The first sight I witness in the lacerating light of day is my distorted rendition of Jane Stanard, sketched in thick strokes of black charcoal on the wall opposite my bed.
I cover my eyes, my head throbbing, on the verge of imploding, and I recall my behavior during the previous night’s bacchanalia with my new companions. I flaunted my poetry, exposed my grim imagination in front of those well-bred boys, and they saw her.
I bolt upright in bed, suddenly panicked that I’m late for one of my seven o’clock classes.
I remember that it’s Sunday and lie back down with a grunt. As soon as my head slaps the pillow, however, a dire urge to vomit sends me tumbling out of bed.
I trip over a pile of hair, coiled like a nest of black racer snakes on my floor, swing open my door, and lunge for the Lawn, where the contents of my stomach explode across the sunlit snow. I crouch on the ground and gasp for air, and the glare from the blinding field of white drills holes through my pupils. My eyes water and leak.
Behind me, some witness of this volatile regurgitation clears his throat.
I glance over my shoulder.
Garland O’Peale, that new shadow of mine, reclines against the green shutter on the left-hand side of my door.
“I’ve been watching you and her from the firelight,” he says.
I pant for a moment before I’m able to ask, “Watching me and whom?”
“You and your Lady of the Dark who appeared in your room unannounced, sopping wet. That ghastly Naiad from the River Styx.”
I kneel there in the snow on hands and knees, my stomach convulsing, and, as hard as I fight against it, I throw up again, repulsed by the foul sweetness of the peach brandy in its acidic resurrection. My face hovers over the mess fizzing below me, and with a groan, I pledge to God aloud, “I will never drink again.”
Garland snorts. “Southern gentlemen drink like fish, Poe, and you need to fit in. Could you perhaps learn to drink better?”
I sink back on my haunches and twist my torso toward him. “Who the devil are you—telling me what to do?”
Garland rises to his feet and brushes a thin layer of ash off the stripes of his pantaloons. “I’m your ticket to pleasure and prosperity, my friend. Bring me anywhere with you, and you’ll be the wittiest king of the crowd. Isn’t that what you want: to stand above the pompous masses and rally the world into worshipping your genius?”
Ignoring the roiling of my brain, I push myself off the grass and stagger over to him. “I don’t need another muse running around in front of everyone. One was bad enough, and you, quite frankly, are an ass.”
Garland smiles. “No, it’s that other one who’s your problem, Poe. I’ll behave for you. I won’t show up unannounced. I’m happy to wander the streets of Charlottesville and observe the performances of the foul and the foolish in the courthouse, or I’ll pore over books in your dormitory, attend your lectures for you—whatever you want me to do. I’ll leave you alone as much as you desire while you fight to better yourself in the halls of this university, if . . .” He raises an index finger and lifts his chin. “If you continue inviting me into these private little soirees in your chamber. There’s nothing that strengthens me more than bathing in the bliss of the applause you receive from people who adore you.”
I rub my parched lips together and contemplate this offer, finding his terms startlingly reasonable compared to anything Lenore has ever proposed.
And yet, this Mephistophelean mockingbird troubles me down to the marrow of my bones.
“‘And so, being young and dipt in folly,’” he says with a sidelong glance, a knowing grin, “‘I fell in love with melancholy . . .’”
I shudder. “Why did you just say that?”
“I wonder if you might be in love with that wraith that weighs down your soul with obsessions of death. Do you actually feel an affinity to something so depressing?”
“I’m not in love with her . . .”
“You can’t risk associating with a specter like that when you’re not even certain how Pa will respond to your request for more money.”
My blood congeals. “H-h-how do you know about my letter to my father?”
Garland removes his hat from his head, revealing a head of short gray hair, slicked back from his forehead—a startling contrast to his youthful face. “Your father, King John Allan, dangles you from the end of a silk thread. Who’s going to be the one who cuts the string?” He cocks his head. “You or the king?”
I shrink away. “Please put your hat back on so no one questions what you are. No one respectable at this university has muses gallivanting about.”
“That’s because no one else here craves fame and attention as much as the young genius Edgar A. Poe, praised by many, yet loved and understood by none.”
“How do you know about my letter to Pa?” I ask again through gritted teeth.
Garland leans forward, his eyes more piercing than even the sunlight. “Because I helped you to write that letter, my friend. I’ve been incubating in your candlelight, inspiring your writings ever since you first realized precisely how much the gentry despises people like you.”
“Well, I didn’t ask for you to incubate.”
“Yes, you most certainly did! You encouraged me to flourish when you wrote your ridicules of Richmond asses and worked yourself into a frenzy to prove you’re not only equal to the bon ton—you’re better than they are.”
I shake my head.
“Don’t shake your head at me, Poe. You’re meant to be a satirist and a literary critic. Your destiny isn’t love poems and nonsensical tales of the grotesque. So, go chase that horrible, hackneyed other muse away. Snuff her out!”
I recoil at his suggestion and cast a glance toward the open Lawn for any traces of a figure clad in a black dress.
Garland gestures with his head toward the south. “I last saw her stumbling around the corner at the far end of the colonnade.” He grips my right forearm, his hand feverishly hot. “Those friends of yours worshipped you last night.” He peers into my eyes with those troubling irises, so swollen with firelight. “They worshipped you,” he says again, “until you slipped under her influence and repulsed them all with those miserable ramblings and drawings.”
I push his hand off me and back out of his reach. “I don’t want the world to see me as simply a man with a barbed pen,” I say, pounding a fist against my chest. “That’s not why people revere legends like Byron.”
Before Garland can spit out any more opinions, I turn and march toward the southernmost corner of the colonnade, fretting over Lenore’s whereabouts after last night’s bout of drinking, knowing that no one from home could help her this time.
Garland O’Peale calls after me in a voice that echoes across the Lawn, “You’re not Byron, Edgar Poe! And you never will be! Be something else.”
From behind a serpentine wall built of bricks, a warbling alto voice sings the final verse of an Irish poem I recognize and adore—Thomas Moore’s “Come, Rest in This Bosom.”
“Thou hast call’d me thy Angel in moments of bliss,
And thy Angel I’ll be, ’mid the horrors of this,—
Thro’ the furnace, unshrinking, thy steps to pursue,
And shield thee, and save thee,—or perish there, too!”
Through some miracle of strength, I manage to overcome the debilitating effects of my recent stomach woes and hoist myself up to the bed of mortar topping the wall.
Down below in the snow lies Lenore, flat on her back, her legs caught in a web of dried-up brambles. She’s missing patches of hair above both her temples, and a dark layer of fuzz that reminds me of the down of a gosling fills the gaps on her scalp. She stares at the sky with eyes dazed and dulled.
Judith’s admonishment from back home haunts me:
When you drink liquor, you silence your muse, more than your father ever could. You’re a bigger threat to your creativity than that man will ever be.
I swing my legs over the wall and jump down to the snow, peeking around to ensure that the professor who manages this tract of garden land isn’t pressing his nose against a window in his pavilion home overlooking the space.
Lenore raises her head two inches off the ground, gazes at me over the length of her supine body, and sings the first verse of the Thomas Moore melody:
“Come, rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer,
Tho’ the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here;
Here still is the smile, that no cloud can o’ercast,
And the heart and the hand all thy own to the last.”
She then plops her head back down on the snow and sighs. “You drank again, Eddy. Stupefied me again. Shunned me again. And, even worse, you summoned another muse to usurp me—a vicious one at that.”
I bend down and untangle her legs from the brambles, pricking myself on thorns as I pluck the vines from her clothing. Stinging drops of blood pool on the surface of my fingertips, but my guilt over Lenore’s pitiable state stops me from wincing or cursing at the pain.
She wears a pair of stockings dyed in the maroon fleur-de-lis pattern of my walls back home. A pang of homesickness for Ma stabs at my heart at the sight of them.
“I am not going to alter my appearance for you,” says Lenore, still lying there, her arms stretched out to her sides. “I followed you here, swam two rivers for you, all to leap straight into the lush and lyrical literary offerings we need to create together as artist and muse. But I don’t have the energy to fight your shame of me. That’s what weakens me most of all: your utter humiliation.”
I pull the last of the thorns from her stockings. “I’m not ashamed of you.”
“That’s a lie. You know it as well as I.” She clenches her hands into fists against the snow. “I spoke to the spirit of your mother the night before you left Richmond, right before Pa and the night watchmen tried to drown me in the James.”
Tingles of fear shoot down my arms. “Her spirit? They tried to drown you?”
Lenore pushes herself up to a seated position and shakes snow from her hair. “Your mother told me, ‘If you’re what his muse needs to be . . . then you should not alter one thing about you for the sake of what others might think.’”
Blood drains from my face. “No one has ever claimed to have spoken to the spirit of my mother—not even I. And what did you mean when you said Pa tried to drown you in the James? What are you talking about?”
Lenore leans toward me. “If you want people to stop seeing me in this crude, undeveloped form, if you want your naysayers to cease their attempts to silence me, then commit yourself to your art, Eddy, as I asked you in Richmond.”
The voices and footsteps of fellow students travel by on the other side of the wall. My heart ceases beating for a second at the sound of them. The fellows laugh and speculate about the edibility of the food they’re about to encounter in the hotel.
Lenore takes hold of my left hand, her metallic nails sliding against my skin, and a strain of music, low, and lilting, and lovely, seems to pour from her fingers into my heart.
“If you pledge yourself to your macabre writings, Edgar, then the others won’t see me in this human form anymore. I’ll mature into a spiritual entity, most likely taking the form of a raven or a crow, and we’ll travel into sumptuous worlds wrought from your imagination. I will direct the course of your art, inspire you, and speak divine truths through you, but you must stop shunning me. And you absolutely cannot replace me with that sharp-tongued serpent that chased me out of your room, whatever the devil he was.”
“The other muse,” I say, dropping my voice in case he’s listening from behind the wall, “calls himself Garland O’Peale.”
Lenore furrows her broad forehead. “Edgar Allan Poe.”
I open my mouth to continue telling her about Garland, yet I stop and ask, “Why did you just say my full name?”
“Rearrange his name.”
I withdraw my hand from hers, for the music she emits while touching me slows my ability to focus on Garland O’Peale.
Garland O’Peale.
Gar, like the end of Edgar.
Lan, like the end of Allan.
I cringe. “He anagrammed my name!”
“He stole your name, the filthy thief. Look what he did to my sleeves with his damned sharp tongue.” Lenore bends her right arm, exposing a rip in her sleeve so damaging, her naked elbow pokes through the fabric. “He’s dangerous, Eddy. He’s the one who’ll turn companions into enemies, not I.”
“Oh, no . . .” I jump to my feet. “I can’t have the two of you fighting and begging me to silence the other. I don’t have time for this!”
Lenore stands, as well, but before she can speak, I tell her, “Pa didn’t leave enough money for my expenses here. If I can’t finish my education, he’ll force me into his counting room for the rest of my life. I’ll pore over ledgers until my eyes weaken and my brain numbs, and I won’t have a single second left for even the most uninspired of writing, let alone anything divine.”
Without warning, Lenore clutches her throat and jerks to and fro, wracked with a sudden fit of convulsions.
I inch toward her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“John Allan’s hand travels far,” she says, her voice a frog’s croak. “I feel his grip on my throat. He’s trying to strangle me through your debt.” She shuts her eyes and endures a greater bout of spasms, as though an invisible hand is wringing her neck.
I stare at her a moment, stunned and anxious by her behavior, yet also suspecting she may be duping me into pledging myself to her version of art.
“Stop that,” I say.
She gurgles and purples.
“Stop your melodrama, Lenore!” I say. “Stop it immediately! You’re far too old for that sort of ridiculousness!”
As soon as my command tumbles from my lips, I realize how much I sounded like Pa.
Lenore’s eyes fly wide open, and she lets go of her throat with a gasp.
I grab my own throat, appalled at the phrases that just flew out of it.
She bends over at the waist and catches her breath. “What did you just tell me?”
“I didn’t mean to sound like him. I thought you were using histrionics to fool me into—”
She snaps the silver chain that I gave her off her neck and stands upright, exposing a gruesome stain on her dress—a bloodstain the shape of the heart made of glass, as though the necklace somehow animated itself and seeped across her bodice.
“Oh, God,” I mutter, but before I can recover from my shock from the blood, she throws the stone at me, hitting me on the chest.
Without a word, she then lunges for the wall and scales the bricks.
“Lenore?” I call after her. “Don’t run around out there while angry. Please, find a safe place to stay. I’ll call for you if I need you.”
She whips her head toward me from the top of the wall, her teeth bared, her spine curved. “If you call for me,” she croaks in the deepest voice I’ve ever heard from any creature, “I won’t come.”
Another throng of students clambers past the wall out there, and Lenore jumps down into their midst. After a brief pause of stunned silence, the fellows shriek like children witnessing an atrocity.
“What was that?” they ask after Lenore must have run away.
“It looked dead!”
“What was that?”
“A corpse?”
“My God!”
“What was that?”
This is the most entertaining night of my life! I remember Miles declaring in my bedroom in the throes of activity the night before, and his praise of Lenore somehow muffles the other fellows’ horror.
I pick up the heart necklace from the ground, unexpectedly warmed by its touch, soothed by its beauty.
Actually, my recollection of Miles’s admiration allows me to suddenly enjoy, and relish, and appreciate these other schoolmates’ reactions to my Gothic muse.
I wait behind the wall for the students to gather their wits, and a smile that must look wicked and as pleased as can be spreads across my face. With my back pressed against the cold bricks, I clutch that crimson heart, which neither beats nor bleeds in my hand, but I imagine all the diabolical details and evocative phrases I would use were I to write about a lifeless human heart quickening back to life—shuddering, shaking, resuscitating with a low, dull thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump . . .