This was my idea: Edgar Poe was still alive.
I was not ill, as you might think. There was no degradation of my mental acumen, despite the long ordeal of incarceration that led me to the realization—this half-formed idea. Edgar Poe had never been dead.
As my eyes turned to the outside of the prison for the first time in what seemed to be months or years (I would have believed either one if told so at this point), all knowledge related to the affair of Poe’s death shaped itself in a new and startling way in my brain.
Perhaps I should have found aid, rest, sanctuary, at the moment. Perhaps I should never have left the confines of the prison, where, strange to say, I was safe from what awaited me outside. But what would you have done—remained there on your cot, staring out at the lights of the stars? Consider now what you’d have done, if you had known with sudden clarity that Edgar Poe was among the living.
(Had Duponte not seen it? Had he not considered it in all his analysis?)
We do not care what happened to Poe. We have imagined Poe dead for our own purposes. In some sense, Poe is still very much alive.
I remembered that Benson had said this in our first meeting, very nearly those words, at least. Benson had seemed to know more than he was telling me. Had he known this? Had he found something he could not reveal in his early investigation, and had he been giving me a suggestion, a clue to the secret truth?
I could see the faces of the men at the funeral, as though daguerreotyped on the mind, could still see them coming toward me with the hurried, muddied footsteps of that day.
Think of it…think of the evidence. George Spence, the sexton, had not seen Edgar Poe in many years, and had emphasized Poe’s unfamiliar appearance when brought in for burial. Neilson Poe saw his cousin only through a curtain at the college hospital, and did he not tell me in his chambers that the patient looked like another man altogether?
Meanwhile, the funeral I witnessed had been performed hastily, lasting perhaps three minutes, with few witnesses and even a canceled oration—as inconspicuous, as quiet, as was ever seen. Even Snodgrass, intransigent Dr. Snodgrass, had exhibited anxiousness, misgiving, self-reproach over Poe’s end and burial. I thought again of the poem we found in Snodgrass’s desk that he had written on the subject, which spoke of his idea of Poe’s drunkenness. It had also recalled that day of the funeral.
But haunts me still that funeral scene!
In shame and sadness oft I trace
Thy burial—sadder none hath seen—
In that neglected resting place!
Had any who knew him of recent years seen the lifeless form as it lay in the coffin before it was lowered under the earth? And most of those witnesses—Neilson Poe, Henry Herring, Dr. Snodgrass—wanted to say nothing about this funeral, as though there was something to conceal. Had they known more? That Poe, in fact, still breathed and still lived? Had he been hidden by outside agents concealing something? Or had he, Edgar Poe, perpetrated his ultimate hoax upon the world?
You see that the reasoning in my mind, produced in an admittedly highly excited state, was neither deranged nor insubstantial. I would demonstrate Poe was not yet dead, and all that had occurred would be thrown into an immediate reversal. I proceeded by foot after passing through the sewer directly to the old Westminster Presbyterian burial ground. Its place toward the center of the city, away from the larger bodies of water, had spared it and the surrounding roads the worst consequences of the flooding, though rivulets still streamed through the grassy burial yard, and certain crevices and corners contained deeper gullies of water.
I would speak to the sexton and insist upon full answers. But as I crossed through the gates, a different determination overtook me. Though it was dark, my eyes retained the exaggerated power of sight resulting from my prolonged stay in the dark cells of the prison. Indeed, with just a single burst of lightning from another storm that was gathering itself, I located precisely the spot of Edgar Poe’s grave, which outrageously had remained unmarked. What was underneath?
I cleared the tree branches and other debris that covered it, and began digging with my bare hands into the grass. With each tuft of grass I removed from the center, a stream of water would appear from underneath. I tried around the periphery with no better luck. At certain places, the soil was so hardened that my fingernails cracked, staining the clumps of dirt and mud with blood.
Realizing I could make only incremental advancement in this fashion, I crossed the burial yard and, fortune on my side, located a small spade. With this instrument I began the labor of breaking up the earth in a circle outlining the grave. I drove the spade into the ground with zeal. Mounds of dirt soon surrounded me. The task was exhausting, and consumed me to such a degree that at first I did not pay attention to the sudden noise bearing down on me. I was distracted by what I saw below.
It was a common pine coffin. I reached my hand down and could touch the cold surface of the smooth wood. Clearing the soil from the top, my fingers found where the cover met the coffin but, just as I began to lift it, I was compelled to release it.
The sexton’s mongrel dog was racing upon me ferociously. She pounced a few feet from me and I thought, for a moment, that she had paused because she remembered our having befriended each other. This was not the case. Or, if she remembered, she was all the more angered by my betrayal of our mutual trust. She was quite certain I was trying to steal a body from her domain (the opposite, brave canine! There is no body to steal!). She snarled and snapped her jaws among the graves, and in my state of intense excitement I thought I could see Cerberus’s three jaws in that one. I tried waving her away with the shovel, but she only lowered her position and, at any moment, would launch herself onto my throat.
The sexton now emerged from within the underground tomb I had once found him in, holding up a lantern. The air was of a quality so dense and dark that I could hardly see him. He looked to be all of one color. I pictured him as the man who was found petrified to stone in that same vault.
“I am not a resurrection man!” I cried out. Although I suppose that as I was waving a shovel in the air, my hands and clothing covered in dirt and blood, with a partially revealed coffin below me, this proclamation was hardly convincing. “Look inside! Look inside!”
“Who is it? Who’s there? Sailor, get ’em!”
I had no choice. I looked longingly at the wood below me, then dropped the shovel and ran. Man and dog chased at my heels.
I was not yet defeated. After leaving behind my pursuers in the cemetery, I located myself in a narrow alleyway for shelter. I spent nearly a half hour recuperating from the fatigue of my failed attempt at the burial yard before stirring myself with a renewed objective. Surely the sexton would now be guarding Poe’s grave. But with wild determination, I made my way across the city, remembering along the way the address of Poe’s last home in Baltimore, on Amity Street between Lexington and Saratoga, to which I had seen reference during my long researches into Poe’s history.
I could ask him. Why? Friend Poe, why write the letter? Why say I am an idle young man, a pest? Had you forgotten we understood one another?
Poe had just withdrawn from his place as a cadet at West Point when, shunned by John Allan in Richmond, who refused to help rescue him from a series of debts, the twenty-two-year-old Poe came to this modest dwelling to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, her daughter, Virginia—then eight years old—as well as Poe’s older brother, William Henry, and his ailing grandmother. Poe searched for a position as a teacher in one of the local schools, without success. Each of his fellow cadets at West Point had given him a dollar for the publication of his first collection of poems, and with this volume he had great plans to make his name.
Certain I had found the correct address at a narrow house between Lexington and Saratoga streets, without any consideration of a more rational scheme, I burst up the steps through the street door and, finding myself at the foot of a narrow staircase, bounded upstairs. Why? Oh, Edgar! Why write that of all
things? Perhaps, if Poe had lived, he would have returned here, to his last home in Baltimore, and left some sign for me of his next destination. I hardly noticed the two women, one with white hair and one young and fair, who screamed upon seeing me enter the tiny back room where they were sitting by a fireplace. (Perhaps I was a dreadful sight, my sackcloth uniform fitted to me by the prison now tattered and dripping, and spotted with soil and blood from my failed efforts at the burial yard.) In another bedroom, a garret room at the very top of the house, a lanky man leaned out the window overlooking Amity Street and began calling, Robbery! Murder! and other exclamations. The two women now scurried through the house, and the walls reverberated with unintelligible shouts.
I shrank from the commotion and, finding that the man was in the process of gripping a crowbar, I hastened down the stairs, past the frantic younger woman, through the front hall, back to the door. I ran at such velocity that I could not stop myself until I was in the middle of the street, where under the vague glow of a faraway streetlight I could see a giant horse and carriage coming right for me, leaving me without time to move in any direction where I would not fall directly under its mass of hooves and wheels. Having no chance to save myself from this gruesome fate, I merely blocked my eyes with my arms from the sight of death.
In a miraculous motion, I was pulled bodily to the curb, out of harm of the carriage. My wrist was held tightly. My deliverer struggled to move me closer. I had shut my eyes in lifeless surrender, and now opened them warily upon this person, as though to find a phantasm haunting me from beyond instead of a human. I looked and found I was gazing on the face of Edgar A. Poe.
“Clark!” he said quietly, gripping me tighter, his mouth contracting into a small, intense line under the dark mustache. “We must take you away from here.”
I paused, I looked again, reached my hand to his face, and in that instant all things trembled and disappeared into blackness.
When I experienced a brief moment of consciousness, it was in a dark, moist chamber. I felt myself being lowered, and I fought a strange foreboding of mortal danger. As my eyes unclosed slightly, and I lifted my neck as high as it would move, I could see only one object with true clarity, for it loomed above, the very horizon of vision.
It was a rectangular tablet, with writing upon it: HIC TANDEM FELICIS CONDUNTUR RELIQUAE.
I gasped as I realized it was a gravestone marker, and with horror translated its morbid epitaph of my twenty-nine years…Here at last he is happy.
28
BLACKNESS OVERTOOK ME again. When I rose from my trance, I sat up in a sudden frenzy and gasped at the harsh thirst burning my throat. Though I could feel myself blinking, I could see nothing, and my thoughts shifted between persuading myself I had been blinded and assuring myself that I was only in a space or chamber with no light. A lamp now came on from across the room.
I heard a small voice near me: “He is awake.” I could see a bowl of water and reached for it.
“No,” another voice counseled sharply. “That is for the hand.”
One of my hands had been hurt in my efforts at the burial yard.
“Here.”
There was now a little circle of candlelight and two children, a boy and girl, whose fair complexions looked green to me, making them look like goblins under the conditions, and who stood around me in stocking feet. The gaslight was turned up now and I saw that the girl was holding forth a glass of water, patiently waiting for me with a look of perfect sweetness. I drank it feverishly.
“Where—” I began to say, then looked up again at the terrible grave marker! In the light, I could now see that it was a large and detailed sketch of a grave marker, and could read its full inscription. HIC TANDEM FELICIS CONDUNTUR RELIQUAE EDGAR ALLAN POE and, below that, OBIIT OCT. VII1849.
I turned to the little girl, grateful for her kindness. I felt suddenly protective of the children. “You are not scared?”
“No,” said the girl. “Only worried for you, mister. You were a frightful sight when Father brought you in!”
I breathed easily for the first time in months. I realized I had been changed into a clean suit of clothes, and was sitting on a flat board resting on two chairs, a makeshift bed I had been lying on.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Clark, there are rarely spare beds in a house with six Poe children and one new Poe baby! I should hope this would afford you some rest nevertheless.”
The man speaking was the one who’d rescued me from the street—only it was not Edgar, but rather Neilson Poe. He looked different than the last time we had met, at the police station house. He was thinner and wore a mustache that made him an almost perfect replica, at first glance, of the portraits of his cousin.
“William. Harriet.” Neilson looked sternly to the children, who had remained loyally at my side. “To bed.” The two children hesitated.
“You have been a great help,” I said in a confidential voice to the boy and girl. “Now you must listen to your father.”
They fled soundlessly from the chamber.
“Why am I here?” I asked my host.
“Perhaps you could answer the question better,” Neilson said with concern, and sat across from me.
He explained that he had received word that there had been some attempt to dig out the coffin of Edgar Poe at the Westminster burial ground and, though the hour was late, he had hired a coach and started immediately for the cemetery. The streets, however, were in poor condition from the rains, and the drive necessitated a path across Amity Street, where Neilson Poe heard a great commotion that he thought was emanating from the old dwelling of his relation Maria Clemm, which—fifteen years ago—had been inhabited by Edgar Poe, as well.
Neilson, finding this coincidence most bizarre and disturbing, considering his current destination of Edgar’s grave, had the driver return in this direction. Stepping down on the pavement, he began to investigate, but remembering that he should continue to the cemetery to inquire into those strange happenings, he instructed his driver to turn the carriage back around, facing the other direction, to save time. At this point, with the driver engaged in this task, I was seen emerging from the street door and, finding that I had placed myself in the immediate path of the carriage and would be crushed, Neilson pulled me down to the pavement, where I fainted.
Having seen the layer of dirt on my clothing as he lifted me into the carriage, Neilson Poe considered that the complaint he had received from the cemetery might not be entirely unrelated to my presence at Amity Street.
I remained silent, unsure how much to say. He went on.
“I transported you here at once, Mr. Clark, and my messenger boy assisted me in lifting you onto this board. The boy then brought back a doctor from the next street, who examined you and departed only a short time ago. My wife has been upstairs praying for you to recover your strength. Had you been at the Westminster burial yard tonight, sir?”
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at the sketch of the grave marker. It sat on a shelf harmlessly with other papers and books but, having initially been illumined by a little light in the chamber, had been the sole and dreary object of my attention during my brief revival of consciousness earlier.
“It is a sketch by the man I have hired to build a suitable marker for my cousin’s grave. Perhaps we should speak of this later. You seemed excessively overtired.”
“I will sleep no more,” I said to him. Indeed, I felt my slumber had rapidly rejuvenated me. There was something more, too. Although Neilson Poe had doubts about my affairs, and I had my own about him, he had protected me—his children had protected me. I felt safe. “I am appreciative of your family’s assistance this evening, but I’m afraid I know more than you may realize. You have told me and the police that Edgar Poe was not just cousin but friend. Yet I know what your cousin called you.”
“What is that?”
“His ‘bitterest enemy in the world’!”
Neilson frowned, stroked his mustache, and calmly nodded without rec
oil. “It is true. I mean that he was known to make comments such as that, about me as well as others who cared about him.”
“What would lead him to think that of you, Mr. Poe?”
“There was a time, when his affections for young Virginia had just developed. I had married my wife, Josephine, who was Virginia’s half-sister, and, feeling that my sister-in-law at thirteen was too young to leave with him, I offered to provide for her education and allow her to enter into society if she remained with us in Baltimore. Edgar saw this as an insult. He said he would not live another hour without her. He felt that I was seeking to ruin his happiness and that he would never see his ‘Sissy’ again. He could not bear himself under the pressure of any grief.”
“What of his suggestion, made in a letter to Dr. Snodgrass, that you would not help his literary career?”
“Edgar believed I was jealous, I suppose,” Neilson answered forthrightly. “I myself attempted something of a literary career in my youth, as I have said to you before. Because of this, he concluded that I was envious of the amount of literary notice he did achieve, both positive and negative.”
“Were you?”
“Envious? Not in the way Edgar believed. I did not perceive myself equal to him. Rather, if I ever were jealous, it was from an observation that his writing carried a quality of genius, of naturalness, that my own lacked however meticulously I labored at it.”
“I can’t forget,” I said firmly to my host, “that you hindered the chance for the police to investigate your cousin’s death, Mr. Poe.”
“Is that what you think?” He remained placid. “I understand why you would believe that. However, it was Officer White, before you arrived at the police station house, who was quite adamant that there should not be the least investigation made, for, you see, the Baltimore police are in the habit of fancying that there are no crimes in our city, particularly any crimes toward tourists. In my practice, I often represent those accused of petty wrongs, and depend much on the police to be reasonable to certain offenders, and felt I had little choice but to cooperate with Officer White’s desires in the matter. I could see that he was wont to make an example out of those who tried to demonstrate more criminal acts in Baltimore than were already known, and so when I saw you at the police station house, I tried my best to dissuade you from any further pursuit for your own good. Sometimes I do not think our justice is so different from the days of witchcraft—crimes are seen only when it suits the accusers.” He walked toward the door of the room. “I see that you believed me overly hostile toward my cousin in our first meetings. Follow me, Mr. Clark.”