A temporary escape into harm.

[unburiable]

Dear Benjamin Rabbit,

A multitude of years have passed since the great fires of my youth, and confined as I am to the airless summit of Clemmonwest, there is still that frail sense of something yet aflame; something covered in wax, refusing to reach its death. Several years. And still, even after rains have washed most of the countryside clean, there is still that frail, unremarkable odor of the deceased, plaguing what should, in all rights, be blackened by neglect and fire.

And goes further what I did not know before and never was meant to anyway until I so clumsily burst the lock at dead grandfather’s chamber door. With a crack and a creak the old documents spilled out and as I grew to be the man I am now, I suffered no less than three heart attacks and one fall from those blasted gated courtyard steps; down I fell into the mulch laid over the grave of my childhood hound Vernon.

There was a bell ringing to me from somewhere in these caverns beyond, and had been persistent at its resounding timelessness for nearly the entire span of a half-moon. By the turn of the night I’d had just about enough of it, noticing in my exasperation a circling arc of angry yellow moons hovering over and about my head as though I’d been bludgeoned with some malicious jester’s mallet. Acquiring sufficient illuminates-in the form of a large wax candle that just barely outweighed my own arm-to aid the short walk I was about to embark upon, I withdrew from my study into the antechamber.

My footsteps, though soft, lent a faint echo to the insensitive caterwaul of whatever bell need be in song at such an hour.

Which is, if we must be forced now to ponder it, a contrivance no earthly set of hearts should have in mind to compose. That wretched bell-if indeed the word ‘bell’ could well describe such noxious palaver-was of such a pitch that truly it could be surmised by anyone that it rang only to summon cruel, musty demons into the darkness of some abysmal church service swallowed whole and forever in gulfs of forgotten ocean ridges. That was how this bell sounded to me.

Ghostly; somehow not natural.

Yet I suppose this should be taken well, knowing that at such an hour, chimes at the hand of one of my own peers might summon forth a scalpel from the nest of my medicine cabinet, warm for the flesh of said peer’s gulping throat. But that is just a wayward morning speaking. Groggy distemper cannot be held with too high a regard if somebody ends up dead, you know.

Notwithstanding, the time was just barely above the croak of Four a.m. (on the eve of the total eclipse, you’ll note). To grieve the night with a serenade of irksome bells at this point in time is not only premature, but also effectively injurious to the thick black veil rushing over this quarter of the countryside even now, under cover of perfect night and virtually traceless in its maneuvers. I dare say that if I’d been out by the moors when the horses had first neighed of its oncoming plaque, I might just have fainted (never again to wake, for though ‘tis the smallest curse of a black veil it is not one given lightly).

I wondered if the bells had much to do with the storm, but thinking soon became an irrational process of itself; there was no truer thought that to hate the bells. To stop the bells could be the only medicine tonight. Not aspirin, not soup, not drink…

Time passed considerably as I traveled many corridors and dimly lit ballrooms, all of them appearing much the same to me in this twilight gloom; shadowed enclosures all pining for the degeneracy of midnight once more, receiving for their tears nothing but sour moonlight on its carnivorous way west. The beams and balustrades of the castle all sighed at once, and such a peculiar cry it was. I gasped for breath, but oh so quietly did I.

It is all too possible I may have gathered on my stopclock the full weight of an endless hour before finally I resigned to relinquish my ineffective investigations, no matter the creeping lethargy I may inherit if falling into sleep amidst this blasted, unrepentant ringing. I’d taken ill not two weeks previous, and sometimes an illness can wrench the senses. Surely no reasonable gentleman could leave these bells to fate alone, but yet here I was, ready to give over the world and let sleep whisk me back to whatever glum high tide I’d somewhat been fished out of for this long, fruitless walk. And oh! All the while, as I began to debate my course back through the seminal Augustine Ballroom (built in 1676), still I remained haunted by that damnable golden sarcophagus chime. Ringing so, like mold that just cannot be scrubbed away. Drifting, ringing.

Even when I have admitted defeat it must chide me like a leper!

Only now that I had tried with ardent objectiveness to furnish a means to its expulsion-in turn suffering a pertinent emotional degree of failure at the sallow peal’s foot-did it seem all the more wearisome to me. Even if I were to find my study again as soon as possible, I’d not finish constructing my will (which had but days left to find a thorough trade in keeping to my heart’s fondest wishes-if my doctors can be taken seriously, anyway, which I am inclined to believe they should), and as a result of my blasted curiosity and pride I now would have to resume its execution much later in the forthcoming day.

The bare fact of this bared wrist, ready to be slapped into acquiescence, was simple enough: I had no more time with which to spare wandering.

So wandering, as it were, would have to be endured only to reverse the wretched contraptions of my ill-attended labyrinthine course. Damn me for not leaving a trail of stale breadcrumbs. Silently, to myself, I cursed my family line. I cursed them for this warren of hopeless track, and for the darkness they inherited without thought to cancel at least the physicalities of their slack attribute by hiring a generation of servants to keep these damned hallways lit!

Though to my greatest muse, however, there did seem to appear some small significant mark of passage I’d inadvertently left in my wearisome wake. This enigma proved to be footprints I’d left on the dusty oak plank boards and chiseled marble of the hallways and beyond.

Great foolish serpent! I’d learned to regard fate even subconsciously. I would have toasted my luck just then if I could only have found the damnable kitchen to pour myself a drink. Still, the smile I wore was remarkably exceeding considering the circumstances.

Not for long. My joy soon found horror to sneak a kiss from, with lips so cold a shudder passed through me all the way to the frosty bunny slippers I wore. For even with this faint aid of sorts, to guide me with bumbling splotches of smeared dust down the many strong walkways of Castle Clemmonwest, my directions seemed mottled. For surely I could not have been this desperately out of key? This inharmonious tracking of routes so delirious that not even the wiliest crocodile might choose to escape the fate of grizzly bears? Oh great devils, blast me for constructing a search party multiplied by One-under the profound influence of sleep, no less!

Could there be no end to my failures tonight?

(Oh, don’t you answer that, you damned bells!)

Suddenly my bunny slippers seemed to be mocking me. I stamped the hardwood floors to quiet their jolly parade. You are here to keep me warm, bunnies. Don’t forget! And don’t chide!

Impatiently I re-traced the clear spots my passing flight had imprinted on the stone slabs of the dusty corridors traversing every which way but to my study. Rather parallel with the perilous age-old trials of misconception leading to the near destruction of Hansel & Grettel, my past footfalls began to lack the clarity they once commanded. So perhaps, I thought, even if I’d the consuming thought to provide my steps with the memoir liquidity of breadcrumbs, might they have been soon nabbed by hidden rats just as Hansel’s had been by birds? Perhaps.

My luck, it seemed, was borne of cake frosting; licked away by the grubby mouths of thieving lepers passing by the open window of a bakery’s moist morning provisions. My stomach soon started to rumble with thoughts of all this food, which embarrassed me to some extent. A loud belly amidst such silence is enough to make a man turn red and drown himself in the Easter Henrisil River.

Until I remembered the bells. The bells would mask my stomach’s cries. Those, ugh . . . bells.

I forgot about bunnies for a moment and concentrated the barrel of my ire on the demoness “Chance,” who seemed all too giddy to show herself an eager prankster tonight. It occurred to me then that this chiming of bells might actually, in some way, be the music of chance. And if so, then who (or what) was the conductor?

It also occurred to me that anger would get me nowhere. So I faked a smile in the darkness and trudged on, hoping I might just find my way back if I slackened my tightened nerves, playing at giving up on the task if only for show (for the conductor and his bells), therefore, for all intent and purpose, jinxing my certainty . . . yet all for the better. I only had not to think about it too hard so that I couldn’t jinx my clever attempt to jinx myself, and then have the whole sordid cycle become as water to 40 days and nights. What a trick that would be!

Oh, but that was poppycock, I know. Because over-thinking a set-up jinx, even when minutely considering out-jinxing it with too much relative thought, is like jinxing the anticipated results anyway, no matter how doubled up the odds and ends are. So in that regard, I’d end up just as hopelessly lost as ever I could be, if not more if you factor in my permeating bad luck.

With my candle now barely a stump, I frowned deep into the thickening gloom. I’d never had the notion to keep matches about the hall for lighting the oil lamps, and had never thought until now what a damned well idea it would have been to hire servants, so when my candle finally decided to let go of its will, I would be stuck cursing the architects that solidified my reclusive dreams with cement and the blood of workmen’s callous hands. But such is the luck of some, and so I swallowed the bad taste of this and pretended it didn’t make my stomach churn.

If these steps grew any fainter I might truly be lost, and let daylight have my soul in whatever shape it remains…

Eventually my return to the library took an abrupt turn for the worse, as could only be expected, whereupon I eased open the charming yet destructively heavy marble door leading into the family crypt. I’d known it to be the celebrated crypt of my family from the very start, as my hands flinched when touching the icy smooth surface of the marble, but Purpose had insofar been spearheaded to such a pointless degree that I fear perhaps I’d lost interest in logic myself.

In which case the scent of the foulest past eating away at flesh became nauseously apparent. Indeed the rot here was so thick I could hear the cells of these bodies losing their grip on solidity and becoming like wet cloth as chests caved in under this lapping, all-consuming veil of gloom.

There were sixty-two subjects in all crowding this vast familial tomb, the more recent components of which negated the general outlook of time-wearied bone and cobweb in the numeric factor of Eleven. When last October the war landed kisses to the lips of my eight brothers, the bodies were immediately carried here to Castle Clemmonwest via horse drawn carriage, along with the successive corpses of three wives having the nature to willingly depart from their own lives in subsequence to the passing of their husbands.

And here before me did they still fume. The architecture of this family crypt was a gallant one, having the centuries-old foresight to trap every last mote of air and strangle it to death before it could settle in for a stay. In such circumstances as this, full decomposition of the average human body could take up to eight months. My brothers and few present wives were at a stage less black than sickly green, but still rather well kept. Their skin shone in the damp glower of my ailing candle, crawling with the drudgery of common putrefaction. Even in this mild light did I spy the eight-legged jaunt of a traveling sequence of young garden spiders. Impossible, I thought to myself. There is no oxygen with which to survive on.

And yet all around me to disprove my standard vocation of factual judgment were silky crystalline webs constructed by spiders.

Oh, tiresome evening, how you restate the obvious. Very well. With no second protest I gave in: There were spiders.

Next on the evening’s agenda was the apparent death of my candle. Always buoyant with fulfilling destiny, the heated wick became cold. The sheen from my changing relatives grew just as suddenly indistinct from the rest of the gloom.

Admitting my defeat turned out to be a rather simple process. It began and ended with a single shrug, made good by my pitching the rotten candle well into the darkness laid out in hollow silence before me. The extinguished candle collided with something soft, expelling a muffled cry, then abated.

Having not the keen knack to see in the dark-with nothing but steadfast rot to keep my eyes busy even if it were to the contrary-I resided to make good on my evening and finally fell back asleep. Consequently, my living will would have to be a day late; there was nothing now I could do about that. If I were insensible, I might have tried feeling my way back through the labyrinthine causeways and rooted channels of Castle Clemmonwest until finding my bed again. But if candles and faded dust prints were not enough to aid me in that quest, indeed even having corrupted my course enough so that I came to the journey’s end in the lowermost quarter of the castle (of all hopeless places), trudging back by way of touching walls and table tops would be a fool’s sojourn.

So Good-bye to the darkness of Thursday evening, and Hello to the livid disorder of my last remaining family. I ran my fingers along the worn edges of a thin marble footpath between two of the slabs to gain surety of its appropriation. It was thick with an oily substance I could only suppose derived from the current eradicative activities of my silent companions. Therefore it would not be accommodating to lay my head to rest on the floor, lest I suffer some frightening infection of sorts.

So with my arms out before me to test my surroundings, I sauntered cautiously to the first available bed, which happened to be the resting place of my brother Henry, as I soon correctly judged from the hoof-handled hunting knife still sheathed at the side of his waistband. I mumbled a half-hearted apology to my forlorn brethren in tones even I could not understand (nor cared to), and proceeded to slide him from the stone slab. It took some effort, the body having been melting into the marble surface for some three months now. But eventually as I pushed harder and harder-my hands sinking into the sides of his stomach and thigh-is weight gave way. The body crumpled over the far side of the slab in wet harmonious clanging that did not echo once the clangings themselves were dead. I borrowed a shroud from a neighboring corpse and cleared the wet stone of excess flesh and liquids. Then I tossed the shroud, curled up into a ball on the cold stone and fell into dreams.

I awoke some time later to precise darkness. As blank and colorless as outer space without stars.

Well rested I was, with not a misplaced yawn to drag too very far, and so I reasonably presumed time to have advanced considerably, at which prompt I found my way back into the corridor. I wiped my hands on the knees of my pajama bottoms, somewhat uneasy with the oily film of queasy grime I’d acquired from feeling my way around the crypt. There were few windows in this depression of the castle, but by what little light could be garnered by way of a watery glow seeping in from upstairs, I soon managed a course that brought me to a familiar back hall in the rear of the castle. For once finally recognizing my surroundings, it would only be a matter of personal speed that led me safely and swiftly back to my chambers.

Remarkably, yet not able to extract truly bewildered guffaws after having suffered such a pointless night of distasteful surprises, I found the entrance to my wing of the castle littered with crawling red ladybugs. The tiny black spots on their backs were like entry wounds to my eyes, but yet these thousand beetles crawled, disturbingly alive. Flew and squawked, they, like demonic sparrows. Some hooted like owls.

But all of them were eerie in their own way, silent or no. Alive. Too alive.

One of them turned crudely as I passed, and but for a moment I fancied the beastly thing to have winked at me, though surely I must have been horribly mistaken. In any case, its eyes did flash before me, and whether they made the unholy contact I perceived or not, I could see its eyes were of the grave, and black as pitch.

Devils, I repeated. Only as remarkable as a gutter. The devils have but spoken, if rather insouciantly. What curse could there be in ladybugs, after all?

So to the tuneless drone of still constant bells, I trudged forth, tired and in no mood for distant, phantom music. Or ladybugs either, regardless of how pretty (if ghostly) they were. To myself I chuckled. Terrible creatures could be beautiful, too.

How beautiful. I must truly be as tired as a man who’d been swimming across the Atlantic with a barge shipwrecked over his back. My heartbeat performed a discordant skip, nearly toppling me: The door to my study was closed.

But the thing is…I had not closed it the night before.

With caution, I entered the room then. Slowly; careful not to disturb ghosts if such entities happened to be milling about, haunting or wallowing. I chanced a cursory inspection of the closets and accompanying stairwell: all empty. At once I fled to my ivory-carved writing desk, afraid for the prosperity of my unfinished will, where to no great surprise but substantially immense horror I found that my lovely, ill-fated will (quill pen and ink vial as well) had vanished completely, without a trace.

Except that certain trace did happen to admit one fault; a clue. In place of my property now rested something I’d not laid eyes upon ever in my lifetime, so I knew it were not through mine own devices, despite how wearied or sleep-starved they were, that it had appeared.

Sitting down to my desk, I unfolded a thin yellow manuscript I’d not seen before and read aloud from it. Ladybugs were clawing at the chamber door. I wondered if they could see through it with those ghastly orbs of melancholy desire, which had previously grasped my attention in the hallway. Desire to eat my flesh, surely. I gasped, but read on, hoping even horrific ladybugs such as those were still no match for a solid oak door.

To my surprise the letter was scripted in numerous hands, and signed below by each of the authors, bearing the genuine sweeping arcs of my late brothers and sisters-in-law. A letter from beyond the grave, implying the whereabouts of my will to be none other than the very bed I crawled from this morning.

The story made itself apparent without my having to deduce a thing. How crafty these people are in death, I thought. So all the while as I slept in confusion and horrified discomfort, it seemed the corpses all around me apparently had the appalling audacity to stumble all the way up to my library, in disdainful dark, to write letters to me. What a strange turn of events, I thought. Well, I would be damned to an eternity of purgatory if I would be bullied into making yet another trip to that cold crypt, God knows where in this great haunted castle, just to retrieve my will. At least not until the following day, that is, as I’d had quite enough of the dead.

So before I got much further than a glance of the content of my letter, I offered silent jeers to the decomposing structures of my late siblings. Have a drink, lads, you’ll be settling in for some time before you’ll see my glaring eyes…

After reading the letter in full, however, I found my once affable contempt to have been summoned under false pretense. For it was not a letter of grief my dead brothers and their three wives had written to me . . . but a solemn, sad Hello. It appeared now that they had graciously been given the chance to walk the earth again in light of the present English holidays. A St. Patrick’s Day custom, a product of the rare moon? Unfortunately-or perhaps all too fortunately---the letter did not specify. But as it were, rather than disturb my fitful sleep, they’d instead decided to write me a quick note before returning to damnation. Before doing so, however, they did put forth a few inquisitions that I might wish to whisper in their ears upon a future holiday. Perhaps they were passages that would allow them to rise from death and live forever. I could not know-most of it was all in classical Latin.

After these terms of recitation they’d listed objects of particular craving-certain ancient tools and ceremonial daggers, I presumed-that I was to have in their crypt upon retrieving my will.

As for retrieving it, therefore, the letter from my brothers beyond the grave stated they’d only brought the unfinished manuscript back to the crypt so that I could finish composing it there, for it seemed there was some sort of insect infestation in this part of the castle and they feared the manuscript might be thence devoured. (So they’d come across these terrible ladybugs as well, yes? Or were their insects something more? Interesting.)

Apparently I’d not even noticed my precious writing utensils or the will itself as I felt my way blindly through the dark upon waking and back out of the crypt. They must still be down there, collecting foul scented dust, bleeding it onto my precious will.

So this surreptitious turn of events turned out not to be so very underhanded in the end. Well, in a way-for still those bells do ring! And goddamned if it does not pierce my like swords.

But that was no matter for the present moment. My daze was thick, my eyes glassy: Sleep would come soon. My instruments of text preparation were safe for the time being, even if amidst the damp mid-winter decay of the family crypt. So fitting, would you not say, for a will? Even more so when you’ll understand that in my will it is stated that my estate and all of its attributes are to be left to itself, inherited by no one on earth or in Hell. Until which time the ground caves in and we are all swallowed.

I smiled, wondering if it would hurt if I were to pass out and the heart in my chest were to stop in its tracks. Would I feel it in a dream? Dreams are surprisingly moody sometimes, so it seemed more than possible.

Before I fail to remember my obligations, the requests of my fellow in-house dead must be heeded if I’m to reclaim and finish that blasted will. And so this is why I have posted this letter to you, Benjamin Rabbit. I have also incorporated into this parcel the proper amount necessary to furnish these things, all expenses paid in gold coins pillaged from a ship off the coast of Dumont d’Urville, Antarctica when I was just a boy. Here is what I believe skeletons are wanting in exchange for my unfinished will…