On a clear and soundless night in late November, starved and weary of my life without my poet, I venture to the arcaded West Range building of the University of Virginia. Chalky layers of dust and grime cake my skin and parch my throat. A thick wall of air—my poet’s resistance—pushes me backward on the Lawn, but I lean my right shoulder forward and plow through the barrier, which smells of the bitterness of defeat.
With silent footfalls, I cross the bricks of the arcade, my ears pricked for any signs of my poet.
“Where are you, Eddy?” I ask in a voice that, I admit, some might call rather menacing. My eyes scan each closed green door. “And where is Garland O’Peale?”
My feet halt before a door.
Behind the green wood, a heart beats with pounding palpitations.
Tick. TIck. TICk. TICK.
Over the waves of muffled male laughter surging from the dormitory within, I hear each thumping valve and chamber of my poet’s heart.
I turn the latch and enter the bruised and dented walls of a booze-drenched room squirming with a dozen young men who chat and chortle around square card tables. They hold plain-backed cards in front of their faces, splayed out like ladies’ fans, and they guzzle down glasses of a clear liquid with sprigs of mint floating around in the bubbles. Coins clank against tabletops. Laughter amplified by alcohol bellows across the chamber, cresting into high-pitched waves that shriek across my brain. One of the players—a potbellied man with fuzzy auburn side-whiskers—can’t be any younger than fifty.
Edgar sits among these gamblers, his own hand of cards fanned in front of his mouth. His skin bulges beneath his eyes, signaling his lack of sleep.
With a startled blink, he catches sight of me and lowers his cards.
Not now, he mouths. Go!
Another batch of cobwebs entangles my nose. I brush at my face and ask over the roar of the crowd, “Is this why you’re ignoring your poetry?”
Edgar widens his eyes.
The other players grow silent and whip their heads around to me, freezing at my presence.
“This is the card playing you told me about?” I ask. “This is your solution? To get expelled and shipped back to Richmond?”
The older man with the potbelly pops up from his chair. “What do you mean, ‘expelled’? Is the faculty on its way?”
“Oh, God!” says one of the boys, also jumping to his feet. “Everyone, grab your winnings and run!”
Knees bang against tables, and cards and liquor cascade to the floor. The gamblers reach out and grab stacks of money, stuffing papers and coins into pockets, cursing and whimpering—a whirlwind of greed and fear that makes me perspire just from watching. They leap up, chairs tipping over behind them, and push each other out of the way in a mad exodus to the door, their mouths twisted with terror, not caring a fig about me—the grim specter among them. In fact, I’m forced to jump aside to avoid getting trampled.
Edgar races past me in the crowd.
I run after him.
Before I can even call my poet’s name, someone clasps me from behind and throws me to the grass beyond the arcade. The assailant yanks my severed hat from my head.
“I told you to stay away,” he says.
I flip myself over on the ground and find Garland standing over me in his green-tinted spectacles, holding my hat—the hat he mutilated.
“Does anyone have a pistol?” he calls out, and he spins toward the last of the fleeing students. “I require a pistol at once!”
A door swings open behind him, and a red-cheeked fellow whom I saw at the card tables reaches out and grabs Garland’s left shoulder. “Thought I heard you out here, O’Peale. Hurry! Get inside Poe’s room before you’re caught.”
The fellow pushes Garland into the room, and I follow them inside, slamming the door shut behind me.
Edgar tenses by his bed when he sees me, a gray coat half-unpeeled from his arms.
“No!” He drops the coat to the floor. “These two can’t be together. Upton, get them out of here!”
“My God, Poe,” says the other student—this Upton—backing away, a hand clasped over his mouth. “Is this—is this your Gothic muse? The one rumored to have prowled the grounds before? The one Miles raves about?”
Eddy peers at me with pleading eyes. “Go back into the hills—please. I’m so close to finishing the session. I need to survive the examinations. I must complete this first year, so I can retain some semblance of honor.”
“I’ll strangle her for you,” says Garland, lunging toward me.
“No!” Eddy throws out a hand and pushes him back by his chest. “Don’t hurt her.”
“But—”
“I said, don’t hurt her!”
The Upton fellow continues to gawk, but he does manage to lower his hand from his mouth, which ends the muffling of his words. “Why have you been hiding her, Poe? She far surpasses anything I’ve ever witnessed before.”
“She wouldn’t have been welcome at the card tables,” says Edgar, and he averts his eyes from mine. “I see the cobwebs dangling from you, Lenore. I apologize for my negligence.” He swallows with a painful-looking ripple of his Adam’s apple. “I’ve missed you.”
I react with a startled blink. “Have you?”
Garland throws my hat at me. “He hasn’t been himself. Don’t feel excessively flattered by that confession.”
Upton inches closer and observes the feathers lining my scalp with a quiet gasp of awe. “She’s a gem of art. I would have paid the price of admission to see the two of you perform together.”
Garland snorts at such an idea.
Edgar arches his eyebrows. “You would have?”
“I told you, dear poet”—I lower my hat to my head—“I’m ready to be seen. Your shame of me is unwarranted.”
“I beg to differ,” says Garland.
“I don’t care a damn about your differing, Mr. O’Peale.”
“Stop quibbling!” Eddy kicks aside his coat on the floor. “I’m planning to destroy the both of you tonight, so there’s no point bickering with each other! Don’t make this worse.”
My blood runs cold.
“What are you talking about?” asks Garland.
Eddy sinks down on his bed.
“Edgar . . .” I say over the hammering of my heart. “What do you mean by ‘destroying’ us?”
He rubs his arms and looks toward his table. “If I’m to keep myself warm tonight . . . I’ll need to . . .” He clears his throat. “I’ll be forced to burn my manuscripts.”
Garland and I lock eyes. My nemesis’s face blanches to the color of bleached bones, and my blood simultaneously drains from my head.
The flames in the hearth choke and sputter behind me, but I don’t dare look at them.
“I’m sorry,” says Eddy, “but I can’t afford another stick of firewood. I’m terrified of falling ill before the examinations. I just gambled away my last dollar.”
“But . . .” I shake my head. “I saw every person at that card game grabbing up piles of money like they didn’t care who it belonged to.”
“Do I seem like a lucky man to you?” asks Eddy. “I was so terrified of getting caught and expelled, I didn’t touch one cent that wasn’t mine. It’s getting so damn cold at night, and a pile of flammable paper sits under my table . . .”
“No, no, no!” Upton heads for the door. “I’ll bring you some of my own logs, my friend . . .”
“No, please don’t!” Edgar leaps to his feet. “I don’t want charity yet again. Please forget this.”
“I’m not going to let you freeze to death, Poe,” says Upton.
“Bring over another glass of mint-sling to keep me warm if that makes you feel better. But please don’t view me as a beggar.” Eddy pushes a smile to his face and sits back down. “Best be off now, Beall. I feel a mood coming on, and I can’t bear the thought of you thinking me both poor and mad.”
“Send away Madam Melancholy.” Garland gestures with his head toward me. “And your mood will crawl away with her.”
“You’re wrong, Garland.” Eddy picks up his coat from the floor and slides it back over his arms. “Lenore pulls the demons from my head. Since childhood’s hour, she’s the only thing that has ever kept me sane.”
A small murmur of surprise bleats from my lips. So touched by his words am I that my human-esque eyes blur with a film of tears, and my mortal chin quivers.
Eddy crouches down to the floor and crawls beneath his table. “Don’t hurt her, O’Peale. Good night to you, Beall. Oh, listen to that!” He chuckles from down in the cobwebs. “I am a Poet to a T.”
Upton opens the door and turns to Garland. “Should I go? Is he all right?”
“I’m coming with you,” says Garland, “I need an ax.”
My heart stops. “An ax? For what?”
Without replying, Garland breezes out the door with Upton.
Eddy backs out from beneath his table while hugging a pile of manuscripts tangled in cobwebs. A spider dangles from the bottommost page on a thread.
“If cobwebs cling to me when you toss your beautiful poems of sorrow beneath your table,” I say, “then what do you think will happen to me if you throw the poems into the fire?” I raise my hands, convinced that I see wisps of smoke emanating from the tips of my fingers. “My skin already tingles as though it might burn.”
“I don’t want to burn my work, Lenore, but, my God, what am I supposed to do? Pa literally left me here to die.”
Garland hurls open the door and hoists a hatchet into the air.
I scream and lunge for the window. Eddy drops his manuscripts.
“Stop screaming!” says Garland. He lowers the blade into Eddy’s table with a force that makes me jump. “Clean off this table and break it down into kindling.”
Edgar gasps. “I can’t chop up my table.”
“You’ve paid for the furniture, Poe. You still have your portable writing desk. Chop it up and leave your manuscripts alone. You are not going to kill your muses.” Garland glances at me. “Not even that one.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” I say, and I grab a pile of books from Edgar’s table and tuck it beneath his bed.
Garland removes the writing box to the corner of the room farthest from the fire, and Edgar and I transfer stacks of papers to the space beneath his bed, where the drafts blow arctic cold against my face.
“I hear your molars clacking together,” I tell my poet when we’re kneeling down there together.
“I thought that was your ghastly necklace,” he says with a laugh edged with pain. He clasps his mattress above, bows his head, and murmurs three new lines of “Tamerlane”:
“For I was not as I had been;
The child of Nature, without care,
Or thought, save of the passing scene—”
My poet then rises to his feet, yanks the hatchet out of his table, and knocks the furniture onto its side with a shove of his right foot. With a blow swift and measured, he hacks off one of the table’s legs with a startling thwack.
Garland joins me at my side during the ensuing whacks.
“I’m much obliged for this idea, Mr. O’Peale,” I say, “even though it galls me to compliment you. I admire your quick-witted thinking.”
“That’s my forte,” he says, removing his hat and his green-tinted spectacles.
I step back, for his face reminds me of Edgar’s. A strange, mockingbird rendering of my poet with short gray feathers for hair.
“Good gracious,” I say. “You look like him.”
“I always have. As do you.”
Edgar throws the fourth leg aside and proceeds to chop up the body.
“I genuinely still believe we might work well together,” I say out of the corner of my mouth to Garland, “if you stop bullying and threatening me.”
Garland tucks his hat beneath his left arm. “I’m going to Maryland with Upton Beall after the session ends.”
“Are you? Why?”
“I’m fond of Beall. He’s extraordinarily fun. And I’m tired of waiting for our brooding Mr. Poe to embrace me. The fire inside me is sputtering out.”
Garland looks me in the eye, and, ’tis true—not a single spark illuminates his irises, which now appear a dull yellowish-green instead of amber.
“He’ll never stop fretting about John Allan,” he says as our poet splits the table into two.
I brush a cobweb off my chin. “Working with other artists isn’t the same at all, Mr. O’Peale. I’ve tried it. It won’t satiate the hunger.”
Garland rolls up his right sleeve and shows me a horrifying black patch of singed skin on his inner arm. “He’s already burned some of his humorous pieces in my presence. His threat to destroy more of his work just now made me realize you were right: Poe is our greatest adversary. You can have him.”
“I don’t know if he’ll be the same without you.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“You might perish without him.”
“Another risk I’d rather face than to suffer this frustration.” Garland offers me his hand. “Adieu, Madame Melancholy. Good luck back in Richmond. I don’t envy you for facing John Allan while there.”
I shake his hand, and my heart quivers over his words about Pa—a man I’d hope to never encounter again while inhabiting this vulnerable frame.
Garland slips out of the room, as do I, while Edgar Poe finishes murdering his furniture.