The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

November fourth, 1841

I was alone. Yet, I was not alone. I had my thoughts.

I had them like the inside of a well has echoes, or a seaside cavern has the constant intrusion of the waves, which wash around inside it, lapping wetly and making it feel hollow. It was something that lurked on the periphery of my dream-vision. It hovered like a half-remembered taste, on the tip of my tongue. However, it was not because it eluded me that I could not know its form. I had turned a blind eye to it, as men often look away from Death, and so he is invisible to them.

Like an elephant in a room that I always inhabited, it was something which I could not admit to myself. Further, the effort of not focusing on it was an agony that made each second crawl. The screaming of my mental nerves could only be eclipsed by a greater danger, or a more immediate pain.

That was what I was searching for, somehow.

I thought about the icy way the rain bit at my cheeks, pricking up an angry flush beneath the blotchy, frozen patches on my skin. I thought about how much colder it became as it hurtled towards the Earth. Each droplet was a tiny comet that left a trail behind it, so that the cumulative tails streaked the sky.

The rain was like a hail of arrows. Up here in the arctic, against the aurora, I could trace the passage of every speeding drop as easily as if it had a solid shaft. As they arced through the sky to strike me, I saw them fall in slow motion. I was a doomed infantryman who stood beneath the fire, my life flashing before my eyes.

I thought about how the soft droplets often became hailstones in the course of their descent. I was like those hailstones, in a way. My progress through life had cooled and hardened me, too. I watched the rain plummet into the grim, black surface of the water, seeking the stillness and thoughtlessness that would be their prize if they joined the many floating icebergs, or hoping otherwise for liquid relief from their sins.

To melt like tears into the salty sea! I thought. To drown and join and be no more... How wonderful that would be!

As I watched the raindrops' suicides, I lastly thought about how much colder it must be in the frigid ocean; colder even than I was on deck. There, I shivered in my oilskin, my hat only serving to collect the downpour in a gutter so that it trickled directly into my eyes. I thought about how cold it must be at the bottom of the sea. Then, I wondered whether that question had ever occurred to anyone but me.

Certainly, if it had, it had not occurred here. I had no doubt that I was the only person to ever lay eyes on the weird, white monoliths that glided across these inky depths. Strangely sculpted, gleaming ghostly blue and glittering like mounds of teeth, they were far too alien to be a part of the collective human consciousness. Only I could see them, I knew, because in that place and at that time, only I was going mad.

I was the sole passenger on my ship, which was an icebreaker of modern, American invention. Its long hull was of sturdy iron, and two chimneys spewed charcoal clouds into the sky. It was a small barge to be attempting such a perilous passage. Indeed, from a distance, it might have been an iron filing drifting in a sea of blotchy black and glacial white.

Saltwater sloshed about the deck, where there was nobody on duty to mop it up. In the cabin room, I also knew, I would find no captain, nor any officers. I had no desire to know how my barge was propelled.

The churning of the water beneath the paddles and the lion-like purring of the steam engine were the only sounds to be heard. The boat crept slowly through the frozen waste. It seemed deliberately cautious, as though it feared the icebergs were monsters that might wake and devour it. Truthfully, its fear was justified. Even I knew that each jagged tip belonged to a submerged leviathan.

Just as the icebergs slumbered, so too was the water itself a trap. It glistened like the oiled muscles of a strongman, rippling with latent power. On a whim, it might have tossed my tiny craft aside, so that its paralysing cold could claim me.

It was such a real possibility that I could not bear to think about it. I merely huddled as the icebergs loomed, burying myself inside my coat. I wrapped my hands inside my sleeves, and tucked my sleeves inside each other. My sailor's hat pulled low over my eyes, I fancied myself a penguin, but of course, there were no penguins here. I was on entirely the wrong side of the globe.

The scattered chunks gradually melted together, and the open sea gave way to a thin shelf of ice. The ship worked at this like a mole attacking a pile of earth. First it head-butted the ice, driving an angry crack along its pristine surface. Then, it forced itself through the opening thus created, tearing the ice asunder. Continuing in this fashion, my craft and I progressed inland, our paddles squealing and our hull grating dangerously.

Several times I thought I saw sparks, before I glimpsed something more worthy of my attention. Up ahead, a black shape was cast in relief against its stark surroundings. I could discern a mast, and what might have been three sets of triangular sails, but no chimney stacks.

Evidently, it was a ship, and yet, there was something ominous about its presence here. It appeared to be an older variety of vessel, but while my own, which was a pioneer, struggled to make pace with spluttering engines, it had lodged itself a further mile inland. There, it had become stuck.

When my craft jarred to a halt, and its engines died out, I did not wait for the ice to close again behind it. Using my numb hands to vault over the side, I disembarked, feeling the slippery surface crunch unpleasantly under my weight. Praying that I did not fall through, I marched towards the masted ship, trying desperately not to think of a landscape made from eggshells.

I knew that whatever lay up ahead was my destination. In this dream, I was determined to reach it. There were no hunters or explorers to delay me here. Nobody could stop me from finding the one thing I was certain could relieve me of my burdensome past. I had convinced myself that only this place could drown my sorrows. It was as though the whole ocean was a potent, alcoholic drink, and all the icebergs were but cubes floating in it. It seemed to present itself as a solution, being all the more delicious and intoxicating for its immediacy.

With nothing but the uneven sound of my trudging to keep me company, I eventually arrived at my prize. It was much bigger than I had expected- a barque one hundred feet long, perhaps, with its sails frozen taut like drums for the rain to beat against. Its rigging was rimed with frost. Icicles hung from its longest ropes, clanging like chimes in the wind. Each tip that threatened to fall was as sharp as a dagger.

I ran gloved fingers along the wood of the hull. It was lacquered and sturdily bolted, but it should not have withstood the ice long enough to run aground. How had it come to be here with those rigid sails, and without a single engine?

Experimentally, I walked the girth of its bulk, and found the answer to my question. A gaping hole had been torn in its other side, and it was onto this cavity that it leaned. Entire boards three inches thick had been splintered like matchsticks. Whatever lay inside the opening was obscured by a bank of accumulated snow, but I could hazard a guess at what had caused the fatal wound. Doubtless, the ship had been punctured by one of the many white teeth in the mouth of the Arctic Circle. The parts that had made it this far were only a gutted carcass.

As I ran my hands over the ragged opening, I could not help but feel a little sad. It was as though this ship had been a friend of mine. There was something familiar about the feel of its timber, as though it had once been touched wood, or a shelter to me. It felt like a ship that had done me service.

I don't know what triggered the memory. I staggered forward with a yelp to avoid tumbling into the second hole- the one I had discovered in my mind. There was a chasm there to match the one the iceberg had ripped. I had stepped unwittingly onto an eggshell part of my skull, and cracked through to the icy pool that lay beneath it. I shivered and shook, convulsing with fear. Nothing I encountered in my waking life or dreams, I knew, could rival the pitted traps in my subconscious.

Gingerly, I peered into the hole in the ship as I peered over the edge of the chasm I had just unearthed. What could possibly be in there? What other horrors might lie in store for me? I trembled, feeling like a man who had narrowly avoided death.

This ship was familiar. It had done me service.

This was the vessel that had carried me to England from America. Or at least, it had carried me most of the way that far. Before it could come to rest in safe harbour, a fierce storm had picked up and decided that it should rest elsewhere. I had been woken from my bunk by a savage jolt, like the one I felt when my icebreaker was grounded. Books and instruments -a small brass telescope, a map, a compass, and, strangely, a locket, among them- had been thrown from their shelf onto my bedspread. Then, the whole room had turned on its head.

My cabin flooded, and I was lucky to be flushed out. I soon found myself among the flotsam in the open ocean, having avoided being crushed by the stricken behemoth as it rolled into the water, finally becoming snagged, keel up, between the spear-like protrusions of Vile Reef. Screams and floundering splashes filled my ears in equal parts. The surface of the deck was now too far beneath the water's foaming surface. Anyone inside the hull was hopelessly trapped.

I wasn't sure whether it was fear, panic or hypothermia that claimed me as I clung to the wreckage, awaiting rescue. I only felt the cruel waves lapping over and about me, and dunking me into the swirling, silt-strewn depths, until it must have been something else which lapped at me; another tide against which I fought.

The void claimed my other recollections. In the next scene I can remember, I was strewn up on the shore, unable to decide whether my heart, my exhausted lungs, or my throat, which was raw from retching seawater, hurt more. I felt as though I had been simultaneously battered, stabbed and suffocated. There was nothing left inside my chest but lead. My first, piercing thought when I found myself in unfamiliar surroundings served to expound the pain in my chest, so that it rose above the others in that contest.

A mile from the beach, I could see the silhouette of my ship still impaled on the rocks. My mother and father were not beside me on the wet sand, where a few other survivors had been dragged. Therefore, I could only conclude that they were still in the sea...

With the last of my strength, I fought off the rescuers who were bandaging my broken ribs. Hatred for them seared its way through my body, overcoming the pain of my injuries.

They had hauled me away from the wreckage! In doing so, they had doomed my family, who were now too far away for me to save.

My struggling was ineffective, and I had been pushed back onto the ground. As though that moment was the eye in a cyclone, I can remember nothing more until I was brought first to the village, then to the city, where the parts of my family's wealth that were not sunken had been transferred to an English bank. For a while, I lived in a modest hotel. Shortly thereafter, I began my correspondence with you, which I need not describe.

In my dream, I sifted through these freshly exhumed memories. I turned them over and over, stirring them until they amassed into a tsunami. Then I fell, sobbing and sputtering, into the snow. Facing the ground on hands and knees, I saw how the ice had cemented itself around the wrecked ship, though I was no longer capable of having any opinion on it. I had thought and felt to capacity. Now, I merely stared.

I stared into the polished circle between my hands, where my collapse had wiped the snow away like grime from a mirror. The ice was packed thick enough to support the weight of the frozen hull, and it was opaque. Nonetheless, I could distinguish shapes within it, warped strangely by its prismatic lens, like objects floating in a fishbowl.

With a start, I jerked away when I saw that they were bodies, but almost instantaneously, I was pulled back. There was a face I recognised, suspended closest to the surface. With a mane of golden hair still tossed about her head, and her eyes -the same eyes as mine- wide open, she had been buried where not even my subconscious could reach her.

I beat feebly at her prison, pounding the hard, cold and impenetrable surface until my fists were numb. Now that I knew it again, I pleaded and whispered and screamed her name.

She was my sister.