Once Upon a Midnight Eerie: Book #2 (Misadventures of Edgar/Allan)
Page 6
Sincerely,
Richard Carmichel
Director of Human Resources
Mr. Poe in the Great Beyond
Mr. Shakespeare approached Mr. Poe’s cubicle with papers in his hand.
“Start packing up your desk, Poe.”
“What?”
“Yes, it’s off to the Animal Languages Division for you.”
“What?”
With the tip of his quill pen, Mr. Shakespeare indicated the place on the paperwork where Homer had signed and approved the transfer.
“Animal languages?” Mr. Poe cried. “I write in English, sir. I might be willing to indulge my excellent Latin or adequate French if you ask nicely. But I will not write in zebra!”
The Animal Languages Division was about as low as it could get for a writer here. Oink, oink. Cluck, cluck. It was one thing to communicate through fortune cookie fortunes or spell cryptic messages on car license plates or slip anachronistic speeches into movie scripts, as Mr. Poe had already done. But for a writer to have to communicate without words? He’d have been better off transferred to the Interpretive Dance Division (and, frankly, Mr. Poe was a terrible dancer).
Mr. Poe had begun to make a counterargument when Mr. Shakespeare stopped him with a raised index finger. “Please, Mr. Poe, try to maintain a shred of dignity and resist the temptation to beg for your position.”
Mr. Poe gathered himself. He hadn’t been about to beg (plead, perhaps). He set his shoulders, raised his chin, and resolved to demonstrate his own indomitable spirit. He started with a quote he recalled from somewhere. “‘You speak a language that I understand not,’” he said, almost cheerfully. “‘My life stands in the level of your dreams.’”
Mr. Shakespeare smirked. “I see you’ve no response of your own, Mr. Poe. Nonetheless, I commend you for choosing to quote from the best—me!”
Mr. Poe took a sharp breath.
“Now, pack up your desk and get down to the Animal Languages Division. Oh, and by the way . . .” Mr. Shakespeare paused.
Mr. Poe waited.
“Hee-haw,” said Mr. Shakespeare, grinning as he turned to go.
Smart-ass, Mr. Poe thought.
Later, Mr. Poe carried his cardboard box of pencils, pens, paper, and other office knickknacks (including his framed photographs of Edgar and Allan) toward the elevator. But on the way, he detoured to the isolated corner cubicle of the poet Emily Dickinson, a shy New Englander whose carefully crafted poems seethed with life and death. Mr. Poe had met her only once or twice, as she liked to keep to herself. But her dark eyes were quite beautiful.
She was employed now in the greeting card division.
“Miss Dickinson?” he inquired softly.
She looked up from her desk.
“May I have a moment of your time?”
With the slightest movement of her head, she indicated yes.
“I’ve been transferred,” Mr. Poe explained.
“Upstairs or down?” she asked.
“Down.”
She put her hand to her mouth. “How many floors?”
“Only about four hundred,” he said reassuringly.
In a building 362 million floors tall, this wasn’t the worst demotion possible (aggravating as it was to Mr. Poe).
“Oh, then perhaps we will meet again,” she said, offering a shy smile.
“I hope so,” he said. “In any case, before leaving I wanted to tell you how much I admire your strange but beautiful and brave poems.”
Of course, Mr. Poe didn’t think she was as great a poet as he was. But what was the point of saying something like that aloud?
“Strange. . . . Beautiful. . . . Brave. . . . Those words could describe your work as well, Mr. Poe.”
He hadn’t felt this good in almost two centuries. “Thank you.”
Her expression turned serious. “Your lovely boys are in danger,” she observed.
He nodded.
“And my lovely nieces have taken a liking to them,” she continued.
“And vice versa, Miss Dickinson.”
She sighed. “Isn’t it a shame that rules prevent us from interfering in their perilous lives?”
But before he could answer, a voice rang out among the office cubicles.
“Poe, what are you still doing on this floor!” Mr. Shakespeare approached from across the hall. “This floor is for writers who use language. You belong downstairs among the grunts and squeals.”
Miss Dickinson glared in the Bard’s direction. “He is smug, wouldn’t you say, my dear Mr. Poe?”
Mr. Poe smiled, despite his multitudinous worries.
“Poe!” Mr. Shakespeare shouted.
Anxious to preserve his last shred of dignity, especially in front of Miss Dickinson, Mr. Poe made a sweeping, courtly bow to her and slipped away from the cubicles and into the hallway, heading for the elevator, his box of desk supplies held loosely in his pale hands.
His face flushed pink.
6
A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM
THE Poe and Dickinson twins watched the brightening sky as the sun edged over the horizon.
What a night it had been. Ghosts, pirate treasure, plans . . .
They stood up from their places on the rooftop and stretched (Roderick, too).
“Look up,” Em said, pointing. “There’s one star that’s brighter than all the others. Venus, perhaps?”
“Actually—” Allan began.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Milly interrupted, taking out her phone. “I have this NASA app that’ll identify it.”
“But—” Edgar started.
“Just give me a second.” She tapped and scrolled before pointing the phone up to the sky. “It’ll beep when it’s identified the object.”
Seconds passed . . . and no beep.
Confused, Milly lowered the phone and looked at the screen. Then she glanced back up into the sky, baffled. “It says there’s nothing up there. No planet. No star . . .”
“That’s because it’s an orbiting satellite,” Edgar said.
“If you watch, you’ll notice it moving very slowly across the sky,” added Allan.
“I didn’t know you could see satellites with the naked eye,” Em said.
“You can if you know how to look.”
The boys had been looking for the past seven years, ever since their parents’ accidental launch into space. They regularly tracked the Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite, the orbiting tomb of their mother and father. They’d last seen it from a Kansas cornfield.
“Is that, um, your parents’ satellite up there?” Milly asked delicately.
The girls knew the sad story of Mal and Irma Poe and the Atlas V rocket.
All of America knew it.
“No,” Edgar said. “That’s just an ordinary one.”
“Oh, drat!” Allan groaned, glancing at his wristwatch. “We’re due in the makeup trailer in forty-five minutes.”
They’d been awake now for twenty-four hours straight.
Em grinned. “I suppose that’s what you two get for being the ‘stars’ of the last scene.”
“Our scenes are done,” Milly added, smiling mischievously. “But we’ll be thinking of you this morning while we catch up on sleep.
In response, the boys could only yawn.
By eleven a.m., the Poe twins still had not started shooting their scene. They’d suffered through the familiar makeup routine, climbed into their stiff-collared costumes, shuffled to the buffet table to smear cream cheese on bagels for breakfast, and arrived on the set on time. But since then . . . nothing, as the lighting crew struggled to get a particular effect that Mr. Wender insisted upon.
“I want it perfect!” he shouted.
Some among the crew whispered that the director’s reluctanc
e to shoot had less to do with lighting than it did with his dissatisfaction with the script. Set in a luxurious, nineteenth-century parlor, the scene was written as a fantasy sequence in which the boys sipped tea and argued about good and evil—two sides of their famous ancestor. But it lacked punch.
It was the final scene in the movie, the all-important closing. And Mr. Wender still hadn’t come up with any improvements.
So the lighting crew was getting an education in German cuss words.
Meantime, the Poe twins caught up on shut-eye, one on the set’s velvet, nineteenth-century divan, the other in the big wingback chair beside the fireplace.
At last, Cassie shouted, “Everyone to their places!”
But Edgar and Allan remained in a deep snooze.
“What is this sleeping?” Mr. Wender shouted, drawing everyone’s attention.
That is, everyone except the twin objects of his anger, who merely began to snore more loudly.
“What in Gott’s name are you two doing?” Mr. Wender raged, slamming his copy of the script to the ground.
At last, the twins opened their eyes.
The director strode toward them. “I do not tolerate sleeping on the set!”
Edgar sat up on the divan. “We weren’t just sleeping,” he said.
“No?” Mr. Wender pressed.
The twins thought fast.
“Um, we were sharing a dream,” Allan said as he straightened in the wingback chair and ran his hand through his cowlicks (identical to his brother’s cowlicks, naturally).
“Sharing one dream?” Mr. Wender scoffed. “How is it I didn’t guess that straight off?”
“Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself,” Allan said, ignoring the director’s sarcasm. He stood, fluffing the high collar of his nineteenth-century shirt and tugging at the ridiculous satin pants. “Do you want to hear about our dream?”
“No!” Mr. Wender snapped, stalking away.
“You might find it inspirational for the final scene,” Edgar added.
After a few steps the director stopped and turned back. “Well . . . maybe.”
Allan nodded graciously. “In the dream, we were the young Edgar Allan Poe, our great-great-great-great granduncle, just like in the movie.”
“That’s of no help.”
“But instead of sipping tea, we were sitting in this very room doing . . .”
“Doing what?” Mr. Wender inquired.
Mr. Wender needed a better ending and the Poe twins needed a little more sleep.
Crew members began to gather around the boys.
“In the dream, what were you doing?” Mr. Wender pressed.
Since the twins hadn’t been dreaming at all, this was no easy question.
Stumped, Edgar and Allan looked at each other.
Hadn’t Em said something about a trick she employed whenever she was stumped by a question, something that both enlivened and cleared her mind?
But what was it?
“Chess pie!” Edgar exclaimed.
The director looked at them as if they had spoken in a foreign language. “What?”
“We mean—um, chess!” Allan said.
“Yes, we were”—Edgar slowly rose from the divan, playing for time—“we were playing chess on a beautiful luminescent board.”
Mr. Wender snapped to attention. “Go on.”
“Naturally, the chess game was very symbolic,” Edgar continued. “The black versus the white, representing the two sides of our famous great-great-great-great granduncle.”
Mr. Wender pursed his lips and then shook his head. “That’s been done before. It’s overworked.”
“But there was more to the dream!” Allan insisted.
They knew Poe’s life as well as they knew their own.
The director sighed as if disinterested, but indicated with a wave of his hand for the twins to continue.
“See, as we moved the pieces on the board, we didn’t talk about good and evil, as in the script, but about how much we missed our mother and father,” Edgar said.
“Hmmm,” Mr. Wender mused, growing more interested. “Yes, Poe was orphaned at a young age.”
Like us, the boys thought.
“And then, at the very end of the dream,” Allan continued, infusing his voice with drama, “we realized that both the black and the white chess sets were missing their kings and queens and had been missing them all along.”
Mr. Wender’s eyes widened.
“Naturally, this prompted us to wonder: ‘Exactly what kind of chess game have we been playing?’” finished Edgar.
The twins waited for the director to answer the question.
“A mysterious chess game,” Mr. Wender muttered. He looked up, inspired. “A game that could be neither won nor lost!”
“Because it lacked the king and queen,” Allan said.
Mr. Wender whispered in German, “Die Mutter und der Vater . . .”
“Exactly,” Edgar and Allan answered in unison.
The boys’ famous ancestor hadn’t been lucky enough to be adopted by loving relatives who accepted him for who he was.
Edgar and Allan thought of Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith.
The Poe twins knew they’d been luckier than their great-great-great-great granduncle.
“By the end of our dream,” Allan said, “we understood a lot more about Edgar Allan Poe’s life.”
“All the ups and downs that are in your movie, Mr. Wender,” Edgar added.
Mr. Wender nodded. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I could cut to a close-up of the chess board,” he said to himself. Then he opened his eyes. “Yes, the final shot of the movie!” A wide grin spread across his face. He slapped the Poe brothers on their shoulders and then turned to the crew, raising his voice. “Call the prop master! I need a luminescent chess board. And we’ll be changing the whole lighting setup.”
The crew snapped to action.
Mr. Wender turned back to Edgar and Allan. “That was quite a useful dream, boys.” He squinted suspiciously. “Wait a minute. Did you say you shared a dream?”
This was no time to get into all that.
Besides, there’d been no dream.
“No big deal,” the boys said in unison.
“Aren’t they little geniuses?” Cassie commented, hovering about the set.
Mr. Wender nodded and turned away, starting toward the lighting crew, calling out his new directions.
Edgar returned to the divan.
Allan returned to the chair.
Zzzzzz . . .
That afternoon—after Mr. Wender shouted, “Cut and print! That’s a wrap!” and the crew cheered and clapped Edgar and Allan on their backs—the Poe twins stopped in the lobby of the Pepper Tree Inn to send a postcard to their school friends.
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .
A RECEIPT IN CASSIE’S HANDBAG:
JACKSON DRUG STORE
3211 W. Diego St.
New Orleans, LA 70116
225-555-4938
* * *
1 bottle Rat Poison
$6.49
1 pack Syringes
$7.74
- - - - - - -
Tax
$1.28
Total
$15.51
HAVE A NICE DAY!
7
BACK TO THE BONEYARD
THE boys were well rested when they returned to the Saint Louis Cemetery late that night. Once again, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith had lingered over evening tea in the lobby of the Pepper Tree Inn, so Edgar, Allan, and Roderick had climbed out of their room window, crawled across the ledge
, and shinned down the balcony to the alley.
This time, however, they were not met by the Dickinson sisters.
Instead, Em and Milly were engaged now in their own part of the mission, which was to find a way to break into the New Orleans Pirate Museum, where the wax figures of the Lafitte brothers highlighted the collection of buccaneer memorabilia.
And that wasn’t the only difference between this late-night trip to the cemetery and the first.
Tonight, Allan and Edgar did not run but strolled casually, hoping to make the pickax, shovel, and pair of flashlights they’d bought that afternoon at a hardware store seem less suspicious to passersby.
And the weather was different. Thick fog had rolled up the river and now blanketed the French Quarter, limiting visibility to about twenty feet. The bright lights of the crowded streets looked like colorful galaxies viewed through an out-of-focus telescope. And as the twins left the tourist district and neared the cemetery, the dimmer, less frequently spaced streetlamps cast strange halos over the otherwise encompassing dark.
Finally, this trip to the cemetery was different because Allan and Edgar had a worrisome sense of being followed, though each time they turned back no one was there. Even Roderick looked over his shoulder from time to time.
The cemetery awaited in stillness.
The boys and cat edged through the break in the wall.
A cemetery that is spooky on a clear night is spookier on a foggy one. But Edgar and Allan were not particularly spooked.
Their first stop was the tomb of their friends.
The memorial stone was different from how it had been just the day before.
No worn-away letters . . . a night off for Genevieve and Clarence.
But the Poe twins’ work had just begun.
Edgar and Allan split up to scour the cemetery, looking for a mausoleum marked SHAKESPEARE. Just twenty-four hours earlier, they might have been startled by the occasional wisps of fog that crept in ghostly shapes around the corners and cornices of the stone crypts. But since meeting the Du Valiers, Edgar and Allan had learned that real ghosts looked more like ordinary human beings than ectoplasm.