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My Little Pen Shop of Horrors
BG
Once upon a midnight inky,
As I fiddled with a Dinkie,
And other quaint and curious pens from days of yore,
As a cat-nap I was catching,
Distantly there came a scratching,
Scratching, oh, so softly scratching,
from a long-unused desk drawer.
‘Must be cockroaches’ I chuckled, ‘scratching ‘round inside my
drawer – only this and nothing more.’
Tho’ I wasn’t all that sober,
I remember ‘twas October,
Waning days of late October,
When goblins walk from door to door.
How I wished that it were daytime,
Happy, sunny, bright-lit May-time,
How I wished that I could stay time,
Turn it back to times before – before I lost my one Mentmore.
That flexy-nibbed and steady flowing
Pen the angels named Mentmore.
Open then my desk I threw,
As horrified, one breath I drew,
Stared in terror at a pen that wrote and wrote inside my drawer;
Seldom slowing, never ceasing,
Steadily its ink releasing, scribbling words that kept increasing,
As it wrote inside my drawer.
The dismal darkness of my drawer.
Wrote on every scrap of paper
In my deep and dusty drawer.
Just the pen and nothing more.
“Pen,” cried I, “what dead hand steers thee? Know you not how my
heart fears thee?
Can’t you see that no one hears thee?”
But the pen did me ignore. Just kept writing, nothing more.
As I stared wide-eyed with fright, I watched that pen just write and
write,
Without benefit of light, in the night within my drawer.
It only wrote, and nothing more.
I picked up a stump of taper. “I must see what’s on that paper! Read
the words upon the paper, scraps of paper in my drawer. Read the
words and nothing more.”
With the flickering candle’s lighting, I could just make out the
writing,
Read the ghostly, ghastly writing, terror-stricken to my core.
Again, again, each time the same, the pen had written out a name,
“Whose name this is, my God, I know!”
The name was Edgar Allan Poe.
And even as I watched fixated,
Filled with terror, yet elated,
The pen that I had shone my light on, found one final scrap to write
on:
“You who yet with breath are blessed,
Whose heart still beats within thy breast,
Pray, grant me peace, I do implore,
What will you take for this Mentmore? For just this pen and nothing
more.”
“You found my Mentmore!” I was screaming. “Is this real or am I
dreaming? I can’t sell it, I adore it!
Hmmm…..
What would you give me for it?”
Nearly dead with lack of slumber, I watched Poe write out a number.
Bleary-eyed, benumbed, bedragged, I sat with that ghost and
haggled.
Talking into my desk drawer,
To a pen and nothing more.
Night’s gloom gave way to morning light; the pen had nowhere else
to write.
As distant bells began to peal,
Poe and I had struck a deal.
© 2007 BG Pentrace Halloween Story 2003
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