The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

Once upon a time, there was a young man. He was hailed as a prodigy; one of the most prolific writers of his generation. There was no denying that he was brilliant.

He was so brilliant, perhaps, because he was so broken. He had a mind like a diamond, but the thing people often forget about diamonds is that they are not born perfect by the standards of diamond-wearers, nor are they chiseled to perfection. To create a gem, a natural diamond is chipped away. In the process of becoming a prism for bending light, it is necessarily broken.

The young man in our story was like a diamond in many ways. He was striking, and his talent was rare, but most importantly, he too was a means of refraction. He was both a lens for focusing meaning, compressing it into a narrow beam of ink that looped and twirled upon parchment, and a device for splitting the light of the world into its many parts. Through his stringent analysis of his surroundings, he extracted a universal spectrum; distilling clarity, the better to compress it again into his metaphors. Each point of observation he made was diamond-sharp, for each had the density of a diamond behind it.

The pressures which created the young man were many. As a boy, he had lived by the sea, on a shore opposite the one he would inhabit as an adult. For many years, books and things uncovered by poking in the many cavities along the cliffs had been his only companions. He lived in other worlds- worlds either given to him, or devised as gifts of nature to his imagination.

Then his sister, Virginia McArbre, had been born. A precocious child, she had been the one thing in the world he dearly loved, but she had been sickly. With skin the colour of marble and hair like finest corn silk, she was an insubstantial thing; never more than a mere ghost. Her presence in the world was fleeting. Tuberculosis had struck her down at age eight.

When she died, she had been indistinguishable from a doll. The only roses that ever touched her cheeks, besides the ones at her funeral, had been the perfect rings of illness.

From that day, the young man's family had been sundered, its parts growing cool and distant like fragments of a frozen shelf becoming icebergs. They had drifted aimlessly, now that their anchor in the living world was gone. The young man's father, Captain Abe McAbre, had voyaged long in search of something that would always elude him.

As a Navy officer, he had encountered foreign lands, washing up in Japan, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, but, far though he journeyed, he never ran aground. While Abe McAbre pined for Heaven, he found only exotic purgatories, and not escape from this earth. In his heart and on his ship, in place of a proper anchor, he carried a coal from the blackest pit of Hell.

Left at home after his sister's death, the young man also sought communion with her. He did this through the stories he wrote, and his obsession with morbid and macabre things. With only a leather notebook in his pocket, he would trek for days at a time over the jagged cliffs with their saltbush tussocks, the wind-sculpted mounds of miniature deserts, the salt-kissed rocks and driftwood-scattered beaches- across all the bleak, bleached places the two had played when the young man's sister had been alive.

Sometimes, he would plant her tiny gardens. These, he made from rocks, dead things, and plucked sea grasses that would soon also die. Most importantly, however, he would think. He would think, and he would address his thoughts to Virginia.

Gradually, the young man grew thin from exercise. Behind the hollows which sank under his eyes, drawn back by the gravity of a swelling mind, he honed himself. On bone-white beaches and coral graveyards, where fragments of shells become knives, he grew sharp.

One spring, when the cool breeze off the ocean was ghosts' breath billowing the lacy curtains, the family had seen fit to leave their seaside home. The same wind had filled their sails as they fled, dejectedly, from the New World. There was no hope in their hearts for their return to England. They knew that for the rest of their lives they would be driven to all corners of the earth. Without any chance of a new beginning, they only sought postponement of an inevitable end.

It might have been a mercy, therefore, when the tempest storm tossed the family's fragile vessel onto the rocks of Vile Reef. Their deaths were violent, but they were final.

All except for one.

Alone among the survivors of the shipwreck, the young man neither lived nor died that day. With his mother, father and sister all in graves, he was rent further from his own heart. Its beating, he found, could no longer affect him. He had no warm courage be stabbed in, nor to seize up with sickness, nor to pine away with lust.

The young man became a container for emptiness. He sought union only with other empty things. Suicide was not for him, for death, he knew, was not a true oblivion. It was not agony enough to sympathise with a plight such as his.

He allowed himself to be dragged ashore from the wreckage, feigning life as he spluttered. He permitted his saviours to lead him into the town, where they furnished him with a dry room, dry clothes, and dry curtains that blew cryptically in a breeze that had chased him across oceans. At a dry desk with dry paper he wet his quill, and started a correspondence with the Lord of that township. In Lord Edmund Vile, he found another sundered soul persisting in an imitation of life.

The Viscount's family, he learned, had also perished, only of disease. His sister and brother, like his young correspondent's own sibling, had died in childhood and adolescence respectively. He was the last surviving member of his household, and kept an estate alone in his own age, having but a handful of servants.

His rattling about it on his cane, he said, was ineffective compared with the cold draughts that rattled the window frames, and the leafless trees that banged and scraped against the glass. The dust that gathered on his clothes was nothing compared to the coating that lay in the halls and over the furniture, stifling the humble sounds of the living so that the only noises left were those of abandoned places- the creaking of protesting doors, the banging of unattended shutters, the scrabbling of rats, the dripping of taps and the pendulous ticking of clocks.

Lord Edmund Vile had been lonely for too long, he explained in his letters. His house was his ancestors' mausoleum, and he himself felt condemned to a tomb before he had yet died. His autumnal years were chilly ones, with winter always looming.

The Viscount had want of company in every sense of the word. That much was plain to the young man, with his sharpened mind.

Together, the two struck a bargain. The young man would come to live in the Manor, and try as best he could to infuse it with his youth and life. The former, he thought privately, had long since faded away. The latter he was aware must exist on a technical level, like his soul, though, try as he might, he could detect no sign of either. In return, Lord Vile would cater to his every need, encourage the young man's considerable writing talents, and eventually complete the deed that would make his guest his heir.

There was but one further clause of their arrangement- the young man, whilst ever he resided at Whirlpool Manor, was bound to tithe one story per day.

It had seemed an agreeable situation. The Manor was lavish, if ill-kept. Lord Vile, however, was not as the young man had pictured him. Nor was he as his miniature, sent in a silver locket, had made him appear. He was more robust than frail, though he leaned on a cane from time to time. This cane was curiously embellished, and topped with an unrecognisable gem close in colour to a black pearl, though far larger.

The Viscount's hair was still grey, though refined rather than wispy, like finely-spun iron. His complexion was also not pasty. His face and hands were the same healthy colour as a hard-boiled egg still in its shell, and he was just as difficult to crack.

Though it took the young man days to realise it, the deal they had struck was not an honest one. The Viscount and the Manor held their secrets as tightly as an oyster, and would not be prised open. Nothing was earnest. Nothing was shared. The place was indeed a whirlpool of havoc into which the hapless youth had been plunged.

Silently, therefore, and with the best composure available to him, he packed his single suitcase. From an inherited desk, he collected loose leaves of paper shed in the autumn of his faith in other men. Like a soldier turning mercenary, he armed himself with quills and pens. Experimentally, he pricked his finger on a quill tip, thus sealing this account with a drop of his own blood.

Inside his mind, the world grew clearer.