Dark Degas
The Accursed Legacy
Author's Note: This play is a work of fiction. While it references real historical institutions and events, the specific documents, characters, and archival records depicted herein are purely products of the author's imagination.
DARK DEGAS: THE ACCURSED LEGACY. © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Dramatis Personae
- EDWARD BLACKWOOD (26): Night Archivist of the Subterranean Rare Manuscripts Vault at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He wears an immaculate black wool waistcoat, dark tailored frock coat, and a high, stiffly starched white collar. His face is pale, with sharp, brooding features and dark, slightly disheveled hair—a striking, living double of Edgar Degas’s youthful self-portrait. His demeanor is rigidly British: glacial, analytical, and armored in quiet intellectual superiority.
- BETHEAL (Age Indiscernible): A tall, gaunt figure draped in an ancient, frayed gray tweed overcoat. His posture is stooped, yet he radiates a suffocating vertical menace. His hands are unnaturally elongated, with translucent gray skin and knobby, root-like fingers. His voice lacks human breath; it is a hypnotic, raspy whisper—a blend of dry rot, grinding stone, and crushed velvet.
The Setting
A subterranean stone vault beneath the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Ribbed Gothic arches of damp, centuries-old limestone rise into impenetrable darkness. Towering oak bookshelves line the walls like silent monoliths. The air is thick with the scent of decaying vellum, iron gall ink, sealing wax, and subterranean chill.
Center stage stands a heavy Jacobean oak reading table. Upon it rests a brass banker’s lamp with an emerald-green glass shade, carving a harsh, sickly circle of light out of the gloom. Stage left, slightly elevated on a wooden dais, is EDWARD’s desk. Upstage center, a pointed stone archway leads into the pitch-black spiral stairwell. High up on the right wall, narrow ground-level leaded windows tremble under the relentless assault of an English thunderstorm.
Note on Stage Time
This piece requires an agonizing dilation of time. Silences between lines are not empty pauses, but psychological battlegrounds. Every minute sound—the turning of a vellum leaf, the creak of oak, the tapping of a fingernail—must be executed with ritualistic deliberation, weaving an atmosphere of Gothic dread and intellectual seduction.
Scene One
Total darkness for ten seconds. Only the steady thrashing of rain against the high leaded glass and the slow, metallic ticking of an unseen grandfather clock are heard.
The brass pull-chain of the banker’s lamp clicks sharply. The emerald light blooms over the center table, casting a ghostly peripheral glow onto EDWARD, seated motionless at his desk. Framed by shadows, he looks precisely like a nineteenth-century oil portrait. He holds a small octavo volume. He reads.
Two full minutes of stage time elapse. Edward turns a single page. The crisp rustle of rag paper cuts through the vault. He returns to absolute stillness.
Suddenly, the ticking of the unseen clock stops dead. The interior silence becomes suffocating.
From the pitch-black archway comes a slow, scraping sound. A heavy shoe dragging across flagstones. Pause. Another dragging step.
Edward does not raise his head. His eyes merely freeze mid-sentence. He listens. With infuriating academic composure, he lays a black silk ribbon across the open crease, closes the small book, and rests his pale hands atop it.
From the archway emerges BETHEAL. He seems to glide over the stone floor without the slightest rustle of fabric, stopping before the mahogany barrier that divides the entryway from the reading room. His face is concealed beneath the sodden brim of a dark hat and his upturned collar. Only his monstrous hands enter the light, resting upon the polished wood like two bleached, withered spiders.
A long, breathless silence.
EDWARD
(Without looking at the visitor, his voice crisp, clipped, and detached)
Duke Humfrey’s Library and the upper reading rooms closed two hours ago. This is the restricted subterranean vault. No scholars are admitted after dusk.
Betheal does not reply. His right index finger—abnormally long and crooked at the joint—rises and lets its yellowed nail fall against the mahogany. Tap. Five seconds. Tap. Five seconds. Tap. The sound is hollow, like a knuckle rapping on a coffin lid.
BETHEAL
(A raspy, seductive murmur that seems to echo from the stone walls themselves)
The rain above washes the moss from the gargoyles, young custodian. Yet down here, beneath the weight of Oxford’s bones... not a single syllable is ever washed away.
EDWARD
(Finally raising his cold, analytical gaze)
If you have lost your bearings in the quadrangle tunnels, the porter’s lodge is at the top of the northern stair. He will escort you past the gates.
BETHEAL
I do not seek the gates. I have come to retrieve a manuscript that belongs to me... by right of prior claim.
EDWARD
Nothing housed within these walls belongs to private individuals. Everything here is the inalienable property of the University. You may submit a formal requisition slip at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, countersigned by the Keeper of Western Manuscripts.
BETHEAL
(Leaning slightly forward)
Tomorrow is a mortal vanity. I require it tonight.
Betheal tilts his chin upward a fraction. The emerald glow of the lamp grazes his ash-gray lips, leaving the upper half of his face drowned in two sockets of bottomless shadow.
BETHEAL
Folio M-Forty-One. The Chelmsford Assizes Registry. Anno Domini sixteen forty-five.
A heavy silence. Edward’s jaw tightens imperceptibly. His pale fingers press slightly harder against his closed book, though his posture remains rigidly composed.
EDWARD
Folio M-Forty-One is suppressed from the general Bodleian catalog. It is kept in the iron quarantine press due to severe parchment blight and... irregular provenance. How did you acquire that shelfmark?
BETHEAL
(A cruel, thin smile stretching his dry skin)
I was present when the clerk sharpened his goose quill. I breathed the damp straw of the dungeon where the deposition was taken. And I possess the requisite credentials.
With reptilian slowness, Betheal reaches into the breast of his gray overcoat and withdraws a stiff, blackened vellum card embossed with tarnished silver seals. He slides it across the mahogany counter.
Edward rises from his desk. He walks with measured, unhurried steps to the counter. He does not touch the card; he merely bends slightly to inspect the archaic Latin inscription. He notices that despite the torrential downpour raging outside, the stranger’s tweed coat is bone-dry and exudes a faint, suffocating odor of scorched earth, ozone, and charnel dust.
EDWARD
A Perpetual Fellow’s Charter bearing the seal of Archbishop Laud... Though this form of dispensation has not been issued in three centuries, the statute of perpetual privilege has never been formally repealed by Convocation.
BETHEAL
Ancient institutions are bound by their ancient covenants. Bring me the volume. I shall take it with me into the night.
EDWARD
(With icy finality)
Out of the question. Sir Thomas Bodley’s foundational statute forbids any volume from leaving this chamber—not even for the King himself. If you wish to examine Folio M-Forty-One, you may do so at that table, beneath that lamp, with neither ink nor blade upon your person, and under my continuous scrutiny. Those are the terms.
Betheal stares at him from the dark sockets of his face. A dry, rattling wheeze—like dead leaves dragged across gravel—escapes his throat.
BETHEAL
Your devotion to the letter of the law is... exquisite, Edward. I accept the table. And I most gladly accept your gaze.
Edward’s eyes narrow slightly at hearing his Christian name spoken by a stranger, yet he offers no remark. He turns sharply and disappears into the pitch-black labyrinth of the rear stacks.
Betheal remains motionless at the counter, only his head swiveling with unnatural smoothness as he tracks Edward’s footsteps in the dark. Slowly, Betheal raises one gaunt hand toward the green lamp; the shadow cast upon the limestone wall behind him does not resemble a man in an overcoat, but a towering, horned silhouette with jagged, wing-like contours.
From the depths of the vault comes the clank of an iron grate unlocking, followed by Edward’s returning footsteps.
Edward emerges carrying a massive, decaying folio bound in blackened calfskin and secured with corroded brass clasps. He places it squarely in the center of the emerald circle of light. A cloud of centuries-old dust rises into the beam.
Betheal glides around the counter and sits at the oak table, facing the audience, his profile toward Edward. Edward retreats to his desk on the dais, remaining standing, his hands resting on the lectern like a courtroom prosecutor.
Betheal lays his long, root-like fingers flat upon the cracked leather cover. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply, savoring the decay.
BETHEAL
Listen to the skin of this binding, boy... Unborn calf, cured in alum and gall in the year sixteen forty-five. Do you know why ordinary scholars tremble when they descend into these vaults? Because they fancy that books are dead things. You and I know better.
EDWARD
Old vellum retains organic collagen and iron sulfates. It is elementary chemistry, not metaphysics. You have forty minutes before the night watch bolts the upper iron doors.
Betheal unlatches the brass clasps. Slowly, he lifts the heavy cover. The spine groans like a dry vertebra snapping.
He turns the first leaf. Then the second. Yet he does not look down at the parchment. His pitch-black eye sockets are locked entirely onto Edward’s pale face across the room. His crooked fingers stroke the handwriting blindly, caressing the ink.
Twenty seconds pass in suffocating silence, broken only by the slow turning of pages—Tap... Rustle... Tap—and the unblinking stare between archivist and visitor.
EDWARD
(His voice cold, though a tremor of tension tightens his posture)
The manuscript lies upon the table, sir. Not upon my countenance.
BETHEAL
Does it? Sometimes the portrait and the lineage are so uncannily identical that the eye cannot tell where the parchment ends and the flesh begins. Look at this script on folio nine... Iron gall ink mixed with vitriol. And here, at the foot of the deposition... a rust-colored smear that the clerk attempted to scrape away with a penknife. That is not ink. It is arterial blood.
EDWARD
The assize clerks of the English Civil War recorded testimonies inside the gaols. Contamination was routine.
BETHEAL
(His voice dropping into a velvet, hypnotic purr)
Ah, but this was no accident. It was pressed there by a thumb. Deliberately. As a seal... Tell me, Edward, do you sleep soundly when you climb out of this stone sepulcher at dawn?
EDWARD
My nocturnal habits are not cataloged for public inquiry.
BETHEAL
You do not sleep. I see the violet bruising beneath your eyelids. You pace your rooms above the misty lanes of Oxford, listening to the shallow breathing of a mediocre world. Pompous dons parroting dead men’s footnotes, gilded undergraduates rutting in the dark... You despise them all. You bury yourself alive in this vault because the living disgust you. Because you feel a phantom hunger in your marrow—a debt left unpaid before you were ever born.
Edward says nothing. His knuckles whiten against the edge of his desk. Betheal turns another leaf with a sharp crack.
BETHEAL
Hear the words recorded at the Chelmsford Assizes on the nineteenth night of November, sixteen forty-five: "Being examined by Master Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, as to whence he procured the ciphered tables of Doctor Dee and the black scrying glass wherewith he divined the movements of Parliament’s armies, the prisoner answered that no mortal tutor instructed him; that he summoned in the dead of night Him who walks behind the shadow, for the learning of Oxford is but ashes to a mind that thirsts for omnipotence..."
The green banker’s lamp flickers violently, though there is no draft in the vault. The temperature plummets; Edward’s breath plumes white in the frigid air.
BETHEAL
He was an extraordinary scholar. Twenty-six years of age. Precisely your years. He possessed your high, pale forehead, your aristocratic disdain... When Hopkins cast him into the dungeons of Colchester Castle, they deprived him of sleep for nine days and nights. They drove three-inch iron bodkins into his flesh searching for the Devil’s insensible mark. The Puritan magistrates expected him to weep and beg for Christ’s mercy. Do you know what he did instead?
EDWARD
(Barely above a whisper, drawn against his will)
He remained silent.
BETHEAL
He laughed in their faces. With his wrists shattered in the irons and blood pooling in his collar, he recited in flawless Greek the forbidden mechanics of the celestial spheres that I had whispered into his ear in this very library. And when they dragged him to the gallows in Chelmsford market square and dropped him from the ladder, he strangled on the hemp rope without ever uttering his Master’s name. He died before his twenty-four allotted years had elapsed... leaving my ledger unbalanced.
EDWARD
The ravings of a mind broken by judicial torture. Nothing more.
BETHEAL
(Slowly rotating the massive folio on the oak table so it faces Edward)
Then step down from your perch and read the name of the condemned upon the indictment. Read the blood-signature he left for his progeny before the hangman broke his neck.
A tremendous peal of thunder shakes the subterranean stones. Dust rains softly from the vaulted ribs above.
As if pulled by invisible wires, Edward steps down from the wooden dais. His movements are slow, somnambulistic. He takes one step toward the table. Then another.
Betheal leans forward into the harsh emerald light. His skin is translucent gray parchment stretched taut over bone, spider-webbed with pulsing black veins. His eyes are two wells of liquid pitch.
BETHEAL
His name was yours. Master Edward Blackwood of Magdalen College.
Edward stops at the edge of the table, staring down at the bloodied vellum. His pupils dilate; his chest rises and falls in shallow gasps.
BETHEAL
(His voice swelling into a resonant, polyphonic seduction that vibrates through the floor)
The Puritans thought his line extinguished on that gibbet, yet the bastard child he sired in secret carried his blood down through the centuries—generation after generation of quiet misery, culminating in you, standing upon the very flagstones where he first called my name. Did you truly believe your obsession with this vault was mere academic curiosity, Edward? I shepherded your bloodline back to this cellar.
Edward’s knees weaken. He sinks slowly into the chair opposite the Beadle. The monstrous shadow on the wall behind the entity swells upward, spreading across the bookshelves like a living black canopy.
EDWARD
(In a hollow, entranced monotone, his gaze fixed on the creature's abyssal eyes)
In my dreams... the smell of wet hemp... and a voice calling my name from beneath the floorboards...
BETHEAL
It is the supreme law of the pit. Omne debitum solvendum est. Every debt must be paid in full. The hangman cut his thread ten years before our covenant matured. When a debtor perishes prematurely by mortal interference, the spiritual lien descends upon the heir of his blood. You are the living codicil to this parchment.
EDWARD
(Speaking like a man submerged in deep water)
If the lien falls upon my blood... if I am bound to honor the remnant of his contract... then the uncollected price is also mine to claim. I shall surrender nothing without receiving what was promised.
The Beadle’s mouth parts in a triumphant, hideous grin. The air thickens with the stench of sulfur and dead roses.
BETHEAL
There speaks the undiluted arrogance of the Blackwoods! That is the music I hungered to hear. I do not offer you vulgar gold or the flesh of harlots, Edward. I offer you what your ancestor bartered his eternity to possess: the lost keys of Enoch, the burned scrolls of Alexandria intact within my memory, the unmaking of time and matter, the power to crush every petty academic who ever dared look down upon you... Complete dominion over the mysteries of the earth!
Betheal extends his withered, claw-like right hand across the bloodstained page of Folio M-41, palm upward, waiting.
BETHEAL
Lay your hand in mine. Ratify your ancestor’s seal, and let the ancient ink flow anew.
Absolute silence. Even the lashing rain outside ceases completely.
Edward’s pale right hand rises slowly from the table. It trembles in the emerald light. Inch by inch, his fingers drift toward the Beadle’s cadaverous palm. The towering shadow on the wall arches over them like jaws preparing to snap shut.
Edward’s fingertips hover a hair’s breadth above the creature’s dead skin.
A five-second pause.
Suddenly, the trembling in Edward’s hand stops completely. His fingers freeze with surgical precision.
Edward blinks once. The glassy stupor vanishes from his eyes, replaced instantly by a look of devastating, Arctic lucidity and profound intellectual boredom. Smoothly, he withdraws his hand, folds his arms across his chest, and leans back in the oak chair, adjusting the cuff of his shirt.
EDWARD
(In a tone of dry, cutting Oxford condescension)
It is frankly pathetic that an entity of your purported antiquity should display such a dismal grasp of both metaphysical bureaucracy and English Common Law.
The Beadle’s head jerks back as if struck. His extended hand twitches in the void. The monstrous shadow on the limestone wall wavers and shrinks slightly.
BETHEAL
(A guttural hiss)
What insolent drivel is this?! Your mind was bound in my glamour! Your blood compels you!
EDWARD
(Leaning forward, planting both palms flat on the table, invading the green light with total authority)
My mind was never under your glamour; I merely played the somnambulist to compel you to state, for the record, the exact terms of your fraudulent claim. As for my blood—allow me to educate you, since you clearly neglect the legal glosses.
Edward taps the open parchment sharply with his index finger.
EDWARD
Under the foundational doctrine of Privity of Contract, a covenant cannot confer rights or impose obligations upon any person who is not a party to it. Furthermore, both in Common Law and in every respectable theological court from Aquinas onward: Actio personalis moritur cum persona. A personal action dies with the person. Damnation is strictly non-transferable.
BETHEAL
(Slamming his claws onto the oak table)
He pledged his lineage! The Witchfinder cheated me of ten years of his service!
EDWARD
A lie—and a remarkably clumsy one. The first Edward Blackwood bargained for forbidden wisdom in exchange for his soul upon the hour of his death. You delivered that wisdom; by your own admission, he recited your celestial geometry in Colchester dungeon. And when Matthew Hopkins dropped him from the gallows in Chelmsford square, his soul departed his body and you collected it in full. The contract was discharged by complete performance in November sixteen forty-five. You have no claim upon me. You came slithering in here tonight like a desperate bailiff hoping to trick an ignorant heir into signing a fresh indenture.
With a swift, decisive movement, Edward seizes the heavy leather boards of Folio M-41 and slams the volume shut directly in the Beadle’s face, forcing the creature to snatch its hands back. The crack echoes through the vault like a pistol shot.
Edward stands, drawing the massive tome under his arm with proprietary calm.
EDWARD
Did you truly flatter yourself that you led me to Oxford? I applied for this post four years ago specifically to gain access to the quarantine press. I traced every parish register from Essex to London until I uncovered the bastard line of Edward Blackwood. I have examined Folio M-Forty-One under ultraviolet light for a thousand nights before you ever dragged your heels down those stairs. In fact, it was I who intentionally entered its shelfmark into the public registry three days ago as bait—waiting to see if the parasite would come sniffing after dead ink.
Betheal rises from the chair with a deafening, sub-human roar that makes the green glass shade of the lamp crack down the middle. The bulb sparks violently. The creature’s overcoat billows as if filled with a freezing gale.
BETHEAL
Arrogant mortal filth! Do you think a courtroom quibble can shield you from the abyss?! I can shatter your sanity where you stand! I can bring these tons of wet limestone crashing down to entomb you alive!
EDWARD
(Unflinching, meeting the monster's glare with icy contempt)
You cannot so much as overturn an inkwell without my permission.
Edward takes a deliberate step toward the entity. Astonishingly, it is Betheal who recoils half a pace.
EDWARD
I have studied your taxonomy far more thoroughly than you have studied my pedigree, Mephistopheles. You and your kind are mere scavengers of human appetite. You possess no jurisdiction over matter unless mortal desire opens the latch for you. Ambition, greed, the terror of mortality, the hunger for forbidden shortcuts... My ancestor fell because he craved godhood. The Doctor Faustus of the chapbooks fell because he was a restless glutton. Now look closely at me.
The monstrous shadow on the wall collapses inward, peeling away from the vaulted ceiling like dissolving soot.
EDWARD
What can Hell possibly offer a man who desires nothing? I crave neither fame, nor gold, nor flesh, nor supernatural parlour tricks. All the wisdom I require is already bound in leather upon these shelves, meticulously cataloged, and my own intellect is quite sufficient to master it in peace. My earthly desires are entirely satisfied within the silence of this vault. You are a peddler standing before a man who does not buy. My soul, sir, is entirely out of your budget.
Betheal seems to shrivel inside his gray tweed coat. His imposing height collapses into the stooped, pathetic frame of a defeated beggar. His knobby hands tremble as he clutches the back of the chair.
BETHEAL
(A wet, venomous hiss of pure impotence)
You will rot alone in this stone sepulcher, Blackwood... Cold, unloved, forgotten by the living... Your own lucidity shall be your coffin...
EDWARD
Wrong again. My solitude is not my damnation; it is my fortress.
Edward withdraws a silver pocket watch from his waistcoat, glances at the dial, and snaps the lid shut.
EDWARD
Reading hours are concluded, and your reader’s privilege is permanently revoked for attempted theft of University property. Vacate my library.
Edward raises his arm and points rigidly toward the pitch-black stone archway.
Betheal fixes him with one final glare of distilled, ancient hatred, yet his form is already unraveling at the edges. Without a sound, the creature staggers backward into the archway. Rather than climbing the stairs, his silhouette simply disintegrates into the gloom like a handful of black ash scattered by a draft.
The instant he vanishes, the unseen grandfather clock resumes its steady, metallic ticking, and the clean, rhythmic murmur of the rain returns to the high leaded windows.
Edward stands alone in the center of the vault. His breathing is calm, unhurried. With the exact same deliberate parsimony as at the opening of the play, he walks back up onto his dais, unlocks a heavy iron drawer in his desk, places Folio M-41 inside, and turns the key twice.
He sits down. He smooths the lapels of his dark frock coat, reopens his small octavo volume, removes the black silk ribbon, and resumes reading at the exact word where he left off.
The green banker’s lamp on the center table clicks off by itself. Only a faint, cold side-light remains, carving Edward’s pale, stoic face out of the surrounding blackness—identical to Degas’s immortal portrait, sovereign and untouchable in the dark.
Slow fade to black.
CURTAIN
DARK DEGAS: THE ACCURSED LEGACY. © 2026 by BENJAMIN GAVARRE is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
