“There’s a squiggled-out verse, just partly finished, when Richard was still trying to do it in a half-modern idiom, with names and all.”
She read it.
Grayson had with him a harlot, who had come to
him from Charlotte,
Though Atlanta, Georgia, was her domicile of
yore…
“There’s another line I can’t read,” she said.
“It says, Who, you ask me, could this pig be, who so got the goat of Rigby . If you look at it under a glass, you can make it out.”
“He’s doing it again, mixing his own role with Rigby’s.”
“But he catches it before the stanza’s done and squiggles it out.”
Her telephone rang.
She took back-to-back calls, from Phoenix and Baltimore. She made her notes with a poker face, as if she were working a rewrite desk assembling facts for a weather report.
She looked up from the phone without a word, pushed her notes off to one side, and again took up Richard’s poem.
“You can see the words changing as it goes along. The tone gets darker, angrier.”
‘’He was a clingy kid,“ I said. ”He was what?…thirteen, fourteen years old. His brother was four years older, the difference between a boy and a young man. Richard counted on his brother to be there when things in his life went wrong.“
“Then it got to be too much.” She flipped a page. “We can only guess how Darryl felt, when all we’ve got is Richard’s side to go by.”
“My guess is the same as yours. He was being suffocated by his father on one side and by Richard on the other. So he ran away with his girlfriend to the coast, only his friend Moon knew where.”
“And Moon wasn’t telling.”
“And Richard settled into a cold rage. He had already lost his mother, and now the unthinkable was happening, he was losing his brother. To a kid that age, the feeling of abandonment was probably enormous.”
“He hated Moon for obvious reasons.”
“Moon was everything he could never be. Strong, independent…the kind of man Grayson would want for a brother.”
“In South Carolina, Grayson found that sense of purpose that would carry him through life. He’d fought Old Scratch and won.”
She read it.
And when the young god chose to fight, he waged
a battle that was mighty;
Purpose kept his honor far away from Satan’s
harsh and blust’ry roar.
This was how he rose above it: did his work and
learned to love it,
And his skills made others covet everything he
made and more.
‘Tis some deity, they marveled, living there
beyond that door:
He’d joined the gods, forevermore.
For three stanzas the god walked on water, could do no wrong. All he touched was blessed: he was on a spiral ever upward.
Then came The Raven .
And when it seemed that none could daunt him,
A sepulchre rose up to haunt him
Stuck in there as if to taunt him, all the more to
underscore
That he who’d walked among the gods
Had tumbled down to hell’s back door,
A-burning there, forevermore.
“The misspelled word,” she said. “But it’s all out of sequence. He’s giving his brother all that success before The Raven , when it really didn’t happen till five or six years later.”
“Creative license again. He thought it worked better dramatically. But the real question is, what is this business of the misspelled word? What the cop in St. Louis told you, that Hockman had just gotten a new book with a misspelled word…that’s damned interesting.”
“And not just any word. The same word.”
“How could Grayson make that mistake again?”
“If we knew that, we’d know something, wouldn’t we?”
“Whatever happened, it was disastrous.”
“The god begins to fail. He starts doubting himself, becomes obsessed by a vision of his failure. He tries to put it right, but he can never do it well enough.”
“Nothing he does can satisfy him now.”
“It can never be good enough.”
“He sinks into despair.”
“And takes refuge in alcohol and sex.”
And Rigby heard in disbelief the Craven’s method
and motif
Of luring maidens into wretchedness behind his
bedroom door.
One poor fool she filled herself with fantasy, then
killed herself,
Unable to instill herself into his craven heart
before
She turned up high the unlit gas and died upon
her father’s floor:
To irk the Craven nevermore.
“God, there was a girl who killed herself,” Trish said. “I kissed her off with a paragraph. I didn’t think it had that much to do with Grayson, it was months after their affair and she seemed despondent over everything, not just him.”
She looked at me, riddled with doubt.
“Who knows what it had to do with,” I said. “Maybe it’s just Richard again, trying to blame some circumstantial tragedy on his brother.”
“What about Laura Warner?”
“You did what you could with her. You chased her pretty hard.”
“Not hard enough.”
“Then that’s what revised editions are for.”
We were in the last lines now. The dark-haired god idolized in the early verse had suddenly been reduced to ridicule.
The time had come to resurrect the ancient failure
that infected
Every facet of his life…
She looked at me and I gave her the next line from memory.
But his second task was tougher; it was Poe who
made him suffer…
“Poe defeated him,” she said. “He never did get it right.”
“Then where’d the book come from?”
She shook her head.
“And the ashes…”
“I don’t know.”
“If Grayson was such a failure at the end of his life,” I pressed, “why is his book still causing so damned much trouble?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
We didn’t speak again till the phone rang. The late man at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
She talked for a while and hung up.
“He burned her house,” she said flatly. “Killed her, then set fire to her house.”
“Laura Warner.”
She nodded. “They’re all dead. St. Louis, Phoenix, Idaho…all dead. All but a blind, crazy woman in the Maryland case.”
BOOK III
THE RAVEN
44
It was raining again. I heard two things, the steady drumming of the rain and the click of my bedroom door as Trish came in. I lay still for a moment, listening to her footsteps as she approached my bed. I had been in a deep sleep for all of ninety minutes: the digits on the clock beside the bed told me it was now 4:52. I blinked my eyes and gradually came awake, aware of her presence a foot or two away. She stood for a long minute, then leaned over and touched my shoulder, shaking me gently.