Classic Literature: The Crimson Weaver

R Murray Gilchrist was an English author who perhaps isn’t as well-known as he should have been. He lived between 1867 – 1917 and there is a definite weird fiction to some of his work. Certainly, Gothic in nature, often, there is a lightness to the writing and a romanticism that pre-dated, of course, but reminded me in parts of some of the work of Tanith Lee.

He wrote several vampire or vampiric tales and the Crimson Weaver was published in 1895 in the Yellow Book vol. VI and is a fascinating tale.

The crimson weaver sees a narrator and his Master travelling and coming across the Domain of the Crimson Weaver, a place accessed across a bridge (being a threshold) and of which they are warned by an old woman not to enter – claiming to have lost a loved one who entered the Domain, with mention of her being beautiful once and hinting that it is because of the Domain that she no longer is. The Master does not believe that such evil exists and they pass into the Domain.

The Master’s resolve starts to wane and he comes to believe there is an evil in the Domain but they continue, at the narrator’s behest, and find a palace. The owner, the Crimson Weaver emerges in a tattered dress and says, “For lack of love I perish. See my robe in tatters!” This ties her robe to her lifeforce. They manage to leave her but after they slept by a pool the Master had vanished.

The narrator returns to the palace and the Weaver is wearing what he takes to be a new dress, “new and lustrous as freshly drawn blood”. He demands to see his Master and she acquiesces for the price of a kiss. Within her loom, which she keeps in the palace, is the Master’s head and heart, the loom spinning its threads from the heart. “I wear men’s lives” she explains. To escape he must kiss her again but she takes his heart also, and though he lives a halflife away from the Domain she steadily steals his life as she weaves. This idea of threads is reminiscent of the Fates but also is an interesting form of vampirism and ties in vampiric clothing. It should be noted that he discovers, during their exchange, that beneath her robe her feet are that of a vulture. In the volume I Am Stone, editor Daniel Pietersen suggests that this equates her to the harpies from Greek myth and there is a Classicist element to the tale – for instance when the Master and narrator sleep after meeting the Weaver it is by the Pool of Diana.

The Crimson Weaver is a remarkable tale and well worth seeking out. My thanks to Leila for putting me on to it and Sarah for getting me the Gilchrist anthology that I read it in.