Poe's Nightmares

The Tell Tale Head

The acute anguish of a troubled mind is a prison of its own cruel devising, with walls built from the bricks of conscience and a merciless jailer in the form of guilt. This I know all too well, for it was by my own hand that I found myself shackled in that grim cell of the soul.

It began as a morbid fascination, an irresistible magnetism drawing me to that which polite society deems macabre and grotesque. I would haunt the darkened alleyways and fog-shrouded graveyards, ever in search of some novel thrill to momentarily allay the gnawing emptiness that consumed me. In retrospect, I suppose it was only a matter of time before simple voyeurism would no longer suffice to feed the ravenous beast within me.

I cannot recall precisely when the idea first took root in my diseased mind. Like a parasite, it burrowed deep, growing and metastasizing until it could no longer be ignored. At first, I recoiled from it in revulsion. But like an addict, I soon found myself craving its sickly promise with greater and greater intensity. 

It was a moonless night when I finally succumbed to my darkest urges. With spade in hand, I crept into that hallowed place of eternal slumber, the damp earth yielding easily beneath my determined stride. When I reached the grave, I fell to my knees and, in a frenzy, began to dig.

How long I labored there, I cannot say. Time seemed to warp and stretch in that liminal place between the living and the dead. My hands blistered and my muscles burned from the exertion, but I pressed on as if possessed. At last, my spade struck rotted wood with a hollow thunk.

Casting the tool aside, I pried open the crumbling lid of the coffin. The fetid stench of decay billowed out to embrace me and I breathed deep of it, savoring its rancid bouquet like a connoisseur. Trembling, I reached into that moldering box and cupped the skull of its occupant in my hands, lifting it reverently.

"Hello, my friend," I whispered. "You needn't be alone any longer."

Secreting my prize within the folds of my cloak, I refilled the grave and stole away into the night. Back in the dingy garrett I called home, I positioned the skull on the rickety table where it might face me. And there it sat, grinning its eternal rictus grin, as I carried on endless one-sided conversations with it.

At first, I was content with my acquisition, my morbid trophy. But like any addiction, it soon demanded escalation. One skull became a paltry thing. I required more stimulating company.

Over the ensuing weeks and months, I became a repeat caller to the cemetery, that morbid marketplace from which I selected more and more companions for my growing collection. Before long, every surface and much of the floor space in my room was occupied by the vacant-eyed remnants of the deceased.  

I was sitting amongst my ossuary, basking in the empty gaze of my silent companions, when the pounding came at my door.

"Open up in there!" a gruff voice shouted over the hammering of an authoritarian fist. "Police!"

In an instant, my blood ran cold as ice water. The skulls seemed to leer at me, every bony smile an accusation. The authorities had discovered my secret! But how?

I leapt to my feet, my eyes darting wildly about the room as I sought for some avenue of escape or concealment. But it was hopeless. Bones littered nearly every inch of the floor, grinning up at me in a ghastly parody of mirth. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

A resounding crash tells me the door has given way. Heavy footsteps approach. The floorboards creak under the weight of my impending doom. And then, framed in the doorway, I behold my unmasker - a burly policeman with a thick mustache and a baton gripped in one meaty fist.

"Dear God," he gasps as his eyes drink in the scope of my transgression. Then, collecting himself, he fixes me with a glare as hard as granite. "You're under arrest for suspicion of grave robbing," he barks.

I open my mouth to protest, to proclaim my innocence in the face of all evidence to the contrary, but my words wither in my throat. For in that moment, I swear I can hear the skulls laughing at me, a hollow, mocking cachinnation that reverberates inside my own head.

The policeman seizes me roughly by the arm and hauls me out of that charnel house. I offer no resistance as he claps the manacles around my wrists. A strange sense of calm descends over me, the kind of cool lucidity that can only be found on the far side of madness.

At my trial, the evidence against me is damning. Witness after witness takes the stand to testify to my nocturnal visits to the graveyard, my furtive digging, the grim trophies I spirited away. And yet, I cannot bring myself to feel the slightest shred of remorse. Those empty sockets had seemed to me like portals to another world - a world free from the shackles of convention, from the tyranny of morality. 

In the end, the judge pronounces me guilty on all counts. I am sentenced to life imprisonment in the asylum for the criminally insane. The gallery erupts into applause at this verdict, the loved ones of those whose eternal slumber I so rudely interrupted expressing their satisfaction.

As the bailiffs lead me away, I hold my head high, a serene smile playing about my lips. Gazing into the sea of jeering faces, I let their opprobrium wash over me, secure in the inviolability of my own twisted philosophy.

For I know that true sanity is naught but a comforting lie, a gossamer veil draped over the yawning chasm of the unknown. Far better to embrace the madness that lurks within, to dive headlong into that roiling abyss and revel in its nihilistic liberation.

And so I while away my days within the padded walls of my cell, conversing with spectral companions only I can see. The doctors call it madness, but I know it for what it is - a truer sight, the ability to perceive the skull that lurks beneath the skin of every illusion we call reality.

For in the end, are we not all naught but bones, grinning our deaths' head grins? Far better to laugh with the skulls than to cower from that inescapable truth. And laugh I shall, long after the flesh has decayed from my own gleaming grin, until insanity and sanity are but words scattered on a meaningless wind.