Decay'd Gentry (one for Edgar)

[Fenris]

Bleak and windswept, my errant ramblings led me to some time-forgotten vale, where stood a desolate and crumbling mansion; its diamond-leaded windows lit against the pale and ebbing day by fitful guttering candles; its rotting limestone pinnacles cowering low beneath sleet-laden winter skies; its wild untended gardens framed by ancient trees that flanked a weed-wracked pathway to its rotting oaken door.

With dying Phoebus now a blood-red smear upon the western hills I so resolved to shelter here out of the coming storm. Foreboding dragged my every step and cawing rooks mocked overhead as if to say "Go, stranger, for you'll find no welcome here!"

Along the gravelled path I trod and beat the door with blackthorn rod; it opened slowly; in I walked with beating heart and ne'er a thought for all the world I'd left behind, as rain and sleet and howling wind blew shut the door with crack of doom and left me peering through the gloom.

Around a table there they sat 'midst putrid food and cobwebbed vats of mouldering wine, their bony mouths gaped vacant as they grinned and laughed through time. I swayed and swooned as in a trance, my own existence thrown by chance into that hellish company who revelled as decay’d gentry - until a fearful thunderclap's reverberations brought me back to sanity. I screamed and fled to where the hillsides cried and bled.

Behind, a voice rang cold and clear: “Mock not the vanity of the dead!” With staring eye and hair turn’d white, I ran into the raving night . . .

[mousey1]

Hey I really liked this. I'm into this kind of writing, the reading of it that is. Lovely Poeishness to it. I'm not really a fan of Poe but I liked this.

I would've enjoyed reading more.

Thank-you. And welcome to the site Fenris.