Yes it was Hugh Larney who had arranged the duel, but it was Jonathan who had taught Miles Standish to choose excitement over shame.
Larney’s voice was shrill with anticipation. “Amos, are you ready?”
The Negro driver touched the reins to his cap. His companion on top of the coach kept his pistol pointed down inside, never taking his eyes from the duelists.
Larney’s small mouth was open, his eyes wide and bright as he quickly looked at his guests standing in the snow and staring back at him. He shouted, “Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute thee! Let the games commence!”
Larney, arm outstretched, dropped his white silk handkerchief in the snow.
“Eeeeeah!” Amos yelled at the team of four horses, snapped his whip and the cracking noise of it echoed across the flat and frozen land. Miles Standish shivered with excitement as he watched the brown carriage fight for traction in the snow, slide left then right, roll forward and pick up speed. Again the whip cracked and now the coach rolled faster, pulling away from the starting point, picking up speed, its iron-rimmed wooden wheels spraying snow to either side of the road.
As the silent men and child whore watched, a man screamed inside the coach.
As if this were a signal, a few spectators ran after the coach, shouting, encouraging one man to kill, the other to die and Miles Standish, so excited that the cold no longer bothered him, imagined that the man screaming was Poe.
When the coach neared a turn in the crude snow-covered racetrack, the screaming suddenly stopped. Then the whip cracked over the horses’ flanks and when the scream started again, Miles’s breathing was almost orgasmic, for in his mind the screaming man in the coach was Poe. Rachel Coltman now belonged to Miles Standish.
SIXTEEN
A terrified Poe couldn’t breathe.
Paralyzed by panic, he stood on the edge of a dark abyss, in a cold wind that whipped his brown hair around his face. He was in a night without end, unable to pull his eyes away from the interminable blackness at his feet, knowing he was doomed to tumble into it, to disappear down into its unending horror. The abyss was deep, bottomless. He was frightened of anything deep-the ocean, a pit, crater, the grave. He desperately wanted to flee this place but his feet were imbedded on the edge. The cold wind howled and shrieked, knifing into his bare flesh and still he couldn’t run, couldn’t leave the edge of the abyss. He had no control over himself; he teetered forward, leaning into the blackness …
And suddenly he was in a coffin, deep within a grave, buried alive beneath damp earth, chest rising and falling as he fought for air. He pounded the inside of the coffin lid, fists wet with his own blood, knuckles pained and smashed, his cries of terror filling his ears. Buried alive! All of his life he’d lived with this fear and now it was real. Buried alive!
Death had been Poe’s obsession, a companion ever since it had claimed his stepmother, wife, those he’d loved above all others. Death, that most awesome of forces, had crept into his mind and lay in wait until called forth in his writings. But Death had warned Poe, warned him that it wanted more than merely his recognition of its existence; Death wanted Poe’s soul and now Death had claimed it, holding him in its clammy grip.
Poe yielded to the terror of the grave; he punched the coffin until all feeling left his bloodied fists. “Air! For God’s sake, air! I beg you, someone help me! I am buried alive! Aliiiiiiiive!”
“Alright, squire, alright. It’s alright now. Come on, wakey, wakey. Mr. Poe! Mr. Poe! It’s me, Figg. Let’s see both yer eyes. Open wide. That’s it, that’s it.”
Poe looked up from his bed to see Figg sitting on the edge, a worried look on his bulldog face. Figg handed him a towel. “You been nightmarin’, squire. Tossin’, turnin’, yellin’ yer fool ‘ead off. ‘Ere, dry yerself. You’re wet, all in a lather like some race horse whats done its best. Woke me up, you did and probably the rest of the bleedin’ unfortunates in this bleedin’ hotel. You always carry on like this when you’re ‘spose to be sleepin’?”
Poe, bare-chested, heart racing much too fast, quickly sat up. Nightmare. He pressed the palms of both hands against the sides of his head. “Need a drink. Rum, whiskey, anything.”
“Nay to that, squire. Alcohol puts you too much sleepy bye from what I can gather and I can’t ‘ave that, no sir. Got some water in the basin over there and I can open the window and bring you a handful of snow. But you ain’t touchin’ spirits whilst you and me is associated.”
Poe hung his head and inhaled deeply. “The thought, sir, of continued association with you is most unpleasant.”
“Awww now, squire, that don’t come from the heart. You and me is on the same quest. Ain’t it me what’s woke you up? You were carryin’ on like a man possessed.”
“I am indeed a man possessed. I need drink, sir. I need stimulants. I also have need for stimulating and intoxicating conversation and again you offer me abstinence, forced abstinence, since you, sir, are an exceedingly unphilosophical man.”
Poe, tensed face shiny with perspiration, let his eyes get used to the dim gaslight. A look at the curtained window told him it was still dark outside and that he was still in a room at the Hotel Astor with Pierce James Figg. He took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled. He was calmer now, but he didn’t want to go back to sleep. Not just yet.
There were always nights like this, nights when his fears mounted a deadly attack on his sanity. Poe feared everything: a hostile world that had rejected and impoverished him; the insanity that had already laid deadly hands on members of his family and could well reach out for him. He feared the demons lurking in his tortured mind, that spewed forth the incredible imaginings no American writer had ever produced. He feared loneliness, he feared dying without ever having been recognized for being an original talent. He feared being buried alive.
But he did not fear Figg. Not anymore. Figg was beneath poe, a brute masquerading as man, something barely animate that smelled of sweat and cheap food, a thing that lacked intelligence and culture and whose thick skull contained a barren void posing as a mind.
He glared at the boxer. “I need relief sir, from myself, from you.”
Figg grinned. “Now that’s all of us what’s in the room, ain’t it. Mr. Poe is displeased by what he sees in God’s universe and would the rest of us in the world kindly leave and allow Mr. Poe to carry on by his lonesome.”
Figg stood up, yawned, stretching his arms towards the ceiling. “Dear me, ain’t life hard. Mind what I said; your lady friend, Mrs. Coltman can stand a bit of lookin’ after, ‘cause if Dr. Parrididdle-”
“Paracelsus.”
“Yeah him. If him and Jonathan is one and the same, well your lady is close enough to this particular fire to get more than her pretty little fingers burned. I know you ain’t happy with a common man like me tellin’ a scholarly gent like yerself what he should be doin’ and all, but you just give some thought to Jonathan carvin’ on the widow Coltman. Heart cut out, liver cut out, oh me, oh my!”
Poe snorted. “Aut Caesar, aut nihil.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Latin. Uttered by Cesare Borgia. ‘Either Caesar or nothing.’ To modernize it, “follow Figg or travel not at all.’”
“Yes sir, I can see where you would say that. I ain’t askin’ you to grieve for my dead. All I wants is for you to help me somewhat and I will be puttin’ things right meself. But you, Mr. Poe’s You be a most proud man, now that’s a fact. Ain’t nobody goin’ to tell you what to do or order you about, no sir. Been that way all yer life, I bet.”