I awaken in the shadows, ravenous for words, hungering for delicacies dripping with dread.
My poet in the black frock coat kneels in prayer beneath the windows in the ceiling that bathe his head in a weak winter light, bronzing his brown curls and the back of his neck. He bends his face toward the floorboards, toward the crypt down below him, and I will the spirits of the dead beneath him to whisper a song:
Once upon a dark December, in a year we must remember,
Morbid mounds of ash and ember told a gruesome tale of gore—
Ah, there now—he lifts his face, sensing my presence. I smell the incense of his imagination kindling. A small shudder quivers through him.
In his mind, I’m a girl with ashen skin and raven hair who watches him from the walls with raptor eyes. He smells the smoke that still clings to me from the flames that sparked me to life all those years ago, when his mother drew her last breath in a cold and silent room. He envisions me as a young woman draped in one of the high-waisted dresses all the fashionable ladies once wore—gossamer, Grecian-inspired gowns that fluttered in the breezes of his childhood.
Oh, Lord—how my hunger worsens! How I crave a tale of horror that will appease my groaning soul. Dream again, poet, of your other lost lady—the one you call “Helen,” who lies in a grave up on Shockoe Hill.
I slither through the shadows, my skirts swishing, sliding, scented with cinders. I don’t quite know for certain whether I truly am a girl, but that’s how my poet tends to think of me, and so I lengthen, and stretch, and wiggle curves into my hips. I thrust out my torso and plump up my breasts, reshaping myself into the silhouette of a young woman who hides in the warmth of the wood, and the nails, and the pale pink plaster. I creak and crawl in the wall on hands and knees, unseen, unheard by most, and set Edgar Poe’s imagination ablaze by conjuring images that astound and horrify him. I inspire him, and in turn, he offers me stories that strike sparks in the flint of my fluttery fragment of a heart.
The Right Reverend Bishop Moore opens his eyes mid-prayer and gapes in my direction.
He senses me, too—ha! ha!
Perhaps my strengthening heartbeat has loudened.
Perhaps my cravings rumble with thunderous wails through the church and shake the floor beneath the bishop’s leather soles.
Perhaps everyone hears the songs I’ve summoned from the dead in the crypt down below.
Edgar cracks a small smile at that last supposition.
“Silence your muses!” the bishop shouts to the congregation minutes later, and I crouch down in the dust of the floorboards and breathe the tang of anguish and terror trapped inside this haunted temple.
“The strongest among us,” says the bishop, “swiftly learned that to walk the path of righteousness, we must turn away from foolish temptations and imaginary realms before our passions grow unruly and wild—before the world views our extravagance.”
Unruly.
Wild.
Before the world views our extravagance.
My soul—so cramped, so sore and weary of entrapment in shadows—longs for unruliness, wildness.
I want the world to notice my poet. To notice me.
Wait until they see what’s coming. Oh, just wait and see . . .
The service ceases, and the congregation rises. With some tantalizing little nudges from me, my poet woos his beautiful, beloved Elmira, and then he tugs at the cream-colored cravat strangling him and plods toward the back of the church, his footfalls hammering out a steady cadence—a bold and beauteous trochaic octameter that empowers me to stretch even taller. His violet-gray eyes flit in my direction for the briefest of moments—long enough for me to join him.