having heeded their years of advice as Peter did. Then I'd awake again. The book-the Griswold volume-had not followed me from my cell to the hospital chambers, and for this I was happy. I chuckled to myself, as though this were at last my great triumph.
There was not much light there in the penitentiary's hospital, the windows unscrubbed and filmy. Even on the morning the rain finally ceased, only a hint of daylight came through to the prison hospital rooms. The guards had been frantically moving prisoners around the building after flooding had begun to occur in some quarters. The hospital room had been safe from the flood so far, but that night I awoke with a shudder at a series of noises.
"Who's here?" I called out obliviously.
It was suddenly terribly cold and, as I swung my bare feet to the floor, a stream of cold water curled over my toes. I jerked back to the cot and groped for a candle. My eyes opened for what seemed the first time in years.
The floods had filled the sewer and had broken through the wall of the hospital chamber. I sat up and saw from the breach in the wall the darkness of the narrow passage open to me. The sewer, I knew, ran underneath the vast, high wall that surrounded the jail and passed into Jones Falls. There wasn't the smallest obstacle between here and there. Because I had not been exposed to light for days, my eyes were immediately able to assess the circumstances even in this darkness.
My mind turned rapidly, vivaciously. A new energy resurrected me from the funereal indolence I had been lying in. A half-formed idea, a certainty, propelled me forward to where the putrid water subsumed my ankles, my waist, reaching to my shoulders. Even as I became weighed down by the streaming water, it seemed I moved with greater swiftness, until I emerged where the gaunt towers of the prison could only be seen in the distant horizon.
This was my idea: Edgar Poe was still alive.
I was not ill, as you might think. There was no degradation of my mental acumen, despite the long ordeal of incarceration that led me to the realization-this half-formed idea. Edgar Poe had never been dead.
As my eyes turned to the outside of the prison for the first time in what seemed to be months or years (I would have believed either one if told so at this point), all knowledge related to the affair of Poe's death shaped itself in a new and startling way in my brain.
Perhaps I should have found aid, rest, sanctuary, at the moment. Perhaps I should never have left the confines of the prison, where, strange to say, I was safe from what awaited me outside. But what would you have done-remained there on your cot, staring out at the lights of the stars? Consider now what you'd have done, if you had known with sudden clarity that Edgar Poe was among the living.
(Had Duponte not seen it? Had he not considered it in all his analysis?)
We do not care what happened to Poe. We have imagined Poe dead for our own purposes. In some sense, Poe is still very much alive.
I remembered that Benson had said this in our first meeting, very nearly those words, at least. Benson had seemed to know more than he was telling me. Had he known this? Had he found something he could not reveal in his early investigation, and had he been giving me a suggestion, a clue to the secret truth?
I could see the faces of the men at the funeral, as though daguerreotyped on the mind, could still see them coming toward me with the hurried, muddied footsteps of that day.
Think of it...think of the evidence. George Spence, the sexton, had not seen Edgar Poe in many years, and had emphasized Poe's unfamiliar appearance when brought in for burial. Neilson Poe saw his cousin only through a curtain at the college hospital, and did he not tell me in his chambers that the patient looked like another man altogether?
Meanwhile, the funeral I witnessed had been performed hastily, lasting perhaps three minutes, with few witnesses and even a canceled oration-as inconspicuous, as quiet, as was ever seen. Even Snodgrass, intransigent Dr. Snodgrass, had exhibited anxiousness, misgiving, self-reproach over Poe's end and burial. I thought again of the poem we found in Snodgrass's desk that he had written on the subject, which spoke of his idea