“You will be first,” Manchester said. “Mr. Poe after. The sun is bright enough today.”
Poe nodded. I felt his fingers clench my arm more tightly, but he did not waver. Inside my skin, the stowaway extended sleeping fingers to touch those of Poe, but I did not acknowledge it.
Manchester gestured me onto a staircase, a platform with a small chair at its center, and I ascended, feeling my skirts draping down the stairs. Was I climbing to heaven?
“Stare into the sun,” Manchester told me, positioning me in a brace, my head supported by a stand, my skirts spread so that I seemed to be airborne. “I will remove this burden from you, but you must stay perfectly still for sixty seconds.”
I looked down at the poet, whose face was hopeful, though the evidence of years of despair was written on it, a cloth pleated by pain.
My spine convulsed where the stowaway wrapped about it, and I saw Poe glance at me, his face concerned, as Manchester aimed the camera at the tableau vivant he’d arranged.
A dark cloud passed over the sun, and a raindrop splattered on the glass panes above me. The monster moved.
Ten seconds. Twenty. My heart quivered in my breast and the stowaway stretched. Thunder outside, and the building rattled. Darker still.
Thirty seconds, and something began to shift inside my skin. I began to feel night falling over my body, stars appearing on the tips of my fingers, coming into light all over my flesh, beneath my dress and up and down my arms, brilliant points of pain and fire, and myself an indigo woman curtained in silk and satin. I heard my own voice cry out as the stowaway began to emerge.
“Stay still!” Manchester shouted. “Do not let it move you!”
I resisted the urge to let my body fall down the stairs and upon him. Not only upon him, but upon the innocent Poe. Their blood and bones, their organs like bright ink on a page made of snow. I would write the story of Thule with their flesh, I would—
Darkness slithered over my eyes, and I held them wide, trying to keep from doing what Night wanted me to do. I tasted metal where I’d bitten my tongue, and I heard myself hiss. A sound a dreamer might make whilst wandering a long passage, the way a scream might transform, in the voice of that sleeper, into a song. All these nights of invisibility, a wandering swath of stars falling upon the unlucky, all these nights, a woman made of nothingness.
There was a crashing sound, and there, before me, was Poe, his face pale as the moon, his eyes no longer anguished, but purposeful.
“TO ME,” he roared, and lurched up the staircase, his hands reaching for mine. He spun to face the camera as the shutter closed, his ungloved hand still clasping my own.
I felt the stowaway leave my body and rush out, into the air, into the camera, away.
The thunderclouds fled the sun, and the sky brightened. Night receded. I drew in a ragged breath.
The daguerreotypist withdrew the plate from the camera and darted to the developing room, donning a set of India rubber gauntlets as he went, but I could only look at Poe. He would not meet my gaze. What had he done?
Manchester emerged from the developing room.
“View it,” he said, and gestured us into the room. “It is not as you imagined it would be, and yet.”
A gleaming tray of mercury, held over a spirit lamp, and fumes that felt golden upon inhaling. The plate rested above the heated mercury, an image emerging in salt on its face, delicate as dust on a butterfly’s wing.
I watched it, praying that I’d see what ought to be in the daguerreotype and not something else. Hoping to see my image containing the stowaway, and all of it trapped within this plate of glass.
But as it emerged, I did not see the creature, nor did I see my own face. It was dark shadows appearing and then shifting through red and blue to black again, the eyes first and then the rest.
I saw Edgar Allan Poe, and within him, all around him, Night. The image was of the poet, suspended in the darkness of the background, and I could see myself in ghostly silhouette behind him, my face covered in stars, my eyes glittering, my fingers laced in his own.
The poet looked at me, and reached into his jacket. He removed a pot of ink, looked at me tenderly, and opened it. I watched him, uncertain, and then, suddenly, he flung it over me.
“Thank you,” he said.
Darkness. A blotting out, a removal from view.
The original Poe portrait, taken in desolate circumstances in the year eighteen forty-eight, the year before the poet’s death, is, over the years, lost and found, discovered in the possession of a traveling hypnotist, fallen from a drawing room wall, set on fire. It lives in legend, copied and etched, discussed, tattooed, made the subject of academic texts.
After the image was taken, the subject wandered the streets, visiting the home of a woman he had proposed to, and raving that he was doomed, that he was done for good. He screamed for his soul.
The daguerreotype depicts a man in a half-buttoned black dinner jacket, a rumpled white shirt, an ascot tied and wrapped tightly enough to suggest that it is keeping his head from tumbling off. He has a high white forehead, a dark mustache, tousled hair, and eyes sunk deep in a face lined with grief. He is a year from dying, but in the Ultima Thule portrait, he appears to have emerged from his tomb, and indeed, the image depicts the poet four days after his failed suicide by laudanum.
If one looks closely, with the proper knowledge, it is possible to see the figure behind him, a spectral form, a radiance draping over one of the man’s shoulders, an image of the missing, left in dust on a silver plate. Perhaps it is a woman, or perhaps it is something else entirely.
The business of portraiture is one of silver and gold by the ton, and the miserable face of the poet is immortalized in precious metal. The presence behind him is a stain rendered in darkness, silver nitrate, an abyss that reflects light.
This is a saint’s icon, Edgar Allan Poe’s image pressed like a kiss to a ground glass windowpane, and the form holding him is a glittering ghost, mutable as frost over a view of a city at night. Does it hold him as a lover or as a captive?
What is left inside this portrait?
That is one way to look at a photo of a ghost. Another way is to look at both figures, this portrait, this imaginary kingdom and its creator flickering in and out of the light, and see it as a record of more than one event, the moment when a poet’s soul was removed, the moment when a man counted down the seconds remaining in his life.
He counts them in syllables. He counts them in sentences. He counts them in stories. All that we see or seem, he writes. Is but a dream, within a dream.
Open the glass panes that house the portrait and blow, a single breath, and the image is only imagined again. Press a finger to the face of this ghost and watch him become thin air.
I felt myself disappearing, but I remained scored into the world, my skin a page with lines on it, my hair streaked with silver, my dress still as bright as it had been, but now obliterated.
The photographer faded as I faded, and the studio as well, whether they had been there or no. An imaginary Providence or a true one, I could not say. The blue wallpaper was night, and I was part of it now, and the mercury bath was stars, and I was part of that as well.
Thule was before me then, a white landscape of cliffs and women shrouded, a body—was it my body?—washing up on a coastline made of bones. I was the sea and I was a ship, and I was a city of ghosts.