Dinner was at a lovely French restaurant off George IV Bridge, Easter baskets were fun, and then Monica and I got a wild hair and decided to round the evening off with Auld Reekie's Terror Tour.
The Southern Baptist Convention would not have been amused, but what else were we going to do? Homework?
At twenty to nine, as the first stars came out (days are getting quite long around here), we gathered with a bunch of tourists, including a particularly annoying group of teenaged American boys, for our tour. Our poor guide, who was fairly attractive in a speedwalk-or-I'll-cane-you sort of way, had to put up with the heckles from these boys all night, but managed to get us into the vaults without losing anyone.
As they tell it, a student living in the building decided to do a little renovation, so he bought a mallet and started swinging at the walls. He then accidentally opened the vaults, which had been closed for a century and a half, and the fun started. The vaults have only been partially excavated, but they're not a nice place to live - pitch black, with damp walls and no windows, and whenever it rains outside, it rains in the vaults 24 hours later. This also applies to the "Gardez loo" phenomenon. Lovely visual, that. The vaults were primarily inhabited by people who had nowhere else to go, since James VI/I made homelessness a crime punishable by death, and as our guide put it, life expectancy in there was pretty short: a month for a man, a week for a woman, and perhaps a few days for a child. Add to that the nasty Tron fire, and you've got a recipe for some fairly unhappy entities.
So then, for whatever reason, the local Wiccan coven decided to start meeting in the vaults in the sixties. They built a stone circle in one room, designed to protect the person within, and then they needed a mirror. Unfortunately, the head of the coven brought the mirror from his wardrobe, and a mirror connected to door without a lock is, essentially, an open portal to whatever wants to come in. Suffice it to say that bad stuff started happening - scratches and whatnot - and so the head changed the circle to be one of entrapment, keeping whatever was in the room inside the ring. Our guide told us this, especially about the e-mails they had received from tourists weeks later describing what had happened to them, and then several people ventured inside.
The Wiccans now meet further down the vaults, in a rather strange temple. Why they're still in there, I have no idea.
The most infamous vault is saved for last, and the rules are pretty clear: men stick to the left wall, women to the right. Apparently, the entity is misogynistic, and tends to attack women. Since it keeps to the left side of the room, however, the men get to take the brunt of whatever happens. Nothing happened to our group, but our guide filled us in on a few stories (after warning us that camera and phone memories tend to get wiped in that vault), especially the unpleasant one about the mother and very young daughter who had been on the tour. The mother had been letting the girl squeeze her finger, and suddenly the pressure increased on her hand to the point of pain. She called for light, the guide finally got the flashlight back on, and then she discovered that no one was holding her hand. In a panic, they looked around the room until they found the little girl curled up in the partially collapsed vault behind them. She said she had never let go of her mother's finger, and that she had been led down there. Good times, eh?
My personal low point of the tour was the Museum of Torture, which is a small, slightly warm room ringed with authentic torture implements. Now, I'm usually not that squeamish when it comes to these things - I wrote two papers on the Black Death, for crying out loud - but when our guide began to describe them and their effects in rapid, graphic detail, I started to feel a little overwhelmed. I made it through the iron masks, I made it through the nutcrackers (not the technical term, but that's pretty much what they do) without effect, but when he got to the bamboo splints, I started to lose it - all the color went from my face, I started to get dizzy, there was a ringing in my ears, and I began to see black spots. I realized I was going to pass out, so I crouched down on the floor and rubbed my temples until I was feeling less shaky. What can I say, fingernail torture really gets to me. I've never fainted in public, and I really didn't want to start last night.
The bracing pint of Strongbow in the pub at the end of the tour was most welcome, as was the declaration of Monica's and my exceptional beauty from the leader of the annoying teenaged boys. Yes, I know, my Davenport fleece just screams "sex appeal".
After that, there was some chocolate and a call to the parents, who seemed a little surprised at my choice of Easter recreation.
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