by Marc Olden
Then her husband had returned and Rachel left his life. What remained was pain, something he knew quite well. Now she was in his life again, in need of his help.
She wanted him to use his contacts as a journalist, as a man of despair, as a man who knew too much about the underbelly and dark side of Manhattan and make contact with the grave robbers who had stolen her husband’s body.
But what was Rachel hiding from him?
She gazed into the fire with eyes that did not blink. On the other side of the closed door, a maid’s laughter faded as she climbed a staircase. “Eddy?” Rachel turned to face him. “Do you ever wish to see your dearest wife alive, even for one brief moment?”
He twisted his thin mouth into a sad smile. “I loved her totally, some would say incoherently. I weep for her not with my tears but with my heart’s blood. My few remaining friends would prefer her to be alive, for I would drink less and therefore, quarrel less. Were Virginia alive, I would also spend less time in that land which exists between life and death.”
Rachel took one step toward him and stopped. Her eyes locked with his. “Would it not be worth anything to feel her arms around you once more?”
Poe closed his eyes and shivered. The sickness that now threatened to overtake him was not that caused by drink or ill health. It was an even more cruel sickness, one rooted deep in personal despair. “Six years ago, a wife whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood-vessel in singing. It was thought she would not live and so I took leave of her forever, undergoing each and every agony of her death. Then she achieved partial recovery and again I clutched at hope.”
Poe opened his eyes and inhaled deeply. “Once more the vessel broke. And healed. One year later, it happened again and again I had no choice but to suffer with her. Partial recovery again until, until… ” He blinked tears from his eyes.
It broke again and again and again, crushing me with unspeakable torment as I watched her die and yes, I died with her. Her pain only made me love her more dearly and with all my strength, I desperately clung to her life. I am, perhaps, too sensitive and all that concerns me I view with total and extreme seriousness, but this has made me a poet which I would not change.”
Poe collapsed onto a dark green velvet sofa and spoke to the ceiling high above him. “I became insane, alternating that hideous state of mind with unfortunate intervals of the most horrible sanity. I drank, God knows how much or how often and I continued to exist, for one cannot call what I endured living. I existed on a pendulum ruthlessly swinging back and forth between despair and hope. Would my dearest one live, would she die. No man, let alone myself, could continue living that way without total loss of reason and when the deliverance for which I prayed finally came I was no happier. For what cured me of living between despair and hope was the death of my wife. The solution became the problem.”
Poe leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “My only life died and let me tell you that the one I received in its stead I hurl back at God and curse him for giving it to me.”
He felt Rachel come up behind him and place her hands on his shoulders. “Eddy, it can be done.”
Poe turned to look at her.
“Eddy, it is possible for the dead to live again.”
He stared at her for long seconds, then said, “I was correct.”
The tone in his voice made her withdraw her hands.
Poe stood up to face her. He was correct. Oversensitive Poe, with his mind buried in tales of terror, revenge and murder, with his soul consumed by death, fantasy, mystery and ratiocination, Poe who never guessed but who analyzed carefully and accurately. Poe who was admired, derided, feared, scorned. Poe knew.
“Rachel?”
She backed away from him.
“Rachel, who has convinced you that your husband can be brought back to life?”
“I, I—” She folded her arms under the lavender shawl, a barrier against Poe. She aimed her chin at him. She feels anger and fear, he thought and so do I, for she is now in the hands of those who will harm her if they can.
He shook his head slowly. His southern voice was softer than usual. “And so they have you as well.”
She spun around, her back now to him.
Poe hurried around the sofa, a hand reaching out for her. He wanted to protect her. “Rachel, they are frauds!”
“They are not!”
“Rachel, these newfangled spiritualists are obscene frauds, please believe me. It is a new fad and will soon be exposed for the dangerous nonsense it is. Spiritualists claim they can evoke the dead. Rachel, they cannot. They claim to be able to speak to the dead. They cannot. They claim the dead speak through them and I tell you this is not so. Oh Rachel, do listen, I beg you!”
She covered her face with her hands and Poe took her in his arms, stroking her long hair. “Rachel, Rachel.”
Poe despised spiritualism because he pursued the truth in all things and this was lies, merely another affront to what little human intelligence could be found in this boorish nation. Money changed hands of course, for as Washington Irving had told him, the almighty dollar reigned in this democratic land.
In dark rooms and for large fees mediums throughout New York City were causing tables to turn and tilt, musical instruments to play through the touch of invisible hands, spirits to “write” on slates, bells to ring, bodies to levitate in darkness and even glasses of water to overturn.
And this trickery was growing ever popular in America. In New York spiritualism was an epidemic, a most lucrative one to be sure, with victims prepared to believe over logic and sanity. Spiritualism was on the rise because people like Rachel would do anything, pay anything to hear that the beloved still lived. These days, no one asks after your health, but how does your table turn. Good and how is yours, sir. Spiritualism was fraud for money, a rising fad and one which Poe wanted to see exposed.
She looked at him and he felt her pain.
“Eddy, I love him as much as you loved Virginia. I want him back.”
“You will never see him alive.”
“Eddy, get him back for me. Bring us together again. Please.” Her fingers dug into his arms. Her intensity and determination were unnerving.
“Rachel—”
“He is waiting for me to—”
Poe grabbed her shoulders and shook her, shouting at the top of his voice. “Not in this world, not in this world! You must understand this. You must! The dead have no place in this life, in this world, not your dead, not my dead, not—”
A fist banged on the door. “Missus, are you—”
Rachel shouted, “I am fine, Charles. There is no need for alarm. Please return to your duties and thank you.”
Poe lowered his voice. “Do not do this, please! Flee these people. They will only harm—”
“Miles Standish will not harm me!”
“Miles Standish.” Poe’s hands dropped from her shoulder. Miles, with his historic name, was the lawyer for Rachel and her husband, a man Poe knew had too much interest in the dead. He was obsessed by the medical profession and spent hours watching the dissection of cadavers. He was wealthy, educated and he would be responsible for arranging for the ransom money to be withdrawn from Rachel’s accounts. Poe, who felt that Miles’s interest in Rachel was growing more personal than professional, did not like him. It was more than jealousy; on first meeting, Standish had made fun of Poe’s threadbare clothes and Poe had retaliated with a cutting remark that had drawn laughter from those present. Poe knew Miles Standish would never forgive him for this public humiliation.
He said, “Did Miles arrange for you to become involved with—?”
“Oh Eddy.” She walked away from him. “Miles wants me to be happy.” She stood looking through a window out onto Fifth Avenue at a hay wagon moving slowly on the cobbled street. “Hay is expensive, Eddy, did you know that. Thirty dollars a ton.”
“Damn the hay!” He gripped her shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Rachel!”
He
r face was streaked with tears. “I will die without him, Eddy. Please bring him back to me. Please.”
“Rachel, I—”
“You know how it feels, you know the hurt, the emptiness. You told me.”
Poe bowed his head. “What do you want me to do?”
“I trust only you, none other. Go to Mr. Standish tomorrow. He is away today on business. I shall give you a note. Speak to him about the ransom. Tell him to begin arrangements now, to have the money ready so that, so that…”
“I shall.”
“Thank you.” She touched his cheek with one hand. “Tell him to see me when he has spoken to my bank. I do not want him in this house until he has done as I asked. Please let him understand this.”
“A question.”
“Yes.”
“Who is the spiritualist in whom you have placed your trust?” And your funds, he thought.
She hesitated.
“Rachel, you ask much of me and I do it willingly. But in turn, you must be honest with me.”
“Paracelsus. He calls himself Paracelsus.”
Poe threw back his head and laughed. “Paracelsus. To hear this name is worth my trip this morning through the snow. Paracelsus.”
Poe continued to laugh until he again sat down on the green velvet couch. “I raced from my sleep, such as it was, to arrive here early enough to make my report and now you tell me that a spiritualist calling himself Paracelsus has promised to reunite you and—”
“I will not have you scorn him!”
Poe quickly stood up. “My apologies, dearest Rachel. It is just that the name is of such magnitude that I could not help but be impressed. The original Paracelsus was one of the most startling figures in magic. A sixteenth century Swiss university professor, brilliant, arrogant. He was magician, physician, alchemist, philosopher. It is said he achieved miraculous cures—”
“I do not want to hear more. You mock me.”
“I do not.”
“Then you will do as I ask?”
He nodded slowly.
“I thank you, Eddy.”
And even though she stood in front of him, she had closed a door and Poe was no longer able to touch her.
“Rachel—” He had to make her see that the dead do not return.
She walked back to the window.
Outside in the February cold, Poe pulled his cloak around him and waited for an omnibus which would take him to a train. From there he’d leave for the country, for his small cottage in Fordham where there was work to do. Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law, the dearest friend left in his life, lived with him and it was she who found these horrid and untalented women who paid her a few dollars to have Poe praise and edit their poems. Humiliating labor but it put bread on the table.
More than once, Poe had sat alone on a rock near his tiny cottage and muttered of his “desire to die and get rid of these literary bores” with their fluttering fans, huge crinolines and handkerchiefs soaked in ether against the odors of dead horses and manure clogging Manhattan streets. He and dear Muddy needed the money, so do it and be done. Then rest and tomorrow, Miles Standish.
Eddy Poe, “a soul lost,” “a glorious devil” in the eyes of women who collected lost souls, now had less than one dollar in change in his pockets. He turned to see Rachel staring through the window at him and when she saw him looking back, she vanished.
Someone called his name.
Poe quickly brought his head up from his chest. He was awake and listening.
He was in his cold, bare cottage and seconds ago, he’d fallen asleep in the small sitting room, chin on his chest and slumped on a wooden chair. His sleep was fitful, uneven, a tortuous escape from reading the wretched poetry of women whose hands should be removed to prevent them from ever picking up a pen again. Believe the Talmud when it says—Who can pro-test and does not, is an accomplice in the act. Poe’s protest against this drivel had been to slip into uneasy sleep.
Someone called his name.
Poe’s cloak was around his shoulders, his greatcoat across his knees; he lacked money for firewood. Two cheap candles sputtered and dripped wax on a tiny table covered with sheets of poetry, and though some of the sheets were perfumed, all reeked with the odor of incompetence. Poe was to read, edit and may God forgive him for doing so, praise these miserable musings.
It was almost midnight with dear Muddy asleep upstairs, widow’s cap covering her snow white hair and Poe was now awake and listening. Someone had called his name. Or had he dreamed—”
“Eddy! Eddy!”
He heard it clearly. A woman’s voice coming from outside the cottage.
“Eddy, come to me! Come to me!”
Who?
“Eddy it is I, it is your beloved Sissy!”
His wife. His dead wife.
Poe was on his feet, to the door and tearing it open, staring out into the night and seeing her by the snow covered lilac bushes near the road. His heart was about to shatter; he could barely breathe. The agony was incredibly exciting.
“Eddy it is I, Virginia. I love you. Come to me!”
He saw the slim, cloaked figure of a woman, her pale thin face made whiter by moonlight and in Poe’s tormented mind, weakened by illness, by sorrow, by unending disappointment, the line between real and unreal disappeared. His heart was seized by well-remembered grief and he leaped from the front porch, falling to his knees in snow, screaming her name.
“Sissy! Sissy!”
He crawled towards her, reached for her with trembling hands. He got to his feet, stumbled through knee high snow, every inch of his body and mind aching to touch her. For one touch, one touch, he would give his soul and more. He fell face down in the snow, his eyes now blinded by the icy softness and when he struggled to his knees, she was gone.
“Sissy!” Her name echoed in the night.
He looked down at the footprints in the snow, saw the blood in them. His wife had died of a ruptured blood vessel in her throat and that had been one year ago and she’d died in his arms.
Still on his knees, Poe pressed handfuls of the blood stained snow to his lips and cried out his wife’s name again and again.
And somewhere in his newfound hell he remembered that Rachel had told him the dead could be made to live once more. He remembered.
SIX
SYLVESTER PIER’S FINGERS clawed in vain at the noose drawn tightly around his neck.
He hung from the ceiling, feet just inches from the floor, eyes bulging hideously. The other end of the rope had been passed through a hook embedded in the ceiling of the tenement room and Jonathan, in controlled rage now pulled down on it, keeping Sylvester Pier in the air. Pier had betrayed him and would pay for it with his miserable life.
Meanwhile, the childlike grave robber suffered in his last seconds on earth. Pain and a lack of air had turned his pleasant face blood red and ugly. He rasped through his open mouth, in a total panic to breathe again and Jonathan, sensing his agony, pulled harder. The two were alone in a shabby room whose only comforts were a pile of straw for a bed and a tin bucket of burning charcoal for light and heat. Sylvester Pier, along with Hamlet Sproul and Tom Lowery, had taken what belonged to Jonathan and for that, all three would die. The three grave robbers would be a sacrifice to Asmodeus, to buy Jonathan time in his frenzied attempt to survive the demon.
Brainless Sylvester Pier. Happy when someone else was thinking for him, leaving him free to stroll Manhattan’s muddy streets in uniforms stolen from drunken military men.
Pier kicked the air and felt the darkness squeeze his brain tighter and tighter. The noose dug into his neck, making his ears ring and giving him pain that was complete, unrelieved and his eyes would not stop watering. Air. For the love of Mary and Joseph, let me breathe. His gray mongrel dog lay on its side, breathing slowly for it suffered as well. Jonathan had kicked it several times with a booted foot, crushing ribs on its right side, driving sharp ends of broken bones into the dog”s entrails and the dog had lay down to die.
> “I want you to know why you are dying.” Jonathan pulled harder, jerking the young grave robber higher in the air. “You are scum, the three of you. I set you an important task and you betrayed me. Here is my answer.”
Jonathan eased his grip on the rope, letting Sylvester Pier’s feet barely touch the dusty wooden floor. Let him think he will live. Let him think that I have been weakened by mercy. Let his agony be prolonged.
Sylvester Pier, standing on tiptoe, greedily sucked in air. The rusted sword that was part of his uniform slipped from his belt and clattered to the floor. Air. He felt as though he’d been without it for a long, long time. He’d come to this decaying, abandoned building because of a message received from Edgar Allan Poe. Come alone ten tonight. First house, Worth Street. Third floor, corner room. Important we talk. Trust me, your gain. E. A. Poe.
Your gain. Message and Mr. Poe’s black bordered card had been folded around an eagle coin and slipped to Sylvester Pier at a crowded dog fight. After betting the ten dollars and losing, Pier had left to keep his appointment with the little poet, whom he liked.
In full naval officer’s uniform and with his dog in his arms, Sylvester Pier had stepped into the dark room and been struck on the head. When he regained consciousness, he was dangling from a rope connected to a ceiling hook where a chandelier had once glittered in days when the slum tenement had been a grand Dutch mansion.
Jonathan jerked hard on the rope, again sending Pier into the air. “I want you to know why you are dying. You, Sproul and Lowery were hired to do a job for me. Instead, you satisfied your own greed and turned from me and I cannot allow that to go unpunished. There will be no disobedience, especially by such as you.”
Caught between an unwillingness to believe what was happening to him and an increasing horror at how near he was to death, Pier tried to say the word why.
Jonathan sensed this. He smiled.
“Mr. Lazarus,” he said and pulled down on the rope as hard as he could.
When Sylvester Pier was dead, Jonathan released the rope, letting the body fall to the floor. From down in the narrow, muddy street a Hot Corn girl lifted her voice in song.
