My poet’s heartbeat drew me to his door.
From across a field of snow lit by a waxing moon, less than two hundred feet from his presence, I detected a change in the air—a bitter chill, as though another form of art—biting and ugly—consumed his attention. Despite my fatigue from my swim, I charged his way, and now I’m standing in his doorway, the glass heart palpitating against my bosom to the rhythm of the heart that beats inside the breast of Edgar Allan Poe.
I clasp the sides of my head and release a silent scream, freeing the essence of Jane Stanard from my soul. The air ripples with her energy, and Edgar draws her on the wall with heavy strokes of charcoal. I close my eyes and direct my artistic vessel to breathe the dankness of her grave, to climb inside her casket with her, to suffer the suffocation of a premature burial, to remember the luster of her light brown curls and the glory of her voice. The candlelight shivers, and Edgar speaks of his dead love and a bed of lilies with beauteous prose in a mournful, whispery tone that floods me with rapture. I remember Morella’s promise for the evolution of beings like me:
You will be able to slip into realms fit for a god. You will roost in a sumptuous world wrought from your artist’s imagination and experience unprecedent spiritual pleasures, of which no mortal has ever dared to dream.
I reach out my hands, so close to touching such a realm.
“. . . and there,” says my poet, “I now lie, beneath a bed of lilies.”
The palpitations of the stone slow to a gentle ticking, and a wind from the open door blows out two of the candles in the room. Through bleary eyes, I see the slumped shape of my poet, his forehead shoved against the wall. He rubs the back of his head of curls with fingers smeared in charcoal.
“What is that?” asks an emerald-eyed blond boy from down on the floor, a note of awe chiming in his voice. He gawks at me with his head tilted backward, and his right foot twitches, knocking over an empty glass.
Three other young men gape at me with expressions of both fear and befuddlement, their eyes glassy, their mouths dangling open, their faces flushed and damp. They’re too stunned to hurt me, and they smell intoxicated, so I don’t fret for my life like I did on the streets of Richmond.
My head tingles and itches, as though something wants to burst free from the roots of my hair. To make room for whatever it is that longs to grow, I grab two clumps of my hair and rip them straight out of my scalp.
A boy sitting in a chair tips over backward and crashes to the floor.
Edgar turns around, and his face blanches at the sight of me.
“I’ve had quite a lot of . . . quite a lot of time to think, Eddy.” I drop the hair to the floor and step toward him, my boots squelching with river water, my tongue swelling up to the size of a brick. “I’m here to show you the joy of your art. The unadult . . . unadulter . . . unadulterate . . .” I shake out my head when the word just won’t come. “The pure joy of concocting grotesque masterpieces.” I shove the heels of my palms against my temples and squeeze my eyes shut. “Did you drink . . .” I sway. “Did you drink again, Eddy?”
“How did you get here?” he asks. “You know you can’t be here.”
“No! Don’t say that again!”
“I’m hosting guests!”
“Don’t you dare throw me out. If I don’t belong here, Edgar, then you don’t belong either!”
“Oh, holy God of Abraham!” says the blond boy on the floor with another gasp of awe. “This is the most entertaining night of my life!”
One of the other fellows—some dandy in a silk hat with gray-and-white feathers—leaps to his feet and hooks a clawed hand around my left arm. I wince with pain, but before I can say a word, he pushes me outside, slams the door shut behind us, and shoves me out to the snow in the Lawn.
“Edgar doesn’t want you here!” says the brute.
I struggle against falling. “Who are you?”
“I know exactly who you are.” He marches toward me, his eyes orange and ablaze with flames that pierce the darkness.
I back away. “I don’t understand . . .”
“Poe isn’t meant to become a purveyor of the macabre,” he says in my face, his breath sickly sweet. “Horror is for the lower classes. Horror isn’t art!”
His words slice a tear in my upper left sleeve.
I leap backward and cover the rip with my right hand, my forearm freezing, stinging. “How did you do that?”
“Go!” He stomps his right foot, as though I’m an animal he can scare off. “Go haunt a ten-year-child—that’s who ghost tales are for, not university students. You’re nothing more than a theater effect, and you reek of cheapness. You’re drivel!”
My right sleeve tears, exposing the skin of my elbow.
“Who the devil are you?” I ask, retreating further still.
“I’m Edgar Poe’s muse.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, but it is, little spider.” He walks closer, wiggling his fingers, mimicking the movements of scuttling arachnids. “So, go crawl back into the shadows and cobwebs from whence you came and leave inspiration to me.”
“Don’t stape . . .” I grab my chin, attempting to move my mouth in a manner that won’t melt my words into nonsense, for my tongue’s just gone numb. “Stape sass.”
The bully in the hat blinks and sways. “Don’t I know what you’re saying. I don’t know . . . what . . .” He clasps his face in his hands, his mouth as seemingly broken as mine.
The same nauseating, liquid sensation that knocked me to the floor of Ebenezer’s bedroom again saturates my brain. I throw my arms straight out to my sides to regain my balance and totter away.
“That’s right, go, spidery spider!” says that counterfeit muse from behind me, his words slurred and punctuated by a hiccup.
I dread the idea of the two of us collapsing together on the Lawn in the dark, so I round the far corner of the colonnade, where it meets up with a curved brick wall. With loud grunts and more rips in the fabric of my dress, I climb up and over the wall, landing on my feet in a moonlit patch of snow near a building that exhales the fiery exhaust of a smokehouse.
My knees buckle.
The ground tilts.
I stagger three more steps and collapse into a snare of brambles, drifting into a brandy-induced haze in a bed of thorns—a far cry from “realms fit for a god.”