Theater Macabre (14 page)

As I made my way to collect some towels, again I wondered what lapse in wisdom had permitted me to admit a stranger into my lodgings, and such a peculiar one at that.

*

Later, with my guest seated and swaddled in towels (which he had used only to give the most perfunctory of dabs to his sodden self), I noted, with much relief, that his disposition had calmed somewhat, at least to a degree whereby lucid conversation was possible.

He dressed in the old clothes I had set on the arm of his chair for him. They were terribly inappropriate for a man of his obvious esteem (while perhaps not ill fitting his behavior) but would suffice until the fire had breathed enough warmth upon his own clothes. I watched him tug the lapels of the black alpaca sack-coat together until he was satisfied that his bare chest was not showing. Then, he donned the tattered palmleaf hat, adjusting it until his eyes were almost in its shadow.

The clothes had been my own once upon a time, but I dread to think I ever looked so lost in them as did Mr. Poe.

As the storm raged outside, rattling the windows like a maddened thing, snuffling beneath the door and sighing through the cracks in my abode, I watched Poe tapping his fingers against his half-full tumbler, and waited for him to speak.

“I admit I’m somewhat lost,” he said at last, frowning and using his free hand to adjust the necktie. “And that it was not you whom I expected to find behind the door when it opened. This house has not always been yours, am I correct?”

“You are. And it is not entirely mine now either. I am merely the lodger. The house is in the name of one Virginia McKellen.”

Edgar nodded fervently and licked his lips, his eyes wide as if I’d made some profound revelation.

“Yes, yes,” he enthused. “Virginia, that’s it. Is she here?”

Although caution told me it would be best to humor him, I couldn’t compose a convincing lie, and did not fully believe it would appease him, so told him the truth, “I’m afraid I’ve never met Ms. McKellen. The address to which I send the price of my lodging is in Richmond, so I must assume that is where my landlady resides.”

His disappointment was almost palpable though there was little I could say to alleviate it. After a thoughtful sip of brandy, I smiled. “But perhaps you could leave her a message. I could enclose it with my payment, due very soon I should add, and she will know of your visit.”

He shook his head irritably. “That won’t do. If she is not here or hereabouts, then I’ve wasted my time. Though the logic in altering her name eludes me. Surely she could not have anticipated a swindle, a deceit, not from me. Unless…”

He was a moody character and, I surmised, hard to lure into amiable conversation as entwined it seemed as he was in his own pursuits. Yet, I thought it best to attempt it. These days, any company is better than none.

“You suggested before that I might recognize your name. Where might I have come across it?”

“It is not proper that I am here,” he muttered, apparently to his now empty glass. “Virginia would not take kindly to my lingering, particularly if she suspected foulness afoot.”

“Sir,” I said, “how might I know your name?”

The wind howled so hard then that had I looked out the window, it would not have surprised me to see a pack of ravenous wolves circling the house, yellow eyes glowing ferally. I felt at sea in the most literal sense, the house dangerously close to tearing loose of its moorings, the creaks and groans like the protests of masts on a belabored ship.

“My, what a night.”

He looked up at the sound of my words, or perhaps at something he had seen within them, and the corners of his mouth twitched, almost enough for a smile.

“Do you read, sir?” he asked, and I nodded. Lucidity, for however short a time, seemed to have returned.

“I read quite a bit; I find it essential to my own writing, though I am not always sure if what I read is worth its weight in paper.”

“Books of that nature are plentiful,” he said, with chagrin, “and I have dedicated much of my career to the task of striking them from the record of the distinguished buyer. I am a writer also and an established one though the rewards do not often equal the cost of such a calling.”

“I see,” I told him, sipping brandy and feeling the shadows slip back into the walls. Conversation of a literary kind I could stomach quite easily. Indeed, it would be a delightful way to pass the hours, and yet I did not completely trust the man. He was after all, a complete stranger. Nevertheless, the warmth, the storm outside, and the brandy had induced in me a complacency I was in no hurry to relinquish.

“Did you condemn these books in a public forum?”

He nodded, slowly. Despite the cheerfulness with which he now spoke, I could not look upon him as being anything other than haunted. The dark circles beneath his eyes were closer to the bruise-marks of grief than the discoloration lack of sleep will bestow upon a man.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve worked in journals and newspapers and exercised restraint not at all when it came time to denounce some of the more esteemed members of the flagrantly illiterate literati!”

I chuckled. “That can’t have made you very popular in certain circles.”

I watched his face darken. “No.” Again his eyes fell to his empty glass. I rose and fetched him a refill. He hardly waited until I’d finished pouring before the glass was to his lips. A man consumed by the most dreadful of thirsts, I concluded, that insatiable panacea that promises much and delivers little.

“So what brings you to Baltimore?” I asked, retaking my seat and watching the effect of the liquor rippling through him. “A literary venture?”

So long was his response in coming that I feared he’d fallen asleep. Certainly his posture suggested the drink had overwhelmed him, his head bowed, hands unmoving. But then he raised his face to the light and I saw to my shock that tears swam in his eyes.

“I am afraid,” he whispered, the wind threatening to obliterate his words.

“Afraid, of what?”

He wiped his sleeve across his eyes and frowned. Again that interminable wait between words. Then: “Whispers. Voices,” he said, weeping freely now. “From those creatures, those receptacles of my angst and ire, those malevolent, malicious malcontents I’ve sent to the grave before me, bricked up in the walls of my selfishness or fed to the felines in my ravaged soul, shoved into Hell with nary an apology, condemned to vicious unspeakable demises executed at the twist of a quill.” His voice rose, as did he, the glass tumbling to the floor, mercifully empty. He swept his sudden terror about the room on trembling hands which seized upon the modest objects that decorate my dwelling, as he paced, paced and wept, yelled and screamed along with a wind that seemed to come from the mouth of this frightened, hopelessly mad writer.

“’So still their graves shall never be ‘neath the spotlight of the glaring moon’” he quoted and spun on his heel, snarling. I jumped to my feet, quickly set my glass aside, then thought better and snatched it up, fearing it might be used as a projectile by my frenzied guest.

“I’m sorry,” I said, backing away, “but I’m not altogether sure I understand you.”

“For years those accursed muses have let me drink from an unfiltered cup, making me pay dearly in my dreams and often in days. In
time itself!
But no malediction should cost me as much as it shall tonight when they open the gates and set all that darkness free. Tonight I die!”

“But I—” I began but stopped when he cocked his head and raised a trembling hand. I watched his eyes slide in their sockets until he was gazing sidelong at the wall beneath the portrait of my father.

“Listen,” he said, a finger rising to hover before his lips. “From the walls…a whisper. Do you hear it? A scrambling, a scrabbling perhaps of myriad claws seeking the flesh of a poor poet to rend apart for his sins. Each mouth drooling with hunger for the taste of a receiver’s flesh, starved for the end to a mind that has
seen
them.”

I of course, heard nothing.

“Mr. Poe, I really don’t—”

His behavior was beginning to frighten me. It seemed possible that he might cause himself hurt, or worse, that he might seek to use my woefully malnourished body as a ‘receptacle of his angst and ire’ as he had put it himself.

“Tonight they will land me like the elusive carp I am and they will prick my skin with their needle claws and that will be the end of Edgar Allen Poe—an unjust death for an unjust man.”

At a loss for anything else to say, I offered him another drink, despite my conviction that it was exactly that which had given his dervish further impetus.

To my surprise, he threw his head back and laughed, then stumbled until he collided with the fireplace, where he stayed, a cruel smile on his lips.

“A drink. Ah yes. Some absinthe maybe, or perhaps only the kind of barbiturate that can offer its soporific effect when administered through the vein. Oh, I have met your kind before, danced and dined with them, only to wake up screaming from the kind of nightmares that wait for you to do that very thing before wrapping their seething arms around your neck. I’ll not be fooled, Fortunato. I’ll not be lulled into insult or injury at the whim of a demon.”

“Fortunato? Whatever do you mean?”

He scowled and swept my clock from the mantle. I winced as it hit the floor, its guts spilling out onto the rug.

“Even now I can hear them, their claws ticking in time with my telltale heart. Are you him? Or perhaps they are you.”

I wondered if Doctor Snodgrass would attend to the fellow at such an hour or if perhaps the constable would be a better match for my increasingly disturbed guest.

In the end, after taking into consideration Poe’s alleged fame and wanting to avoid a scandal, I decided it would best be dealt with privately.

Then he uttered what I thought was a name.

“Fetch Herring,” he said with a gasp of horror, eyes wide as he focused on something over my left shoulder. I spun, infected by the wild panic on his face and saw that the hallway door had come ajar. I had left it closed but attributed its opening to the pounding of the wind through the walls, and not anything Poe’s feverish delusions might have wrought.

Overhead, the lights hummed and flickered.

“It’s just the wind,” I said soothingly and went to shut out the source of his dismay.

“No,” he moaned, raising his hands to his face but peering between his fingers like a terror-stricken child. “No, it’s them.”

“Don’t be absurd,” I said, closing the door. Before the latch could catch, I felt a push on the other side and widened the gap to leave a black cat scurry over my shoe.

Poe positively bleached, his moaning louder. He moved away until the wall would allow him to go no further, his hands clawing at the air in desperation.

I looked at him curiously. “Perhaps this is all that you heard,” I said, reaching down to scratch the cat behind the ear. It’s purring vibrated through my arm. “Nothing more than Scoundrel.”

“An emissary of the Devil!” Poe declared, almost screeching. “Tonight it comes to drag me down to it master.”

I straightened. “Oh come now,” I said. “This is merely a pet. A sickly one at that, but even when such timid creatures fall ill, they retain their affection for their Masters. That’s more than can be said for some people.”

Poe pressed himself back against the wall until it must surely cave in beneath his weight, allowing the wind to rage through my living room. “Ill indeed. Ill with the need to level a man who sees them for what they are, I’d wager!”

I smiled a little. Poe, while quite obviously deranged, was without doubt perceptive amidst the madness. “You knew there were more?” I said, allowing the door to yawn wider.

I watched his eyes drop to the floor around my feet, at the scurrying black tide of creatures that flowed around my ankles.

“’Rabies,’ they said. ‘Need to be put down,’ they said, but it would be a heartless man who would end suffering with more suffering, wouldn’t you agree?”

Poe ran for the door and the cats followed, echoing his shrieks with yowls and hisses. “Loneliness is the worst kind of madness,” I called to my guest as he scratched at the door, nails digging into the wood. “Here there be no demons, Poe. Only my friends. They wish you no harm, only to keep you here a little while longer.”

But for whatever reason, the animals had instilled in Poe a manic terror. He lashed out with his bare foot and caught one of the animals on the side of the head. The cat spat and fled, with me hissing in empathy. The tide of its brethren clawed at Poe’s flailing legs, but at last his desperate hands found the latch and pulled, pulled, pulled until the cold wind exploded into the room, driving the cats away.

“You are the devil and these are your servants!” he cried without looking back, so I could not be sure if it was the wind or his host whom he had addressed.

And then he was gone.

*

It’s quiet now. The storm has moved on, nothing left behind but a faint hungry grumbling in the sky.

It will be dawn soon, the beginning of another long, tiresome day. I suppose it will be some time before I see another visitor quite as colorful as Mr. Poe. Quite a curious man indeed. Not even my account does him justice. Now I ponder his plight and whether or not he was able to outrun whatever horrors he perceived were bearing down upon him. Until then, I will continue to write, and in those long dark treasured nights when the words cease to flow, I will pause and sip my drink, await the kiss of the muse. Should it deny me as it so often has in the past (for not all of us are privy to Poe’s visions or untainted cups), then I suppose I will converse with my cats, or perhaps venture out to draw inspiration from those lost souls—like Poe—who wander the streets lonely and aching for an audience. Aching for my company.

As they have so many times before.

Visiting Hours

"How do you die?" my father asked me and I could have sworn the fall of cold gray light illuminating the shape, the slight bump of his emaciated legs beneath the coverlet, grew colder. The shadows in the creases deepened. It was snowing outside, and that seemed appropriate--I had come to see a dying man, and death is not a warm occasion. The sole window in the room looked out over the hospital parking lot. Not much of a view, but then, he didn't need one, and wouldn't have cared, or noticed, had the Swiss Alps magically taken the place of those dark, hunkered snow-limned cars, silently nudging the curbs like morbid onlookers eager for a closer view. The wind forced the snow into near-horizontal flurries that made the parking lot seem a stage for hurried ghosts.