Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Is he raving? He is raving. Is he drunk and damaged? He is. Has he been bitten by a dog and does he wish to drink the ocean itself? Does he wish to transport himself to Thule by sipping the boundary between the imagined and the real, drinking it down until all that lies between his words and his life is a tender desert?

He does.

Annabel Lee is a child and he is a child (he is not a child) and Lenore is nevermore. Virginia is coughing and singing at a piano, blood spattering the keys, and then she is drunk on charity wine, and then she is dead, her cheeks flushed a color that cannot appear in Thule. Made of ice and gray is the heart of the poet, and in his kingdom, on his dark throne, he sits, as all of it melts into a bath of silver nitrate and acid ink.

He wishes himself extinguished.

The studio of Masury & Hartshorn was on the second floor, and we made our way up the stairs, my companion half-collapsing as he climbed. Inside my body, I felt the sleeping stowaway dreaming of meat. I would not feed it. I would resist. The stairwell smelled of chlorine and chemicals, a bracing scent that revived me to the task at hand. I had a body that was my own still, despite its inhabitant, nostrils that could burn and a throat that could close. I glanced at the man beside me, and wondered. Could I deliver him? Could I deliver us both?

We entered through glass doors into a room suffused in blue light, a sort of greenhouse with an intricate mechanism of shades and shadows. The walls were papered in cobalt, and the ceiling was a skylight with reflecting mirrors set at an angle beneath it. There, we found a young man polishing a silver plate with a soft cloth. He looked up at us through thick glasses, and raised his eyebrows at the spectacle before him. It was little wonder. A woman in a gaudy dress accompanied by a man on the brink of death. I could see the photographer considering us as subject.

“Messr. Masury?” I asked. I brought out the card the medium had given me in New York.

“No. I am Edwin Manchester,” he said. I could not believe my luck.

“You, then, are the man I am seeking,” I said, and passed the card to him. He read its contents, and looked more closely at me. He took my hand and weighed it in his own, and then pinched my wrist between two fingers. My flesh was denser than it ought to be, I well knew. I felt as though I contained sand, and indeed, I did. The night was made of sand and stars, and all of it was too heavy for a human body to bear.

“I see,” he said. “And your companion?”

“This is Mr. Poe,” I said.

The photographer’s eyebrow raised higher. “It is an honor,” he said. “A man of your stature in the spirit world.”

“He suffers a similar malady,” I said. “I believe it is related to the kingdom from whence my trouble came.”

The photographer looked closely at Poe.

“He has suffered a loss rather than a weight,” he said. “You have more than you require, and he has less.”

“I have enough in my purse to pay for both portraits, if you might assist him as well as I.”

“I will need no payment for his image,” Manchester said. “It will be displayed in this shop as advertisement of our services.”

“I am not possessed,” Poe said. “I am in debt. I have left something aboard a ship as collateral.”

“I see as much,” said Manchester. “You are missing your soul rather than carrying another within your body. I can assist in this as well.”

The daguerreotypist took off his apron, placing the silver plate on a table. I looked into it and was startled by the mirror it presented, my hair in disarray, and for a moment, my eyes glowing the way the stowaway’s eyes glowed, my skin a sea of stars.

I glanced at the portraits on display in the studio, the way their subjects seemed to float, each in their own transparent darkness, their faces made of gilded dust. Did some of those portraits contain demons and ghosts? Were some of them exorcisms, or were they only portraits of the wealthy? I could not say.

“You will be first,” Manchester said. “Mr. Poe after. The sun is bright enough today.”

Poe nodded. I felt his fingers clench my arm more tightly, but he did not waver. Inside my skin, the stowaway extended sleeping fingers to touch those of Poe, but I did not acknowledge it.

Manchester gestured me onto a staircase, a platform with a small chair at its center, and I ascended, feeling my skirts draping down the stairs. Was I climbing to heaven?

“Stare into the sun,” Manchester told me, positioning me in a brace, my head supported by a stand, my skirts spread so that I seemed to be airborne. “I will remove this burden from you, but you must stay perfectly still for sixty seconds.”

I looked down at the poet, whose face was hopeful, though the evidence of years of despair was written on it, a cloth pleated by pain.

My spine convulsed where the stowaway wrapped about it, and I saw Poe glance at me, his face concerned, as Manchester aimed the camera at the tableau vivant he’d arranged.

A dark cloud passed over the sun, and a raindrop splattered on the glass panes above me. The monster moved.

Ten seconds. Twenty. My heart quivered in my breast and the stowaway stretched. Thunder outside, and the building rattled. Darker still.

Thirty seconds, and something began to shift inside my skin. I began to feel night falling over my body, stars appearing on the tips of my fingers, coming into light all over my flesh, beneath my dress and up and down my arms, brilliant points of pain and fire, and myself an indigo woman curtained in silk and satin. I heard my own voice cry out as the stowaway began to emerge.

“Stay still!” Manchester shouted. “Do not let it move you!”

I resisted the urge to let my body fall down the stairs and upon him. Not only upon him, but upon the innocent Poe. Their blood and bones, their organs like bright ink on a page made of snow. I would write the story of Thule with their flesh, I would—

Darkness slithered over my eyes, and I held them wide, trying to keep from doing what Night wanted me to do. I tasted metal where I’d bitten my tongue, and I heard myself hiss. A sound a dreamer might make whilst wandering a long passage, the way a scream might transform, in the voice of that sleeper, into a song. All these nights of invisibility, a wandering swath of stars falling upon the unlucky, all these nights, a woman made of nothingness.

There was a crashing sound, and there, before me, was Poe, his face pale as the moon, his eyes no longer anguished, but purposeful.

“TO ME,” he roared, and lurched up the staircase, his hands reaching for mine. He spun to face the camera as the shutter closed, his ungloved hand still clasping my own.

I felt the stowaway leave my body and rush out, into the air, into the camera, away.

The thunderclouds fled the sun, and the sky brightened. Night receded. I drew in a ragged breath.

The daguerreotypist withdrew the plate from the camera and darted to the developing room, donning a set of India rubber gauntlets as he went, but I could only look at Poe. He would not meet my gaze. What had he done?

Manchester emerged from the developing room.

“View it,” he said, and gestured us into the room. “It is not as you imagined it would be, and yet.”

A gleaming tray of mercury, held over a spirit lamp, and fumes that felt golden upon inhaling. The plate rested above the heated mercury, an image emerging in salt on its face, delicate as dust on a butterfly’s wing.

I watched it, praying that I’d see what ought to be in the daguerreotype and not something else. Hoping to see my image containing the stowaway, and all of it trapped within this plate of glass.

But as it emerged, I did not see the creature, nor did I see my own face. It was dark shadows appearing and then shifting through red and blue to black again, the eyes first and then the rest.