Edgar Poe was my only kin; the man who taught me geography and history, the man who could scare a rational-minded young woman like me under my bed with his stories of vengeful madmen; the man who preferred spending rainy days writing poetry or walking Baltimore’s streets in search of such.
“Fonderous R-Reynolds?” he asked. “The s-seam above the floor? Oh, vast sky.” He closed his eyes and turned his head against the pillow, but held firm to my hand.
“Miss Franks?”
Dr. Griffin, an older man with soft hands and hard eyes, had been known to me for years. The first time my uncle was found publicly drunk, it was Dr. Griffin who brought him to the hospital to sober up. I saw pity on his face now, but I shook my head and stood to meet him.
“He’s sober,” I said.
The doctor scrubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks. “Your assessment agrees with my own. Your uncle is suffering from a malady unknown to me. Did he recognize you?”
“No.” I looked down at my uncle. “I saw him just yesterday and he was well. Have you seen his wrist?”
“Reynolds!” my uncle cried. “Endless lands! Vilest fire.” He shoved the sheets off his body, scrambling backward in an attempt to get out of the bed. When he hit the headboard, he turned to his left, rolled onto the checkerboard floor, and crawled away.
Dr. Griffin called for his colleagues; I could not get near my uncle without him shrieking anew. I backed away, only realizing I was crying when Nurse Templeton shoved a handkerchief into my hand.
“Go home, Miss Franks,” Dr. Griffin said over his struggles with my uncle.
“The seam!” My uncle screamed these words, over and over until I covered my ears to block it—but still, I heard it like a heartbeat. The seam. The seam.
Dr. Griffin and three other men carried my uncle back to the bed and firmly strapped him down. By hand and foot they bound him and when this made his screams worse, they also bound his mouth. He screamed even beyond the gag, muffled and strained.
“You can’t!”
Nurse Templeton led me out of the room and closed the door behind us. I was shaking as she guided me to a chair and pushed me into it. I stared at her heavily lined mouth, unable to understand a word that came from it. She gave me a hard shake and then I heard, “...come again tomorrow; perhaps he will be well.”
I knew as I walked back to our townhouse in the mist, that one evening would not solve my uncle’s problems. What had happened to haunt his eyes so? What part did the stranger from this morning play?
My uncle had employed a housekeeper these last two years, to tidy what he messed while I spent my days as a tailor’s assistant. Though Mrs. Wine would have made me a warm dinner, I sent her home. I wanted only to be alone. I locked the door behind her, discarded my coat and bag, and went to my uncle’s office.
It was the one room Mrs. Wine was asked not to touch, but nothing struck me as unusual as I entered. Papers and books were spread over the sofa and chairs, over desktop and floor. I lifted a pile from one chair and sat, bringing the sheets into my lap. He was working on a new poem.
I fell asleep reading of a city by the sea, where mortals bought fruit from angels carrying baskets. I didn’t dream of this place; I didn’t dream of anything. When I woke, I felt rested and wondered if morning had come, but the thought left my mind when I saw the man who gave me the note perched in a far corner, watching me.
Think of it. You believe yourself alone in your own home, are comfortable enough to sleep wherever you lay down and when you wake, your mind still fuzzy from its rest, you discover yourself not alone, but watched. Your mind races, but it can’t catch your heart. How long has he watched you?
Was he there when I came in? Who is he and how did he gain entry? I pictured broken windows and doors, but felt it was worse than that; this man had come inside another way, a way unknown to me. That frightened me most of all.
“Please do not scream,” he said.
I screamed. I flung my uncle’s poetry and fled the office, feeling this man close on my heels. He yanked the door open when I meant to slam it; he snatched my skirts, slowing my escape. His fingers seemed to catch my hair and pull me backward. Through his fingertips I felt shackles around my uncle’s wrists. Those hands had placed them there, but not in this world, in another.
“Reynolds?” I asked.
His touch vanished. I swung around in the darkness of the hallway and felt a presence, though I could not see him.
“He called me that.” His crumpled velvet voice brushed against my cheek. “Go to your uncle.”
The voice came from all around me now, disembodied. As I turned round, I would have sworn to the stroke of fingers against my skirts. Shush. Shush.
My heart pounded in my throat. “What did you do to my uncle?”
This man admitted nothing. Round and round he circled me. I felt his eyes upon me (half familiar and frightening!) but still I could see nothing of him. Maddening! His cold-kissed fingers brushed over my cheeks and then I was horribly alone.
I did not sleep that night. I checked the doors and windows, but decided it would not matter how securely they were locked. That man had come into our house another way. Taking no chance, I retrieved my uncle’s small pistol from the locked box beneath his bed and sat with my back to the wall the entire night through. Rain drummed upon the roof; in its rhythm, I found words. The seam. The seam.
Come morning, I went to the hospital, the pistol concealed in my brocade reticule. I would not be caught unawares another time by Reynolds, whatever name he took.
My uncle was less coherent that morning, Dr. Griffin reluctant to allow me into his room.
“I have bled him twice to no effect,” Griffin said to me outside my uncle’s door. The doctor paced, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “I begin to fear, Miss Franks, that he has a blackness within him and if I cannot find and remove it, he shall perish.”
Reynolds’ first words echoed back at me. “You’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.” Would he perish at the doctor’s hands or was my uncle already near death from whatever had befallen him?
I gripped my reticule, feeling through the fabric the line of the pistol. Was it the solidity of the gun that calmed me or the idea of pressing it against Reynolds’ chin?
“I want to speak with my uncle,” I said and made to move past the doctor, to open my uncle’s door.
Griffin grabbed me by the arm to forestall me, then dropped it when a nurse passed us. He bowed his head to look at me through narrowed eyes.
“Absolutely not! I don’t believe you grasp the seriousness of the situation, Miss Franks.”
Being accosted by a strange man in one’s own home was quite serious enough for me.
Griffin continued. His tone was low and calm, as though he were trying to calm a spooked horse. “When I remove his gag, he speaks of terrible things. I do not understand the blackness within him. I need to find it, cut it out. We loosened him for a bit this morning as a test and he nearly cut out his own eye—”
I grabbed Dr. Griffin by the arm as he had me in an effort to make him understand that on this matter I would not be budged. “I will speak with my uncle,” I said. “No matter the terrible things he says, I will.”
The doctor let me step into the room and did not follow. I closed the door to blot out his disapproving expression. However, now in the gray room with its scent of antiseptic and rapidly aging old man, I hesitated. I looked across the room at the figure in the bed and did not recognize it for my uncle. This man was thin and dark, lashed to a bed with a thin mattress. A hard rubber gag covered his mouth and now even his eyes were masked. Coarse hair covered his sunken cheeks.
“Uncle?”
He did not move and I wondered if he was sleeping. Or dead. I held my breath as I waited for the rise of his chest. Only when I saw that feeble movement did I step toward the bed.
I set my reticule on the bedside table and reached for the mask which covered Edgar’s eyes. The
tie was lost in the bird’s nest of his hair; it took some time to find the end. When at last I loosened the ties, I found myself looking into unfamiliar eyes. Or let me say that upon longer examination, the eyes themselves were painfully familiar—it was the deep wrinkles around them, it was the pale white scar above the left eye, it was the freshly stitched wound below the right—these were the things I could not equate with my uncle.
With some difficulty I loosened and removed the gag from his mouth. Edgar closed his mouth, licked his lips, and swallowed.
“Do you know me?” I asked him.
His eyes rolled back into his head and he turned his cheek against the pillow. “Vilest fire.” His voice cracked the words apart like they were nutshells in his throat. “Hunters stab never sleeping sky—the seam above the floor. The seam—”
He spoke of phenomenon and contraptions I could not understand while his hands moved against his bonds, fingers straining to reach the unseen. His eyes seemed to watch an invisible dance in the air between the bed and ceiling; flit, flit, glide.
I had hoped to make some sense of the “terrible things” Dr. Griffin mentioned, but as my uncle spoke on and on until his voice dried to a whisper, I could find no reason in the words. There was only one word that made sense to me and when he said it at last, his eyes moved to the far corner of the room.
“Reynolds.”
I turned in time to see the man called Reynolds slink out of the room. The tail of his brown coat (how like the coat my uncle had been found in) slithered out the door a second before it closed.
How long has he watched you?
How did he get in?
My heart stammered in my chest. I grabbed my bag and followed Reynolds from the hall, only in time to see his coattails once again slide around a distant corner. I fled past Dr. Griffin and into the blowing rain of the day. Reynolds was a tall man with a long stride and there was no keeping pace with him. By the time I reached the store where I had first met Reynolds, I could see no sign of him.
Then, coming down the cobblestones appeared the same gold and claret four-in-hand I had seen the day before, Reynolds now perched beside the driver. The horses’ hooves didn’t seem to touch the ground, even though I heard them clearly ring against the street stone. I lunged into the street, for the driver would have to stop for fear that he might hit me, but he didn’t. The hot breath of one horse curled over my cheek before the world went black.
I woke, if one can awaken when one does not remember sleeping, atop the auburn horse, harness and tack cutting into my left hand, while my right still clung to my bag with its pistol. The ground sped away beneath me at a dreadful haste and for a moment I buried my face in the horse’s mane. My cheek lay against hot horsehide, silky red-gold mane blinding me, every part of my body jostled as the carriage continued onward.
I chanced a backwards glance at the driver and Reynolds and squeezed my eyes shut a second after. They were not men!
Another look proved this true. The driver sat tall in the seat, a black coat dripping from its narrow body. A tattered blue scarf gave the illusion of a neck, but I feared he truly had none. The octangular head was small and gray, with bulging black eyes that must have taken everything in at once. Surely he saw me staring at his four spindly legs and two arms, all of which seemed employed in driving the carriage. His arms bore spines and hooks, over which he had draped a couple reins, but I felt certain this wasn’t their main usage.
“Miss Franks!”
It was Reynolds who spoke, but a Reynolds I did not recognize. Reynolds possessed a squat body, colored brown with slim yellow stripes, and he now spoke through mandibles. His brown coat had pooled around him; why, his thin arms would never support the fabric!
“Hold fast!” he said. “We cannot stop in the endless lands.”
I turned my head around, so that I might see these endless lands for myself; lifted myself on elbows enough to see around the whipping horse mane.
Every bit of Baltimore had vanished and all around us spread a seemingly endless blur of gold shot through with ruby stars. Whirlpools twisted in the sky, churning nausea within me as I watched them. I watched until I felt I would be ill, then bowed and buried my head again. I prayed the ride would soon be over, but perhaps there was no one to answer that prayer, for the ride went on and on.
The motion of the horse beneath me soon became familiar, enjoyable. I had never known such a sensation. Its warm hide was also a comfort as the air grew colder around us. There seemed to be no sun, yet all around us were slanting shafts of light. Colored golden and ivory, they fell from above and the more I watched them, the more my eyes began to adjust and see what truly lay around us.
The land was no longer barren. Perhaps it never had been. My eyes became accustomed to the light and the way it changed the landscape around us. From one angle, the land was empty; from another, I could glimpse strange constructs in the distance. There seemed to be little near the horizon; everything I was able to see hovered in that sunless sky. If I saw other people, it was only briefly; I saw what seemed a woman, but the wind was tearing her apart. She shredded, arms and legs peeling apart like fabric, and then even her clothing lifted up and away. This didn’t seem to bother her. She smiled and went on her way, into the vast sky.
Oh, that vast sky—my uncle’s sky? Had he seen this place and breathed this air? This air, that smelled vaguely of apricots and roasting meat, washed over us in abrupt gusts, forcing my eyes shut. I savored the darkness.
I couldn’t understand this place. What was it and how could it exist? The more I wondered, the more ill I felt. I remembered my Baltimore with its rain-washed streets, hints of sky caught between close buildings, people rushing to and from work. There seemed no such things here.
The carriage never slowed. My nausea deepened. I became aware of hands on my shoulders, an arm under my legs. Reynolds lifted me from the horse and carried me back into the carriage itself. I lay on the padded bench and stared at him sitting opposite me. In this light, he looked like a man and had a beautiful mouth.
The thought should have shocked me, but it didn’t.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“That much is plain.” I had to fight to say the words and my voice didn’t sound right when I finally forced them out. I fought also to sit up, to focus my attention on Reynolds. Even though I knew he wasn’t a man, he appeared as such and it gradually began to calm my mind.
“You’ve placed me in quite a predicament,” he added.
I could hardly believe he was serious, but I recalled the look on his face the day we’d met, when I’d pulled him back from this very carriage. I now understood I had kept him from returning. What had drawn him out in the first place? What else tied us together? My uncle, I thought as my eyes settled on Reynolds’ vest.
“You—You’re wearing my uncle’s vest,” I said. “I sewed it for him—”
“A gift last Christmas,” Reynolds said.
His dark velvet voice was rough again. “How can you know that?” My hands sought the bag at my side, but I no longer carried it; my pistol was lost.
“Edgar told me all about you.” His mouth bent into a smile and I realized this man knew things about me he shouldn’t know. He knew about my first pet (a kitten named Croak) and my first formal dance (how I’d stumbled down the last two stairs and fallen to reveal entirely too much to those gathered); he knew my uncle’s stories could frighten me, and he knew that deep down, I loved the fear.
“I don’t understand.” I blinked back tears and looked out the carriage window. The angle of light allowed me to see to the horizon this time. Against its water-washed color, I saw a wrecked whale bone ship. Closer to the carriage wheels, I saw pallid bloated creatures upon the shifting ground. One of them held a golden key in its mouth.
“How long have you known my uncle?” I asked. I looked back at Reynolds, who watched me and not the world beyond the windows. “How long was he your prisoner?”
“I did
not imprison your uncle, though others of my kind did.”
“I felt you put those shackles on him.”
Reynolds said nothing to that. Maybe it was an action he couldn’t argue; maybe he had been forced. Whichever, he kept his silence, watching me with keen eyes that seemed to see all of me at once. He knew my parents were dead, and he knew— He knew Edgar was my only family.
“Stop watching me,” I whispered.
“I will not,” Reynolds said. “I spent far too many years dreaming of you to look away now.”
I curled my hands into my skirts. “What the devil do you mean by that?” If I thought I could have survived it, I would have jumped from the carriage. I think Reynolds must have known this, for he grasped my hands and held me firm.
“Your uncle should never have come here. I tried to fix that and have failed. The least I could do was see that he didn’t die alone this time. He’s gone now. All you’ve known is gone. You shouldn’t be here, but I can’t help but be happy you are.”
I jumped from the carriage then. Reynolds’ words scared me worse than the idea of death. I wrenched my hands out of his, pushed him backwards, and kicked the door open. I flung myself into the speeding landscape and landed in sandy, loose ground.
There was no sign of the carriage, nor any sound from it. Its wheels had left no tracks. Wherever I was, I needed to get out, but there was nothing to guide me. No sun, no landmarks, nothing on the horizon here. I wiped the grit from my eyes and strained to see through the beams of light.
Reynolds found me first. I caught him from the corner of my eye, running at me as fast as the carriage horses had flown. I turned to run, but the ground seemed to suck me down. Reynolds was on me before I could escape; he dragged me down and pinned my hands, slapping a shackle around one wrist.
“Beast!” I cried, unable to wrench myself free.
“Literally, that is true,” Reynolds said. His nice mouth curled in a sneer. “Edgar called me fonderous.”
I slapped him with my free hand. He felt of flesh and bone and his skin reddened as would any man’s under a strike, but he only laughed and secured the other shackle to my other wrist.
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