My poet is a boxer, so I use the strength of my arm muscles to dig a grave into the ground of the university Lawn—fully prepared to fill said grave with a body later tonight if Mr. Garland O’Peale proves problematic. A wind howls at my back and stirs up the soil and the dank fumes of the earth. Despite my coughing from the dirt I’ve sucked into my lungs, I complete my task without assistance.
I wedge the toes of my boots into the wall of mud and climb out of the hole with my spade, borrowed from a shed beyond one of the serpentine walls. Once I’m back aboveground, I shake out my hat and clothing and tromp through the darkness, pushed forward by that easterly wind that hurls me toward my poet’s ticking heart.
Some inebriated fools shout crass and blunt propositions about what they’d like to do to my female body when they glimpse a figure in a dress on the grounds. I growl in their direction, and they stumble onto their faces, their bottles rolling across the colonnade’s bricks.
My poet’s forest-green door appears ahead, beyond a set of Tuscan columns. A sudden case of strung nerves slows my step, but I press onward nonetheless, wringing my hands, swallowing deep breaths.
I approach his room and lean my right ear next to his door.
Within his dormitory, to my relief and exhilaration, Edgar recites a longer rendition of the poem from the pond:
“ . . . Yet that terror was not fright—
But a tremulous delight,
And a feeling undefin’d,
Springing from a darken’d mind.
Death was in that poison’d wave
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his dark imagining;
Whose wild’ring thought could even make
An Eden of that dim lake.”
Applause clatters across the room. I bend down and peek through the keyhole, spying five young men seated on the bed. Eddy bows in front of a fireplace stocked with meager sticks of kindling that wheeze with flames no taller than my fingers.
I place my lips next to the keyhole and breathe a warm breath across the room that enlivens the candles and firelight.
My poet’s hair shivers in the breeze, and he turns toward the door.
“Let them see me,” I whisper through the keyhole.
He steps toward me, the heels of his shoes brushing against the floorboards, his left hand pressed against his stomach. His eyes glisten with a violet incandescence.
“Let them see me,” I say again, and I further unsettle the atmosphere inside the room with another stir of my breath.
“Once upon a midnight frightful,” says Edgar, his voice deepening, “’mid a windstorm fierce and spiteful, something wicked and delightful perched outside my chamber door . . .”
He treads closer and softens his tone. “Hush now, listen closely—hear her, sighing sighs of sorrow—fear her. Hush! Her wintry words grow clearer. Gentlemen, come meet”—Edgar whisks the door open—“Lenore!”
A stunned and wondrous wave of silence rushes against my ears. The boys on the bed shrink backward, pale and trembling, yet mesmerized by the sight of a maiden bathed in moonlight with the taste of death about her.
I step across the threshold, willing the candles to shimmer taller and to cast a glamour upon me. In the breadth of a heartbeat, my mourning dress brightens into a gown of crimson satin with ruffles and ribbons that bloom in place of the flocks of feathers. My hat shrinks down into an arrangement of rich black hair worn “up in the style of modern young women”—as my poet once requested of me. Ringlets dangle in front of my ears like clusters of flowers dipped in the indigo tinge of the night. And the string of teeth clasped around my throat, of course, transfigures into a necklace of freshwater pearls imbued with the softest blush of pink.
I’m a vision of ideal feminine beauty, with just enough scent of the sinister to inspire the audience to hold their breaths, waiting to see what I might do.
I stroll to the opposite end of the room, rest my right palm upon the windowsill, and say, with my face raised, “Let us dance to the tale of the Usher children from Richmond.”
“Ah, yes . . .” Edgar’s candlelit face breaks into a devilish grin, and he rubs his hands together. “An excellent suggestion.” He turns toward his audience, and the shadow of his figure stretches up to the ceiling.
“In Richmond,” he says, his voice whispery and low, “many years ago, there appeared a pair of theater players by the names of Mr. Luke Noble Usher and Mrs. Harriet Ann L’Estrange Usher—two better names I couldn’t have invented myself.”
The boys chuckle, their laughs tight, trapped in their throats.
“The Ushers had two children,” continues Edgar, wandering to his right, his arms crossed over his chest, “James and Agnes—two wan and nervous waifs—orphaned in the tender years of their youth. What you are about to witness, my dear friends, is their strange and shocking tale, set in the insufferable gloom of the mansion they inherited from their wealthy benefactors . . .”
A strain of music sings across the air when my poet embarks upon an embellished story of the peculiar Usher siblings, the real-life orphaned children of two of his mother’s actor friends. The poor dears were plagued by neuroses and, according to Edgar’s dramatic rendering of their lives, met grim fates involving murder and madness.
The audience listens with rapt attention, but they’re not shivering with terror. Their eyes haven’t yet widened with wonder, even though my poet waves his arms about in a theatrical fashion and raises his voice, fighting with all his might to disturb these boys.
“Let us dance,” I say again, under my breath, “to the tragic tale of the Ushers.”
The walls covered in charcoal sketches clear away, revealing a ballroom with varnished mahogany floors, lit by the handsome brass chandelier that sparked the great Richmond Theater fire of 1811—yes, the fateful lamp of the theater fire! Eddy pauses and peers at the vision around him, his eyebrows arched, his mouth agape.
“Let us dance,” I sing out at the top of my lungs, “to Edgar Poe’s tragic tale of the Ushers!”
Out of the emerald-and-onyx sheen of the ballroom’s walls step five young women in dresses of black barege silk with short, capped sleeves and coiled rope sashes. They wear ebony gloves that reach up to their elbows, and black jewels drip from their ears and necks. Feathered masks designed to look like ravens conceal all five of their faces.
The young ladies approach the gentlemen seated on the bed—now a settee of purple velvet—and they each offer a hand to the young man whose hair corresponds to the color of their own. A blonde for Miles George, a redhead for William Burwell, and so forth.
Next to a roaring fireplace with flames as tall as I, an orchestra strikes up a discordant waltz, harsh to the ears yet stirring to the heart. The musicians’ muses buzz above their heads as a cloud of hummingbirds with bewitching coats of turquoise and sapphire that twinkle in the rays of the fire. The longer the firelight flickers against the musicians, the clearer it becomes that their faces lack flesh. These musical accompanists to the risqué revelry are mere skeletons with talent in their bones!
One of the cellists—a willowy woman in a vermillion dress—strums the main melody, and if you listen quite carefully, you can hear her weeping with a percussive beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat.
The young men and women step-step-step, step-step-step, step-step-step to the rhythm of the waltz, while my poet sings his dreary song of the tragic Ushers—a dreary yet ravishing song. And oh, how his imagery causes the rich blue blood to flow through the university boys’ veins! The waltzers spin and glide quick-quick-quick, quick-quick-quick, quick-quick-quick until they fall to the floor, exhausted and sickened, for my poet just sang out such a grisly exclamation:
“James Usher sealed his sister’s dead body into the wall!”
The musicians cease playing and wait for me to react, bows raised above quivering strings, hollow eye sockets directed my way. I lift the hems of my swishing skirts, and with my feet bedecked in red satin slippers, I step over the masked girls and university boys strewn across the floorboards and clamber toward my poet, who loosens his crimson cravat by the flames of the fire. He’s breathless from his tale, his handsome face shining in the light of that theater chandelier that once lit the fair face of his mother.
“Do you feel the elation?” I ask of him.
Edgar nods, his pupils dilating from the intoxication of his own imagination, his eyes so violet, so luminous, I see creativity pulsating throughout his irises.
I offer him my hand, my fingers clad in a black glove that conceals my nails.
The members of the orchestra straighten their postures. A breath of anticipation gasps from the fire. I nod, and the musicians resume the same discordant waltz, amplified to twice its previous volume. The floor beneath my soles trembles with music.
My poet and I entwine ourselves together and launch into a dance that travels around the entire room. We stare each other in the eye, not missing a single beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat with our feet-feet-feet, feet-feet-feet, feet-feet-feet. Our shadows whirl across the walls, gliding, growing, transmogrifying into a pair of ravens—while young Usher seals his sister’s corpse into the wall, while our audience freezes in horror on the floor, while I try-try-try, try-try-try, try-try-try to evolve into my future self before the music stops.