The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

Meanwhile, Lord Edmund stood alone in a house from which all the bats had departed. He was fully dressed again, though his appearance and attire were changed, as was his demeanour. Curtained off from the impending morning, he smelled much less like mothballs and more like sweat and fear.

He had left his jacket off, and had instead rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, acquiring the look of a much younger, sterner man. He might have been a general, or a king, had he mastered the art of wearing responsibility less like a weight and more like a mantle. A pipe hung limply from his mouth, huffing smoke in time with his muttering. On both splayed hands, he leaned heavily against the desk in his office.

There, two notes were laid out, side by side, like battlefield options pinned onto a map. Neither one was presented as being the least bit optional.

We servants are taking our leave, said the first. The maids are terrified, and the cellar boys reluctant. We cannot stand the noise, and politely decline your invitation to discuss matters further.

-Sincerely, Eddrick Eddison, Head of Household.

Edmund rubbed his moustache as he considered this note. It was not unexpected, yet it was a campaign loss- another barb in his side. Quashing the resentment that welled up inside him, he forced himself to regard the second note.

This is what he read:

Dear brother,

The time has come.

We are a house nearly without servants now, and so you must join us. You have performed your part well, but there is no longer any need for you to stay aboveground. The time has come for you to forsake bricks and mortar, which may crumble, and join the everlasting halls of your home.

I know you feel for the boy. Your human weakness, and thus your attachment to him, are my own fault. You must not fear. Edgar is one of us, too, as he will come to realise. There is no life compares to the immortality of death.

The kraken is waking. Join us in the underdocks. Your young charge will make his own way. I understand the difficulties you have faced. Fear not, for they are coming to an end.

Do this, because I ask it of you, brother.

Do it because you have no choice.

Your guide and trustee,

Edan,

Chief Messenger of the Sunken House of Vile

As though he could erase it with his eyes, Lord Edmund scanned his note a second time. As his gaze slid down the page, it slipped finally, like an anchor, into the suddenly liquid contents of his stomach. One line in particular stuck in his mind, so that he was forced to hear it ringing there, over an over, in the cavernous space the bats, the servants and Edgar had left.

Do it because you have no choice.

Edmund was unused to sitting at the crux of matters. Indeed, he had survived as long as he had only through complacency, and a contentment to sit in the shadows, from which the gothic Whirlpool Manor might arguably have been built. His had been a life of taking orders. It had been such a long, boring existence.

Even since his brother's death, whereupon he had become the sole remaining member of his family, he had had freedom only in superficial matters. This, he had exercised to its furthest extent. He had gone to great lengths in acquiring morbid and exotic tastes, collecting foreign species, and indulging in eccentric entertainments. He had chosen the decorative elements of his imprisonment, much as an inmate may bring personal effects into a cell.

He had never had a real choice in anything.

Thus, he had learned to be subservient. He had learned to bend himself as a reed bows to the river, to avoid blows and losses. In the process, he had lost all rigidity and spine. He had even taken to leaning on a cane.

Why? He had never been an invalid. He had simply become so adept at reading others that he had forgotten how to act of his own free will.

Even Edgar, he thought, with a guilty pang, who was younger, poorer and more desperate than him, had been the driving force in their bargain. Certainly, it had been he, Edmund, who had written to invite the younger Ed to the Manor, but his hand had been motivated by the things that Edgar said and did. It was as though the boy truly were a phantom, working behind the scenes, and Edmund himself was merely an actor; a puppet, a clown...

He sighed theatrically as he pondered his dilemma.

'No m-more,' he muttered, so quietly at first that it was almost a whisper.

'No more... No more. No more!' He banged his fist on the tabletop.

Then, with one swift, violent motion, he swept the two sheets of paper onto the floor, along with the other contents of his desk, which smashed and clattered in protest. Brass scales tumbled. A dried starfish broke into fragments, and a sea urchin shattered like a globe of an alien world. Glass shards from an inkwell lay in a glittering corona, spreading out from the puddle of ink itself. The latter bubbled unnaturally, hissing vengeance as it dissipated.

How Edmund yearned to spill another kind of ink that way!

'No longer will there be ink in my veins!' he declared, scattering the rest of his private papers, including his and Edgar's poems. 'Ink has ruled this house for far too long!'

Unaccustomed to the racing of his heart, he paced towards the widest window, which would have been a wall of glass when its curtains were drawn back. The distance took him places in his mind, so that he found his hands grabbing the curtain cords. With all his might, as though he were ringing the thunderous goliath in a bell tower, he heaved on the rope. It shot up towards the ceiling, sending the thick velvet flying back and sunlight streaming in.

As he pulled, a bell tolled silently for him.

It rang out from the mountains to the sea in the loudest kind of dawn. That dawn was fire and brimstone, Hell raining onto earth. It was both an upset of balance, and a glorious victory. It was the blaring of trumpets, and the lancing light of angels' spears thrust into the valley. It scoured the misty moors as if they were dust in a cupboard, and the creaking sky above them had opened to revelation. It was a cleansing dawn, like the wrath of God.

'I do have a choice,' Edmund insisted. 'Just as Edgar made choices for himself from determination, so too must I make choices in my own hour of darkness. I choose to be an old man no longer. I refuse to be passive. I shall neither be led nor blindfolded henceforth!'

Casting aside his pearl-topped cane so that it struck the floorboards like a gong, he straightened. The effect was both instantaneous and striking.

The Viscount had possessed a latent power, which he had allowed to bend him as a burden, but which was now fully harnessed. Tenacious strength rippled along his shoulders, back and forearms, where the wiry muscles had tasted their first exertion in his heaving. The grey flecks in his hair were stately, now, as silver feathers on an eagle. They were an improvement on youth rather than a leech of it, lending cunning to his vigour.

He thought of Edgar, whose spirit seemed to have been transmitted to him. At some point in the storm of their collision, the tide had turned. Now, he was less an aching ocean pulled by Edgar's pale, distant moon than a force that marched towards it. He was an army composed of one man.

Onwards, he strode towards the door. The streaming sunlight glared as his backdrop, painting a long shadow like a path before him. With the same burning sunlight in his heart, Edmund seized the door handle.

He gripped it, and with a chill reminiscent of locking eyes with an enemy, he felt the same handle held from the other side.