Divine 05 - Nevermore Read online

  Then the cabin door blew open and in rushed a cloaked Edgar Allen Poe. He swung an ax at the monster and its head came off. It hit the wall, rebounded and rolled across the floor toward me. There was no blood, just black sludge that splattered my pants. The jaws kept snapping and I tried frantically to kick it away, but my muscles wouldn’t cooperate.

  There are degrees of horrible things. Horrible things that embarrass, things that anger—horrible things that could only, please God, happen to other people. And then there was this. This was the horrible thing that couldn’t happen at all, not if the sun still rose in the east and God was in heaven.

  Clearly, I thought, this was all just a terrible nightmare, which was actually a bit of a relief.

  Then Poe swung back around to look at me. He picked up the biting head and chucked it out the door, and I finished my performance of useless horror victim clichés by fainting at his feet.

  Chapter 2

  “A poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”

  —Edgar Allen Poe from The Philosophy of Composition

  I came to awareness slowly and reluctantly. My vision was blurred and at first I thought that I was at the family apple ranch in Pollock Pines and seeing my father splitting some kindling. Dad had often cut wood with an ax for our potbellied stove and it did not seem that odd that he would be doing it inside the cabin since it was raining. But as my vision cleared I became aware of several alarming things, not the least of which was that the man with the ax was not my father and that what he was chopping up had never been a tree.

  “Lay still,” the soft and somehow familiar voice suggested. That seemed like a very good idea though the floor was hardly comfortable. “You’ve had a shock.”

  “You look like Edgar Allen Poe. Without the mustache and with long hair,” I said after a moment and then wondered why I wasn’t screaming. A normal person would scream if they saw a man with an ax toss a twitching and blackened arm into a fire.

  “That’s because I was Edgar Allen Poe. Long, long ago.” I accepted this as true and not because of the probably sensible advice about not arguing with madmen. It was just easier to believe what he said, to not fight for a more reasonable explanation. Also, that little voice inside that might be called intuition said that I was not in danger. From him. Whatever event had threatened me was passed.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know… anything. And I feel numb.”

  “That is to be expected. The lightning is strong here and you were… bitten in a vein. The remedy can cause some temporary amnesia and hypothermia. The fire will be ready soon though and I can prepare food for you if you have an appetite.”

  “Was it a snake?” I asked, though I knew it couldn’t have been. Snakes didn’t have legs and—talons. What that a talon at the end of the leg he was stuffing in the fire? It couldn’t be. I had to still be in some hypnagogic state brought on by cold and terror, perhaps I was even unconscious and dreaming.

  Though he had told me to be still, I forced myself onto one arm so that I could better see what was happening. I became aware that my chest hurt and looked down to find my bloody blouse unbuttoned almost to my waist and a strange circular burn over my heart. My bra was in place but filthy with mud and leaves and charred at the lacy edges. I smelled smoky. The left shoulder of blouse was torn and bloody. My sweater was missing. I made an effort to button up but it was futile.

  “What happened? Where’s the chair?” I asked, finally noticing it was gone.

  The man who looked like a fantasy version of Poe stopped mid-swing and studied me. His eyes were black as any moonless night. They assessed me calmly as he weighed responses.

  “The chair is outside,” he finally said and returned to his work. “It is distressingly dirty and must be cleaned before it is used again.”

  Distressingly dirty? Well so was I. My clothes were beyond salvation and I was glad I hadn’t opted for my best black wool dress. I never quite knew what I should wear to a cemetery or even what went best with a broken heart years after it should have mended. Widows in the old days had it easy. Black wool and a veil was the only fashion option and no one mocked you for being tragic if you went around in it until you died yourself. Grief was respected.

  My thought were trending in a bad direction and I jerked them away from self-pity.

  “Wow. Edgar Allen Poe. I should interview you for my magazine,” I blithered as I tucked in my blouse. Even as I spoke, I felt my mind clearing enough to wonder why I wasn’t panicking. Had shock hijacked common sense? Normally this was the sort of situation that called for at least mild hysterics.

  “Your magazine? You work for a periodical?” He didn’t actually start, but I knew I had troubled him with this comment. Perhaps, given his skill with an ax, I should amend this and tell him that really I had been raised by wolves and didn’t even know how to read. On the other hand, it wasn’t like I worked for Newsweek or The National Enquirer.

  “I publish Golden Words. And some other newsletters for various local historical societies.” This augmented my meager income from my late husband’s magazine.

  “I know Golden Words,” Poe said thoughtfully and resumed chopping. “I thought H. Peyton was a male.”

  I blinked.

  “He was. Harrison was my late husband. He died three years ago.”

  “My condolences on your loss.” The reply was formal but I felt it was sincere.

  Loss indeed. Loss as in a sucking blackhole of despair that eats all light and hapiness. Had I been one of those people already inclined to crawl into my bathtub with an unsheathed Lady Schick or to chew on a barrel while cleaning my gun, Harrison’s sudden death would have been the end of me. But that is not how I am wired, so I had done the hardest thing imaginable and rebuilt a life without him. A smaller life, only a wafer thin slice of what I had wanted—but still a life, and I did not intend to let this stranger see that I had been first broken and then imperfectly mended by my loss. I was modern and did my grieving in private.

  Thunk. He picked up the last of the blackened body and thrust in into the fire. I noticed that it burned merrily, not like a body at all, so maybe I was imaging things.

  “I was at the cemetery,” I said, coaxing out memories from my reluctant brain. Spaces of time were in hiding or else completely departed. It seemed that earlier I had been clearer on events. “There was a raven.”

  “Yes.” The dark, almost inhuman eyes were turned on me again. “I saw you. You have family interred there?”

  “No. I was there for your birthday.”

  “Ah. May I say that I find that a bit odd?”

  I dragged myself a few more inches and leaned my back against the wall. I could feel strength and coordination returning to my limbs. In fact, I felt better in all ways. The fog was lifting from my brain and I could feel my heart pumping strongly.

  “I am doing a feature about you actually. It’s all written. I just wanted to get a glimpse of whoever is leaving brandy and roses at your grave. I thought it might be a nice way to end the piece instead of the same old, same old speculations.”

  “I see.” The lanky figure folded his legs and sank gracefully to the floor across from me. I noticed that his own shirt was open and that he also had some sort of scar or burn on his chest, though it did not look new and was golden in color rather than red. His skin was ghostly white, luminous like finest marble. Had the circumstances been less bizarre, I would have even thought him beautiful. And this was very odd because I had never thought of Edgar Allen Poe as attractive. Brilliant, yes. But not beautiful. “There is no mystery. I go every year to visit my wife.”

  “I thought the flowers could be for your wife. My husband and I discussed it often,” I said, pleased that my theory was correct. Seeing that he looked a bit grim, I changed the subject. “So what are you doing with yourself these days?”

  Besides chopping up bodies, my inner-voice added. It, too, was regaining strength.

  “I
still write. Poetry and prose.” He paused. “Not under my old name, of course.”

  “Of course.” My pulse quickened. Poe was still writing? Modern poets often do slice of life verses, but I am not fond of their inadequate, blank verse style. Unlike Harrison, I prefer the writers from the days when words were lush and odes were long. Poe’s work was both these things. “Would it be too personal to ask how it is that you are still alive? Everyone believes that you died in Baltimore.”

  He stared into the distance and I began to wonder if he would answer.

  “In all honesty, had you not been attacked I should be reluctant to discuss this. But under the circumstances.…” He paused. “Let me tell you the story and you may decide how much of it is true. Or if I am a liar and madman.”

  I nodded, wishing he hadn’t added the last bit. And here is the story (to the best of my recollection).

  The Tale of The Poet and The Dark Man

  It was about dusk, one evening during the harvest season, that I encountered a stranger, a dark man who was resting at the side of the road outside my home. He accosted me with excessive warmth when I stepped outside, and I thought at the time that he had been drinking much or perhaps imbibing stronger things. I was pleased to see him though for a terrible lowliness of spirit had had me in its grasp for much of that week, and in relief at seeing a smiling face, I carelessly invited him into my home and offered him shelter for the night.

  We drank heavily and talked of many things. He was sympathetic and as the hour grew late, the conviction that this man knew me rather well enlarged steadily in my fuddled brain. I told him of the death of my wife and of my failure to thrive with a broken heart. I told him of my many bodily pains and my fear that I, too, was dying. And it was then that this dark man made me a strange offer. He said that he was a physician and that if I would come to Baltimore to a clinic he knew there that he could cure me of my many pains and also my melancholia.

  At first I dismissed this as bluster, and was glad enough to see the strange depart in the morning when my own head was clearer. But once the idea had entered my brain it haunted me day and night. I grew perhaps a bit mad. If I was to die anyway, why not seek out this creature and let him attempt his cure.

  The dark man had been inexplicit in the nature of the cure he offered, but I knew that it involved electricity. There had been some experimentation of this nature for some years and it was known that passing a current through muscles could cause animation even in persons drugged to insensibility. Some people had also described a certain euphoria as an after-effect of this treatment. I wished devoutly that this lifting of spirit could be mine as well.

  Determined upon a course, I detoured on my way to visit a friend in New York and stopped over in Baltimore to seek out the stranger and offer myself into his care. He was unsurprised at my arrival and had a room prepared at a hospital.

  Now, when I think of the dark man, it is mainly of his strange and knowing smile which he wore the entire time he prepared me for the procedure. Drugs were given to me and they affected me most oddly. I was unafraid though when I looked about the room where we were, at the shackles and other instruments I should have been quite terrified. It was, in fact, this lack of fear that finally prompted me to leave. I knew that I had been precipitous and needed more time for reflection before taking this drastic step.

  I escaped when he left the room and I reeled out into the streets which were bright and frightening. Though able to see and hear perfectly, I found my muscles hard to control and I was soon overtaken by the dark man and his strange nurse, a swarthy creature with badly scarred skin and brutal strength who never spoke a word. I cried out in alarm, but they told the crowd around us that I was a lunatic drunkard and they allowed him to take me away though this was in no way the case.

  I was brought back to the hospital and locked into a room, dark and small as a prison cell. That night a storm came. In the darkest hours of the night I was taken from my bed and shackled to an iron frame out in the courtyard. There the doctor left me while a storm raged. Eventually I was struck by lightning.

  I died, at least for a time, and then the dark man thrust a needle into my heart and injected me with a concoction that I suspect was some form of cocaine. The pain was intense, but it called me back from death’s arms, her embrace was broken and I lived again.

  I awoke in a morgue with other bodies. All my senses were heightened. Sight and hearing, of course, but above all smell. My nose was as keen as a bloodhound’s and the odor in that place was abhorrent. The dark man, still smiling as he released my shackles, told me then that the transmutation was complete, that I was cured, that no pain of the body were ever again afflict me and my only mental travails were those I chose to let molest me. He also said that I would enjoy extreme longevity and would not appear to age for perhaps as many as fifty years, but at the end of that time it would be necessary for me to again have the same treatment, or else all my evaded years and suffering would come upon me in a matter of days and that I would die in agony.

  He also told me that he had reported me as dead and arranged for a burial of another body in my place. He said that it would be best if I went away. I argued, but he told me that others who had had this treatment had chosen to remain in their old lives and had become suspect when they did not age. Friends and family had come to fear them as things of evil, and those he had treated had become objects of revulsion. As was fitting; I was now a monster.

  The dark man left me then. Having nothing except the money in the pocket of my tattered coat, I got up from the table where I reclined and left the hospital and my previous life behind. It was only days later, when the effect of the drugs had worn off that I understood what had happened—what I had gained and what I had lost when I was killed and then reborn. It was difficult to accept but I knew that the Dark Man was right and I could never return to the life I had had, but a single glance in the mirror told me what I must do.

  And I have abjured that life ever since, making only exception of a yearly visit to my wife’s grave, where I leave three flowers, one for my wife and for every child who did not live to be born.

  I hardly knew what to say at the end of his tale and ended up blurting out: “What a great story! Too bad almost no one would believe a word of it. Except me. I believe you completely.”

  This earned me a small smile.

  “Are you remembering anything of what happened yet?” he finally asked me. Then, perhaps not as irrelevantly as it sounded at the time: “It’s almost dawn.”

  I looked toward the small window and saw that the sky was still dark but graying around the edges.

  Sunrise, not sunset. I had lost almost an entire morning, afternoon and night.

  “I can see as clear as day,” I whispered wonderingly. “Even though it’s dark.”

  “Yes.” This was said encouragingly.

  “And I hear the wind outside, the drops of rain falling on the ground. It sounds like footsteps.” Later I would ask myself it was really rain, or Fate marching toward me in Jackboots with an eye to kicking me off my settled, safe course and into adventure. “They say shock can heighten the senses. That must be it.”

  He nodded. I stretched my senses further and realized that I could taste in my mouth a mix of ozone and solder, like I had just had metal fillings put in my teeth.

  “Did you do something to me?”

  “Yes. I offered what aid I could.” He sounded stiff.

  “Did you….” I was feeling no fear of my host but it took an effort to ask this last bit. “Did you make me like you?”

  “It was that or let you die. That thing that bit you—” He stopped and considered again. “The Dark Man had other get, other creations, other creatures.” When he said Dark Man, I heard the capital letters. “Among these was a son. He goes by the name of Saint Germain. The son, so much more evil than his mad father, has made other abominations in his distorted image and it was one of these that bit you. The bite was poisoned. You would have
died before sunrise, liquefied from within.”

  I swallowed the metal taste and waited for the fear and revulsion that surely would come after that kind of news, but nothing happened. Though able to think, I was still blessedly numb from the neck up. Something was shielding me from almost all emotion. I decide that this was a good thing under the circumstances.

  “Was it human?” My memories were distorted, nightmarish and I didn’t want to believe they were accurate.

  “Partly. I think the rest might have been Komodo dragon. Something exotic like that would appeal to him.”

  This sounded so strange that I started laughing. The crazy man who might be Edgar Allen Poe smiled again, but there was little humor in it. Realizing that the laughter was three part hysteria I made myself stop.

  “You seem to be taking this rather well. I was not nearly so calm when I changed.”

  “Yes, I think I’m doing well,” I agreed. “But then I think that I am probably dreaming all this so there is no reason to be hysterical. I’ll wake up soon.”

  “All that we or seem is but a dream within a dream,” he muttered. “I believe that we had best depart this place if you are able to walk. It isn’t safe here anymore.”

  “There are more of those things out there?” Finally I felt some stirrings of alarm.

  “Always. I keep moving but they eventually find me. Fortunately, they don’t know about you. Yet. I would like to keep it that way for as long as we can.”

  “Me too,” I said earnestly and made an effort to regain my feet. It took a moment but I managed on my own. “In fact, I think it would be best if I went home now and forgot all about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though it was a pleasure to meet you, of course.”

  The poet also rose. He did it more gracefully. The dark eyes watched me and I knew he was debating whether to let me go. I made an effort to ready my muscles for flight or fight but knew that I could not outrun him in my present state.