Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

I had no doubt, however, that the real reason it had come to me was Officer White. An attempt to torment me and force me to admit my crime, to bemoan my wretched position in life. In the minuscule cell, there was no escaping it; if I looked away from the book during the night, my hand would fall on it in the paroxysms of unhealthy slumber. When it was daytime, I would hide it under my sleeping board so I would not see it, only to find my foot kick against it when I moved to sit up, the maniacal volume revealing itself by sliding out the other side. I would throw the book through the bars into the corridor, rejoicing to be rid of it, but upon my next waking it would appear again, neatly positioned next to my pitcher of water or on the end of my sleeping board-placed there by a prison official or, for all I knew, another prisoner bent on plaguing me.

After all this, I could not help myself. I began to read. Skipping Griswold's worthless comments, I instead took in Poe's letters that he'd interspersed throughout his memoir of the author. I wondered, soon after, when I found what was there, whether Officer White had any secret inkling of the abyss into which this would sink me.

Deep within-I cringe to remember-I found Poe had listed me in a letter among several names of people who might support his magazine, The Stylus, in the city of Baltimore. Griswold had written to Poe in reply, asking for more details. Then came this, in a subsequent letter from Poe elaborating on my identity:

"The Clark you ask about is a young man of idle wealth who, knowing my extreme poverty, has for years pestered me with unpaid letters." [1]

Each day I would set aside a moment of my highest lucidity to read the page again in an effort to ensure that it was not merely an apparition of mental fatigue. Unpaid letters! I could not believe it. Poe had- but you have already seen! -Poe had insisted I not pay advance postage on our correspondence, as if I would otherwise be offending our friendship. He had asked that I help him! ("Can you or will you help me?") He had called for my commitment directly! ("Pestered"?)

I could not stop repeating the words of Poe to myself and, worse yet, I could hear the words in the wearied voice of my father. Young man of idle wealth! The wealth that he had transmitted to me with so much industry and sense.

If only I knew how Poe's voice sounded, so my mind might abolish the other one! But at the moment, I could not even guess at how Poe might have talked. Perhaps he really did speak with my father's voice.

Pestered?…A young man of idle wealth.

I no longer found strength enough to leave my sleeping board. My feeble condition was obvious, and I could not bring myself to speak. After several days produced almost no sleep, I drifted off into continuous drowsiness, and I could not tell the difference between sleeping and waking states. I remember very little from this time except the undertone provided by the torrents of rain and regular claps of thunder that had been building now, on and off, for days.

There were no more visitors, no more faces to come to me except for indistinct police officers and guards. Although, once, I was certain I saw across from my cell a man whom I had seen before. The stowaway from the steamer Humboldt, the scene of Duponte's secret victory that made me feel as if a gift possessed by him had been bestowed onto me. There, in this dingy Baltimore prison, I thought in my dreamy hazes I saw him again, watching over me, but this time there was no sea captain to catch hold of his arms. There were also other strange moments, feeling every grain of my skin covered with bugs and flies, as one newspaper had reported Poe was found, only escaping this when waking up on my board in a cold perspiration.

With the probability of my own death by hanging gnawing at my bones, I would often rehearse the story in my mind that the Baron had told me about Catherine Gautier-only her face, as it gazed down with pale calm from the height of the gallows, sometimes looked like sweet Hattie, and other times like Bonjour, a wickedness creeping into the countenance. Meanwhile, the warden of the prison came through for inspections and, after determining that my senseless and speechless condition was authentic, ordered me to be moved to a cot on the first floor of the prison. When I was touched, I apparently gave only a cold shudder in response, and no pulling or shouting in my ear would make me stir.

I woke amid the new surroundings, and found myself the sole occupant of an apartment where not even the prisoners wanted to go-for though it was more comfortably appointed than the cells upstairs, here people were sent to die. The doctors detected nothing wrong with me physically, but concluded that my wavering sleep proved the die had been cast. Upon being asked some simple questions by agents of the police to test my consciousness, I remained silent or muttered unintelligibly. I was told later that when questioned as to my birthday, I repeated October 8, 1849, again and again-the date of Poe's funeral, which besides not being my birthday would have made me two years old.

For my part, I could call to mind only brief moments of myriad dreams. When news of my parents' death had first reached me, I had sat for many days in my chamber with a roving chill and illness. In my stupor, I had the clearest visions of speaking with my parents-conversations that had never occurred but were as real, or more so, as any that I had had in my life. In them, I repeatedly apologized for having given up so much, for not having heeded their years of advice as Peter did. Then I'd awake again. The book-the Griswold volume-had not followed me from my cell to the hospital chambers, and for this I was happy. I chuckled to myself, as though this were at last my great triumph.

There was not much light there in the penitentiary's hospital, the windows unscrubbed and filmy. Even on the morning the rain finally ceased, only a hint of daylight came through to the prison hospital rooms. The guards had been frantically moving prisoners around the building after flooding had begun to occur in some quarters. The hospital room had been safe from the flood so far, but that night I awoke with a shudder at a series of noises.

"Who's here?" I called out obliviously.

It was suddenly terribly cold and, as I swung my bare feet to the floor, a stream of cold water curled over my toes. I jerked back to the cot and groped for a candle. My eyes opened for what seemed the first time in years.

The floods had filled the sewer and had broken through the wall of the hospital chamber. I sat up and saw from the breach in the wall the darkness of the narrow passage open to me. The sewer, I knew, ran underneath the vast, high wall that surrounded the jail and passed into Jones Falls. There wasn't the smallest obstacle between here and there. Because I had not been exposed to light for days, my eyes were immediately able to assess the circumstances even in this darkness.

My mind turned rapidly, vivaciously. A new energy resurrected me from the funereal indolence I had been lying in. A half-formed idea, a certainty, propelled me forward to where the putrid water subsumed my ankles, my waist, reaching to my shoulders. Even as I became weighed down by the streaming water, it seemed I moved with greater swiftness, until I emerged where the gaunt towers of the prison could only be seen in the distant horizon.

This was my idea: Edgar Poe was still alive.

I was not ill, as you might think. There was no degradation of my mental acumen, despite the long ordeal of incarceration that led me to the realization-this half-formed idea. Edgar Poe had never been dead.

As my eyes turned to the outside of the prison for the first time in what seemed to be months or years (I would have believed either one if told so at this point), all knowledge related to the affair of Poe's death shaped itself in a new and startling way in my brain.