Black House

light of our regard), she finds herself remembering that stupid Edgar Allan Poe poem they had to memorize in the ninth grade. She hasn’t thought of it in years and has no reason to now, but the words of the opening stanza rise effortlessly and perfectly in her mind. Looking at Irma, she recites them aloud in a toneless, pauseless voice that no doubt would have caused Mrs. Normandie to clutch her stringy white hair and groan. Tansy’s recitation doesn’t affect us that way; instead it gives us a deep and abiding chill. It is like listening to a poetry reading given by a corpse.

“Once upon a mih’nigh’ dreary while I ponnered weak ’n’ weary over many a quaint ’n’ curris volume of forgotten lore while I nodded nearly nappin’ sun’ly there came a tappin’ as of someone gen’ly rappin’ rappin’ at my chamber door—”

At this precise moment there comes a soft rapping at the cheap fiberboard door of Tansy Freneau’s Airstream. She looks up, eyes floating, lips pursed and glossed with coffee brandy.

“Les’ser? Is that you?”

It might be, she supposes. Not the TV people, at least she hopes not. She wouldn’t talk to the TV people, sent them packing. She knows, in some deep and sadly cunning part of her mind, that they would lull her and comfort her only to make her look stupid in the glare of their lights, the way that the people on the Jerry Springer Show always end up looking stupid.

No answer . . . and then it comes again. Tap. Tap-tap.

“’Tis some visitor,” she says, getting up. It’s like getting up in a dream. “’Tis some visitor, I murmured, tappin’ at my chamber door, only this ’n’ nothin’ more.”

Tap. Tap-tap.

Not like curled knuckles. It’s a thinner sound than that. A sound like a single fingernail.

Or a beak.

She crosses the room in her haze of drugs and brandy, bare feet whispering on carpet that was once nubbly and is now balding: the ex-mother. She opens the door onto this foggy summer evening and sees nothing, because she’s looking too high. Then something on the welcome mat rustles.

Something, some black thing, is looking up at her with bright, inquiring eyes. It’s a raven, omigod it’s Poe’s raven, come to pay her a visit.

“Jesus, I’m trippin’,” Tansy says, and runs her hands through her thin hair.

“Jesus!” repeats the crow on the welcome mat. And then, chipper as a chickadee: “Gorg!”

If asked, Tansy would have said she was too stoned to be frightened, but this is apparently not so, because she gives out a disconcerted little cry and takes a step backward.

The crow hops briskly across the doorsill and strides onto the faded purple carpet, still looking up at her with its bright eyes. Its feathers glisten with condensed drops of mist. It bops on past her, then pauses to preen and fluff. It looks around as if to ask, How’m I doin’, sweetheart?

“Go away,” Tansy says. “I don’t know what the fuck you are, or if you’re here at all, but—”

“Gorg!” the crow insists, then spreads its wings and fleets across the trailer’s living room, a charred fleck burnt off the back of the night. Tansy screams and cringes, instinctively shielding her face, but Gorg doesn’t come near her. It alights on the table beside her bottle, there not being any bust of Pallas handy.

Tansy thinks: It got disoriented in the fog, that’s all. It could even be rabid, or have that Key Lime disease, whatever you call it. I ought to go in the kitchen and get the broom. Shoo it out before it shits around . . .

But the kitchen is too far. In her current state, the kitchen seems hundreds of miles away, somewhere in the vicinity of Colorado Springs. And there’s probably no crow here at all. Thinking of that goddamn poem has caused her to hallucinate, that’s all . . . that, and losing her daughter.

For the first time the pain gets through the haze, and Tansy winces from its cruel and wiry heat. She remembers the little hands that sometimes pressed so tidily against the sides of her neck. The cries in the night, summoning her from sleep. The smell of her, fresh from the bath.

“Her name was Irma!” she suddenly shouts at the figment standing so boldly beside the brandy bottle. “Irma, not fucking Lenore, what kind of stupid name is Lenore? Let’s hear you say Irma!”

“Irma!” the visitor croaks obediently, stunning her to silence. And its eyes. Ah! Its glittering eyes draw her, like the eyes of the Ancient Mariner in that other poem she was supposed to learn but never did. “Irma-Irma-Irma- Irma—”

“Stop it!” She doesn’t want to hear it after all. She was wrong. Her daughter’s name out of that alien throat is foul, insupportable. She wants to put her hands over her ears and can’t. They’re too heavy. Her hands have joined the stove and the refrigerator (miserable half-busted thing) in Colorado Springs. All she can do is look into those glittering black eyes.

It preens for her, ruffling its ebony sateen feathers. They make a loathsome little scuttering noise all up and down its back and she thinks, “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil!”

Certainty fills her heart like cold water. “What do you know?” she asks. “Why did you come?”

“Know!” croaks the Crow Gorg, nodding its beak briskly up and down. “Come!”

And does it wink? Good God, does it wink at her?

“Who killed her?” Tansy Freneau whispers. “Who killed my pretty baby?”

The crow’s eyes fix her, turn her into a bug on a pin. Slowly, feeling more in a dream than ever (but this is happening, on some level she understands that perfectly), she crosses to the table. Still the crow watches her, still the crow draws her on. Night’s Plutonian shore, she thinks. Night’s Plutonian fuckin’ shore.