The Basilisk by R Murray Gilchrist

By J W Waterhouse

In her excellent anthology I Shudder at your Touch, Michele Slung wrote: “This lush piece of nineteenth century prose has an almost operatic quality” as Marina and her lover set out to follow a path into the marsh where she will confront the basilisk, whose stare, during her youth, has turned her to stone so that she cannot return love. Now she will undo the spell, it is a simple matter of buying and selling; and she is prepared to pay any price.

Slung continues: “But at the same time that the language infuses our senses with its eerie vegetable torpor, it seems to hide beneath a nearly overpowering Gothic richness layers of even more suggestive meaning. There is little dialogue, but of what there is, note how many of the phrases vibrate with memorably weird, tantalizing eroticism.”

Deep in the forest, the two come to a great pool:

 “...almost a lake, that was covered with lavender scum, where stood an isolated grove of wasted elms. As Marina beheld this, her pace slackened, and she paused in momentary indecision; but at my first word of pleading that she should go no further, she went on, dragging her silken mud-bespattered skirts. We climbed the slippery shores of the island (for island it was, being raised much above the level of the marsh), and Marina led the way over lush grass to an open glade. A great marble tank lay there, supported on two thick pillars. Decayed boughs rested on the crust of the stagnancy within, and frogs, bloated and almost blue, rolled off at our approach. To the left stood the columns of a temple, a round, domed building, with a closed door of bronze. Wild vines had grown athwart the portal; rank, clinging herbs had sprung from the overteeming soil; astrological figures were chiselled on the broad stairs.”  

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by J W Waterhouse

This is like almost every pre-Raphaelite painting you have ever seen, suffocatingly intense and atmospheric. Marvellous. 

This story can also be found in the R Murray Gilchrist collection A Night On The Moor and Other Tales of Dread published by Wordsworth Editions (2006), and The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread from Ash-Tree Press (2003).