I stood just inside the back door and listened to the building. I heard nothing, which I hoped meant that Poe was still reading upstairs. If Nick ever saw him in person, he’d have no doubt it was Edgar Allan Poe in that security footage, and I really didn’t want to have that conversation with him, no matter how high his tolerance was for inexplicable things.
I stopped into the storeroom and called softly, “Poe? Are you in here?”
There was no answer from the nest, so I opened the door and peeked in. It smelled faintly of vomit, but Poe seemed to have cleaned it up himself. I dropped the twin mattress down and quickly made the bed with the bottom sheet I kept on the shelf. Then I went into the bar and heated up some soup I’d gotten for George two days before and brought it upstairs to the library with some bread.
Poe was stretched out on the sofa reading and sat up suddenly when I walked in. I placed the food on the coffee table near him and then sat. “Talk to me about spirals,” I said.
He tore off a chunk of bread and had taken a bite before he suddenly paused and looked at me with a flush of embarrassment. “Forgive me for not waiting. I forgot…”
Wisely, he didn’t finish the sentence that I was sure would have sounded something like, ‘I forgot that you’re a lady.’
“Eat,” I waved him on.
He marked the page in his book and made an effort to take slow, deliberate bites of the food. “What about spirals?”
“They’re a theme. Clocks have them, staircases have them. Spirals seem to be present in nearly every one of your stories or poems that features time.”
He stopped eating mid-bite and considered my words. After a moment he resumed. “Hmm. I had not considered that.”
“I wonder if it might be a spiral that Clocks you to different times,” I said as I picked up a pencil and the notebook I’d taken notes in before and handed them to him. “Here, draw what you think a spiral looks like.”
I didn’t have anything more to go on than a gut instinct, but something told me that this was the right direction in which to focus our attention.
Poe turned to an empty page and began to idly sketch between mouthfuls of soup and bread. “What does it mean, to ‘go running’ as you said earlier?” Poe asked. “Is it some sort of euphemism for an unsavory nighttime activity?”
I stared at him. “An unsavory nighttime … are you back to accusing me of being a prostitute?”
“I merely asked a question,” he answered primly.
It was with a force of will that I kept my tone of voice calm. “I run for exercise, and as I sleep during the day, nighttime is my only opportunity to do so.”
He was silent as he sketched, and I could see five interconnected spirals take shape on the page. “I have given further thought to the conversation we began about the man who sleeps in the street behind this building,” Poe said.
“So have I,” I said. “Thank you for bringing it to my attention.”
He frowned at my thanks, as though graciousness didn’t fit my profile. “Have you, by chance, read The Masque of the Red Death?” he asked, looking up from his drawing to meet my eyes.
“Years ago,” I admitted. “I know the basic story.”
He arched an eyebrow at me as though he didn’t believe that I’d read it. I sighed and then elaborated. “A rich prince throws a big party for all his courtiers during a time of plague. He locks everyone else out of his castle so they can’t spread infection to his guests, who eat and drink and dance like they are the only people in the world. But then a masked guest comes out of nowhere, and when the prince chases him through all the rooms, it turns out the guest with the mask is actually death, and all the guests fall down dead with the plague. Beyond that, I don’t remember many details except the clock, as we discussed earlier, and the circular shape of the seven party rooms in the prince’s castle.”
Poe had the grace to look impressed. “The first time the story was published, in 1842, I titled it The Mask – M-A-S-K – of the Red Death. Then, when I had the opportunity to republish with some corrections, I settled on the title The Masque – M-A-S-Q-U-E – of the Red Death. Can you guess why?”
“To shift the emphasis from the face covering that was hiding death to the party where the rich were hiding from death?” I guessed.
Poe raised an eyebrow in surprise, and then huffed a tiny laugh. “You continue to astound me, Mistress Ren, with your grasp of concepts which … others of my acquaintance are unequipped to see.” He sipped his cold tea and considered me.
“My wife and I had moved back to New York, where the class distinction between those with means and those without stood in sharp relief. Virginia had been ill with tuberculosis for three years then, and death was an inevitability that loomed large in our lives.”
I knew that his wife had died from tuberculosis in 1847, which for him was two years ago. He continued, and I realized I was being treated to a kind of literary analysis from the author himself.
“In my story, death and its many guises was not the enemy.”
Poe stood and walked to the window, where he looked down at the shelter George had constructed for himself. “The true antagonist of The Masque of the Red Death was the masque itself – the display of wealth and greed and privilege that allows the few to lock themselves away from the plight of the many.”
He turned back to face me. “Is there also, perhaps, an element of fear that contributes to your self-isolation tendencies?”
“You ask me as though I have removed myself.”
“Have you not?” he asked.
I scowled at him. “I own a bar. I interact with people – all kinds of people – every night.”
“You serve them drinks. You take their money. That is a transaction rather than a connection.”
I didn’t like his tone or his accusation. “I connect with people every time I ask about their day, or whenever I steer the conversation toward something meaningful – which I do regularly and with such subtlety that people rarely realize they’ve opened their minds to a new idea.”
Poe looked back steadily. “Whom do you see reflected back at you from those interactions? Do you see yourself? Because in my experience, we only exist as we are in relation to others. I am a writer because I write, but my stories are only as meaningful as the meaning others have found in them. You are a bartender because you tend a bar, but do you allow others to experience the reader, the thinker you are here, behind your closed doors? Are you really those things if you do not share them with others? Or …” he must have seen the expression on my face shutter, because he sighed, “perhaps I should observe you working in your establishment before I cast judgments about your connections with other people.”
“Maybe you should,” I spat back, before promptly thinking better of it. “Actually, you can’t. Your image was captured on a video inside a pawn shop, and the police are looking to arrest you for the break-in.”
He stared at me. “You have strung together words I don’t understand in a way that is meaningless to me. A video? Captured?”
I pulled out my phone, willing myself to let go of the annoyance his smug observations of my self-isolation tendencies had inspired. I navigated to the security cam footage on the police website and pressed play.
Poe stared in shock at the digital black-and-white image of himself stumbling through what appeared to be the storage cellar of the pawn shop. “What is this?” he whispered, horrified.
“It’s called technology, and I shouldn’t have shown you. Except that other people have seen this footage now, so it’s not safe for you to be out in public while they’re looking for that man,” I stabbed a finger at the screen.
“No,” he said, touching the screen. “What is this?” He pointed to the wall he had just stumbled away from on the screen. I froze the image, then screenshot it and zoomed in. It wasn’t enough, so I navigated to a photo editing program, imported the screenshot, and added contrast to the photo as Poe looked between me and the screen on my phone with amazement.
There, as barely visible scratches on the brick wall, was the unmistakable image of five interconnected spirals.
“Oh,” I exhaled softly as I realized I must be looking at a Clocker portal – the time travel spiral that had transported Edgar Allan Poe from 1849 to now. I met his eyes. “That’s how you came through.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “but how do I return?”