I was feeling better. Not 100 percent, not even close, but given what that bastard put me through, I was pretty damn solid. I called Rachel, but she was out. Basketball game. Seems the team was still undefeated and if they won another game would be guaranteed a spot in the play-offs. Bully for them.
Called Lisa, too, but she was not at home.
Found a book on the corner of my desk, one I’d forgotten about in all the turmoil following my abduction. Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose-Poem. The only Poe I hadn’t read yet, as far as I knew. And weird as all get-out.
I opened the book and started to read. It was hard going. Strange. Poe as writer qua astrophysicist. Lots of cosmological theorizing, but couched in unscientific, poetic language that made it extremely difficult to follow. I’d read Poe’s bio-he was no scientist. Why had he written this? It was like Carl Sagan on an acid trip.
I had to reread a passage three times-some babble about irresistibly attractive forces-before I got any sense of what he was talking about. Then it occurred to me that what he was describing, an enormously powerful force in space sucking everything toward it, sounded a lot like a black hole. Did we know about those in Poe’s day?
Then there was the passage in the coded message Edgar sent us: From that one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.
Which, placed in context, sounded for all the world like the big-bang theory, once I read it over about six times and decoded some of the nonscientific terminology. My history of science was sketchy, but I thought that idea came later, that in Poe’s era people were still mostly buying into the Adam and Eve bit. How could Poe know this?
Normally, I tried to empathize with a living, breathing person, but this time, I let my mind wander into the psyche of this writer, long dead, who had penned this bizarre work. What was he trying to accomplish? And what did Edgar-our Edgar-get out of it? Why was this book so significant to him that he led us to it? It was baffling.
Until I started to see a weird sort of pattern emerging, a secret latticework woven between the sentences. And some disturbingly familiar terminology. Dream-Land. Ascension. Golden Age.
That was when I started to get it.
I was so absorbed in my reading I didn’t even notice the woman standing at the other end of my desk. She had to clear her throat, then drum her fingers.
“Thallium.”
I looked up. It was Jennifer Fuentes, the toxicologist.
I squinted. “You’re saying I need Valium? Do I seem stressed?”
“Not Valium. Thallium. A deadly poison.”
I pulled my head out of the book. “And the reason you’re saying this is…”
“I found it in Fara Spencer’s mouth, just like the O’Bannon kid predicted. I used a wide range of reagents for different hard-to-detect poisons. Thallium clicked. The spectrophotometer confirmed it. It had broken down, as any poison would over that period of time. So to double-check, I put the sample in a graphite tube and heated it to vaporize the poison. Put it under the blue light. Voilà. Thallium. Judging from what was left more than a week after her death, I’d say it was a significant dosage.”
“Enough to kill her?”
“Oh, yeah. Instantly.”
“So he took the heart out after she was dead.”
“I think so. Immediately thereafter, before the blood had a chance to coagulate.”
“But she wouldn’t have felt the pain.”
“Not if she was dead.”
Of course not. He’d captured her, sure. Probably terrorized her, just like he did me. And he’d taken the heart, because that’s what Poe wanted him to do, and that’s what he wanted to mail to me. But he couldn’t do it while she was alive. She wasn’t an offering, and outside of his twisted plan for redemption, he lacked the requisite cruelty. Or at least one of his personalities did.
And Darcy had known it all along.
“Tell me about thallium, Doc. Is it hard to get, like that voodoo zombie stuff?”
She shook her head. “Rat poison, most likely. Contains thallium sulphate. Half the people in Vegas probably have it in their garage, never suspecting how deadly it can be.”
“But Edgar would know. Edgar knows everything.”
“I feel like an idiot. I would’ve missed it altogether if it hadn’t been for that kid.”
“Don’t feel bad, Doc. You were meant to miss it.”
Jennifer walked humbly back to her office and I returned to my reading.
I’m getting close to you, Edgar, I thought. I was still missing a few key pieces of information, but it was starting to fall into place, like snowflakes on a Colorado mountaintop. And the few things I didn’t know yet, I knew where to find.
In this book.
There was a reason why Edgar was who he was, why he did what he did. And I was going to discover it. Before his damned Day of Ascension. Before it was too late.
Who are you? Where did you come from?
29
“Please, Nana, please. We’ll be careful.”
“No. You’re too young. You children should stay near the house.”
“We’re old enough. Honest.”
“Ernie, I’ve given you my answer.”
“But Nana!”
The twins had lived with their grandmother for almost a month before she relented, on a bright summer morning when the California air was so cool and the sun so warm even she must’ve found the temptation irresistible. Her small rural house backed up against a forest full of brush and hidden dangers, maple and oak and tall pines, redwoods and relicts of redwoods. Even better, not a quarter mile beyond the forest was a vast expanse of beach, a private access road to the Pacific Ocean. Nana’s family had bought this choice land not far from Salinas at the turn of the century and never let it go, even though they were poor as dirt and it came to be worth a substantial sum. But what good did it do the twins if they weren’t allowed to leave the house?
“I want you children where I can see you. No telling what kinds of mischief you might get into.” She had a cat in her arms, a huge peach-colored Maine coon that stared at Ernie with eyes that never blinked. “I know what you were up to when your parents weren’t watching and I won’t have any of it. You just stay put.”