Nevermore, p.1
Nevermore, page 1
LOOK FOR THESE TRUE-CRIME SHOCKERS BY “AMERICA’S PRINCIPAL CHRONICLER OF ITS GREATEST PSYCHOPATHIC KILLERS.”*
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—Booklist
DERANGED
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DEPRAVED
“Shocking.”
—Ann Rule
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THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS
by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR HAROLD SCHECHTER’S MASTERFUL HISTORICAL NOVEL NEVERMORE
“Authentic…. Engaging…. Schechter manages at once to be faithful to Poe’s voice, and to poke gentle fun at it—to swing breezily between parody and homage.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Schechter … recounts the legendary author’s brush with real-life homicide as one of Poe’s own protagonists would—with morbid, scientific rapture … plenty of suspense and nicely integrated background details.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A] tantalizing tale full of tongue twisters and terror….”
—Booklist
“Caleb Carr and Tom Holland are going to have some competition for turf in the land of historical literary crime fiction.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Schechter does a good job of re-creating Poe’s phantas-magoric style.”
—San Antonio Express News
“Wonderful…. I highly recommend NEVERMORE. I had more fun with this book than any I have read in a long time.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
“A real page-turner…. Deftly re-creates 1830s Baltimore and brings Poe to life…. [Poe] makes an engaging sleuth.”
—Richmond Times Dispatch
PRAISE FOR HAROLD SCHECHTER’S TRUE-CRIME MASTERPIECES
BESTIAL
The Savage Trail of a True American Monster
“Yet another essential addition to Schechter’s canon of serial murder history…. Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Bestial spare[s] no graphic detail…. Reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing…. The story provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killing’s sake.”
—Amazon.com
“[A] deftly written, unflinching account…. A fascinating police procedural…. Schechter’s macabre stories unfold like finely-tuned crime novels…. Well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look.”
—Journal Star (Peoria, IL)
DEPRAVED
The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer
“Must reading for crime buffs. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”
—Ann Rule, bestselling author of A Rage to Kill
“A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer who embodied the ferociously dark side of America’s seemingly timeless preoccupations with ambition, money and power. Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”
—Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist
DERANGED
The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer
“Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real…. What Albert Fish did … would chill the bones of Edgar Allan Poe.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
DEVIANT
The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”
“[A] grisly, wonderful book…. A scrupulously researched and complexly sympathetic biography of the craziest killer in American history.”
—Film Quarterly
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
“This grisly tome will tell you all you ever wanted to know (and more) about everything from ‘Axe Murderers’ to ‘Zombies’…. Schechter knows his subject matter.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
Books by Harold Schechter
The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (with David Everitt)
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Nevermore
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NEVERMORE
HAROLD
SCHECHTER
POCKET BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
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Copyright © 1999 by Harold Schechter
Originally published in hardcover in 1999 by Pocket Books
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ISBN: 0-671-79856-1
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First Pocket Books paperback printing January 2000
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Dedication
In loving remembrance of CELIA WASSERMAN SCHECHTER
HISTORICAL NOTE
In March 1834 the Philadelphia publishers Carey & Hart brought out A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, the only authorized autobiography of the legendary pioneer. The book—recounting Crockett’s colorful life from his early backwoods exploits to his political battles in the House of Representatives—became an immediate bestseller, transforming its author into a national celebrity, a homespun symbol of America’s rugged frontier spirit.
Shortly after the appearance of his life story, Crockett—a savvy self-promoter—embarked on a major publicity tour. Setting out from Washington, D.C., he travelled throughout the Northeast, attracting admiring crowds wherever he went. His itinerary included stops in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Baltimore.
For all its commercial success, Crockett’s autobiography did not win universal praise. A particularly scathing notice appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger—a distinguished magazine of the day—whose reviewer denounced the book for its “vulgarity.”
As it happened, the author of this pan was residing in Baltimore at the very time of Crockett’s visit. Living in financially straitened circumstances with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her twelve-year-old daughter, Virginia, this brilliant young writer was struggling to establish himself as a literary figure. Before long his savagely critical reviews would win him a widespread reputation as the country’s most controversial critic—the “tomahawk man” of American letters.
His name was Edgar Allan Poe.
CHAPTER 1
During the whole of a dull, dark, and dreary day, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the sky, I had been sitting alone in my chamber, poring over a medical treatise of singular interest and merit. Its author was the eminent Doctor M. Valdemar of Leipzig, whose earlier volume, The Recrudescence of Leprosy and Its Causation, had done much to divest that grave affliction of the aura of preternatural dread that has surrounded its sufferers throughout the ages. In one remarkable stroke, Valdemar had succeeded in elevating the study of this ancient scourge—so long steeped in primitive superstition—to the heights of pure science.
Valdemar’s latest treatise, which had so absorbed my attention throughout that dismal afternoon in the latter week of April, was offered in the same spirit of enlightened rationalism. Its subject was, if conceivable, even more repugnant to refined sensibilities than the bodily disfigurements produced by infectious leprosis. Indeed, it was a subject of such extreme morbidity that—even in the hands of one as averse to mere sensationalism as Valdemar—it resounded more of the ghastly themes of the Gothic than the concerns of medical philosophy.
The volume, prominently displayed in the window of a vener able bookseller on Lexington Street, had caught my eye a few days earlier. Even more than the name of its distinguished author, it was the ride of the book, gold-stamped on green leather, that had riveted my attention: Inhumation Before Death, and How It May Be Prevented. Here, indeed, was a matter worthy of the most rigorous scientific investigation. For of all the imagined terrors that vex the tranquillity of the human soul, surely none can parallel the contemplation of that awful eventuality to which Valdemar had addressed himself in his newest book. I mean, of course, the grim—the ghastly—the unspeakable—possibility of premature burial!
Personal affairs of more than usual urgency had delayed my perusal of this remarkable volume. At last, with sufficient time at my disposal, I had sequestered myself behind the closed door of my sanctum, where, by the sombre yellow light of my table lamp, I had devoted the better part of the day to the intense scrutiny of Valdemar’s treatise.
Applying the prodigious erudition that is the hallmark of his genius, Valdemar had produced a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge concerning this most awful of subjects. His chapter headings alone gave ample indication of the enormous breadth of his undertaking: “Cataleptic Sleep and Other Causes of Premature Burial,” “The Signs of Death,” “The Dangers of Hasty Embalmment” “Cremation as a Preventive of Premature Burial,” “Resuscitation from Apparent Death,” and “Suspended Animation after Small-Pox,” among many others. It is scarcely necessary to state that the wealth of useful—nay, indispensable—knowledge embodied in these pages more than justified the somewhat exorbitant cost of the volume.
Still, the all-compelling interest of the book did not derive solely, or even primarily, from the practical information it contained. Rather, it stemmed from the many documented cases Valdemar had assembled from medical reports throughout the world: the all-too-numerous instances of wretched fellow-creatures whose fate it had been to suffer the supreme torments of living interment. Indeed, though Valdemar’s prose style (in his scrupulous efforts to avoid any taint of the lurid) verged, at moments, on the dryly pedantic, the mere recitation of these cases was sufficiently chilling to provoke in the reader an empathic response of the highest intensity.
At least, so it proved with me.
One particular instance, cited from the Chirurgical Journal of London, had transfixed me with horror. This was the case of a young English gentleman who had fallen victim to an anomalous disorder—a cataleptic state of such profound immobility that even his physicians mistook it for death. Accordingly, he was placed in his coffin and consigned to the family plot. Some hours later, the sexton heard an unearthly gibbering issuing from the ground. The gravedigger was summoned; the casket uncovered; the lid prised open. Within the box lay the young man, cackling wildly, his black hair bleached completely white by fear!
When, by slow degrees, he recovered the power of speech, he described the agonies of his experience. Though seemingly insensate, he had retained his auditory faculties throughout his ordeal. Thus, he had listened—with an acuity born of absolute terror—to every sound that attended his intombment: the closing of the casket; the clatter of the hearse; the grieving of his loved ones; the sickening fall of shovelled soil upon his coffin lid. And yet, in consequence of his paralysis, he had been unable, by either sound or motion, to alert those around him to the extremity of his condition—until, set loose by his utter desperation, a torrent of maddened shrieks had vomited forth from the very pit of his fear-harrowed soul.
Something about this story so impressed itself upon my imagination that, as I sat there lost in contemplation, I gradually fell into a kind of waking reverie—or rather, nightmare. I lost track of time. My familiar surroundings—the small, shadowy chamber with its meagre furnishings and black-curtained window—appeared to dissolve. Darkness embraced me. I felt myself enveloped by the suffocating closeness of the grave.
No longer was I merely ruminating upon the agonies of premature burial; I was experiencing them as vividly as if my own still-living body had been laid, all unwittingly, in the tomb. I could feel, hear, and sense every particular of that dread calamity: the unendurable oppression of the lungs—the clinging of the death garments—the rigid embrace of the coffin—the methodical thudding of the gravedigger’s shovel—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm.
A scream of the purest anguish arose in my throat. I opened my terror-parched lips, praying that my cries would save me from the ineffable torments of my predicament.
Before I could summon this agonized yell (an act which would unquestionably have alarmed the entire neighborhood and occasioned me a great deal of embarrassment), a dim awareness of my true situation broke into my overwrought fancy. Suddenly, I realized that the noise I had mistaken for gravedigging was in reality the muffled thud of some unknown caller, pounding on the front door of my residence. Or rather, I should say, of the residence I shared with my beloved Aunt Maria and her angelic daughter, my darling little cousin Virginia.
I pulled out my pocket handkerchief and, with a deep groan of relief, wiped away the moisture that my all-too-vivid fantasy had wrung from my brow. Laying aside Valdemar’s treatise, I cocked an ear towards the front of the house. I could discern the distinctive tread of my sainted “Muddy” (for so, in tribute to her maternal devotion, I fondly referred to my aunt) as she hastened to answer the knocking. Dimly, I could hear her interrogative tone as she greeted the visitor.
An instant later, striding footsteps echoed in the corridor, succeeded by a sharp, determined rapping upon my chamber door.
Shaking off the horror which, even then, retained a lingering hold on my spirit, I bade the caller enter. My door swung in upon its hinges and a tall, broad-shouldered figure stood silhouetted within the frame. He posed there for a moment, critically surveying my quarters before delivering a statement of such stentorian quality that it smote upon my ears like the discharge of a cannon. The content of his remark was no less surprising than its volume.
“Well I’ll be jiggered if it ain’t as glum as a bear-cave in here,” he boomed.
So startling was this comment that, as if by reflex, I swivelled in my chair and parted the heavy curtains obscuring the window behind me. Owing to the lateness of the hour (which was rapidly approaching dinnertime), as well as the sullenness of the weather, only a modicum of daylight was admitted by my action. Still, this illumination, added to that of my table lamp, proved sufficient for me to take stock of my visitor.
He cut an imposing figure. Though his height fell several inches short of six feet, he appeared to be a man of nearly Herculean stature: an effect that was in large part due to his erect, indeed military, carriage, as well as to the exceptional span of his shoulders and chest. His full head of thick, black hair framed a visage of equally striking character. There was something in his features—the piercing blue eyes, hawklike nose, and prominent chin—that spoke of boundless interior strength and resolution. To this must be added a vague yet palpable air of natural bonhomie. Perhaps his most noticeable characteristic, however, was his robust complexion, which attested to a life of rugged outdoor pursuits.
This latter impression was heightened by his clothing; for though his garments were of the most presentable cut and fashion—high-collared coat, gray-striped pantaloons, stiff shirtfront and cerulean cravat—he seemed strangely constricted in this formal attire, as though he were more accustomed to the loose-fitting garb of the yeoman or hunter.
My inspection of this singular individual—who had yet to trouble himself with the nicety of an introduction—lasted no more than a few seconds. Determined to learn his identity without further delay, I parted my lips and made ready to speak. Before I could give voice to my question, however, he withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his side pocket and opened it with a flourish.
“I reckon I had best say why I’m here, for I see that you are set to bust like an airthquake with curiosity,” he declared in his unmistakable backwoods “drawl.” There was something strangely familiar in his manner of speech, as though I had heard his voice before. Where I had encountered it, however, remained a mystery, for it was indisputably the case that I had never laid eyes on him before.
