Mike’s pawn shop was just a couple of blocks from The Door, and the place gave the whole neighborhood a slightly seedy appearance. I slowed my jog to a walk and noticed the little differences like chains around bicycles and heavy-duty locks on the doors, which were a revealing testament to an elevated level of fear among the inhabitants there. That didn’t bode well for Poe’s ability to get back into the pawn shop.
Whenever Mike was in my bar, conversation around him inevitably turned to guns, crime, and the people who would be shot if they ever tried to break into his place. There was a surveillance camera mounted above the door and a heavy chain wrapped around the double door handles closed tightly with a large padlock. The chain looked new, and I wondered if it had been added because of Poe. The building was a two-story pre-Civil War brick row house with a full basement, and when I saw a curtain twitch in a window overlooking the street, I thought it was likely that Mike lived upstairs, so I continued my run down the block, past other row houses toward the patch of greenery at the end. I still needed to exercise, and the night air was crisp and carried the scent of rain.
I changed my usual route and traveled streets I hadn’t been on in years. The historic districts remained my favorite parts of Baltimore, but new construction had gone up everywhere. I let my feet take me wherever my eyes led, and I marveled at the details. For years I’d blended into the background noise of the city, not allowing myself to dwell in the foreground of anything. I’d made sure no photos had been taken of me since I’d come back to The Door a decade before, so no images existed for comparison as time passed. In a world where snapshots of people’s lives were almost more real than the lives themselves, I had ceased to exist. Only the person who sat at my bar knew my face, and when those people saw me day after day, they stopped seeing the details. It was a common human condition to lose sight of the things we saw most often. I’d done it with George, and I wondered what else I had missed.
I turned my focus back to the task at hand, and as my mind wandered through the imagery of Poe’s clocks, my gaze danced across the scenery. There were planters full of late-blooming flowers, new window displays in vintage shops, and playful clothing on headless forms. A chandelier sparkled in the bay window of a dining room, a forgotten ball lay hidden under some steps, and there, on the sidewalk before me, a child’s chalk drawing of a spiral filled the sidewalk.
I halted, the images in my mind suddenly clashing with the one on the ground. Poe’s clock symbolism had included spirals – lots of them. A long spiral staircase going up to a clock tower in A Predicament, the circular motion of the hands of the clock, the dancers and the very shape of the rooms in The Masque of the Red Death – all were spirals.
I turned back the way I’d come and pushed myself to run faster than before. Spirals. How many movies and comic books used spirals to indicate time travel? And if it were true that the portal was a spiral, was there another one that could take Poe back to 1849?
The thought of that date carved a hole in my gut that filled with acid. According to the quick search I’d done on the October 3, 1849 election, the most notable thing about that day was that it was when Edgar Allan Poe had been found outside a polling place in Baltimore, apparently drunk and ill. He’d been taken to a hospital and died four days later.
I couldn’t scrub the knowledge from my brain, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Keep searching for the way to send him back, knowing that if I succeeded, he would die within days of his return, or let him stay here and … then what? Keep him? The idea of being responsible for an out-of-time anti-abolitionist held no appeal to a mixed-race Southern woman with far too much experience with the ideas of his time. And if he didn’t go back, what unknown effects could that have on the events in his time? I had to send him back if I could and let fate take over from there.
My footsteps slowed as I approached the pawn shop block again. This time I didn’t turn the corner onto the street, but instead darted down the back alley behind the buildings. It was after midnight, and the darkness felt desolate in a way that reminded me of lock-downs and curfews. I didn’t like the vulnerability that came with the desolation.
I had just passed the back door of the pawn shop when I felt a shiver of awareness crawl up my spine. Someone was watching me, and my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in hard. I tensed to run when I heard the low voice from the shadows.
“What are you doing here?”
My heart pounded as adrenaline surged through my veins. I turned around slowly, keeping my hands loose and visible at my sides.
“Nick,” I breathed, wariness warring with relief. Interested in me or not, Nick Pieretti was still a cop. He took a step forward out of the shadow of the building he’d been leaning against, and I instinctively took a half-step back. I didn’t mean to do it, and the instant of suspicion that crossed his face made me wish I hadn’t, but I’d lived too long to take my security for granted.
“Why are you here, Ren?” His low voice held a warning.
“Why are you?” I shot back.
He seemed to consider that for a moment and then surprised me by answering. “I walk when I can’t sleep.”
“I read,” I said automatically. It was true. I’d spent very long nights alone with my books.
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “What are you reading?”
“The Code Book,” I answered truthfully. “About code-making and breaking throughout history. I watched the footage of the drunk guy on the security cam and realized I knew the owner of the pawn shop.” I nodded up at the back of the building. “Mike’s a customer at The Door. It made me curious about the building, and I wondered how the guy got in.”
If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I’ve been wondering that too,” he said. He indicated the pawn shop. “The owner lives upstairs, so it’s not like the guy could have snuck in and hid while he was out. If I hadn’t seen the footage myself, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“The drunk didn’t actually do anything, did he? I mean, there wasn’t anything missing or broken?”
Nick shook his head. “Nothing. Honestly, it was like the guy was in the wrong building, realized it, and got the hell out. Apparently the locks were all deadbolts that could be thrown from inside, so the bigger question is how did he get in?”
Interesting, but if I was right, getting Poe in again was the bigger issue. “So why are you out here walking off your sleepless night?” I asked.
Nick scoffed. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
I shrugged. “Does it matter what I think?”
He looked sideways at me. “I’d like it to.” Then he shook his head. “It sounds nuts even to me, and my tolerance for inexplicable things is off the charts.”
That gave me pause. For the two years Nick had been coming into The Door, he’d just seemed like a regular guy’s guy – not too deep, not too serious or too curious – just easy with a smile and a flirtatious comment, and generally straightforward in a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of way.
“I believe in things I can’t explain,” I said quietly.
He glanced at me again, then seemed to decide to trust me. “The guy on the security cam – the drunk guy – looks like Edgar Allan Poe.”
It didn’t even surprise me when he said the words. Having seen the footage, I half-expected someone to make the connection, but I didn’t expect it to be Nick Pieretti. “I didn’t take you for a reader,” I said finally.
Nick scowled at me. “Poe is probably the whole reason mystery novels exist. His suspense writing was way ahead of its time, and you should know, since you’re reading a book about ciphers, that he was totally into secret codes. He used one as a main plot point in The Gold Bug, and also ran a cryptography contest in one of the magazines he edited, challenging readers to send him ciphers to break. Apparently, he solved them all.”
“I didn’t know you were so into secret codes, Nick,” I said, quelling the smile his enthusiasm almost inspired.
He scoffed. “I dare you to find any kid who wasn’t. Some of us just never grew out of it.”
“What do you know about clocks in Poe’s work?” I asked, not really sure where I was going with the question.
“I know they’re all through it,” Nick said with a shrug. “Why?”
“Just something I’ve been working on.” I started walking away down the alley toward my own building. Nick fell into step next to me.
“What do you think about what I said – that the drunk looks like Poe?” he asked, almost too casually, as if doing a check on my assessment of his sanity.
“I think you’re right, he does. I’m just not sure what that has to do with anything,” I said with an equally casual tone.
He sighed. “Me either. It’s just weird.”
We walked together in silence, and I gradually realized he was matching his stride to mine. “You don’t have to walk me home, Nick.”
“Unless you have superpowers you haven’t told me about, I’m walking you home.”
I scoffed with a laugh. “But I do.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
I shrugged. “Immortality.”
He looked over at me with a grin. “Cool. Is it catching?”
I couldn’t help the answering smile. “Could be, but I’m not giving it to you.”
His expression fell comically. “Bummer. Well, good to know you can’t die. But I’m still going to walk you home so none of the non-fatal things happen to you either.”
I chuckled, and we continued past the front of my building around to the alley in back. George was just shuffling in from the other end, and as he reached his small shelter, he tipped an imaginary hat to me as he usually did.
“Do you need to use the bathroom, George?” I asked, startling both Nick and the homeless man, who stared at me in surprise.
“No ma’am. I mean … no, thank you, ma’am.” George seemed flustered, and Nick looked at me with a strange expression on his face.
I nodded. “Well, I’ll open the back door just before dawn. If you want to use the bathroom then, please come in. I’ll leave a towel for you, and a toothbrush and toothpaste. You can keep them under the sink if you’d like.”
“Thank you, ma’am. That’s most generous of you,” George said with another imaginary tip of his hat.
I unlocked my back door and then turned to say goodbye to Nick. He looked bemused. “Thanks for walking me home.”
“You’re seriously going to invite that guy in to your building?”
I looked him straight in the eyes. “Yes.”
He turned to study George’s little shelter for a moment. “Huh. Okay, guess I’ll be back here just before dawn then.”
“What? Why?” I sputtered.
He shrugged and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Like I said, you may be immortal, but you’re probably not impervious.” He tipped an imaginary hat to me too, echoing George’s gesture. “Lock your door,” he called over his shoulder as he walked away down the alley past George’s shelter.
“Thanks for caring,” I whispered to no one in particular.