Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

The Baron followed the lyceum director onto the platform and to the podium. I looked around desperately, trying to think of what to do, but found myself on a mental treadmill. Finally, I pushed forward onto the platform and attempted to at least divide the Baron from the podium. Then I saw the crowd-no, call it the mob, the endless, formless, hollering expanse of people's stares-and I understood why the Baron did not need Bonjour at his side to be protected. He was safe in a crowd. He was about to become legitimate again in the eyes of the world.

In the background, a lyceum clerk was fixing a light, causing it to sway disruptively, further confusing my senses in the dark hall. I could only shout for the lecture to be stopped and heard moans of displeasure in response.

I had lost all ability to articulate, all flow of logic. I shouted something about justice. I pulled and prodded, and was pushed in return. At some point in the fog of my memory, I can see there was the face of Tindley, the Whig doorkeeper, standing out in the crowd. A red parasol twirled in the horizon of my sight. I saw faces: Henry Herring, Peter Stuart, who pushed past the anxious crowd to come closer to the front. The old clerk from the athenaeum was there, too, squeezed into his seat, and newspaper editors from all the chief offices of the press. Sometime in all this, in the wavering light I saw it-the grin, the razor-sharp peculiar grin of mischief that Duponte had held for Von Dantker, now precisely plagiarized upon the face of the Baron. Then there was the noise, the only noise that could have risen above the excited clamor that my disturbance had now provoked. It was like a cannon burst. The first sent the stage lights crashing to the ground, drowning the whole place in darkness. And then there was another.

I jumped back amid the sea of screams and feminine shrieks at the sounds of gunfire. I trembled with a sudden chill, and from some macabre instinct put my hand to my chest. I remember only fragments after that:

The Baron Dupin above me and both of us falling together in a bloody tangle, upending the podium in the process…his shirt stained with a wide oval, the rim of which was a thick darkness the color of death…he groaning, gripping madly, passionately at my collar…a horrid weight over my body.

Then, both of us sinking, sinking into oblivion.

I WAS NOTsuspicious when Officer White took me in his coach from the lyceum to Glen Eliza. Think of it. I had more knowledge of the complex situation that had just occurred than anyone. Though I did not have unreserved confidence in the abilities of the police officers, I believed that with my assistance, Duponte could be found…and then he would find the truth the Baltimore police could not.

Officer White entered the drawing room of Glen Eliza with his clerk and several other police officers I had not seen before. I proceeded to transfer to White all the knowledge I possessed-from the arrival of Baron Dupin in Baltimore to the violent moment as I had just witnessed it. But from his interjections, I began to wonder how closely he was listening.

"Dupin is dying, " White kept repeating with different emphasis. "Dupin is dying."

"Yes, at the hands of these two rascals," I explained once more, "who pursued me through the city earlier, thinking I was trying to prevent their petty vengeance against the Baron."

"Then you saw one of them shoot the Baron at the lyceum?" asked Officer White, who sat at the edge of an armchair. The police clerk was all the while standing dumbly behind me. I never liked feeling watched, and I looked back repeatedly with an unsubtle desire that he would at least be seated.

"No," I answered the officer, "I couldn't see anything from the stage, with the glare of the lights shining and then going off, and that mob of people. A few faces…But it is most obvious, it had to be their deed."

"These two rascals you mention-names?"

"I do not know. One of them nearly did me in the day before. I was shot through the hat! He would be injured, no doubt, from our struggle, as I managed to cut him. I do not know their names."

"Tell me what you do know, Mr. Clark." The police officer had a distant tone.

"That they were French, that is most certain. Baron Dupin was in great debt. A Parisian creditor will never quit his harassment and dunning-even as far as Baltimore." I did not know if this was true of all Parisian creditors, but thought it best under the circumstances to make an axiom of it.

To this, Officer White merely bobbed his head as one would do to a rambling child.

"Claude Dupin had to be stopped-for the sake of Poe," he said.

I was surprised at this turn in the conversation. "Precisely," I replied.

"You told me earlier he had to be stopped-‘at all costs.'"

"Indeed, Officer." I hesitated then began again. "Yes, you see, what I meant…"

"He was certainly laid out awful flat," commented the clerk from behind my chair, "Dupin was. Flat as a hog barbecued."

"A hog barbecued, sir?" I asked.

"Mr. Clark," Officer White continued, "you wished to choke off his speaking at the lyceum. You told me as much beforehand when you came looking for your French friend."

"Yes…"

"That portrait you passed along to us, signed by one Von Dantker, was of the Baron. It shows him to a hair. Why had you commissioned a portrait of him?"

"No, it was not the same man! I did not commission anything!"

" Clark, you may gas and blow all you have a mind to later, but no more fables today! It is said that the Baron had precisely the same fantastic smile upon his face right before being shot as the one shown in this portrait! Unusual smile!"

My skin grew warm, my body sensing danger before I could think about what was happening. I halted when I noticed my shirt stained with the Baron's blood. Then I realized that my servants were shuffling around nervously in the corridors, away from their posts. The three or four police officers who had come with Officer White were nowhere to be seen in the room-and other policemen were now parading through the room, enough to constitute a standing army. I could hear footsteps ascending the stairs and moving in the bedrooms above. Glen Eliza was being searched even as I sat there. I felt as if the walls were sinking around me, and the image of Dr. Brooks's burning house came into my mind.

"You grabbed the Baron, even as he began to address the audience-"

"Officer! What do you mean to say?" We were talking over each other now.

"No one could account for your presence-and there is no trace of your friend, this ‘Mr. Duponte,' anywhere. "

"Officer, you are implying something…you may call me a story-teller if you like…!"

"…Poe has done you in once and for all."

"What? What do you mean?"

"Your obsessive dalliances with Mr. Poe's writings, Mr. Clark. You would have done anything to stop Baron Dupin talking of Poe, wouldn't you? You have admitted you assaulted and ‘cut' another Frenchman. You wished only for yourself to talk of Poe and nobody else. If someone indeed was involved with Mr. Poe's death, I wonder if that person would have exhibited signs of preoccupation with it-it's leading me to wonder about your own activities at the time Edgar Poe died."

As I strenuously objected, the police clerk came around and took my arm, asking in calm tones that I stand up and not struggle.

AT FIRST Iwas held in one of the cells across from Officer White's private rooms in the Middle District station house. At the sound of every footstep there rose in me a semi-desperate expectation. Imprisonment, I might interrupt myself to say, does not merely produce a feeling of being alone. Your entire history of loneliness returns to you piece by piece, until the cell is a castle of your mental misery. The memories of solitude flood over all other thoughts of the present or the future. You are only yourself. That is the world; no poet of the penal system could devise anything harsher than that.