The Poe Estate

by Polly Shulman

  “Hey, it looks a lot like your house, Spooky!” said Cole.

  “You’re right, Cole. Especially those gables,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

  “Makes sense,” said Andre. “Laetitia Flint was influenced by Hawthorne.”

  “What about that clump of houses up ahead?” I asked. They looked kind of like the Hawthorne ones, only more modest.

  “Those are from Mary Wilkins Freeman stories—she was another writer who influenced Flint,” said Elizabeth. “Remember those doorknobs you sold us? We think they came from one of her stories.”

  Cole spun around to watch them disappear as we passed. “That last one looks like my house, a little bit,” he said. “Do you think mine could be haunted too?”

  “Oh, I hope so!” I said. “Then you would be the spooky one! What should I call you? Fearsome Farley? Uncanny Cole?”

  “Fantastic Farley, obviously. Or—” He put on a deep voice and intoned, “Cryptic Cole—he’s always a surprise!”

  “Here comes one of our coolest houses,” said Andre. “Up to the right, see? The Cap’n Brown House. It’s from a Harriet Beecher Stowe story and it’s haunted by a herd of headless black colts.”

  “Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” I asked. “We read about that book when we were studying the Civil War. I didn’t know she wrote ghost stories too.”

  “Sure, lots of writers did back then. Look left now, we’re passing another one of my favorites.”

  A little wooden structure flashed by. “What was that?” Cole asked.

  “The haunted schoolhouse from Charles W. Chesnutt’s story ‘Po’ Sandy.’ A man gets turned into a tree, and they make the wood into a schoolhouse. So of course the man haunts it.”

  “I would too,” Cole agreed, “if somebody built a school out of me.”

  I thought about the many reasons ghosts had for haunting people and places. They wanted revenge, or acknowledgment, or something they lost. Or they were trying to keep a promise from when they were alive, like my sister. It must be so sad to be a ghost and not be able to do anything really new—if you needed something done, all you could do was try to get someone living to do it for you. And half the time the living people couldn’t even hear you.

  “Here comes the jewel of our collection,” said Elizabeth. “We named the annex in its honor.”

  The train labored toward a medieval-looking stone building with a still lake in front of it. Its unruffled luster reflected the castle’s bleak walls and empty, eyelike windows.

  “Ooo, creepy,” said Cole.

  “That’s the House of Usher,” said Andre proudly. “From the Poe story.”

  I stared at the house. “Didn’t you say we were related to some Ushers?” I asked Cousin Hepzibah.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I wonder if it’s the same family.”

  “That place looks so dismal,” I said. What a gloomy family I’d been born into, so full of ghosts and death! At least the Flint stories sometimes had happy endings—though not for everyone. Just for the hero and the heroine, usually. I hoped I was the heroine here.

  “Wait a sec,” said Cole. “I read that story. It’s called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ The fall of the house. The house falls down in the end. It gets completely destroyed. So how can it be here now?”

  “Thanks for noticing! We’re very proud of that,” said Elizabeth. “A former page of ours at the repository, Leo Novikov, is doing some really innovative work in fictitious technology. He invented a machine that can select any temporal state in the narrative span of a fictional object.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

  Dr. Rust clarified. “If you have an object from a work of fiction, Leo’s machine can return it to the state it was in at any point in the story. It’s been incredibly useful.”

  The train dived into a dark wood, then chugged up a hill. When it reached the top, I could see seawater sparkling in the distance. “Almost there,” said Andre.

  As if the hands of a ghostly brakeman had pulled a spectral lever, the train screeched and rolled slowly to a halt. We shouldered our backpacks, and Cole picked up Cousin Hepzibah’s bag. Andre pulled the door open, ducked through it, jumped down, and held out his hand to me. He caught me as I stumbled on the steep step. “Here we are,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Spectral Library

  Here turned out to be a quaint New England port town with little square white houses and redbrick sidewalks.

  “Are we still in the Poe Annex?” I asked.

  “Yes, the annex comprises this whole landmass, down to the water. Once you get out on the ocean, though, you’re in neutral territory. This is the town of Library Point, from ‘The Spectral Librarian,’ a short story by Flint. And there’s the Spectral Library itself,” said Elizabeth, pointing. “The Library of Fictional Volumes.”

  Ahead of us, silhouetted against a brilliant orange sunset, was a tall, rectangular stone building with banks and banks of windows.

  “Fictional volumes?” echoed Cole. “You mean novels and short stories? But why would they keep the ship’s logbooks there? Aren’t logbooks nonfiction?”

  Andre said, “It’s not a fiction library. It’s a fictional library of fictional books. Some are fictional fiction and some are fictional nonfiction.”

  “Isn’t all fiction fictional? Isn’t that what the word means?” Cole objected. “And what’s fictional nonfiction? That doesn’t mean anything.”

  Dr. Rust explained, “The Spectral Library is where we keep books that only exist in books. Like . . . What’s a good example, someone?”

  “The Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning,” suggested Andre.

  “Exactly! The Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning is a work of fiction—it’s a medieval romance. But it only exists in the Poe story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ The narrator reads The Mad Trist to his crazy friend. You can’t find it in any ordinary library, but we have a copy here in our library of fictional books. It’s fictional fiction.”

  “Okay, what’s fictional nonfiction, then?” I asked.

  “Same idea. Not all the fictional books are fiction,” explained Dr. Rust. “Some are nonfiction.”

  “Huh?” Now I was thoroughly confused.

  “Oh, for example . . .” Dr. Rust hesitated.

  Elizabeth suggested, “The Key to All Mythologies?”

  “Yes! Good one. That’s in Middlemarch, a novel by George Eliot. A fussy scholar spends his life writing it—The Key to All Mythologies, I mean. It’s nonfiction, but it exists in the novel, which is fiction. So it’s fictional nonfiction. See?”

  “Okay,” said Cole, “then why did Andre just call the library a fictional library of fictional volumes?”

  “For the same reason the rest of our collection in the Poe Annex is fictional,” said Dr. Rust. “The library comes from a work of fiction. In this case, ‘The Spectral Librarian’—another Laetitia Flint story . . .”

  “Actually,” Elizabeth interrupted, “if you want to get really technical, you could call it a fictional fictional library of fictional fiction and fictional nonfiction. Because in the Flint story, the narrator finds a manuscript in an old library. The manuscript is called The Spectral Librarian, and it’s a novel about a ghost librarian who tends the Spectral Library of Fictional Volumes. It’s a story within a story. So in the Flint fiction, the library is fictional, which makes it doubly fictional here.”

  Before my brain could explode, we arrived at the building, which seemed solid enough. Dr. Rust pulled open the doors.

  I often dream of libraries, but this was better than all my dreams. It had galleries of books with dimly gleaming bindings. Wheeled ladders leaned against tiers of shelves and filigreed staircases twirled up to balconies, with catwalks spiderwebbing from section to section. Oak tabl
es stretched out under skylights and cozy chairs were nestled beside crackling fires. I wanted to pluck a book from a shelf, curl up in a chair, and stay there forever.

  Cousin Hepzibah evidently had the same thought. “Oh, poetry! Here’s Christabel LaMotte’s A Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems! And Herbert Keanes’s Flowers and Fruit! And I’ve always wondered what John Shade’s other poems were like.” She gathered an armful of books from the shelves and sank into one of the sofas with a sigh of pleasure. Griffin sank down at her feet and put his nose in her lap.

  Cole got down to business. “Where are the logbooks?”

  “I’m not perfectly sure,” said Dr. Rust. “The cataloguing system here is idiosyncratic. We’ll need to consult the Spectral Librarian.”

  “Where do we find him? Or her,” I asked.

  “There’s a bell he answers. This way.”

  “I think I’ll wait for you here,” Cousin Hepzibah said. “Enjoy yourselves!”

  • • •

  It was hard to keep following Dr. Rust—I kept wanting to stop and read—and apparently Andre did too.

  “Ravisius Textor’s Absurdities,” he said. “That’s from ‘The Assignation,’ by Poe.” He flipped pages. “There’s supposed to be a list in here of people who died laughing.”

  “Come on, Andre,” said Cole. “We’ll never find the treasure if you keep stopping to read.”

  Andre put the book back reluctantly.

  I trailed my finger along the spines of some mysteries. “Which are better,” I asked, “real books or fictional books?”

  “What an interesting question!” said Dr. Rust. “What do you think, Elizabeth? You’ve read way more of these than I have.”

  “It depends. There are lots of terrible imaginary books.” Elizabeth waved her hand at the ones we were passing, which had lurid spines. “Bad writers will always produce bad books, even fictional ones. But fictional books can be screamingly funny, especially when a comic genius made them up as satire. Like the Millie books, from Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series. They’re so exquisitely terrible, they make me laugh till the tears run down my face. And fictional books have the advantage of staying closer to the writer’s conception. You know how sometimes, when you’re trying to write something, you start out with a huge, magical, unformed vision, but no matter how well you write the book, it never comes out how you imagined?”

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t write much,” he said.

  “Okay, it doesn’t have to be writing,” said Elizabeth. “Anything that takes imagination—a picture, a song, whatever. Swinging a baseball bat.”

  I thought about carving pumpkins with Kitty when I was little. My pumpkin never came out anything like the scary ones I saw in my head before I started. Kitty’s were always a lot better than mine; the year I was five, I had to use the back door the whole week of Halloween because I was too scared to walk past Kitty’s pumpkin on the front porch. It was that good.

  Of course, maybe the one in her head was even scarier.

  “Fictional books perfectly embody the original conception, so the magic doesn’t leak out in the writing process. Here we are, the Reference Room,” said Elizabeth.

  There was a round brass bell on the corner of a long wooden counter. Dr. Rust walked over and struck it.

  • • •

  The sound of the bell went on and on. It was sweet but dark, like the smell of graveyard roses. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I thought must have been the Spectral Librarian standing at the opposite end of the room. He was tall, gaunt, and dressed in something black and flowing—a long coat, maybe, or a scholar’s robe.

  I turned my head for a better look, but that end of the room was empty.

  Confused, I glanced away, and the Spectral Librarian was back.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” said Elizabeth. (I wasn’t sure why she’d decided it was afternoon just now—the sun had been setting last time we saw it.) “Can we trouble you to help us find the logbooks from the ship Pretty Polly, out of Tom Tempest’s Treasure?”

  With a sidelong glance, I saw the Spectral Librarian bow and glide toward the center of the wall. A shadow opened in the wall and he wafted through it.

  “Come on, Spooky,” said Cole, grabbing my arm. We all followed the ghost into the shadow.

  It was a confusing trip. Books and shelves and stairs and walls spun past the corners of my eyes, but whenever I tried to look at them directly, they glimmered away like those dim stars you can only see with the edges of your vision. Underfoot I heard my shoes click on stone, creak on wood, or crunch on gravel, but when I concentrated on the sound, it spun into silence, like the silence in a strange house deep in the country at night. So I fixed my eyes on the back of Elizabeth’s head in front of me.

  Elizabeth had a plastic tortoiseshell clip in her hair. It looked very ordinary. I found that comforting.

  “Why the cloak-and-dagger stuff?” asked Cole behind me. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just use the Dewey decimal system like everybody else?”

  “Cole!” I hissed, worried he was going to offend the Spectral Librarian. But the vague figure kept gliding through the nebulous passage as if it hadn’t heard.

  “All the best libraries of fictional books have spectral caretakers,” said Dr. Rust. “It’s a sensible tradition. Safer this way.”

  “But why?” Cole asked again.

  “Well, it obviously doesn’t much matter who reads Millie of Lowood House. But some of the books here are dangerous.”

  “Like what?” asked Cole.

  Elizabeth said, “Tons. The Spectral Librarian itself—you don’t want someone messing with the source book while you’re inside a fictional structure. The King in Yellow. The Necronomicon. Most manuals of magic. The Garden of Forking Paths. The Magician’s Book.”

  “I remember that one!” I said. “It’s in the Narnia series. One of the characters reads a dangerous spell and gets into trouble.”

  The hair clip bobbed as Elizabeth nodded. “Books like that need a guardian.”

  The Spectral Librarian stopped gliding, and I found myself in a compact room with tables bolted to the floor, cabinets running neatly up to the ceiling, and sun streaming through a row of portholes. Outside, light danced on waves out to the horizon. In the corner of my vision, the Spectral Librarian bowed and vanished. I felt a little unsteady, as if the room were gently rocking.

  I turned around. On the round table in the center of the room lay a neat stack of leather-bound books that smelled of the sea.

  • • •

  We each took a volume of the ship’s log to hunt for clues to the treasure. They were enormous, sharp-cornered volumes that poked you in the lap and kept flipping themselves shut. Only Andre had long enough arms to hold them comfortably.

  I wrestled mine to the window seat and laid it open on the hard leather cushion. Phineas Toogood had written with a quill pen dipped in liquid ink by the light of a whale-oil lamp in a cabin that probably rocked like an amusement-park ride. And back then, even tough-guy pirates wrote with loops and flourishes. It took me a while to get the hang of telling the T’s from the C’s and the f’s from the s’s.

  It was wild to think that Phineas had actually touched these books! Handsome Phineas, with the yearning eyes and the cold, ghostly hands, back when his hands were warm because he was still alive. I turned the pages carefully, imagining him turning them himself. They were stiff and crinkly, like the pages of a book you leave out in the rain and then dry in the sun.

  Most of the entries were just brief notes: weather, distance, location, amount of remaining rum. But now and then Phinny would take a quarter of a page to tell a story, like when the ship stopped on a deserted island to take on water, and they discovered three families living in a vast, ruined temple.

  “Listen to this, Libbet!” said Andre. “‘The day began with p
leasant Weather and a moderate Breeze. Wind freshened at 3 p.m. and sails adjusted. Raised a ship to the Eastern Board, which prov’d to be the Dolphin out of Lynhaven. Dined aboard with Cap’t Heidegger, the notorious Red Rover. Plum duff excellent.’ Is that the same Dolphin here in our collection?”

  “Must be,” said Elizabeth. “Ours is out of The Red Rover, by James Fenimore Cooper. The details match.”

  “The Dolphin’s from a novel? What’s Laetitia Flint doing with a ship from some other book in her book?” I asked.

  “She read a lot of Cooper novels, and this one’s a rip-roaring pirate story—it must have influenced her,” said Elizabeth.

  “That sounds like more than just influence.” Our English teacher had given us a strict lecture about plagiarism. Using someone else’s ship in your own book might qualify.

  “The Dolphin’s not in her novel, just in her fictional logbooks,” Dr. Rust pointed out. “I don’t think that really counts, since fictional logbooks aren’t exactly published. But objects often cross from writer to writer, through influence. That’s probably why you have that Hawthorne broom in your family, for example.”

  We went back to our books, and the room fell silent except for the swish of turning pages. Then Cole shouted, “Got it! This is it! It has to be!”

  “What?” asked Elizabeth.

  “‘Sighted Land just after the first dogwatch, which proved indeed to be Broken Isle. Dropped anchor in Northern Cove’—then a bunch of numbers—that must be the depth or something. Blah, blah, blah, more numbers . . . okay, here. ‘We followed the Compass north to a ridge beneath the high hill, where we determined to secrete our Treasure beside that of Red Tom Tempest.’”

  “Let me see that,” said Andre. “You’re right! Looks like you found it!”

  “How do we get there, though? The coordinates are all messed up,” said Cole.

  We all peered at the book. That volume was even harder to read than mine—apparently it had gotten soaked in a storm or something and the ink had run. The columns for longitude and latitude were completely illegible. “Oh, no!” I moaned.