He felt the cold, wet body of a snake against his face and Poe couldn’t stop screaming. He was on his knees, hands pulling the long, green snake from his face. His head was filled with the noise of his own shrieks and when it seemed certain that he would never breathe again, Poe fell forward on his face, into a blessed darkness that alternated with a pain redder than the sun. The last thing he remembered was two horned demons reaching out for him.
He awoke lying flat on his back and gazing up at a tall, thin woman with a small, round head and black hair parted in the middle. She wore all black and no rouge on her unsmiling face and she clutched a bible to her bosomless chest. She was Miles Standish’s wife.
“I shall read over you, Mr. Poe, for the word of the Lord has power-”
Poe sat up. “The painting. It was alive.”
“I shall read over you, Mr. Poe.” She opened the bible.
Behind Poe, Miles Standish’s voice was again calm and sure.
“Nonsense from a quill pusher who survives by lecturing on the metaphysical. Conclusions springing from whiskey. Sound and fury signifying nothing.”
Mrs. Standish read from the Book of Revelations and Poe, clutching the billiard table, raised himself to his knees. “It was alive.”
He was on his feet, breathing heavily through his mouth. “It was alive.”
Miles Standish stared down at the backs of his own hands. “I believe in being blunt, sir. You are a drunkard, a man with a known mystical turn of mind. You reek of alcohol-”
Poe sniffed the air, touched his clothes. He did reek ofwhiskey. His shirt and coat were wet with it. A half-empty bottle and a glass stood on the side of the billiard table. Was he losing his mind?
A Negro servant held out Poe’s cloak, hat, walking stick. “I suggest you consult a physician,” said Standish. “I know of several. Perhaps Dr. Paracelsus would consent to-”
Poe shoved his left arm at Miles Standish, causing the lawyer to lean away. “Demons stretched out their hands for me and I say to you, this is blood, my blood!”
Poe showed his slashed left palm.
Both of Standish’s eyebrows crept slowly up his forehead. “I would agree. And do try not to break any more cue sticks. They are handmade and expensive. His eyes went to the floor and Poe followed his gaze. A broken, bloodstained cue stick lay on the gray carpet.
A silent, stunned Poe left the billiard room with the sound of Mrs. Standish’s bible reading following him into the hall and out into the cold. He heard Miles Standish say that all arrangements for the ransom would be made, but Poe paid no attention. He clenched his left fist to stop the bleeding and he wondered how much longer he would be able to function before his mind snapped and he joined his brother and sister in that world of permanent horror known only to the hopelessly insane.
EIGHT
Jonathan slashed Tom Lowery’s throat so that when the burly grave robber opened his mouth to scream, no sound came out. Lowery, fighting to free himself from a drugged sleep, willed himself to sit up, to rise from the straw mattress and destroy the man who had done this terrible thing to him. But his powerful body would no longer obey him.
Lowery’s eyes were wide with horror and blood gushed from severed arteries under both ears as he watched Jonathan use the scalpel on his naked body with terrifying efficiency. When the pain became excrutiating, Lowery passed out and never knew that he, like Sylvester Pier, was both the victim of Jonathan’s revenge as well as an offering to Asmodeus, king of demons.
NINE
In a narrow, windswept alley between two rundown wooden buildings, several children crawled on their hands and knees in mud. None of the children spoke. Each crawled silently and slowly through the dark brown ooze. Figg, standing beside Titus Bootham, said, “Odd sort of game, that. Tots frolickin’ in mud on a day what’s cold as this.”
The English journalist said, “They are not frolicking, my friend. They are trying to eat.”
“Eat mud?” Figg’s frown, as usual, made him appear ferocious.
“No, not actually eat it. They are searching through the mud for dead animals. Rats, cats, birds, dogs, anything. When they find what they are looking for, the children will take these rotting carcasses to meat dealers, who use the carcasses to feed pigs. The pigs, in turn, will be slaughtered for pork, a large part of the American diet. Not my diet, let me assure you. The children earn a few pennies for this deadly work. What one earns by eating pork I dare not say.”
“Ain’t there no other way for them to eat?”
Some collect chips from the street. Dried manure. Pays four pennies to the bucket. Some become prostitutes; they sell their little bodies. More than some, sad to say. Others become thieves, beggars, the peddlers of paper flowers, dried apples, two-a-penny matches. Ten thousand homeless children roaming the streets of New York and I assure you, not all of them are acolytes in church.”
Figg and Bootham were across the street from Phineas Taylor Barnum’s American Museum, a mammoth five-story marble building on the corner of lower Broadway and Ann Street. At eleven o’clock in the morning, traffic in the area was extremely heavy. Never in Figg’s life had he seen such a crush of people, horses and anything that moved on wheels, foot, hoof all in one place, at one time. Stagecoaches, painted, with glorious names embossed on each side; wagons and handcarts piled high with merchandise; private carriages with uniformed drivers; an unending stream of cabs; high-stepping horses with breath turning to steam in the cold. Noises. Drivers cursing and snapping their whips in the air like so many pistol shots; iron horseshoes striking cobblestones where snow had melted or been worn away; men, women, children talking, shouting and no one pausing for breath; bells jingling on the reins of horse-drawn sleighs. People. Young, pink-faced messenger boys darting through crowds and risking their lives in traffic; tall men in tall hats, capes, long coats, greased side whiskers and thick beards, their mouths filled with cigars or tobacco juice; women in for and silks, their hands warmed by muffs; a parade of women in a rainbow of bonnets, plumed hats, with lace and diamonds at their throats and each woman stepping daintily into ankle deep mud, lifting a skirt to show leather boots which buttoned on the side.
The sight and sound of it all was splendid and frightening. Nothing in London-not Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses, not the Strand or Oxford Street-could compare to what Figg was seeing on the Broadway of New York.
The number of shops was unending and the buildings, mostly wooden and none over five stories tall, seemed to draw people by the thousands.
Power, energy, riches. This was New York and Figg was intimidated by such a city. But he saw other things, too. There were gutters packed with garbage and trash and there were side streets jammed with empty barrels, boxes and battered buckets filled with coal ashes. There were ugly pigs roaming the streets, brown pigs with long thin legs and sickening black blotches on their backs. They rooted noisily in the trash and garbage, oblivious to blocking the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to either push through them or walk around them into ankle deep mud.
Titus Bootham, wrapped in a shaggy coat of black bear for, was a short, gentle, fifty-five-year-old with the lined face of an old woman who had endured much without knowing why. He was awed by Figg. Awed, impressed, pleased to be in his company. Like all Englishmen, Bootham saw boxing as being an exact metaphor for all of life, the chance for a man to show maximum courage and doggedness, the chance to give and receive pain, persisting in this ideal like the British bulldog who hung on once he laid his teeth into a thing. The prize ring was John Bull, Englishman, at his finest and for Bootham, the opportunity to associate himself with Pierce James Figg was equal to drinking ale with the Prince of Wales.