I came to consciousness slowly, ears-first as usual. The sounds were different than I was used to – more muffled somehow. Someone was talking … upstairs? That couldn’t be. I slept on the top floor of my building. Except … everything came back to me then. I wasn’t in my building. The last thing I remembered was falling to the floor of the pawn shop before I blacked out.
I listened more keenly, and I heard what sounded like two men talking above me. There was movement and footsteps overhead, and then the quiet settled over the building again like a heavy blanket. I couldn’t even hear the sound of clocks or the hum of anything electronic in the room around me.
I opened my eyes and saw dim light coming through a small, high window. Dim light meant either sunrise or sunset, but since I was waking up, it had to be sunset. Where was I? The basement, was it? The smell of something musty and damp assailed me and confirmed the likelihood of being underground. I sat up then and realized I was curled up on some kind of sofa amidst a jumble of furniture and junk stacked in precarious piles around the room. My eyes adjusted to the dim light, and I scanned the room for a door or a staircase out.
Panic began to crawl up my throat as I realized that if it was, in fact, evening, then Poe had been locked in the nest for almost twenty-four hours. I stood up too quickly and almost fell as my eyes searched frantically for a way out. I finally found a narrow staircase that led up, and I made my way over to it on silent feet, forcing myself to stay calm and quiet. I climbed the staircase quickly. At the top of the stairs I paused to listen again, not certain about the silence on the other side of the door. My hand was on the light switch, but I didn’t dare turn it on until I determined whether I was alone.
Then I saw the shadow of feet outside the door, and my heart stopped beating and the breath caught in my lungs. The doorknob began to turn, and I stepped back against the left wall and tried to become one with the bricks. As the door opened, I considered pushing through it and past whoever was coming in. I was already up on the balls of my feet when I heard a whispered voice.
“Mistress Ren?”
All the fight drained from my body and my heart began beating again as blood whooshed through my ears. “Poe?” I whispered back.
A familiar dark head poked in through the door, and I could just see the smile on his face as he looked at me in the dim light. “You’re alive.”
“I don’t kill easily,” I responded. “And I don’t think Mike intended to kill me.”
“Intent is far too subject to the whims of circumstance for such confidence. I feared he may have done you harm when he realized the consequence of his actions.”
Poe opened the door to the stairwell wide. “But come. You should escape this place before he returns, lest he seek to do such harm.”
“Poe,” I said quietly, “we’re here. Somewhere in this basement is your spiral.”
“Yes, I know. It is why your friend, Mr. Pieretti, brought me here when he came to escort Mr. Weir to the police station.”
I could barely process his words as I turned to head back down the stairs. Nick had been here? To arrest Mike? “Come with me, and explain, please.”
As we descended the steps, my hand trailed across a light switch, which, when turned on, illuminated one dim bulb in the center of the low ceiling. I hoped it wasn’t enough to draw attention to the small window at the top of the wall, but I didn’t want to take chances.
So, as Poe told me how George had recognized Mike then trailed us to the pawn shop, I climbed up and covered the window with the lid of a cardboard box. As we began our search for the spiral, he regaled me with Nick’s discovery of the nest based on his knowledge of pre-Civil War buildings and the rumor, documented in a book about Baltimore history, that mine had been a safe-house on the Underground Railroad. The fact that Nick had not only discovered the room but found the key was cleverness I hadn’t expected from him, and when Poe told me how Nick lured Mike away to the police station to identify the man who’d broken into his building, I found myself wishing he were with me as I tried to send Poe back in time.
“I find I quite liked your friend,” Poe said. “He seemed remarkably well-versed in my work, and I believe I would have enjoyed speaking with him at length. It’s a pity you won’t allow him to court you, despite the fact that he is clearly smitten.”
I scowled at him. “How do you know that?”
“Why, he said so, of course.” Poe looked startled at the question. “And he was quite frantic at the idea that you could be injured. You’re not, are you? Your alley-dwelling neighbor seemed certain that you hadn’t been, but he seemed to believe there was a future in which you would be if we hadn’t acted as we did.”
“My alley-dwell— George?”
“Yes, quite. I do believe he might have a touch of the sight. He was most insistent that we time our distract-and-rescue plan for precisely sundown. He seemed to believe it would be our greatest chance for success on all fronts – removing the pawn shop owner from the premises and locating you. He couldn’t know about our quest for the spiral, of course, but he certainly put an emphasis on our chance for success on all fronts.”
Oh my. Apparently George and I were going to be having a conversation about who, exactly, he was.
I shifted a box out of the way and something clattered to the floor. A walking stick – no … I bent to pick it up – a sword stick. The cleverly-concealed sword within the walking stick was topped with a handle made of carved ebony in the shape of a bird’s skull. I slid the sword partway out of its sheath, then turned to Poe.
“You need to take this with you,” I said, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the symbolism. “If we’re successful and you return to the same place you left, it is likely to be the coop where you were beaten and forced to drink alcohol.”
Poe looked around the cellar of the pawn shop at the brick walls and the low, thick-beamed ceiling. “If I were in a cooping gang, I would certainly consider this place a likely hole in which to hide my victims. I shall take your advice, Mistress, for I had not thought beyond finding the spiral itself.”
“And …” I shifted the last box away from a wall I had recognized from the surveillance footage. “Here it is.”
Poe stepped up beside me and studied the etching in the brick. The whole design was approximately the size of my arm from elbow to fingertips, with a center spiral and four others surrounding it in the rough shape of an equilateral cross.
He exhaled quietly, and I realized he was perhaps as nervous as I was. I turned to him and started to speak, “I don’t know—”
“Mistress Ren,” he began quietly as he met my eyes. “It is by no means an irrational fancy that in a future existence we shall look upon what we think our present existence as a dream.”
I smiled at the tender expression in his eyes and marveled at my sense that I was about to lose a friend. “Present and future being relative, of course,” I said.
“Of course,” Poe patted his shirt pocket proudly. “I spent my time in your secret room quite productively. Perhaps there will yet be a story about a woman’s quest for a doorway to the past that will set her free from the walls behind which she has imprisoned herself.”
I leaned forward and gave him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. “Be sure to mention the traveler who learned to see the world through new eyes.”
“Ah, but the traveler is the storyteller, and the woman is the heroine who set his heart and mind free to explore the richness of a world his narrow view had denied him.”
Sadness for the future he wouldn’t have hit me like a wave. “I hope I get to read it someday,” I said as I stepped back so he could approach the spiral. “Be safe, Edgar Allan Poe.”
“And you as well, Alexandra Reynolds.”
“Do you know what to do?” I asked as he stepped forward to touch the spiral.
He began tracing the center spiral with his finger, then moved to the right one. “Yes,” he said, “I believe I do.” His finger followed the lines of each spiral until the end of the last one, and then he was gone.