Yes, indeed, I’m quite beguiling; there’s a reason Edgar’s smiling—yes, I kissed a kiss of dread into the heart I wore before—the stone heart I doffed afore, and he shall see what I’ve in store, if he follows his Lenore . . .
“Lenore!” I shout into the wind from the Lawn, tasting the name that curls around my tongue like chocolate shavings must melt in the mouths of mortals. The students of the University of Virginia dart back into their dormitories and watch me from behind cracked-open doors, fearful yet curious.
Oh, so curious.
Their fascination fortifies my soul, fans the fires flowing through my blood, and sends another tingling sensation of impending growth tickling across my scalp, urging me to rip out more of my hair to make room for the feathers. They must be feathers!
I stop in the snow in front of the northern rooms of the East Lawn and yank out every strand of my hair from my head. Yes! Every single strand! The process of tearing out fistfuls of tresses—that unnecessary glamour impeding my evolution—feels absolutely divine and causes no pain.
A young man gawks at me from the shadows of a Tuscan column. I pay no attention to the features of his face, for my eyes lock onto the outward-curving crown of the tremendous black hat that climbs into the air nearly two feet above his head. I rub my fingers across the downy fuzz encasing my scalp. The breeze chills me.
The young man seems frozen in Parian marble, and yet I approach him.
“May I have your hat, sir?” I ask in my politest of tones, knowing that university gentlemen don’t often receive requests from hairless creatures in outmoded mourning dresses.
“W-w-what did you just say?” he asks, his chin quivering, eyes watering.
“May I have your hat? In exchange you may have my hair that’s lying over there in the snow.”
“I don’t want your—” He abruptly stops himself, his eyes protruding from his sallow face, as though he fears he’s just made a horrid mistake by rejecting my hair.
“Please”—I loom closer, my hands on my hips—“my head is freezing. May I have your hat, sir?”
Without speaking, he whisks his hat off his head of golden curls—the fellow could have stepped straight out of Rubens’s Cherubs painting—and hands the chapeau to me.
“Thank you. I am much obliged to you for your generosity,” I say, for I am not a monster like that usurper Garland O’Peale. My manners are as appealing as my madness.
I fit the hat over my head, thrill at the warmth of the satin lining sliding across the curves of my scalp, and with a tip of my head to my generous benefactor, I dash off for the city of Charlottesville, in search of artists who will offer me scraps of nourishment while my poet learns he needs me.