I ran down the stairs, checking the camera app on my phone as I did. It was Nick Pieretti. Off duty, by the state of his dress, but still a cop.I ran down the stairs, checking the camera app on my phone as I did. It was Nick Pieretti. Off duty, by the state of his dress, but still a cop.
I unlocked and opened the heavy back door. “Nick.”
“Can I come in?”
“Why?”
“Please?” he said.
“I’m busy.”
He sighed. “Just for a minute. Please, Ren.”
I considered him for a moment. I liked Nick and I’d never been intentionally rude to him. Now was not the time to behave in a way that was out of character. I stepped back from the door and let him into the hall, then led him through the building to the bar. The running lights were the only illumination in the big room, and I left it that way. I directed him to a table, where I pulled out a chair and sat. He dropped into a seat across from me and looked around the dimly lit room.
“You got any ghosts in the place?”
I held back a shiver at his prescience. “Why are you here, Nick?”
“I want to get to know you. I’ve been coming in The Door for two years, and the only conversations we ever have are about three minutes long if I happen to grab a barstool right in front of the register.”
“I’ve told you, I don’t date customers,” I said quietly.
“And I’m sitting here, across the table from you in a closed bar, clearly not a customer. I will back off if you’re genuinely not interested, but I’d like to hope you wouldn’t make that call without getting to know me first.”
I scoffed. “What if I were gay, Nick? Would that be an acceptable reason not to date you?”
“Maybe. Probably.” He looked chagrinned. “Are you?”
I bit back the smile that threatened. “Not particularly.”
“Not …” he sat back with a mischievous grin, “not particularly?”
“Nick, I’m not going to play mental fantasy games with you. I’m not playing any games with you. I do not date. Period.”
The smile dropped from his face and he leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “Are you married?”
I scowled but didn’t answer.
“I mean, I don’t think you’re married. I wouldn’t do that – pursue a married woman. That’s not cool.”
I got up from the table. “I have things to do.”
His expression fell into something that looked defeated as he stood to follow me out of the bar and back down the hall. “I’m sorry, Ren. I just really hoped that if you got to know me a little outside our usual cop/bartender roles, you might let yourself like me.”
“I do like you, Nick,” I said, facing him as I opened the door. “You’re funny, and charming, and—”
“Handsome?” he supplied hopefully.
I laughed. “You know you’re handsome. But my life is complicated, and I don’t make that anyone else’s problem.” He was standing too close in the small hallway, and I wanted to push him out the back door.
“But who do you get hugs from, Ren?” he said quietly as he looked down into my eyes.
My breath stuttered and then caught, and slowly – so slowly I could easily duck away if I wanted to – Nick put his arms around me and pulled me close to his chest.
I was enveloped in his arms, and the only motion I could feel was the beating of his heart beneath my ear and the pounding of mine throughout my body. He held me, so warm, so alive, so human, and I let myself sink into him for one breathtaking moment, until the scent of his skin and the flutter of his pulse brought me back to myself, and I pulled away.
“Good night, Nick,” I whispered, unable to meet his eyes.
I could feel his gaze searching my face as I looked past him through the open door into the cooling night air.
He cleared his throat, as if to get his voice back to normal volume. “Lock your doors, okay? We haven’t caught the drunk yet, but CCTV put him right around here.”
“The drunk?” I dragged my gaze back to his face.
“The one they found in the pawn shop. We have the security cam footage up on the news to try to get him turned in. He must have really scared the owner, and now the guy is out for blood.”
I nodded quickly. “Yeah, I’ll lock the door.”
He looked like he wanted to say something else, but then shook his head and walked out. I watched him head down the alley, and then I locked the door quietly behind him.
I exhaled, and leaned back against the wall. Why? Why did Nick have to make it personal, to reach past all my carefully constructed social distancing measures into the one fissure in my defenses – human touch. It had been so long …
I missed hugs.
The floor above me creaked, and I realized I’d lived alone so many years that it was a shock to hear someone moving around my building. Nick said the police had made the security cam footage public, and I needed to know if it was Poe in that pawn shop so I could figure out what to do with the guy in the room above my head. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and navigated to the Baltimore PD Twitter feed, then scrolled down to the black-and-white footage in the WANTED post.
It was grainy and eerie in the way infrared footage is in dim light, but the man stumbling away from the wall toward the staircase was definitely Edgar Allan Poe. The room was full of all the things I expected to see in the cellar of a pawn shop, plus one drunk human no one would ever think to see in the twenty-first century.
I sighed and kicked off the wall.
I considered my options as I climbed the staircase. This didn’t have to be my problem. Just because Edgar Allan Poe had stumbled into my bar didn’t mean he was my responsibility.
I groaned. Who was I kidding? Even when things ended spectacularly badly, as they certainly had before, anyone who stumbled into my place was my responsibility. It was how I’d always been and probably always would be. It just happened less often now than it used to, most likely because no one really remembered I was here.
I’d worked hard on my invisibility skills, but that meant I didn’t know of any Immortal Descendants living in the greater Baltimore area. It’s not like there was a hotline to call when someone needed a Clocker portal. The few hints I had about Descendants came from whispered conversations when I was a child and a memorable encounter when I was a young woman. Since then, I had run into very few Descendants of the five Families in Baltimore, though among them had been the Seer who sat at my bar during Prohibition one night drinking tea laced with whiskey from his own flask, telling me everything he Saw about the patrons around us.
By the time the flask was empty, the Seer had informed me that I was not normal. The Family I belonged to, he’d said, was made up of loners, outcasts, and travelers who never put down roots or lived in communities of any kind for longer than a few years. The fact that I’d been in Baltimore most of my life had stunned and him, and he had considered sticking around, just to see how things turned out for me.
He didn’t survive the winter.
Self-isolation meant that I had no easy access to other Descendants, and basic humanity meant I had no will to kick Poe out into a time that wasn’t his own. The only option I saw was to figure out how he’d managed to Clock himself here and get him to do it again in reverse.
Poe was seated on the couch, engrossed in my book. He sat primly, with back straight and his legs crossed at the thigh. His posture forcibly reminded me of the comportment lessons my grandmother had given me. How I’d hated all the rules, until Grandmother Alexandra had explained that they were her means of survival as a woman in a society that did not value a woman’s mind, her heart, or her will. The best camouflage for living outside the rules is to hide behind them, she’d said. I wondered if she had known how prophetic her words would be to a woman who had survived precisely because of that camouflage.
I crossed the room and sat in my chair, my legs curled under me in deliberate defiance of my grandmother’s rules. “You came here through a portal of some kind – a door of sorts that only opens for certain people. You seem to be one of those people.”
Poe looked up from my book. “A door that is a door only for one able to open it.” He frowned. “Presumably, the action that brought me here can be done in reverse?”
“That’s usually how it works,” I said, “but I’m not a Clocker, so I don’t know what a portal looks like, and apparently, neither do you.”
“And yet I can open one.” Poe considered this for a long moment as he turned The Code Book over in his hands. “Perhaps,” he finally said, “I know more than I realize. How well do you understand secret codes?”
“I’ve read that book several times, and I’ve used encryption myself in situations where it was warranted. Why do you ask?”
“Encryption?” He pondered the word, and I realized I didn’t exactly know when it had come into popular use. “From kruptos, perhaps? The Greek word for hidden.” His gaze returned to me. “In any case, I confess that I find it entirely fascinating that the meaning of one thing can be hidden inside something entirely different, but that in order to unlock that meaning, the key must be accessible to the one for whom the message is intended.”
“Like deciphering your poetry, for example.”
He smiled slowly, as if the desire to smile was a surprise. “It is true that I bury meanings beneath words of a different cast in much of my poetry. I enjoy challenging my readers to stretch beyond what they know into what they could possibly imagine.”
“How does that help us find a portal to get you home?”
“You accused me of being a ‘Clocker.’ It is a term with which I am unfamiliar, except, of course, in the purely mechanical sense. And yet, upon closer rumination, it seems that I am intimately familiar with clocks and their imagery, as they appear throughout my work in what I now perceive to be very intriguing ways.”
I leaned forward. “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
“That is not even the most evocative clock image, but yes, of course,” he said with an air of satisfaction. “In addition to The Man of the Crowd, William Wilson, The Devil in the Belfry, A Predicament, and, of course, The Masque of the Red Death.”
I considered what I knew of his work. I hadn’t read all of the stories he’d named, but barring a literary deconstruction, I couldn’t see any common thread beyond the clock imagery.
My words were carefully measured. “If we operate under the assumption that your subconscious mind was encoding a message within your work, how would you interpret your use of clocks in your stories?”
He looked thoughtful. “My subconscious mind? Sub, meaning beneath, and conscious, from the Latin conscius, or knowing.” His gaze met mine as he stood and returned The Code Book to the small table near my chair. “Mistress Ren, I find your grasp of the question to be extraordinary. One might assume you were a man for the clear, concise way you see past the information given to that which lies beneath.”
I smirked. “I appreciate that you believe you are complimenting me, Poe, so I’ll take the compliment in the spirit in which it was meant.”
He slanted a look at me that could have been interpreted as impatient. I ignored it as he continued to pace the room.
“Perhaps less important than what clocks signify is the form and shape they take, if, indeed, we seek to find the portal through which I have traveled.”
I nodded. “That’s pretty brilliant, actually. Find the common themes for the clocks, and maybe the form is hidden among them.” I got up and retrieved a notebook and pencil from a drawer in the table, then returned to my chair and looked at him expectantly.
“So, where should we begin?”