Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  Back to Edgar. As we’ve said, even had he succeeded in gathering a group to assist him in his pursuit, he would have had to find a way to introduce them to Prosper’s images and their colors. If he could have, he would have... reoriented them, their minds, the channels of their thoughts. Vauglais’s designs would have brought them closer to where they needed to be; they would have made available certain dormant faculties within his associates.

  Even that would have left him with challenges, to be sure. Mesmerism, hypnosis, as Prosper himself discovered, is a delicate affair, one subject to such external variables as running out of lamp oil too soon. It would have been better if he could have employed some type of pharmacological agent, something that would have deposited them into a more useful state, something sufficiently concentrated to be delivered via a few bites of an innocuous food—a cookie, say, whose sweetness would mask any unpleasant taste, and which he could cajole his assistants to sample by claiming that his wife had baked them.

  Then, if Edgar had been able to keep this group distracted while the cookies did their work—perhaps by talking to them about his writing—about the genesis of one of his stories, say, “The Masque of the Red Death”—if he had managed this far, he might have been in a position to make something happen, to perform the Great Work.

  There’s just one more thing, and that’s the object for which Edgar would have put himself to all this supposed trouble: Virginia. I like to think I’m as romantic as the next guy, but honestly—you have the opportunity to rescript reality, and the best you can come up with is returning your dead wife to you? Talk about a failure to grasp the possibilities...

  What’s strange—and frustrating—is that it’s all right there in “The Masque,” in Edgar’s own words. The whole idea of the Great Work, of Transumption, is to draw one of the powers that our constant, collective writing of the real consigns to abstraction across the barrier into physicality. Ideally, one of the members of that trinity Edgar named so well, Darkness and Decay and the Red Death, those who hold illimitable dominion over all. The goal is to accomplish something momentous, to shake the world to its foundations, not play out some hackneyed romantic fantasy. That was what Vauglais was up to, trying to draw into form the force that strips the flesh from our bones, that crumbles those bones to dust.

  No matter. Edgar’s mistake still has its uses as a distraction, and a lesson. Not that it’ll do any of you much good. By now, I suspect few of you can hear what I’m saying, let alone understand it. I’d like to tell you the name of what I stirred into that cookie dough, but it’s rather lengthy and wouldn’t do you much good, anyway. I’d also like to tell you it won’t leave you permanently impaired, but that wouldn’t exactly be true. One of the consequences of its efficacy, I fear. If it’s any consolation, I doubt most of you will survive what’s about to follow. By my reckoning, the power I’m about to bring into our midst will require a good deal of... sustenance in order to establish a more permanent foothold here. I suspect this is of even less consolation, but I do regret this aspect of the plan I’m enacting. It’s just— once you come into possession of such knowledge, how can you not make use—full use of it?

  You see, I’m starting at the top. Or at the beginning—before the beginning, really, before light burst across the perfect formlessness that was everything. I’m starting with Darkness, with something that was already so old at that moment of creation that it had long forgotten its identity. I plan to restore it. I will give myself to it for a guide, let it envelop me and consume you and run out from here in a flood that will wash this world away. I will give to Darkness a dominion more complete than it has known since it was split asunder.

  Look—in the air—can you see it?

  For Fiona

  When I was a college freshman, my English class read a selection of Poe’s stories, including “The Masque of the Red Death.” For “The Masque,” the Professor gave us the assignment of figuring out what we thought the meaning to the story’s elaborate color schema was. He spent an entire class writing our responses on the board, comparing our answers. At the end of class, we asked him what he thought. He smiled and said, “I don’t know.”

  Here’s another attempt at an answer.

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