The Poe Shadow

'Perhaps our little gift to you has woken up, Dr. Moran.' The Baron laughed in a way perhaps no man had ever done in the immediate vicinity of two dead bodies. The Baron leaned through the opening and peered down into the shaft. I was now in the dark center of the passage and, miraculously, was blocked from the Baron's view by the bag with the corpse. He returned his head to the room.

'Never mind,' said Moran, 'we secure the windows and doors with ropes in this building, and the place still seems to make more noise than any of the patients ever did.'

I then saw Bonjour trade places with the Baron at the shaft opening, and I became more anxious. She leaned fearlessly inside the horrible compartment.

'Take care, miss!' Moran said.

Bonjour now launched herself fully into the shaft, and for a moment I was certain she would land on top of me. Instead she caught the rope with one hand and then between her knees to steady herself. Moran must have been protesting above, since I could hear the Baron trying to placate him. I clung to my position for my life and prayed for a miracle. I could almost feel Bonjour's eyes pierce the darkness directly onto my uncovered head.

She lowered herself inch by inch toward me, raising my side of the rope so that I was involuntarily moving nearer to her.

Eyes closed tight, ignoring the drops of cold perspiration, I waited for my discovery. A terrible inhuman shriek broke my concentration-at a breath, an army of voracious black rats rushed up the walls of the shaft. They ran en masse toward Bonjour, as though involuntarily attracted by her. Several propelled themselves onto my shoulders and back, their wiry claws attaching to my coat and daring me not to scream.

'Only rats,' Bonjour murmured after a moment, then kicked some of the creatures off the walls, sending them dropping down. The Baron extended a hand and helped her back into the lecture room.

'For goodness' sake,' I gasped in gratitude to the beasts. I brushed off two that had remained perched on my back.

Since I could still hear most of the conversation, I decided to pull myself back up only a few inches and stay at that safer position.

'If you will go on with the details, Doctor,' said the Baron. 'You told Poe you would bring his friends to him.'

Moran paused in hesitation. 'Perhaps I should consult with Mr. Poe's family and friends before speaking with you further. There were some cousins of his, when we were treating him-if I remember right, a Mr. Neilson Poe and a friend, a lawyer, Mr. Z. Collins Lee…'

The Baron sighed loudly.

'Let us see what is on the doctor's table,' Bonjour said playfully. I could hear her rustling the white blanket on the naked cadaver.

'See here!' Moran gasped with obvious embarrassment. 'What are you doing?'

'I have seen men before,' Bonjour replied happily.

'Do not shock the young doctor, my dear!' the Baron cried.

'Perhaps we should take this deceased gentleman home for our study,' Bonjour said, rolling the table away. Dr. Moran protested vigorously. Bonjour continued: 'Come now, Doctor. No halves-finder keeper. Besides, I wonder, Baron, if the family of that young woman we have hoisted up in that shaft would be interested to know her body's missing from the grave and could be found here, waiting to be diced to pieces by the dandyish doctor.'

'Most interested, I'd think, sweetheart!' said the Baron.

'What? But we do this to learn to save lives! You brought that other body here yourselves!'

'On your request, Doctor,' said Bonjour, 'and you have accepted it in exchange for the information my master asks for.'

The Baron, sotto voce, leaned in to Moran: 'You can see you had the wrong sow by the ear, Doctor.'

The heroism of the doctor's voice deflated. 'I see the gist now. Very well. Back to Poe then. I told him, in trying to comfort him, that he would soon enjoy the society of his friends. He broke out with much energy and said, I remember, The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol. When he beheld what had become of him, he was ready to sink into the earth, and so on, as one talks when depressed in spirits. He then slipped into a violent delirium until Saturday evening, when he began calling for ‘Reynolds' again and again, for six or seven hours until the morning, as I have told you the other day. Having enfeebled himself from exertion he said, ‘Lord help my poor soul' and expired. That is all.'

'What we wonder now,' said the Baron, 'is whether Poe had been induced to have taken some sort of artificial stimulus, a drug-opium, perhaps-that put him in this condition?'

'I do not know. The truth, sir, is that Poe's condition was quite sad and strange, but there was no particular odor of alcohol on his person, that I can remember.'

During this exchange, I alternated between careful attentiveness to their words and desperate attempts to calm my pounding heart and breathing from my near discovery by Bonjour. When they closed the interview to the Baron's satisfaction, and I felt convinced by listening for footsteps they had left the fourth floor, I climbed past the body and heaved myself through the opening in the wall. I checked that the coast was clear and dropped into the lecture room. Flattening myself on the floor, I coughed out the air of the dead and gulped in rapid, grateful bursts.

You will perhaps judge me harshly for not immediately relating my adventures to Duponte, and yet you have seen yourself the frequent inflexibility of his philosophies. I am not of a particularly philosophical cast. Duponte was born an analyst, a reasoner; I, an observer. Though it may occupy only a lower rung of the ladder of wisdom, observation requires practicality. Perhaps Duponte, and our investigations generally, needed a light shove toward the pragmatic.

I should have explained above, when I was searching for the mention of Henry Reynolds, how it was I had free access to the newspapers we kept in the library without Duponte taking notice. Since the first day we had disembarked in Baltimore, Duponte had inhabited the library and oversaw all the contents of his sanctum. However, when he was reading other things he would remove himself from the increasingly cramped library to different chambers and bedrooms of Glen Eliza I had forgotten existed. He would choose the odd book that I had on my shelf; or one of my father's atlases of an obscure province of the world; or a pamphlet in French that my mother had brought from abroad. Duponte also read Poe, a practice that did not escape my interest.

At times the concentration with which he read Poe reminded me of the sheer nourishment the tales had provided me for so many years. But usually it was far more scholarly than that. Duponte read mechanically, like a literary critic. The critic never lets his reading overtake him; he never pulls the pages promiscuously close to his face and never wishes to be brought into the crevices of the author's mind, for such a journey would relinquish control. Thus, often a reader will read a magazine critic's notice of a book, after having already read the book himself, eager to compare perspectives, and think, 'This cannot be the book I read! There must be another version, in which everything has changed, and I shall have to find it, too!'

I thought a dispassionate survey of Poe's works by Duponte quite fitting. I believe it allowed Duponte crucial insights into Poe's character and into the mysterious circumstances that we had begun to examine.

'If only it was known which ship Poe arrived to Baltimore on,' I said one afternoon.

Duponte became instantly animated. 'The local papers speak of it as the unknown details of his arrival. That they do not know, monsieur, certainly does not confine it to the bounds of the unknown. The answer is plainly presented in the articles from the Richmond newspapers published in the last months of Poe's life.'

'When Poe was lecturing on various subjects of poetry and literature.'

'Precisely. He was doing so in order to raise money for his proposed magazine The Stylus, as he mentioned also in his letters to you, Monsieur Clark. We may not know on which ship Poe sailed from Richmond to Baltimore, but this is hardly what is important, and hardly qualifies as making the purpose of his trip unknown. His reason for coming to Baltimore is quite knowable to any person employing thought. From the rumors in the newspapers over the last two years before his death, Poe had been involved in various romantic unions since his wife's death. In this last period, he had just engaged himself to a wealthy woman in Richmond, and so his trip to Baltimore would likely not have been for the purposes of any