William Bernhardt - Dark Eye

Then there was the passage in the coded message Edgar sent us: From that one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.

Which, placed in context, sounded for all the world like the big-bang theory, once I read it over about six times and decoded some of the nonscientific terminology. My history of science was sketchy, but I thought that idea came later, that in Poe’s era people were still mostly buying into the Adam and Eve bit. How could Poe know this?

Normally, I tried to empathize with a living, breathing person, but this time, I let my mind wander into the psyche of this writer, long dead, who had penned this bizarre work. What was he trying to accomplish? And what did Edgar-our Edgar-get out of it? Why was this book so significant to him that he led us to it? It was baffling.

Until I started to see a weird sort of pattern emerging, a secret latticework woven between the sentences. And some disturbingly familiar terminology. Dream-Land. Ascension. Golden Age.

That was when I started to get it.

I was so absorbed in my reading I didn’t even notice the woman standing at the other end of my desk. She had to clear her throat, then drum her fingers.

“Thallium.”

I looked up. It was Jennifer Fuentes, the toxicologist.

I squinted. “You’re saying I need Valium? Do I seem stressed?”

“Not Valium. Thallium. A deadly poison.”

I pulled my head out of the book. “And the reason you’re saying this is…”

“I found it in Fara Spencer’s mouth, just like the O’Bannon kid predicted. I used a wide range of reagents for different hard-to-detect poisons. Thallium clicked. The spectrophotometer confirmed it. It had broken down, as any poison would over that period of time. So to double-check, I put the sample in a graphite tube and heated it to vaporize the poison. Put it under the blue light. Voilà. Thallium. Judging from what was left more than a week after her death, I’d say it was a significant dosage.”

“Enough to kill her?”

“Oh, yeah. Instantly.”

“So he took the heart out after she was dead.”

“I think so. Immediately thereafter, before the blood had a chance to coagulate.”

“But she wouldn’t have felt the pain.”

“Not if she was dead.”

Of course not. He’d captured her, sure. Probably terrorized her, just like he did me. And he’d taken the heart, because that’s what Poe wanted him to do, and that’s what he wanted to mail to me. But he couldn’t do it while she was alive. She wasn’t an offering, and outside of his twisted plan for redemption, he lacked the requisite cruelty. Or at least one of his personalities did.

And Darcy had known it all along.

“Tell me about thallium, Doc. Is it hard to get, like that voodoo zombie stuff?”

She shook her head. “Rat poison, most likely. Contains thallium sulphate. Half the people in Vegas probably have it in their garage, never suspecting how deadly it can be.”

“But Edgar would know. Edgar knows everything.”

“I feel like an idiot. I would’ve missed it altogether if it hadn’t been for that kid.”

“Don’t feel bad, Doc. You were meant to miss it.”

Jennifer walked humbly back to her office and I returned to my reading.

I’m getting close to you, Edgar, I thought. I was still missing a few key pieces of information, but it was starting to fall into place, like snowflakes on a Colorado mountaintop. And the few things I didn’t know yet, I knew where to find.

In this book.

There was a reason why Edgar was who he was, why he did what he did. And I was going to discover it. Before his damned Day of Ascension. Before it was too late.

Who are you? Where did you come from?

“Please, Nana, please. We’ll be careful.”

“No. You’re too young. You children should stay near the house.”

“We’re old enough. Honest.”

“Ernie, I’ve given you my answer.”

“But Nana!”

The twins had lived with their grandmother for almost a month before she relented, on a bright summer morning when the California air was so cool and the sun so warm even she must’ve found the temptation irresistible. Her small rural house backed up against a forest full of brush and hidden dangers, maple and oak and tall pines, redwoods and relicts of redwoods. Even better, not a quarter mile beyond the forest was a vast expanse of beach, a private access road to the Pacific Ocean. Nana’s family had bought this choice land not far from Salinas at the turn of the century and never let it go, even though they were poor as dirt and it came to be worth a substantial sum. But what good did it do the twins if they weren’t allowed to leave the house?

“I want you children where I can see you. No telling what kinds of mischief you might get into.” She had a cat in her arms, a huge peach-colored Maine coon that stared at Ernie with eyes that never blinked. “I know what you were up to when your parents weren’t watching and I won’t have any of it. You just stay put.”

“But there’s nothing to do in the yard!”

“And what is it you think you’re going to do in the forest? Don’t you know that place is full of ticks? Poison ivy? Do you know what poison ivy looks like? I’ll bet you don’t. You get a dose of that and you’ll be miserable for days. Snakes out there, too.”

Ernie was unconvinced.

“Did I tell you about the wild boars? My mother saw one, just before the Lord took her home. Teeth like razors. Could eat little things like you two in a single gulp.”

But Ernie did not relent. To him, the forest was an unexplored wonderland teeming with adventure. Even from a distance he could see its dark and foreboding corners, and the mystery made it all the more alluring.

“We could play lots of games in there. We could build forts and play hide-and-seek.”

“You can do all that in the yard.”

“Not good. Not like we could there.”

Nana’s eventual surrender was inevitable, given how both Ernie and Ginny pounded her with the relentlessness only eight-year-olds can muster. “But just for one hour. And I want you to carry this tin whistle. You get in any trouble, meet up with a wild boar or something, you blow on it, hard. And when you get back, I’ll be inspecting you for ticks.”

“All right, Nana. We will, Nana,” he said, throwing himself up against her and hugging her tightly.

“That’s enough of that,” she said, pushing him away.

“And what about the beach? Can we go there, too?”

“Under no circumstances are you to go near the beach. I couldn’t hear you out there even if you did blow that whistle. Now get along, before I change my mind.”

“Yes, Nana,” he said, already running.

And so the revels began. They were like pagans, Ginny and Ernie, romping through the forest, worshiping each other and secret gods known to no one but themselves. They would pretend to be astronauts on another planet searching for new life-forms and alien civilizations. They would play endless games of chase. There were no other children living anywhere near them, and they never minded in the least. They were a world unto themselves.

On some afternoons, Ernie’s favorite ones, after the running and chasing were done, they would sit together on their makeshift table, a huge stump of a tree that had been logged a generation before. Hidden amidst the maple and second-growth redwoods, they would tell each other everything. They had no secrets. Why would they? Each was an extension of the other. As far as they were concerned, they were two parts of the same person.