The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

Water dripped from the eaves, splashing onto the masonry outside Edgar's bedroom window. The dark granite was a cemetery kind of stone, and the rain sheeted against it from a sky choked up as if in mourning. As it cried onto the glass, its widow-black mascara ran into the night, its sobs coming in thick, wet gulps.

Fat tears fell on the ivy leaves that framed the jutting window ledge and the pillars on either side in funeral wreaths and bunches. They ran in rivulets from the cheeks of the gargoyles who crouched at the base of each pillar. With wings folded and faces contorted, they were demonic effigies of weeping angels. The raindrops' descent as they slid from leaf to leaf was a slow, percussion dirge, urged along by the steady trickling down the brickwork, and the hammering of the downpour against the roofing tiles.

As each dripping, slopping or plopping droplet fell, another second slipped from the hands of the clock on the wall. The shorter of these hands stood rigid and nearly at attention, reaching for Heaven. The longer hung low like a pendulum, its knife-sharp point thrust directly at the centre of Hell.

A spring clicked as the clock struck half-past. Edgar snapped, becoming unnaturally upright, as though it had been he, and not the clock, that had been wound up all along. Like a mechanical golem that sprung to life, he immediately assaulted the parchment with his industry. His quill scratched and scribbled tirelessly, the noise of its efforts drowned out by the storm.

Occasionally, lightning flashed outside the window. Had anybody but the gargoyles sat on the wide ledge, they would have seen their portal briefly become a mirror.

Had Edgar looked up from where his nose was pressed against the parchment, so close to the fresh ink that he could have smeared it, he too would have seen something startling. The black glass between the purple velvet curtains, which throughout most of the evening had reflected pale Edgar, his flickering lamps and his misshapen candles, lit up with a whiteness so intense that it was purifying. Wrathfully, it scorched shapes to sticks and incinerated shadows, throwing everything into sharp contrast.

For a split-second, the spinning skeletons of submarine creatures long since dredged from nightmare grinned ghoulishly. They became macabre marionettes, with grim death masks upon their faces and malice in their eyeless sockets. The spare quills in their large jar were serrated daggers, and the lumpy cushions and abandoned coats became slumped ragdolls- either corpulent or headless.

Yet, Edgar did not notice.

Amongst his hideous puppets, he was master. He did not even glimpse his own reflection, sketched in relief by the lightning that birthed his work as it had been midwife to Dr. Frankenstein before him. His nose was hooked like a scythe, his arms rail-thin as the Slender Man's, and his back hunched with his crippling labour. The bumps of his spine protruded like the ridge on a dinosaur. His fringe hung lank and feverish over eyes that sank deeper than ever in their worried wells. Those eyes were wide with emptiness, but Edgar did not trouble himself to see them. The greater madness was inside his head.

As the lightning flashed and thunder made the building quake, as though it feared almighty judgment for its complicity in the horror unfolding on the desk, Edgar wrote.

He scratched and scraped and scribbled and scrawled, until his head was as empty as his face. Only then did he finally crumple.

Exhaustion struck him down for his sins, and he wrote no more.