The Negro was bent over the girl. I could not make out what it was that he did, save that when he finished his task, there was a sigh as loud as a rushing winter wind. I felt the cold of it on my face. The girl’s body snapped almost in two as her spine convulsed. Once, twice, and then she was still. Jupiter rolled her over again, stood straight, and walked away behind the stage and up the stairs.
I looked around the long dark space. All the portraits and curtains seemed dark as the candles began to gutter and go out. Had it all been a trick of the light and the drugs? Or had the Odalisk been a dream entire?
Poe stood up on his own and began walking stiffly, following the sad trace of the girl’s gory end as it led across the room. I followed, still disoriented. I scanned the portraits as we passed them, but could not find the oval frame and Molly’s face again. Poe stopped and looked down on the wreckage of the bound and bloodless body.
I do not exactly know what I saw. I can report but not explain what I believe happened. But the taste of whiskey, wine, opium, and Molly was still in my mouth and in my head. I may be the most unreliable of sources.
Her eyes were no longer hazel, but were dulled as if a fog had filled the orbs. Her tongue was not black, instead the protruding tip was a sickly red mottled with yellow. Her cheeks were sunken and a miasma rose from her that was rank with foul odors of every description. All of her bones were prominent as if her flesh had been deflated. Her chest and abdomen were rent with deep fissures. What drug had made me imagine with touch or with sensation that this was my Molly? I staggered back away from the ruin.
“Months,” Poe said. “Perhaps a year. It’s so quick for them – those that are delayed so long.” He collapsed beside her, and I shouted for Jupiter.
Soon the African came back down the steps. He was carrying a bottle and a book. He knelt beside Poe and removed the familiar envelope from his coat pocket. He had brought his powders, and he salvaged some absinthe from the wreckage upstairs. He went about his business without a word.
As he worked, I saw the book he had retrieved. The black leather spine was marked “Rituel Catholique” in gilded letters. It was Fox’s book.
“They are all gone, aren’t they?”
“Gone,” said Jupiter. His face was full of sadness.
“Your Marie, Poe’s Virginia, Caroline – Fox still has them, doesn’t he?”
Jupiter looked straight into my eyes. He opened his mouth – and then closed it again. He looked down at Poe, who was beginning to stir. “Fox has them.”
“We don’t know where, do we?”
He shook his head.
Poe was on his feet again. He headed towards the broken bottles. “Have you saved any wine, Jupiter? I need a drink.”
I wrapped the girl, whoever she had been, in a sheer white drape that had fallen to the stage in the chaos of the evening. We left the way we had come. Our footfalls on the iron steps rang like alarm bells in my ears, but no authorities nor forces of any kind intervened to stop us. The night was cold, and a mist turned to light rain as we walked south, each with his thoughts. Baltimore was very quiet in that pre-dawn darkness.
I wished my mind were as still.
Chapter 32
October 2, 1849 4:30 a.m. - Tomorrow I Shall be Fetterless -
If my actions, or those of my comrades, were to be coldly considered, no doubt they could be labeled as products of some universal, perverse instinct. That is, I did what I did precisely because I knew I should not do it. This principle is not comprehensible when examined by conventional modes of moral reasoning. In fact, many would deem this compulsion a direct intervention of the Archfiend himself. They would discount the good that sometimes results from such a paradox as this Divine evil.
Our room at the Bradshaw was dark and cold. It took Jupiter several tries to reignite the fire in the rusted stove and give a small amount of heat to the stagnant, dusty air. Poe was pacing back and forth before I had managed to light the small bedside lamp. Molly’s corpse remained, wrapped in its dingy shroud by the wall.
Jupiter slumped down in a chair, tipped back off the front legs, and leaned back against the wall. He sighed, closed his eyes, and was quiet.
I started to walk to Molly’s white form, barely visible in the shadows, but the memory of my recent experience, or hallucination at the Odalsik – if that is what I had experienced – came back to me in all its vivid power, and I stopped. The bed, instead, welcomed me with such hospitality as such soiled sheets could offer. I fell asleep counting Poe’s heel strikes on the floor as he traced and retraced his path from wall to bare wall. I slipped into a quiet dream of water and an empty garden. Time passed, or did not, as is the way of such an exhausted rest as mine. An hour. A minute. A lifetime. A sound.
“There is only one way.” Poe’s voice was a whisper, barely audible over the thin beat of rain on the alleyway window.
“There is only one way.” The sound hissed. A creak of heated iron came from the direction of the stove’s glowing coals.
“There is only one way.” Poe became a snake in my dream, and his tail twitched in anticipation of an approaching meal.
“There is only one way.” The whisper again – I heard it in on the edge of sleep. The words were there and then gone.
“There is only one way.” I was on my back. Exactly as I had been when I fell onto the bed. I had not moved. I did not move.
“There is only way.”
“I will find him without you.” Jupiter’s voice was muffled.
“But our bargain?”
“Where is Fox?” Jupiter’s voice got louder.
“There is only one way to find him.”
“I cannot do that.”
“You can.”
“No. Why not give Fox what he wants as the bait?”
“I will give him no such thing. At least, I will not give him only what he wants. We need surprise. I want him to see his mistake. Then he will hesitate. If he gets Molly, he may run before we can spring the trap. There is only one way. Trap him with his own horror. Do it.”
“I cannot…”
“He is so pure?” Poe’s hissing whisper mocked and provoked. The rain beat harder on the windowpanes. Loose in their rotted sills, they clicked as the cold drops hit them. “Where is your thundering justice? Is not your Marie worth any necessary sin?”
“I will not. It will not work.”
“It will.”
A pause in the voices was filled by the rain and wind that tunneled down the alley in a sudden gust. Then Jupiter’s voice returned, even quieter than before. “Fox will take the bait?”
“He wants me.”
“He wants you dead. If the Raven is buried, what does he care for you then?”
“He would have to be sure. You know that.”
“And so we lie?’
There came a stifled little thin laugh – Poe’s laugh. “Lie? Oh, horrors.”
“I did not object to the lie.”
“There is only one way.”
“It would work?”
“Fox wants me.”
“Yes. Yes. And he wants Molly.”
“Poor, poor Molly. She needs to be put to her rest. But rest will not come. Not until Fox is finished.”
Jupiter’s chair creaked as he leaned. “Have you done something?”
“Oh, I’ve done so many things.”
“Poe, have you done something to Molly?”
“I eased her pain. And Griswold ended it, didn’t he?”
“A pauper’s grave. She’ll have a pauper’s grave. And like as well be forgotten.”
“Fox will not forget. But perhaps he can be distracted. And if not…”
“What have you done?”
“I’ve done what I must do. We will do what we must do, Jupiter. I am a good servant. As for Fox and Molly, there’s something else he’d want as much.”
“As you said. The raven.”
“Do ravens ever die? Isn’t there a story?”
“You and yo
ur foolish tales.”
“We’d have this tale told, Jupiter.”
“We’d have to make sure word was out.”
“I’ve already done so.”
“Poe, you are so sure I would aid you in this.”
“Your imp at your service. A wise servant knows what his master hungers for before the master’s stomach rumbles. I’ve sent out the Hop-Frog boy with the news.”
“You are sure.”
“Yes, the perfect bait. Sugar Alley will be stirring. The ghouls will hear.”
“Fox must hear.”
“Nabbity will tell him. Nabbity is a good servant, and I’m sure he senses Lord Fox’s drool.”
“Nabbity? The friend of the man O’Hanlon?”
“Nabbity the grave robber.”
I almost spoke. I suppressed a tremble. Again, the rain increased in volume. Steps sounded in the hall. They were heavy and shook the bed. The steps approached, then continued past the door to our room. A lock clicked, and a loud creak was barely muffled by the walls. A slam announced that the unknown guest had entered his room. I tried not to breathe. The conversation was too quiet. I had missed some of the exchange. I remained still and concentrated. My ears found the words again.
“…a mean, pitiable death.” Jupiter’s voice broke through the background. I clung to the thread again and listened.
“Regrettable, I agree. But Fox will want the Raven, and I am sure Nabbity will gather a crew to exhume the grave.”
“In time?”
“Time is a troop of echoes.” Poe’s words were recited with almost a lilt in the sibilance of his almost ghostly whisper.
“Fuck you. Will they be in time?”
“It is a gamble.”
“Spoken as a man with nothing to wager.”
“There is only one way.”
Jupiter sighed. “It is true, I see no other.”
“They will lead us to Fox. As they believe they deliver his enemy.”
“It may work.”
“I have already set the rumor.”
“We need an undertaker.”
“The boy has been sent to fetch one.”
“A pauper’s grave.”
“But not for long.”
“I pray you are right, Poe.”
“We are beyond any prayers, my dear Jupiter. When they lead us to him, we shall have work to do. Then, perhaps you can ask forgiveness.”
“And you?”
“I will only ask for mercy.”
“He will not grant you any.” Jupiter’s chair creaked. I heard him walk to the stove. The iron door was opened, and a chunk of coal thrown into the dying fire. There was a rustle of cinders and ashes as he stirred the heat. “He will damn you.”
“What will it be like, Jupiter?”
“I cannot say with certainty.”
“But you have seen it happen.”
“Each is different. Minutes or days it may last.”
“For me?” Poe’s voice had a frightened child’s plea in the timbre of the words. “What will it be like?”
“Just hope they will reach the coffin in time. And if you have one more prayer in you, Poe, pray he shows you mercy.”
“There’ll be none from you if he…”
“No, Poe. No mercy from me. I forgive what you’ve done to me. I cannot forgive you for your sin against him. I will leave with my account settled. You must depend on his mercy when the moment comes.”
“You are a god.”
“There you are in the trap of your sensibility again, Poe. I am a man. Though you never accept that. I am a man.”
“Like me?”
“No. Thank God, not like you at all.”
The rain slackened. The stove creaked with heat. The windowpanes settled in the flakes of old, crumbling flashing. The conversation was ended. I listened intently, should it start again. Finally I drifted into sleep again. I did not dream.
I did not move.
Chapter 33
October 2, 1849 10:25 a.m. - Nothing There is Motionless -
All language falls short of describing the miracle I awoke to later that morning. Sometime after dawn, I pulled the sheet and dark coverlet over my head to shield myself from the light, which, though gray and weak, leaked into the alley and in through our room’s soot-streaked window.
At first I did not see it. But as I opened my eyes there in the darkness of that poor imitation of a tent it moved. At first I could make no sense of it. It was Poe, dressed in black and tiny – his minuscule form pacing back and forth, appearing and disappearing – walking upside down on the dim white of the mattress cover.
I watched him, fascinated. He could not have been a single inch tall, yet clear and focused until I moved my shoulder and disturbed the cover. He vanished. Slowly, gradually, I moved my shoulder back to where it had been. There. A flicker, and then my miniature upside down Poe was back on the sheet – pacing on the ceiling.
I had read of this effect. The camera obscure was described by DaVinci, and before him it was known to Aristotle and even the Arab, Abu bin Ali Hasad. A small hole focuses light, and an image may be projected on a wall or canvas. The principle is, indeed, the same used by Monsieur Daguerre in his marvelous production of permanent images. There was evidently some aligned piercing of the cover and sheet over my head. Sheer fortune had aligned the holes, the rays, and Poe as he paced outside my refuge.
Back and forth he walked – there, then gone again – Poe walked like some black-coated insect on the ceiling of our room. I might have watched it until the light failed, taking a childish delight in the phenomenon, but Poe stopped pacing, looked in my direction and, after turning quickly to the desk, approached me.
He blocked the light and spoiled the focus. I blinked and my vision was gone. I felt a tap on the top of my head.
“Wake up, Griswold. Wake up.” There was a transparently false cheerfulness to his inflection. He tapped me again. “Griswold.”
I threw back the covers. “Poe.”
“Here you are.” He handed me a cup full of green liquid.
“What is this?” I took the cup and sniffed. My eyes opened wider.
“A touch of the fine thujone, my friend.”
“Absinthe? I would rather have the whiskey.”
“Today is a day for the stouter armor, Griswold. Gird yourself.”
I looked around the room. Jupiter’s chair by the window was empty. “Where is he?”
“Off on an errand.” Poe himself was sipping on the liquor. His arms twitched each time he raised the glass, but he did not spill a drop.
I turned and saw Molly’s shrouded form on the floor. “We failed last night. I was… I don’t know what happened.”
“You were remarkable, Griswold. Such a shot. I owe you my life.” With a grand operatic gesture, he waved his arm and knelt beside the bed on one knee. “Take it now in payment, I beg you.” He bent his neck. “Behead me, kind sir. That would do the trick. Or shoot me once. Blow out my brains.”
“Enough, Poe. Enough.” I got out of bed on the side away from the poet turned jester, pissed into the chamber pot as best I could, and went straight to the basin. I filled it with dirty water from the cracked pitcher and performed what rude toilet I could. I dried my face with my shirttail and turned to see Poe at the desk mixing some powders. When he saw I was watching him, he straightened, took up his cup, and toasted me.
“Here’s to the day, Griswold.”
I made a perfunctory tip of my mug and touched the liquid to my lips. The absinthe left a curiously cool sensation behind, almost a numbness that spread to the tip of my tongue.
“Today we shall bury Molly.”
“A proper burial?” I began remembering last night’s conversation. What exactly had I overheard? “You’ll not desecrate poor Molly?” It seemed important.
“The one moral barrier I hope to never cross, sir.” He bowed again. “When I stand before the throne I might at least say, ‘Father, there is one sin that does not soil
me.’ Soil? Ha!”
I might have thought Poe was overcome with anxiety. His voice quavered, and his hands shook. But it was unlike any behavior I had seen through all the horrors of the week, and I dismissed the thought.
“Where has Jupiter gone, Poe?”
He threw back his cup and downed the last of the measure. He wiped his mouth as a common man in a tavern and looked hard at me. “You loved Molly, didn’t you, Griswold?”
I did not know how to answer, not expecting the question put so boldly. I sat on the bed and, like Poe, drained my cup of Absinthe. With a burning mouth, I confessed. “Yes, Poe. I loved her, and I love her still.”
“She would have betrayed us, and yet you love her.”
“Somehow, Poe, in all the days I have been with you, treachery has been as common as the clouds.”
“Why, there is a touch of the muse on you, Griswold.” Poe refilled his cup and came to where I sat to do likewise. “As you love her, you would wish she be buried in holy ground, where Fox may never lay eye or hand on her again?”
“I would so wish.”
“Then remember the deed I do today.”
“What deed, Poe?”
“Forgive me for what else I may do this night.”
“What are you saying, Poe?”
“And tomorrow repay me this one deed. Repay me with the sweetest mercy of vengeance. Your revenge will be my forgiveness.”
“I am confused.”
At that juncture, the door to our room entered. Jupiter entered with a solemn look on his face. When he saw me, his expression turned grim. There was an uncomfortable moment before Poe spoke.
“Jupiter, have you arranged it?”
“Yes, the man was suspicious at first, but when he saw the money…”
“All problems can be solved at their root,” laughed Poe.
“What have you done?” I asked.
“Our good friend Mr. Jupiter has made the arrangements for Molly, or should I say Miss Mykini Athenos.”
Imp: Being the Lost Notebooks of Rufus Wilmot Griswold in the Matter of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe Page 24