Nevermore: A Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe

by David Niall Wilson

  "Some," Lenore said. She didn't look up from her drawing. "Tell me. What was it called?"

  "It was called," Edgar said, "The Raven. I will tell it in my own words – I've read it recently, and I have a good memory."

  "I love stories," Lenore said.

  "As do I. I just can't seem to find one with a happy ending. The Raven, as you might expect, starts with a young girl. It goes like this…"

  The Raven

  A Revision with Apologies to the Brothers Grimm

  In a long ago time, and a faraway place, there lived a queen. The queen had a very young daughter, too small to walk on her own. The child was precocious, and no matter what the queen said, nothing could prevail upon the girl to listen, or to be silent. The crying of the child maddened the queen, and she stormed about the castle in anger until she happened to glance out the window.

  Ravens circled the castle, a great unkindness of ravens. They screeched and cried out, and it reminded the queen of her child. She flung open the window in frustration and turned to her daughter.

  "I wish you were one of them," she said. "I wish you would become a raven and fly away, screeching as they do, and leave me to my peace. Then I would have some rest."

  Now, the story says that at this point, the child was instantly transformed to a raven, and flew away. That is not exactly so. There was an old woman who worked in the service of the queen – her name was Estrella. Though she was named star, there was no light in her. She was conniving, and versed in potions and dark arts she kept to herself. She sometimes cared for the girl as a part of her duties, and that very day, when the Queen made her wish upon an unkindness of ravens, she whisked the princess off to safety.

  Later that day, she slipped away with a bag of seed corn in a pouch tied about her waist. She found a clearing in the woods, scattered her corn, and set her trap. It did not take long to lure several ravens close enough, and, eventually, the perfect vessel set off her trap. She scuttled back to the castle with her prize in an ornate iron cage, avoiding its darting beak and using a heavy cloak to muffle its cries.

  Estrella lived in an upper room of an all-but-abandoned tower at the rear of the castle. Her rooms were drafty – hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter, no matter how she built her fire. None of this bothered her, for she was a sorceress, and the simple threat of weather was of no consequence to her. She rarely slept, and when she did it was usually to snatch a few hours during the brightest light of day, when she was least powerful.

  She placed the raven's cage on her mantel and went to the old sideboard, abandoned and decrepit, that served as her desk. She had few possessions, and most of them would have had her burned at the stake, or drowned, had anyone in the castle ever seen them. They did not, of course, because – as I have said – she lived in an abandoned wing of the castle, and because she had laid an intricate sequence of charms and illusions on the entrance, and on her chambers. What others would find, if they managed to stumble into the room, would be an empty chamber, dingy and windswept, and they would find themselves drawn inexplicably to the doors.

  She found what she sought; a thin leather tome with intricate, arcane designs worked into the cover and flipped it open. A moment later she gave a sharp cry that might have been elation, or even dark laughter, but evoked no sense of mirth. She was not in the queen's service out of fealty. She had a plan, and like the solving of a dark puzzle the pieces were falling into her hands.

  It was a simple spell. She needed something from the raven. She needed something from the girl. Neither was a problem, as she'd been collecting bits and pieces of her small charge for more than a year. Trimmed locks of hair. Scraps of cloth. A favorite toy, believed lost. The bird she had all of.

  She worked through the night. She designed a small talisman, formed of bits of the girl's life. She added things that sparkle and things with odd scents. She formed it into a small, dangling bauble and attached it to a string, which she then dangled into the raven's cage. At first, it only glared. It backed away and cried its baleful cry. She persisted. The small ornament caught the light from her candle and glittered.

  The bird attacked. It grabbed the bits and pieces of the princess in its strong beak, screeching and rending, and as it did so, fast as a serpent, the crone plucked a single feather from its tail. She left her captive in frustrated battle with her talisman, and went off in search of the princess.

  The girl was playing behind her mother's throne. There were thick blankets spread, and one of the queen's chamber maids watched in trepidation as the child seemed to stalk the most valuable items within reach, one after another. Each time she was chastised, the tiny princess let out a wail, and would not be calmed. Just as Estrella entered the chamber the child let out a shriek of outrage and petulant anger. The girl watching her dropped to her knees and tried to calm the girl, but she would not be defeated so easily. She sought her mother's attention and the only way to achieve her goal – for better or worse – was to get past the defenses set by her keepers. She redoubled her cries, and tried to squirm free.

  Estrella moved in quickly.

  "I will take her," she said softly. "I will quiet her, and get her food. When she has calmed, I will bring her back to you."

  The girl nodded quickly. A few moments more, and the queen was certain to rush in on them, threatening curses and punishment.

  Estrella took the princess, who, despite her desire to be with her mother, was always curious around the old woman. She sensed something different, and there were always interesting things to see, taste, and smell when Estrella watched her. She grew silent, and allowed herself to be lifted and taken from the chamber without further protest. The chamber maid stood and scanned the room. The queen was nowhere to be seen. She knew that she should not hand off her charge without direction, but she feared the queen's frustrated rage more than her anger at being disobeyed in a smaller matter. Estrella often watched the girl, and she could claim an honest mistake in believing she had done the right thing. If all went perfectly, the princess would be returned before anyone noticed, and there might actually be a reward for keeping her silent.

  Estrella wasted no time. She carried the princess through the halls of the castle quickly. She cast a glamour around the two of them so none would notice their passing. As she climbed the stairs to her room, she smiled. It was her first genuine smile in years – possibly decades. The princess stared up at her, wide-eyed. She did not cry out, and she did not struggle. She sensed something – interesting – to come, and she waited.

  Estrella carried the child to her bed and laid her carefully among the ratty blankets and threadbare pillows. She stared up and cooed, reaching out her chubby fingers for whatever might be offered.

  Estrella watched her for a moment. On the mantel, the raven still tore at the talisman. For the second time, the crone smiled. She pulled the feather from a pocket in her dark robes and held it out to the girl, tickling her fingers and teasing it over her cheeks. The princess giggled, then laughed, and then with sudden speed, she snatched the feather from Estrella’s grasp. There was no hesitation. Like every other thing that went into the baby’s grasp, she shoved the feather between her lips and bit down.

  The room shimmered. Though she knew what to expect, the burst of power still startled Estrella. She stumbled back from her bed, even as the raven perched where the princess had been only moments before stretched its wings and stared at her. She met that glassy-eyed gaze, studied it, and thought that – just for a second – she caught a glimpse of confused terror.

  Then, without hesitation, as if she had flown every day of her life, the princess launched from the bed, whirled in a tight arc around the room, and took to the sky. Estrella watched, just for a moment, and then opened the door of the cage and released the raven.

  "Watch over her, dark one," she whispered. "One day someone will come for her. If she is not safe, I will come for you."

  The bird squawked, staggered a moment after being imprisoned in the
tiny cage, and then, with a quick angry shake of its wings that sent down and feathers in all direction, it dove for the window and disappeared. Estrella walked to the window and gazed upward. The ravens circled the tower in a dark stream, agitated, and suddenly augmented by one.

  When they curled around the far edge of the castle, and out of sight, Estrella turned back to her chamber and began to quickly gather her things. She had her own ways in, and out of the castle. She knew that the chamber maid would believe she had stolen the child, but it was unlikely the girl would admit to letting someone take her charge – at first. By the time she did, they might not believe her at all. Probably the girl would be put to death for her trouble, but that was no concern of Estrella's.

  When they finally searched the castle for the old woman – she was long gone. The rooms where she'd stayed seemed as though they had been deserted for years. They found nothing at all, in fact, to mark her passing, but a rickety old wrought iron bird cage, and a single raven's feather.

  The queen never recovered. She ranted, and raged. The king, who had been away at war, returned to find his daughter missing, and the explanation of that disappearance – sketchy. He knew how his wife had felt about the child, how she'd raged about the crying, and the misbehaving – as if the girl was old enough to attend her and wait on her hand and foot, instead of a babe.

  The kingdom fell into disarray, and there was no heir. Eventually, the king grew old and his health failed. The queen tried to assume control, but the king had a cousin, a dark man with darker ambitions. The queen was locked away in the same tower of the castle where Estrella had lived. They sent men in to clean it, and seal it against the winter, but she was watched around the clock, and never allowed beyond the confines of her rooms.

  Lenore pulled the pencil away from the paper and turned. Edgar, who had allowed himself to be caught up in the story, sensed the change – and stopped speaking. He shook his head.

  "Where did that story come from?" Lenore asked him.

  He glanced down at her drawing without answering. The near perfect image of Grimm had changed. In the feathers of his – her – chest, the face of a young woman stared back at him. He knew that was not possible, that the eyes stared at whatever the angle they'd been drawn at required, but he couldn't shake the sensation.

  He looked up.

  "It's like when I write," he said. "I would not be able to write as I do, or the stories that I do, without the link. Grimm somehow connects to my thoughts, shares memories, brings me visions. It has never happened before without him – her? – being very close.

  "The story I just told is not The Raven – not the one that the Brothers Grimm penned so long ago, in any case. It is a new darkness, a shift of the sort that so often separates reality from fictions. If the Brothers did not record the story exactly as it happened, or if they merely repeated what they had heard passed down from oral history, it might explain the flaws in the original story. And still…I feel as if there is more, something powerful that I'm missing."

  "Flaws?"

  "The story of the queen crying out to the ravens, and cursing her daughter is dark, born of the frustrated rage of a woman not ready for motherhood. The rest of their story – a young man meeting the grown princess and going on a magical quest, where he finally frees her using a wand that can open any door, a cloak of invisibility and a magic horse, don't fit. It is more like two completely different stories. As if one were obscured by time – or – possibly by something more powerful – or someone."

  "Grimm is not a raven," Lenore said. "The story is about a raven, not a crow."

  "You've said yourself that Grimm is more than a bird. If there is power behind those dark eyes, and if there is truly someone trapped inside, is it possible – perhaps – that she has obscured it? That she has made herself common in order to obscure her nature? That she has bonded with me – one who can share her thoughts – because she is also trapped."

  "That is not all you," Lenore said. "You are thinking out loud, but the thoughts are not random. You must have felt some of this, sensed it as you wove the words…"

  Edgar turned back to the drawing. The girl inside was no child. In some way, she had grown. She should have been long dead, and so her growing had been painfully slow. She had been denied her childhood, denied interaction with other young women, adults, young men – and yet – in trade – she had known Grimm. She had learned and evolved and somehow the two – bird and girl – had realized that it was time for her to be free. Either that, or whatever curse had bonded them in the first place was set to play out, and they were all in danger of being swept up in its darkness.

  "Astounding," Edgar said. "You must finish this. You must remove her, remove Grimm, whatever it is that you do…she must be freed. I have no idea what will happen when you do that. This is not one of your spirits that will shift up through the clouds and away. I am afraid that the consequences may be far-reaching."

  Anita had wandered over as Edgar told his tale. She'd listened, rapt, to his revision of the Grimm Brother's tale, and she'd heard the conversation that followed as she worked her way around the nearby tables, polishing surfaces that had long been clean.

  She stepped forward. "What if it is not so simple?" she asked. "What if it is like last night? What if you do this, and it draws you in – back, forward – to some other place, some other time? And the old sorceress – Estrella? Where is she? What will happen if you undo what she created? She said one day someone will come for her – the princess. Are you that one?"

  Edgar and Lenore turned in a single motion and stared at the girl. What she said made sense, and it should have occurred to both of them.

  "There is danger in trusting the words of a fairy tale too literally," Edgar said. "This story has been filtered through my mind, and – apparently – that of the crow as well. Or raven – or familiar. Whatever Grimm is, she has a part in this. I don't know how much of this I might have just made up."

  "She is out there," Anita said. She shivered. "I felt something when you told the tale, like a cold wind. I heard your voice, but it did not seem like your words. Not the way you would tell it – I mean. Forgive me. I hardly know you, and I have heard none of your stories, but – it is what I feel."

  The room had begun to fill with other guests. Wagons had pulled up with supplies, and a carriage filled with young men headed to the capitol in Raleigh had spilled its charges into the tavern, ready for a meal and a drink on the way through. The relative privacy they had enjoyed nearer to sunup had dissolved into a busy crowd.

  "Anita!" the bartender called. "I don't pay you to stand around and gossip."

  "I have to go," she said. "I will meet you in your rooms when I can."

  She turned to Edgar then, her face troubled. "I wish you luck," she said. "It is forward of me, but I feel that you can use it. Be careful."

  Edgar nodded, and Anita hurried to the bar. Lenore gathered up her drawing, pencils, charcoal and erasers. She packed them carefully. From inside her bag she brought forth two sheets of what appeared to be onion-skin. She placed them over the front and back of the drawing and slid it carefully into the bag.

  "Shall we?" she asked.

  Edgar nodded. "There is no sense in putting it off. Somehow all the talk of sorcery and trapped spirits has not inspired me to finish this tale by candlelight."

  "Out of character," Lenore said. She smiled.

  They rose, and with a quick wave to Anita, who nodded and smiled thinly, they left the tavern and turned down the long porch toward their rooms.

  Chapter Five

  The work was even slower than it had been the night before. There was only the one face trapped, but Lenore had never worked an image like this. For one thing, she'd drawn the portrait of the bird without seeing anything. She had already had to rework it once to superimpose the girl's features, and she'd seen them only for an instant – an instant that had burned dark lines into her mind.

  The paper was raw from the constant eras
ing of the lines, and the risk of damaging the paper, or smearing the shading was constant, and distracting. She removed Grimm from the center of that image one feather at a time, softly working in the details of a young and very beautiful face. She had thought of asking Edgar to talk, to tell her another story, to tell her about his love, Virginia, and their life, anything to break the silence and create the atmosphere that aided her work, allowing her to free her mind from the mundane world and be lost in her vision.

  Somehow it didn't seem right this time. A story had brought them to this point, and any attempt to tell the rest of the story might send them both veering off track. Though happy endings were clearly not Edgar’s forte, he might attempt one, and she did not know what would happen if he consciously tried to change things at this late point. It would be better that they saved what simple skills and powers they possessed until events had played out as they had existed, or at least as they'd been written. As she thought this, she smiled.

  Edgar did not watch her work. He stood at the window, gazing out at the trees, and the huge, deep expanse of The Great Dismal Swamp beyond. He studied the sky, and he kept his eyes open for anything that might shift or change. It wouldn’t do for some innocent to wander up in the middle of whatever was to come. Even if no one was hurt, he and Lenore would be in danger. What they accepted as their lot in life, others would see as sorcery, black magic, and evil. They had no time to talk their way out of trouble. It was not a thing he usually had to worry about, as his visions mostly invaded his mind, and his stories were written late at night or in the wee hours of morning.

  As Lenore approached the final lines of the drawing, ever-so-softly rubbing away the last of what covered the princess’ face, a shadow broke over the trees. Edgar watched as Grimm, circling in a slowly narrowing spiral, worked her way down to the earth just beyond the window. It still didn't feel right thinking of the bird as a female, regardless of what Lenore had seen. He opened the window. The bird met his gaze and hopped back and forth from one foot to the other. He, or she, was clearly agitated, and made no move to enter.