The Raven

by Patrick Carman

  That’s exactly what I was thinking, that Poe has been hiding in the shadows from the start. All the way back to the very beginning, when I was laid up in a hospital, my leg shattered and my head pounding — he was there. He’s always been there, haunting my dreams and filling my mind with wild ideas. If every writer has the spirit of some past, dead writer living inside him, then Edgar Allan Poe isn’t buried in a cemetery in Baltimore — he’s buried in the deepest, darkest part of my soul, digging his way out in my words, trying to find the light of day.

  sarahfincher.com

  Password:

  theredroom1849

  Tuesday, July 19, 7:02 p.m.

  The Apostle has vanished like vapor in the air. He’s gone, and I realize now that only one remains: the Raven. I have a feeling, deep down in my bones, that the Crossbones is all but wiped off the face of the earth. Their three-part mission feels like something sitting at the bottom of a box in an attic, left over from a time long past where such things had a place in the world:

  1) preserve freedom.

  2) maintain secrecy.

  3) destroy all enemies.

  Only one guy left living by that code, and he’s got his sights set on one enemy.

  Me.

  Today, I have wanted the comfort of my journal and nothing more. All day I wished for a pen and paper, to feel the security of words trapped on pages. I put them in, they can’t get out. And the world can’t get in. These words are a prison with bars to keep the Raven away.

  I’m being followed. I have very little doubt about this fact. It’s a feeling that probably eludes anyone who lives in a big city. But out here, where there are a thousand trees for every person, I can feel when someone or something is moving toward me. I don’t have to see them. I could be blind as a bat and I’d know.

  I spent part of my day running errands for my dad. To the post office, out for lunch, to the grocery store for bottles of water and Clif Bars. Every time I left the safety of the fly shop I felt it, like ice on my neck: The Raven watching me.

  Sarah will reach Monticello by nightfall. She’ll check into her hotel — the last hotel before returning to Boston — and she’ll call her parents and say something like, “Yeah, all tucked in for the night. Can’t wait to get home tomorrow. Miss you, too.” Then she’ll get right back in her car and drive three hours up to Baltimore. There, she’ll examine Edgar Allan Poe’s grave site. I can’t say that I’m thrilled. For once, I wish it were me standing at a gravestone after midnight. I think standing at Poe’s grave might bring me a sense of relief, of having come full circle.

  I know too much about this guy. For example, I know that the gravestone Sarah is going to see is not the one that was originally prepared for Mr. Poe’s burial plot. That one was made, but never put to use. Instead, it was struck by a train run off its tracks, broken into a thousand pieces. This kind of thing was always happening to Edgar Allan Poe: things snatched away without warning or reason. Even in death he couldn’t escape the random cruelty of life.

  And so he was buried in an unknown plot, without a headstone or a marking. This for the man who invented mysteries, science fiction, and horror. Like van Gogh before him, Poe was an artist revered in death, not the least bit appreciated in life.

  Sometime later, a cheap sandstone marker was placed over the burial plot with the number 80, nothing more. And later still, money was raised in order to build a proper grave site. Unfortunately, even this effort ended in a final offense that remains to this day. Poe’s birthday is engraved as the 20th of January, but he was born on the 19th. Insult piled on top of insult. After all he’s given us, we can’t even get the man’s birthday right.

  Maybe that’s why I don’t show anyone the stories I work on. I’d just as soon skip the part where nobody cares and I die in obscurity without having someone from some magazine say my stories lack depth or my character development is weak. No thanks.

  Later on, long after I’m gone, someone will find my stories and be like — wow, I totally would have read this guy when he was alive, what a shame. But I know the truth. Nobody would have cared. Critics would have ripped me apart. They’d have been cruel.

  I love to write, especially when I’m feeling miserable and paranoid.

  This was fun.

  Wednesday, July 20, 12:06 a.m.

  The call came in, one minute past midnight, Sarah standing before the Poe grave. It sits inside a church gate, off in the grass, away from the monument. The headstone is supposed to denote the location where Poe was actually buried, which is separate from the monument erected closer to the street.

  “There’s a raven on the top,” she whispered, because it was after hours and she’d climbed over the stone rail into the cemetery. “And the words ‘Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.’”

  I had to tell her it was the last line of the eighth stanza in his most famous poem, a heartbreaking epitaph.

  But that’s not the information she was there to get. The Raven Puzzle had made it clear: look on the back right corner, down by the grass.

  “I didn’t see anything at first, but then I dug a little into the grass right at the base of the headstone,” she said. I was, as usual, amazed. Who digs around the edge of Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in the darkest part of the night?

  “I don’t think you’re going to like what it says.”

  I had already been wondering about this. In my heart of hearts, I’d always known. I knew it before she said it, knew it from the start.

  All roads lead to Skeleton Creek.

  “Are you ready?” she asked me.

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad.”

  And then she told me what she’d found. She couldn’t say whether it was part of the original carving in the stone or if someone had carved it after. But there it was, filled in with mud, which actually made it easier to read with a flashlight.

  “SC: Plot 42”

  We both knew what it meant. For some reason, when she said it, I laughed. It all felt so right, like every part of our effort had led to the only place it could lead in the end. SC: Skeleton Creek. Plot 42: the old cemetery on the hill. There were two cemeteries in Skeleton Creek, the newer one at the far end of town, and the old one on the hill. No one had been buried in the old one for a while, like a hundred years, and it was in poor condition. All those headstones were numbered, that much I knew. It was the way things were done in a small town long ago, just like the number 80 on Edgar Allan Poe’s gravestone.

  And how about that number, 42?

  Everything all coming together like a puzzle now, the same number as the dredge. Whatever final secret the Crossbones was hiding, it would be buried under headstone number 42. I’d need a shovel and a load of courage.

  The shovel I could get easy enough. The courage was another matter entirely.

  “You can do this, Ryan.” Sarah could sense my deep hesitation in the silence that hung on the line. “And you have to do it now, not tomorrow or the next day. Right now. Waiting isn’t going to make it any easier. And more important, waiting is going to mean someone else could find it first.”

  She was right, of course. For all I knew, Albert Vern had already tapped into my phone or figured out a way to put a tail on Sarah from back at the Washington Post. What would happen if he figured this whole thing out and beat us to the location? I could already read the headline in the paper: Reporter Uncovers Deepest Mystery Yet in Skeleton Creek, Outdoes Local Hero.

  I can live with that. The problem? Sarah can’t. After all she’s done, she’ll never forgive me if I don’t get my sorry self out of this room and up on that hill before dawn.

  “Remember what we talked about before,” she said. “How you gotta get out there or life will pass you by? Those journals aren’t going to give you a life. You have to go out and take it.”

  I think she’s wrong about that. Minus Sarah, I think writing is the best part of my life. It makes me happy. So sue me.

  “I’m going back to my hotel now,” she sai
d. “And tomorrow I’ll be going home. The end is up to you, and I’m glad for that. I tell you what — dig the grave and I’ll come out and see you.

  How’s that for incentive?”

  It was a strong incentive. And I figured she could do it. She’d talked her parents into letting her drive across the country once, why couldn’t she do it again? Or better yet, make it easier and take a dang airplane this time.

  “Call me when you land,” I said, thinking of an airplane but meaning when she landed in her hotel. “I’ll get it done.”

  I sat in my room for ten minutes.

  Then I thought about how much Sarah would want to see what I was doing, so I took a roll of silver duct tape out of my desk drawer. A guy can make just about anything out of duct tape. I fashioned a little pocket for m y phone and held it against one of my baseball caps. Then I wrapped duct tape around the pocket and the hat and put it on. Now I could run my phone’s video camera and dig up a grave at the same time. It was a very Sarah thing to do.

  I pulled out the ghost book and wished I knew what it meant, wished Fitz had never given it to me in the first place. I took out my collection of Poe stories and turned to the end of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I’d read it ten or twelve times and felt its power.

  He spoke to me then, down through time, one writer to another. And I felt as he must have felt all the days of his life.

  There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss.

  I feel that way now, as if I’m falling into an unmarked grave, already forgotten by anyone who ever loved me and everyone who never knew me. I am falling, falling, falling into the abyss.

  I won’t return until I dig up the grave marked 42.

  Wednesday, July 20, 3:19 a.m.

  I’m not dead.

  sarahfincher.com

  Password:

  theclause

  Wednesday, July 20, 3:39 a.m.

  Sarah knows everything now. She’s safe, which makes me happy. Pretty soon she’ll be sleeping, and after that she’ll wake up and drive home. I’ll be happier still when I know she’s off the road for good.

  She immediately took what I shot at the cemetery and put it up at her site. I wanted her to see it first, to know what I know before I write it down.

  She said I sounded like I was in shock. She said I didn’t sound like myself. I haven’t slept in a long time and everything about what happened after my long walk to the old cemetery is a brain melter. I’m still putting it all together.

  Every story, fact or fiction, has its own way of unfolding. There is purpose to the way we craft these things. So Sarah has the images, but I’m still going to write what happened.

  Wednesday, July 20, 3:45 a.m.

  My leg began to fail me and I started to limp as I walked down the street with that shovel in my hands. I’d put that leg through a lot during the past few days — riding down to see Fitz, crossing the river, moving through the woods — and it was finally saying, Hey, dude, enough already.

  A dog whined off in the distance and I imagined it was hit by a car, wobbling off into a ditch to die. Other than that, it was a still night in Skeleton Creek as I approached the hilltop graveyard. I looked back over my town and heard the dog once more. It wasn’t like staring out over a city at night with its sea of lights.

  Skeleton Creek, from up here, looked as secret and haunted as it always had. A porch light here and there, a darkened Main Street, the shadowy outlines of trees and houses.

  I searched the graveyard in silence as a soft wind drifted over the hilltop. With a flashlight in one hand and a shovel in the other, I crept close to each stone and found they had no order. I wouldn’t find headstone 42 next to 41 next to 40. Whoever had envisioned this plot of land hadn’t been in possession of an ordered mind. More likely they’d dug a hole in whatever open space they could find, dropped the coffin inside, and planted the headstone. Maybe that was the way things were done a hundred years ago, or maybe the person in charge just didn’t care. Either way, I searched for a while before I came to number 42.

  The numbers were on the backs of the headstones, and coming around the front, I had an unforeseen moment of terror. Because there it was, the name I saw on headstone number 42:

  Albert Vern.

  I stared at the words, and, like magic, the letters began to move in my mind. Who was Albert Vern, if not the man he’d claimed to be?

  The first letter remained, hot and glowing in my brain.

  A

  All the rest of the letters in his first name fell away, like white bones over a cliff, tumbling into a black sea.

  The last name remained: VERN.

  And then the letters started to move, rearranging themselves as I wished they wouldn’t and my grip on the shovel grew tighter.

  The man had never been A. VERN.

  He had only ever been the RAVEN.

  There was a brief moment where I started to scream, or tried to, at least. My throat had gone dry and nothing but a whimper came out. Too bad, Mr. Mayor. There is no reporter from the Washington Post. Only a man with a black ax searching for answers.

  I knew then that Albert Vern had been following me all day. He’d been following me all week. He knew I had the ghost book. He knew who’d given it to me. And what was worse, he’d arrived in the cemetery, black as night, drifting in through the trees.

  The Raven approached with that same inhuman motion I’d seen before. The ghost of Old Joe Bush moved like that. Far away, then somehow standing right beside me.

  And then he spoke.

  “I’ve been following you.”

  He held the great ax in his hands, spun the blade, examined me carefully. Would I run away? Would I scream someone awake in the dead of night? He need not have worried: I was still like one of the tombstones, turned to stone with fear.

  “I know what you stole from me.”

  I held the shovel as if it might protect me from the swinging ax.

  “I know the Apostle led you here.

  “I know what lies beneath the grave.”

  The Raven moved harrowingly close then, his face almost knowable, but still bathed in shadow. I wanted to point my flashlight in his eyes, but my mind and my hand wouldn’t cooperate with each other.

  “Step aside, son. Or meet your maker.”

  The Raven raised the ax over his head. If ever I needed to move, now was the time.

  But I couldn’t. Or at least, I didn’t.

  The ax hovered over the Raven’s head, as if he was searching for a reason not to swing. And then a new voice boomed into the graveyard.

  “I INVOKE THE CLAUSE!”

  The Raven turned in the direction of the voice and light flashed over his face. The Raven, Albert Vern, Fitz’s dad — these faces were one in the shadows and the gloom.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off his face. Was it an hour, a minute, a second that I stared into those eyes? Time had no meaning until I finally did turn to see what the Raven saw: Fitz, shadowy and big, holding the clause in one hand and a flashlight in the other. There were words on what was once an empty sheet of yellowed paper, brought back by whatever had been in the vial I’d given him.

  With a voice of authority I hadn’t heard before, Fitz read the clause.

  “We believe in the everlasting supremacy of one generation after another.

  We believe that the world is ever changing.”

  The great ax lay at the Raven’s side, and he began reading along with Fitz, their voices drifting together over the stones of the dead:

  “We give power to the firstborn son of the last man standing.

  We trust in the passing of time and the knowing of all things.

  The duty to preserve falls now in the line of all good men.”

  They were beautiful words, strong and meaningful. They had authority. The Raven fell silent, as if he’d waited his whole adult lif
e to hear those words, wondering when they might be said, knowing they would have power over him in the end. I wondered if he’d said the words himself a long time ago, wrenching power from a long line of men.

  Fitz read the last of the clause alone without even looking at the words he was saying.

  “I take this oath

  To preserve freedom.

  To maintain secrecy.

  To destroy all enemies.

  I appoint these three:

  To protect: Sam Fitzsimons

  To record: Sarah Fincher

  To treasure: Ryan Mccray

  We are the Crossbones now.”

  Fitz paused and I looked back and forth between the two. And then the son spoke the last of the oath to his father, and there was a sadness in those words I didn’t see coming.

  “Your time has passed.”

  The Raven never did take the hood off of his head, but he did drop the ax. He left it lying there in the cemetery and Fitz picked it up. I had a strange sensation, seeing my friend there with a weapon of some size. Was Fitz to be the new muscle of the Crossbones? And more 210 important, was I to be its Henry, and Sarah its Apostle? The very thought of these things left me foggy in the head, afraid of what was to come in the months and years that would follow.

  We both watched as the Raven — or what once was the Raven — disappeared into the trees. After an awkward pause, Fitz spoke.

  “Did that just happen like I think it did?”

  I didn’t think about my reply. I simply said it, which made it feel true even if it wasn’t.

  “I think we’ve become what we were fighting all along.”

  I looked at the top of the grave site and I knew what I should have said.

  Stand back. I’ve got some digging to do.

  But I didn’t, and I can’t say exactly why.

  Fitz didn’t know there was something to find at gravestone number 42. How could he? The guy had been cooped up in a cave for a week. He didn’t ask for the ghost book, which seemed to have slipped his mind just then. He simply said it was over, we’d ended the Crossbones.