the wood below me, then dropped the shovel and ran. Man and dog chased at my heels.
I was not yet defeated. After leaving behind my pursuers in the cemetery, I located myself in a narrow alleyway for shelter. I spent nearly a half hour recuperating from the fatigue of my failed attempt at the burial yard before stirring myself with a renewed objective. Surely the sexton would now be guarding Poe's grave. But with wild determination, I made my way across the city, remembering along the way the address of Poe's last home in Baltimore, on Amity Street between Lexington and Saratoga, to which I had seen reference during my long researches into Poe's history.
I could ask him. Why? Friend Poe, why write the letter? Why say I am an idle young man, a pest? Had you forgotten we understood one another?
Poe had just withdrawn from his place as a cadet at West Point when, shunned by John Allan in Richmond, who refused to help rescue him from a series of debts, the twenty-two-year-old Poe came to this modest dwelling to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, her daughter, Virginia-then eight years old-as well as Poe's older brother, William Henry, and his ailing grandmother. Poe searched for a position as a teacher in one of the local schools, without success. Each of his fellow cadets at West Point had given him a dollar for the publication of his first collection of poems, and with this volume he had great plans to make his name.
Certain I had found the correct address at a narrow house between Lexington and Saratoga streets, without any consideration of a more rational scheme, I burst up the steps through the street door and, finding myself at the foot of a narrow staircase, bounded upstairs. Why? Oh, Edgar! Why write that of all things? Perhaps, if Poe had lived, he would have returned here, to his last home in Baltimore, and left some sign for me of his next destination. I hardly noticed the two women, one with white hair and one young and fair, who screamed upon seeing me enter the tiny back room where they were sitting by a fireplace. (Perhaps I was a dreadful sight, my sackcloth uniform fitted to me by the prison now tattered and dripping, and spotted with soil and blood from my failed efforts at the burial yard.) In another bedroom, a garret room at the very top of the house, a lanky man leaned out the window overlooking Amity Street and began calling, Robbery! Murder! and other exclamations. The two women now scurried through the house, and the walls reverberated with unintelligible shouts.
I shrank from the commotion and, finding that the man was in the process of gripping a crowbar, I hastened down the stairs, past the frantic younger woman, through the front hall, back to the door. I ran at such velocity that I could not stop myself until I was in the middle of the street, where under the vague glow of a faraway streetlight I could see a giant horse and carriage coming right for me, leaving me without time to move in any direction where I would not fall directly under its mass of hooves and wheels. Having no chance to save myself from this gruesome fate, I merely blocked my eyes with my arms from the sight of death.
In a miraculous motion, I was pulled bodily to the curb, out of harm of the carriage. My wrist was held tightly. My deliverer struggled to move me closer. I had shut my eyes in lifeless surrender, and now opened them warily upon this person, as though to find a phantasm haunting me from beyond instead of a human. I looked and found I was gazing on the face of Edgar A. Poe.
" Clark!" he said quietly, gripping me tighter, his mouth contracting into a small, intense line under the dark mustache. "We must take you away from here."
I paused, I looked again, reached my hand to his face, and in that instant all things trembled and disappeared into blackness.
When I experienced a brief moment of consciousness, it was in a dark, moist chamber. I felt myself being lowered, and I fought a strange foreboding of mortal danger. As my eyes unclosed slightly, and I lifted my neck as high as it would move, I could see only one object with true clarity, for it loomed above, the very horizon of vision.
It was a rectangular tablet,