The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

November fifteenth, 1841

He was just as Edgar describes him- pinched and parched, with his brittle nose upturned as if he was repulsed by his own smell. His milky-white eyes were less imploring than they were predatory, while there was a haughtiness about him that was more than merely aristocratic. With fingers whose bones were worn to twigs, he brushed down the threadbare lapel of his silken overcoat. It was an arrogant gesture. I soon saw why.

Behind him, in the dank, nearly lightless pit where I supposed the floor must have been, other pairs of lantern-lit orbs hovered, like clustered will-o-wisps. The eyes of the army began to swim, as the army itself began to move. A whiff of something salty accompanied their stirring.

'You must be our guest of honour.' The spectre grinned liplessly as he bent down towards me. He might have stood six or seven feet high- surely taller than he had done when he was alive. The grin became a snarl, as he snapped, 'You're late.'

I wondered if he knew that my brother was dead.

'What do you want with him?' Edgar demanded, from beside me. His face had lost its haunted look, and instead taken on a hardened quality. He was pale enough in the eerie light that he could have passed for cold, impassive marble. 'What use do you have for him, now?'

The skeleton gave a guffaw that shook the lace about its neck. 'What do we want?' it repeated, incredulously. 'Nothing more than we're due. The Viscount here belongs with us, don't you, Lord Vile?' This time, his ingratiating smile was composed entirely of teeth. 'You belong with your brother.'

He knew.

As if on cue, the lights that were rounded fish eyes began to bob frantically in the darkness, swarming ever closer. There was a slopping and splashing sound, and bizarre shapes began to appear out of the shadows. I caught the glistening of rounded heads, and the flash of webbed fingers, which were blue-veined beneath greyish skin. I saw the tips of claws, and the tattered remains of lace and tweed. Drenched, yellowed collars that had once been finery now hung from withered throats like useless skin.

I saw flashes of pearls, and occasional, winking lumps of jet. Mouths drooped open like miniature caves, lined with needle-sharp teeth instead of stalactites. Fins, ribbed like those of fishes, protruded from the sides of smooth, egg-shaped heads in place of ears. Gills lined throats that had been slit long ago.

I gave a yelp, which echoed around the caverns. Beside me, I heard Edgar also give a sharper, clearer cry. I had not expected the lost ones to be so degenerate. Edgar, I surmised, had not expected to see them at all.

I reached out a hand to clutch at him, but his sweaty grasp was ripped from mine. The fish people were upon us. They were upon me- I saw, to my slight relief, that they had bypassed him for now. For some reason, he seemed to be completely invisible to them.

Instead, they were set on me like blind, groping hounds. My scent, I knew, was in my blood, and in the blood spilled down my shirt.

I ran, sprinting headlong in the only direction available to me; the only direction in which it was not anticipated that I run. I went into the cavern.

The monsters, though they presented an obstacle, were not difficult to toss aside when I encountered them one by one. They seemed to be physically weaker than I was. Their time underground had made them soft and greasy, like eggs pickled for a long time. I heard painfully loud splashes as I ran, and saw dumbfounded heads look up. If the creatures were unused to seeing, then they were experts at detecting sound.

I sprinted down the stairs, which became a spiraling sinkhole, like a drain. Propelling myself with my hands against the slimy walls, I descended down the wide, gaping well, until the monsters were far -but not safely- behind me.

I soon found myself in the sewer proper. This place was carved from recognisable brick, as though it were the underground part of an abandoned city.

There was a steady, trickling moistness about this place that would have made it alien to anyone but me. A labyrinth of pipes the size of train tunnels sprawled beneath whatever lay above the surface this far into the maze- I had never seen it, nor even imagined what it might be. Perhaps it was ruins. Perhaps it was nothing at all.

Luminescent fungi clung to every surface as the pipes seemed to twist in defiance of the laws of physics. They glowed like lanterns in every shade of green, blue and purple, pulsating in harmony with the sickening tide of a green river that ran at the bottom of each pipe. Some had even sprouted veins that throbbed and bulged as their stems were skewed and their caps forced lopsided by the weird gravity.

This sewer, I knew, was an uncanny ecosystem. Many strange breeds of thing lived here. Of course, I had been conscious on some level of the sewer's existence, ever since my brother, Edan, had first appeared to me in death. Nevertheless, it was surreal to see it otherwise than recounted.

Beneath the pearly sheen on the water’s surface, bug-eyed goldfish grew as large as carp. Many-legged cockroaches skittered, and sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a soft, sponge-like animal camouflaged where it had pressed itself up against a crumbling brick wall. They had porous, undulating hides with mouths like trapdoors, and every now and then, a stalked eye would surface from a squashed, leech-like body, but never in the same location.

As I travelled, I was accompanied only by the wet echoes of my footsteps. In a dream-like state of being lost, I considered the task of finding an exit. Instinctively, I knew that there must be one. As I ran, I also thought of dreams and nightmare. Notions of them seemed to be intrinsic to my surroundings.

How much easier it was to dream, than to be chased! I thought. How much easier to give up a piece of my mind, and live this way forever...

How easy it would be to tread water in a nowhere for the rest of eternity.

I shook away those thoughts, recognising them for what they were. In coming to my senses, I felt the influence of something foreign in my gloomy environment. The Angler Fish, I realised, was trying to force me to concede. It was trying to trick me.

I was in a vast world of pipes now. These were the pipes, I knew, that joined the escape route Edgar had described in the dream in which he and Edward, my pet, had been one being. I saw other, less tame bats flitting blackly, like holes cut in the scenery. I thought of Edgar as I recalled the progress of his dream, attempting to decipher the way out.

He would be fine, I assured myself. They would not harm him immediately. If I could just reach an exit, I could get to the bat tower. I had a plan. Beneath my breath, I cursed the absence of my tame bats, which slumbered overhead.

If only there were another living creature I could catch nearby. I ignored the countless cockroaches, searching for something more akin to a rat.

The had to be something sentient.

The mouths of the passageways, as I inspected them, became more constricted. The high, peaked stone arches that formed the sewer ceiling sank lower, made darker by the etched shadows of something I could not distinguish. Anxiety writhed in my chest as I saw how the space contracted.

This was not what I had expected. Where was I going?

The walls, with their green-streaked mortar, seemed to close in on me, stifling my breath, as though the Sewer and I were having a joint convulsion. The pipes bled reminiscent of open wounds, while sludge poured out of them like vomit. As I watched, they continued to disgorge themselves of an endless river. Filth overflowed the gutters, swirling through basins, before finally sloshing over a dam towards a huge, iron grate.

I felt my eyes drawn to the sickly, green river. It seemed to sponge its contents gradually from the brickwork, stirring them into a thick, lazy stew. I watched each chunk slide by, counting the many wasted weeks and years I had spent aboveground, letting this all go on beneath me. Regret bubbled and loss murmured as each segment of the sliding muck conveyed a brief, passing insight, spilled over the edge, and was gone.

I began to walk towards the grate, tip-toeing carefully. There was something beyond it that was alive. I could feel it. Something intelligent lived in there.

If only I could harness it, then I might yet have time to bring it back to Edgar and hope my scheming worked. The Angler Fish needed a world created for it. For this, it relied on the guidance of sentient beings. If it were only possible to trick it, then it might be contained in a mind that was not human; a mind that was large enough to perceive, yet small enough to offer no hope of escape.

The cobblestones were slippery as I crawled, using my hands and knees so as not to slip and be swallowed by the river. I crunched over the skeletons of rats, mice and fragile lizards that covered the steps like a trap built out of ribcages. The rot and the mildew refused to touch them, choosing instead to leave bleak reminders.

Yes, there was definitely something here. Something that lured and ate animals.

Next, something hideous happened. In my excitement, I slipped. The river pulled me down, and I was carried through a curtain of sludge that cascaded from above the grate in a toxic, gluggy shade of green. Fighting and spluttering, I felt the sheeting slime as it struck me. A frantic moment later, I found my foothold in whatever invisible architecture was on the other side, and clung to the damp, exposed rock.

Only when the slime had dripped from my eyes did I see where I stood.

I stood in a lair. It was a lair filled by the greatest despair I have ever felt. In it, I despaired not only for myself, but for Edgar. Surely, we were both doomed. We would not even die together.

Masonry spiraled far higher than in any other part of the Sewer, twisting out of sight into the darkness. Whereas the pathways around it had tightened, this part of the sewer remained expansive. Swollen, sore and infected, it was a hollow that had been gnawed out by the Angler Fish over the course of decades.

The walls were carved into macabre shapes, resembling an expanse of butchered parts- stacked vertebrae, curving ribs, long, fibrous digit bones and stretched muscle filament. From jutting ledges, algae hung in ropey columns like intestines.

What was worst, however, was the thing that pulsed in the water in the middle of the vast, dripping room, like a heart in a rotting chest.

It was the kraken, red and lumpy, with writhing limbs like arteries, spurting saltwater. It screeched as it laid hungry eyes on me. It was more servant than minion, I saw. While the Angler Fish was not of this earth, the kraken was a mighty, pseudo-thinking creature- it was simply also an alien one. Thus, it was the Angler Fish's choice a channeling being, until it could get its tendrils on a human host.

The kraken, I realised, was a thing which the Angler Fish possessed.

It was possessed and it was coming for me.