The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

November first, 1841

My hands were numb, my stare glacial.

At first, there was only whiteness all around; a grim expanse so bright that it was blinding. My eyes narrowed against it, glancing off the sheeted nothingness that might as well have been ice, and that was just as desolate as any arctic wasteland. I felt my features harden, crushed beneath the weight of an age that lay thick and silent like permafrost. I was old in this dream.

My cheeks were pinched, but not rosy with cold. I was thin. I knew that my hands, if they could feel, would have traced lines around my nose and under my eyes, which were diamond-hard with all they saw. They captured the merciless emptiness, and their focus somehow intensified it. I braced myself for realisation, as though against a bitter wind.

I was old in this dream. Old and harrowed.

As I walked forward, and out of the icy void, there came shapes. The landscape was difficult to discern at first. So many of the hills and embankments were blanketed with snow, but the snow, I saw, had a softness that the nothingness had not. When flakes began to fall from the sky, drifting in sheets and clouds, their hue was not the same white as the space behind them. There were shadows around their lacy edges, and hints of glittering blue caught in their crystalline webs.

Eventually, I reached a gate without a fence. In its ironwork were wrought these words:



I turned around, and saw that the way behind me was gone. The very land had vanished, and so I had no choice but to go on.

As if spurned by my decision, a cobbled path grew out of the blankness up ahead, where the snow met a white chasm of untellable depth. Fine powder tumbled over the surface of the nothing in spills, so that it was sometimes difficult to tell which reflected the other -substance or lack of substance- or whether the two were simply juxtaposed. With each step I took, a new square of path would unearth itself from the alabaster mingling, as though some snow had been brushed aside, or some of the void had dissolved.

I came across a glassy lake, much like the mirror that shimmers in the bay on clear days. Around it, several men were sitting with their backs to me, wearing overcoats like the one I realised I was also wearing. It was similar to that which I own now, but much tattier, becoming in some places threadbare, as though even the fabric in this reality was stretched. A fishing rod arced out from each man's seat into the cryptic, silver surface of the water. I wondered what strange fishes they hunted there.

As though in answer, a tentacle raised itself, slowly and languidly, like a shipwreck resurrected on creaking iron chains, and strangled by their natural equivalent in kelp. Its questing tip hovered over its reflection. Like a viper's tongue, it tasted the air before it curled in on itself and plunged back underwater.

I heard its splash echo in my gasp. So did a small girl, whom I hadn't noticed was sitting by the lakeside with the men. She had no fishing rod, but was lying on her stomach, hands folded for a headrest. She might have just woken from sleep. Her doily skirts were smooth and unruffled, and posture was relaxed. Evidently she regarded the lazy scene as placid rather than ominous. Now her head was turned. Between two blonde pigtails of bunched sunshine, the only things besides her cheeks that were coloured in the black and white scene, I saw her eyes connect with mine.

They were the same, and yet they were not. They could not have been.

They must have only looked the way I knew my eyes felt- that faraway stare, as though they slid through, rather than pierced, my face and searched my brain directly. I could feel them doing to it what my own eyes had done to the dream world when I first saw it. They were capturing and intensifying me, and carrying a parcel of me away with them, or perhaps throwing it back. They were hooks of eyes, like the barbs that fisherman use to drag the fish from the ocean, before regarding them once, and then tossing them home for the sea to nurse or mourn.

It wasn't right for a child to look at anyone that way, which only made the hooks sink deeper. Though logic screamed in agony, I was hopelessly impaled. She had such a hold on me that when she skipped and sashayed over, I felt that I was the one being reeled in. There was something in her sway that was less lithe than otherworldly. She stretched in odd places, bending like jelly where I had thought her composed of rigid bone. Her joints stretched unnaturally. Her beaming smile was too wide, and filled with too many perfectly even teeth. I knew it instinctively, though I did not have time to count them.

She was a warning sign, and yet, like the fish who is caught and then sees the lure for what it truly is, there was nothing I could do to avoid her.

'Are you looking for him?' she asked, imploring me with my own eyes. 'You must be looking for him, because he's looking for you.'

I opened my mouth to reply, but as I discovered, I was mute in my dream. I was not capable of asking questions. I mouthed wordlessly, like the many catfish, eels and ancient ammonites piled in baskets by the fishermen, flopping, flapping and gasping for air.

I felt suddenly sorry for them, because I was a fish out of water, too. Where once I had been sure I stood on solid ice, my dream was now melting around me, forming mirrors and lakes and drowning pools in a little girl's eyes. Who knew what lay in wait beneath the surface of such treacherous places?

With a nod, I allowed myself to be led along, thinking it better to pretend at free will. We followed the path away from the lake, towards a hillock that rose like the crest of a wave. It looked like a ripple left over from an earthquake, and was built of the same not-quite-snow I had encountered during the first leg of my journey. Over the hillock, the cobbled path became a rough track. Weeds sprouted up on either side, the first vegetation of any kind I had yet seen.

As we progressed, these grew higher and higher, becoming at first thorny, and then simply thorns growing in their own right; malicious sickles wrought out of the same tough wood as rose stems. Each was as tall as a man.

Some of the thorns were curved like the Reaper's scythe. These struck my panicked heart with all of its inherited fear. Others had even more thorns upon them. Still more doubled back on themselves like butchers' hooks, sharp with promises and oiled by years of cruelty. Beads of some dark substance gathered at their tips. It was either blood or venom, so far as I could tell, as I was careful not to brush against those plants as I passed.

If their purpose was to force me to crouch and humble myself, or to terrify me, then they were successful, for I soon learned that they were part of a deliberate garden. Two particularly devious spirals wrapped themselves around a sign, serving both as its posts and decorations.

I thought them reminiscent of the wrought iron embellishments on your gates. Then I saw what was engraved on them in spiky, silver letters, each stroke a knife:


I was immediately reminded of the return address on the first letter I received from you-



Anchor on the Hill, and Kraken on Anchor? Was this dream place then a deliberate corruption of the windswept, seaside peak that is your home, and my home now, too?

As soon as I thought it, the landscape complied. A rocky outcropping burst, jagged and leaning, through the white earth, which crumbled and fell away. The deafening landslide that announced its birth was like Hell's thunder, if the whiteness all around me was the ceiling of the underworld. A spiraled road wound precariously around the hoary finger, which stretched up to accuse the sky. Its fingernail in silhouette appeared to be a house of some kind, with many sloping shingles, steeples and spires, like yours.

We walked to the house, and I verified that it was indeed a ghastly replica of Whirlpool Manor. Then, the door creaked open, and a man sprang down the steps.

That man was me.

Only, again, he could not have been, though he startled me at first. He had my same eyes, with the same empty look that glazed the child's, so that they were mere bright baubles in her cheerfully vacant face. Furthermore, however, he wore my clothes. They were the same clothes that all the other men had worn, identically tailored and beaten.

A sinking feeling accompanied this recognition when I paired it with the next, more startling one. The stranger also had my face, only it was a much younger face than I imagined that I possessed in my dream. He was me as I am now, in waking- neither elderly, nor saddled with any kind of burden.

If there was anything that distinguished us, it was this lack of any haunted element in his expression. Instead, something else glinted in those eyes of mine. It was not a threat, this time, but a temptation. They spoke of the bliss of emptiness. In emptiness, they crooned to me, the whole world is a void where thoughts may not simply run, but dissipate, and cares dissolve. Emptiness means to abandon every sorrow, and to have no need for joy.

'He's looking for you,' said the man who was me, just as the girl had concluded before him. 'You must be looking for him, too.'

Again, I felt my throat compress around my vocal chords. I nodded.

As I followed the man inside the pale effigy of the Manor, the girl trailing after to prevent my escape, I felt cool darkness touch my face upon the threshold. I was aware of the similarities between my unwitting entrance and the first, fatal step of a fly that has landed on the slippery lip of a carnivorous pitcher plant.

How easily I, too, could have plunged to my doom! How easily I was swallowed, and still, as the landscape vanished behind me, how little choice I had.

The rug, coloured like a wine stain, that unrolled on the doorstep was so like a tongue that at first I held my breath. I expected a blast of rank, warm air. I even half suspected that the rug would slide out from under me, or else snake itself about my ankles and slither back into its den, taking me with it.

Two rows of servants, dressed in black and white, were arranged like lines of teeth on either side of this narrow entrance. In aprons, waistcoats, bonnets, socks and smartly buckled shoes, they too presented an opposite, for they were as many as Whirlpool's servants are few. I hope you will forgive me this observation- I mean nothing by it. I am grateful for your hospitality, and only seek to repay it with a diligent following of your instructions.

Nevertheless, there was a great number of staff in the place, and each of them with my eyes. Each of the men was my twin at a different age, but none as handsome as the fellow who led me on. Each of the women bore uncanny resemblance to the young girl. As we passed, they spoke to me, not in turn, but all at once.

'The things we've seen with our same eyes,' they chorused.

One maid stepped forward, beaming, just as her younger sister had done. 'You must be eager to meet him,' she said, her manner pleading. 'Do hurry!'

I did hurry, although I confess that I was torn between running to and running from. They seemed the same thing in that moment. I broke away from my guide. The corridors that received me twisted and turned, becoming actually curved, and looping back around themselves like fishermen's knots. Sometimes I would march the whole length of a floor, only to find myself face to face with the same locked door I had begun at. I did not know where I was heading. The ceilings grew high and lost in shadow like open vaults, then they would descend again, so that my progress was like crawling through catacombs.

Everywhere I went, the furniture warped or shrank or swelled accordingly, and on every surface portraits hung, in frames that were comprised only of tentacles coiled like lengths of rope. These looked pale, slimy and slightly engorged, as though with rot, and they gave off a salty, fish-market odour. I dared not touch them, for fear that they were genuine.

In each such frame, there was a portrait of a childishly young man or woman, finely dressed. The gentlemen and ladies, for they were certainly nobility, wore black velvet, lace, dinner suits of purple silk, tweed, pearls, jet and silver, and held smoking pipes that were of whalebone, or knobbed walking sticks set with jewels I could not identify.

They must have been a family, or at least an ancestral lineage. Each face was long and aquiline, but there was something stranger about them. In place of ears, each one had variegated fins, like those of fishes. On each slim neck, above the ruff or starched collar, was a series of lacerations that I first took for the marks of hanging. On reviewing my assumption, I realised with fresh nausea that they were gills.

Most curiously of all, however, each and every one of the faces in oil paint had my same eyes. They had something uncanny in common with me. If eyes were souls, it might have been a common fate, or destiny.

With a yelp, I ran on, tripping on the carpet, and believing that it was tripping me. Abruptly, I skidded to a halt, coming to a dead end. The portrait that hung here was one of the most ghastly I had seen yet.

The subject depicted was not a person. I refuse to believe that such a monstrosity could ever have been human. The bald skull was misshapen and cracked, like an egg left too long to boil. Compared to the body, most of which was lost in folded fabric, it was engorged beyond deformity. The skin, which stretched thinner than the paper I now write on, had tensed to breaking point, and several seams had ripped along it. Out of the larger ones a greenish substance oozed.

It had my same eyes, too, but in such a visage, the effect was much more severe. More than merely distant, the two glassy orbs seemed blinded by cataracts. I knew better, however, than to think that such a travesty of a creature could be so afflicted. These aberrations, I knew, were the symptoms of a horrible inversion.

The thing, whatever it was, had grown so used to seeing by other means that its physical eyes had become vestigial. Just as I had felt my own eyes harden with massive knowledge, these eyes had accumulated such gravity that they had finally imploded. Now they only saw from within, and looked out through the windows in my own mind, planting thoughts that screamed there like seedlings strewn upon a bed of acid.

For too long, we have waited to meet each other, the painting intoned. Open the door and see me face to face.

Though I trembled, I did as I was told. I cannot be sure how I made sense of those instructions. I can only assume that my intuition occurred for the beast's convenience. Placing my shaking fingers in an indent behind the writhing frame, I pressed. The squirming tentacle withdrew from what it had been guarding, disappearing though a single hole at the top of the ordinary door frame underneath. The lever I had touched turned out to be a door handle, adorned just as the ones at Whirlpool Manor are. I admit freely that I did not find it to be any comfort.

I opened the door. It seemed to swing for an eon, creaking by degrees, like a compass sketching the curvature of a world. While it crept, I waited anxiously. Once it was ajar, I wished fervently for it to be closed again, but there was no forcing back the wriggling mass that had erupted. There could be no reversing what had been seen and magnified in my strange eyes, compressed to insanity times one thousand.

Inside the room was a statue of the painted figure, carved from material so white and flawless that it could not have been stone. Tentacles sprouted from its base, worming over and under one another like a nest of snakes, pouring out of holes in the ceiling, walls and floor, no doubt to adjoin the various portraits in the Manor.

The strangest thing of all, however, was the eyes. In its head of weird, dead matter, it was living eyes that failed to look at me. They failed to look, but did not fail to see.

You did not expect me, they began, dropping the words into my consciousness as smoothly as if they had altered reality to put them there, to show you my real form?

I could think of no reply. I could do nothing but be a receptacle for the thoughts that swarmed into me. My eyes had been prised open, and though I struggled to close my mind against the onslaught, it was futile.

Thought after thought accumulated, until they all drowned each other out, becoming a blanket of white. It was then that I knew from what material the dream world had been made.

I was helpless to do anything but fall limp, and slip out of that world. I stared into nothingness, and nothingness stared back.