Nevermore

31 In the Flesh

The door swung open. Isobel depressed the track button again, and another round of applause came from the boom box. Edgar Allan Poe strode into the room. He stood for a moment, his expression a mix of grim remorse and melancholy, one hand held reverently over his heart.

Her mom had done a good job with the white makeup, Isobel thought. His paleness and the circles under his eyes looked too real. Then again, they had stayed up most of the night, so they probably were real. She thought the black wig they’d gotten from the costume aisle at Walmart looked a little hokey, but she figured she’d done an okay job cutting and styling it. Her father wore the tux he’d gotten married in, and being more than just a little tight now, the pant cuffs hiked up over his black socks like high-waters. A long white dish towel tied around his neck served as a cravat, and a little hair left over from the wig had been glued onto his upper lip that morning with spirit gum. The whole getup (combined with his “woe is me”

expression) might have been genuinely impressive, if not for the plush toucan, spray-painted black, hanging limply off his right shoulder, where it had been fastened that morning with Velcro. The bird bobbed stupidly as he strode into the room, prompting an outburst of laughter and applause.

Isobel stood up from the desk and reached out to shake hands with the fake Poe. Then her dad took the open chair next to Varen, who stared, his grip tightening on the armrests of his own chair. Her dad seemed to get the message and didn’t offer to shake.

“Welcome, Mr. Poe,” said Isobel, trying to get past the tense moment. The room quieted down, everyone eager to see what would happen next.

“Thank you, thank you,” Poe crooned in a goofy Southern accent. “Always a pleasure to return to the realm of the living.”

Isobel flipped through her stack of index cards to the one she needed first. She’d written almost all her questions out in a backward fashion, giving the facts first, asking for confirmation rather than information. It couldn’t, after all, come off looking like her dad had done the work. He hadn’t, either, Isobel reminded herself. Mostly he’d spent the night goofing off, parading around the living room, answering every single question with “Nevermore!” and coming up with ways to incorporate horrible Poe puns. Given the way he was currently hamming up the part, Isobel couldn’t help but wonder if he’d remember a single authentic thing she’d told him.

“So, Poe,” she began, “how’ve you been these past one hundred and fifty plus years since your untimely and mysterious death in the fall of 1849?”

“Weary.”

“And how’s Night’s Plutonian shore these days?”

“Dreary.”

More laughter. Isobel watched as Varen’s head turned slowly toward her father. She couldn’t exactly tell with the sunglasses, but she somehow knew that he had to be staring down the false Poe with one of his most penetrating “you are the essence of lameness” expressions.

Isobel plowed on. “I would just like to say that we are so glad to have you here on the show today, Mr. Poe and Professor Nethers.” She plastered on a big cheer smile. “Mr. Poe, your major works include such stories as ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ All of these feature themes of death and elements of the supernatural. Is it also true that you are considered to be the father of the modern detective story?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Poe, gesturing loosely with one hand. “Indeed I am. I hear that I am also considered by many in this day and age to be ‘America’s Shakespeare.’” Her dad beamed at Varen. “Isn’t that correct, Professor?”

This was the part that had caused her the most worry. This was the part she’d wanted to warn him about but hadn’t gotten the chance. But they’d had to think of some way to involve Varen so he wouldn’t just be sitting there, some way that he would pick up on. This part, Isobel remembered, had been Danny’s one and only contribution, suggested during the ten seconds he could stand to keep his game on pause.

“Uh, yeah,” Varen said, shifting in his seat.

She nodded, pressing on, “Perhaps your most famous work, though, was and still is the narrative poem ‘The Raven.’ Can you talk a little bit about your success with that particular piece?”

“Indeed,” Poe said, crossing his legs, leaning back in the chair. He raised a finger to brush the tarred crest of the limp fake raven. “That poem became more widely read than I could ever have dreamed. My success was, I must say, nothing short of stupendous. I became a sort of . . . literary Elvis, if you would.”

Varen blanched at the comparison.

“You disagree, Professor?” asked Poe.

“No,” he said, “except that Poe never made any money off ‘The Raven.’”

Poe sat up, gripping his seat, the bird jiggling. “Certainly I made a profit!”

“Fifteen bucks.”

An outright burst of laughter broke through the room.

“That, sir,” Isobel’s dad said, leaning back in his seat and straightening his jacket, “is beside the point.”

“So it’s true that you were very poor,” Isobel went on, ad-libbing.

“In terms of money, yes, I was poor,” her father said, glowering in Varen’s direction. “I see that since my death, America has changed little in its obsession with the dollar.”

“Is it also true that you drank to excess?” Isobel asked, flipping to the next index card.

Poe scoffed at the question, his response simply “Nyeh.”

Varen’s head snapped so quickly toward her father that Isobel was surprised the sunglasses hadn’t flown off.

“Well, sometimes,” Poe corrected himself. Shifting, he stooped in his seat.

Varen’s stare remained.

“Often,” Poe growled, angling away, pulling his already tight jacket around himself even tighter.

This time Isobel thought she even heard Mr. Swanson chuckle. Good, she thought. Maybe that meant he’d let this whole thing fly.

“Though you can’t say that I wasn’t, at heart, a gentleman,” Poe argued, this directed outward. “And not to excuse myself, but when I drank, it was only to drown out the sorrowful pain brought on by the blackest despairs of my life, such as the long illness and ultimate demise of my dearest Virginia.”

Wow, Isobel thought, impressed, so he had remembered something after all. “After your wife Virginia’s death,” she said, “you attempted to remarry, correct?”

“Well, for a short while, I courted Miss Sarah Helen Whitman.”

“And Annie,” Varen interjected.

Poe paused, smiling. He lifted a finger to loosen his cravat. “And . . . Annie,” he conceded.

“Who was married.”

“See, that’s an interesting story indeed. I—”

“And then Elmira.”

“And then Elmira, yes, fine.” Poe crossed his arms, slumped, and looked away. There came a mix of laughter and several teasing “ooh’s” from the back of the class.

“What can I say?” Poe muttered. “Chicks dig the mustache.”

Laughter again. Isobel shut her eyes and held them closed, trying to halt the crawl of color over her face. Take it down a notch, Dad, she thought toward him, opening her eyes again.

Then she grinned in spite of herself, because the plan was working better than she had hoped. As she asked more questions, Varen continued to interject between her father’s misty replies, supplying the real facts, eliciting laughter with his dry coolness. Soon they had only one subject left to cover: death.

“Mr. Poe, the details of your end are, at best, cloudy.” Her mom had told her to phrase it that way, though Isobel thought it made her sound like a cheesy soothsayer. “No one knows exactly what happened to you on that fateful night. There are theories ranging from rabies to murder.”

“Mmm. Murder,” Poe mused, “that most hideous yet somehow fascinating of human pastimes.”

“You admit that you were somehow involved in foul play?”

“I admit nothing,” Poe said. “I enjoy mysteries too much. I invented them, remember? And so I am obliged not to reveal the answer to the riddle of my death.” He stood slowly and began pacing, hands clasped behind his back. “Besides, I fear I cannot fully recall what happened to me that night so long ago, so many eons ago. . . .” He reached a quivering hand out toward his audience, his fingers curling into a rueful fist. Isobel rolled her eyes. She never would have thought he had it in him!

“I was on my way from New York to Richmond.”

“Richmond to New York,” Varen corrected.

“That’s right,” Poe whispered, bringing his hand toward his brow, bracing his head. “The musty air of the grave! The lull of death’s sleep. These things can congest the brain, clog the memory—but you’re right. I was leaving Richmond, yes, where I had finally become engaged. I was to be married. Yes, married. But first! First I was to return to my home in New York to collect my dear aunt Moody.”

“Muddy.”

“That’s what I said.” Poe stopped then, tilting his head as though listening to something far off. “I remember traveling by train with my trunk full of manuscripts and lectures. The train stopped and then I . . . I . . .”

Isobel let her eyes stray from her father to scan the faces of her classmates. Everyone stared. Even Bobby Bailey, who usually laid his head on his desk, had sat up to listen.

“Perhaps, Professor Nethers,” Isobel ventured, “you can enlighten us about some of the details surrounding this mystery?”

Varen, maybe remembering Isobel’s whispered plea, took his cue. “For five days Poe went missing,” he said, his voice slicing into the stillness of the room. “He was found near a tavern in Baltimore in a state of delirium, wearing someone else’s clothing. He was then taken by his cousin and a doctor friend to the hospital.”

“Yes, I remember now . . . ,” Poe whispered.

“The doctor’s reports say that Poe raved for days, talking to imaginary people and invisible objects on the wall.”

“Demon!” Isobel’s dad shouted suddenly, shooting a finger out to point at the ceiling. With a collective shriek, the entire room jumped in their seats. “Thing of evil!”

A strange feeling stole its way over Isobel. Her brow knotted, and she felt her jaw tighten and set. As she watched her father improvise, her hands pressed down on the desktop while her thoughts and her memory slowly wound around reawakening fears. She remembered now that Varen had mentioned this in the library, that first time they’d met for the project—how Poe had screamed out to invisible beings while on his deathbed.

“On the night before he died,” Varen continued in a solemn tone, “he began screaming out a name, shouting it for more than a day, calling for someone no one knew. Someone Poe never reportedly knew, either. Someone named Reynolds—”

Isobel gasped audibly. Prickling white spikes of fear and panic shot through her, freezing her mind and stalling her body. She sat stunned, her eyes on Varen while her memory projected onto her mind the image of a black-shrouded figure.

Isobel had no way of telling how much time trickled by before she registered Mr. Swanson’s voice. Apparently, however, it had been long enough for him to guess that this wasn’t just another part of the presentation. “Isobel,” he said, “are you all right?”

Dazedly she looked for her father, who had all but dropped out of character to stare at her with a “What’s going on?” look on his face.

“Uh,” Isobel croaked, fumbling for the radio. Flustered, she pressed play, then pause, then stop. “That’s the—all—all the time we have today,” she stuttered, pressing play again in an attempt to cover her mangled lines. The tail end of another round of clapping trickled lamely through the boom box before dying out.

Her father made a hesitant bow, now to the live though somewhat sporadic applause of the class, whose attention had begun alternating between Isobel and Varen. No doubt they were wondering what they’d missed.

“I, uh, shall take leave of you now,” her father said, backing toward the door. He shot a questioning look at Isobel. She nodded at him. It was all she could manage. “Yes,” he affirmed, turning back to the class. “Here I take my leave, to return to this realm— nevermore!”

Isobel watched numbly as her father swept dramatically from the room, pausing at the door long enough to jiggle the light switch before ducking out. The bird dropped from his shoulder and onto the linoleum. A black-cuffed hand shot back in and snatched the bird out again. Isobel scowled, vaguely recalling having begged him to leave out the light switch part.

The bell rang, ending the class in what felt like a whirlwind. Everyone shot up from their seats, papers flapping, notebooks dropping, laughing and talking. Mr. Swanson rose too, announcing over the clamor, “Okaay, then. Very good job, everyone—and their parents, I suppose,” he added with a pointed look at Isobel that normally would have made her gulp.

“Papers up front, if you please. Your grades will be ready some time next week and, from there, we’re going to talk a little bit more about Mr. Poe, the antebellum era and the Romantics, then we’ll pick up on writers of the Civil War era. Have a very safe Halloween tonight, go Trenton Hawks. Pull up your pants, Mr. Levery, I don’t need to see your boxers—everybody please stay out of trouble!”

Trouble. Isobel’s gaze fell to the swirling grain of Mr. Swanson’s desktop, her brain repeating the word. She was in trouble.

Reynolds.

Hadn’t he been something purely out of her subconscious? Or could Varen have mentioned him before? No. No, she would have remembered that. Her dreams. Had they been real? It was the only explanation, she realized. It was the only thing that explained everything. The Poe book. She had thrown it away. The figure in the door at practice. The image in the mirror.

The run through the park. The voice in the attic. She wasn’t crazy—or maybe she was? Isobel funneled her focus onto a single black knot in the wood as she tried to recall something else Reynolds had told her. What he’d said about . . .

“Varen?” she asked breathlessly.

She stood abruptly and looked into the seat next to hers. She saw only their paper, bound neatly in a plastic report cover. She watched dully as all the others began piling on top, burying the neat Gothic typeface he’d chosen for the title. She looked up, her eyes locking on his desk in the corner. Empty. His satchel, his black book—gone.