Something stirs within the cabin where Judith, Dabney, and Old Jim reside.
Ma and Aunt Nancy knit scarves for the poorhouse up in Ma’s bedroom, and Pa has been working at his mercantile since morning. Judith and Jim labor in the kitchen, and I hear Dabney cleaning the stable down the way.
Yet I sense movement and breath within the wood-framed structure standing before me.
In my right hand I carry a heart-shaped necklace, dug out from a box of costumes and stage jewelry from my old Thespian Society days with schoolmates, before our parents shut down our theatrical endeavors. The red stone cut from glass grows warm from my hand, and the silver chain slips out from between my fingers.
In my head I carry ten lines of a poem I’ve been struggling to compose while resting from the sherry.
I walk up to the door of the cabin and breathe through a nervous bout of light-headedness.
The screech owl—“Morella”—lands upon the peak of the pitched roof with a flap of her striped wings. I ignore the mournful sound of her whinnying, avert my gaze from those shocking yellow eyes, and rap upon the door.
A glance over my shoulder confirms that I’m still alone and unobserved, save for the owl. I turn the latch, enter the quarters, and close the door behind me.
In the main room, where Jim and Dabney sleep, stand a pair of plain wooden beds, covered in gray woolen bedcovers, butted against the bare planks of two of the walls. A table occupies the room’s center, its three chairs all pushed in, with no signs of recent use.
I walk across the floor, drawing groans from the bellies of the unvarnished boards. My eyes drop, and I spy soot sprinkled across the braided yellow rug in front of the toes of my shoes. More patches of the fine black powder trail off toward the door to Judith’s bedroom, which stands slightly ajar. The closed curtains, coupled with the gloom of the sky outside, transform the room beyond into a dark abyss.
With my left hand squeezed around the glass heart, my gaze focused on that door, I dare to tread two more steps. My back tingles with the same flood of chills that used to wash down my spine whenever Judith spun her stories for the other servants and me. Her voice, how it rumbled, every syllable enunciated to dramatic effect, and her face, how it glowed such an extraordinary shade of orange from the shine of the flames snapping in the kitchen’s fire. Whenever she finished sharing her fantastical feasts of folk tales, she would tuck me into bed, and I would yank my blankets over my head until I struggled to breathe. More than anything else in the world, I feared that a cold phantom hand would reach out and grab me from the darkness, or that I’d open my eyes to the ghastly face of a ghoul breathing against me.
“Lenore?” I call toward Judith’s doorway.
No voice, nor breath, nor creaking floorboard responds.
Nonetheless, I offer an olive branch to my muse by speaking the opening lines of the new poem I’m composing:
“Thy soul shall find itself alone—
Alone of all on earth—unknown
The cause—but none are near to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall then o’ershadow thee—be still . . .”
Nothing stirs in reply to my words. My poem simply thudded against the walls.
I consider leaving, but before I swivel my shoulders toward the exit, the bedroom door cracks farther open.
I freeze and hold my breath.
“Write the words down,” says a voice that reverberates within my rib cage.
More chills run down my spine, leaving in their wake a cold sweat that spills out to my shoulders.
I see her—Lenore, that living shadow wrought from the embers of my soul. She sidles around the door. Her maroon lips still match the chamber wall from whence she came, and I now detect the fleur-de-lis pattern of my wallpaper etched across the curve of her bottom lip. Her ashen complexion looks more cadaverous than I remember, which magnifies the protrusion of her round, jet-black eyes. Her broad forehead, I realize, resembles mine, framed by that long and tangled hair so desperately in need of combing.
“Write the words down,” she says again, more slowly.
“I—I can’t.” I inch backward. “Not until I’m safely gone from Moldavia. But I intend to call the poem ‘Visit of the Dead.’ What do you think of it so far?”
She nods toward the silver chain dangling from my left fingers. “What are you holding?”
I open my palm and reveal the glass heart, which shimmers a red so dark, it almost resembles her eyes. “It’s for you.”
She turns her chin to her right and casts a glance that tells me she does not trust this material offering.
“I must beg your pardon for my initial reaction to you,” I say. “And for drinking. Please, accept this gift as an offer of my humblest apology.”
She rubs those maroon lips together. “You speak as though you’ve been trained to say pretty words when behaving like an ass.”
I can’t help but laugh a little. “Yes, I have, indeed, been trained to speak in such a manner, but the apology is sincere. Someone more knowledgeable about muses than I showed me the error of my ways.”
With cautious footfalls, Lenore approaches, her eyes fixed upon the sparkles of the glass.
My hand quakes.
The chain jangles.
Those mortifying molars strung around her throat chatter as though they’re lodged inside a human skull.
She lifts the heart from my palm and sniffs the stone, so seemingly pleased by the aroma, that her eyes flutter closed, and a sigh pours from her lungs.
“It smells like a theater,” she says, her voice softer, warmer, easier to absorb.
I sigh, as well. “I fetched this beauty from a box of costume pieces.”
Her eyes reopen, and the fires of creativity throb around her pupils.
“The chain is long enough,” I say, my voice squeaking, “that you can simply loop the necklace over your head, without my needing to help you clasp it.”
She lifts the necklace over herself—no need for me to touch her, thank heaven! She pulls her hair out of the back of the chain and settles the heart against the soot-powdered fabric of her bodice, several inches beneath the string of teeth. The stone shines scarlet against the sable backdrop of her bosom.
I clear my throat. “You may follow me to the university this weekend, Miss Lenore . . .”
She snorts. “‘Miss?’”
“Yes.” Again, I clear my throat and straighten my posture. “But only if you work to assimilate into the world of the university, which, as you may or may not know, only permits male scholars.”
Her jaw stiffens. “You should have imagined me as a boy, Eddy.”
“Well, we shall figure out a clever way to—” I purse my lips, unsure how to complete that thought, wondering how the devil I’m supposed to hide this oddity in the middle of the University of Virginia—an institution reserved for the South’s most refined and promising young gentlemen.
“Perhaps . . .” I gesture toward my neck and grin with a show of my teeth, hoping she’ll understand that I want her to remove that disgusting string of molars without my having to actually articulate the request.
“‘Perhaps . . .’?” she asks, peering at me from the tops of her eyes, as though she does understand but wants me to say it.
“Perhaps you could remove that other necklace.”
Her glare turns menacing, and she seethes like a bull, but I persevere with my requests, for they’re vital to our survival.
“And . . . and maybe wear your hair up in the style of modern young women. And perhaps refrain from destroying my friends’ bedrooms . . . or frightening townspeople . . .”
“You”—she steps forward—“are not”—she pushes her face into mine—“my master.”
“I don’t claim to be your master.”
“We are supposed to work as collaborators.”
“We . . .” I lean away from the heat and the stench of her hell-furnace breath. “Are we?”
With a growl of frustration, she grabs me by my shoulders. “You do not get to tell me how I should appear and act”—she backs me toward the front door—“when you created me to look and behave this way. If you want me docile and dull, then resign yourself to forever writing those anemic love poems you’ve pilfered from Lord Byron!” She slams me against the front door.
“You sound just like Pa,” I say through gritted teeth.
“That’s because Pa and I both know you can do better. But the difference between us is that John Allan fears your potential, whereas I’m the electricity igniting it.”
I turn my head at the sound of hooves squishing through the snow that’s melting out on the street.
“I should go,” I say. “Pa might return.”
“How am I to follow you to the university, Edgar? How do you intend for me to get there when you’re so ashamed of me—so terrified of people seeing me?”
I shake my head. “I—I don’t know. Can’t you travel in a non-corporeal manner? Or seep back into the shadows?”
“No! I’m meant to be seen now. There’s no going back.”
The hooves travel nearer. I pray that they don’t belong to the mares pulling Pa’s carriage.
“Well”—I swallow—“then a boat might be best. Stow away on a vessel heading north on the James, then somehow find your way up the Rivanna River into Charlottesville.”
Her eyebrows relax into regular brows, as opposed to two clashing sabers.
“Would you like me to write those directions down?” I ask.
She shakes her head and says, “North on the James, and up the Rivanna River.”
“Pa cannot know that you’re out here. Please hide well until I leave for the university. Do not make a sound.”
She backs away, her narrow skirts swishing. “I shall be as quiet as a dead mouse.”
“No, that’s not how the saying . . .”
She turns her head an inch to her right and narrows her eyes, daring me to try to correct her mistake in adding “dead” to the idiom.
“I’m much obliged,” I say instead.
“Do not try to change me.”
“I wasn’t . . .”
“I’m the best part of you, Edgar Poe.”
Oh, dear God, I hope that’s not true.
I shake my head. “I don’t . . .”
“‘Discouragement be damned’ is what you need to say. That’s all you need to do to save me. Pledge yourself to our art until your dying day, or else . . .” Her eyes flood with tears—a strange sight on one who doesn’t seem to feel much in the way of sorrow. She clutches the glass heart hanging around her neck and blinks as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with her emotions. “Or else you’ll lose me,” she says, her tone so frail, so human, I forget for a moment what she is.
I snicker softly. “I don’t think I’m apt to lose someone like you too quickly.”
She watches me for a moment without speaking, and then she says in a voice that reaches straight into my soul, “I’m obsessed with death but terrified of dying.”
My lips part with a gasp.
I’m obsessed with death but terrified of dying.
This astonishing creature has just put into words what my heart has longed to speak ever since my mother ceased breathing. My throat fills with a pain more lacerating than the blade of a razor, and before I know what’s happening, a paroxysm of silent, tearless sobs shudders through me, my stomach convulsing, my lips trembling.
“I understand,” I say in a strained whisper, curling my hands into balls by my sides in a desperate fight to regain my composure.
A tear spills down Lenore’s right cheek, etching a trail of soot. “Then pledge yourself to me, and I will never smolder out and die on you—not as long as you shall live.”
“I must go.” I open the door and slip outside.
“Eddy—”
I close the door and say through the wood, “I’m sorry. Pa’s due to return home.”
I then scramble back to the main house with the swiftest stride I’ve ever walked without actually running, for I cannot pledge myself to something so strange, so singularly unsettling, when I, too, am an oddity who’s only pretending to belong.