The moon lit the structure from above, imparting its argent glint upon that which had appeared in the night. There was no doubt as to what it was, its two upright posts supporting a crossbeam thick and worn, a solid piece of timber from which dangled the lone noose, its end suspended above a raised platform. A gallows. A gallows impossibly set upon the hill between the trees, something my eyes—the dual orbs that engulfed the limitless barrage of photons and did nothing but witness the present—had never seen there before. Yet it was real. I was certain that what I saw was real.
For some time I didn’t move. I was fixated on the noose. It swayed back and forth, twisting in the air by the invisible hand of the wind. It had a freedom to it, a melodious sway that sung of movement unconstrained, its hoop untroubled by any head around which it was destined to be cinched. Back and forth, back and forth it continued to twist and sway and all I could do was stare—stare and stare until it started to grow, the noose getting larger, the platform and its posts and crossbeam increasing in size, swelling, filling more and more of my vision until I could make out each fibre of the deathly rope, the sausage-like thickness of the hemp, the splinters and nails that projected from the wood.
I’d walked right up to it.
My feet, carrying me of their own accord, had brought me to the gallows unaware.
I took another step, crunching the floor of fallen leaves. I reached out my hand, wanting to touch and feel the grain of the wood, perhaps to step up onto the platform, the flat board with its trapdoor, the place where feet—trembling and wet with urine—would stand, awaiting the moment when the floor was no longer there and the eternal abyss beckoned with its swift descent. The temptation was too much. I was starting to move, reaching forward, somehow wanting to know what it would feel like to—
“Many have I hanged.”
A man’s voice came from somewhere close. The quiet pain of his words froze me in place.
“Many have I hanged”, the voice said. “Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.”
I turned my head toward the sound. Hunched behind the far side of the platform was a man. He was enrobed in a woollen garb the colour of dirt, a hood pulled up over his head that showed within it nothing but the grim black of night.
“Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.” Wind blew in from the east, ruffling the man's hood, setting the noose further in its erratic swing. “Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.”
Sweat erupted along my spine, under my arms, across the nape of my neck where it ran, steady as a river in spring, to join the flood that made itself known on my back. Entire degrees were stripped from the world. I stood paralysed and cold next to the wooden gibbet, hearing repeated and repeated without end the words of a ghost. It was a ghost, I realised. Never before had I witnessed such (and never since have I seen the same) but on that night, right beside the platform that never truly was there, I was certain I was looking at a ghost—the hunched and hooded form of a hangman—one who wept a cruel and accursed sound, a sound that I cannot remove from my mind, even now, all these decades later, as though lamenting the souls he had struck from this earth.
“Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.”
He went on and on, relentless, the tremor in his voice a wraith to the spiral cochlea of my ear. In my paralytic state, I didn’t know what to do, though I became certain of something: he had no knowledge that I was there. How could he? Whatever time or space he occupied, it was not the same as mine. We were dislocated, temporally estranged, casualties of fate or chronologically entwined; a thousand other terms could describe how two beings so disparate in time could co-inhabit a singular moment. It was some error of the universe, some glitch or rift or broken seam. These words are all I can proffer as explanation.
I wanted to scream, to run, but it was as though my feet were glued to the soil. My mind defaulted, imagining that somehow the hangman’s hands slid and elongated away from from his body, racing across the ground like snakes to wrap themselves around my legs, holding me in place to suffer forever in his endless repetition. Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.
His head turned in my direction and the hood fell back, revealing the tormented lines of his face.
I screamed.
I passed out.
*
When I awoke, I was lying on the path beside the bushes. The heat of the sun bled from the ground, though I had no recollection of it having been warm the day before. It was early enough that no one had come up the hill, though if they had they would have found me there, sprawled on the floor as if drunk. They would have laughed at the corpse of my body.
My hand was swollen. It was covered in bites, a hundred tiny red spots, the trail of ants having claimed my skin, testing it with their mandibular jaws. I watched them, incapable of doing anything else, fascinated for them at the world they had discovered in such short few hours; repulsed by the swollen size of my flesh. Perhaps, I wondered, the ants thought the giant slain. Or perhaps they thought nothing at all.
Eventually, I got up, dragging my body upright. It was at that moment that I recalled what I had seen and my head shot toward the bushes and trees. There was nothing there. I knew there would be nothing there. There were only the trees in all their verdant greens and to the right the many buildings that made up the campus atop the hill, the one that looked down on the expanse and mystery below. Dawn had almost arrived, the sun still a coward behind the rise but probing the sky with its infinite rays. I stumbled down the hill, back to my dorm. I showered, got dressed. I ate breakfast with those who happened to be in the building’s kitchen. There was nothing abnormal to be found in that morning. The routine continued. I walked back up the hill to class, my eyes drawn to that place within the trees. There was nothing. The only trace of what I had seen that night was the moniker that the hill itself wore. One that remains to this day.
*
Of course, that’s how I remember it. It never happened again. For some days I tried to piece together what I had seen, trying to link the feelings spoken by the girl whose surname was a medieval tune, of the hangman whose voice repeated over and over, and of my heart, locked and incapable of beating its own blood, the organ in my chest I had extracted and offered on my palm to find it containing nothing but sunken valves. I couldn't piece it together. I still can't.
There is something else I must note, before these words I write expire. I had a friend back then, one who went to the same university. His name was The Hat. It was a strange name, one given to him by my grandfather, a man stoic and war-torn and who couldn’t understand that a cap or hat or any kind of covering for the head could be worn indoors and done so with the same freedom as a shirt. Have you seen The Hat? he would ask, and I would tell him that yes, I have, I see him often, and he would say nothing, simply nodding as though satisfied and perhaps playing witness in his mind to the conversation I might have had, the one that his brain—a brain far older and knowing than mine, having seen and outlived the cruelties of war—computed and projected towards his own inner eye. Yes, I have seen The Hat, I would repeat, and he would nod again and we would talk of something else, most likely the war.
Some months later, or perhaps it was weeks, The Hat and the girl whose name was an old English folksong—a melody that still plays out across the page as my hands form these words, undying in their pursuit for the truth—were together. This simple knowledge made me smile. Their pairing seemed correct, and with it, gradually, the confusion in my blood filtered away, lost and diluted not by time but by the glomeruli, the nephrons, the tracks of vessels that flow endlessly within.
I was, for the first time in my life, relieved.
Thank you for reading. This was the concluding part of Gibbet, which I began last week here. As with a lot of things, I wrote this semi-consciously, its meaning buried and blurred. Extract from it whatever means the most to you. Leave the rest for the hangman.
This has real Poe vibes, and I love that from you, man!
Fascinating, and scary. I assumrd the face of the hangman would be yours.