The wedding invitation, blood-red script on black, didn’t surprise. However, the time and place did pique my curiosity. Aza and Harri’s wedding was precisely timed, six minutes past eleven on Halloween in the Terminus Chapel at Rookwood cemetery.
Now Rookwood wasn’t just any cemetery, it was Sydney, and indeed Australia’s, largest, having been open for business for one hundred and fifty years, with a million burials under its belt.
As you would expect, I giggled at the Terminus Chapel name, which appealed as a very Annie-like play on words. In fact, the building had originally been part Sydney’s rail network, a dead-end perhaps; with funeral trains from the city running twice daily. Tickets cost one shilling, though corpses travelled free.
The funeral trains stopped many years ago and the building fell into disrepair. But, in one of the periodic bouts of privatisation, the Government sold the Chapel to a private philanthropist. I hadn’t realised, until the invitation arrived, that this was now, like Rookwood’s modern chapel, a wedding venue.
And, if an old mortuary chapel was available, it came as no surprise that my most goth friends had made that their venue of choice. For each of them was considered somewhat weird by our friends, but together they were much more than the sum of the parts, more like weirdness squared.
How I met Aza, in our first year at Sydney University, was lost in the mists of time. But, when I think back to my university days, Aza was always at my side. Kind of like a protective guardian angel, even letting herself be a scapegoat for some of the scrapes I got myself into.
In fact, she was more panicked than me and my boyfriend, Joseph, when I missed my period in my second-to-last year. Fortunately, that was a false alarm, but I was surprised by the intensity of Aza’s concern.
Her name, which was, I discovered from the invitation, short for Azazel, was perhaps the least unusual thing about her. While her skin was pale, everything else was dark. Black hair, dark eyes, black makeup, dark clothes. I have resorted to that old Henry Ford joke, ‘that Aza could have any colour she liked, so long as she only liked black.’
She also adored body art and bracelets, though her taste wasn’t everyone’s. A tattooed web and spider hung from an earlobe, clinging to her neck. And on the other side of her neck, two tattooed daggers pointed towards her heart.
I hadn’t seen all of her body as she hated the sun and never came to the beach with us. But she had told me about other tattoos and piercings, like the goat she had tattooed above her mons the day her clitoral hood was pierced.
Shortly after my pregnancy scare, Aza introduced me to Harri. And the moment I laid eyes on Harri, I knew she and Aza were peas in a pod. Not physically identical, as Harri was, at five-two, a full foot shorter than her girlfriend.
Rather they shared the pale skin and dark sartorial tastes. And an obsession for ancient and modern religious beliefs. Not that they ever went to church, rather they just were so intrigued by why we humans thought as we did.
I had, one evening over a pint of Guinness or three, learnt about Celtic myths from an Irish backpacker I waitressed with in my first year at university. Susie was fascinating, telling me why the Celts started what became Halloween, around 2000 years ago.
They enjoyed, the night before their new year started on the first of November, a festival called Samhain, to celebrate the harvest and the start of winter. Traditionally, Samhain was when ghosts made an appearance, and the Celts, dressed in masks, with bonfires lit, put out food and other offerings for their supernatural visitors.
Susie struggled with Halloween’s timing in Australia, thinking spring better suited Beltane, the Celtic festival honouring life. At the end of October, in the peak of spring, life is bursting with potential fertility which, Susie argued, would be better celebrated than the northern autumn.
I didn’t learn any more about Celtic myths that day as, having mentioned bursting with fertility, Susie remembered she was fair bursting too. So, after getting another Guinness for us, she changed tack and flirted her way into my knickers.
Susie’s knowledge of myths was, however, trivial compared to Aza and Harri's. When telling me about different cultures’ creation myths, it felt as if they had been there. And Harri, whose name, the invitation informed me, was short for Harut, also liked to demonstrate magic tricks that had originated in those older cultures.
The two of them had been wonderful on what was the saddest day of my life. The day before I had told them how excited I was as I expected Joseph to propose on my birthday, the following Saturday. And I was so going to accept.
But that morning Joseph just did not wake up. I was devastated then, and always will be, drawing no comfort from the coroner’s report which termed his death inexplicable. Fortunately, Aza, Harri and a handful of others were there for me and kept me from being totally overwhelmed by grief.
Remembering that they had been there for me when I most needed it, made me so full of anticipation for their nuptials as a taxi drove me into Rookwood, past rows and rows of tombstones, dropping me outside the Terminus Chapel shortly before eleven on Halloween. Dressed in white, as requested; as the brides, as was traditional for them, had told me they would be in black.
Of course, had I googled the names Azazel and Harut and learnt their origin, I would have felt more foreboding. But not googling meant nothing clouded my mind that sunny spring day, apart, that is, from the really odd feeling of fragility and impermanence you have when driving into the resting place of a million souls.
The imposing old Chapel was, of course, built with Sydney’s golden sandstone, though that had naturally darkened over time. The only hint of colour now on the outside was the ivy that ran up the left-hand wall of the chapel alongside the remodelled entrance.
The Chapel was bigger than I had expected, but, having once accommodated the regular mortuary trains, it needed to be wider than the average church.
I was greeted at the door by Lucy, a tall, cadaverous, ascetic looking woman. Her eyes ran over me, hawk-like, as she took my hand in her clammy ones, introducing herself as the celebrant for my friends’ wedding. I was used to being checked out, what girl isn’t, but I couldn’t put my finger on why her gaze was so intense. It was as if she knew of me and was checking that I was as she was expecting. That made me shiver apprehensively.
With a hand on my back, she guided me into the chapel past a large statue of the Archangel Michael, the angel of death. That statue would have been a comforting sight for mourners in the past, who would have known that God had entrusted Michael with carrying the deceased’s soul to heaven. I couldn’t help but notice Lucy avert her eyes, weirdly discomforted by the marble gaze of God’s most powerful angelic force.
Stepping inside the church chilled and surprised me. My taste is usually more Rocky Horror than Edgar Allan Poe, so another shiver ran through me as I seemingly stepped back in time into his gothic world. One even less colourful than outside, and darker too given the small number of windows.
The left-hand side of the church was traditional, a high altar with steps underneath it leading down, presumably, to a crypt. Behind the altar, a stained-glass window portrayed Judgement Day, though Hell did have a prominence I didn’t remember from visiting Europe’s great cathedrals. In front of the altar were pews for a good-sized congregation, certainly more than the forty wedding invitees.
But what surprised me, well stunned to be honest, was that the right-hand side of the chapel was the final resting place of restored hearse carriages from Sydney’s original mortuary trains. Concreted into place, the carriages had chairs and tables, which I hoped weren’t the original tables on which the deceased took their final journey, set for dining.
And bizarrely two women, flitting around like bats, were dressed in colourful Studio Neon t-shirts, one of Sydney’s best catering companies, getting the former hearse carriages ready for luncheon service. Their t-shirts and the stained-glass window were, truth be told, the only colour inside the chapel.
Most of the guests seemed to have arrived before me, and eyes turned to stare. I immediately felt self-conscious, being the only one dressed in white. The few men, older and clearly relatives of the brides, were in grey or black. And the women were in dark colours, no one in black, though navy and grey were popular choices.
I was actually a little irritated with the brides. While okay with agreeing to what they wanted, namely me wearing a white dress, I hated standing out like a sore thumb with that decision.
As Lucy turned back to greet other arrivals, my friend Buer came over and hugged me. Taking me in hand, she led me towards the front and we sat together, chatting easily as we always did.
Like Aza, I couldn’t remember how I met Buer at university, but however our paths crossed, we soon hit it off. I had done philosophy as an elective as part of my nursing course as I adored debating philosophy, logic and ethics; as did she. Buer was the only one at Aza and Harri’s wedding who I knew really well, certainly being counted amongst my closest friends.
You know what it is like at university; after a few drinks and weed, you debate the night away. And Buer and I had more than our share of intoxicated conversations about the meaning of life. She too had been special for me after Joseph died, making sure I wasn’t alone and, as a fellow member of the bisexual club, helping me deal with lust; yet instinctively understanding that I was in no way ready to think about commitment.
In fact, she was very adventurous and egalitarian in the bedroom, treating every orifice equally. I learnt more about kinks, shall we say, from her than I had from Joseph. Buer had converted me into a lover of anal and indeed had got me deep throating all manner of toys.
Maybe it was the presence of the mortuary carriages, but, as the organist struck up the ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Wagner's opera Lohengrin, it sounded to me like a dirge presaging that darkness was afoot. Which did seem ungracious on the brides’ happy day, especially as they smiled at me as they walked past, and ended up in front of Lucy and the altar.
As Lucy intoned her opening remarks, she mentioned, God knows why, that this was the six hundredth and sixty-sixth minute of Halloween. As the words left her mouth, overhead, thunder clapped super loud, and the dimly lit chapel darkened further.
We Sydneysiders are used to spring storms rising up in the Blue Mountains and scurrying, with a tight trail across the city, towards the sea. But that was usually in the afternoon and you could feel the storm in the air as it built. This one seemed to have emerged out of a cloudless spring morning and was, oddly, hanging around Rookwood rather than scampering for the sea.
And when a lightning bolt hit the steeple, I was all very thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightened. My fear was then accentuated by a loud noise from the crypt, which caused my heart to race and my palms to become sweaty.
Fortunately, Buer’s soft hand reached out to mine, and, when I looked at her, alarmed, she smirked and whispered, “Does this mean the Gods don’t like gay marriage?”
I couldn’t help but laugh, as I knew we both understood that love was love and opposing marriage because of the happy couple’s gender was just weird.
As only she could now that I had lost Joseph, Buer’s words and touch quietened my racing heart, enabling me to focus on the service. Especially enjoying, in the gloaming of the storm, when Lucy pronounced Aza and Harri wife and wife. And, after the organist had, in a remarkable piece of musicianship, played Mendelssohn's ‘Wedding March’ as a dirge, we settled into the mortuary train carriages for a spot of lunch.
The carriages were decorated with Halloween clichés; spiders, cobwebs, the odd broomstick and fake ghost. Hollowed out pumpkins glowed with candlelight; all, as Susie had told me, drawn from the traditional Celtic way of marking the passage into the darker half of the year.
While the decorations were cute and not at all frightening, I did remember something darker from our conversation. Susie had mentioned that this was a liminal time when the boundary between us and the otherworld thinned, meaning spirits found entry to our world easier and liked to be more active.
Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but joke to Buer that as spirits and ghosts had a liking for Halloween, perhaps it was a busload of them turning up in the crypt that caused the loud noise down there during the service.
Talk about awkward; those who heard my words, turned and stared as if I had been totally inappropriate.
“The Aos Sí are to be both respected and feared,” Lucy said, from a few seats away, her intensity not matched by her understandability.
“Do you mean the devil?” I asked, “But fire at Halloween keeps the devil away.”
Following many sharp intakes of breath, the conversation halted, redefining the meaning of pregnant pause.
“No, not just the devil,” Lucy finally replied, “While some think fire is the devil's natural home, fire is allegedly said to protect humans from a broader range of beings.”
“Allegedly?”
“It is a myth, Annie. The Devil and the Devil’s Henchmen will enter the world at the time of their choosing. Be aware that Halloween is a liminal time, so today makes sense, but nothing, and certainly not fire, will stop them when they choose to call.”
For some reason, Lucy’s remarks gave me goosebumps, and not the pleasant kind. Her words seemed to suck the warmth from the room.
Buer, noticing me shiver, quickly changed the subject. And, credit to the caterers, we ate a particularly good meal while listening to fine congratulatory speeches; after which the guests started slipping away.
I was in no hurry to leave as I was enjoying chatting to Buer and sipping my champagne; happily gossiping, in my own little world, until I realised that only the brides, Buer and Lucy remained in the mortuary carriage with me.
The brides would have none of my suggestion about leaving, saying they had a treat planned. And from somewhere a bottle of green liqueur was produced and five glasses lined up.