Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

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 dumbwaiter. 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.