The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

It started with a jack-o-lantern smile- the kind that splits a skull from ear to ear. While it was a wide grin, it rang hollow, for there was nothing inside it but fire and malice.

Before he could glimpse it in any of the pumpkins, the smile was manifest in the landscape. It was the devious, lop-sided curve of the sickle moon, orange like a scythe at harvest time. It was in the sunset glow over the distant mountains, where the clouds were coals and embers erupting from silhouette volcanoes. It was the twinkling in the vast, starlit vault, and the mischievous rustling of dry leaves.

As he stepped forward, a train of these leaves scuffed his feet. He kicked them away, and moved on. The suitcase that had been heavy in his arms had mysteriously vanished.

Edgar didn't notice.

The cobbled path grew narrow, so that it was barely wide enough to permit the young man on his own. It became thin and winding, and the canopy of twigs around it pressed in thicker and lower. The trail was a viper's tongue, hissing through the undergrowth as it snaked from daylight into the blackness of a barely open mouth; for the forest also smiled.

Then, as though the boy had been swallowed by the beast whose tongue was the trail and whose winking eye was the moon, the path vanished. Or at least, the cobblestones vanished, though the way through the belly of the beast was clearly marked. Appearing at intervals, tucked amongst roots and beside tree trunks like toadstools, were buttery, yellow candles. They had no holders, but were cupped by curled leaves that partially protected them from the breeze, so that their flicker about the skeletal canopy was like firelight.

The young man expected to hear the crackling of a real blaze when they inevitably set something alight. Thus, the impossible silence was even more disturbing than the dangerous roaring of flames.

The breeze itself was as warm and stale as the breath inside a living animal. The arching branches, or so Edgar imagined, were bones inside a ribcage. The forest ceiling opened up, creating a kind of cavern, so he now moved through a tunnel instead of ducking under claws and teeth.

As the naked forest digested him, so too did he digest it, in all its chaos and autumnal splendour. The candles grew larger as he followed them along, progressing from tiny fireflies and mushroom lights to great, heaping lumps of wax that dripped like honeycombs. Their leaf containers were replaced first by stumps and keyholes cut into tree trunks, then by actual pumpkins, like the ones the Irish and Scottish immigrants had displayed in mid-Autumn at home in America.

Samhain, All Hallow's Eve, Halloween...

Those were the words they had used; the names for the pagan festival or festivals peculiar to the season.

Edgar knew, because he had spied on them. Sneaking away from his mother's mindful watch in his boyhood, and then later from her incautious distraction, he had been voyeur at the dances, and seen the pumpkin-carved decorations with their expressions of sadistic glee. He had gazed starry-eyed at the monolithic bonfires, and felt their flames leap in his irises, smouldering in his breast and finding kindling in his soul.

Edgar knew the rituals were a curious mixture of heathen and Christian sacrifice. He knew their complex connection with the world of the dead, even if he only knew it as an outsider. He held his tongue at town meetings, and in church. There, the pastor, who looked upon his wanderlust with scorn, calling him socially withdrawn and a lost boy, had explained the damnation of the immigrants.

He had held his tongue as the pastor spoke of Hell's licking flames, which the God-fearing need never feel. All the while, he had felt flame tongues like the ones from the bonfires licking at the inside of his ribcage, and driving the boiled blood into his temples.

By the time he was a young teenager, and Virginia already beneath a wreath of lilies, Edgar feared nothing, least of all God. He knew the flames for what they were -bright amber sprites, curious and magical. He felt himself drawn to them, so that the churchgoers condemned him as a stray. They called him a midnight cat and a Devil's familiar, and accused him of being lured into the sizzling pits of Beelzebub's domain.

Edgar had been shunned, in those days.

Edgar had been shunned always.

Now, he followed the trail of candles without fear, nurturing hope like a light to maintain an open mind. The silence, he realised, was not impossible after all. It was merely ethereal. It was a cathedral silence. Likewise, the boughs that arched around him were becoming cathedral branches with fine latticework between them. Edgar marveled at their exquisite architecture, determined to have his breath stolen away.

This, he told himself, was the silence that filled the gaps in requiems. It was the silence of reverie- the silence of graveyards.

As the candlelight swelled, filling the grove that opened up before him with will-o-wisps and angels, Edgar sensed that he was getting closer to something he had sorely missed. Finally, he thought, he was coming close to piercing the veil.

The breeze that tempted the last remnants of crimson foliage was light, but it was just strong enough to push aside a veil, had one been hanging from the treetops. It was just sufficient, Edgar saw, to make the unprotected lights wink, as though they were the gleaming souls of ghosts crouching just out of sight...

As he looked around the clearing, taking in the multitude of pumpkins that crowded the undergrowth, the forked branches and the shelf-like, rotting stumps, the young man's eyes were inevitably drawn upwards. There, he saw it.

Amongst the gutted jack-o-lanterns and waxy pillars with their greasy, haloed light, there hung the mother of all pumpkins. So large that its cracked shell was six inches thick, it swung like a cauldron on great, iron chains. Its bottom had been completely carved out, so that a whole candelabra of cunningly pointed design could be seen wedged up inside it, draped in entrails left over from an unceremonious gutting. Pumpkin flesh hung in ghoulish streamers from the candelabra's limbs, while pulp was still visible through the sockets of the jack-o-lantern's eyes.

'Welcome to the celebration! Do you like it?'

Whirling in his smoky cape like a flame extinguished by a sudden gust, Edgar spun around. The breath that had extinguished him was instantly knocked out of his body when he saw the stranger standing there.

No, he corrected himself. This was not a stranger. He was stranger than a stranger.

The colours of his silken garb were the pink and red of flesh. Its pinstripes and its cut were eighteenth century. Lace blossomed at his cuffs and around his collar. The ruff at his neck, in particular, was so thick that it seemed designed to keep his head from falling off. Despite the relative balminess of the night, his coat billowed with immense, luxurious volume, as though it guarded him against the chill of death, or against some still colder thing.

There was a unique cunning in his milky white, lantern eyes, which were overlarge in their sockets, with bright, intelligent points like embers. A feathered hat was turned down over his face, so that shadows hid his bony cheeks and the thin, pinched nose where his papery skin stretched so taut that it threatened to break. All the same, however, those eyes looked upwards, scrutinising the stiff, young writer.

The skull-face guffawed. 'What troubles you? Cat got your tongue?' he purred more than asked. As he spoke, he stalked a patch of leaf-littered earth, his cloak swishing behind him like a tail. 'Has the Devil's familiar got it?'

Stricken by the sound of the familiar name, Edgar looked up, as though he expected the huge pumpkin to fall and crush him. Gingerly, he stepped away.

The stranger lit a pipe from his cushioned pocket. Holding it between two wand-like, skeletal fingers, he took what seemed to be a deliberate, theatrical drag. The smoke billowed pointlessly at his throat, sucked in through his needle-like teeth and expelled from hooked passages of his nose in an unbroken ribbon. It was as warm and curdled as the fluids in Edgar's own body were frozen.

The rest of the setting faded in comparison to this morbid being, so the youth was sure he would remember only one thing clearly- that thin, lipless grin that was almost a grimace beneath the drooping brim of the wide, black, battered hat.

'Who are you?' Edgar asked. 'Where is this place?'

'This is the Dead Hall,' said the skeleton. 'It is perpetually dusk here, and perpetually Autumn. It is perpetually dying.'

'This is purgatory then?' Edgar sounded smaller and more frightened than he was used to hearing himself sound. He thought of his phantom cape, and suddenly felt immeasurably foolish for ever having worn it, now that he stood before a genuine phantom.

The skeleton laughed again. 'No, you need not fear, little stray. This is not purgatory, and I am not the Devil, nor a demon, nor any other kind of evil spirit.'

The glimmer of his thousand-toothed smile begged the contrary, but Edgar chose to ignore it. Willingly, he saw two dozen teeth instead of a number that would stretch his already fragile sanity.

'If you are not Devil,' he asked, cautious in his awe, 'then what are you?'

'I am dead,' said the spectre, 'and dead is not Devil. Devils are fanciful, and death is the opposite of fancy. It is the one thing humans have by God no license to tamper with. Death is untouched by human inventions, to the extent that it is a gaping hole in the collective consciousness of men. Death is the unknown. It is the one thing that may penetrate dreams.'

'Then...' Edgar felt his chest swell with apprehension. It was an unusual inflation, given how rapidly his heart had contracted and sunk. 'Am I... dead?'

Is this all a dream? he wondered. Is this my final dream, from which I will not wake, and this the reaper to carry me at last beyond this grove?

Suddenly, another thought struck him. The candlelight flickered, as if the idea were a pebble dropped into a pond, and sent out tangible ripples.

Will I see my family again?

Whirlpool Manor seemed so far away now; so unimportant in the larger scheme that was emerging. Edmund Vile meant nothing beside Edgar's parents and sister. The petty mysteries of the Vile household, with all its dust and tentacles, were trifles compared with the cosmic question mark that was like one, enormous, spiraled limb of a space-dust galaxy.

His whole life, when it ran before him like sand from an hourglass, was compressed. Amassed in the tiny bottom bulb of his short existence, it was such a small thing; so easily dismissed. His time at the Manor comprised but a few grains of sand. It was barely an incident.

It was barely anything at all.

Edgar relaxed, giving himself over to complete and utter uncaring. It was strange, now that he thought of it, how easy he found letting go. Against the prospect of dying, he had expected to put up some resistance. Where was his dream self now? Where was the other hunter? Where was his sister's image?

They must have all been fancies, he thought, or fears, perhaps. This was the truth. There was nothing in the universe as significant as emptiness. Nothing was more meaningful than death.

The skeleton smiled, turning its pipe over in its hands as it savoured the thoughts it overheard. This was just what it had wanted.