicated as I was. Soon we were swapping stories of cold nights of failure and frantic searches through books and newspapers. I began to talk about the first time I saw Stephen, but found myself unexpectedly tongue-tied, the details almost too intimate to share. He seemed more interested in dates and places, even jotting down a few with the implication he might visit them himself. When he mentioned his own experiences, he seemed not to speak of beauty but of detail: the more the better. I thought of Stephen slowly fading away, and understood the distinction.

I asked, feeling a little intrusive, if he had ever watched – over days, or weeks, or years – someone smudge away into nothingness.

“No.” He looked at his watch. “Do you know where she is?”

The sudden, direct question surprised me.

“I… I think so.”

“Great.” He pulled out print-outs from an OS map. “Whereabouts? I’m pretty sure it’ll be this year, but I’m not as clear as I’d like on where the house was.”

I unfolded my own map, blown up to a larger image. I’d tried to draw in the plan of the house, based on old maps and a few different accounts.

“I think the west wing of the house stood here, and the kitchen garden would have been here.”

“Great,” he nodded. Most accounts reported her walking through the kitchen garden, he would already know that.

“Where did you find the year? I’ve never managed to…”

“Parish records. No funeral, of course, but the church a few villages over had a vicar who was willing to do some sort of blessing.”

I smiled, shaking my head. “Wow.”

“Yeah, I only found that a few weeks ago. Just in time.”

Here was someone to whom I didn’t need to explain myself, didn’t have to hide the passion that filled most of my waking hours. He lived a similar life to mine, and I saw in his eyes a glitter that matched my excitement.

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We walked the mile or so to the garden centre. Meeting him felt like coming home, and I could feel my thoughts running on ahead, wondering how many more adventures we might have together. Chasing rumours, ploughing through dusty archives, sitting for hours in the cold – all these things could be shared, rather than solitary.

We climbed over the wall, and used my phone to find the exact spot I’d identified. There was a small paved area, moss and grass growing through cracked slabs, where we set up chairs. Sweeping my torch around, I fancied the sunken area in front of us could once have been a carefully-tended garden. We settled down in companionable silence to wait for her. We were both used to waiting.

Before it was even fully dark, I saw a pale, shining halo start to form about twenty feet from where we were sitting. I must have tensed, or pulled in a sudden breath, because I heard the man twist in his chair. As we watched, she came fully into view, gliding slowly towards us.

She was slight, and wearing a long dress with a low, square neck and a tiny waist. Unlike my doodle earlier, she wore no headdress but had long, straight hair falling over her shoulders. She was perfect and I gazed at her, dazzled.

“Oh my god!” My companion’s voice was a whisper, but he too was clearly besotted. I looked briefly aside, and was surprised to find his eyes on me, not her, as she drifted gently alongside us.

I turned away, a little disturbed by the wary intensity in his eyes, and tried to go back to drinking in the sight of the Lady.

The man’s chair scraped violently across the paving, and he lunged past me towards the silvery figure.

“No!” I froze, horrified, convinced my Lady would be scared away.

The man leaped to occupy the same space she did, thrusting his hands deep into her gleaming hair. She twisted this way and that, her mouth opening in a silent scream, but she seemed pinned by him.

He threw back his head, his own mouth mirroring hers, and sparks of lightning began to tumble around them. My sketchbook slid to the floor and I gripped the thin, canvas arms of my folding chair, unable to understand what the man was doing. Light streamed from the Lady, burning the backs of my eyes; the air glitched and crackled with static and a piercing scream that made me clap my hands over my ears. For a few moments I cowered away, unable to bear the scene in front of me.

When I looked back, the lines of her dress were beginning to blur, her face tearing apart. Through her thinning grey shape, I could see the man’s clenched arms, braced and bulging as he wrestled to hold her. The tendons strained from his neck like knives, and as she broke into pieces his body vibrated with a low, breathy groan.

When she was nothing more than a few sad, shredded wisps of light, the man’s head lolled round and he looked directly at me. His expression was of idiot ecstasy, and his mouth hung open like a wet wound.

“Better than sex,” he panted. “Four hundred years old, eh? Been wanting to ride this one since I first heard of her.”

I remained in my seat, stunned. I tried to speak but found my lips trembling, quavering out of my control. My breath hitched, and I had the horrible sensation of tears spilling down my cheeks.

A huge void was tearing its way out of my chest. Such beauty, four hundred years of beauty, destroyed because I had led this horror, this monster, straight to her.

“You…”

The man jerked his head to one side, with a tiny sound of contempt. “It’s beyond your dreams.” His wide grin gave way to laughter. “You should try it.”

I lunged. Much as he had done, I sprang out of my seat. I had no conscious intention, no plan, just a mad, spiralling fury. I slammed straight into his chest and he – surprised – tumbled over backwards. His head slapped meatily against the stone slabs.

For a moment, only a moment, I stood in a sort of triumph. Then I saw the rapid rush of blood from his head and threw myself to my knees, aghast. His lips were moving, but he said no words. Even as I scrabbled in my pocket for my phone I felt, rather than saw, his life leave his body. I checked for a pulse, for any sign of breathing, and then carefully stood up. There was no blood on my clothes or shoes.

By the time the body was discovered, I had my story rehearsed. But no one connected me to the man from the pub. No one even asked when or where we had parted ways.

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I sat on a deserted sea-wall and watched as a man who had drowned just days earlier rolled in the waves below, phosphorescence shedding from the sculpted muscles of his arms and chest. He wore no clothes, and the pale gleam of him against the black water was flawless.

“Stunning,” I whispered, pencil in hand. He was stunning, among the most beautiful I’d ever seen, his perfect form turning over and over as the sea lapped at him.

Better than sex… Beyond your dreams… Been wanting to ride this one…

The filthy words echoed through my mind, robbing the sight below me of all joy. The memory of that monster, destroying my Tudor Lady with his grasping, greedy hands, had spoiled everything. The sketches I made now were lifeless; the beauty of each figure an emotionless catalogue of perfection. Everything was coated in a layer of disgust at what my “fellow collector” had done.

And at the same time a tiny, ugly curiosity grew inside me. I wondered what it would feel like to drop into the cold water, wrap my arms around the drowned man, and pull him into me.

Better than sex… Sex was something I had never wanted.

Beyond your dreams… Once, all I had dreamed of was seeing these glimmering, delicate beings.

Would “riding” the cold spectre in the waves help me understand why that brute had committed such meaningless acts?

The thought turned my stomach, but it fascinated me. I tried to push it away, but I longed to know. How would it feel to have that energy pouring into me, lightning screaming and crackling around me? I rammed my sketchbook back into my bag, and hurried away.

The drowned man had already died a violent death; he did not deserve the further agony of human hands crushing his shining body and tearing his last essence to tatters in the night.

No one deserved that. No one.

No one?

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I return to the space behind the garden centre whenever I can. Night after night, I sit here, with my folding chair and my flask of coffee. I do not bring my sketchbook or pencils, because I will not need them.

It is, as always, just a matter of waiting.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 912 for March 22nd, 2024.

The Eidolonpterist [EYE-do-lon-ter-ist], by Elizabeth Guilt

Narrated by Leon Alexander Clarance; hosted by Kat Day audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have The Eidolonpterist [EYE-do-lon-ter-ist], by Elizabeth Guilt. This story is a PseudoPod original.

Author bio:
Elizabeth Guilt lives in London, UK, where history lurks alongside plate glass office buildings and stories spring out of the street names. Her fiction has appeared most recently in Escape Pod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and The Arcanist. You can find her at https://www.elizabethguilt.com/, or on Twitter as @elizabethguilt.

Narrator bio:
Leon Alexander Clarance is a film and TV producer with Zero Gravity Management. He has produced all manner of weird and wonderful projects, from the hit TV series SENSE8 with the Wachowski’s and J. Michael Straczynski to small charming indie movies like Crucifixion with the Conjuring franchise’s Hayes brothers and Peter Safran (the latter now being the head of DC Studios). For any Stranger Things fans, he produced the film Kodachrome alongside the team at 21 Laps that produce the show. He has done several horror films and concedes has also made some horrific ones. Whether they overlap on a Venn is up to you. He’s also a chartered accountant, a hedge fund consultant, an advisor to law firms and used to play football (soccer) semi-professionally. That’s quite a lot to go on a business card, but nobody uses them any more anyway, right? Right?

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

 

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Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of The Eidolonpterist by Elizabeth Guilt? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

Elizabeth herself had this to say:

“This story originally had a dull title, because titles are hard. Pseudopod’s editorial team had the lovely suggestion of playing on the word lepidoptery [lepid-op-tery] with some borrowed Greek, giving my narrator the hobby of eidolonptery – or ‘ghost wing collection’.”

Of course, as a result of that title change, I’ve now had to say Eidolonpterist several times. That’ll teach me to be so clever. Anyway. This story is wonderful, isn’t it? I love the way, here, we’re introduced to the main character and we swerve from ‘curious’ to ‘creepy’ to ‘sympathetic’ in just a few short paragraphs. That sort of characterisation is hard to do, and Elizabeth nails it. We instantly find ourselves empathising with the main character, for all that we may not like him very much.

And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the only named character here is Stephen, the ghost? Even the “fellow collector” isn’t named. Our narrator says: “Meeting him felt like coming home,” and yet… his identity, his name, is still not so important as our main character’s first ghost. It speaks, to me, of a man who thinks he’s desperate for a connection with another human being, but who can’t quite see it through. He finds someone whom he seems to have something in common with, but, still, he’s not quite there.

I found myself pondering over what this piece has to say about sexuality, control, abuse… we’re not told exactly what killed the Tudor Lady, but the line: “No funeral, of course, but the church a few villages over had a vicar who was willing to do some sort of blessing” and the fact that we later see that her hair is loose, her head uncovered, suggests an unmarried mother, who perhaps died in childbirth. Which leads us to wonder: did she consent to the act that led to that pregnancy?

Which is a nuance that casts an even more unpleasant light on the other “collector’s” actions – grabbing her, almost seeming to kiss her, stealing what remains of her life essence.

In life, so in death.

And so we come back to our main character. He is, briefly there, the hero. The other man is punished for his horrible behaviour, if not entirely intentionally.

But of course, his thoughts were not about doing the right thing for the ghost, for her sake. He doesn’t want to release the spirts, send them peacefully on their way. It never even occurs to him. No, it’s all about him, what he wants. He’s upset the Tudor Lady was destroyed because he wanted to continue observing her. He’s just as selfish as the other man – it just doesn’t manifest in the same way.

And so the ending. The obvious bad guy is going to get his well-deserved comeuppance, and that feels… right? Fair? But it’s also dark, because… we fear our main character is going to be changed by the experience, or perhaps sent down an even darker path than the one he was already on.

The trouble with revenge is that we tend to focus on the moment of revenge, which is short, and not what will come afterwards. Which… will almost certainly be long.

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And now to the subject of subscribing and support, PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re now formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly donation on Patreon will go farther than you would believe. Subscribers give us way more than just money, they give us stability, reliability, and dependability. Monthly donations give PseudoPod a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you don’t want breaches in our walls.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, and we understand, times are tight – then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media seems the least awful this week. By the way, we now have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. And if you like merch, Escape Artists also has a Voidmerch store with a huge range of fabulous hoodies, t-shirts and other goodies. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet. Check it out!

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Next week we have… The Vengeance Of Nitocris by Tennessee Williams
And finally, PseudoPod, and Morpheus, the Sandman, knows….

“The price of getting what you want… is getting the wants you wanted.”
See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.