by John Pelan
I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark, and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs. Miller's door.
It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional muffled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.
She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.
I was alone.
My old coat and jumper lay spreadeagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over, and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.
The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.
I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.
I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.
In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that—seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the scraps of light—looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.
I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot that constituted it made it look as if she was screaming.
One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand, and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the space where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.
And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.
VISITATION
James Robert Smith
Only the few who sorcery's secret know,
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.
— H. P. LOVECRAFT
James Allyson received a postcard from E. A. Poe on October 28, 199-.
It wasn't a cruel joke or a hoax perpetrated by some acquaintance. He'd left all of those people behind. He had a deep feeling, a cold certainty that the card was real. He'd had the feeling before.
James stood in the red dust beside his mailbox near the un-paved road, and he held the card up to the light. The beams glowed through the yellowed cardstock, and it was like looking through a hardened sheet of beeswax. He gazed at the inkings scrawled there and felt the chill again.
He reread it, a spidery script style from decades ago:
James, I will be arriving soon. Travel is slow for me. I look forward to meeting you.
Sincerely, E. A. Poe.
The date scribbled on the card was two weeks old. James looked down the road and up, but there was no one to be seen between himself and where the gravel track bent east and west. He was alone except for the trees and the birds that flitted here and there in the warm October air. Still, a shiver crept the length of his spine, and he shrugged his shoulders to ward it off. How long would it take him? James didn't know, but he turned to hurry down the mile-long driveway to his house.
All along the way he kept glancing into the surrounding forests. But, though he jumped at each woodland sound, every rattle of blowing leaf, at the snap of tiny twigs beneath small feet, he saw nothing that should not be and arrived none the worse but for the odd chill that tickled his spine.
This was yet another misplaced gift from them.
James was alone. He had no brothers with whom to communicate, and no sisters were around to fuss over his welfare. His father and mother had died in that automobile accident. Police had told him the accident was caused by a road too wet and a night too dark. The pain of their loss was still not blunted; it was a sharp ache that he'd rarely forgotten in the months since they passed. He could not grow content in the home they had left in his name, in this secluded house in which he had lived the best days of his youth. And there was that unfaced hunger, so great that his life had become little more than a kind of slow struggle not to think about it.
His parents, always striving to give, to make him happy: He feared their deaths had been a deliberate act on their part, a way to free him from a life he hated. Perhaps it was true. Who else had known of his passion for the writer?
Coming at last to the end of the gravel drive, James made his way across the wide parking area. Standing alone in the open place in the forest, he gazed again at the oblong of card-stock pinched in his fingers. Arriving soon.
I look forward to meeting you. James would have wondered why, but he remembered his parents, and all that they had given and tried to give. Still trying, it seemed.
He had been quite miserable in the year or so before his parents had died. The constant rip and tear of competition once he was away from school had been almost too much for him. There had been times when he felt that there was nothing to do but kill himself. And though he had never voiced it to them, they must have seen it in his demeanor when they visited. The pressures had been too great for their protected boy, so they had acted this final time as they had acted so many times in the past. And while James had contemplated suicide, waiting to gather the courage, he had been informed of the accident.
Depression had gripped him for a time. Who else cared? Who else could now comfort him and hold him and keep him safe? There was no one. And when he dwelled on that single, cold fact, he almost had been able to act. And then he thought of retreat. As they must have known he would.
Around him he had solid walls: paid for. Beyond those walls lay hundreds of acres of post oaks and Virginia pines. His nearest neighbors were more than two miles away, accessible only by red clay roads; the closest phone was two miles past that. And there was money in the bank. More than he might have saved over a lifetime of hoarding and investing. He had his parents' savings and their life insurance policies: double indemnity for their untimely demise. His contentment and safety had been bought through the mortality of the only people with whom he had truly shared love.
They had always given him what he needed most, when his needs had been at the most severe. A trip to Baltimore as a teen, standing in a sunlit cemetery, gazing upon the tomb-now-shrine. “Oh, I would loved to have met him,” he had told his parents, those givers of all.
And so he prepared for the arrival of Mr. Poe.
He put away his car and shut up the garage, so that the doors to it were stoutly locked and not liable to swing accidentally open. There had been a television in the den, which he rarely used. So he boxed it up and stored it safely in the attic. He went about the old house after that, searching for things that might disturb his coming visitor. When he had finished, he found he had several boxes full of appliances and electronic necessities. Poe and his fellows had done without, and so would James.
After that, he went through the house, from the attic to the basement, from one end to the other, searching for anything that might distract either of them from the other. And he almost, almost, missed it.
He opened up the liquor cabinet and hid the score of bottles in the back of a row of high shelves above the kitchen counter. James's father had once stored paints and stains there, and it had a door and a lock so that young James wouldn't be able to get into trouble. James found the key to it in a jewelry case that had belonged to his mother, and he locked it safely and forgot about it.
Later he went to his room, unpacking boxes of near forgotten books he hadn't read in years, and he filled the empty gaps where the electronic gadgets had taken up space. He arranged his bookshelves, making certain books easier to reach t
han others, some more obvious than their companions. His books covered the walls and filled the nooks wherever he could fit a shelf or customize a place for them.
James Allyson took out the card from where it rested against his chest in his shirt pocket. He fingered the stiff, yellow paper and felt at the sharp corners of it and ran his fingers over the faint, raised trails where Poe had scrawled his name. I look forward to meeting you.
He gazed up at the hardwood shelves that loomed to the height of the ten-foot ceilings: a wall of neat, well placed spines—a thousand authors facing out at him. Maybe the visit was a message to salve his guilt.
Days passed. He waited for Poe, sitting at the end of the drive near the house, his back to a smooth-barked poplar tree, a book to keep him company. The sun came up over the steep ridges that closed the house in its little valley, the brook below him trickling over polished quartz. He waited there, but no one came.
At last, tiring of the wait, James closed himself into the den that had become a library. The smell of pulp, of gilt-edged pages and leather spines, surrounded him. He drank it up, reading aloud, mumbling alone in the room until he fell to sleep.
In his sleep, he dreamed that he heard horses, that he heard their hooves clattering over stones and that iron-bound wheels were crushing scree into the earth. He dreamed he heard the hooves clop-clop their way to his house, and then there came the sound of a door opening wide, slamming soundly shut. Footsteps at his front door, and the fading retreat of shod horses vanishing into the twilight.
When he awoke, Poe was there.
His eyes were large and deep, like those of some huge, faithful dog, but flinty and hard. His face was pale, his cheeks standing out as if from some long fast, making his eyes look as if they were buried in shallow pits dug there in his poor face. But his mouth, below a thick mustache, was pleasant, turning almost into a smile as James roused himself, startled, his book falling from his lap.
“I apologize. I didn't want to awaken you, and since I was expected, I made my own way inside. I didn't mean to frighten you.” His voice was solid, real, if somewhat faint, as if husked from lungs unaccustomed to such use.
After a while, James collected his senses enough so that he did not merely sit and stare. He eased to the edge of his seat and looked hard at his visitor, making certain that he was real, that he was not some phantom or a fever dream brought on by his lingering guilt or by his long seclusion from the world. When he felt he could, he asked the question.
“Why are you here?”
Poe remained where he was, stationed in front of one of the larger bookshelves that began at the doorway and ended at a spot less than two feet from the hearth. He turned his eyes from James Allyson and let them roam over the spines bulging out at him. His hand went up, feeling the fabrics and the inks, his pale skin stark against the darker colors of the volumes he touched. “I will tell you, James. But not yet, not now. For the time, I ask only for your hospitality, and that you allow me to read these works. … I wish to inspect them.”
“The books.” James looked at the small man who gazed stiffly up at the volumes.
“Yes. Will you allow it?”
There was no hesitation. “Of course.”
And the stiffness went out of Poe, so that he seemed almost to wilt at the utterance. But quickly, quickly, he reached up, apparently at random, and he took down the first book that met his fingertips. He looked at the title, at the name of its author, and he sat back in the blue chair that was to his left, and he began to read in the failing light.
Before Poe could ask how, James went to the lamp that stood beside the blue chair, and he switched it on. Poe looked up at him, no words passing his lips, but the gratitude was there in his eyes.
After that initial exchange, Poe traded no words with his host. And as if understanding that nothing more was expected of him, James made little attempt to engage his guest, except to offer to share the meals James cooked and to indicate where the writer might sleep, should he feel the need for rest.
Both became like ghosts, neither speaking nor indicating a desire for communication. Allyson moved softly about the house, going from room to room, pausing to prepare his meals, from time to time checking to make sure that Poe needed nothing. Occasionally, he would go and stand expectantly at the threshold of the den, waiting for word from the mystery who had come to exist beneath his roof. Always, he would merely stand and watch, waiting for the words that wouldn't come. For Poe would only sit, unmoving except for his hands, which quickly turned the pages of the books that he consumed, going through them one long shelf at a time.
And he did read them. He went through that initial shelf more swiftly than James would have thought possible. His eyes darted over the pages, and his white-skinned fingers turned the papery leaves at a quickening pace that began to grow more and more bothersome to James as the days passed slowly by. And James began, bit by bit, to become annoyed with his guest.
If Allyson had to be host to this uncalled wraith, then he must certainly be allowed to know the why and how of this visitation. He tried to bury himself in one book or another, to try to forget that Poe was there until such time as Poe made good on his agreement to allow James to know the why. He decided to go to Poe's work, to drown himself in Poe's fiction, searching there for the reason behind it all. But he found nothing. No great revelation came to him, and the deep, dark melancholy of it all seemed to only increase his growing impatience, to begin to slowly turn it into something approaching anger.
And just when he thought that his patience was going to rupture, Poe spoke.
“Soon,” he said. “Allow me just a little more time.”
After that, James shut himself up in his room. He came out only to eat and to bathe, and he no longer made meals that were large enough for two. Before, Poe had shared the food with James. Now, though, James did not notice if his guest ate at all. And he did not know if hunger ever gripped the man, for he merely avoided the small figure so that the not-quite-welcome presence didn't turn James's emotions again toward anger.
James did notice when Poe had read all of the books in the den. For at night he would hear him as he left the room with its great bookshelves, so that he could go to the other rooms and retrieve the books that were stored in them. James bit down on his impatience, trying not to let the resentment turn to hate. He tried very hard. And then the image of his parents — that nagging question.
At last, he could not take any more.
One dark morning, James awoke. He didn't bother to bathe or to dress in anything more than the same rumpled clothes he had worn the day before. He had to get out of the house, he had to leave so that he could find some vent for his anger before it exploded in the face of his guest. A walk in the forest was what he had needed, some fresh air and a short time away from the one who sat reading in his home, wearing thin what welcome there had been.
It was dark out, but he had chosen quite an early hour to rise. He went to the front door and had his hand placed firmly on the brass knob there. Peering through the glass panes and into the darkness, he saw, and his hand froze on the tarnished metal.
Outside, it was snowing; but the silent fall was not of frozen water. Ash was falling silently from the sky, so that James could see little else but the constant flow of the sooty stuff. What trees he could see were half buried, their trunks bare poles standing amidst it all. The fall of it had near buried his house to a point above the sash of his windows but below the eaves of the roof. He turned the doorknob, and the click was so loud that it seemed a rifle shot in the silence.
“I would not do that,” Poe said from behind, causing James's heart to skip a beat. “If you opened the door now, it would just get in. And then where would you be?”
Allyson took his hand from the door and leaned against it, his fingers to his mouth, trying to stifle the gasp that had come to him. Poe stood in the threshold of the den, staring at James with that same burning gaze with which he had arrived. James looked to
the shelves above the counter, and he saw that the door there was opened wide, that the lock had been forced. There was the faint stench of liquor in the close air of the room. The drink. James had not thought that Poe would search for it.
James stared first at the broken cabinet, and then at the hardened eyes of the one who waited in front of him.
“Are you ready to know? Now?”
Although his lips fluttered as if he were speaking, no sound came from James's mouth.
Poe took another step toward him. “I thought not.” He stopped and let the bottle drop from his grasp. “But I am going to tell you, whether you want to hear it or not.
“Sit down.” Poe indicated one of the straight-backed chairs that sat about the table James's father had built long ago. Allyson did as he was told, looking up at who stood still in the doorway to the den. There was a long silence as Poe seemed to be waiting, as if listening to the silent fall of the earth outside the house, burying the pair of them in their cozy tomb.
“My life was a horror. From my birth to my death, it was a horror. You cannot know what it was like to be me.
“I attempted to tell the world what it was to struggle against what I faced. I wanted the world to know, just a little, what I suffered. I wanted it to know the failure, and I wanted it to taste the sorrow, and I wanted it to feel the complete sadness that filled my days.
“And, perhaps, I did that, to some measure. Perhaps some who read my work do know what I felt, what pain my art revealed. But…”
Then Poe's gaze was fixed on James where he cowered, his back against the wood, the dead man before him. “But I never was rewarded with seeing the actual horror written on another's face as life had written it on mine. I wanted them to feel it, but I never experienced their fear, their revulsion.
“And then. I learned of you. And that is why I returned, and that is why I chose you, and that is why I will see now what I could never see in life.”