Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

Regaining my senses sufficiently I plunged into the crowd of umbrellas and soon located the back of the man. He had slowed to a stroll, almost a summer saunter! But I was deceived; this was not the same man. Upon gaining ground, I noticed that in the clouds of fog everyone looked approximately like the subject of my search, even the fairest ladies and darkest slaves. That creeping mist concealed and blended us together, disturbing the regulated order of the streets. And I own that each person tried their best to hold their heads and to stride in perfect indifferent imitation of that one man, that phantom.

There on the corner a stream of gaslight broke through the thick air from a window half hidden underground. It came from the outside lamps of a tavern, and thinking this might be a beacon to attract someone of conniving motives, I rushed down and burst inside. I pushed through the clusters of men intent on their drinks, and at the end of a long row I saw one crumpled over a table. His once-fancy coat was just the one I'd noticed worn by my phantom.

I took his arm. He weakly lifted his head and gave a start upon seeing my intent countenance.

"A mistake. Sir. Sir! A grave mistake on my part!" he cried. His words died together drunkenly.

This was not the man either.

"Mr. Watchman," a nearby inebriate explained to me in a sympathetic loud whisper. "That's John Watchman. I drink to him, the poor fellow! And I drink to you, too, if you'd like."

"John Watchman," I agreed, though at that point this name meant nothing to me (if I had seen it in the newspaper columns, it was with only passing attention). I left some copper coins for the continuation of the man's indulgences, and quickly returned above to the street to press ahead with the search.

I saw the true culprit revealed to me where the fog lessened. At one given time it seemed, in my distress, that all the inhabitants of the street were giving chase to him, summoning their courage to hunt him.

Did I say our Phantom was my height? Yes, and that is true. But this is not to suggest that he resembled me in any way. Indeed, I was perhaps the only one on the streets then not bearing a strict similarity to my subject. I, with dusty hair of a color like the skin of a tree, which I kept well-groomed, and small, reasonable, clean-shaven features too often called boyish. He-this Phantom-had different proportions to his body. His legs seemed nearly double mine in length, so that however briskly I went along, I could not reduce that gap between us.

As I ran through the prickly mist, I was filled with frantic and excitable thoughts with nothing tying them together except that they thrilled me beyond any logic. I collided with a shoulder, another, and once almost the entire body of a large man who could have flattened me out on the red brick of the side pavement. I slipped on a track of dirt, coating my left side with mud. After that I was all at once alone-nobody in sight.

I stood perfectly still.

Now that I'd lost my prey-or he had lost his-my eyes focused, as though I had put on a pair of spectacles. Here I was, not twenty yards away from it: the narrow Presbyterian burial ground, where the thin slabs of stone sloping out from the ground were only barely darker than the air. I tried to think whether the interloper had actually led me here through half of Baltimore as he fled my pursuit. Or had he been gone for the whole length of the chase, before I came near this place? This place where Edgar Poe now rested, but could not.

Many years earlier, when I was but midway through my teen years, there was an incident on a train I should recount. I was riding with my parents. Although the ladies' car permitted family members of women to sit with them, it was quite full, and only my mother was able to stay. I sat with my father a few cars away, and we walked through the train to visit Mother at regular intervals, into that compartment where no spitting and cursing could take place. After one such excursion, I returned to our seats ahead of Father and found two gentlemen in the seats moments ago occupied by us. I politely explained to the men their mistake. One of the men flew into a violent passion, warning me that I would have to "walk over his dead body" to get our seats back.

"I shall do that very thing if you do not step aside," I replied.

"What did you say, lad?"

And I repeated the same absurd statement with equal calm.

Imagine me as rather a thin boy at fifteen-stringy, you can say. Typically, I might have begged the pardon of the occupant and diligently searched out inferior seats. You wonder meanwhile about the second interloper in this episode, the other thief of our seats. He, it appeared by a similar look around the eyes, was the brother of the first; from his bobbing head and stare, I believed him to be slow-witted.

You may wonder also as to my reaction. I had been enveloped in my father's presence shortly before. Father was always a sovereign to all around him. You see, in the moment, it was perfectly natural to me to assume that I, too, could adjust the world as fit my sense of things. This had been the sneaking nature of the delusion.

I may as well finish the story. The villain did not stop landing severe blows to my face and head until my father's return to the train car. Less than a minute later, my father and a conductor had banished the men into another train of the car to be removed at the next depot.

"Now, what did you do, my boy?" my father asked me afterward as I lay prostrate across our seats in a haze.

"I had to, Father! You were not here!"

"You provoked someone. You might have been killed. What would you prove then, Quentin Hobson Clark?" I looked back at the blurry image of this man lecturing me, standing above me with his usual composure, and knew the difference between us.

Now I thought of the new warning I had received. It is unwise to meddle… The Phantom's image locked up my mind beside the demon of the train from my childhood. How I burned to talk about it! My great-aunt at this time was residing with me for a few days to help oversee the housekeeping. Could I tell Great-Auntie Clark about the threat?

"You ought to have been caught young and trained carefully," she would say-or something along those lines. She was a great-aunt on my father's side, and applied the sternness of my father's business principles to promoting sober behavior more generally. Great-Auntie Clark praised Father for his "strong Saxon thoughts." Her affection for my father seemed to accrue partially to me, and she watched over me with dutiful vigilance.

No, I did not tell Great-Auntie Clark and soon she had departed from Glen Eliza. (Could I have told my father if he were alive?)

I wanted to tell Hattie Blum. She had always been pleased to hear of my personal enterprises. She alone had been able to speak to me after my parents' deaths in a tone and confidence that understood that though my parents had died, they were not corpses to me. Yet, as I had not seen her since the day we were supposed to have been engaged, I could not fathom how she would perceive my interest in this.

In a way, the Phantom's words attracted as much as they startled me. It is unwise to meddle with your lowly lies. Though he was warning me away, the cryptic words acknowledged that the perception of Poe could be meddled with-in other words, they could still be changed by me. In a way, that warning encouraged me.

I felt an excitement that was only remotely familiar and only half unwanted. It was different from anything I had known in our work.

One long afternoon at the office I sat looking at the street from my desk. Peter was nearby. He was in the middle of reprimanding our copying clerk over the quality of some affidavit when he glanced over at me. He returned to his speech, then glanced abruptly at me again. "All right, Quentin?"