The White Doe and the Spider Web: How a Childhood Memory Becomes Fiction

When I was a child, my family visited relatives in Germany, and one day we hiked up toward the St. Sebastian chapel near Holzheim. I can’t remember much about the whole trip, except walking with candlelit paper lanterns during a local festival, probably the Haft- und Hokafescht near Kirchheim unter Teck, held each year on the last weekend in June. My memory provides only glimpses of those experiences, like the vague recollection of a nightmare I had one night, and my terror of my aunt and uncle’s dog, a Chow who seemed, to us children, like a household demon. My memory kept the bright things, the frightened things, the sudden things, the sensual fragments that lodged in the body before the mind knew what to do with them. I remember the path, the woods, and the hill. I remember the particular feeling of being far from home but close to an older, storied version of home, the nostalgic Germany of folk tales, dialect, and song. A Germany that never really existed except in my fevered imagination. But most of all, I remember the deer.

The day was overcast, but beginning to clear. Patches of sunlight would fleetingly appear, then the path would fade into gloom. We saw them on the hike up the hill in the shadows of the woods. I can’t remember how many, moving through the trees with that peculiar furtive, spectral grace deer have, more like apparitions than flesh and blood creatures. A child doesn’t need folk tales to tell him what he already knows. The deer belonged to the woods and the silence around the chapel. Possessed of an animal immanence, they seemed that day to have visited me, or they’d come to greet me.

As we approached St. Sebastian’s, the clouds suddenly broke, and the chapel became radiant. In my mind, even the deer paused, startled by the sudden illumination. That’s the part I’ve never forgotten. The building suddenly seemed preternaturally beautiful, not just an old chapel on a hill. I was young enough to run unabashedly toward the numinous. I ran toward it, full of excitement and reverence and childish impatience, and ran straight into a spider web.

A spider web, invisible until my body found it, stretched across the way. But to me as a child, the shock was immediate. The terrible intimacy of those threads sticking to my skin. I remember the flailing and the disgust of the invisible made tactile. One second, I was running toward light; the next, I had been stopped dead by a veil I hadn’t seen. It felt like a betrayal, beauty and promise turned to terror.

Moira, the protagonist in my unpublished novel In Her Blood the River Flows, has a similar experience.

Beyond the black stone shrine, the ground rose into a rough enclosed circle of rocks and broken walls, shadowed by the trees overhead. The stream seemed to originate from somewhere within the ring, then flow outward past the shrine. A small child-sized arch opened in the wall, black just inside, and beyond it, Moira saw a sudden flash of white, no more than a twinkle, moving between stones and ferns. Before Ms. Reissmann could stop her, Moira tore her hand free and ran.

Just then, the cloud passed, and a beam of bright sunlight hit the arch, enveloping it in a blaze of white light. Dazzled by the sudden glare, Moira ducked through the small arch heedless of the brambles and the slippery ground, and passed face-first into a spider web stretched across the opening. It clung to her cheek, brow, and lips in sticky, horrible strands. She cried out and tore at it with both hands, half-blind with disgust and panic, then stumbled into the enclosure. The broken walls opened around her, stones mottled with moss, the ground uneven with roots and debris, and in that pocket of dim green light, she saw it.

The white doe stood among the ruins regarding her serenely. It was so pale it seemed unreal, as though the woods had molded a lambent creature from mist, milk, and moonlight. For a brief suspended instant, Moira didn’t think of it as an animal at all. She thought, in the unformed but absolute way a child thinks, that this was what remained when all the statues had been taken away. She was the last holy figure still willing to appear.

Years later, as I began writing fiction dealing with family histories, haunted houses, visionary experience, and the uncanny presence of inherited places, that childhood memory returned. Invention allowed the memory to transform. The deer becomes charged with possibility. The chapel becomes a crumbling grotto in the Finger Lakes region. The spider web becomes a warning, a sign that the invisible world isn’t an abstraction. It touches, it catches, it can stop a child in mid-flight.

One of the great freedoms in fiction is that it doesn’t have to preserve memory in amber. It allows memory to ferment. Think yeast, alive but dormant. Think of the rising bread I saw and smelled for the first time that trip in the communal Backhaus near my grandmother’s house. Fiction allows an ordinary childhood experience to disclose the mythic pattern hidden inside it. A real deer becomes a white doe. A real chapel becomes a visionary ruin. A real spider web becomes the veil between the ordinary world and the charged world beneath it. In fiction, our world becomes enchanted again, because we have allowed the dream-life of memory to speak.

In the fictional version, the white doe isn’t just an animal. She is an invitation and a disturbance. She belongs to the long tradition of fairy-tale creatures who lead human beings away from the known path and into the forest of ordeal. Such animals are never safe. They appear at the edge of perception and ask, are you ready? In my memory, the deer only moved through the landscape with their animal grace, but the child who saw them felt them as uncanny apparitions. That strangeness, given time, became a story.

The spider web mattered as much, if not more. Without the web, the memory would have faded, lovely, but incomplete. The web gave the scene its wound. It introduced revulsion, fear, and that sense of spiritual betrayal. It made the approach to beauty dangerous, or at least fraught. In the blunt language of sensation, I learned that the path toward the sacred may be crossed by invisible horrors.

That idea followed me into much of my writing. I’m drawn to thresholds, like attic doors and chapels, hidden grottos, and basement anchorholds, ruins, forest paths, and old lake houses that remember what their inhabitants cannot bear to know. I’m drawn to a character who desperately seeks revelation but receives only cryptic contact. The face of a doll under the ice. A white doe in the mist at the tree line. The sticky web against the face. The dream of stillborn dead twins. The body understands first, and the mind arrives afterward, carrying its poor little lantern.

There is something merciful in that, though it might seem pitiless. Childhood gives us so many small terrors, ecstasies, triumphs, and failures we can’t understand or forget. Later, as artists, we might return to them to resolve or complete the scenes we play out in our minds.

They became interior shrines, or knots, or doors.

I’ve since learned St. Sebastian's was a plague chapel built in 1716 after the devastating plague of 1712 – 1714 tore through southern Germany. Inside, the choir fresco shows Holzheim under the protection of Saint Sebastian, while the inscribed cartouches preserve the language of petition: spare us, shield us, stand between us and what strikes unseen. Sebastian, pierced by arrows, became one of the great saints invoked against plague, partly because arrows had long symbolized affliction arriving invisibly, suddenly, from the air. That seems apt. The morning at St. Sebastian’s remains vivid because the day contained a pattern I would spend years trying to understand. A child sees magic in the woods and runs toward it. An invisible web catches him. Wonder becomes fright. Beauty becomes terror. The world says yes, come closer, and then, almost in the same breath, says: not so quickly. Only later did I understand that something in the child had been pierced by the invisible.

That’s one of the ways fiction can begin. Memory, steeped in time and experience, becomes luminous and uncanny. Fiction often arises from some small, unburied thing: a hill in Germany, a chapel suddenly bright in the sun, several deer moving through the trees, a child running toward beauty, and the invisible web stretched across the way.