Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017

by Uncanny Magazine

  The man I’d chosen as a husband was gone, hidden by pulsating dark.

  The stowaway flowed over the carpet toward me, bringing cold, but also bringing fire. I felt my edges crackle.

  “Annabel,” said the stowaway, its voice still the honey it had always been. “You have betrayed me. You might have spent your life dreaming, but you’ve made yourself hostess of a nightmare. Now you are mine, and I am yours. You will hide me in your skin, and together, we shall seek for my creator.”

  It took my hand and pressed its lips to my flesh. I felt the points of its teeth like lightning striking, and the stars of its skin glowed brighter. With a rush, the entirety of the creature was absorbed into me.

  The stowaway is no longer visible to the world, but I can feel it. The physician I visited in the city told me I carried nothing at all, but I know him to be wrong.

  “Hysteria,” my father insisted, and the diagnosis was that. There was a movement from the men in my family to send me to a sanatorium, and though I resisted, I knew it was only a matter of time before they overpowered me. Hence my flight.

  “This story explains my presence here, in your inn,” I concluded at last. “To no one’s satisfaction, not my own, nor yours. Yet am I here, and here I will remain until the stowaway is gone.”

  The innkeeper looked steadily at me, seemingly aware that I’d omitted certain terrible facts, certain shameful aspects of the possession. I could not speak them. I would not. My mouth watered, even still, and my ribs ached. One morning I’d awakened with claw marks rending my garments, and traveling up and down my torso, and another I’d woken in the river itself, drenched and half–frozen, clutching a bloody fingerbone. In the papers, I began to see notices of disappearances, men of letters, men with dark dreams. Their bodies were not found.

  I knew where they were.

  “Guests come here to die, some of them. Perhaps you are one of them?” she asked.

  “I mean to be saved,” I said. “I mean to save myself from this creature. I will not offer it harbor. It is a criminal fled from the land of dreamers, and it is a nightmare.”

  “Thule,” she said. “That is the origin of the ship in the bay, in and out of our waters these twenty years,” she said. “There have been men from aboard it here. Those curtains came from a Thule trader, once, long ago, and this sapphire as well. There are beautiful things to be had in the land of dreams, as well as horrid ones. The ship is a ship of explorers, hunting something fled here years ago. I believe you may know all too well what it is they seek.”

  I looked at her. Her skin glowed pale and her eyes shone, and I wondered when she had lost her own ghosts, or whether she boarded them here in hope of being transported one day to their realm.

  I glanced at the curtains. I’d not examined the toile the night before, and today I saw the pattern was quite other than I’d imagined. Explorers, yes, their spears raised and pressing into the flesh of something without edges, a blot in the fabric speckled with stars. Another scene of the darkness taking them, dead men in the snow. Another of ships filled with vague forms, their faces stricken, and beneath them, the water itself made of night.

  I shivered. What was it I contained? Would I be free of it?

  “What shall I do?” I asked her.

  “If it emerges,” she said, “you must wrest it back into the land of dreams. Only then will you be free.”

  I went out into the city, trying to calm myself for the portrait. It was a silly thing, to attempt beauty in a portrait such as this one. It did not matter, or so the medium said. All that mattered was the method.

  Half to the studio, worrying that perhaps my fever had returned—the stowaway heated my body to an uncomfortable degree—I felt a presence behind me.

  I spun on my boot heel, but saw no one. It was full daylight, and there was no reason to suspect another thief, but I walked on, shifting toward a busier street, listening for steps behind me. I knew better than to rove alone, even at this time of morning, a time not unreasonable for any lady to be unaccompanied. I wouldn’t be mistaken for any of those nightingales who’d be swaying toward their rooming houses at this hour, rather than away from them, but something possessed me to keep on my own path, to pass quickly by any carriages for hire. I had a horror that if I looked to the drivers I’d see a series of monsters leaning forward over the reins.

  How many could there be of the creature that plagued me? Where had my first husband found the stowaway? I’d scanned map after map, but on none of them could I find the country called Thule. No, all that was on those maps was a vague area of nothingness with that label. Had it come aboard as cargo, hidden in a barrel of sugar, a secret folded in the silk? Had it pretended to be rope? My husband had been an importer of trade goods, but what had he gone to dreamland to acquire? He had filled his hold with a devil, and now the devil held me.

  There were no steps in the street behind me, but only the sound of a cane, tapping, tapping, each cobblestone scratching beneath it, and the sound of splashing as well, as whatever wraith it was moved over the stones. I readied myself to scream, to run, but there was no need.

  “Lady,” a weak voice whispered. “Lady, will you hear me? I am a broken man, and not long for this world. The mistress of the inn sent me after you.”

  I turned and saw him for the second time: the man who’d walked out of the bay, still drenched, his waistcoat dripping, his black suit hanging on him as though he was a cadaver. He was correct in his assertion. Blue shadows bruised his eyes, and his cheeks were gaunt. He looked as though he’d climbed from out of a tomb.

  “Where have you come from, Sir?” I asked him. The Sir was an afterthought. He was not demon, not ghost, but not whole either.

  “A ship,” he said, and I knew him to be deranged, but who was to say that I was not? He was a kindred spirit in that fashion, and so I let him speak. “I swam from a ship that floats there still—on the border of Dream–land—”

  He extended a trembling finger toward the horizon, as though I would see his ship. There was nothing to be seen. “—and up again into the light.”

  “And what is your name?”

  “Edgar,” he said, and swayed, leaning heavily on his cane.

  I felt the stowaway twist inside me, and I flinched, bending at the waist. My corset was laced particularly tight, some vain hope of caging the creature and keeping it still. It did not wish to be still.

  “Are you well?” he asked.

  “I am not,” I said.

  “Nor I,” he said, and gave me a look of profound sympathy. “Not since the death of my wife.”

  I was reminded of my ghost husband. There were no men made of anything more than trouble in my history, and this one was no different.

  “My name is Mrs. MacFarlane,” I said.

  “What is your Christian name?” he asked. He was no threat, his body wizened like that of an ancient, though he could not be much older than I.

  “Annabel,” I told him. Recognition flickered on his face for a moment.

  “Ah, then it is true,” he murmured. “Annabel. I have heard your name in passing, yes, in passing through the night. I have heard it whispered in a dream I had.”

  “Are we acquainted?” I asked. He was oddly familiar to me, it was true, more so than just the vision of him staggering up from the sea.

  “No, no. We have never met in the waking world,” he said, and the alert look he’d had was gone again. I smelt the alcohol on him, and more than that. He smelled of the sea, of salt, of blood. “I am a dreamer destined only for sorrow, Annabel, and there is one more thing I must do before I end my days.”

  Was I entranced by his suffering, so akin to my own? Or his handsome face, his history of loss. Some part of my heart, one I had not noticed in some time, felt enticed to compassion for one so miserable.

  “I thought that I was destined for death as well,” I told him recklessly, “but I refuse to accept it. I am to the portraitist. Will you accompany me, sir? I dislike undertaking the j
ourney alone.”

  Quite unexpectedly, he smiled.

  “You would take me to a photographer?” he asked. “This broken poet? Four days ago, I attempted suicide on a train. When I woke, it was on a ship in this bay, and I knew the crew of tattered men, and I knew the captain. He hunts the night for a beast he cannot find, a thing from his own sleeping kingdom which has fled to this one. He has sent me into the town to seek on his behalf, Annabel, to seek the beast. Have you seen it?”

  He stood, his hands hanging, a pleading expression on his face. And here was I, containing the beast he sought. Here was I, an unwilling case for a spirit I’d never invited in.

  “I have not,” I told him. I could not trust him yet. I’d met handsome men before. I’d met a handsome ghost, a betrayer of my body. “I do not even know your full name,” I said.

  The man before me winced.

  “Edgar Poe,” he said. “I am a writer of horrors. It is only reasonable that I should end in horror myself. I have spent my life a dreamer, and now my dreams haunt me in daylight.” He lifted his shoulders and his expression was that of profound regret. “It was a dream I made, long ago, and I worked at it, night after night, inventing its appetites. The dream made itself flesh and escaped the boundary of the land I’d made for it. After that, I know not where it went, though I am told there have been tales of its takings. I did not imagine I would be held here to reckon with my imagination, unable to die unless I captured it.”

  I felt faint, but still more resolved. The lacings of my corset bowed behind my back, and I gasped, pulling my own flesh in as the stowaway pressed against it. I felt the bones bend, and the silk threads, in the claws of something horrid.

  “A dreamer,” I said, thinking of my own miserable, missing nights. “That does not matter. What one does in the dark is not a thing one must own in the light.”

  “If that were the truth of things, then murders might be done at midnight and never a murderer jailed for them,” Poe said.

  I thought of fingerbones, of a ribcage, of a man’s wedding ring I’d found in the bosom of my dress. I thought of pocket watches and ink pens, of men I’d never met, of a black silk tie undone and knotted again about my wrist. I thought of a carved ivory cane I’d found beside my bed, the knob carved into the shape of a skull. All these things could have belonged to a man like the man before me, and too, he resembled a man I’d known once, long ago, a man who had been my husband.

  I thought of the true reason I’d fled, a sudden waking in the darkest hours, finding myself far from home. I thought of the man I’d found before me, on his back, a man who looked enough like this one to be a twin to him. This one was not dead, no, but moaning on the platform of a train, swearing up and down that he was not waking but dreaming, insisting that he was doomed. It was too early in the morning for a crowd, and I leaned over his face and heard my own hiss, my own voice honeyed and covetous. I felt my body hum at proximity to the man and to his mind, but he was drugged and nearly insensible, and the lights in the station were beginning to be lit. I fled. My body was nothing human at all. I had torn his papers from his case, and rifled through them, hunting I know not what. What did the stowaway want? A maker? A parent? The man who had created it? What did it want with me, but a vessel? I’d been too long a vessel for this monster. I’d been too long hungry for meals I did not wish to consume.

  “Take it away from me,” I said to the poet. “Can you do that?”

  “Perhaps,” the poet said. “That is my aim.”

  I felt the stowaway longing for something, but what I knew not. It did not want me, though it accompanied me. It had never wanted me. It wanted a man, or a friend, or a companion other than I. Where had it come from? The country beyond the wall? The ship anchored in the bay? The place where night slept when the sun was in the sky?

  If I could not be rid of my monster, I would go to Thule myself. If it was death I courted, so be it. I glanced up at the angle of the sun. Still enough time in the day for safety. The stowaway slept.

  “Accompany me,” I said, and the poet looked at me. The stowaway clasped and unclasped my fingers, stretched itself inside the borders of my body. It had been days since I’d fed on the meal the stowaway wished for, and I knew I had only hours before it would overcome me.

  Poe took my arm and I felt him trembling. Together, we walked to Winchester Street, three beings, each breathing and longing, each desirous of its own story.

  The Poet’s Annotation

  And now the story of the poet and the story of the lady and the story of the stowaway converge into one line, fiction and fact pressed too closely together to tell one from the other. The waking world and the sleeping one are the same, each engineered by dreamers of one kind or another. The poet writes an obituary for himself. The poet writes a tale of grief, his wife lost, his love dead. The poet is in a pit, and above him a pendulum. He will not marry again. He will be denied, and with that denial will come the rest of his life, the last year on earth. He writes on, the monster beside him, and the lady he’s made of all the ladies he’s lost. He writes himself down Winchester street, walking with a companion who may or may not be visible to anyone else in Providence. There will be no record of anyone named MacFarlane, nor of anyone met at a hotel. There will be nothing but this poet walking through the streets and to a portraitist, in the worst week of his life.

  Is he raving? He is raving. Is he drunk and damaged? He is. Has he been bitten by a dog and does he wish to drink the ocean itself? Does he wish to transport himself to Thule by sipping the boundary between the imagined and the real, drinking it down until all that lies between his words and his life is a tender desert?

  He does.

  Annabel Lee is a child and he is a child (he is not a child) and Lenore is nevermore. Virginia is coughing and singing at a piano, blood spattering the keys, and then she is drunk on charity wine, and then she is dead, her cheeks flushed a color that cannot appear in Thule. Made of ice and gray is the heart of the poet, and in his kingdom, on his dark throne, he sits, as all of it melts into a bath of silver nitrate and acid ink.

  He wishes himself extinguished.

  The Portrait

  The studio of Masury & Hartshorn was on the second floor, and we made our way up the stairs, my companion half–collapsing as he climbed. Inside my body, I felt the sleeping stowaway dreaming of meat. I would not feed it. I would resist. The stairwell smelled of chlorine and chemicals, a bracing scent that revived me to the task at hand. I had a body that was my own still, despite its inhabitant, nostrils that could burn and a throat that could close. I glanced at the man beside me, and wondered. Could I deliver him? Could I deliver us both?

  We entered through glass doors into a room suffused in blue light, a sort of greenhouse with an intricate mechanism of shades and shadows. The walls were papered in cobalt, and the ceiling was a skylight with reflecting mirrors set at an angle beneath it. There, we found a young man polishing a silver plate with a soft cloth. He looked up at us through thick glasses, and raised his eyebrows at the spectacle before him. It was little wonder. A woman in a gaudy dress accompanied by a man on the brink of death. I could see the photographer considering us as subject.

  “Messr. Masury?” I asked. I brought out the card the medium had given me in New York.

  “No. I am Edwin Manchester,” he said. I could not believe my luck.

  “You, then, are the man I am seeking,” I said, and passed the card to him. He read its contents, and looked more closely at me. He took my hand and weighed it in his own, and then pinched my wrist between two fingers. My flesh was denser than it ought to be, I well knew. I felt as though I contained sand, and indeed, I did. The night was made of sand and stars, and all of it was too heavy for a human body to bear.

  “I see,” he said. “And your companion?”

  “This is Mr. Poe,” I said.

  The photographer’s eyebrow raised higher. “It is an honor,” he said. “A man of your stature in the spirit world.”
r />   “He suffers a similar malady,” I said. “I believe it is related to the kingdom from whence my trouble came.”

  The photographer looked closely at Poe.

  “He has suffered a loss rather than a weight,” he said. “You have more than you require, and he has less.”

  “I have enough in my purse to pay for both portraits, if you might assist him as well as I.”

  “I will need no payment for his image,” Manchester said. “It will be displayed in this shop as advertisement of our services.”

  “I am not possessed,” Poe said. “I am in debt. I have left something aboard a ship as collateral.”

  “I see as much,” said Manchester. “You are missing your soul rather than carrying another within your body. I can assist in this as well.”

  The daguerreotypist took off his apron, placing the silver plate on a table. I looked into it and was startled by the mirror it presented, my hair in disarray, and for a moment, my eyes glowing the way the stowaway’s eyes glowed, my skin a sea of stars.

  I glanced at the portraits on display in the studio, the way their subjects seemed to float, each in their own transparent darkness, their faces made of gilded dust. Did some of those portraits contain demons and ghosts? Were some of them exorcisms, or were they only portraits of the wealthy? I could not say.

  “You will be first,” Manchester said. “Mr. Poe after. The sun is bright enough today.”

  Poe nodded. I felt his fingers clench my arm more tightly, but he did not waver. Inside my skin, the stowaway extended sleeping fingers to touch those of Poe, but I did not acknowledge it.

  Manchester gestured me onto a staircase, a platform with a small chair at its center, and I ascended, feeling my skirts draping down the stairs. Was I climbing to heaven?

  “Stare into the sun,” Manchester told me, positioning me in a brace, my head supported by a stand, my skirts spread so that I seemed to be airborne. “I will remove this burden from you, but you must stay perfectly still for sixty seconds.”