by Alma Katsu
THE
DEVIL’S
SCRIBE
A Novella
Alma Katsu
Author of THE TAKER TRILOGY
Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Alma Katsu
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First Pocket Star Books eBook edition March 2012
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ISBN 978-1-4516-8796-5 (eBook)
CONTENTS
The Devil’s Scribe
Exclusive Excerpt from THE TAKER
THE DEVIL’S SCRIBE
1846
The evening of my return to America was ominous and an indication, I feared, of things to come. We sailed into Baltimore harbor under a weirdly yellow night sky not unlike the celestial phosphorescence of the northern lights. It was as though an unknown hand had blanketed the city in a haze of brimstone for my arrival, a sign that something sinister would take place that night. You may find those words melodramatic or think them the ramblings of a paranoid mind, but I’d come to believe I was cursed, and deserved nothing less.
I regretted returning to America this way—gracelessly, hastily—having fled more than twenty years earlier after inflicting a grievous hurt on a man. Any stranger would have said I scarcely looked twenty years of age, and might have asked how a girl my size could possibly have harmed a full-grown man, to which I had no reply. I’d learned long ago to tell no one anything, and keep my strange story to myself.
I thought I’d never return to Boston, so great was my shame. I’d been fleeing my past, trying to outrun the terrible thing I’d done all those years ago. I was learning, however, that one never really escapes from one’s sins; they will demand your attention if you try to ignore them. I had suffered many sleepless evenings and had nightmares on the rare occasion when I managed to sleep. At last I could take it no more, and booked passage back to Boston to attend to a dark duty that was long overdue.
Baltimore was a popular port in those days, particularly for ships coming from Europe. Travelers could take a train in either direction on the eastern seaboard, either up to New York or Boston, or south to the fine old houses of Charleston. Boston, a city where I’d once lived, was my final destination, but the train did not leave until the following day, so I checked into one of the more luxurious hotels in the city. I sent my bags up to my suite but, as the hour was late, decided to go into the dining room first for a nightcap before retiring. It was uncommon in those days for a lady to imbibe alone, in public. To do so was to risk being taken for a prostitute, but by that point in my life I cared little what others thought of me, for the truth was much worse than anything they might imagine.
I asked for a discreet table—though I needn’t have bothered, as a lone woman would be given only the least desirable table in the house—and ordered a bottle of whiskey. It seemed for a moment that the waiter considered rebuking me, but then he slunk away, perhaps thinking the better of wasting his energy on an obviously unrepentant sinner. Left alone in the murky darkness of the back room, I made myself comfortable, pulling off my gloves and lifting the veil I wore to hide my face from casual observation.
A bottle and glass were left abruptly in front of me, the waiter not even bothering to pour the first drink for me. I sloshed a shot of whiskey in the glass and threw it back, fiery and raw, burning all the way to my stomach. I was about to have a second drink when I noticed that I was being watched by a man sitting at a nearby table.
He was by himself, but judging from the evidence at the table, he’d recently had company. He sat behind a hodgepodge of dirty plates and discarded napkins, finishing off a bottle of wine. When he saw that I’d noticed him, he nodded at me solemnly. It was then that I committed an indiscretion: I never encouraged strange men in public, but for some reason that night I returned his nod with an almost imperceptible salute with my shot glass. I meant it only as an acknowledgment of our similar situations that night—“Hail, fellow! Well met!” and all that—but to my surprise he picked up his glass and meandered over to my table.
He was not prepossessing in any way, but he hovered over my table in a manner that commanded my attention nonetheless. “Good evening, mademoiselle,” he said by way of a greeting, though it came out slurred. “I do not mean to intrude on your solitude, but only wish to tell you that you are the loveliest sight I’ve seen inside a month and that I would regret it later if I did not find the courage to tell you so.” He bowed his head to me in a way meant to be gallant.
Obviously, he was angling for an invitation to join me. He appeared to pose no threat to a woman alone: he was thin, almost scrawny, with a tentative manner. While he wasn’t expensively attired, he seemed neither destitute nor desperate. I found him unattractive, with his high forehead and sunken eyes and a tiny, pinched mouth like a parrot’s beak. There was something pitiable about him, as though he was accustomed to misfortune; indeed, as though misfortune was a companion he had given up trying to elude. In this, he had my sympathy, for I felt I’d been dogged by bad luck ever since I’d fled from America twenty years ago. Besides, I could use the company, a diversion from what lay ahead.
I nodded at the empty chair opposite me. “Would you care to join me for a drink?” Where was the harm in one drink? I thought. My night would be long. He might be good company. If he turned out to be a bore, I’d retire to my room.
He fell on the bottle before he took a seat, pouring two fingers of whiskey into his wineglass, streaked with the last of a red he’d consumed. Now that he’d gotten his invitation, his tentative edge fell away, replaced by relief. “This is most generous of you. As you can see, my companions have retired but I am not ready to join them. I favor the evening. I treat it as another man treats the day. So would you, it seems.”
I watched him drink thirstily, as though it were water and not whiskey. “I like the evening, but I wouldn’t say I’m nocturnal by nature. My ship has just docked, you see, and I’m having a nightcap before . . .” I stopped. It seemed too intimate to say to a stranger what came next: retirement and bed. As it was, I already regretted my impetuous invitation and resolved to bid him adieu after one drink. He was far more interested in the bottle than in me, which boded well for a swift excusal.
He gulped down the whiskey in his mouth in his haste to reply. “A traveler! Tell me, have you come from far away? Where have you come from, Miss . . . ?”
“Lanore,” I said wearily.
At the mention of my name, a change came over him. It was as though he had been half asleep and only now awoke. He stared at me, a glittering and amused look in his eye. “Lanore, you say. That is a special name to me, Lanore.” His finger dawdled on the wineglass as though weighing a c
ertain matter in his mind before extending his hand to me. “A rare pleasure to meet you, Miss Lanore. Welcome to Baltimore. Is this your first visit?”
“Yes, it is. But I travel onward tomorrow.”
“That’s a pity. If you stayed a few days more, I would show you all of Baltimore’s charms. It’s not a complicated city, or a pretentious one, but it has a few entertainments. Baltimore is an honest town, a workingman’s place.” He took a long pull on his liquor. “I can’t imagine higher praise for a city, really.”
I decided to linger and listen to him. After all, I’d been traveling alone on the ship. There’d been casual conversations with the other travelers at cocktails and meals, and an occasional game of cards or promenade around the deck, but for the most part I’d shunned company. The task waiting for me in America was always foremost in my mind, and that spoiled any desire for companionship. Besides, I’d come to the conclusion that no one had ever benefited from my company and that, indeed, I might be cursed. But now I craved company, and this man would do.
He told me that Baltimore was not his birthplace but rather an adopted hometown. His life story came out in snippets as he explained how he’d come to be in the hotel that evening. The poor man was both an orphan and a widower, alone in the world save his few friends. He’d lost his parents as a young boy and had been taken in by a businessman and his family but was never adopted. He had no money and no family to fall back on; he made his living at assorted jobs, though the past few years he was able to support himself by writing poetry and stories, he admitted with a sheepish smile. Indeed, he said, he styled himself as the Devil’s Scribe, for he preferred to write tales of intense darkness—“from the devil’s lips to my ears!” he confessed—tales so unsettling that he hesitated to show them to a lady such as myself. I had no desire to read his stories, anyway; his admission cooled me toward him, for I have never trusted anyone who makes his keep by milking his fancy. Artists and the like unsettle me; I’d take a good-hearted laborer over a storyteller any day.
I revealed nothing about myself to my accidental companion, however. In truth, he had started to grow on me, though perhaps it was because his circumstances were even more pitiable than mine. He’d recently lost his young wife—who also happened to be his cousin: not an uncommon happenstance—and he said he’d been rudderless ever since. “I’m a lonely creature,” he confessed, “and haunted by the sad circumstances of our life together. I wish I could’ve done more for her.” He seemed happy to have someone to listen to him, and in general it is preferable to tell your troubles to a stranger, as there will be fewer consequences once the last words have been uttered.
I let him take me on a stroll through the midnight streets of Baltimore to visit some of his favorite sights. “You’re safe with me, miss. There are few to none in the city who would make mischief against me, for my reputation is widely known,” he said as he helped me into my cloak.
“Your reputation?” I replied, amused. I couldn’t imagine how this strange man could be seen as formidable or dangerous. For I had known dangerous men in my time—indeed, my mission was to revisit the most frightening one of all—and could not see this timid, nearly deliriously soused man as being of their kind. He didn’t explain, however, but thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and looked down at his shoes as we walked, measuring his footsteps.
By then it was quite late. We’d shared a few details of our lives with each other, enough for my new friend to ascertain that he was safe in proposing that we visit a friend of his acquaintance, not far from where we were at the moment. His friend had recently returned from a position in the East where he’d picked up “the Chinaman’s habit,” an expression that could have only one meaning at the time. Upon meeting this friend, a weedy Englishman who knew his way around pipes and opium chests, I had to think it was a friendship of convenience and little else, and indeed might be a sort of commercial establishment, one of the first of its kind in America.
After four or five puffs on the long pipe, I felt much better. My trepidation over the task that lay ahead eased, albeit temporarily. Temporary respite was still respite.
As our eyelids drooped, the narcotic preparing to take us to our separate dreams, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know this man’s name. I nudged him before he drifted completely into unconsciousness. “You never did tell me your name. . . . How should I call you?”
His smile was forlorn, an orphan’s smile. “My friends call me by my surname, Poe, but I would like it if you would use my given name, Edgar.”
I’m not exactly sure how Edgar came to join me on the train to Boston the following day. From his friend’s house, he escorted me the next morning to my hotel room and I expected he would be gone by the time I came down with my bags, but no, he had planted himself in a chair in the lobby and was reading a newspaper as though waiting on a tardy wife. I believe he was not completely in charge of his senses when he insisted on joining me on the trip. He claimed to wish to come along as a matter of convenience, as he had associates in Boston he’d been meaning to visit. He figured he might as well take advantage of circumstances and have a pleasant traveling companion on this trip, and then we’d go our separate ways.
The fact that he didn’t return home to fetch luggage worried me that he was making the trip only to further our acquaintance. It wasn’t that I feared he was some kind of crazed ax murderer and that I’d come to a bad end at his hands—that seemed beyond poor Edgar. No, it was because I feared he’d set his sights on me in a romantic way, in which case he would be sorely disappointed and perhaps sink deeper into darkness.
Edgar sat with me in a first-class berth on the train. Travel by rail was slow by steam engine. We lumbered from station to station, pausing to take on more water and coal at each stop. Edgar was pleasantly subdued most of the time, sipping from a flask and reading from a chapbook of poetry he had secreted in his coat, prodding me for stories of my travels. He asked me once or twice about my business in Boston, but I turned his inquiries away with banal pleasantries. The purpose of my trip was not unlike going to see an old acquaintance now confined in an asylum after a ghastly accident. Only, in this case I wasn’t visiting in the hope of seeing an improvement in the patient’s condition, rather to confirm that there was no change.
We disembarked in New York City and took a carriage to a station outside the city to catch the train north. During this short ride, Edgar was distracted, staring out the window and fumbling with his pocket watch. When I asked if he was afraid we’d miss the train, he blanched as though he’d been caught at something, but he didn’t reach for his watch again.
By the time we arrived in Boston, Edgar was unpleasant company. He’d had no change of clothes for several days and very little to eat or drink besides whatever alcohol he was able to purchase during our trip. Aside from his rumpled appearance and aroma, however, he comported himself well. During the lonely late-night passages, when none of the other passengers was stirring, I wondered if he’d try to snuggle against me, but he didn’t so much as hold my hand. He occasionally made dismal or pessimistic comments, something sharp and pithy, which would stun me for a moment and make me think there was something dark in Edgar’s history.
It was late when the train arrived in Boston. I asked a cabby to take me to a hotel not far from the harbor, and Edgar followed suit, saying he would call upon his friends in the morning at a decent hour.
He insisted we meet for dinner in the hotel lobby, and as it probably would be our last time together, I felt I couldn’t deny him. Now that we were off the train, we were both in a better mood and I truly enjoyed Edgar’s company that night. He was so entertaining that I almost forgot the reason I’d made the long trip from Europe in the first place. Still, the hours for proper entertaining began to draw to a close, and my mind raced ahead to the task at hand. I was as skittish as a soldier sent to man the firing squad for the first time, but in truth I
knew the executioner’s job already.
As Edgar poured the last drops of champagne into our glasses, he gave me a soft look of longing. “It seems our time together is nearly over. I sense your thoughts are elsewhere. Already you are thinking about whatever it is that’s brought you here—or should I say ‘whoever,’ for I sense that you’ve come to Boston to be with someone: a man, I would guess.”
I touched the back of his hand gently. “Edgar, I must tell you that while I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your company, if you’ve followed me all the way to Boston in the hope of a romantic encounter, I’m afraid you will be disappointed.” I spared him my gaze, looking aside. “I hope I have not been too unkind.”
His silence was alarming. I feared I’d hurt him to the marrow. When I finally was able to look up at him, I saw that, rather than being angry with me, Edgar was amused, his grave mouth now upturned in a state of barely suppressed humor.
“I see I’ve misunderstood,” I said archly.
“I apologize if I’ve hurt your feelings,” he rushed to assure me. “But no, romance never was my intention, Lanore. It isn’t that you aren’t a lovely woman—but I think you’re aware of that already,” he added, offering his smile again. “I see that, having misled you so ungallantly, it’s time to come clean. The reason I’ve fastened myself to you in such an unforgivable manner is because . . .” He hesitated one more time, as though hoping for divine intervention, but when we remained uninterrupted, he continued. “. . . I sense you have a story to tell. There must be a reason you’ve come all this way, alone, after the travels you’ve related to me of the Araby states and the mysterious East . . . and yet you won’t give up a word, and that has made me all the more curious.” He narrowed his eyes on me, and suddenly his benign face became serious, even sinister. “I came all this way to hear your story, Lanore: what must I do to get you to tell it to me?”
