Poe and Molly set a hard pace as they ran south down Calvert, then ducking into some angled alleys, veered more east towards the Falls. Again, as usual, I made my best effort to stay with them. I was losing the race and falling far behind. The twists and turns were dark, and I was soon following only the retreating sound of their footfalls across the mud and loose pavers of the back ways we traveled.
At one corner, my boot stepped upon some foul pile of soft wet substance and flew from beneath me. My hip struck the pavement as I fell, sliding across the offal and trash of the alley. My ankle struck the curb, and a sharp pain ran up my leg as it turned with the impact. My hands were sore with scraping across the broken stone and glass and stung with the friction of their vain effort to halt my fall. The stench was immediate and overpowering. I was covered in pig dung and worse. I lay there a moment trying to catch my ragged breath, when voices shouted out behind me.
“They’ve gone this way.”
“Remember, the captain says to deliver them to his friend, so don’t damage them too much.”
“His friend? Ha! Ready Tom has paid for the favor, I’ll wager.”
“We’ll get our share. Besides, what’s a friend who doesn’t pay?”
The men were coming closer. They were laughing, but there was no welcome in the sound, nor cheer.
“Men of the Nightwatch at your service!” Two shouted in unison. They approached the corner I had just turned. I could not see them, but the beam of their lantern moved on the wall I had just passed before my filthy slip.
I was not a man of the night streets. I had no experience in the ways of the criminal. Until that sojourn in Baltimore, I had considered myself an upstanding citizen. But as I lay in the shit and the rotting food that night, I was a changed soul. I had left my life of tea and scripture and become the willing accomplice in the slaughter of a man in a whiskey and blood-soaked back room. Perhaps a primitive instinct had been loosed in my psyche by the horrors of that abattoir, for whatever reason, I knew my nature, as Adam knew shame after eating of the fruit. As God’s footsteps in the garden caused the first man to hide in shame, so I fled the deputies of Baltimore.
Pulling myself up as quickly as I could, I threw myself through the thinnest of gaps between a privy and the frame wall of a tenement house. Within six feet, I came to a low fence, and I scrambled over it, scraping my knees and shins. The voices of the Nightwatch men entered the alley I had just fled.
“Why couldn’t they have stayed at the hotel?”
“Fucking stupid to leave such a nice place on a cold night like this.”
“Shut up and eyes open. I saw that skinny one duck down this alley.”
“Where’s he heading?’
“Heading to hell if we find him.”
From behind the fence, I could see them in the light of their lantern. There were three men, all of them clad in black coats with the collars pulled up over their thick necks. One had the lamp, another a long brickbat in his hand, and the third may have had a gun. The dark and their movement made it difficult to determine.
“What a stink here.”
“Fucking pigs.”
“Look at the trail here, lads.”
“He’s taken a nasty tumble, eh?”
“Fucking pigs.”
“Too bad he didn’t run into a sow. Think he did?”
“No. We’d have heard that ruckus. He’d be screaming.”
“Aye – a bloody scream if a porker got hold of him.”
“Nasty fucking pigs.”
“Last week that little kid over on Saratoga got his leg chewed off.”
“Poor tyke.”
“Eat or be eaten, my daddy told me. Ha!”
“Fucking pigs.”
The men were moving out of hearing. Their lamplight faded, and the alley was dark again. I stayed as still as I could. Poe and Molly were blocks ahead of me in a strange city. I had no idea how I was to find them. All I could recall were the directions that Jeffers had given at the hotel. I’d have to make it south to Pratt and then wander east. I might manage that, I thought. But Poe had no idea the watch was onto him. And Ready Tom, no doubt working for Fox, was after us all.
I decided not to chance the alley that I had just left. I might run into the watch when I emerged. Looking behind me was pitch black save for a sliver of light that made a dim blade of illumination between two peeling wooden houses down the alley. Though I should say that “alley” was a poor term for the narrow gap floored in mud that I made my way along, feeling with my hands each side of the passage. On more than one occasion, I bumped my head on a protruding brace or bay sill, and at one disorienting moment, I struck a cage of chickens that jutted out of a boarded window. The hens exploded in complaints, and I moved blindly past them in a rush. A drunken voice came out of a high window.
“Get the fuck off there! I’ve got something for you if you steal those chickens!”
I took off in a quick run. There was a splash behind me and the stink of human feces mixed with piss. The man had dumped a chamber pot out from above. In my haste, I tripped over an unseen hole full of icy garbage and again struck my poor head on some invisible hazard. I lay there as still as I could, hoping that another barrage of filth might be averted. My ankle was very sore. My head pounded with pain. In my perverse state of mind, I longed for a taste of whiskey to ease my discomfort.
With some effort, I calmed my breathing. And began to silently weep. For as suddenly as my primitive criminal instincts had led me into this darkness, now I was overcome by a wave of despair. How had I fallen so low?
I don’t know how long it took me to regain control of my emotions. The thought of finding Poe and Molly now seemed to be a distant possibility. I determined to pick myself up and find an alley, or a lane, or a street, and go back to the hotel. I would get my possessions, such as remained, and take a proper carriage to the railroad station. I would return to my life and give up on this futile errand of such spiritual danger.
When my calm returned, I pushed myself up on my knees. Then I heard it – at first a low snuffling of air through capacious lungs, then a deep, hungry smacking of some unseen mouth. Was the origin in front of me or behind? The narrowness of the space caused echoes and distortions. I looked behind me with straining eyes. Then I turned back and heard it again, and then a snort and a wet guttural swallow of a challenge. I couldn’t see a thing in the pitch-black passage.
Two snorts – louder this time, and then, the scrape of cloven hooves on frosted stone bounced off the walls to my ears. Standing up as quietly as I could manage, I turned my head this way, then that. My eyes strained against the nothingness, but brought no warning. The sounds were the only warning in that gut-like trap I found myself wandering.
I started a step, and in an instant there was a slobbering roar. Some heavy jaw glanced off my boot at the ankle, and my foot was thrown almost hard enough to knock me down. My hand reached for balance and came to rest on the bristle-haired spine of some monster that immediately bucked. Its head came up between my legs and tossed me like a doll into the air.
I landed on my feet by chance, and with a reflexive jump, reached up the wall for some handhold. My fingers wrapped around a metal bar above my head, and I pulled my legs up as high as I could, just as the invisible beast turned and rushed again. I heard the lips and the teeth slobber and snap beneath me in the dark.
The hog grunted and twisted, maddened by the closeness of its prey and frustrated when tusks only found air to slash.
My hands were slipping. The rod I had used to hoist myself up out of reach was cold and slick with moisture. I pulled up with all my strength and reestablished a grip, but I was wavering. The strain of lifting my legs high enough to avoid the animal’s teeth was telling on me. And still beneath me, the slavering and the futile gnashing of the jaws continued with ferocity.
I couldn’t keep my legs high enough. My grip slipped again, and I felt the fire start to burn in my shoulders. My legs pulled at me and dropped
lower. Some fang snagged the bottom of one of my trouser legs and, with a horrifying power, swung me towards the wall. A great weight began pulling me down deeper into the darkness.
At that very moment, two things happened. The fabric at the cuff of my trousers ripped free, and I almost flew upwards, as if I were some sort of spring, high again on the slippery perch above the thrashing anger below.
No sooner had my grip steadied than one of my feet by accident found a small ledge on the wooden wall to my left. No more than two inches wide, it was still sufficient to give me some purchase. I clung to the metal bar and, putting pressure on the foot that had found the hold, pushed myself up so that both of my feet had found some rest. My muscles were cramped, but offered some precious respite.
With its prey now completely out of reach, the agitation of the she-demon below me only increased. The flimsy wall of the frame building shook with the impacts as the sow threw herself against the boards with increasing rage. I gasped for air, with the metal rod shaking in kind, forced into my diaphragm with every charge of the brutish thing below in the void.
I had blundered into the sow’s lair. Kept there and fed on garbage and worse in its sunless little gap between the rickety buildings, the pig had grown huge and strong. Had it eaten the odd unfortunate cat or stray dog over the months? Had it chewed on dying gull or inattentive rat? Had unwanted child or slaughtered rival been offered to its jaws? I can only surmise. One thing was clear. She had a taste for meat.
Another charge of the colossus into the wall shook me, and one of my feet slipped to the edge of the wooden lip I stood on. A chunk of the wood soft with rot broke away, and I fell again towards the teeth. My grip barely stood the strain. The pig bit at my boot, and the toe just slipped away, lubricated by the drool on its lips. I pulled myself up with a mad burst of energy, and my feet found the ledge again, though now it was only half an inch wide. If the beast charged the wall again, I was not sure I could withstand the shaking of the wall.
At that moment as I braced myself, the sow roared as I had never heard an animal roar. The sound was deep, rushing from its insatiable gut through hot gullet. Over salivating tongue and yellowed tusk it came. I trembled as the vibrations of its hunger bounced off the walls of the passage.
I heard the sow back away, preparing another charge. That’s when the second floor window that had issued the chamber pot opened again. A veritable flood of yellow light entered my eyes and I blinked – for with the darkness I had endured, a single guttering candle would seem bright as sun.
“What’s going on?” A man yelled from above.
I looked down and saw her – dark brown, with dirty yellow bristled fur standing up along her spine that stretched at least six feet from her neck to her haunch. Her narrow hips were tipped with a slightly curled tail, straightened as it could, in anger, above her haunches. Her head was huge and set on a massive neck where the yellowed bristle turned black as coal. And she looked back at me with pinkish eyes and slavering mouth.
“What are you doing there?” he yelled again. “What you doing there with my pig? Jezebel, you all right?”
I looked at him with no response to give. I must have looked absurd, perched as I was on the side of the house, clinging to an iron brace. The man did not await an answer in any case. With a start, I realized he had a pistol in his hand. He pointed it and shot before I could realize what was happening.
The bullet hit the wall above my feet, and a spray of splinters flew up towards my head. Reflexively, I twisted my body, and the rod in my hand tore free from its mooring. As it ripped loose, I fell towards the muddy ground of the passage. Expecting to be dismembered, I was surprised when my feet touched ground unmolested, and I was able to keep my balance, for to my good fortune, the sow had also been startled by the report of the pistol and had sprinted off a few strides.
In a panicked moment, I looked at Jezebel and then away down the narrow space, now lit by the window’s illumination. Seeing a way clear, and still holding the iron rod in my hand, I sprinted off with all my speed. I jumped a pile of old railroad ties, and just as I landed on the other side, another shot rang out – and another roar. The sow was in pursuit, now undeterred by the gunfire.
I ducked under a discarded ladder and saw that I had but twenty-five feet to go before I would reach a tall board fence that blocked the way. Barely delayed, the beast was scrabbling over the creosote-stained ties behind me, snorting with the effort, and another shot – this one like an angry hornet arrowing past my right ear – missed me.
Though I considered using the rod to turn and defend myself, the roaring porcine snarl behind me dissuaded me from that course. I took the longest strides I could and leapt for the top of the barrier in front of me, throwing the iron rod ahead. Again a mouth full of fangs snapped at my heel, and with the barest of margins my hands found their hold on the top of the splintery old board fence. In a moment, I pulled myself up and threw myself over headfirst.
I landed on my shoulder and fell back against the old boards I had just topped. There through a hole the size of a man’s head, Jezebel’s snout emerged in a shower of loose wooden shards, and her tusks bit down on my neck. I frantically jerked away, leaving the sow to sup on my collar and nothing more.
I never took my eyes off of that sow’s pinkish eyes as I crabbed backwards away from the fence, scraping my knuckles on the bar that had once been my salvation. When I stopped at a safe distance, the sow settled down and just looked at me – a cruel look, indeed. She looked at me as if she were memorizing my face. I know that I shall never forget hers.
After some time, calming myself with some whiskey from a flask I had filled before leaving the hotel, I was able to stand up. I had ended up in a street this time. Suitably paved, it was for the most part dark, as it was not lit as a major thoroughfare. But just half a block down, there was a lamp glowing on a major street. I hurried down to the corner and read the street designation painted on the brick of the building there. I remember laughing. For the lettering read “Gay Street.”
I thought myself hopelessly lost. How would I find the hotel and carry out my intention of leaving this accursed city? But when I walked around the corner door and looked up, I found the intersecting street was Pratt. Having enough knowledge of that byway, I knew that I need only go back west a little and find Calvert. The hotel and my escape from the madness was at hand.
Before I could step out on my new direction, I heard voices.
“So, it’s a good night for a parade, eh, Mr. Woolfolk?’
“As any other,” came a gruff drawl.
“The Nightwatch is always glad to lend a hand, sir.”
“For some small recognition, of course.”
My pursuers were coming up Pratt. I ducked back into the shadows of the corner building’s doorway. It was set deep in the wall and offered some cover. I crouched down low and pushed myself back against the dark wood of the entry.
Within a minute, I could see them. The three watchmen, with their lamp, walked beside a man on a grey gelding. He wore a broad Planter’s hat over a leather greatcoat and in the hand nearest me held a coiled bullwhip resting on his thigh. It had to be the Mr. Woolfolk that Jeffers had told us about – the slaver.
And then they came – chained together in twos and threes, with six or seven small children walking in their midst unbound, a long line of slaves bound for the boat at Fell’s Point. The blacks kept their gazes downward, and their steps were slow and deliberate. I made no exact count, but there had to be fifty of the poor souls. At the end of the column was a particularly big figure chained to a much smaller man. I could only make out a profile, but I was sure. It was Jupiter.
Behind him rode another man on horseback. I could make out a rifle in the rear guard’s hand. I wondered where Poe and Molly had gone, but only for a moment. I sniffed at the foul odor that came off my clothes and into my nose. I felt the blood oozing over what had been my collar. I remembered the sound of the sow’s jaws, and I gave up
my plan for escape. Instead, I decided to become a thief.
I took a long sip of whiskey and laughed softly. “Fucking pigs,” I said under my breath. “Fucking pigs.”
I felt alive.
Chapter 21
September 30, 1849 5:20 a.m. - The Throwing Down of Jezebel -
As a Christian, I believe with perfect faith that the Messiah did come and will come again. Though He may tarry before he returns, I wait daily for his coming. In my routine, in the life I had known before this ill-advised detour from the righteous ways, I began each day with scripture and meditation – hoping for a closer understanding of what the Divine plan held for me as expressed in the tasks and encounters that may make up my mornings, afternoons, and evenings. By rigorous contemplation of my place in God’s creation, I strove to make myself more accepting of the perplexing nature of Providence.
So it was that the story of Jehu came to me and set out my steps before me on that dark night in Baltimore. Not that I thought myself a prophet who comes to avenge wrong, but rather merely as a eunuch in the window of Ahab’s palace. I would follow the word of God. The only question was, could I run fast enough to let his word be heard?
I crouched safe in the shadows until Woolfolk and the Nightwatch at the head of the sad parade passed me. Then, in the first instant I felt safe, I moved as fast as I could, back up Gay Street to the plank fence. I did not stop for a moment to contemplate what I was about to do, but placed my trust fully in the true way revealed to me in scripture.
Reaching the terminus of the passageway, I saw the sow’s snout still poking through the hole. She was twisting her great head trying to force her way through. A pinkish pool of snot and foul saliva had formed on the stone walk below her scared and bleeding pink lips. She was a hungry, eating thing, and she would fight free of the planks if she could.
I ran my hand across the back of my head where blood oozed from my scalp. Then, taking my hand, I rubbed the clotted stain across Jezebel’s snout. The scent maddened her, and she began snorting and pushing harder at the planks. I picked up the iron bar I had discarded in my escape and rapped her hard on the tip of her soft nose. She roared and pushed harder. I could hear her legs striving for purchase on the other side of the plank fence.
Imp: Being the Lost Notebooks of Rufus Wilmot Griswold in the Matter of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe Page 15
