Roger Zelazny - The Black Throne

"It is—sacrificed."

"You cannot be serious."

"I cannot be otherwise," he replied. "Sir! I repeat! There is nothing to be gained in striking a dead man!

Release me!"

"Go to hell!"

"This is a state of mind with which I am not unfamiliar."

I felt Ligeia's hand upon my arm.

"Come away," she said.

I realized by degrees that I had dragged the man halfway out of his casket and was shaking him. Ligeia's other hand passed down my spine and I felt a warm current sweep through me. I let Valdemar fall back into his box.

"Yes," I said. "Yes."

She turned him off and led me away.

Yet was I back again the following days, for his answers seemed always to breed fresh questions:

"Bonjour, Monsieur Valdemar."

"Lady, I speak to you as one racked in the House of Pain—"

"Then I'm sure you'll welcome a little distraction. Eddie has a few more questions for you."

"Yes," I said. "It did not occur to me to ask earlier, but how did your—uh—remains come into the possession of Mr. Ellison when they had been in the custody of Griswold for all of this business you've been describing?"

"Mr. Peters and Emerson managed to spirit me away one night recently."

"Does Griswold know that we have you?"

"Yes."

"And he made no effort to recover you?"

"He no longer needed me once he had Annie."

"She can do anything you can?"

"She lacks my unique perspective—but she can satisfy his special needs for astral intelligence."

"How did he ever find a person in your condition, to begin with?"

"In good health and normal spirits."

"I do not understand."

"You asked how he found me."

"Then what changed you?"

"He did."

"Oh. You mean ..."

"He brought me to the point of death, then suspended me here."

"I'm sorry. I did not understand fully."

"Then release me. Let me die."

"I can't. We need you."

I drew back and looked away. Ligeia returned him to wherever he went between sessions and we blew out his candles.

"Coffee? Tea?"

"Yes."

It was three days before I approached him again. I watched storms come and go, I read some of Ellison's books and fiddled with his fascinating alchemical equipment. I even went to Captain Guy, had him open his armory and provide me with a saber. I commenced my old dismounted drills with the weapon then—at first, in my own room; then later, topside, at odd hours, when the deck was pretty much deserted. I liked working in the open air, I required the exercise, and, as my benefactor had pointed out, it seemed a skill worth resurrecting. And so I stamped and lunged, to Emerson's occasional applause from the rigging.

Still, these distractions were not sufficient to halt the speculative faculty for long; and Ligeia and I opened his casket once again. The tapers flickered, the mesmeric currents flowed. Shortly, a series of moans signaled our establishment of contact:

"Good morning, Monsieur Valdemar."

"Any chance of your letting me die today?" he inquired.

"Afraid not," I responded. "But I'll try to be brief. First, I've a general question. It wasn't clear to me from what you said the other day whether Annie had been forced to create the bond with Poe and myself."

"No," he replied. "I had merely to locate a person of her potential who already was party to such a relationship. Then Dr. Templeton caused her to create your kingdom by the sea."

"The odds, sir, on finding such a bizarre connection must be astronomical."

"It makes no difference—if one has an infinity of possibilities from which to choose."

It was not until that moment in my life that I began to appreciate the concept of infinity, a thing which was later to occupy considerable of my thinking. In the meantime, curiosity drove me but a step further:

"How can the human mind compass infinity?" I asked.

"The dead can view it from the vantage of eternity," he replied. "Speaking of which—"

"No. Not now," I said. "I will not discuss the joy of death with you."

"Eddie?" Ligeia said, accenting the second syllable as was her wont.

"Yes?" I answered.

"You have seen me about this business for some small while now, and I have observed you for just as long. You are not as sensitive to drink or to mesmeric influences as one who is native to this world. On the other hand, you have an enormous capacity for both."

"What are you trying to say?"

"It would be interesting to teach you the rudiments of the system—to see what comes to pass of it. We might start by having you return Monsieur Valdemar to his rest."

"I am not certain that I approve—" Valdemar began.

"Hush!" she said, taking hold of my hands. "What do you know of the subject?"

"I—"

Our first gesture silenced him, as I felt the current faintly.

"Well done," she said. "You really should keep at it."

I did, and though my efforts over the next few days met with some success they were accompanied by distracting side-effects. That is to say, whenever I would begin to employ animal magnetism as she directed there would come sharp rapping sounds from within the walls, from overhead or underfoot, furniture would be thrown about, and small objects would develop a tendency toward levitation or spontaneous shatterment.

"I'm going to have to give it up," I said on the third day. "It's simply too messy."

"It is appropriate for the place you came from," she replied. But perhaps it is hazardous to continue these experiments aboard ship. The ocean is deep."

So I restrained my animal magnetism and we returned to our former operating procedures. The very next day Valdemar informed us that the field of probability had narrowed. Paris was to be our destination.

... And the circumstances of his death were as mysterious as events in one of his stories, nor did matters end at that point. He was buried in the Poe family lot in Baltimore's Presbyterian Cemetery. His grave was not marked by name but bore only the number 80 which the sexton had placed there in identification. Several years later, Edgar's cousin Neilson Poe ordered a tombstone for him. It was broken, however, by a freight train which jumped the track into the marble yard where it was being carved. Nobody tried again till it was too late for certainty. The 80 was lost, and time and the vicissitudes had their way with the Poe lot.

While nobody knows for certain just where the hell his body is, there is now a monument to Edgar Allan Poe; and generally, on the eve of his birthday, he is remembered. A bottle of bourbon may turn up at his tomb, along with a few flowers and an occasional stuffed raven. Baudelaire and a number of his countrymen thought him one hell of a fellow.

Henry James disagreed, but he always was a bit of a spoilsport. Poe is one of those writers, as someone said, who holds a great special place in literature rather than a great general place.

It happened this year, too. But he doesn't touch a drop anymore.

There came a night when my sleep was troubled. I tossed fitfully, drowsing and rousing, and seem to recall at one point hearing the sounds of a November storm. My dreams were a rag-bag of ill-matched people and places, going nowhere. At some unmarked hour the storm faded. I found oblivion for a time and its taste was sweet... .

I found myself sitting up, listening, searching the shadows, waiting for awareness to catch up with my senses, uncertain as to what it was that had called me awake. It felt as if there were someone present, but moonlight streamed through a porthole and my eyes were entirely dark-adjusted. I saw no one.

"Who's there?" I asked, and I swung my feet over the side of the bunk, dropped to one knee and fetched out the saber from where I had stowed it beneath. No one responded.