literature

Edward - Story of Snow Pt1

Deviation Actions

Published: Dec 27, 2010

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Literature Text

Chapter One

Sepia shadows striated the dusty wooden floorboards of a long abandoned attic. The silence was as soft as the worm eaten rafters… and yet… was there a breath softer than silence? A spider's dark shadow in the far corner against the wall shifted ever so slightly. There ran the spider, away, skittering over the bare beams, but somehow the long and crooked shadow remained.
A figure drifted from the gloom, less purposeful than the spider, yet horribly alike. It was almost as if a designer, drawing up plans for a fantastically thin and looming spectre, had conceived this very figure on paper as the true spirit of a spider, all legs, and horrid black angularity and yet had compromised in the face of practical reality and was finally able only to produce a mere insect.

No spider in a child's worst nightmare could have matched this black and ragged apparition of dust and apparent decay. The creature appeared to be composed of scraps, spare parts and limbs bound together with torturous wires and spars, and only part successfully it seemed, for the lurid silhouette creeping out from the shadows looked as if it was falling apart, trailing long rags and bits of itself. Even worse, when it emerged fully from the shadows, it disclosed the startling white face of a long-dead corpse. A corpse whose once boyish face had been brutally butchered. The thing looked as though it had no eyes, for the sockets were as deep as wells, and the skin was unhealthily purple where horrendous scars ran amok, long scoring seams connecting cheek and jaw and eyebrow. And where no skin could be seen, there was glistening blackness, and buckles tightly fastening coiled swathes of shimmering black bandages. Braces and belts snaked around a frail neck and desperately thin torso. Cords criss-crossed and corseted the meagre calves. And from the thin, black-bound arms terrible steel spikes and shears raked forth from wrists where hands never were.
Edward.

Edward had no other name. His creator had never given him one. He had never needed another because there was only one Edward, and if you had seen him you would have known it too. The people from the town below had given him another name once but he had been forgotten by them, a long time ago, or, if faint memories stirred, they had now become the stuff of legend, a tale passed down behind closed doors on Hallowe'en or on those long cold nights when the snow fell, quietly, solidly, constantly from the forested heights on which the old inventor's house stood. The attic of that old and haunted mansion was the last and best hiding place for this man-sized and frightful looking marionette, a place from which he never stirred and where eventually it was inevitable he would fade from living memory altogether.

The creature known as Edward had stirred tonight though, however. He looked exactly like a clockwork puppet of some demonic toymaker's devising as he stopped and then indecisively started jerkily forward again across the dusty attic floor, his head tilted at an unnatural angle. What had disturbed him from his dusty doll's torpor?
Suddenly the air outside rang sharply with the ring of metal on metal, a deep and resounding bell tone. The spindly black figure jumped, and scuttled back to the walls of sheltering obscurity. Then slowly, cautiously, it edged its way towards one of the bright stripes of moonlight piercing the gentle gloom of the sloping roof. Spars like ribs protruded from the attic's bulk, black against the holes of purple night sky, and, where the moon gazed in, another white face now peered out.

Down below, in the frozen avenues and frigid lawns of a wintry garden, the gate clanged once again and fell open in answer to another whack from the uplifted car jack handle, and suddenly a trio of adolescent voices burst out.
"Chayney, we can't come in here. Look, it's private - we're trespassing. C'mon, man, seriously."
"Webbo's scared, dude, check it out. Been listening to his old man too much - oh no, Webbo what's that on your face?!
"Where - I"
"Man, you are so - hey, did you hear the word gullible's been taken out of Wikipedia...?"
The voices trailed off. The white face, overshadowed by a gable end, drew back into the soft darkness.

Close against the attic wall and back in what seemed to be its habitual corner, the sinister creature that looked so much like a member of the undead, actually seemed to be… trembling. The alarming white face under its wild and straggling mane of unkempt black tangles was turned towards a large doorless archway right on the other side of the attic, the coal black eyes trained unblinkingly on the gaping blackness, and the whole spider-like body seemingly tensed ready to leap on anything that ventured through. But the desolate hunching of the shoulders and the continual flinching provoked by the least innocuous sound was more indicative of fear than menace. And just now there had surely been a soft whimper that was almost lost in the eternal background lament of the wind as it rushed through the ragged lattices of the roof space.
Edward dropped his head. And at this angle, in this light, as the pale moonbeams gently washed away the worst of the disfiguring scars, subtly illuminated the graceful line of the cheek, and lit a soft glow in the big dark eyes, the awful monster of local legend just looked like a lost little boy, small, abandoned, and scared.

Stark moonlight and deep blue shadows cast by yew and privet sliced the garden into ribbons of light and darkness as the three teenaged boys cautiously wended their way deeper into the old inventor's demesne. Two of them, the tall gangly redhead with long arms sticking well out of his outgrown cuffs, a scruffy knapsack on his back, and the shorter thickset dark lad with the beady eyes, like a rat who'd grown fat on greasy cheese, hung back slightly before a dark hedgeway arch.
The third boy, who was clearly the brains of the operation, strode forwardly determinedly, swinging the car jack casually as he disappeared under the arch. If he was at all apprehensive, the regular if slightly calculating features under the mop of thick blonde hair didn't show it. There was something about the set determination of the boy's jaw, the way the neck tendons had tensed into hard cords, the physique which looked born of steroids and the tendency of the blue eyes to fix into a hard stare, showing a little too much white around the edges, which would have been recognized all too quickly by those who'd done a spell inside.

"C'mon Dean," the blonde jock called over his shoulder, "Webbo, you little goofball, you can change your underwear later, hurry up!".
Ginger-haired Dean grinned and barged his furious mate forward to follow the blonde boy.
"Yeah, well, Chayne, how about giving me the jack then, big guy?" the smaller boy yelled after him and, as he and his mate caught up, he muttered "You weren't so tough when we broke into the old Boggs place, were you?"
The three boys halted suddenly as an immense and terrifying shape loomed out of the twilight before them.
"Argghhh!"
"Shut your face, Webbo, you div, it's just a mangy old bush."
"It looks like a freaking tarantula. What kind of space cake cuts up trees to look like spiders?"
"It's a hand, you moron. They say he wants hands, but he hasn't got any, so he just keeps making the things he wants out of trees."

They passed a huge topiary maiden, stiffly pirouetting in the pale moonshine. A few flakes of white drifted silently.
"Now what?"
"They say you're close when you see the snow, don't they, Chayney."
"It's not snow. It's ice. He makes it."

Chapter Two

Whirling eddies of gently gathering whiteness almost masked the three figures, who stood stiff and staring at one another. The mansion looming blackly behind them seemed to hold its breath also.
Suddenly one of the figures doubled over with loud braying laughter, and almost as if in mortified answer, the glistening flakes thinned out then ceased altogether.
A look of shame-faced relief broke out on the rat-like features of Webster, but the blonde Chayne only frowned slightly, knelt and softly brushed the ground with his finger tips.
The snow had begun to settle on the courtyard flags and on the shoulders of the hedge maiden. The boy took some of the feathery whiteness between thumb and forefinger, and rubbed it absently, his eyes on the ground, unseeing, thoughtful.
He twisted, still kneeling, and stared up, beyond the faces of his two laughing companions, at the shadowy walls towering obliquely above, and the dark window inset high up near the roof. Then his gaze fell to the massive and forbidding ironbound door, looming over a grim flight of icy grey stone steps just a little way beyond them now.
"It must have been here..." murmured the blonde boy softly.

Straightening up, he hefted the jack to his left hand, shifted the backpack he carried and started walking towards the house. Without a backward glance he strode quickly and fearlessly up the snow covered flight of stairs towards the door. The other two stopped laughing immediately, and gingerly followed him
"So we're still going in, are we? It's all hokum, about the ice and all that, it's just snow-"
Chayne stopped and turned slowly to face them, his hand resting boldly on the scrolling black ironwork of the gigantic latch which secured the door.
"I've lived in this town all my life. Even when I was little I remember it snowing. Every December. It's like a proper Christmas card, only, somehow, nobody goes out in it. Well, almost nobody... And I always wondered why." The two boys were silent, staring at Chayne.
"Have you never looked at it, up close? Have you never watched the weather forecast round here? The one where the weather guy always says it's gonna be cold but fine, because we're in one of the only states where another place'd have to freeze over first before it actually snowed here?"
Chayne drew breath, and pushed open the door, "It's never been just snow."
As the three of them entered the musty, dim interior of the mansion, squinting while their eyes adjusted to the gloom after the clinical purity of the white landscape outside, nobody noticed the curiously eager look on the blonde boy's face.
"It shows he's alive..."

Chapter Three

Chayne's words echoed ominously around the cavernous and cobweb hung chamber they now found themselves in. For a moment all three shrank back towards the door - with good reason. A less welcoming foyer you could never wish to see. On this side of the massive arched doorway, another broad flight of narrow stone steps ran straight down to the floor level, but the steps themselves were chipped, worn and treacherous. Beyond these spread a hall of imposing proportions, paved with massive weathered flagstones. The place was dimly and unsuccessfully lit on the very far side by a series of three arched windows, which somehow failed to achieve perfect symmetry and thereby succeeded only in presenting the handiwork of some flawed architect, like three rents clawed in the bare stone by a giant hand. Some distance away, in the very centre of the chamber, a broad silver staircase rose up, curving back on itself above the onlookers' heads, leading to unknown heights above. About halfway up the staircase a monstrous silver chandelier hung in twisted furls from a massive silver chain, and the single sweeping balustrade, which was equally sinuous and tormented in its silver scrollwork, was terminated at its foot by a newel post in the form of a rusted and frozen phantom, rearing up, presumably to punish foolhardy interlopers.
The boys remained speechless, and for an instant it seemed as if the silver banshee at the foot of the stairs had, in addition to its ugliness, a gorgon's ability to turn its beholders into stone. But then Dean moved forward incredulously, and his voice faltered ever so slightly as he turned to Chayne.
"Give me a break, you don't believe that story, all that junk about the boogeyman with the scissors?"
"No," answered Chayne, and Dean looked relieved. "Not the story where they said he was dead."
Dean looked worried again.

Chayne moved across the echoing stone flags towards the flight of stairs. The other boys followed, cautiously, avoiding the outstretched metal phantom at its foot and staring up at the shining curve ascending into the darkness.
"Nobody ever saw the body," Chayne resumed, "They said she just came out. With a hand."
"Eww!" Webster made a face, and involuntarily his eyes darted about in the crepuscular light of the hall.
"Not a real hand, dummy, just a bunch of knives and scissors."
"Really? Those are his hands? "
Chayne stopped short, his foot on the bottom step of the winding staircase.
"Just what do you two think we're really doing up here then?" he asked.
Dean came over to the foot of the stairs and stood in front of Chayne, arms folded belligerently. The tall, rangy red head stared down at the blonde boy, who was slightly shorter, but more muscular in frame from his many days out on the pitch.
"Well, I thought we were going to come up here, check it out and if isn't totally falling down, use it as our new hangout. Then we just keep spreading the ghost stories, and people will remember to stay away, just like they already do," His tone of voice became slightly mocking, "But I didn't think you believed in any of it."
For a fraction of a second, Chayne froze, and the whites of those intense blue eyes gleamed unnaturally around the edges, as if the boy's whole face had petrified into rigor mortis while the eyes remained alive, milky and staring behind a rigid deathmask. But suddenly his focus shifted beyond Dean, to the stairs, and something lying on one of the steps.
"You don't believe it?" he asked quietly, stepping past Dean and reaching down,"What's this then?".
And he waved aloft a dusty bundle of long, horrific-looking blades.

Chapter Four

All three stood as if transfixed, repelled yet fascinated by this unexpected proof of what they'd all thought was just a local ghost story.
The scissor hand was a lot more horrific in real life than they had ever imagined when hearing the story behind closed doors as kids. The blades were a good two foot long, composed of an imaginative assortment of round-handled scissors and shears of varying lengths, roughly mimicking the composition of fingers on a human hand, riveted and bound together in such an ingenious way that it was clear to see the owner could perform any number of dextrous movements. But overall, the ferocious and lethal nature of such a hand was evident. And the owner had more than one such hand.
"Chayne, I'm not sure we should be here," gulped Webster, even as Chayne swung round, intent on bounding up the stairs. At the same instant Dean sprang in front and blocked him and the two were struggling angrily, when all of a sudden, as if in answer to the outburst, a dark shadow fell over them and a perfect eddy of white flakes silently whirled down the twilit stairwell.
Even Chayne's nerve broke at that, at the snow actually falling from inside the house and all three raced for the door, pursued by the snow storm which continued fast and furious in their wake.
Outside, the boys' voices quickly receded into the distance. "Yeah, and we don't need a new place anyhow. It's crazy, we just moved all our stuff into your old man's garage, didn't we, Chayney? Chayney...?"
"...Yeah." The blonde boy was hardly listening as he stuffed a hastily wrapped object into his bag…

Inside the mansion the air was still filled with the aftermath of the sudden and violent blizzard. Angry flecks still swirled densely down the sweeping spiral of stairs, billowing thickest on the landing, but occasionally disclosing glimpses of a massive white, spectral shape. However, as all became peaceful once more among the moonlit banks of frosted summer flowers outside, the flakes became more scarce and, finally, abated. The gigantic white shape resolved itself into the towering ice figure of a dancing girl. Some distance beyond it stood the slender, black, silver-taloned figure of the sculptor.
Edward was now standing motionless at the large window overlooking the garden, as he had done once before, many years ago. His dark eyes, shadowed round with purple like a sick child who has never seen the sun, stared down emptily from the strangely young face marred by the hideous, raised scars and the deathly pallor. Only the slight shirring sound from scissors softly opening and closing betrayed any sign of life as he stood there, framed against the moonlight.
After what seemed like hours of silent contemplation, Edward jerkily spun about, carefully holding his hands well away from his sides, where there were slightly more tears in the strange buckled remnants and straps of placeholder leather that seemed to serve him as a sadly unfinished suit of skin.
"Hello Edward." whispered a voice from the shadows.
Next

Fiction about Edward Scissorhands. More coming very soon, so keep watching and I'll keep adding onto this file

. The boys have a sinister reason for trespassing, one of them more than the others, and Edward won't be able to hide in his attic for much longer.

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