Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE

The Clockwork Horror

F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE IS A NATIVE of Perthshire, Scotland, but spent his formative years in the Outback as one of the thousands of “child migrants” who were expatriated from post-war Britain to rural Australia. He now divides his time between homes in New York City and in Gwynedd, North Wales.

Macintyre is the author of several novels (some of them published under pseudonyms) and dozens of science fiction, horror and mystery stories published in British and American periodicals. An artist as well as an author, he has illustrated number of his own works as well as some of Ron Goulart’s stories in Analog magazine.

He is currently working on the illustrations for his next science fiction novel, which has the intriguing title The Lesbian Man .

Although “The Clockwork Horror” is fiction, in writing the story Macintyre made a genuine addition to the known facts of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, as he reveals: “In 1836, while editing the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, Poe published an essay titled ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’, describing his recent encounter with an Automaton – an ostensible mechanical man – that was capable of playing chess and even defeating most challengers.

“In his essay, Poe used observation and deduction to build a convincing case that the Automaton was a hoax, containing a human chess-player. Oddly, Poe’s essay does not reveal precisely when and where he witnessed the performance of Maelzel’s Automaton. His 1836 essay merely states that the machine was exhibited in Richmond ‘a few weeks ago’, giving neither a precise date nor an address for the exhibition.

“When I started the research for this story, I was astounded to discover that no existing biography of Edgar Allan Poe gave a date or a location for Poe’s encounter with Maelzel’s Automaton. Determined to solve this mystery, I went to Virginia in search of further clues. In the archives of the Richmond Enquirer – a newspaper of the 1830s, published twice-weekly – I discovered several contemporary references to the activities of ‘Edgar Poe’, denizen of Richmond.

“I also tracked down advertisements for Maelzel’s touring exhibition, verifying that the Chess-Player was exhibited in Richmond’s city museum from December 15th, 1835 through January 2nd, 1836. Somewhere within those eighteen days, the real Edgar Allan Poe encountered the authentic (fake) Automaton . . . although presumably not with the same results described in the story!”

JANUARY 6TH, 1836

RICHMOND! Unholy citadel, which both condemns me and exalts me! Grotesque city of the perverse, where black men’s bodies are sold at auction in Capitol Square, and white men’s souls are flung into the gutter. I am fettered to this Richmond: its destiny is enchained with my own, and both our fates are inescapable.

As my name opens no doors and purchases no ease, I render it for your inspection. I am Edgar A. Poe, latterly a native of Richmond, now returned once more within this city’s gates. True! I was not born here, and I have been known to call myself a Bostonian. Yet it is Richmond, the resplendent carbuncle on Virginia’s hindquarters, that holds the mortgage to my flesh. The city of Richmond holds the pawnbroker’s ticket upon which I have pledged my immortal soul . . . and I no longer dare to hope that this pledge may be redeemed.

My mother was English by birth, and my father a Baltimore scoundrel: Richmond held no claim upon the one nor the other. Still, it was Richmond where my parents conjoined in holy wedlock, although my father clearly saw fit not to honour the nuptial vows. My sainted mother was the ingenue Elizabeth Arnold. My alleged father was David Poe: son of the war hero General Poe who was quartermaster to Lafayette in the late War of Independence. Improvident actors, my mother and father were “starring” respectively as the heroine Sophia Woodbine and the scapegrace Villars in “The Blind Bargain” at the Haymarket Theatre, here in Richmond. I will show you their notices, if you like. The Easter weekend is always a slow season for actors, so between engagements – on Easter Monday, the seventh of April, 1806 – my father and mother got married in a Clay Street lodging-house.

My parents found no outlet for their thespian endeavours in Richmond, so they soon joined Alexander Placide’s touring company in Boston, where I had the dubious privilege to be born. My actress mother was renowned for her talent and beauty. My father, aggrieved that his own theatrick talents were vastily inferior, abandoned us in the spring of 1811, during a repertory season in Philadelphia. Finding no compassion there, my mother returned with me to Virginia’s capital, where she briefly won acclaim at the Richmond Theatre on Shockoe Hill at East Broad Street . . . in a tragedian role as Angela in “The Castle Spectre”, dancing a hornpipe while disguised as a boy in “The Curfew”, and displaying her musical skills as the ingenue Letitia Hardy in “The Belle’s Stratagem”.

Richmond murdered my mother. As she became too ill to travel with the departing troupe of actors, my mother Elizabeth Poe gained some meagre employment in the old Indian Queen tavern, at the northwest corner of Ninth and Grace Streets, engaged as the assistant to a Scots-born milliner. It was in this tavern’s cellar that my mother squandered her eyesight, stitching together the piecework of ladies’ shovel-bonnets by candelight. When I was scantly two years old – on Sunday morning, the eighth of December 1811 – my half-blind mother was carried off by an infectious fever, in the milliner’s room.

Yet this dark city was not finished with me. My godparents, John and Frances Allan, took me into their home in Richmond, in rooms at Thirteenth and East Main Streets, abovestairs from the counting-house of my foster father’s business: the merchant firm Ellis & Allan. My mother, meantime, was buried nearby, in an unmarked grave in the eastern section of St John’s Episcopal churchyard. It was in this very church that Patrick Henry uttered his famous words – “Give me liberty, or give me death!” – while neglecting to mention that he was a slaveholder. I have visited this churchyard often, yet I cannot know the sure location of my mother’s grave.

Richmond baptised me. Three days after my mother’s demise, with my own beliefs never consulted, I was conscripted into the Protestant faith in the Richmond home of Mr and Mrs John Richard. On this same day, rumours arrived of my father’s death in Baltimore.

By long tradition, the night after Christmas is when theatres are most profusely attended. Eighteen nights after my mother’s death – December twenty-sixth, 1811 – the Richmond Theatre was utterly destroyed in a fire of unexplained source, while an audience of six hundred souls beheld Placide & Green’s tragedians in a performance of “The Bleeding Nun”. Seventy-three persons died, including Virginia’s governor. The scene of my mother’s greatest triumphs was burnt to ashes.

Richmond was the place of my breeching: I refer to the ritual transition of early boyhood, when a lad is deemed at last mature enough to exchange his childish skirts for honest trousers. In the inexorable torrent of my helpless boyhood years, my adoptive parents the Allans compelled me to attend services with them at Monumental Church. By a perverse whim of the fates, this church had been erected on the very site of the burning ruins of the Richmond Theatre. Where the stage had once been consecrated to the gods of drama, now stood an altar. Where bright lamps illumined in calcium carbonate gleamings had once served as footlights, now the guttering tongues of candelabra stood sentry-post. Oh! Sacred reader! I implore you to imagine the stark outline of my thoughts in 1815, as a sensitive lad of six years, huddled in Pew #80 of the Monumental Church, and aware that on this same spot – adjacent in space, separated in time – my mother had once danced upon the stage, singing her popular tune “Nobody Coming to Marry Me”, scarcely a month before her tragic demise.