The clock down the hall strikes midnight.
I’ve returned my papers—bong—to my writing box—bong—and I can’t stop thinking—bong—how the final stanza of “Tamerlane”—bong—needs to be scratched out—bong—and completely rewritten—bong—but I don’t dare lift my pen—bong.
He wanted to shoot her!
Bong!
He loaded his musket and threw open my door to shoot her!
Bong!
I lie frozen—BONG!—on my side—BONG!—in my bed.
BONGGGGGGGGGG . . .
I hold my breath and listen for any snores or farts or restless movements stirring in Pa’s room down the hall. The urge to revise Stanza XVII of “Tamerlane” prods at my brain like a peevish, pestering finger, but he wanted to slay her, and I don’t dare write tonight. Part of me wishes Pa would just go out and frig the widow Wills until they both turn blue and collapse in her bed, because I don’t dare write tonight while he’s brooding and bumbling around in this house, waiting for me to err—waiting to barge through my door and KILL MY MUSE!
Outside on the portico, a flute plays eight airy bars of a song that succors my rankled temper. I squeeze my eyes shut and absorb the music into my veins.
A pause ensues, and again I listen for Pa puttering about in his chamber.
Once more, the flute beckons, and I hear a line from “Tamerlane” whistling in the notes:
“The lovliness of loving well . . .”
“I don’t dare write tonight,” I say toward the drapes shielding my door.
“I have no words, alas! to tell
The lovliness of loving well!”
I cover my face with my hands. I don’t dare write tonight.
Lenore’s voice flutes through the keyhole in my door to the portico.
“Let. Them. See. Me . . .”
The flames in my lamps bloom within their frosted glass cages. They bedazzle my room at twice their normal brilliancy.
Beyond the windows and curtains, a guitar erupts into song, and quite inexplicably, out in the nighttime world, I hear Ma singing in a lovely voce forte:
“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.”
I rise from my bed and ponder whether I should succumb to this artistic temptation.
I dare not.
No man has ever died from stifling his muse, said Pa tonight—but, oh, my dear Pa, what you don’t understand is that no artist truly lives after silencing the muse!
I flap my coat over my shirtsleeves and slip my feet into shoes. To barricade my interior door—a door that does not lock, to my chagrin—I haul the chair from my desk across the room and wedge it between the latch and the floor.
Ma continues singing “Come, Rest in This Bosom” to the accompaniment of the guitar, her voice a sweet contralto; the guitar an aural feast of strumming. No merrier rendition of a musical composition has met my ears before.
Light steals beneath my curtains.
Love and beauty await.
I throw open the drapes, and find Lenore—my winged, dark angel—playing a golden guitar she appears to have conjured from the air. She leans her back against one of the white wooden columns of the upper portico, my hat cocked on her head, and her eyes warm at my presence. Her lips ease into a smile. She seems to be illuminated by the flames of a hundred lamps I can’t see.
I open the door. “Be careful! A short while ago, John Allan broke into my room with a loaded musket, hell-bent on killing you. He destroyed half my drawing of you in my fireplace.”
Without missing a note of the music, Lenore glances down at a hole in her skirt—a raven-shaped burn mark with edges that curl inward with the putrid smell of singed fabric. The knees of her stockings peek through the sinews of threads.
Ma’s voice ceases singing.
Lenore strums a different melody—one that matches the flute music from before.
“Let us embark upon revisions of the ending of ‘Tamerlane,’” she says.
I step out to the portico. “I don’t dare write tonight.”
“Stanza XVII: ‘I Reach’d My Home.’” She swivels around with her guitar and tips her face toward a scene below her. “The conqueror returns from his quest for power and pomp.”
I edge toward the railing, and my stomach burbles, for I do not see the deserts or river valleys of the conqueror Tamerlane’s home of Transoxiana.
Instead, I see Moldavia’s grand hall.
Down within the dreary floral walls, a facsimile of myself in my black frock coat and striped pantaloons embraces Ma near the front door—the very scene of my return from Charlottesville. My trunk and writing box sit behind that twinned version of me. My pockets are turned out, empty of all coins.
Pa shakes his head at Ma and me and clomps up the mahogany staircase, which winds up to the portico where the real me stands—where my muse strums her guitar. His feet thump against each step like the gulps of a beating heart.
“‘I reach’d my home—my home no more—’” I say, and I grab hold of Lenore’s left elbow, for Pa plods closer.
Lenore strums all the louder.
The duplicate version of me breaks away from Ma, whips his head toward Pa, and sings to the tune of Lenore’s guitar:
“I reach’d my home—my home no more—
For all was flown that made it so—
I pass’d from out its mossy door,
In vacant idleness of woe.”
Pa climbs higher up the stairs, and his eyes meet mine. I yank Lenore into my room, shut the door, and bolt the latch.
“Write it down,” says Lenore of the opening lines of the stanza, still plucking at the strings, and a chandelier flares to life above my desk.
I peek at my barricaded door that leads out to the interior corridor of the house. “Pa’s listening from his room. I don’t dare write.”
Another chandelier whooshes to life near my bookcase, and in front of the dented leather spines of my well-read volumes, an image of Ma presses her hands against her heart and sings:
“Oh! what was love made for, if ’tis not the same
Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame?
I know not, I ask not, if guilt’s in that heart,
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.”
I approach my desk with silent footfalls and twist open my brass inkstand, releasing the aroma of poetry into the air.
Lenore strums and sings:
“I reach’d my home—my home no more—
For all was flown that made it so—
I pass’d from out its mossy door,
In vacant idleness of woe.”
I pull my draft of “Tamerlane” out of my writing box. My chair remains lodged against the door, so I’m forced to stand and bend forward to scratch out the final stanza. I pen my four new lines in my tiny, looping handwriting.
I reach’d my home—my home no more—
For all was flown that made it so—
I pass’d from out its mossy door,
In vacant idleness of woe.
My hand forms the little knot of the final e.
“‘The lovliness of loving well . . . ,’” sings a voice from my midnight-blue chaise longue, and I discover Elmira reclining on the lounge in her midnight-blue dress from her engagement party. She leans against her left hip, her left arm draping the armrest, and a laurel of linden leaves crowns her head. “‘I have no words, alas! to tell/The lovliness of loving well!’”
I shift toward Lenore, who’s now strumming in the shadows—playing to the beat of a clock with a crescent-shaped pendulum slicing through time.
“Tamerlane should come home to find his beloved dead,” I say, my heartbeat deadening.
Lenore nods a grim nod.
I resume penning the stanza.
There met me on its threshold stone
A mountain hunter, I had known
In childhood but he knew me not.
(I stop to count out the meter of the following lines with silent taps of my fingers against the desk.)
Something he spoke of the old cot:
It had seen better days, he said;
There rose a fountain once, and there
Full many a fair flow’r rais’d its head:
But she who rear’d them was long dead,
And in such follies had no part . . .
I peer at the maroon fleur-de-lis of the wall in front of me and mouth numerous possibilities for the final couplet. My eyes rest on a framed watercolor painting of Boston Harbor that my mother painted and bequeathed to me upon her death. For my little son Edgar, she wrote on the back, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best, and most sympathetic friends.
In unison, Lenore, Elmira, and Ma sing—
“There rose a fountain once, and there
Full many a fair flow’r raised its head:
But she who rear’d them was long dead,
And in such follies had no part . . .”
I rub my forehead and dither over the phrasing—debate the best words to rhyme with there and part. The pendulum swings; the clock ticks and tuts. The floor below me rumbles with the vibrations of a distant drumming, and my chest tightens at the tension trembling through the walls.
“It is time,” says Lenore, and she closes her eyes, strumming the guitar as though she’ll die if she stops.
I peek over my shoulder at my door.
Elmira and Ma have vanished.
“‘What was there left of me now?’” I say, and I bleed that question across the paper in ink as the second-to-last line.
I tear at my hair. The rest of the couplet refuses to burst from my brain.
My shoulders flinch, for I swear, I just heard footsteps trudging toward my room.
“Despair!” shouts Lenore, and she steps out of the shadow, her fingers bleeding on the strings from the fervor of her playing. “‘What was there left of me now? despair—’”
I nod and write despair at the end of the second-to-last line.
The footsteps draw nearer.
“Hurry!” shouts Lenore. “Tonight is the night! ‘What was there left of me now? despair—’”
I lean over the parchment and seal shut my cherished epic poem—my darling “Tamerlane”—with a line that pours across the parchment in a flood of amethyst lamplight:
A kingdom for a broken—heart.
“Finito!” I shout with a satisfying dunk of my quill into the inkstand, and I reach for Lenore. “Discouragement be damned!”
My muse removes my hat from her head and beams with the brightest smile I’ve ever witnessed on a face in my eighteen years of life. She cups a warm hand around the back of my neck, and without further ado, she kisses me with her magnificent maroon lips.
And, oh, what a kiss it proves to be!
The touch of her mouth against mine transports me into a realm painted in luscious shades of blacks, and reds, and ghastly grays, where the air smells misted and autumnal, where the wind cries with a woebegone wail, and the waters of a tarn moan and howl, moan and howl. My soul soars over the pitched and moldering roof of the house of the Ushers—a melancholy mansion that resembles Moldavia, with macabre eyelids for windows that blink wide open to reveal vacant stares. I travel through one of these ocular openings, where I find a young man pulling teeth out of the mouth of the woman he loves—his deceased love, Berenice—whose molars of a pearled and pristine white become the object of his appalling monomania. The shadow of a cat lingers on the wall behind him, and I hear the scratches of the Usher sister beneath the boards of the floor, along with a tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking heart. And there! Down the hall, await a series of rooms of singular hues in which masked revelers waltz to a hypnotic beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat, and the pendulum swings, while within the walls of a chimney a woman screams. And the sea roars outside with a moan and howl, moan and howl.
The heat of Lenore’s lips sears too much to withstand. I pull away from her mouth amid a blast of wind that gusts from her feet up through the feathers of her head. Her guitar no longer exists, and she stands with her arms to her sides, her palms facing me, her head tipped backward. With a smile of divine pleasure, she endures that hurricane force blowing through her figure in a rippling aurora of violet and gold, violet and gold. Feathers sprout across the bodice of her blouse, enrobing her breasts and her arms in beauteous black plumes. Her lips fall open and darken to a metallic charcoal gray, and she raises her elbows into the air, where her arms adhere to the wings unfurling behind her. I brace myself against my desk and watch in wonder as my muse closes her eyes and evolves before me, the air screaming and brightening around her, feathers blossoming down her forehead—
An earth-trembling explosion suddenly throws her backward.
Dear God!
The back of her skull crashes against my wall, and she drops to the floor. Blood pools across her chest, and smoke hisses from her head, her clothing, her fingers, her brown boots. I stumble to reach her but fall against the desk, confused about the ghastly stains of red spattered across the furniture, the papers, the inkstand, my clothing, my mother’s watercolor painting of Boston Harbor.
I don’t understand what’s just happened.
What’s happening? Oh, God!
I crouch down beside her and shove my hands over a hole in her chest that gapes through her feathers. Blood seeps between my fingers and scalds like flames, drenching my hands, blistering my skin. The furnace of smoke blasting from her body billows into plumes that sting my eyes and incinerate my lungs. My throat clogs and sears, as though I’m gagging on embers.
“That’s not a real girl, Edgar,” says Pa from behind me. “She’s a chimera. A dream. A distraction . . .”
I glare over my shoulder at John Allan, who reigns over the center of my chamber, the smoking musket gripped in his right hand.
But he’s wrong about Lenore. When I turn back toward her, I no longer see a raven-esque creature. She’s a girl—a loving girl, a dying girl—bleeding on my floor in a black dress of mourning. Her feathers are gone, as are her astounding wings, yet her face remains that morbid, marble gray that now worries me dreadfully. She’s more human than ever, which is precisely what pains me most of all. I didn’t nurture her well enough. I’ve allowed her to die. She was so close to soaring . . .
“Let your muse go, Edgar,” says Pa, his voice softening to a tenderness that turns the situation even more sickening. “Please, let her go, son. Wrap your hands around her neck and strangle the rest of the life out of her. She’s not real. It’s not murder. You may stay in this house if you silence her this moment and free yourself of her influence.”
With eyes a dazed and lusterless black, Lenore stares at me. She reaches for my face, and her fingers smear my cheek in streaks of blood that steam against my skin. Tears of soot run down her cheeks, and I taste the salt of my own tears on my lips. The smoke gusting from her skin turns into ribbons of gray that flutter from her wound.
She attempts to speak. “Lea—”
I bend closer. “What? What is it?”
She clutches the back of my neck and squeezes her fingers around my top vertebrae. “Leave this house. Take me with you. Don’t let me go. Please, don’t let me go!”
“I won’t.” I scoop her up in my arms and struggle to rise to my feet.
“Edgar!” says Pa. “If you walk out the front door—”
“How can you possibly expect me to stay?”
“I won’t give you a penny if you leave . . .”
“No, of course, you won’t, you damn, heartless miser!”
I maneuver Lenore out of my room, and in my fog of shock, I mistake the agate lamp glowing outside the door for Jane Stanard, holding up a torch in her white robes, guiding me onward.
I haul my muse down the winding staircase without falling, despite my lack of balance, despite her weight bearing down on my chest, despite the blood dripping across the steps.
“Where are you going, Eddy?” shouts Ma from the landing above. “What did you do, John?”
“If you leave this house and attempt to salvage your artistic follies,” calls Pa, “I predict you’ll be dead in the streets within the year. Within the month!”
I lean forward and open the latch of the front door from behind Lenore’s skirts. A cold blast of air rushes at us, forcing her eyes to blink farther open, and yet her face is so contorted with agony, I can’t bear to look at her.
I kick the door open and cart her out into the night.