The Macabre Tales of Young Edgar

November second, 1841

The ceiling fan wobbled overhead, spluttering ineffectively in the heat. It was summertime, not that this fact was of much consequence in the resentful subcontinent. That wild quarter seemed to deliberately resist calendar months, insisting on only two seasons -wet and dry- as if this was part of its conspiracy to resist British aid.

Everything was warped by the stifling temperature, so that the landscape seemed surreal. Humidity lay over the forested mountains like a heavy blanket, and beneath it, almost every creature had gone to sleep. Only crickets chirped outside. In the settled air, their call reverberated maddeningly, pulsing in time with pounding blood and heavy hearts. Not even screeching monkeys and tropical birds could be heard in the tangled canopy. Thunder rumbled distantly, but it was faint, and made no promises of quenching the jungle's fever. Even the clouds could not be roused to exert themselves on such a day as this.

I found myself seated on a wicker couch, with white, canvas cushions designed to repel the heat. The thin sections of the walls that had been painted between wooden frames were also pearly white, while the ceiling was plastered in a cooler, milky shade. The combined effect was one of a melt of snow. Everything in this room looked as though it might peel or drip or dribble. Indeed, even the many animal skins spread over the floor looked like puddles left by tigers and elephants that whose meat and skeletons had evaporated.

She was melting, too.

She was a sculpture in jelly and cream. Once finely dusted icing sugar was now caked to her proud nose and high forehead, where it was coming away in lumps. Her white visage had begun to run, revealing paler, more ashen skin underneath. The roses that had been dabbed onto her cheeks found themselves outshone, eclipsed by the angry flushes of heatstroke blossoming behind them.

She fanned herself limply with a folded map, though it served to do little save waft more warm air in her direction. Her reddened lips were parted with the effort of breathing in her corsetry. She looked as if she might faint.

'Have you seen him?' I heard myself asking. My words were as much of a puzzle to me as they must have been to her, for they were not of my creation, nor their utterance of my volition.

She nodded. She was either too tired or too demure to bother with words.

As she did so, I noticed what it was that I found most unsettling about her. This was a more lucid dream than my previous one, at least in one respect. While I was isolated from the waking world, I could remember snatches of things that had happened to me in dreaming before. That was why I recognised the peculiar, buttery shade of her hair, and the way it had been parted into bunches. It was only that in this instance, those bunches had been rolled up into balls on either side of her head, whereas in my last dream, they had been ponytails on a little girl.

A hand that was pale and limp as a crumpled lily, ungloved in the oppressive weather, handed me the map she had been fanning herself with. Then, from the lacy over shirt tucked inside her bodice, she withdrew two other items. The first was a small picture, of locket size. I heard my sharp intake of breath, for who was I to see there but myself, dressed in my clothes from the previous dream.

Only, it was not me, as I knew a moment later. It was the young man who had been me, when I had been old. For some reason, I was not so haggard in this dream. Indeed, the man in the picture seemed the very same age as me, which only made events more curious.

The second item the lady handed to me was a silver locket, such as you will recall gifting me prior to my arrival at the Manor. Bizarre symbols were scrawled into its face. However, and when I tried to force it open, I discovered that it clasped its contents more tightly than an oyster.

I wanted to ask whose it was, but found my tongue bound as it had been before. I was mute, and would learn only what was given to me by way of instruction. Nevertheless, the lady seemed to sense my question, or else had received her cue to inform me.

'He is the hunter,' she said. 'Every trophy in this room is one of his.'

She nodded in the direction of a huge stuffed and mounted panther which occupied one corner of the parlour. Its glassy eyes, which were curiously grey, bored into mine with a familiarity that lanced through into my very brain. Instinctively, I turned away. I let my startled gaze slide instead over ivory tusks, big cat skins and the mounted heads of wildebeest-like animals, allowing them to rest at last on the shriveled hand of what I could only presume had once been a silverback gorilla.

This last was a ghastly ornament, mounted on a polished stand. With sworn vengeance it clutched the air, curling in on itself, as though it reached through from beyond the veil. Its withered grip spoke of despair, for it had come just short of seizing its killer.

'The hunter has gone missing,' the lady explained. 'He never returned from his last expedition, which was into the heart of this jungle.'

She waved a languid hand in the direction of the open window, where the jungle began mere metres from what I saw was the edge of our settlement. It held us under siege, encroaching day by day; only delayed in its ravenous efforts by the village boys who could be glimpsed hacking it back.

'We are all so very glad you have arrived,' my hostess continued. 'Naturally, you will be eager to find him as quickly as you can. A pack has been prepared for you, should you not have brought your own things.'

She smiled, and there was something callous about her smile. Though it was outwardly encouraging, her lips curled in a way that made my skin crawl. In the rippling, illusory atmosphere, I imagined that mouth stretching into a maw. I even worried, irrationally, that she might leap forward and eat me. I forced myself to return her smile, and then to look away.

I examined the photograph more closely, holding it gently between my clammy fingers. To me, it was a precious fragment of something from which sense might be made.

Why is this man me? I wondered.

'He looks strangely like you,' the lady commented, rather than replied. She spoke as though she were simply remarking on the weather, or acknowledging a sibling resemblance. Her manner irritated me, but I left the matter alone. Presently, something else had begun to bother me, and nagged my racing heart more.

Who are you, then, lady? Who is it you resemble, and why have I seen you before?

Though I employed my whole concentration, I received no answer. She simply continued to melt, staring silently at me, in total acceptance of her fate. Her troubled breathing having ceased, she became as still as the air, and much eerier for the subtlety of her transformation. It was as slight, and yet as significant, as the difference between dying and death.

It was only then that I understood the strange looseness of her clothes. Her lace collar, cuffs and frills, which must have been starched, nonetheless draped like melting icicles from her neck, wrists and lapels. They hung in the sad manner of any lace garments upon corpses embalmed for burial; adopting a pose which suggested their lifeblood had drained with that of their wearer.

The lady was nothing corpse-like, however. Though she had a definite stiffness about her person, it was not inspired by decay. Indeed, to my focused brain, she became less lily-like and more akin to those native Indian orchids and hanging flowers I have seen, which seem to wilt naturally as a way of growing.

It was then that I panicked.

Scrunching the locket, the photograph and the map together in one hand, I sprang up from the wicker couch with its melting cushions and marched from that room as quickly as my heavy boots and English waistcoat would permit. I wondered briefly why I was dressed that way, so impractically for the conditions, but I knew at once that the reason was clenched in my fist.

My clothes were the same as the hunter's, and his clothes were the very ones we had both worn in my previous dream. Juxtaposed against the effigy of Whirlpool Manor, they had not seemed out of place. It was only here, in the revolting climate, that they contributed to my nightmare.

I thought of exiting the dream, then. I truly did not wish to find the hunter. I sensed a trap. Blindly, I ran around and around, confronting dead ends in every direction. I did not see rooms stuffed with trophies, or trophies stuffed with sawdust. Neither did I see portraits and landscape paintings gilt in gold, or canvas tents set up outside, or folding chairs, the bare earth that had been cleared around the settlement, or the broken vines and the gnashing jaws of the jungle beyond.

None of those things were relevant to me. In place of each of them, I saw only the absence of any possibility of escape.

Wake up, I told myself. Wake up, wake up, wake up!

My mind lassoed those fleeting words, making them into a mantra. I clung to them like a lifejacket, but it was no ordinary sea in which I sank. With each repetition, my chant became more noise and less meaning. With each repetition, it became more and more indistinguishable from the incessant din of the crickets. It beat with my rising pulse, until my blood drummed its tattoo directly into my skull.

Wake up, wake up, wake up!

The words were automatic now; just another instinct. I was becoming as mad and mindless as the insects, and just like them, I would hum indefinitely- until the end of time. My chanting was what drove me mad, and yet, it was my only hope.

Then, another voice piped up. At first I was not sure whether it was my own.

'You want to stay,' it told me. 'You're his only hope. Please help. Please save my brother.'

I looked down, and found myself staring into the pleading eyes of a child. She was younger than the girl I had seen in my previous dream. This little girl was barely more than an infant. Her golden ponytails were ringleted, and her dress had more petticoats than skirts. She had been trussed up in so much lace that she might have been a paper doll. Her face was porcelain, as though somebody had lovingly crafted an idol to charm.

'Please help my brother.'

She tugged at my trousers, and I sighed. I was defeated. Her request was irresistible.

Or so I thought, before I summoned the very last willpower in my reserve. With a set jaw and a determined stride, I fled that scene, turning my heel on the child. You might think this a despicable trick to play on my audience, but I assure you that it is no lie. I did it in my dream, and thus I awoke and ended my vision. It is true. I did it because I am a coward.

If it makes for a disappointing tale, then it is only because I am no protagonist for a Bulletin story, nor a fitting hero for any kind of publication.