A Creature of the Crypt

From the sepulchral gloom of his charnel-house of a study, where the very air didst hang heavy with the dust of unread tomes and the cloying scent of a false genius, there arose one Elwood P. Abernathy. A soul, perchance, not born to art, but to a grotesque mimicry of it, he fashioned his life into an unhallowed tribute to the departed master, Edgar Allan Poe.

 Abernathy's visage, a ghastly pale canvas of self-congratulatory pride, was oft-pursed in a manner most befitting a man who had, with a singular lack of originality, chosen to exhume the plots and phantasms of another's mind, only to rebury them in the shallower grave of his own pedestrian prose. He was not a supplicant; nay, he was a sycophant of the highest, most abhorrent order—one who, in his utter servility, believed himself the destined successor.

​Upon a night of tempest and despair, with the storm-winds rattling the casements like the knell of some long-forgotten agony, this Abernathy, in a fit of exquisite hubris, resolved to summon the dead. He sought not counsel, not a ghostly nod of approval for his latest, most plagiaristic manuscript, but an audience for his own, self-proclaimed apotheosis. The ritual was a vile concoction of arcane words and ill-begotten purpose, a litany of vanity that did but profane the silence of the grave. And as the final, blasphemous syllable hung trembling in the air, a phantasm didst form, born not of vapour and moonlight, but of an infinitely cold and consuming literary rage.

​It was Poe, but a Poe as one would find him not in the annals of men, but in the deepest, most tormented recesses of the mind's own charnel pit. His eyes, two burning coals of vengeance and profound disappointment, pierced the very darkness of the room, and his voice—a chilling harmony of rustling crypt-cloth and the groaning of a forgotten sepulchre—didst utter a most terrible condemnation.

​"You have, in a manner most abhorrent, roused this spectral form from its perpetual repose," the spectre began, its voice a low, melodic curse. "And for what? To present this... this papyrus of intellectual decay, this grotesque monument to a soul's own barrenness? Know this, Abernathy, for it is a truth more terrible than any living interment: The sycophant doth not live, but merely haunteth the tombs of the truly departed. He is a creature of the crypt, subsisting on the effluvia of another’s genius. You have not, by God, sought to stand in my shadow; nay, you have sought to feast upon my very shade, to possess its form without its essence, its sorrow without its depth, its torment without its soul. You are a carrion-eater of narratives, a purveyor of stolen lamentations. Your so-called 'art' is but the echo of a dying gasp, repeated ad nauseam within the hollow vault of a thief's own mind. You have plagiarized not merely my words, but the very madness from which they sprang, without knowing the exquisite agony of its genesis. Go! For your soul, like your work, is a copy, an imitation, and a thing without the final dignity of death."

​The phantasm, its purpose served, dissolved into the gloom, leaving no trace but a singular, lingering chill. And Abernathy, a man who had sought to raise a genius from the dead, found his own spirit immured, a living corpse in the unholy sepulchre of his own mind. He had not merely been critiqued; he had been judged, weighed in the scales of truth and found wanting—his very being a final, horrifying plagiarism.