Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  Matthew Brady’s Portrait of Edgar, taken 1848, his last full year alive. It’s the best-known picture of him; were I to ask you to visualize him, this is what your minds’ eyes would see. That forehead, that marble expanse—yes, his hair does make the top of his head look misshapen, truncated. As far as I know, it wasn’t. The eyes—I suppose everyone comments on the eyes, slightly shadowed under those brows, the lids lowered just enough to suggest a certain detachment, even dreaminess. It’s the mouth I notice, how it tilts up ever-so-slightly at the right corner. It’s hard to see; you have to look closely. A strange mixture of arrogance, even contempt, and something else, something that might be humor, albeit of the bitter variety. It wouldn’t be that much of a challenge to suggest colors for the picture, but somehow, black and white is more fitting, isn’t it? Odd, considering how much color there is in the fiction. I’ve often thought all those old Roger Corman adaptations, the ones Vincent Price starred in—whatever their other faults, one thing they got exactly right was Technicolor, which was the perfect way to film these stories, just saturate the screen with the most vibrant colors you could find.

  I begin with the Portrait as a reminder. This is the man. His hand scraped the pen across the paper, brought the story we’ve been discussing into existence word by word. Not creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, creation... if my Latin were better, or existent, I’d have a fancier way to say out of the self, or out of the depths of the self, or—hey—out of the depth that is the self.

  Moving on to our next portrait... Anyone?

  I’m impressed. Not many people know this picture. Look closely, though. See it?

  That’s right: it isn’t a painting. It’s a photograph that’s been tweaked to resemble a painting. The portrait it imitates is a posthumous representation of Virginia Clemm, Edgar’s sweetheart and child bride. The girl in the photo? She’ll be happy you called her a girl. That’s my wife, Anna. Yes, I’m married. Why is that so hard to believe? We met many years ago, in a kingdom by the sea. From? “Annabel Lee,” good. No, just Anna; although we did meet in the King of the Sea Arcade, on the Jersey shore. Seriously. She is slightly younger than I am. Four years, thank you very much. You people. For Halloween one year, we dressed up as Edgar and Virginia— pretty much from the start, it’s been a running joke between us. In her case, the resemblance is striking.

  As it so happened, yes we did attend a masquerade as the happy couple. That was where this photo was taken. One of the other guests was a professional photographer. I arranged the shot; he took it, then used a program on his computer to transform it into a painting. The guy was quite pleased with it; apparently it’s on his website. I’m showing it to you because... well, because I want to. There’s probably a connection I could draw between masquerade, the suppression of one identity in order to invoke and inhabit another, that displacement, and the events of our story, but that’s putting the cart about a mile before the horse. She’ll like that you thought she was a girl, though; that’ll make her night. Those were her cookies, by the way. Are there any left? Not even the sugar cookies? Figures.

  Okay, image number three. If you can name this one, you get an “A” for the class and an autographed picture of the Pope. Put your hand down; you don’t know. How about the rest of you?

  Just us crickets...

  It’s just as well; I don’t have that picture of the Pope anymore. This gentleman is Prosper Vauglais. Or so he claimed. There’s a lot about this guy no one’s exactly sure of, like when he was born, or where, or when and where he died. He showed up in Paris in the late eighteen-teens and caused something of a stir. For one winter, he appeared at several of the less reputablesalons and a couple of the—I wouldn’t go so far as to say more reputable—maybe less disreputable ones.

  His “deal?” His deal, as you put it, was that he claimed to have been among the quarter of a million soldiers under Napoleon Bonaparte’s personal command when, in June of 1812, the Emperor decided to invade Russia. Some of you may remember from your European history classes, this was a very bad idea. The worst. Roughly a tenth of Napoleon’s forces survived the campaign; I want to say the number who limped back into France was something like twenty-two thousand. In and of itself, being a member of that group is nothing to sneeze at. For Vauglais, though, it was only the beginning. During the more-or-less running battles the French army fought as it retreated from what had been Moscow, Vauglais was separated from his fellows, struck on the head by a Cossack’s sword and left for dead in a snow bank. When he came to, he was alone, and a storm had blown up. Prosper had no idea where he was; he assumed still Russia, which wasn’t too encouraging. Any Russian peasants or what have you who came across French soldiers, even those trying to surrender, tended to hack them to death with farm implements first and ask questions later. So when Prosper strikes out in what he hopes is the approximate direction of France, he isn’t what you’d call terribly optimistic.

  Nor is his pessimism misplaced. Within a day, he’s lost, frozen and starving, wandering around the inside of a blizzard like you read about, white-out conditions, shrieking wind, unbearable cold. The blow to his head isn’t helping matters, either. His vision keeps going in and out of focus. Sometimes he feels so nauseated he can barely stand, let alone continue walking. Once in a while, he’ll see a light shining in the window of a farmhouse, but he gives these a wide berth. Another day, and he’ll be closer to death than he was even at the worst battles he saw—than he was when that saber connected with his skull. His skin, which has been numb since not long after he started his trek, has gone from pale to white to this kind of blue-gray, and it’s hardened, as if there’s a crust of ice on it. He can’t feel his pulse through it. His breath, which had been venting from his nose and mouth in long white clouds, seems to have slowed to a trickle, if that. He can’t see anything; although, with the storm continuing around him, maybe that isn’t so strange. He’s not cold anymore—or, it’s not that he isn’t cold so much as it is that the cold isn’t torturing him the way it was. At some point, the cold moved inside him, took up residence just beneath his heart, and once that happened, that transition was accomplished, the temperature outside became of much less concern.

  There’s a moment—while Vauglais is staggering around like you do when you’re trying to walk in knee-high snow without snowshoes, pulling each foot free, swiveling it forward, crashing it through the snow in front of you, then repeating the process with your other foot—there’s a moment when he realizes he’s dead. He isn’t sure when it happened. Some time in the last day or so. It isn’t that he thinks he’s in some kind of afterlife, that he’s wandering around a frozen hell. No, he knows he’s still stuck somewhere in western Russia. It’s just that, now he’s dead. He isn’t sure why he hasn’t stopped moving. He considers doing so, giving his body a chance to catch up to his apprehension of it, but decides against it. For one thing, he isn’t sure it would work, and suppose while he’s standing in place, waiting to fall over, someone finds him, one of those peasants, or a group of Russian soldiers? Granted, if he’s already dead, they can’t hurt him, but the prospect of being cut to pieces while still conscious is rather horrifying. And for another thing, Prosper isn’t ready to quit walking. So he keeps moving forward. Dimly, the way you might hear a noise when you’re fast asleep, he’s aware that he isn’t particularly upset at finding himself dead and yet moving, but after recent events, maybe that isn’t so surprising.

  Time passes; how much, he can’t say. The blizzard doesn’t lift, but it thins, enough for Vauglais to make out trees, evergreens. He’s in a forest, a pretty dense one, from what he can see, which may explain why the storm has lessened. The trees are—there’s something odd about the trees. For as close together as they are, they seem to be in almost perfect rows, running away into the snow on either side of him. In and of itself, maybe that isn’t strange. Could be, he’s wandered into some kind of huge formal garden. But there’s more to it. When he looks at any particular tree, he sees, not so mu
ch bark and needles as black, black lines like the strokes of a paintbrush, or the scratches of a pen, forming the approximation of an evergreen. It’s as if he’s seeing a sketch of a tree, an artist’s estimate. The black lines appear to be moving, almost too quickly for him to notice; it’s as if he’s witnessing them being drawn and re-drawn. Prosper has a sudden vision of himself from high above, a small, dark spot in the midst of long rows of black on white, a stray bit of punctuation loose among the lines of an unimaginable text.

  Eventually, Vauglais reaches the edge of the forest. Ahead, there’s a building, the title to this page he’s been traversing. The blizzard has kicked up again, so he can’t see much, but he has the impression of a long, low structure, possibly stone. It could be a stable, could be something else. Although there are no religious symbols evident, Prosper has an intuition the place is a monastery. He should turn right or left, avoid the building— the Russian clergy haven’t taken any more kindly to the French invaders than the Russian people—instead, he raises one stiff leg and strikes off towards it. It isn’t that he’s compelled to do so, that he’s in the grip of a power that he can’t resist, or that he’s decided to embrace the inevitable, surrender to death. He isn’t even especially curious about the stone structure. Forward is just a way to go, and he does.

  As he draws closer, Vauglais notices that the building isn’t becoming any easier to distinguish. If anything, it’s more indistinct, harder to make out. If the trees behind him were rough drawing, this place is little more than a scribble, a jumble of lines whose form is as much in the eye of the beholder as anything. When a figure in a heavy coat and hat separates from the structure and begins to trudge in his direction, it’s as if a piece of the place has broken off. Prosper can’t see the man’s face, all of which except the eyes is hidden by the folds of a heavy scarf, but he lifts one mittened hand and gestures for Vauglais to follow him inside, which the Frenchman does.

  And... no one knows what happens next.

  What do I mean? I’m sorry: wasn’t I speaking English? No one knows what happened inside the stone monastery. Prosper writes a fairly detailed account of the events leading up to that point, which is where the story I’m telling you comes from, but when the narrative reaches this moment, it breaks off with Vauglais’s declaration that he’s told us as much as he can. End of story.

  All right, yes, there are hints of what took place during the five years he was at the Abbey. That was what he called the building, the Abbey. Every so often, Prosper would allude to his experiences in it, and sometimes, someone would note his remarks in a letter or diary. From combing through these kinds of documents, it’s possible to assemble and collate Vauglais’s comments into a glimpse of his life with the Fraternity. Again, his name. There were maybe seven of them, or seven after he arrived, or there were supposed to be seven. He referred to “Brother Red,” once; to “The White Brother” at another time. Were the others named Blue, Purple, Green, Orange, and Violet? We can’t say; although, as an assumption, it isn’t completely unreasonable. They spent their days in pursuit of something Vauglais called The Great Work; he also referred to it as The Transumption. This seems to have involved generous amounts of quiet meditation combined with the study of certain religious texts—Prosper doesn’t name them, but they may have included some Gnostic writings.

  The Gnostics? I don’t suppose you would have heard of them. How many of you actually go to church? As I feared. What would Sr. Mary Mary say? The Gnostics were a religious sect who sprang up around the same time as the early Christians. I guess they would have described themselves as the true Christians, the ones who understood what Jesus’s teachings were really about. They shared sacred writings with the more orthodox Christians, but they had their own books, too. They were all about gnosis, knowledge, especially of the self. For them, the secret to what lay outside the self was what lay inside the self. The physical world was evil, a wellspring of illusions and delusions. Gnostics tended to retreat to the desert, lead lives of contemplation. Unlike the mainstream Christians, they weren’t much on formal organization; that, and the fact that those Christians did everything in their power to shunt the Gnostics and their teachings to the margins and beyond, branding some of their ideas as heretical, helps explain why they pretty much vanished from the religious scene.

  “Pretty much,” though, isn’t the same thing as “completely.” (I know: such precise, scientific terminology.) Once in a while, Gnostic ideas would resurface, usually in the writings of some fringe figure or another. Rumors persist of Gnostic secret societies, occasionally as part of established groups like the Jesuits or the Masons. Which begs the question: Was Vauglais’s Fraternity one of these societies, a kind of order of Gnostic monks? The answer to which is—

  Right: no one knows. There’s no record of any official, which is to say, Russian Orthodox, religious establishment: no monastery, no church, in the general vicinity of where we think Prosper was. Of course, a bunch of Gnostic monastics would hardly constitute anything resembling an official body, and so might very well fly under the radar. That said, the lack of proof against something does not count as evidence for it.

  That’s true. He could have been making the whole thing up.

  Transumption? It’s a term from classical rhetoric. It refers to the elision of a chain of associations. Sorry—sometimes I like to watch your heads explode. Let’s say you’re writing your epic poem about the fall of Troy, and you describe one of the Trojans being felled by an arrow. Let’s say that arrow was made from the wood of a tree in a sacred grove; let’s say, too, that that grove was planted by Hercules, who scattered some acorns there by accident. Now let’s say that, when your Trojan hero sinks to the ground, drowning in his own blood, one of his friends shouts, “Curse the careless hand of Hercules!” That statement is an example of transumption. You’ve jumped from one link in a chain of associations back several. Make sense?

  Yes, well, what does a figure of speech have to do with what was going on inside that Abbey?

  Oh wait—hold on for a moment. My two assistants are done with their set up. Let me give them a signal... Five more minutes? All right, good, yes. I have no idea if they understood me. Graduate students.

  Don’t worry about what’s on the windows. Yes, yes, those are lamps. Can I have your attention up here, please? Thank you. Let me worry about Campus Security. Or my masked friends out there will.

  Okay—let’s skip ahead a little. We were talking about The Transumption, a.k.a. The Great Work. There’s nothing in his other references to the Abbey that offers any clue as to what he may have meant by it. However, there is an event that may shed some light on things.

  It occurs in Paris, towards the end of February. An especially fierce winter scours the streets, sends people scurrying from the shelter of one building to another. Snow piles on top of snow, all of it turning dirty gray. Where there isn’t snow, there’s ice, inches thick in places. The sky is gray, the sun a pale blur that puts in a token appearance for a few hours a day. Out into this glacial landscape, Prosper leads half a dozen men and women from one of the city’s less-disreputable salons. Their destination, the catacombs, the long tunnels that run under Paris. They’re quite old, the catacombs. In some places, the walls are stacked with bones, from when they were used as a huge ossuary. (That’s a place to hold the bones of the dead.) They’re also fairly crowded, full of beggars, the poor, searching for shelter from the ravages of the season. Vauglais has to take his party deep underground before they can find a location that’s suitably empty. It’s a kind of side-chamber, roughly circular, lined with shelves full of skull piled on skull. The skulls make a clicking sound, from the rats shuffling through them. Oh yes, there are plenty of rats down here.

  Prosper fetches seven skulls off the shelves and piles them in the center of the room. He opens a large flask he’s carried with him, and pours its contents over the bones. It’s lamp oil, which he immediately ignites with his torch. He sets the torch down, and gathers
the members of thesalon around the skulls. They join hands.

  It does sound as if he’s leading a séance, doesn’t it? The only difference is, he isn’t asking the men and women with him to think of a beloved one who’s passed beyond. Nor does he request they focus on a famous ghost. Instead, Vauglais tells them to look at the flames licking the bones in front of them. Study those flames, he says, watch them as they trace the contours of the skulls. Follow the flames over the cheeks, around the eyes, up the brows. Gaze into those eyes, into the emptiness inside the fire. Fall through the flames; fall into that blackness.

  He’s hypnotizing them, of course—mesmerizing would be the more historically-accurate term. Under the sway of his voice, the members of the salon enter a kind of vacancy. They’re still conscious—well, they’re still perceiving, still aware of that heap of bones burning in front of them, the heavy odor of the oil, the quiet roar of the flames—but their sense of their selves, the accumulation of memory and inclination that defines each from the other, is gone.

  Now Prosper is telling them to think of something new. Picture the flesh that used to clothe these skulls, he says. Warm and smooth, flushed with life. Look closely—it glows, doesn’t it? It shines with its living. Watch! watch—it’s dying. It’s growing cold, pale. The glow, that dim light floating at the very limit of the skin—it’s changing, drifting up, losing its radiance. See—there!—ah, it’s dead. Cool as a cut of meat. Gray. The light is gone. Or is it? Is that another light? Yes, yes it is; but it is not the one we have watched dissipate. This is a darker glow. Indigo, that most elusive of the rainbow’s hues. It curls over the dull skin like fog, and the flesh opens for it, first in little cracks, then in long windows, and then in wide doorways. As the skin peels away, the light thickens, until it is as if the bone is submerged in a bath of indigo. The light is not done moving; it pours into the air above the skull, over all the skulls. Dark light is rising from them, twisting up in thick streams that seek each other, that wrap around one another, that braid a shape. It is the form of a man, a tall man dressed in black robes, his face void as a corpse’s, his head crowned with black flame—