Edgar Allan Poe
I woke retching, the meager contents of my stomach retained only by force of will. I was weak, and my legs trembled as I attempted to stand, and once upright, they rebelled at my first step. I was aided by the cane, which I had unaccountably retained in one hand, while my other hand patted my breast pocket. I was reassured to feel the crinkle of paper still there, and suddenly, escaping the walls which imprisoned me was foremost in my thoughts.
Mistress Ren had been correct in her assumption that I would return to the coop in which I had apparently been held. Surrounding me on the floor and against the walls were ten or twelve men in various stages of inebriation, the stench of whom filled my nostrils unpleasantly. The steps that led to the ground floor rose ominously, and the pitch black of the night outside the small window was broken only by the light of a single lantern suspended from a hook on the wall near the staircase.
I picked my way carefully through the landscape of limbs, attached, as they seemed, to their owners without discernable means of control. The men were uniformly drunk, uniformly dressed in clothing that indicated their means to be spare, and of uniformly pale countenance, as though it had been several days or even a week since they’d seen the sun.
I reflected, as I stepped past young men and old insensible with drink, that I had been among them just days before, imprisoned by men of my own race, and it was only by the grace of a woman whom I had insulted at every turn for hers that I stood now, sober and sword in hand, armed with the riches of the ages from my time spent in her library, and indeed, her company.
Emboldened with purpose, I climbed the stairs and prepared myself for battle, as whatever stood between myself and freedom could not keep me. My mind swirled with the bright butterflies of knowledge, each dancing so tantalizingly on the breeze, and each more enticing than the next. I had to wrench my mind’s eye back to my purpose. Freedom of body first, then freedom of ideas and words could follow.
I paused at the top of the stairs, listening to the quiet beyond with an ear attuned to the silence of the space between the walls where I’d spent the most remarkable days of my life. No voices spoke, no footsteps fell, and no human sounds announced the occupants of the rooms beyond, so I turned the handle of the door and pushed it open, marveling that it hadn’t been barred or locked, so confident were my captors in the strength of their drink.
When I stepped into the hallway, I realized the building was a storehouse of sorts, with sacks of dry goods filling the room beyond. I listened for just a moment more before I took my quest for freedom in hand and moved toward the rear of the building. I hoped that any door there might be fastened from the inside, but what I found instead was a man entering from the alley carrying jugs likely full of whatever swill kept the men below subdued.
He stared at me in horror. “You!” His shout was that of a man who couldn’t believe what his eyes told him to be true, and I instinctively lunged for the still-open door. He tried to grab for me, but I knocked his hand away with the handle of my stick and pulled the door shut behind me. It would only deter him a moment, but in that moment I knew freedom.
Instinctively perhaps, or by unconscious design, I ran for the only haven I had known in Baltimore since I had shared a residence with my aunt and cousins on Amity Street. The sounds of my pursuer followed me as I turned down the back alley of Ren’s building, but I was inside the door before the villain had seen me. I could still hear his shouted questions about the direction the “thief” had taken.
I hurried down the hall to the room which I knew to be full of racks and shelves. The light inside the building was different, and a flickering lantern cast eerie shadows on the casks and crates that lined the walls. The shelves that covered the door to the room between the walls held few boxes, and I was able to move them quickly. The secret door itself was not locked, so I swung it open, brought the lantern with me as I stepped inside to pull the shelves in front of the entrance, and then pushed the door closed behind me.
Breathing hard from exertion, and indeed, panic, I finally took stock of my circumstances. The space felt much the same as it had the last time I had occupied it, but it appeared rather differently. There was no mattress propped against the wall, but there were several thin bedrolls and blankets stacked in a corner. There was a flagon of water and a bedpan for waste, as well as a jar with dried bits of fruit and another with a sort of hard tack cracker. There were no books on the shelves, but there was a neat stack of paper, several quills, and a bottle of ink. In the corner of the small room, near the floor, was the brick with the square-within-a-square markings. I pulled the brick from the hole it hid and reached inside to find a much smaller stack of letters than I’d found previously. By the light of the lantern, I could see some I recognized from my last perusal.
These were the words of slaves who had escaped their bonds and had sheltered in this place on their way to freedom. The parallel to my own circumstances, however tenuous the thread, struck me a heavy blow that rocked me on my heels and sent my thoughts staggering.
Here, in a tiny room hidden between walls, was a place to rest, and in the brief moments of safety that were felt in this place, the people had been able to put pen to paper and create. How many stories had not been told because there was no time or strength for anything other than survival? I had experienced this, as Mistress Ren had pointed out, in times of poverty in my own life. What must that be for one who had no guarantees – whose only guaranteed freedom in life was from life?
I pulled the notepapers out of my pocket and picked up the quill, then considered carefully before I finally wrote the conclusion to Mistress Ren’s story as it should go.
But in the end, she shaped the freedom that had been within her all along – the freedom to choose her own mind, no matter her circumstances – to fit the dreams she had for her life. And when she shared what she had chosen to think, to feel, to imagine with others, the dreams took shape and form.
And, I wrote in the voice of the traveler, I saw in her dreams the substance of her journey, and knew then that I had not been as alone on my own journey as I had imagined.
The sound of the shelves moving outside the door surprised me such that I dragged the quill across my signature. I hurriedly folded the story and shoved it behind the brick with the slaves’ letters to keep it safe from the cooping gang should it be them outside the room, then stood against the far wall, away from the door.
It opened. I heard whispering, and then a young woman and her small child entered the space. The woman carried a piece of bread and a bit of something wrapped in paper, while the child gnawed on a late apple. The child saw me first and froze, eyes wide with terror, and the mother went very still. “What is it?” asked a voice I recognized, but should not have known.
It was not possible.
Was it?
“Mistress Ren?” I said, forgetting in my shock to whisper.
The second woman, for it surely was Mistress Ren, albeit in proper women’s garb and not the scandalous trousers she’d worn during our brief acquaintance, stared at me in horror.
“Who are you?” she whispered, her fear scenting the air.
“It is I, Edgar Poe, Mistress. I mean you no harm,” I said, holding my hands open before me. The young mother flinched, and I addressed her. “Nor do I mean you or your child harm. Forgive me, madam. I shall leave you to your haven.”
I left the lantern behind and slipped past the shocked women out into the storeroom. Mistress Ren murmured something to the other woman and then called out to me, “Wait, sir.”
I paused, my own heart pounding uncomfortably at the fear in her tone. I turned slowly, my hands still open by my sides, perhaps to show that I held nothing beyond the cane that I’d tucked under my arm. “I am sorry to have frightened you, Mistress. I should not have presumed.”
“You’re Edgar A. Poe, the poet,” she said quietly, and I marveled at the balm her words were to my sense of myself.
“I am,” I answered.
“How came you to my … here?” Her words stumbled, as though she were new to the ownership.
How to answer, for it was clear she had no memory of me, nor should she, if in fact time was linear and days were lived sequentially. “You gave me safe harbor in that room you call a nest.”
Her brow furrowed, and I thought to myself, in the way one thinks of fine art or an exquisite sentence, that she was beautiful. “When did I do that?” she asked.
I studied Alexandra Reynolds for a moment as I considered my words. She truly did not remember, and I considered the likelihood that my honesty might alter something for her. But I saw no other choice than honesty, because it was all I had left to give her, even as I owed her so much more than I could ever repay. “More than a century from now,” I said quietly.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “But how could you know what I—” She broke the sentence in half and swallowed what had not yet been uttered. Then she shook her head, as if in disagreement with herself about what could be true.
Suddenly, a commotion filled the hall outside the storeroom. Fear lit behind her eyes, but purpose moved her to action as she slid the shelves into place and stood with her back to the wall as if on guard.
“There is something here, I know it,” a man’s voice snarled close by.
I expected the man from the coop. I braced myself to attempt to run past him again to lead him away from this haven, but when the intruder rounded the corner and filled the doorway with his bulk, I saw it was not him.
“Where are they?” He lunged, clearly intent on doing harm to the woman behind me. Without conscious thought I stepped forward and smashed the head of my cane into the man’s nose, which broke most convincingly and splattered his face with blood. He howled and lunged again, this time at me, but I launched myself from the room as my original plan had dictated, and prayed he would follow me from the building.
I ran for the front door through what appeared to be a warehouse full of fabric and was gratified to hear the man lumber behind me. I called to Mistress Ren and hoped she could hear the plea in my voice. “Save yourself, for one day you will save me.” I hoped only to steer him clear of the building so that she could lock the doors behind him, but just as I looked back to see her at the door, the man from the coop stepped out of the shadows and swung a club at my head.
Ren’s scream was the last thing I heard before the world went black.