The Poe Shadow

not even guess at how Poe might have talked. Perhaps he really did speak with my father's voice.

Pestered?…A young man of idle wealth.

I no longer found strength enough to leave my sleeping board. My feeble condition was obvious, and I could not bring myself to speak. After several days produced almost no sleep, I drifted off into continuous drowsiness, and I could not tell the difference between sleeping and waking states. I remember very little from this time except the undertone provided by the torrents of rain and regular claps of thunder that had been building now, on and off, for days.

There were no more visitors, no more faces to come to me except for indistinct police officers and guards. Although, once, I was certain I saw across from my cell a man whom I had seen before. The stowaway from the steamer Humboldt, the scene of Duponte's secret victory that made me feel as if a gift possessed by him had been bestowed onto me. There, in this dingy Baltimore prison, I thought in my dreamy hazes I saw him again, watching over me, but this time there was no sea captain to catch hold of his arms. There were also other strange moments, feeling every grain of my skin covered with bugs and flies, as one newspaper had reported Poe was found, only escaping this when waking up on my board in a cold perspiration.

With the probability of my own death by hanging gnawing at my bones, I would often rehearse the story in my mind that the Baron had told me about Catherine Gautier-only her face, as it gazed down with pale calm from the height of the gallows, sometimes looked like sweet Hattie, and other times like Bonjour, a wickedness creeping into the countenance. Meanwhile, the warden of the prison came through for inspections and, after determining that my senseless and speechless condition was authentic, ordered me to be moved to a cot on the first floor of the prison. When I was touched, I apparently gave only a cold shudder in response, and no pulling or shouting in my ear would make me stir.

I woke amid the new surroundings, and found myself the sole occupant of an apartment where not even the prisoners wanted to go-for though it was more comfortably appointed than the cells upstairs, here people were sent to die. The doctors detected nothing wrong with me physically, but concluded that my wavering sleep proved the die had been cast. Upon being asked some simple questions by agents of the police to test my consciousness, I remained silent or muttered unintelligibly. I was told later that when questioned as to my birthday, I repeated October 8, 1849, again and again-the date of Poe's funeral, which besides not being my birthday would have made me two years old.

For my part, I could call to mind only brief moments of myriad dreams. When news of my parents' death had first reached me, I had sat for many days in my chamber with a roving chill and illness. In my stupor, I had the clearest visions of speaking with my parents-conversations that had never occurred but were as real, or more so, as any that I had had in my life. In them, I repeatedly apologized for having given up so much, for not having heeded their years of advice as Peter did. Then I'd awake again. The book-the Griswold volume-had not followed me from my cell to the hospital chambers, and for this I was happy. I chuckled to myself, as though this were at last my great triumph.

There was not much light there in the penitentiary's hospital, the windows unscrubbed and filmy. Even on the morning the rain finally ceased, only a hint of daylight came through to the prison hospital rooms. The guards had been frantically moving prisoners around the building after flooding had begun to occur in some quarters. The hospital room had been safe from the flood so far, but that night I awoke with a shudder at a series of noises.

'Who's here?' I called out obliviously.

It was suddenly terribly cold and, as I swung my bare feet to the floor, a stream of cold water curled over my toes. I jerked back to the cot and groped for a candle. My eyes opened for what seemed the first time in years.

The floods had filled the sewer and had broken through the wall of the hospital chamber. I sat up and saw from the breach in the wall the darkness of the narrow passage open to me. The sewer, I knew, ran underneath the vast, high wall that surrounded the jail and passed into Jones Falls. There wasn't the smallest obstacle between here and there. Because I had not been exposed to light for days, my eyes were immediately able to assess the circumstances even in this darkness.

My mind turned rapidly, vivaciously. A new energy resurrected me from the funereal indolence I had been lying in. A half-formed idea, a certainty, propelled me forward to where the putrid water subsumed my ankles, my waist, reaching to my shoulders. Even as I became weighed down by the streaming water, it seemed I moved with greater swiftness, until I emerged where the gaunt towers of the prison could only be seen in the distant horizon.

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-