Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  This is what happened—what started to happen to the members of the salonProsper took into the Parisian catacombs. He attempted to implement what he’d learned during his years at the Abbey, what he first had perceived through the snow twirling in front of his eyes in that Russian forest. To manipulate—to mold—to...

  Suppose that the real—what we take to be the real—imagine that world outside the self, all this out here, is like a kind of writing. We write it together; we’re continuously writing it together, onto the surface of things, the paper, as it were. It isn’t something we do consciously, or that we exercise any conscious control over. We might glimpse it in moments of extremity, as Vauglais did, but that’s about as close to it as most of us will come. What if, though, what if it were possible to do something more than simply look? What if you could clear a space on that paper and write somethingelse? What might you bring into being?

  Edgar tries to find out. Long after “The Masque,” which is as much caution as it is field guide, he decides to apply Prosper’s ideas for real. He does so during that famous lost week at the end of his life, that gap in the biographical record that has prompted so much speculation. Since Virginia succumbed to tuberculosis some two years prior, Edgar’s been on a long downward slide, a protracted effort at joining his beloved wife. You know, extensive forests have been harvested for the production of critical studies of Edgar’s “bizarre” relationship with Virginia; rarely, if ever, does it occur to anyone that Edgar and Virginia might honestly have been in love, and that the difference in their ages might have been incidental. Yet what is that final couple of years but a man grieving himself to death? Yes, Edgar approaches other women about possible marriage, but why do you think none of those proposals work out?

  Not only is Edgar actively chasing his death, paddling furiously towards it on a river of alcohol; little known to him, death has noticed his pursuit, and responded by planting a black seed deep within his brain, a gift that is blossoming into a tumor. Most biographers have remained ignorant of this disease, but years after his death, Edgar’s body is exhumed—it doesn’t matter why; given who Edgar was, of course this was going to happen to him. During the examination of his remains, it’s noted that his brain is shrunken and hard. Anyone who knows about these things will tell you that the brain is one of the first organs to decay, which means that what those investigators found rattling around old Edgar’s cranium would not have been petrified gray matter. Cancer, however, is a much more durable beast; long after it’s killed you, a tumor hangs around to testify to its crime. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to how long he’d had it, but by the time I’m talking about, Edgar is in a pretty bad way. He’s having trouble controlling the movements of his body, his speech; half the time he seems drunk, he’s stone cold sober.

  There’s something else. Increasingly, wherever he turns his gaze, whatever he looks at flickers, and instead of, say, an orange resting on a plate, he sees a jumble of black lines approximating a sphere on a circle. It takes him longer to recall Vauglais’s experience in that Russian forest than you’d expect; the cancer, no doubt, devouring his memory. Sometimes the confusion of lines that’s replaced the streetlamp in front of him is itself replaced by blankness, by an absence that registers as a dull white space in the middle of things. It’s as if a painter took a palette knife and scraped the oils from a portion of their picture until all that remained was the canvas, slightly stained. At first, Edgar thinks there’s something wrong with his vision; when he understands what he’s experiencing, he speculates that the blank might be the result of his eyes’ inability to endure their own perception, that he might be undergoing some degree of what we would call hysterical blindness. As he’s continued to see that whiteness, though, he’s realized that he isn’t seeing less, but more. He’s seeing through to the surface those black lines are written on.

  In the days immediately prior to his disappearance, Edgar’s perception undergoes one final change. For the slightest instant after that space has uncovered itself to him, something appears on it, a figure—a woman. Virginia, yes, as he saw her last, ravaged by tuberculosis, skeletally thin, dark hair in disarray, mouth and chin scarlet with the blood she’d hacked out of her lungs. She appears barefoot, wrapped in a shroud stained with dirt. Almost before he sees her, she’s gone, her place taken by whatever he’d been looking at to begin with.

  Is it any surprise that, presented with this dull white surface, Edgar should fill it with Virginia? Her death has polarized him; she’s the lodestone that draws his thoughts irresistibly in her direction. With each glimpse of her he has, Edgar apprehends that he’s standing at the threshold of what could be an extraordinary chance. Although he’s discovered the secret of Prosper’s designs, discerned the nature of the Great Work, never once has it occurred to him that he might put that knowledge to use. Maybe he hasn’t really believed in it; maybe he’s suspected that, underneath it all, the effect of the various colors on Vauglais’s designs is some type of clever optical illusion. Now, though, now that there’s the possibility of gaining his beloved back—

  Edgar spends that last week sequestered in a room in a boarding house a few streets up from that alley where he tripped over Prosper’s book. He’s arranged for his meals to be left outside his door; half the time, however, he leaves them untouched, and even when he takes the dishes into his room, he eats the bare minimum to sustain him. About midway through his stay, the landlady, a Mrs. Foster, catches sight of him as he withdraws into his room. His face is flushed, his skin slick with sweat, his clothes disheveled; he might be in the grip of a fever whose fingers are tightening around him with each degree it climbs. As his door closes, Mrs. Foster considers running up to it and demanding to speak to this man. The last thing she wants is for her boarding house to be known as a den of sickness. She has taken two steps forward when she stops, turns, and bolts downstairs as if the Devil himself were tugging her apron strings. For the remainder of the time this lodger is in his room, she will send one of the serving girls to deliver his meals, no matter their protests. Once the room stands unoccupied, she will direct a pair of those same girls to remove its contents—including the cheap bed— carry them out back, and burn them until nothing remains but a heap of ashes. The empty room is closed, locked, and removed from use for the rest of her time running that house, some twenty-two years.

  I know: what did she see? What could she have seen, with the door shut? Perhaps it wasn’t what she saw; perhaps it was what she felt: the surface of things yielding, peeling away to what was beneath, beyond—the strain of a will struggling to score its vision onto that surface—the waver of the brick and mortar, of the very air around her, as it strained against this newness coming into being. How would the body respond to what could only register as a profound wrongness? Panic, you have to imagine, maybe accompanied by sudden nausea, a fear so intense as to guarantee a lifetime’s aversion to anything associated with its cause.

  Had she opened that door, though, what sight would have confronted her? What would we see?

  Nothing much—at least, that’s likely to have been our initial response. Edgar seated on the narrow bed, staring at the wall opposite him. Depending on which day it was, we would have noticed his shirt and pants looking more or less clean. Like Mrs. Foster, we would have remarked his flushed face, the sweat soaking his shirt; we would have heard his breathing, deep and hoarse. We might have caught his lips moving, might have guessed he was repeating Virginia’s name over and over again, but been unable to say for sure. Were we to guess he was in a trance, caught in an opium dream, aside from the complete and total lack of opium-related paraphernalia, we could be forgiven.

  If we were to remain in that room with him—if we could stand the same sensation that sent Mrs. Foster running—it wouldn’t take us long to turn our eyes in the direction of Edgar’s stare. His first day there, we wouldn’t have noticed much if anything out of the ordinary. Maybe we would have wondered if the patch of bricks he was so fo
cused on didn’t look just the slightest shade paler than its surroundings, before dismissing it as a trick of the light. Return two, three days later, and we would find that what we had attributed to mid-afternoon light blanching already-faded masonry is a phenomenon of an entirely different order. Those bricks are blinking in and out of sight. One moment, there’s a worn red rectangle, the next, there isn’t. What takes its place is difficult to say, because it’s back almost as fast as it was gone; although, after its return, the brick looks a bit less solid... less certain, you might say. Ragged around the edges, though not in any way you could put words to. All over that stretch of wall, bricks are going and coming and going. It almost looks as if some kind of code is spelling itself out using the stuff of Edgar’s wall as its pen and paper.

  Were we to find ourselves in that same room, studying that same spot, a day later, we would be startled to discover a small area of the wall, four bricks up, four down, vanished. Where it was—let’s call what’s there—or what isn’t there—white. To tell the truth, it’s difficult to look at that spot— the eye glances away automatically, the way it does from a bright light. Should you try to force the issue, tears dilute your vision.

  Return to Edgar’s room over the next twenty-four hours, and you would find that gap exponentially larger—from four bricks by four bricks to sixteen by sixteen, then from sixteen by sixteen to—basically, the entire wall. Standing in the doorway, you would have to raise your hand, shield your eyes from the dull whiteness in front of you. Blink furiously, squint, and you might distinguish Edgar in his familiar position, staring straight into that blank. Strain your gaze through the narrowest opening your fingers can make, and for the half a second until your head jerks to the side, you see a figure, deep within the white. Later, at a safe remove from Edgar’s room, you may attempt to reconstruct that form, make sense of your less-than-momentary vision. All you’ll be able to retrieve, however, is a pair of impressions, the one of something coalescing, like smoke filling up a jar, the other of thinness, like a child’s stick-drawing grown life-sized. For the next several months, not only your dreams, but your waking hours will be plagued by what you saw between your fingers. Working late at night, you will be overwhelmed by the sense that whatever you saw in that room is standing just outside the cone of light your lamp throws. Unable to help yourself, you’ll reach for the shade, tilt it back, and find... nothing, your bookcases. Yet the sensation won’t pass; although you can read the spines of the hardcovers ranked on your bookshelves, your skin won’t stop bristling at what you can’t see there.

  What about Edgar, though? What image do his eyes find at the heart of that space? I suppose we should ask, What image of Virginia?

  It—she changes. She’s thirteen, wearing the modest dress she married him in. She’s nine, wide-eyed as she listens to him reciting his poetry to her mother and her. She’s dead, wrapped in a white shroud. So much concentration is required to pierce through to the undersurface in the first place—and then there’s the matter of maintaining the aperture—that it’s difficult to find, let alone summon, the energy necessary to focus on a single image of Virginia. So the figure in front of him brushes a lock of dark hair out of her eyes, then giggles in a child’s high-pitched tones, then coughs and sprays scarlet blood over her lips and chin. Her mouth is pursed in thought; she turns to a knock on the front door; she thrashes in the heat of the disease that is consuming her. The more time that passes, the more Edgar struggles to keep his memories of his late wife separate from one another. She’s nine, standing beside her mother, wound in her burial cloth. She’s in her coffin, laughing merrily. She’s saying she takes him as her lawful husband, her mouth smeared with blood.

  Edgar can’t help himself—he’s written, and read, too many stories about exactly this kind of situation for him not to be aware of all the ways it could go hideously wrong. Of course, the moment such a possibility occurs to him, it’s manifest in front of him. You know how it is: the harder you try to keep a pink elephant out of your thoughts, the more that animal cavorts center-stage. Virginia is obscured by white linen smeared with mud; where her mouth is, the shroud is red. Virginia is naked, her skin drawn to her skeleton, her hair loose and floating around her head as if she’s under water. Virginia is wearing the dress she was buried in, the garment and the pale flesh beneath it opened by rats. Her eyes—or the sockets that used to cradle them—are full of her death, of all she has seen as she was dragged out of the light down into the dark.

  With each new monstrous image of his wife, Edgar strives not to panic. He bends what is left of his will toward summoning Virginia as she was at sixteen, when they held a second, public wedding. For an instant, she’s there, holding out her hand to him with that simple grace she’s displayed as long as he’s known her—and then she’s gone, replaced by a figure whose black eyes have seen the silent halls of the dead, whose ruined mouth has tasted delicacies unknown this side of the grave. This image does not flicker; it does not yield to other, happier pictures. Instead, it grows more solid, more definite. It takes a step towards Edgar, who is frantic, his heart thudding in his chest, his mouth dry. He’s trying to stop the process, trying to close the door he’s spent so much time and effort prying open, to erase what he’s written on that blankness. The figure takes another step forward, and already, is at the edge of the opening. His attempts at stopping it are useless—what he’s started has accrued sufficient momentum for it to continue regardless of him. His lips are still repeating, “Virginia.”

  When the—we might as well say, when Virginia places one gray foot onto the floor of Edgar’s room, a kind of ripple runs through the entire room, as if every last bit of it is registering the intrusion. How Edgar wishes he could look away as she crosses the floor to him. In a far corner of his brain that is capable of such judgments, he knows that this is the price for hishubris— really, it’s almost depressingly formulaic. He could almost accept the irony if he did not have to watch those hands dragging their nails back and forth over one another, leaving the skin hanging in pale strips; if he could avoid the sight of whatever is seething in the folds of the bosom of her dress; if he could shut his eyes to that mouth and its dark contents as it descends to his. But he can’t; he cannot turn away from his Proserpine as she rejoins him at last.

  Four days prior to his death, Edgar is found on the street, delirious, barely-conscious. He never recovers. Right at the end, he rallies long enough to dictate a highly-abbreviated version of the story I’ve told you to a Methodist minister, who finds what he records so disturbing he sews it into the binding of the family Bible, where it will remain concealed for a century and a half.

  As for what Edgar called forth—she walks out of our narrative and is not seen again.

  It’s a crazy story. It makes the events of Vauglais’s life seem almost reasonable in comparison. If you were so inclined, I suppose you could ascribe Edgar’s experience in that rented room to an extreme form of auto-hypnosis which, combined with the stress on his body from his drinking and the brain tumor, precipitates a fatal collapse. In which case, the story I’ve told you is little more than an elaborate symptom. It’s the kind of reading a literary critic prefers; it keep the more... outré elements safely quarantined within the writer’s psyche.

  Suppose, though, suppose. Suppose that all this insanity I’ve been feeding you isn’t a quaint example of early-nineteenth-century pseudoscience. Suppose that its interest extends well beyond any insights it might offer in interpreting “The Masque of the Red Death.” Suppose—let’s say the catastrophe that overtakes Edgar is the result of—we could call it poor planning. Had he paid closer attention to the details of Prosper’s history, especially to that sojourn in the catacombs, he would have recognized the difficulty—to the point of impossibility—of making his attempt alone. Granted, he was desperate. But there was a reason Vauglais took the members of hissalon underground with him—to use as a source of power, a battery, as it were. They provided the energy; he directed it
. Edgar’s story is a testament to what must have been a tremendous—an almost unearthly will. In the end, though, it wasn’t enough.

  Of course, how could he have brought together a sufficient number of individuals, and where? By the close of his life, he wasn’t the most popular of fellows. Not to mention, he would have needed to expose the members of this hypothetical group to Prosper’s designs and their corresponding colors.

  Speaking of which: pleasant as this violet has been, what do you say we proceed to the piece de resistance? Faceless lackeys, on my mark—

  Ahh. I don’t usually talk about these things, but you have no idea how much trouble this final color combination gave me. I mean, red and black gives you dark red, right? Right, except that for the design to achieve its full effect, putting up a dark red light won’t do. You need red layered over black—and a true black light, not ultraviolet. The result, though—I’m sure you’ll agree, it was worth sweating over. It’s like a picture painted in red on a black canvas, wouldn’t you say? And look what it does for the final image. It seems to be reaching right out of the screen for you, doesn’t it? Strictly speaking, Vauglais’s name for it, “Le Dessous,” the Underneath, isn’t quite grammatical French, but we needn’t worry ourselves over such details. There are times I think another name would be more appropriate: the Maw, perhaps, and then there are moments I find the Underneath perfect. You can see why I might lean towards calling it a mouth—the Cave would do, as well—except that the perspective’s all wrong. If this is a mouth, or a cave, we aren’t looking into it; we’re already inside, looking out.