My Clockwork Muse Read online

  But the man said none of these things.

  "He is a busy man, Mr...?"

  "Poe," I blurted out, failing to think of an alias in time. I cursed my feeble brain. "Tell him it is Mr. Poe to see him."

  "An appointment is necessary," the man said, gesturing vaguely toward a book that lay open upon his desk. In it, he had penned the day's appointments in a flowery script.

  I took a couple of steps forward and the man jerked back as if I meant to bite him. I noticed that the sounds from behind the frosted glass had ceased. "Does that mean he is here then? Billy Burton is here? Look! These appointments are for this very day! Are these Burton's appointments?"

  "Mr. William Evans Burton, yes," the man said stiffly, disapproving of my familiar tone.

  Then I heard the man's voice itself. "Is that you, Poe?"

  I looked up and saw none other than Billy Burton striding out of his office. A few years my elder, he was a heavy-set man with long side-whiskers. If anything, he looked to have gained weight since I had last seen him. He had certainly gained weight since I fancied I had last seen him. And he had gotten his lips back too. And he smelled a damn sight better! But he looked none too happy to see me, though I expected that.

  I rushed past his appointment secretary, much to the man's loud chagrin. I ignored his protestations, for I had to reach Burton, to touch him with my own hands. I saw him, but I scarcely believed it. "Burton!" I cried.

  He took a step back. "Now look here, Poe," he said in a warning tone. When I didn't stop, he raised his fists and adopted a pugilist's stance.

  He must have feared that I had come to punch him in the nose, as I had so often threatened. But punching was the last thing I had on my mind. I had hardly even considered the idea that I would find him here in the flesh. I certainly had not foreseen my emotions upon doing so. With a feeling of unmitigated happiness, I flung my arms around him. He was tense as a board and I could feel his clenched fists pressed against my chest. But when he realized that I embraced him out of joy and not a desire to squeeze the life from his lungs, he relaxed and gave me a pat or two on the back, his befuddled version of a return embrace.

  "You would never believe how happy I am to see you, Burton!" I cried, holding him at arm's length. "I had heard you were missing."

  Burton began to stammer. "I had—I had gone to England..." Then he straightened and looked at me crossly, his nostrils twitching as he seemed to sniff at my breath. "Look here, Poe! Have you been drinking?"

  "I am drunk on happiness and relief at your safe return," I replied, in high spirits.

  "Yes, I thought I detected more of cabbage there than cocktail." Burton disentangled himself from me and took a step back, maintaining his cross expression. "Tell me what this is about, Poe? Since when are you happy to see me?"

  "Since you have been reported missing," I explained. "Why should I not be happy at your safe return?"

  "If it's about the hundred you owe me, I will gladly accept payment any time."

  The man was wholly unlikable, even in the midst of a joyful reunion. But my relief at finding him alive would not permit his irascibility to dampen my happiness. I had the feeling of a man who awakens from a nightmare to find himself safe in his own bed. Part of me wanted to run to Gessler to tell him. Another part of me felt liberated from the man and the detection of his ghastly crimes once and for all. Now that I was assured the victim bore no connection to me whatsoever, I felt I was a free man.

  Still, what I had just heard spill from Burton's lips was a slander that could not go un-remedied.

  "It is not one hundred," I assured him, "but sixty. Minus the nine you unjustly deducted from what you owed me for the publication of my stories."

  "Unjustly? What right have you to my money—money which you have no intention of repaying?"

  Burton's chubby face had gone red. If I hadn't been tempted to strangle the man on the spot, I might have laughed at his apish expression. "I have every intention of repaying. But sixty, not a hundred!"

  "How dare you, Poe? How dare you come in here—?"

  "How dare I? It is robbery, sir! Fifty-one is what I will repay—"

  Burton's appointment secretary grasped me in a bear hug or I would certainly have broken Burton's nose. For one who wrote in such a flowery script, the secretary had strong arms, and I strained against them, struggling to get my hands on his apish master.

  "'Faulty construction and poorness of style' indeed!" I cried. "Oh, yes, I knew it was you, Burton. Who else would write such twaddle?"

  "Such twaddle as your Narrative of Arthur-whatsit-Pym, you mean!"

  "Gordon, you oaf!" I shouted.

  By the time the secretary had wrestled me out the door, I wished it had been Burton I'd seen bricked up in the boarding house basement. Whatever relief I'd felt upon finding him alive was now squandered in anger.

  Still, for better or worse, Billy Burton lived. Now, I had only an unknown corpse to occupy my mind. As my anger began to subside, my feeling of relief returned. I made my way to the train station for home, glad, at least, not to know who it was who had been interred in the boarding house basement.

  Chapter 3

  The route to the train station took me past the boarding house where I had seen—where I had fancied I'd seen Burton dead. I slipped to the opposite side of the street and tried to make myself small behind the foot traffic on the sidewalk. I had a feeling Gessler's men were probably looking for me, that after they had thrown me to the curb, they had turned their backs only to look again and find me missing, having wriggled from their grasp. It was just a matter of time before they showed up at Briggs' again and I wanted to be well away before they realized where I had gone.

  A throng of the curious had gathered around the door of the boarding house and above the teeming mass, I glimpsed the brawny Irishman. The brass badge on his policeman's hat glinted in the sun as he looked one way and then another. I had to laugh when I saw his puzzled expression, for I knew then that I had indeed given him the slip. No doubt Gessler was down in the corpse-scented cellar blustering that he had lost his Dupin, never realizing that while his men looked off in one direction, Dupin was walking away—in plain sight!—in the other. This idea lifted my spirits. I soon found myself whistling a little tune as I dug a coin from my pocket for the flower-seller in front of the station: a single red rose for Virginia's tomb.

  As the train began huffing and chugging towards my cottage in Fordham, the idea that I had seen the detestable Billy Burton walled up dead wearing a fool's cap seemed a comic, if not altogether desirable, notion. I saw his fat red face and his eyes bulging beneath the idiotic hat, all the criticisms that dripped from his vile tongue reduced to a harmless jingling of bells. Ha-ha! It almost seemed funny now that I thought about it on the train.

  Still, the idea that I had seen Burton where there was none troubled me. Briggs was right, of course. My anxiety, already piqued by the burdens of my work, had been heightened by Gessler's crime scene. Who could blame me? What man, roused from a troubled sleep and thrust into the company of a moldering corpse, would not be prone to disturbing visions?

  But the only vision I had now was of Burton in motley. As I listened to the wheels clicking and clacking along the tracks, I began to recount my adventure in my mind, cast in the humorous light I now believed it deserved.

  I must have laughed aloud at some point, for I caught one of the other passengers, a young girl, eying me curiously. Suppressing my grin, I gave her a nod and she buried her face bashfully in her mother's blouse. I then spent the remainder of the thirteen-mile journey lost in pleasant reverie as I composed the story in my mind as I would surely tell it in cheerful company when the occasion next arose.

  My good humor was tempered only by the fact that where I was going, there would be no one to tell.

  Virginia had been interred in the Valentine family vault in a church graveyard not half a mile from our cottage. The Valentines owned the house I had rented and the poverty in which we l
ived there had become well-known. I had been publishing little and the Journal had just started and seemed destined to forever teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. We had become the objects of pity. Worse still, news of Virginia's death after her long illness of consumption had made us the recipients of charity as well: linen grave clothes for Virginia, suitable mourning attire for me, a coffin, even a borrowed grave. To such a state had our pitiable existence fallen!

  Dusk was approaching by the time I arrived at the burial ground. The air had grown chill and the sky was beginning to darken. It was autumn. Even though the weather had been dry, the ground in the churchyard, under the perpetual shadow of massive twisted oaks, was constantly damp. Wet leaves clung to the toes of my shoes.

  I knew the path to Virginia's vault well. I could have walked it with my eyes closed, for I had made the trip often enough, even in the dead of night. Once, I had visited her in my sleep. I had awakened at her graveside with my stocking feet in the snow and no knowledge of how I had come to be standing there. Oh, my Virginia! No man had ever experienced a grief as deep as I had for the loss of his beautiful little wife. As I turned a corner and saw the structure of Virginia's vault at the end of the path before me, I regretted that I had but a single red rose to lay upon it.

  And I saw something else, too: a figure that seemed to glide soundlessly across the graveled path and vanish behind the very structure to which I was bound. I had caught only the briefest glimpse of the form, but it was enough to cause my heart to quicken. Had I seen a ghost? Or merely some overdue mourner to Virginia's grave?

  Neither seemed likely. As I pondered the issue, noting that the phantom failed to re-appear from either end of the vault, I became convinced that the mysterious figure must have been a Valentine, come to pay respects to one of their own.

  Of course!, I thought, chuckling at my foolishness. That imbecile Gessler had me jumping at shadows. Had I not had enough of ghosts for one day?

  Out of respect for the mourner's privacy, I contemplated turning back, but decided that I wouldn't mind a little company, even if we had nothing to share but our grief, and thus continued boldly along the path. But when I came to the corner of the vault, I was shocked to see not a Valentine, but a Coppelius.

  The daughter of Coppelius, that is. It was Olimpia.

  It was a chilly autumn day, but she was dressed as if it were the middle of winter. Her elegant coat nearly touched the ground and she wore upon her head a luxurious snow-white fur hat. She removed her hand from a matching muff long enough to place a long-stemmed red rose on the ledge at the base of Virginia's slab. Her lips and her flower seemed to be only splashes of color in an otherwise dreary landscape of the dead.

  I looked down at my hand and saw that our roses matched. I placed mine alongside hers, both of them standing upright. She noticed me and looked up with watery, soulful eyes.

  "To the most beautiful woman I have ever known." The words spilled from me before I had time to consider them, and I began to stammer like a fool. "Had...ever known, I mean. To the most beautiful woman I had ever known. To Virginia..."

  The corners of Olimpia's mouth twitched upward in a bewitching ghost of a smile. Of course, she had loved Virginia as I had. Though it was her father, Dr. Coppelius, who had tended Virginia through her illness, it was Olimpia who had often remained at her bedside into the wee hours. She brought broth and wine to ease her suffering and to keep her warm had replaced my old military cloak with a new soft comforter. Throughout Virginia's illness, I had grown so used to finding Olimpia at her side that after Virginia's death I found that I missed her presence almost as much as I missed Virginia herself.

  God help me for saying so, but it was true.

  "She..." I began, feeling my cheeks grow hot. "...Virginia, that is, expressed to me often how much she treasured your visits, Miss Coppelius."

  Now her soft cheeks reddened. "My father..." I heard her begin to say, but she spoke in such a low tone that the rest of her words were lost to me, though I leaned in close to hear her. As far as I knew, she never spoke in anything above a low whisper. In all the time I had watched her tending Virginia and listened to them conversing, I don't think I'd ever heard a single intelligible thing fall from her lips.

  Her voice was nevertheless like music to me. She seemed like something not of this world—though that might have just been a fancy of mine, for I had never seen her outside the context of the dead or the dying. In my mind, she had become a kind of mythic being that straddled the chasm between the living and the dead and not a mere flesh and blood woman.

  "And I can assure you," I said, hoping her comment—"Times New Roman" s 12whatever it had been—did not require a direct response, "that she would appreciate your coming here. My Virginia loved to have company. I wish you had known her before she got sickR12 f "Times New Roman" s 12"

  "My father..." she said again before her voice trailed off. I inclined my head to hear her words, but my ear was filled only with the faint music of her unintelligible voice.

  "Yes," I answered, "Dr. Coppelius, your father. I would love to have you both as guests sometime. I see so little of anyone now, and I did so enjoy the company of you and the doctor. I would be honored to have you as guests to my house. I don't have to be ill to warrant a visit, do I?"

  I tried to utter a casual little laugh, but my nerves caused me to lose control of my voice and I feared I might have cackled like a madman. I pursed my lips and leaned forward, hoping for an audible reply.

  "Oh, of course not, Mr. Poe," she said.

  I felt triumphant, for it was the first complete thought I had ever heard her utter and I seized upon the moment to press my luck.

  "Please, Miss Coppelius, Virginia always called me Eddy, and I would like for you to call me Eddy, too."

  She would not meet my eyes, but I heard her distinctly. "Eddy," she said in such a low whisper it might have been a rustling of leaves. But it wasn't; it was "Eddy".

  I was about to say more when a black shape suddenly crossed my vision and landed upon my shoulder. The thing struck me with such violence that I was nearly thrown from my feet. I staggered and turned just in time to see it scamper away under a bush. I felt a pain in my cheek and when I touched it, my fingers came away bloody. Seconds later, a cat appeared out of the bush.

  But not just any cat. It was the loathsome, one-eyed Pluto.

  It crouched there, hissing at me.

  It was Virginia's cat. She had loved it as deeply as I detested the damned thing, and it hated me with a passion that exceeded us both. That it had successfully ambushed me at Virginia's graveside in the presence of Olimpia was an offense I would not soon forget. For Virginia's sake, I still put out little tidbits of food and milk for him, but the creature often went missing for weeks at a time. Now I knew where he was, off in the graveyard chasing rats.

  I was scandalized that Olimpia should have had to witness an attack by such a vile creature, but when I turned to calm her fright, I saw that she had gone. I looked around and found her already in the distance, gliding elegantly away down the path, out of earshot.

  "Nice going, Pluto, you damned thing," I said, but Pluto had vanished too. Only the shuddering of the bush showed where he had gone.

  I wiped the trickle of blood from my cheek and turned to the vault where Virginia's name was engraved upon a slate-gray slab and thought about Olimpia calling me Eddy and saw how our two roses stood side by side, like twins.

  ~ * * * ~

  "So it's love then, is it, Eddy?"

  It was pitch dark by the time I fished the key from my pocket and opened the cottage door. The voice came to me from the gloom inside. I didn't want to hear it but didn't bother saying so; navigating the darkness required all my concentration.

  "Damn-it-all!" My shin struck a chair and sent it scuddering across the bare wood floor. The voice chuckled in the darkness.

  "Yes, very funny," I said, feeling the little spot of fire on my shin. Doubtless, a welt would grow there. I had hit the
chair dead-on and hard. I hobbled to the mantle and found a match.

  "I could have told you you were about to walk into that chair."

  "Thanks," I said, striking the match. I lit a candle and turned.

  The raven sat perched on the back of my rocker. He cocked his head at me and then strained forward and let out an ear-splitting squawk. I winced and the bird flapped a little, clearing his throat.

  "Sorry," he said. "That one slipped out. What I meant to say was—"

  "You talk too much as it is, Tap," I said, cutting him off. I arranged some firewood and kindling in the fireplace, thinking I might warm up some cold tea. "I could live without the squawking, but, I must say, I prefer it to your incessant—"

  "I said I was sorry," Tap replied crossly. "I get excited when I actually have somebody to talk to. Sue me!"

  "I didn't know you required an ear for your endless chattering."

  "Endless? Now, that stings, Eddy. You suppose I sit here all day talking to myself?"

  "Don't you?"

  "You'd think I was crazy if I did."

  "Well, what do you do, then? Perch there quietly?"

  "Perched upon my rusty chalice..." Tap said in a sing-song voice.

  "Your what?" I blew on the kindling and the fire flared up around a charred piece of wood. Hot tea in moments.

  "Rusty chalice."

  "You mean 'bust of Pallas'."

  "Chalice ... Pallas ... Whatever, Eddy. The point is, I got squat to perch on. Wait ... What were we talking about?"

  "How you spend your days."

  "Oh, yeah ... Hardly endless chattering, Eddy. For your information, I spend most days dodging Pluto—when he manages to get inside. Thanks for asking."

  "Why don't you fly off to live in the trees? You know...like a bird."

  "Window, Eddy," Tap said. "Can't fly through glass."