The Pet and the Pendulum

by Gordon McAlpine

  The trio passed through the pillared arches and tall doors.

  “Hey, this place is impressive,” Stevie observed, moving into the library’s large marble foyer. “It could be a state capitol building.” He looked up at the intricately decorated glass ceiling, which cast the subtle, sunlit colors over the foyer.

  “Is this the first time you’ve ever been here?” Allan asked.

  Stevie nodded. “I generally use the Internet.”

  Edgar and Allan didn’t have that option, due to Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith’s edict. But the twins weren’t sure they didn’t prefer libraries anyway. They loved the smell of books. And the mazelike possibilities of rows upon rows of tall bookshelves. The Enoch Pratt Free Library was as familiar to them as their home.

  “What if somebody’s already checked out the book you want?” Stevie asked as they moved past the information and checkout desks toward the grand staircase.

  “That’s unlikely,” Allan said, starting upstairs. “It’s not exactly a current best seller.”

  “Or what if it got lost over all these years?”

  “Hey, Stevie, if we’d known you were going to worry so much, we wouldn’t have brought you along,” Edgar said.

  “Oh, I’m not worried,” Stevie answered. “Even if the book’s not here. I like watching you two deal with the unexpected. Like that time Mr. Witt came back into class and found you had taken the magnesium strips and—”

  “This is a library, Stevie,” interrupted Allan. “Organized with the Library of Congress Classification system. What could be unexpected here?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  Actually, the Poe twins knew that the unexpected could happen anywhere, anytime.

  “Hey, actually, why did you guys bring me along?” Stevie asked. They turned at the top of the stairs and walked past another reference desk toward the biography section, which occupied an entire room.

  “Oh, we were just walking by your house on the way here and said to ourselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to hang with Stevie?’” Edgar said.

  “My house is not on the way here,” Stevie pointed out.

  There was a silence.

  “OK, we needed somebody big enough to fit Roderick inside his shirt so nobody would notice.”

  “Oh, great,” Stevie said loudly.

  The trio turned down a row of bookshelves for privacy.

  “Stevie, cats aren’t allowed in libraries,” Edgar whispered. “And they inspect backpacks.”

  “And we weren’t going to leave Roderick behind,” added Allan.

  “Meow,” Roderick agreed quietly from within Stevie’s size XXXL shirt.

  “Besides, Stevie, you know it’s not just your size. We really do like being with you.”

  Stevie nodded. The Poe twins often helped him. For example, they’d once arranged an unscheduled series of small rockets to launch on the soccer field in the middle of a game. All the players had been distracted except Stevie, who’d been tipped off to the plan, and so he’d scored his only goal of the season, unopposed.

  “Well, I’m happy to help in any way I can, I guess. Even if it’s as a pet carrier.”

  “Hey, Roderick’s more than just a pet,” Edgar reminded him.

  “Sure, I know,” Stevie said.

  The three boys (and cat) passed through an archway and entered another large, Georgian-style room. The biography section began at one end with the baseball player Hank Aaron and ended many, many shelves later with the Persian mystic Zoroaster.

  The selection of Edgar Allan Poe biographies occupied almost two whole bookshelves.

  “Impressive,” Stevie acknowledged as they perused the books, arranged alphabetically by author. “Almost as impressive as having an NFL team named after his most famous poem.”

  The twins continued scanning the shelves. “Yeah, go Ravens,” they muttered.

  “Here it is,” Allan said. “The Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Does it have the page?” Stevie asked.

  Allan flipped to 277. “It’s here.”

  “What’s it say?”

  Roderick poked his head out of Stevie’s shirt, interested in the mysterious text.

  The Poe twins read it silently.

  “Well?” Stevie pressed.

  Allan closed the book and shook his head disappointedly. “It’s just an old, discredited claim about the death of our great-great-great-great granduncle.”

  “What claim?”

  “That he was murdered,” Edgar answered.

  “Murdered by who?” Stevie took the book from Allan’s hands, and Roderick examined the pages with him.

  Allan’s face betrayed his disgust. “According to his jealous literary rivals, the scandalous newspapers of the day, and far too many historians since then, the great Edgar Allan Poe was, essentially, beaten to death.”

  “By who?”

  Edgar answered: “Either by political thugs who mistook him for a common drunk or by the brutish brothers of a woman he was courting at the time.”

  “Murder?” Stevie again scanned page 277. “Interesting.”

  “Oh, it’s just conjecture,” Allan interrupted, taking the book back from his friend and snapping it closed. “The ‘murder’ theory has been seriously questioned in recent years by many scholars.”

  “Our great-great-great-great granduncle likely died of a brain disorder or some other natural cause,” Edgar added. “Nothing more, nothing less. Just a great loss for humanity.”

  The three boys and cat were silent. Death was unsettling, however it was served up.

  But after a moment, Stevie spoke. “Then why would someone deliver the book to your house just to make sure you noticed that particular page?”

  The twins looked at each other. “That’s a good question, Stevie,” they said.

  Suddenly, Stevie’s eyes widened and his face went white. “It’s—it’s—it’s him!” he stammered, looking past them.

  Allan and Edgar turned.

  Standing at the end of the long shelf of books, perhaps thirty yards away, was Edgar Allan Poe—the author, poet, dead ancestor. In the non-corporeal flesh!

  Real as life.

  For once, the twins were almost awed.

  They’d learned in New Orleans that this was exactly how ghosts appear. And it was also true that their great-great-great-great granduncle had died within a mile or two of here, well within the circumference allowed for wandering spirits.

  “L-L-Look!” Stevie stuttered.

  The great author held up one finger, as if asking for a moment of stillness and attention.

  How could the twins be anything but attentive?

  “Reynolds,” the great author said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Uncle Edgar?” the twins said aloud, starting toward the apparition.

  And then the lights went out.

  There was total blackness in the biography room.

  The twins continued forward, feeling their way along the shelves. But it was to no avail.

  When the lights came back on a moment later, the apparition was gone.

  “Was that who I think it was?” Stevie sputtered. “Should I believe my own eyes?”

  The twins were silent.

  “What was that name he said?” Stevie continued. “Reynolds? Who’s Reynolds?”

  Edgar shook his head. “No one knows, though it’s been much considered over the past hundred and sixty-five years.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was one of the last words our great-great-great-great granduncle said in the hospital before he died,” Allan answered.

  “He cried it out several times,” Edgar added.

  “Oh,” Stevie said quietly.

  “So maybe it wasn’t a brain disorder,”
Edgar said.

  “He wouldn’t be haunting these streets if it had been natural causes or even an accident,” Allan agreed.

  The twins once more opened the book to page 277.

  “It looks like we have another murder to solve,” Edgar said, almost to himself.

  “Another spirit to set free,” Allan added.

  Stevie looked around, very nervous. “Who knew the library was such an exciting place?”

  WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .

  A TYPED NOTE IN A SEALED ENVELOPE SLIPPED THAT AFTERNOON UNDER THE OFFICE DOOR OF M. ALEXANDER MARTIN, PHD, PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  SUBJECT: PERSONAL

  Dear Professor Martin,

  First, allow me to congratulate you on your recent article in Physics Journal. You are a genius. Your scientific speculations are revolutionary (even if they are far less developed than mine, which I have kept secret from the scientific community). Having said that, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you . . . there’s not room for the two of us in this world.

  Let me explain.

  Your article concerns quantum entanglement—the theory that a pair of subatomic particles separated from one another, even by distances as wide as the whole universe, may remain tied together in a mysterious fashion. The two particles act as one, instantaneously responding to each other. Of course, all this is elementary, but in your article you ask what might occur if objects larger than mere particles were “entangled.”

  Well, I have indeed discovered something larger than mere particles—human beings, identical twin boys whose linked minds somehow defy space and time. You and I know the long odds against such an occurrence. But that is why my work cannot be threatened by your scribblings. You see, I plan to kill one of the twins while imprisoning the other, which will enable me to use the captive as a human channel to contact his brother in the afterlife, resulting in unimagined access to information and worldly power!

  Now do you see why I can’t allow another physicist to speculate publicly about “large-object quantum entanglement”? Do you understand how threatening public attention could be? Do you acknowledge that this world just isn’t big enough for the two of us? And, finally, do you grasp why I planted beneath your desk a small explosive, activated a moment ago when you opened the envelope that contained this letter?

  Sincerely,

  Professor P.

  P.S. That’s right, 3-2-1 . . . BANG!

  REYNOLDS WHO?

  AFTER returning home, Edgar and Allan said very little over dinner. A tale of the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe haunting the stacks of the Enoch Pratt Free Library would elicit disbelief on Uncle Jack’s face and barely contained terror on Aunt Judith’s. Why burden them? Besides, Uncle Jack was full of NFL playoff talk, and Aunt Judith was anxious to discuss the latest entertainment news. The twins didn’t exactly ignore them, but responded with agreeable and benign answers that took no thought.

  “You’re right, Uncle Jack, we could win the Super Bowl this year.”

  “You’re right, Aunt Judith, that new movie star is sure behaving irresponsibly.”

  Meantime, these more pressing questions were what actually occupied the twins’ shared thoughts:

  Q. If Edgar Allan Poe had been murdered, then why had he waited so long to make himself known to the twins, who’d lived their whole lives in downtown Baltimore, the general area of his demise?

  A. Perhaps Edgar and Allan were of use to the great author only now, after meeting the Du Valiers in New Orleans and coming to understand how things worked with murdered souls.

  Q. Why had their great-great-great-great granduncle not spoken more to them in the library?

  A. Just because some spirits were chatty didn’t necessarily mean all of them were capable of talking up a storm.

  Q. While spirits can materialize and speak, they aren’t capable of moving physical objects. So who had delivered the book with the missing page that led to the boys’ meeting the spirit in the library?

  A. Perhaps the spirit of the great author had communicated instructions to a human agent who was too terrified to stick around long enough to identify him- or herself.

  Q. How were the twins to solve Poe’s murder when their great-great-great-great granduncle had offered only a clue already long known to history: the name Reynolds?

  A: ???

  “Boys, you’re dripping marinara sauce!” Aunt Judith exclaimed, reaching to wipe at the red splotches on the tablecloth.

  The twins snapped out of their shared trance.

  “Whoops,” they said, dabbing at their shirts with their napkins. It looked as if someone had been murdered right there at the dinner table.

  “What a mess.” Their uncle tutted.

  With so many good questions and so few good answers, it seemed to Edgar and Allan that Uncle Jack had no idea what a real mess was.

  Fortunately, the Poe twins liked it when things got messy.

  That night, Edgar and Allan stayed up very late.

  Actually, they didn’t sleep at all.

  It was not the otherworldly sighting itself that kept them awake. They had experienced that in New Orleans, along with Em and Milly Dickinson. It was the boys’ burning desire to solve their legendary forebear’s murder to set him free from haunting the vicinity of the horrible crime.

  But they had only one clue.

  Reynolds.

  The boys lay on their backs in their twin beds staring distractedly at the cracks in the ceiling as they ran through their encyclopedic knowledge.

  “It can’t be an allusion to the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company,” Edgar whispered.

  Allan concurred. “That wasn’t founded until decades after our great-uncle’s death. And the Reynolds Metals Company was founded even later.”

  “Right, which rules out tobacco or metallurgy.”

  “Both potential causes of illness. But for our purposes—useless.”

  Roderick had gone to sleep on his satin cushion, preferring dreams of catnip and field mice to listening to the twins’ speculations.

  “And it’s not an allusion to astronomy, specifically the Hubble-Reynolds Law,” Edgar continued.

  Being an expression of the surface brightness of elliptical galaxies, this was one of the Poe twins’ favorite astronomical laws. But what good did it do them now?

  “And as for individuals who lived in that era . . .” Allan considered.

  They started with the obvious choice. “Of course, there’s Jeremiah Reynolds,” Edgar said.

  Jeremiah Reynolds was a newspaper editor who thought the Earth was hollow. That belief, and Reynolds’s sailing trip to Antarctica, had inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

  “But why would Jeremiah Reynolds commit murder?” Allan objected. “Poe supported his unusual beliefs. So where’s the motive?”

  Edgar agreed. “How about Alexander Reynolds, the American general?”

  “He attended West Point,” Allan said.

  They shared a lightning-fast calculation.

  Allan said, with frustration, “Drat. That was two years after our great-uncle had been expelled, so they’d never have met.”

  The boys sighed.

  “What if he meant a fictional person, not a real one?” Edgar proposed. “Like Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.”

  “Our great-uncle likely read it.”

  “And while a fictional character can’t commit a real murder, maybe the ghost was alluding to an actual housekeeper,” Edgar continued, sitting up in bed. “Maybe the housekeeper did it!”

  “But our great-uncle could never afford to employ a housekeeper.”

  “That’s true,” Edgar acknowledged, his enthusiasm fading as he fell back to the ma
ttress. “Nor did any friends, acquaintances, or members of his family work as housekeepers.”

  “Drat!” Allan said again.

  Suddenly, the door to the boys’ bedroom burst open.

  Uncle Jack’s silhouette filled the doorway. He stepped into the moonlit room, his eyes sleepy and his body lumpy and disheveled in striped pajamas. “Do you two have any idea what time it is?” he snapped.

  The twins hadn’t realized that in their enthusiasm they’d raised their voices.

  “Well?”

  Edgar glanced at the clock on the night table. “It’s 2:44 a.m., Uncle Jack,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Allan rolled onto one elbow, facing his uncle. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler for you to just look at your own clock rather than come in here if you wanted to know the time?”

  “Quiet down and go to sleep!” Uncle Jack ordered. He slammed the door after him.

  Roderick awoke and looked at the door with a disgruntled expression.

  So much for quiet.

  The twins waited for Uncle’s Jack’s footsteps to recede down the hall before they began whispering again.

  More possibilities, more conjecture.

  The boys brimmed with Reynolds references and allusions, Reynoldses fictional and actual, Reynolds, Reynolds, Reynolds . . .

  It was nearly as difficult as figuring out the nine-digit code to the Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite’s remote navigational system. And they hadn’t solved that yet either.

  When daylight brightened their window and the alarm clock went off at seven a.m., they’d come up with nothing useful.

  Once again, their bedroom door opened.

  “Rise and shine, boys!” Aunt Judith said, smiling in her housecoat and hair curlers.

  The twins rose.

  But they weren’t exactly shining.

  Allan and Edgar were only half awake when they arrived at their adjacent lockers before first period. They spun through their identical combinations, opening the metal doors and placing their lunch sacks atop their stacked textbooks.