by Greg Chapman
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Patrick Oswald Edwards
My name is Patrick Oswald Edwards. I feel at odds with myself. Each day I suffer a quiet discord and it's beyond my comprehension. Writing anything, in fact any instance of creativity is near impossible, as if I am inflicted with some obscure mental sickness. My intellect and imaginative spark seems lost to the darkness, like a child fallen into a well. But strangely, objects and visions still attempt to inspire me.
My neighbour, Mr Pym, is a unique individual. Each day he tends the pond in his yard, calling to his goldfish, telling his scaly sons and daughters stories of journeys to places far and beyond. Sometimes I overhear him and his words puzzle and astonish me all at once. He tells the fish of a great hunt that he cannot remember the ending of, but it is vivid with details of great bow ships and wild open seas.
If I ever brave the cold air he calls to me over the fence and insists upon giving me trinkets from his seafaring days. The last gift, which he literally pushed into my hand, was an ornate mariner's compass, and he instructed me that it would help me find the path back to who I am destined to be.
Ironically, that is my conundrum -- who I am. I live in the home I was raised in. It is a modest two storey home, but it serves my purpose. I eat and sleep on the upper storey and the lower floor is my creative domain. But as of late, it has become little more than a cesspool of lost thoughts; pieces of paper stained with the scratchings of a creative psychotic. On occasion I stop and look at what I have written and the words disturb me.
Then there is the bird.
A black carrion or suchlike crows to me in my sleep and becomes whole when I wake. At night it translates what I have written and during the day it visits, begging me for sustenance. It gratefully accepts any food that I have to give, but it has a taste for insects especially. When daylight breaks through my curtains sometimes I find a pile of dead insects at my feet, mealworms, flies and spiders, all dead. I have no inkling of where they came from or how I happened to invite them into my bed. But the bird knows, and when I let him in each morning he flies into my room and picks the sheets clean.
Stranger still is the reflection in the mirror. It shows me flesh and bone, but it is blurred and there seems to be someone else trying to peer back at me. The eyes of the unknown visage are sunken and cold, the apex of an unwavering suffering. Often the face is talking to me and trying to write something on the glass, but the words are lost to me. The only word I recognise is floorboards.
This word becomes a sliver in my subconscious and I find myself obsessed to the point where I have an uncontrollable urge to delve deeper. Before I can inhibit myself, I am digging a great pit in my backyard. Mr Pym notices and he seems to savour my calamity. At one instance he hands me a small grandfather clock and instructs me to bury it. I make no argument and gladly commit the time piece and its pendulum to the soil. Soon after the pit is full, I feel calm again.
My melancholy returns at twilight and bizarrely I find the carrion at my writing desk, the pen in his beak, and he has written a single message for me -- floorboards. The words sting like a knife and I find my obsession returning in waves. I scan each piece of wood at my feet, studying the swirl of the grain and the gap between each plank. My fingers, now shaking with anxiety, locate a gap that is far wider than the rest and I find myself tearing at the wood to see what lies beneath. Splinters pierce my fingernails, but I pay no heed to the blood. All I seek is what has been hidden from me.
There in the dank darkness is the sum total of two lives, one past and one that is now. A photo of a solemn fellow peers back at me and he is like an old friend who has been a stranger for many a year. His high forehead and dark gaze are all too familiar. I know this man; I know his words and it is here, under the floorboards, that I discover what he has been trying to tell me. I am then drawn to a photo of myself; the eyes look the same as his and for the first time in a long while I smile. My memories are his memories and his words are my words.
And there on the floor, below the floorboards are his and my words, pages and pages of text that I had feared lost. I read and re-read his words and mine and I understand now the raven, Mr Pym and the pit and the pendulum. These words have been calling to me across the shadows of time.
I crawl down in the depths and lay with our words and purposefully I pull the boards back over me. I feel calm again as the boards envelop me like a funeral shroud. Now I can sleep and dream and think and reacquaint myself with my soul. Then, when he says my heart is ready to tell tales, then and only then will I return to spread his dark message across the world.