Poe - [Anthology] Read online

  Having forgotten to close the curtains, she saw D before she heard the tapping on the glass. Close enough to reach the latch without getting up, she flipped it open. D stepped in like a fine lady, stately, grim, carrying a bulging trash bag. Cold snowless air swept in, shocking, and its disappearance when D slid the door shut was equally shocking. “Sure. Come right on in.” She couldn’t muster the sarcasm she’d intended.

  D said, “Oh, my dear,” dumped canned goods and cereal boxes and baby toys out of the bag among all the other clutter on the floor, and went straight to Ryan. Toni just sat there on the stool. Some of the toys looked like ones Ryan used to have that she hadn’t seen for a while. Some of the food she used to like.

  With the baby wrapped in a blanket Toni didn’t think she’d ever seen before, D settled in the rocker and gave him a bottle, then held out a clamshell box of restaurant leftovers toward her. The steady glow of the gas logs cast long, feathery shadows on the floor. When Toni jerked back to protect herself from both the hand and the shadow of the hand, the stool teetered and-tipped and she slid off into a mound of Matt’s clothes. They smelled like him. She was so tired. She drifted in and out of jumbled half-sleep.

  Some time later, Ryan was in her arms, small sturdy weight and baby smell, tiny fingernails pinching at her skin. Some time later, he was gone again, and Toni stirred, gave up and fell back into semi-consciousness. The air grew denser.

  She became aware of things disappearing—Matt’s clothes, the baby, the violet velvet curtains and stool, Matt’s golf clubs, the rug they’d bought that time in Costa Rica, Matt’s watch, candlesticks never used and the wedding photo from the mantel. Pickers came in, first a few cocky teenagers one-upping each other and arguing over cool stuff they found, then parents and grandparents and children and babies. Seeing that D had put Ryan down among them, Toni fumbled and retrieved him and bundled him close to her, where he squirmed and tried to nurse. D came at her with a spoonful of something, actually tapped it against her mouth, but Toni was long past any hunger that food could touch.

  Clearly D was in charge, giving instructions in their intricate language. They clucked and cawed and chuckled and cooed as they gathered around and began to strip her of things she had no more use for—her wedding ring, her shoes, the locket with the tiny heart-shaped picture of Matt when they were dating. She struggled a bit when they removed her nightgown, but not much. “Evil!” she wailed when they took Ryan from her, “Devil!” but it was true that she was of no use to him anymore. Weak and weary, she couldn’t even keep Matt in her mind.

  Gathering around her, the pickers stroked and then clawed at her skin. They cut her hair and then pulled it out. They licked and bit her. The babies crawled over her like grubs, sucking. Still sitting, still sitting, D leaned and put her mouth on Toni’s and never left her side.

  I’ve always loved Poe’s poetry, especially “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “The Raven.” They’re part of my creative subconscious, put there by my father who insisted I read aloud and memorize a poem a week for most of the weeks of my childhood.

  “Ah, distinctly I remember/It was in the bleak December/And each separate dying ember...”

  ‘“Twas many and many a year ago...”

  “... the tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells bells bells...”

  Don’t get me started.

  At about the time I heard about this anthology, I was reading The Mind of the Raven and Ravens in Winter by the naturalist Bernd Heinrich. Monographs and field reports at a level of detail only a scientist could love, these are nonetheless quite accessible to a (very) layperson like me, and I learned all sorts of fascinating things about ravens. They appear physically and in myth in a great many parts of the world, pretty much wherever there are humans and other large predators. They use what we have no more use for. Heinrich contends they’re more intelligent than dolphins, with language second only to human languages in complexity and subtlety.

  So all this new information went into my subconscious where “The Raven” already was (“the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain”—sorry). As Poe’s gaunt and ghastly bird rubbed feathers with Heinrich’s beautiful and complicated ones, a sort of alchemy started.

  Out of it, the character of D emerged, raven in human form. I worked with her to be both the witness of grief who won’t go away and the scavenger who gets a bad rep for what might be thought of as recycling. Then Toni took shape, the character to be acted upon. And I had a story.

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  E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado—strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SCI-FICTION,Realms of Fantasy, Talebones,and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.For more visit www.ecatherine.com .

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  Beyond Porch and Portal

  By E. Catherine Tobler

  When they found my uncle wandering incoherent in the foggy morning streets he wasn’t wearing his own clothes.

  A man unknown to me brought word of my uncle’s illness, presenting me with a small folded letter on fine ivory paper. The papershushed between our bare fingers a moment before he turned away. He traced his way through the general store with its many occupants, back into the bustle of the street.

  “Sir!”

  Clutching the letter at which I’d only glanced, I followed him through the double doors, grabbing his jacket sleeve before he could be overcome by a claret and gold four-in-hand. The horses blew past us and onward down the cobblestones with the loud ring of their silver-shod feet overtaking my words.

  The man glared down at me as if I had upset his day rather than he mine. There was something in his eyes, half familiar and frightening. He was not an older man; he seemed of a marrying age, but I knew he was not married. How I knew this, I could not say. He disliked my consideration of him and twisted his arm free from my hold.

  “You’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.”

  “Are you a friend to my uncle?”

  He refused me even that much information and hurried down the street after the four-in-hand, October’s breeze lifting the tails of his coat behind him. I blinked once and he was fully gone. If anyone else upon the street noticed something odd about that, they didn’t look sideways. I expected someone to gasp and say, “But here, he walked here a moment ago, and now has vanished like a candle’s flame under a breath!” No one said a word; the people were too wrapped in their own business.

  Carefully I smoothed the letter I had crumpled. The ink had smudged upon the page, written in a hand I did not know. My uncle had been found this morning; he now rested at the college hospital and, as the mysterious man had, the letter urged me to hurry to his side before he passed into the next world.

  There were things in that next world that my uncle would welcome, I thought as I left off shopping and followed the fingerboards to the hospital. I had never been there in my twenty years. My mother and father died there, so my uncle told me, leaving me in his capable care ever after.

  He seemed capable no longer. Doctors led me to my uncle’s side and he did not know me. He clutched at my skirts and muttered “Reynolds,fonderousReynolds...”

  I untangled his hand and saw that he indeed wore someone else’s clothes. The trousers were butternut, the coat an earthy brown. My uncle always, even on Sundays, wore black. Even his boiled shirts would have been black, but this one was whiter than I’d ever seen, with a smudge of blood against the collar, were blood to be mostly ochre.

  “Uncle?”

  He startled and reached blindly out. I grabbed his clammy hand and lowered myself to his bedside, to breathe in the scent of him. There was no alcohol on his breath as I’d feared. He groaned and tried to roll away from me. This motion pulled his shirt cuff back, exposing the pink, abraded skin of his wrist.

  “What happened to you?” I whispered. I couldn’t fathom it.

  Edgar Poe was my only kin; the man who taught me geography and history, the man who c
ould scare a rational-minded young woman like me under my bed with his stories of vengeful madmen; the man who preferred spending rainy days writing poetry or walking Baltimore’s streets in search of it.

  “Fonderous R-Reynolds?” he asked. “The s-seam above the floor? Oh, vast sky.” He closed his eyes and turned his head against the pillow, but held firm to my hand.

  “Miss Franks?”

  Dr. Griffin, an older man with soft hands and hard eyes, had been known to me for years. The first time my uncle was found publicly drunk, it was Dr. Griffin who brought him to the hospital to sober up. I saw pity on his face now, but I shook my head and stood to meet him.

  “He’s sober,” I said.

  The doctor scrubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks. “Your assessment agrees with my own. Your uncle is suffering from a malady unknown to me. Did he recognize you?”

  “No.” I looked down at my uncle. “I saw him just yesterday and he was well. Have you seen his wrist?”

  “Reynolds!” my uncle cried. “Endless lands! Vilest fire.” He shoved the sheets off his body, scrambling backward in an attempt to get out of the bed. When he hit the headboard, he turned to his left, rolled onto the checkerboard floor, and crawled away.

  Dr. Griffin called for his colleagues; I could not get near my uncle without him shrieking anew. I backed away, only realizing I was crying when Nurse Templeton shoved a handkerchief into my hand.

  “Go home, Miss Franks,” Dr. Griffin said over his struggles with my uncle.

  “The seam!” My uncle screamed these words, over and over until I covered my ears to block it—but still, I heard it like a heartbeat.The seam. The seam.

  Dr. Griffin and three other men carried my uncle back to the bed and firmly strapped him down. By hand and foot they bound him and when this made his screams worse, they also bound his mouth. He screamed even beyond the gag, muffled and strained.

  “You can’t!”

  Nurse Templeton led me out of the room and closed the door behind us. I was shaking as she guided me to a chair and pushed me into it. I stared at her heavily lined mouth, unable to understand a word that came from it. She gave me a hard shake and then I heard, “...come again tomorrow; perhaps he will be well.”

  I knew, as I walked back to our townhouse in the mist, that one evening would not solve my uncle’s problems. What had happened to haunt his eyes so? What part did the stranger from this morning play?

  My uncle had employed a housekeeper these last two years, to tidy what he messed while I spent my days as a tailor’s assistant. Though Mrs. Wine would have made me a warm dinner, I sent her home. I wanted only to be alone. I locked the door behind her, discarded my coat and bag, and went to my uncle’s office.

  It was the one room Mrs. Wine was asked not to touch, but nothing struck me as unusual as I entered. Papers and books were spread over the sofa and chairs, over desktop and floor. I lifted a pile from one chair and sat, bringing the sheets into my lap. He was working on a new poem.

  I fell asleep reading of a city by the sea, where mortals bought fruit from angels carrying baskets. I didn’t dream of this place; I didn’t dream of anything. When I woke, I felt rested and wondered if morning had come, but the thought left my mind when I saw the man who gave me the note perched in a far corner, watching me.

  Think of it. You believe yourself alone in your own home, are comfortable enough to sleep wherever you lay down; and when you wake, your mind still fuzzy from its rest, you discover yourself not alone, but watched. Your mind races, but it can’t catch your heart. How long has he watched you?

  Was he there when I came in? Who is he and how did he gain entry? I pictured broken windows and doors, but felt it was worse than that; this man had come inside another way, a way unknown to me. That frightened me most of all.

  “Please do not scream,” he said.

  I screamed. I flung my uncle’s poetry and fled the office, feeling this man close on my heels. He yanked the door open when I meant to slam it; he snatched my skirts, slowing my escape. His fingers seemed to catch my hair and pull me backward. Through his fingertips I felt shackles around my uncle’s wrists. Those hands had placed them there, but not in this world, in another.

  “Reynolds?” I asked.

  His touch vanished. I swung around in the darkness of the hallway and felt a presence, though I could not see him.

  “He called me that.” His crumpled velvet voice brushed against my cheek. “Go to your uncle.”

  The voice came from all around me now, disembodied. As I turned round, I would have sworn to the stroke of fingers against my skirts. Shush. Shush.

  My heart pounded in my throat. “What did you do to my uncle?”

  This man admitted nothing. Round and round he circled me. I felt his eyes upon me (half familiar and frightening!) but still I could see nothing of him. Maddening! His cold-kissed fingers brushed over my cheeks and then I was horribly alone.

  I did not sleep that night. I checked the doors and windows, but decided it would not matter how securely they were locked. The stranger had come into our house another way. Taking no chance, I retrieved my uncle’s small pistol from the locked box beneath his bed and sat with my back to the wall the entire night through. Rain drummed upon the roof; in its rhythm, I found words.The seam. The seam.

  Come morning, I went to the hospital, the pistol concealed in my brocade reticule. I would not be caught unawares another time by Reynolds, whatever name he took.

  My uncle was less coherent that morning, Dr. Griffin reluctant to allow me into his room.

  “I have bled him twice to no effect,” Griffin said to me outside my uncle’s door. The doctor paced, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “I begin to fear, Miss Franks, that he has a blackness within him and if I cannot find and remove it, he shall perish.”

  Reynolds’s first words echoed back at me. “You’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.”Would he perish at the doctor’s hands or was my uncle already near death from whatever had befallen him?

  I gripped my reticule, feeling through the fabric the line of the pistol. Was it the solidity of the gun that calmed me or the idea of pressing it against Reynolds’s chin?

  “I want to speak with my uncle,” I said and made to move past the doctor, to open my uncle’s door.

  Griffin grabbed me by the arm to forestall me, then dropped it when a nurse passed us. He bowed his head to look at me through narrowed eyes.

  “Absolutely not! I don’t believe you grasp the seriousness of the situation, Miss Franks.”

  Being accosted by a strange man in one’s own home was quite serious enough for me.

  Griffin continued. His tone was low and calm, as though he were trying to calm a spooked horse. “When I remove his gag, he speaks of terrible things. I do not understand the blackness within him. I need to find it, cut it out. We loosened him for a bit this morning as a test and he nearly cut out his own eye—”

  I grabbed Dr. Griffin by the arm as he had me in an effort to make him understand that on this matter I would not be budged. “I will speak with my uncle,” I said. “No matter the terrible things he says, I will.”

  The doctor let me step into the room and did not follow. I closed the door to blot out his disapproving expression. However, now in the gray room with its scent of antiseptic and rapidly aging old man, I hesitated. I looked across the room at the figure in the bed and did not recognize it for my uncle. This man was gaunt and dark, lashed to a bed with a thin mattress. A hard rubber gag covered his mouth and now even his eyes were masked. Coarse hair covered his sunken cheeks.

  “Uncle?”

  He did not move and I wondered if he was sleeping. Or dead. I held my breath as I waited for the rise of his chest. Only when I saw that feeble movement did I step toward the bed.

  I set my reticule on the bedside table and reached for the mask that covered Edgar’s eyes. The tie was lost in the bird’s nest of his hair; it took some time to find the end. When at last I loose
ned the ties, I found myself looking into unfamiliar eyes. Or let me say that upon longer examination, the eyes themselves were painfully familiar—it was the deep wrinkles around them, it was the pale white scar above the left eye, it was the freshly stitched wound below the right—these were the things I could not equate with my uncle.

  With some difficulty I loosened and removed the gag from his mouth. Edgar closed his mouth, licked his lips, and swallowed.

  “Do you know me?” I asked him.

  His eyes rolled back into his head and he turned his cheek against the pillow. “Vilest fire.” His voice cracked the words apart like they were nutshells in his throat. “Hunters stab never sleeping sky—the seam above the floor. The seam—”