Upon a mantel of worm-eaten oak, they stood—a congregation of my soul’s ink pots, in creosote—a contagion of grief I had myself distilled from the rot of my own heart. Every word I had written of her—every sonnet, every lamentation, every fevered elegy—had served only to grant her a form more solid than my own, a voice more clamorous than the shrieking of the tempest.
Up the flue it went, ashes of the ink pot…a final, black prayer sent into the gaping maw of the heavens, bearing with it the last of her tenebrous shape. From this sepulcher of a chamber, wherein the very dust appeared to hold its breath in terror, I commenced my final and desperate rite. The moon, a sliver of bone in the ebon sky, offered no solace, only a spectral light that made the shadows writhe and twist into forms of purest lunacy.
And silence fell. A silence so profound, so absolute, it was a sound in itself. The chill in the room deepened, no longer the phantom presence of another, but the true and glacial cold of an abandoned soul. The whispers in the rustling tapestries were but wind. The face in the windowpane was but my own, hollowed out and strange And silence fell. A silence so profound, so absolute, it was a sound in itself. Haunting me, nevermore.
For she was gone. And in her place, a void. An emptiness so vast, so starless and abyssal, that I found myself begging, in the lunatic stillness of my mind, for even the slightest echo of her shade to return. But the flue was cold. The ashes were spent. And I, the wretch, was left alone with my cure—the exquisite and eternal torture of nothing at all.
