The Poe Shadow Read online

  I leaned against a post supporting the awning of a daguerreotyping establishment. Soon, a carriage that I recognized drove up the street. It was the same hackney cab that had been waiting for the Baron and Bonjour the other night. I could only imagine how the Baron had cajoled or threatened the original coachman to gain private use of the carriage. Bonjour stepped down. The same lean, light-skinned black man sat in the driver’s seat. I learned later that the Baron had secured the service of this slender slave still in his teen years, whose name was Newman, to drive and deliver messages for them. He had told Newman that if he performed well, he would purchase the slave’s freedom from his master.

  Bonjour quietly reported to the Baron, in French, that at nightfall “we meet him at the Baltimore Cemetery.” That was all I could hear.

  I returned to Glen Eliza and pulled the city directory from the shelf. The Baron Dupin had revealed that the “Reynolds” in the street with him was a carpenter. In the directory, the entry for the beguiling surname with that occupation and an address close to where I saw the two men read thus:

  REYNOLDS, HENRY, CARPENTER, CORNER FRONT AND LOW

  What could this inconspicuous carpenter I had seen in the street have had to do with Poe? The one sort of person who never employs a carpenter, after all, was someone traveling, as Poe had been in Baltimore. That I could know without the aid of ratiocination. And this particular Mr. Reynolds himself had denied seeing the poet.

  I thought more about the Baron Dupin’s comments on the street. He had implied that Henry Reynolds had been with Poe in Ryan’s, had witnessed something. I sat thinking gravely about why this Reynolds might have been with Poe in his hour of misery, and how the Baron would know…

  There was mention of the election. “Election days are rather wild in Baltimore, Mr. Baron.” And the “other judges.” Reynolds had been at Ryan’s, perhaps, in some connection to the elections, since Ryan’s was used that day as the Fourth Ward polling station. I burrowed through our collection of newspapers. I stopped when I found the Sun from October 3, 1849. That was the day when Poe was discovered in Baltimore in “shocking condition,” as one of the papers had said, at Ryan’s.

  There, in the political department of the newspaper, was the name “Henry Reynolds,” on a page with a long list of Baltimore’s election judges, men who administered the oaths to voters and oversaw the polls. Reynolds was one of the election judges for the Fourth Ward’s polling place, Ryan’s hotel. This was Reynolds’s local poll. That explained why the Baron had been hounding him so close to Ryan’s—it was right near where the carpenter lived.

  I was burning to speak aloud about my discovery. But if I told Duponte, I would certainly be reproved. He would repeat, philosophically, his previous pronouncement that we not speak to witnesses. “We can ascertain everything we need obliquely,” he would say. Besides, the Baron Dupin had already spoken with Reynolds, he would reason; the Baron had contaminated him, not to mention most other persons in Baltimore.

  I repeated silently to myself that Duponte was the world’s most eminent analyst, that my contribution should be nothing more ambitious than providing for his needs. Yet, now I could not stop myself from thinking who him might be—the man the Baron and Bonjour were to meet on the dangerous grounds of the Baltimore Cemetery tonight according to what I had overheard. I could not help but wonder this, and wonder whether their rendezvous touched the subject of Reynolds. When darkness fell, I excused myself for some air.

  I secured a coach and rode through the streets into a northeastern quarter of the city where one would prefer to have daylight. Closing in on the Baltimore Cemetery, my carriage came to a choppy halt. The horses pulled and quivered.

  “Driver, do you not have control over the horses?” I asked.

  “No, sir, I suppose I do not.”

  “Stop here! I will walk the rest of the way.”

  “Here, sir? You’ll walk here?”

  I would have asked myself the same question if I were not so guided by a need to know more about the Baron. I stepped hesitatingly through the gates of the graveyard and stayed at the perimeter, as close as possible to the nearest light at Fayette and Broadway.

  I spotted the Baron’s carriage ahead and kept enough of a distance to be safely concealed by the night. I could see that a heavy package was being transferred into the vehicle, and then another figure disappeared into the dark of the cemetery. Though I was careful not to be noticed by them, I was taken with a rush of panic when their carriage started to drive away from the cemetery. I had no wish to be alone in this kingdom of the dead after dark (no Baltimorean would), and I scurried along with the grace of a rodent.

  Now hurrying to the right of the graveyard, I followed the sounds of the carriage toward the Washington College Hospital—the hospital where Edgar Poe had been brought from Ryan’s hotel, and where he had died. This large brick building, with its two severe towers hovering above, was hardly less dismal than the neighboring burial yard. In fact, not long after Poe’s death, the faculty of the college had decided the location was too inconvenient to the center of Baltimore, and there was now only sporadic use of the building as a hospital. The college, overstraining its financial resources with new locations, was now attempting to sell the barren edifice and its property.

  The Baron’s carriage was parked nearby. I found the gates to the hospital yard locked.

  “No more bodies!” a voice shouted at me, from a front window of the building.

  I ignored this strange pronouncement and was testing the gate again when the caretaker appeared once more in a state of agitation.

  “We don’t need no more bodies! We got a fresh one in!”

  Newly deceased corpses were used by the doctors to instruct their students in the practice of surgery. The resurrection men would furtively sneak into cemeteries and use an iron rod with a hook on the end to pierce a hole in a coffin. These fishermen of bodies would catch the corpse under the chin and pull it up from the ground, sometimes only hours after it had received a respectful burial. The proximity of this cemetery to the college hospital made it an especial target for the theft of bodies. Few persons even of the bravest constitution would venture near the Baltimore Cemetery and Washington College Hospital at night, for it was said that sometimes, when no fresh corpse was to be found, passersby would be kidnapped and made to suit the purpose—earning the kidnappers the usual ten-dollar award from the doctors.

  “You heard me now? No more bodies.” The face squinted from its place in the window.

  “My apologies, sir,” I said.

  He retreated inside. I paced along the fence until I found a section lying flat in the mud and stepped over this. The street door to the hospital building was still unlocked from the recent entry of the Baron Dupin and Bonjour.

  This division of the hospital seemed empty. It was much colder in here than outside, as though the old building congealed and chilled the air. I jumped every time there was a noise, thinking the caretaker had heard me come in and would nab me, but soon I realized that the windows and doors up and down the giant structure were slamming from the wind.

  I climbed the stairs cautiously and upon reaching the third floor heard garbled voices from above. It sounded like the Baron and Bonjour were speaking with someone in a fourth-floor lecture room. However, the stairs curved right past that room, and as the door to that lecture room was open, I could not ascend the stairs without them seeing me. Meanwhile, I could hear their conversation only faintly.

  I have told you, said an unfamiliar voice.

  I surveyed my surroundings. If I could not raise my position quickly by some means other than the stairs, my aim would be lost. There did not seem to be a rear staircase. There was, however, a closet filled with barrels. Removing two of the lids in search of some helpful tools, I gasped to find them filled to the top with human bones.

  Growing despondent at having come so far to no avail, I soon found a hollow shaft in the wall that seemed like a sort of oversized dumb
waiter. Though it was pitch-black in the shaft except for the light that dripped in from each floor, I reached inside and, fortunately enough, could feel there was a hoist and pulley. It rose up from below and continued above—right up to the lecture room. A stroke of great luck, it seemed.

  Finding that my body fit with surprising ease into the passage, I placed my hat on the ground and then wrapped my legs as tightly as I could around the rope and inched upward by pulling on the opposite end of the rope. The air was noxious and stale. I tried my best not to look down at the three stories below as I approached the fourth floor. The conversation became clearer with each small advance upward toward the lecture room.

  The man who was with them had a loud voice, almost as theatrical as the Baron’s.

  “And now the newspapermen have been dunning me about it. Why we must speak more of this, I cannot see.”

  “The particulars,” Bonjour said calmly. “We need all your particulars.”

  “You see,” Baron Dupin continued Bonjour’s thought, “we are close to understanding exactly what happened to Poe on that singular day he was brought to you. You, Brother Moran, shall be the hero in a tale of injustice.”

  An intrigued pause in the exchange. Meanwhile, I looked around at the narrow and dark tunnel enclosing me. When I groped the wall for balance, it was slimy and cold. Then a pair of red eyes appeared in a crevice along the wall and a rat, alarmed by my hand on its hiding place, extended itself toward me. “Choo, choo,” I pleaded with the rodent. Its horrific blood-red stare nearly caused me to slide back down, but my determination to hear more allowed me to climb closer to the voices.

  The bit about being a hero seemed to enlarge Moran’s voice as he continued. “Edgar Poe was brought in the afternoon of a Wednesday, around five, sent by hack. The driver assisted me in lifting him out. I paid him myself.”

  “Was there nobody else in the coach other than Poe and the driver?” asked the Baron.

  “No. There was only a card from Dr. Snodgrass, the magazine editor, informing me that the man inside was Edgar Poe and required assistance. We gave him a very comfortable room on the second-floor tower with a window facing the courtyard. He was unconscious of his condition—who brought him or with whom he had been associating.”

  “What did Mr. Poe say? Did he mention the name Grey or E. S. T. Grey?”

  “Grey? No. He talked, but it was vacant conversation with imaginary objects on the walls. He was pale, I remember, and drenched in perspiration. We tried to induce tranquillity. Naturally, I tried to get more information from him. He was able to mention that he had a wife in Richmond. I have since come to understand they were not yet married; no doubt he was confused mentally. He did not know when he had come to Baltimore or how he came to be here. That is when I said we would make him comfortable enough to soon enjoy the society of his friends.”

  As Moran was speaking, I climbed nearly even with the lecture room. My outstretched hand groped the dark and landed on some solid material. Canvas, it seemed. I squinted for a better view. This must have been the bag that was placed in the Baron’s carriage at the cemetery. Its lower portion was now even with my head. Patting it with my hand, I struck upon the realization that I was grasping a lifeless human foot. Suddenly, I realized what the Baron had brought from the cemetery and knew that this was no dumbwaiter. The shaft I had climbed was used to hoist corpses to the various floors’ dissection rooms.

  The body had been moved from the rope on which I was clinging to a hook in the shaft, and by peering into the lecture room, I could see why it had not yet been transferred inside. There was already the body of a dead man, or part of a body, salted and covered with a white cloth on the examination table in the middle of the room. Aprons, both clean and bloody, were hanging nearby. They could not move in this new subject until the old one was disposed of.

  I shuddered at this sight and my closeness to this fresher corpse. I breathed quicker to try to calm myself, but that let in a horrific stench I hadn’t noticed before. My grip loosened.

  I slipped down fast—and down more—nearly an entire floor down. Scrambling my legs into the side of the shaft, I attempted to regain my balance so I would not drop four stories to a certain demise in the eternal blackness below.

  “What was that?” I heard Bonjour say. “That noise? It’s from inside the wall. The hoisting shaft.”

  I steadied my grip and made myself as still as the corpse now several feet above me.

  “Perhaps our little gift to you has woken up, Dr. Moran.” The Baron laughed in a way perhaps no man had ever done in the immediate vicinity of two dead bodies. The Baron leaned through the opening and peered down into the shaft. I was now in the dark center of the passage and, miraculously, was blocked from the Baron’s view by the bag with the corpse. He returned his head to the room.

  “Never mind,” said Moran, “we secure the windows and doors with ropes in this building, and the place still seems to make more noise than any of the patients ever did.”

  I then saw Bonjour trade places with the Baron at the shaft opening, and I became more anxious. She leaned fearlessly inside the horrible compartment.

  “Take care, miss!” Moran said.

  Bonjour now launched herself fully into the shaft, and for a moment I was certain she would land on top of me. Instead she caught the rope with one hand and then between her knees to steady herself. Moran must have been protesting above, since I could hear the Baron trying to placate him. I clung to my position for my life and prayed for a miracle. I could almost feel Bonjour’s eyes pierce the darkness directly onto my uncovered head.

  She lowered herself inch by inch toward me, raising my side of the rope so that I was involuntarily moving nearer to her.

  Eyes closed tight, ignoring the drops of cold perspiration, I waited for my discovery. A terrible inhuman shriek broke my concentration—at a breath, an army of voracious black rats rushed up the walls of the shaft. They ran en masse toward Bonjour, as though involuntarily attracted by her. Several propelled themselves onto my shoulders and back, their wiry claws attaching to my coat and daring me not to scream.

  “Only rats,” Bonjour murmured after a moment, then kicked some of the creatures off the walls, sending them dropping down. The Baron extended a hand and helped her back into the lecture room.

  “For goodness’ sake,” I gasped in gratitude to the beasts. I brushed off two that had remained perched on my back.

  Since I could still hear most of the conversation, I decided to pull myself back up only a few inches and stay at that safer position.

  “If you will go on with the details, Doctor,” said the Baron. “You told Poe you would bring his friends to him.”

  Moran paused in hesitation. “Perhaps I should consult with Mr. Poe’s family and friends before speaking with you further. There were some cousins of his, when we were treating him—if I remember right, a Mr. Neilson Poe and a friend, a lawyer, Mr. Z. Collins Lee…”

  The Baron sighed loudly.

  “Let us see what is on the doctor’s table,” Bonjour said playfully. I could hear her rustling the white blanket on the naked cadaver.

  “See here!” Moran gasped with obvious embarrassment. “What are you doing?”

  “I have seen men before,” Bonjour replied happily.

  “Do not shock the young doctor, my dear!” the Baron cried.

  “Perhaps we should take this deceased gentleman home for our study,” Bonjour said, rolling the table away. Dr. Moran protested vigorously. Bonjour continued: “Come now, Doctor. No halves—finder keeper. Besides, I wonder, Baron, if the family of that young woman we have hoisted up in that shaft would be interested to know her body’s missing from the grave and could be found here, waiting to be diced to pieces by the dandyish doctor.”

  “Most interested, I’d think, sweetheart!” said the Baron.

  “What? But we do this to learn to save lives! You brought that other body here yourselves!”

  “On your request, Doctor,”
said Bonjour, “and you have accepted it in exchange for the information my master asks for.”

  The Baron, sotto voce, leaned in to Moran: “You can see you had the wrong sow by the ear, Doctor.”

  The heroism of the doctor’s voice deflated. “I see the gist now. Very well. Back to Poe then. I told him, in trying to comfort him, that he would soon enjoy the society of his friends. He broke out with much energy and said, I remember, The best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol. When he beheld what had become of him, he was ready to sink into the earth, and so on, as one talks when depressed in spirits. He then slipped into a violent delirium until Saturday evening, when he began calling for ‘Reynolds’ again and again, for six or seven hours until the morning, as I have told you the other day. Having enfeebled himself from exertion he said, ‘Lord help my poor soul’ and expired. That is all.”

  “What we wonder now,” said the Baron, “is whether Poe had been induced to have taken some sort of artificial stimulus, a drug—opium, perhaps—that put him in this condition?”

  “I do not know. The truth, sir, is that Poe’s condition was quite sad and strange, but there was no particular odor of alcohol on his person, that I can remember.”

  During this exchange, I alternated between careful attentiveness to their words and desperate attempts to calm my pounding heart and breathing from my near discovery by Bonjour. When they closed the interview to the Baron’s satisfaction, and I felt convinced by listening for footsteps they had left the fourth floor, I climbed past the body and heaved myself through the opening in the wall. I checked that the coast was clear and dropped into the lecture room. Flattening myself on the floor, I coughed out the air of the dead and gulped in rapid, grateful bursts.