He couldn’t move. Somehow, the Raven had imparted a paralysis that he couldn’t shake.
“Why have you strayed from the Path?”
Ernie didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t believe he was talking to a raven, but there it was, perched on his shoulder. It wasn’t like other birds. It was larger, its face more expressive, more human. Its eyes terrified him.
“I-I didn’t know-”
“The Path was shown to you. But you have not followed it.”
“Well… I’ve been busy with classes and-”
“There are no excuses.”
“Look, just-just tell me what to do. I’ll do it. Really I will.”
“You know what to do.”
“I don’t. But if you could give me a little hint-”
“Nevermore!” The coal-black eyes flared, angry and intense. Ernie tried to inch away, but he was still unable to move. “I have been with Virginia.”
Ernie’s hunger was supplanted by an aching in his chest, a new emptiness. “You’ve seen her?”
“I have been with Virginia. And so could you.”
“But how-”
“In my realm, all are reunited. All are one.”
“I don’t know what that-”
“You have the potential for greatness. You could be what I am.”
“I-I’ll do whatever I must. Whatever you want.”
The Raven unfolded its wings and the span was endless, a dark umbra that spread from one perimeter of his vision to the other, swallowing him. He screamed, and somehow, the act of screaming ended the visitation. He was wide awake, able to move, fully conscious that he was alone in the middle of the desert.
But he was certain he had been visited by his totem, and that the visit had meant something. What was he was being called to do?
The sweat on his brow had vanished, replaced by a fevered chill. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, trying to warm himself. Something had changed, something inside him. He didn’t know how or what exactly. But he knew he would never be the same.
It was hard to avoid the sorrowful look in the eyes of all who shook Ernie’s hand as he left the questing headquarters. Word had gotten out. They all were aware that he had been visited by the Raven, the totem of death, and they all believed that meant he would soon be dead.
But Ernie knew differently. The Raven might be the totem of death, but not his own. This visitation had a different meaning.
He returned to school, ostensibly focusing on his studies, but obsessed with the Raven’s words, trying to uncover the mysteries of his path. He graduated with honors and became a teaching assistant while pursuing his Master’s in American Literature. But although he performed his appointed tasks with excellence, his heart was no longer in them. And his soul was in another place altogether.
He had not wanted to revisit the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He remembered those stories from his childhood as dark and gruesome, obviously the product of an unstable, demented mind. But he was TA-ing an American Lit survey course, and of course he had to grade the exams, and he couldn’t do that unless he refamiliarized himself with the texts. So he sat down in his room late one evening, alone as always, with a thick volume of Poe.
He had not intended to read the entire book. A few of the major works would do, surely. He started with the poems, lovely things, sonically immaculate, if rather syrupy. But so much of it reverberated in strange and unforeseen ways.
She was a child and I was a child in that kingdom by the sea…
Such love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me…
Had Poe really written that about his lost child bride? Could anyone but Ernie himself have written that?
It was only a short while before he reread Poe’s great masterpiece, “The Raven.” Eighteen immaculately rhymed quatrains, with the Raven as the harbinger of death. Could this possibly be a coincidence?
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting… just above my chamber door…
Ernie felt as if his brain had been opened wide. As if the sun had dawned for the first time. After the poems, he pored through the stories, over and over again. It was only after he had read them many times that he began to see beyond the superficial entertainments and realize that there was something important buried within them. The similarities, the points of correspondence, were too great to be coincidental. Just as the Raven had spoken to him, so it also must have spoken to Poe. He found a tantalizing clue in one of the worst of the tales, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”: It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge-some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Yes! And another story-“The Premature Burial”: To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
That was what the Raven was trying to tell him. Death was not an ending but a translation, a passage from one borderland to another. But this wasn’t a Christian fantasy, a heaven up in the clouds such as they spoke about in Sunday school. This was something real. The Dream-Land Poe described in his poems existed, and his sweet Virginia must be there. The narrator in “Ligeia” brought back his love. Could Ernie not do the same? But what was the mystic formula that the prophet hinted at but never described? How was this magnificent end to be accomplished? How could he enter Dream-Land? How could he make Poe’s Golden Age a reality?
The answer came to him in the December of that year, not from his intensive studies, not from his work, but from a purely adventitious discovery in a small coastal California town. In a used-book store, he found an obscure Poe work, something that hadn’t been in any of the anthologies. It was titled Eureka.
He had seen references to this work in some of the biographies he had consumed, but they were all brief and dismissive. A failed effort, they called it. A hopeless mishmash. It seemed useless and irrelevant, and for that reason, and because it wasn’t in any of his books anyway, he had never bothered to read it.
When he did, it gave him the answers he had so long sought. The path.
Poe believed in dreams, not just sleeping dreams but waking ones, believed they were glimpses into another world, a better world, one to which we could all be translated. He limned a memorable, if enticingly vague, portrait of this world in his poem “Dream-Land”: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Much of Eureka was concerned with Poe’s efforts to create a new cosmology, which was rejected by contemporaries because of his lack of scientific training, and yet in retrospect, some of what Poe wrote was positively prescient. Poe solved Olbers’s paradox-why the sky is dark at night-envisioned black holes, and was the first to describe the universe as expanding, then contracting. He proposed the big bang theory, which would not be formally discovered until seventy years later, by Alexander Friedmann, a Russian mathematician who was very fond of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
How had Poe known, long before the scientific observations had been made that could prove it?
The Raven told him, of course.
Poe believed that man was a mere extension of the Deity. He believed that as man shrinks into spatial nothingness he will regain his lost harmony and become absorbed into a perfect, mystical unity. He wrote: The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity [in death] ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is neither more nor less than the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.
After he read that passage, Ernie wept. He threw his hands up in the air, ecstatic, euphoric. He had wondered for so long, had needed to know. And all the while, the prophet had been trying to tell him.
These were not mere stories, mere poems. They were blueprints.
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t get this Poe stuff. I mean, I know he was great and brilliant and all, but to me, it just seems gross.”
Ernie was in his tiny TA’s office, opening his mail, trying to appear interested.
“I guess, I grew up in the suburbs, you know what I’m saying? We didn’t have guys sealing each other up in the basement or swinging big pendulums over their chests. And what was the deal with that story where the guy yanked out that woman’s teeth? I mean, this Poe guy had issues, if you ask me.”
Ernie tried to smile. She was a tiny thing, presumably eighteen, but she looked younger. She had a round face and large eyes and long, straight blond hair. He knew she had a reputation as a partyer. She wore far too much makeup. “So what, pray tell, can I do for you, Miss Swanson?”
She shifted from one side of the chair to the other, crossing her legs. “See, I know the final is supposed to be like, final, but I think I didn’t do so hot on it.”
“Why do you believe that?”
“Well… I never finished the reading. I mean, I’m sorry, but those stories were just so wrong.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Yeah, but my sorority is counting on me to keep up the academic average, and I wondered if there wasn’t some way I could… make it up.”
“I’m afraid Professor Levy doesn’t give second chances.”
“Would he have to know?”
“I could hardly offer a makeup exam without his authorization.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about another test.” She slithered off the chair and onto her knees, just before him. “I was hoping I could make it up… some other way.”
“Miss Swanson, I’m sure I don’t know…”
“Come on,” she said, rubbing her hands up and down his pant legs. “I know you pretend to be above it all with your big words and your old-fashioned suits. But I’ll bet there’s a real man in there somewhere.”
“Miss Swanson, this-this is most inappropriate.”
“Sure?” She unzipped the fly of his pants.
“Miss Swanson!”
“Come on. I’ll do you a favor, you do me one.” Her hand reached inside his pants. “And I’ll bet-” She stopped, choked. “Oh, my God! What’s wrong with you?”
Ernie hurriedly tucked himself back inside. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing! It’s gross!”
“I had an accident. When I was a child.”
She stepped away from him, her face stricken. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be cruel. I was just-startled.” She waved her hand back and forth, as if fanning the air. “Look, let’s just forget it.”
“But-you said-”
“I can do a lot, but I can’t do that. I’ll just take the D.”
“Nevermore?” he whispered.
He wasn’t sure how it happened. But he heard the Raven speaking to him, loud, insistent, and he saw the girl, so like Poe’s own, and he felt his shame and embarrassment, and he was desperate to find the path, to know what it was he was supposed to do. And a moment later, the letter opener was jutting out from her left temple. She was dead in seconds.
“You have done well,” the Raven intoned. “You have begun your journey. But there is still much to be done. Much to be discovered.”
And so Ernie quit his position at the college and trolled up and down the coast of California, through Montana, then Nevada, refining his prowess and technique as he traveled, finally making his way to Las Vegas, where the final secrets were revealed to him, and the countdown to Ascension could begin at last.
30
“So what you’re basically telling us is, Edgar is Jesus Christ?” Granger wheezed.
“In his mind, yes.” I was back in the classroom again, except this time it was packed beyond capacity, not only with Granger’s increasingly sizable team, but with all the new FBI agents on the case, most of whom I hadn’t formally met. And here I was lecturing these feds, debriefing them as if I were some kind of behavioral genius. Patrick had gracefully allowed me to take the lead, thereby ensuring that I would be kept in the loop and given a decent modicum of respect. But this case was federal now. We were still allowed to play. But they owned the sandbox.
“This stuff is all fine for the college professor crowd,” Granger said, “but how is it going to help us catch the guy?”
“If you don’t understand who he is, you’ll never get him. You spent valuable man-hours last week having your men blanket all the S &M clubs and similar places Edgar would never dream of visiting.”
“One of his victims worked in an S &M club!”
“He went there because his victim of choice was there. That’s no indication that he liked it. I’ll bet he hated it and left as soon as possible.”
“Excuse me.” This came from one of the agents in the front row. “In your opinion, will he continue to abduct only girls with given names found in the works of Poe?”
“Frankly, no.” I saw their looks of disappointment-one of the few useful leads lost. But I had to give them the straight scoop. “Too restrictive, now that everyone knows. He won’t be able to find an Annabel this side of the Rocky Mountains. And let’s not forget about his last victim-there are no Faras in Poe. I think we have to assume he’s over that, or that he’s taking different instructions from whatever voice is talking to him now.”
“I read your report on the Eureka book,” he commented. “Fascinating. Do you have any idea what he might be planning to do? To bring about this Golden Age?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Except that it will have something to do with Poe. The connection may be mostly in his mind. But there will be one.”
“And do you have any theory about when this might happen?”
“According to that last phone call, he’s already started.”
He scribbled something into his notepad. “I assume someone has reviewed the missing-persons reports?”
“Yes, but remember, this is Vegas. There were eighteen missing-persons reports filed last night. Four of them concerned teenage girls.”
“Any likely suspects?”
“A group of three. Wandered away from a cheerleader clinic. No one has seen them since.”
“Three? At one time?”
I nodded grimly. “As I said, Edgar’s actions will escalate. Until his plan is completed. During the phone call, he spoke of a day of ascension-when something big was going to happen, something that would change everything. I called some of the local Christian churches. They say Easter is generally considered the day of ascension. But since this is October, I doubt if that’s Edgar’s target date. He’s planning his own ascension, on his own timetable. Like any other self-respecting savior.”
The Feeb almost smiled. “Does this put us in the role of Judas Iscariot?”
I returned the expression. “I’ll be happy to kiss the man on the cheek. Next time I see him.”
During the drive to Carson City, Darcy read police reports to me. It was funny listening to him, and not just because of that uninflected voice. His vocabulary was incredible; we never hit a word he didn’t know. But his pronunciation was often far from the mark. I got the impression he had done a good deal more reading than he’d done talking. I suppose he wasn’t the first person to find books more comfortable than other people. But I still liked being with him, and I know he liked being with me. And that felt good.
“Did you know there are over nine hundred missing-persons reports filed in Clark County each year?” he asked as he shuffled between files.
“Your point being?”
He was staring at a group of photographs. The cheerleaders. “They seem like nice girls, don’t you think? I hope the Bad Man doesn’t do anything mean to them.”
Poor sweet Darcy. “I could be wrong. But how else do you explain their disappearance?”
“Spontaneous combustion?”
“Seems unlikely.”
“White s
lavery ring? Did you know that white slavery rings are still active in Kuwait and many Middle Eastern nations? But I don’t know about Las Vegas.”
“Let’s hope that isn’t it.” What kind of books did O’Bannon have in that library? “I can’t be certain, Darcy. But my instincts tell me Edgar grabbed these girls. And I’ve learned to trust my instincts.”
“Me too,” Darcy said, surprising the hell out of me. “You’re usually right.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“Ninety-three point six six percent of the time so far.”
“Thanks, Spock.” I wasn’t going to ask how he’d calculated that. Or what he considered to be my mistakes.
His head tilted to one side. “You smell good today.”
“I do? Oh-you mean no coffee breath.”
“Uh-uh. Something else.”
And I guess I knew what that was, too. I’d made it through the night again without taking a drink. And I could do it again. I knew I could. I had the strength now. And the really strange thing was that I knew I was getting that strength-at least in part-from Darcy.
“I didn’t like that funny smell. I like Susan smell better.”
Good thing I knew he was autistic. Otherwise I might have him arrested.
We didn’t know that Tiffany was dead. But I still found my voice choking, my eyes tingling, throughout the interview. Was this the first time I’d done something like this since David? Or perhaps, was this the first time I’d done something like this sober since David?
“It seemed such an innocent, harmless activity,” Mrs. Glancy said. “Cheerleading camp. What could happen?”
It’s not your fault, I wanted to tell the woman. But it wasn’t my place. “The team sponsor says she and the others disappeared after dinner. Around nine.”
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