Nevermore, p.17
Nevermore, page 17
With the frontiersman’s assistance, I made my way to the rickety chair that stood beside the dining table and—after lowering myself onto the seat—propped one elbow on the tabletop and rested my forehead in my hand. I remained in this attitude for several moments, as though waiting for my dizziness to subside—all the while ruminating busily on the best way to proceed.
To confess the actual, motivating cause of my visit seemed imprudent in the extreme, since I had yet to ascertain what—if any—association existed between my sainted mother, Eliza, and the recent atrocities that had now befallen no less than three individuals whose names appeared in the precious newspaper clipping I kept stored in my casket-shaped “treasure box” My terrifying encounter with the ghastly female spectre—the mere sight of whose countenance had caused my soul to sicken and my brain to reel—only served to reinforce my inclination to provide the police with a carefully tailored version of the truth.
At length—having resolved on a suitable story—I looked up at Crockett and Captain Russell and said: “Forgive me, gentlemen. The shock, both physical and mental, which I have so recently endured has left me somewhat light-headed. In answer to your query: After arriving back home, I found myself overcome with a sense of intense chagrin. To have abandoned the investigation merely as the result of a minor disorder of my respiratory functions constituted, I believed, a gross dereliction of my responsibilities.
“I therefore resolved to return forthwith, under the assumption that I would find you still engaged in the search. In this supposition I was mistaken. Discovering—to my surprise—that the apartment was vacant, I determined to continue the examination of the premises on my own. As I pursued this endeavor, something—I cannot recall with any clarity precisely what—drew my attention to the space beneath the bed. Moving aside this article of furniture, I immediately noticed a loose plank in the floor and, without hesitation, pried it up with my fingertips. So ghastly—so appalling—so utterly hideous was the sight which smote my eyes that I staggered back in an ecstasy of horror, and, slipping upon one of the many old newspapers scattered about, toppled backwards and struck my head upon the floor—evidently with sufficient force to render me absolutely unconscious.”
“I see,” said Captain Russell, regarding me with a look of peculiar intensity as he tugged meditatively on a corner of his luxuriant moustache. “Well,” he sighed after a momentary pause. “It appears, Mr. Poe, that, once again, you have rendered us an inestimable service. Your persistence, ingenuity, and singular powers of both observation and deduction have led to a discovery which had escaped the best efforts of myself and my associates.”
I acknowledged this tribute with a gracious nod. “But how,” I inquired, “did you come to learn of my presence?”
“It was the neighbor lady,” the frontiersman declared. “Mrs.—dang it all, but I’ve disremembered her name.”
“Mrs. Purviance,” Captain Russell said to Crockett; then, turning to me, he explained: “Hearing a piercing shriek from these premises—which carried clearly through the kitchen window that we had left open for the pupose of ventilation—the good woman immediately dashed into this apartment from her dwelling next door and found you sprawled upon the floor. In the next instant, she caught sight of the gap in the boards and, peering within, ran to police headquarters in a condition of nearly uncontrolled hysteria.”
“Can’t hardly blame her for taking on so,” said Crockett. “I’m blest if that thing over yonder ain’t downright horrificacious.” And, so saying, he tilted his head in the direction of the three police officers who were, at that moment, in the process of removing the buried horror from its place of concealment beneath the planking.
It was the body of an elderly male, clothed in a frayed, cambric shirt and patched, tattered trousers. Having already glimpsed the thing once, I was better prepared for the sheer ghastliness of its condition. Even so, I took a moment to steel my nerves before focussing my attention on the hideous remains that now lay stretched upon the floor.
That the corpse was that of Alexander Montague seemed incontrovertible. The deplorable state of the clothing—the haggardness of the frame—the sparse, grizzled tufts sprouting from the temples of the otherwise hairless skull—all clearly betokened that the body was that of a pitiably undernourished and indigent old man. Even his most intimate acquaintances, however, would have been unable to identify the deceased from what remained of his features—so fearful—so gruesome—so inhumanly savage—were the wounds that had been inflicted on the victim’s countenance!
The eyes had been gouged from their sockets, leaving a pair of loathsome, blood-encrusted cavities. The nose had been entirety excised, and, in its place, a ragged, roughly triangular hole gaped in the center of the face. As ghastly as these mutilations were, however, they did not compare—in terms of sheer grotesqueness—to the awful condition of the mouth, whose corners had been brutally sliced upwards, almost to the level of the ears, endowing the dead man with the leering—the indescribably macabre—appearance of a Hallowe’en “Jack-o’-lantern.”
In a voice half-choked with revulsion and outrage, Captain Russell observed: “Never, in all my years as an officer of the law, have I been witness to a crime of so bloodthirsty—so fiendish—a nature.”
“I reckon I ain’t neither,” Crocked: said grimly—then added: “Except only once.”
Shooting him a sharp, inquisitive look, Captain Russell asked: “Yes? And when was that?”
The frontiersman folded his arms across his capacious chest, and—turning towards Captain Russell—replied thusly: “Way back in the winter of ’14, when I was fighting alongside Ol’ Hick’ry in the Redstick Wars. We had us a young feller in our troop—maybe eighteen years of age—by the name of Gibson. Rance Gibson. To look at him, you’d a reckoned he hadn’t no more harm in him than a newborn baby lamb. Had curly blond hair as soft as any school-gal’s, and eyes as dear and blue as a Tennessee mountain stream. But when the killing commenced, why, them eyes’d blaze like the devil’s—and that sweet li’l ol’ lamb would turn uglier’n a copperhead in July.
“I recollect one time in particular, when we was heading southwards to join forces with Major Daniel Beasley’s company down around Fort Talladega. We were fording the Coosa River when a whole passel of Creek warriors come a-whooping and a-hollering out of the woods like a cloud of Egyptian locusts. Well, me and the boys yanked out our firearms and, in less time than it takes to skin a badger, we had ’em on the run. Chased ’em all the way down to Tallusahatchee, where a couple dozen of the varmints took refuge in an empty log house. Well, we set that house on fire, and every time one of them red devils come running out through the door, we shot ’em down like dogs.
“As we was enjoying this sport, one injun boy—couldn’t a been no older than twelve or thirteen—come a-tearin’ through the door and got shot just a few feet away from the burning house. His arms and legs was all shattered, and he had fallen so near to the fire that the grease was just a-stewin’ out of him. But I’ll be hanged if he wasn’t still alive and doing his damnedest to crawl along the ground. Not a murmur escaped him, neither. So sullen is your redskin when his dander is up that he had sooner die than make a noise or ask for quarters.
“Anyways, I was just taking aim with ol’ Betsy to put the boy out of his misery when I saw one of my own men run up to the redskin, fall upon him with a blood-curdling cry, and commence to carve him up with a big ol’ huntin’ knife. I was plumb dumb-foundered to see such savagerous behavior in a white man. And when I saw just who it was, why, you coulda knocked me over with a feather pillow.
“It wasn’t none other than that sweet-faced young ’un, Rance Gibson!
“Well, I jumped from my hiding place and come a-running up beside him. Before I could reach him, though, he’d already carved up that redskin boy like a Thanksgiving Day turkey. Sliced off his ears, his nose, and was commencing to work on the fingers when I grabbed him by the wrist and asked just what in tarnation he thought he was doing. He looked at me with a smile so mean that I’ll be hanged if it didn’t give me the fantods. Said he was collecting some trophies. Said he planned to dry ’em out like beef jerky and wear ’em on a necklace.
“And that’s just what he done. Strung ’em on a leather thong and wore ’em ’round his neck.”
Here, Crockett breathed a sigh and shook his head slowly, before concluding: “Would a took the injun boy’s pecker, too, if I hadn’t a stopped him.”
By the time Crockett had completed this appalling tale, the stillness in the room was so intense as to be almost palpable. Not only Captain Russell and myself but the three police officers as well—who were huddled around Montague’s corpse—stared at the frontiersman in a state of utter—of awestricken—silence.
It was Captain Russell who finally spoke. “The atrocities you describe, Colonel Crockett, do indeed sound remarkably similar to the horrors that have been inflicted on the present victim. Is there any possibility that this Gibson fellow, now grown into full manhood, is currently residing in Baltimore, where he has embarked on a career of ghastly murder to satisfy his unnatural blood-lust?”
Crockett gave a mirthless snort through his nose. “’Taint likely, Cap’n. Wearing that necklace proved to be a mighty poor idea on ol’ Rance’s part. A couple of weeks after the scrape I just mentioned, me ’n’ my troop was ambushed by a party of Creek warriors down around a place called the Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River. We finally beat ’em back, but ol’ Rance was took captive. I guess them injuns didn’t cotton to the notion of him wearin’ pieces of one of their own kind as a knickknack. By the time me and the boys found ol’Ranee, them Creeks had been having their fun with him for a good twenty-four hours.”
“I presume he was dead,” said Captain Russell.
“Not yet,” Crockett replied grimly. “Though he sure-enough wished he was. Them infarnal varmints had cut a little hole in his belly, yanked out one end of his guts, tied it to a dog, and made the cur run ’round a big wood post ’til Ranee’s innards was all unwound. And that was just for starters! He was still breathing when we found him, but we soon put him out of his misery.”
Several moments elapsed before Captain Russell found his voice. “We must assume, then,” he observed somewhat hoarsely, “that the killer of both Alexander Montague and Elmira Macready is a creature of a similar ilk—someone possessed of a profoundly disturbed imagination that is capable of conceiving the most grotesque horrors and morbid acts. Once we locate such a man, we are sure to have found the perpetrator of these unspeakable crimes!”
“I reckon you are right, Cap’n,” Crockett replied. “But tracking down such a critter is likely to be trickier than—” All at once, the frontiersman interrupted his statement and, in a deeply solicitous tone, inquired: “You feeling all right, Poe?”
“Fine,” I replied—though, in fact, a sudden, sickening wave of dizziness had swept through my brain, causing my head to reel and my vision to darken. Placing one hand over my eyes, I propped my elbow on the tabletop and waited for the vertiginous sensation to pass.
Stepping to my side, the frontiersman gently remarked: “Sorry, pard. I reckon it wasn’t good judgment to go on that way about such horribleness” Reaching down one hand, he laid it upon my shoulder and said: “You have done a rattling good day’s work, ol’ hoss. Let me help you to your feet, and I will fetch you home.”
CHAPTER 18
Crockett’s proposal to escort me home to Amity Street would, under ordinary circumstances, have been greeted with a polite but firm refusal; for—in spite of the lateness of the hour and the dreary expanse of deserted thoroughfares that lay between Montague’s dwelling and my own—I would normally have required no such assistance. My nerves, however, had been so completely unstrung by the dismaying events of the day that I not only acceded to his offer but positively welcomed it.
Even with Crockett’s companionship, the long march homeward promised to be a wearisome undertaking, given my state of extreme emotional and physical depletion. The reader may thus imagine my intense and delighted surprise when—upon emerging with Crockett from Montague’s dwelling—I spied a handsome chaise hitched to die wooden post directly in front of the house.
Undoing the reins, the frontiersman climbed into this conveyance and motioned me to assume the seat beside him. “Mr. Potter, the hotel manager, loaned me the use of this-here buggy for as long as I am lodging here in Baltimore,” my companion informed me as I settled into my place. “Said he reckoned a man of my station ought to be riding around in style.” Then, with a flick of the reins and a cluck of the tongue, Crockett urged the steed forward.
As we proceeded along the moonlit streets towards our destination, the rhythmic motions of the carriage, combined with the hollow clopping of die animal’s hooves upon the paving-stones, seemed to lull me into a sort of Mesmeric trance. My eyelids felt weighted with lead—my head drooped—my shoulders slumped—my mouth hung partway open. Sunk into this stuporous state—incapable not merely of speech but, indeed, of coherent thought—I sat dully beside my companion, so utterly oblivious of our progress that I bolted erect with a startled gasp when the chaise suddenly drew to a halt and the frontiersman announced: “Here we are, ol’ hoss. You’d best git yourself straight to bed. I’ll be shot with a packsaddle if you ain’t plumb tuckered out.”
With a muttered word of gratitude, I dismounted from the vehicle and made my way towards my front door.
“I will see you and them two purty gals of yours tomorrow evening,” Crockett said by way of farewell, as he skillfully maneuvered the carriage around and headed back in die direction from whence we had travelled.
The extremity of my mental fatigue was such that I could make no sense of Crockett’s parting words. For what unexplained reason he intended to visit my household on the morrow I neither knew nor cared. My only thought at that moment was of the sweet, unutterably beguiling object that lay just within the walls of my abode. I mean, of course, my bed.
Slipping inside my dwelling, I closed the door carefully behind me and paused briefly in the entranceway. The interior of the house was as silent and dark as the tomb. Evidently, Muddy had remained ignorant of my surreptitious departure from the house after supper. Had my absence been discovered, I would undoubtedly have found her seated at the kitchen table, anxiously awaiting my return.
Making my way down the lightless but utterly familiar hallway towards my bedchamber, I cautiously opened die door and stole inside. The curtains of my window had not been drawn, and moonlight—pale and ghostly—streamed through the unobstructed panes. So profound was my fatigue that the mere prospect of exchanging my garments for a nightshirt plunged my soul into despair; Staggering towards the bed, I collapsed face downward upon the mattress and fell instantly asleep.
To those who—for whatever reason of bodily or emotional suffering—have endured its prolonged deprivation, there is nothing on earth (or in heaven) more devoutly to be desired than sleep. Nowhere is this truth made more wrenchingly evident than in the justly renowned soliloquy of the tormented protagonist of Shakespeare’s magnificent (if, perhaps, somewhat imperfectly motivated) tragedy Macbeth:
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
And yet, while few passages in literature possess more of the truly sublime, these lines do not take sufficient account of a no less important, though absolutely contrary, phenomenon—the degree to which sleep itself may, on occasion, be the source, not of healing, solace, and refreshment, but of the very opposite effects: to wit, nervous agitation, spiritual unease, and even more debilitating exhaustion.
Such, unhappily, was the case with the vexed and tormented slumber I experienced that night Awakening with a sob from a harrowing dream—in which a chimerical creature with vulture wings, a woman’s head, and the body and legs of an arachnid pursued me through a labyrinth of subterranean chambers—I lay prone upon the mattress and stared wildly about my chamber, From the intensity of the daylight suffusing the room, I deduced that the morning was already well advanced, and—consulting my clock—saw to my astonishment that the time was approaching the noon hour!
Dragging myself from my bed, I stood for a moment with throbbing head and reeling brain, like a man attempting to readjust to solid land following a protracted voyage at sea. Eventually my dizziness subsided, and—crossing unsteadily to the washstand which stood at the opposite end of my chamber—I splashed a handful of cold water onto my face before regarding myself in my shaving-mirror.
The debilitating effects of that long and surpassingly dreary night were all-too-plainly inscribed upon my countenance. The mere sight of my reflection in the glass—of my pale and haggard complexion—of the purplish sacs depending from beneath my eyes—of the intricate webwork of crimson capillaries defacing the orbs themselves—brought an involuntary gasp of dismay from my lips. Turning from the glass with a shudder of revulsion, I traversed my chamber, flung open the door, and stepped into the hallway.
No sooner had I done so than my finely attuned auditory sense was struck, not by any particular sound, but—on the contrary—by the entire absence of acoustical stimuli. An intense, almost preternatural, hush seemed to suffuse the atmosphere, suggesting that mine was the only living presence in the dwelling. This impression was quickly confirmed when—upon calling out to both Muddy and Sissy—I received no reply.
Deeply puzzled by this strange, this unaccountable, development, I proceeded to the kitchen, where the mystery was immediately resolved. For there, at my place at the table—along with a platter holding several biscuits and a single slice of cured ham—lay a sheet of paper that contained the following message, inscribed in my darling Muddy’s neat, if somewhat childlike, hand:
