I felt faint, but still more resolved. The lacings of my corset bowed behind my back, and I gasped, pulling my own flesh in as the stowaway pressed against it. I felt the bones bend, and the silk threads, in the claws of something horrid.
“A dreamer,” I said, thinking of my own miserable, missing nights. “That does not matter. What one does in the dark is not a thing one must own in the light.”
“If that were the truth of things, then murders might be done at midnight and never a murderer jailed for them,” Poe said.
I thought of fingerbones, of a ribcage, of a man’s wedding ring I’d found in the bosom of my dress. I thought of pocket watches and ink pens, of men I’d never met, of a black silk tie undone and knotted again about my wrist. I thought of a carved ivory cane I’d found beside my bed, the knob carved into the shape of a skull. All these things could have belonged to a man like the man before me, and too, he resembled a man I’d known once, long ago, a man who had been my husband.
I thought of the true reason I’d fled, a sudden waking in the darkest hours, finding myself far from home. I thought of the man I’d found before me, on his back, a man who looked enough like this one to be a twin to him. This one was not dead, no, but moaning on the platform of a train, swearing up and down that he was not waking but dreaming, insisting that he was doomed. It was too early in the morning for a crowd, and I leaned over his face and heard my own hiss, my own voice honeyed and covetous. I felt my body hum at proximity to the man and to his mind, but he was drugged and nearly insensible, and the lights in the station were beginning to be lit. I fled. My body was nothing human at all. I had torn his papers from his case, and rifled through them, hunting I know not what. What did the stowaway want? A maker? A parent? The man who had created it? What did it want with me, but a vessel? I’d been too long a vessel for this monster. I’d been too long hungry for meals I did not wish to consume.
“Take it away from me,” I said to the poet. “Can you do that?”
“Perhaps,” the poet said. “That is my aim.”
I felt the stowaway longing for something, but what I knew not. It did not want me, though it accompanied me. It had never wanted me. It wanted a man, or a friend, or a companion other than I. Where had it come from? The country beyond the wall? The ship anchored in the bay? The place where night slept when the sun was in the sky?
If I could not be rid of my monster, I would go to Thule myself. If it was death I courted, so be it. I glanced up at the angle of the sun. Still enough time in the day for safety. The stowaway slept.
“Accompany me,” I said, and the poet looked at me. The stowaway clasped and unclasped my fingers, stretched itself inside the borders of my body. It had been days since I’d fed on the meal the stowaway wished for, and I knew I had only hours before it would overcome me.
Poe took my arm and I felt him trembling. Together, we walked to Winchester Street, three beings, each breathing and longing, each desirous of its own story.
And now the story of the poet and the story of the lady and the story of the stowaway converge into one line, fiction and fact pressed too closely together to tell one from the other. The waking world and the sleeping one are the same, each engineered by dreamers of one kind or another. The poet writes an obituary for himself. The poet writes a tale of grief, his wife lost, his love dead. The poet is in a pit, and above him a pendulum. He will not marry again. He will be denied, and with that denial will come the rest of his life, the last year on earth. He writes on, the monster beside him, and the lady he’s made of all the ladies he’s lost. He writes himself down Winchester street, walking with a companion who may or may not be visible to anyone else in Providence. There will be no record of anyone named MacFarlane, nor of anyone met at a hotel. There will be nothing but this poet walking through the streets and to a portraitist, in the worst week of his life.
Is he raving? He is raving. Is he drunk and damaged? He is. Has he been bitten by a dog and does he wish to drink the ocean itself? Does he wish to transport himself to Thule by sipping the boundary between the imagined and the real, drinking it down until all that lies between his words and his life is a tender desert?
He does.
Annabel Lee is a child and he is a child (he is not a child) and Lenore is nevermore. Virginia is coughing and singing at a piano, blood spattering the keys, and then she is drunk on charity wine, and then she is dead, her cheeks flushed a color that cannot appear in Thule. Made of ice and gray is the heart of the poet, and in his kingdom, on his dark throne, he sits, as all of it melts into a bath of silver nitrate and acid ink.
He wishes himself extinguished.
The studio of Masury & Hartshorn was on the second floor, and we made our way up the stairs, my companion half-collapsing as he climbed. Inside my body, I felt the sleeping stowaway dreaming of meat. I would not feed it. I would resist. The stairwell smelled of chlorine and chemicals, a bracing scent that revived me to the task at hand. I had a body that was my own still, despite its inhabitant, nostrils that could burn and a throat that could close. I glanced at the man beside me, and wondered. Could I deliver him? Could I deliver us both?
We entered through glass doors into a room suffused in blue light, a sort of greenhouse with an intricate mechanism of shades and shadows. The walls were papered in cobalt, and the ceiling was a skylight with reflecting mirrors set at an angle beneath it. There, we found a young man polishing a silver plate with a soft cloth. He looked up at us through thick glasses, and raised his eyebrows at the spectacle before him. It was little wonder. A woman in a gaudy dress accompanied by a man on the brink of death. I could see the photographer considering us as subject.
“Messr. Masury?” I asked. I brought out the card the medium had given me in New York.
“No. I am Edwin Manchester,” he said. I could not believe my luck.
“You, then, are the man I am seeking,” I said, and passed the card to him. He read its contents, and looked more closely at me. He took my hand and weighed it in his own, and then pinched my wrist between two fingers. My flesh was denser than it ought to be, I well knew. I felt as though I contained sand, and indeed, I did. The night was made of sand and stars, and all of it was too heavy for a human body to bear.
“I see,” he said. “And your companion?”
“This is Mr. Poe,” I said.
The photographer’s eyebrow raised higher. “It is an honor,” he said. “A man of your stature in the spirit world.”
“He suffers a similar malady,” I said. “I believe it is related to the kingdom from whence my trouble came.”
The photographer looked closely at Poe.
“He has suffered a loss rather than a weight,” he said. “You have more than you require, and he has less.”
“I have enough in my purse to pay for both portraits, if you might assist him as well as I.”
“I will need no payment for his image,” Manchester said. “It will be displayed in this shop as advertisement of our services.”
“I am not possessed,” Poe said. “I am in debt. I have left something aboard a ship as collateral.”
“I see as much,” said Manchester. “You are missing your soul rather than carrying another within your body. I can assist in this as well.”
The daguerreotypist took off his apron, placing the silver plate on a table. I looked into it and was startled by the mirror it presented, my hair in disarray, and for a moment, my eyes glowing the way the stowaway’s eyes glowed, my skin a sea of stars.
I glanced at the portraits on display in the studio, the way their subjects seemed to float, each in their own transparent darkness, their faces made of gilded dust. Did some of those portraits contain demons and ghosts? Were some of them exorcisms, or were they only portraits of the wealthy? I could not say.