The Map of the Sky (25 page)

Unhappily, that light proved as fragile as a candle flame, for it was soon extinguished. Allan’s next letter was terrible and harrowing, penned by a man who had lost all belief in life.
My dear friend,
it began,
I write to you on the brink of the deepest abyss of despair, for I am at last convinced that my miserable soul is the plaything of Fate. Virginia, my delicate nymph, is gravely ill. A few days ago, while she was entertaining me with some of my favorite songs, accompanying herself on the harp, her voice broke on a high note, and in a gruesome spectacle arranged by the Devil himself, blood began to pour from her sweet mouth. It is consumption, my dear friend. Yes, that vile harpy has come to snatch her from me in two years’ time, or less, according to the doctors, mindless of the fact that no one can take her place. What will become of me when she is no more, Reynolds? What will I do when she begins to fade, when her gentle beauty starts to lose its bloom, like so many petals falling into my clumsy hands as I vainly try to reconstruct the flower of her youth?

Deeply moved by the illness of the young woman he had not even met, and the terrible suffering it caused his friend, Reynolds resolved to do whatever was in his power to help. He offered them the solace of a farm in Bloomingdale, on the northern outskirts of New York, a rustic paradise where the fresh air and soft grassy meadows could breathe new life into Virginia’s slowly deteriorating lungs. The couple apparently enjoyed
a brief respite and even managed to squeeze a little happiness out of life, until the fierce winter forced them back to the city.

Shortly after his return, Allan threw the literary world into a stir with the publication of “The Raven,” a poem he had been working on for some time, and which their peaceful sojourn in the country had enabled him to finish. The explorer was told that people came in droves to listen to him recite those dark verses, which struck fear into their hearts. Intrigued, Reynolds attended one of those performances and was able to see for himself the effect Allan’s reading had on the audience, particularly on the impressionable ladies, as he sat stiffly in his chair, his face luminously pale. When the function was over, Reynolds invited him to dine at a nearby restaurant, where, after clumsily dissecting his meat pie, the gunner broke down and confessed that the continual veering between hope and despair caused by Virginia’s illness was having a worse effect on his soul than if she had died outright. And the only relief he could find was in alcohol and laudanum. Naturally, they no longer spoke of the distant days spent together in the Antarctic fighting against the terrible creature from outer space intent on killing them. All that seemed unreal now, perhaps imaginary, and of no consequence. As they gave each other a warm farewell embrace, it no longer mattered to Reynolds whether or not Allan had lost his mind. The love of his life was dying, Virginia was slowly being taken from him, and there was nothing anyone could do. Somewhere someone had decided at random that those two good, generous souls would suffer for no apparent reason. This and this alone was what made the world a truly terrifying place.

Reynolds did not need to open the gunner’s next letter, sent from one of the places to which his peripatetic wanderings took him, to know that it contained painful news. The next he heard of Allan was that he had returned to Richmond. There he had discovered that Sarah, the childhood sweetheart who had never received his letters, was now a respectable widow, and he had looked her up immediately, as though needing to close the circle. Sarah had accepted his courtship, and within weeks they were engaged. It was then that Reynolds received Allan’s last letter,
informing him that he planned to stop off in Baltimore on his way to Philadelphia to fetch his aunt for the wedding. Reynolds replied instantly, offering to pick Allan up when his boat docked and to stay with him until he caught his train. However, Reynolds was needlessly held up by various matters, so trivial in nature he could only remember them later with bitter rage, and by the time he reached the port, Allan was gone.

XIII

O
N THE MORNING OF
S
EPTEMBER
29, 1849, B
ALTIMORE
awoke in the grip of an icy cold. It was Election Day, and in the doorways of the taverns, which had been turned into polling stations, the citizens had lit fires to combat the freezing temperatures. Failing to find Allan, Reynolds remembered with a start that it was the habitual practice of election gangs to drag any poor wretch they could find from tavern to tavern, inebriating him along the way, and getting him to vote several times for the same candidate. He suddenly feared that his friend might have fallen prey to one of these gangs, and so he began scouring the taverns of Baltimore asking for the gunner. And had anyone been able to observe Reynolds’s trajectory from above, they would have noticed sadly how on more than one occasion he might have chanced upon Allan if he had not at the last moment turned down one street and not another.

Thus, without bumping into Reynolds once, Allan wandered from tavern to tavern, stinking drunk, jostled by a gang of heartless rogues who had pounced on him the moment he arrived at the port. He went from tavern to tavern, arms wrapped round himself to ward off the cold penetrating the threadbare clothes they had dressed him in as a disguise, while everything around him became increasingly blurred. Finally he fell to his knees, exhausted, outside one of the taverns. Unable to drag him back to his feet, the gang left him to his fate. Gasping for breath and seized by violent fits of trembling, Allan tried to fix his gaze on the fire blazing in the tavern doorway to provide him with an anchor in that
heaving world. But his head was spinning so much that the flames took on the proportions of a conflagration, and the merciless cold combined with the dancing flames to stir his memory.

Terrified, Allan felt a tiny dam burst inside his head, and the memories it was holding back flooded into his consciousness with such blinding clarity he thought he was living them anew: he could see the
Annawan
enveloped by the roaring blaze, the sailors in flames hurling themselves onto the ice from the top deck, the monster from the stars loping toward them, its claws dripping with blood and a trail of headless dogs in its wake. He could hear Reynolds’s voice ordering him to get up, telling him they must run if they wanted to live even a few more minutes. Allan began flailing his arms desperately, convinced he was running, oblivious to the fact that he was scraping the skin of his knees raw as they rubbed against the hard ground. The gunner ran across the snow, urged on by Reynolds, fleeing the monster that dwelled in his nightmares and was coming for him once more, a monster that had landed on Earth from Mars, or some other planet in the universe, for the universe was inhabited by creatures so horrifying that they were beyond the scope of Man’s paltry imagination, a monster that was going to tear him limb from limb because he could not run any farther, he was exhausted, and all he wanted was to lie down on the ice and let that be the end, but no, his friend kept urging him on, run, Allan, run! And so he ran, he ran round in circles, on his knees, in front of the blaze, while a white void stretched out before his fevered eyes, and he heard the creature’s roars behind him and his own voice calling out to the explorer, begging him for help over and over:

“Reynolds, Reynolds, Reynolds!”

He was still calling his friend’s name at the Washington College Hospital, where Reynolds finally found him after going to every hospital in the city.

They had installed the delirious Allan in one of the private rooms at the hospital, an imposing five-story building with arched gothic windows
situated at one of the higher points of Baltimore. The hospital was renowned for being spacious, well ventilated, and run by an experienced medical team. According to the nurse who took him to Allan’s floor, through wards filled with beggars suffering from varying degrees of exposure, the gunner had not stopped calling his name since he was brought in. When they finally reached the room where his friend lay dying, Reynolds could scarcely make out his shuddering body through the crowd around his bed: gawping medical students, nurses, and other members of staff, who must have recognized the celebrated author.

“I am the man he is calling for,” Reynolds announced in a solemn voice.

The group turned as one toward the door, surprised. A young doctor came over to him.

“Thank Heaven! We didn’t know where to find you. I am Doctor Moran.” Reynolds shook his hand warily. “I was the one who attended Mr. Poe when he was brought in . . . For it is Mr. Poe, is it not? Despite his beggar’s garb.”

Reynolds gazed mournfully at the stinking clothes the doctor was pointing to, draped across a chair with a care unworthy of such rags. He could not help wondering what must have happened to his friend to have ended up dressed in those garments. Then he contemplated Allan’s skinny body, barely covered by a sheet drenched in sweat.

“Yes,” Reynolds confirmed, “it’s him.”

“I thought as much. I have read many of his stories,” the doctor said, gazing at his illustrious patient with compassion. Then he turned to Reynolds. “Mr. Poe arrived at the hospital in a complete daze, unaware of who carried him here. Since then he has not stopped calling your name and insisting he is being pursued by a monster.”

Reynolds nodded, smiling wistfully, as though accustomed to his friend’s ravings.

“Did he say anything else?” he asked without looking at the doctor.

“No, he simply repeats the same thing over and over.”

As though confirming what the doctor had said, the gunner cried out once more: “It’s coming for us, Reynolds. The monster is coming for us . . .”

The explorer gave a troubled sigh, then looked at the people gathered around Allan’s bed.

“Could you leave me alone with him, gentlemen?” he ordered rather than asked. But then, seeing the doctor’s reluctance, he added, “It will only take a moment, Doctor. I would like to say good-bye to my friend in private.”

“The patient hasn’t much longer to live,” protested the doctor.

“In that case let’s not waste any more time,” Reynolds replied brusquely, looking straight at him.

The young doctor nodded resignedly and asked the others to follow him.

“We shall wait outside. Don’t be long.”

When he was alone, Reynolds finally approached Allan’s bed.

“I’m here, Allan,” he said, taking his hand.

The gunner tried hard to focus, staring at him with glassy eyes.

“It’s coming for us, Reynolds!” he cried once more. “It’s going to kill us . . . Oh dear God . . . It has come from Mars to kill us all!”

“No, Allan, it’s over now,” Reynolds assured him in an anguished voice, casting a sidelong glance at the door. “We killed it. Don’t you remember? We did it, we defeated the monster.”

Allan gazed about him distractedly, and Reynolds realized the gunner was not seeing the room in the hospital.

“Where am I? I’m cold, Reynolds, so awfully cold . . .”

Reynolds took off his coat and draped it over Allan’s frame, which was still lying on the ice, in temperatures of forty degrees below zero.

“You’re going to get well, Allan, have no fear. You’ll get better and they will send you home. And you will be able to carry on writing. You will write many books, Allan, just wait and see.”

“But I’m so cold, Reynolds . . . ,” the gunner murmured, a little calmer. “In fact I’ve always been cold. It comes from my soul, my
friend.” The explorer nodded, tears in his eyes. The gunner seemed to have regained his sanity for a moment: his mind had somehow come back from the icy wastes and once more occupied that body shivering on a hospital bed. Allan’s increasing serenity made Reynolds uneasy. “I think that’s why I joined that accursed ship, just to find out whether anywhere in the world was colder than inside me.” The gunner gave a feeble laugh that turned into a dreadful coughing fit. Reynolds watched him convulsing on the bed, fearing the violent jolts would shatter his fragile bones. When they finally abated, Allan lay, mouth open, gulping for air that seemed to get stuck in some narrow duct in his body before it could reach his lungs.

“Allan!” Reynolds cried, shaking him gently, as though afraid he might break. “Allan, please . . .”

“I’m leaving you, my friend. I’m going to the place where the monsters dwell . . . ,” the gunner murmured in a faint whisper.

Desperate, Reynolds watched Allan’s neck tense and his nose seem to grow horribly sharp. His lips were turning a dark shade of purple. He understood his friend was dying. Allan choked with a bitter sob, but managed to croak, “May God have mercy on my wretched soul . . .”

“Have no fear, Allan. We killed it,” Reynolds repeated, stroking his friend’s brow with the tenderness of a mother trying to convince her child there are no monsters lurking in the dark. He realized that these would be the last words his friend ever heard. “There are no monsters where you are going. Not anymore.”

Allan gave a feeble smile. Then he looked away, fixing his gaze somewhere on the ceiling, and left his tortured existence with a gentle sigh, almost of relief. Reynolds was surprised at how discreet death was: he had expected to see the gunner’s soul rise up from his body like a dove taking to the air. More out of bewilderment than politeness, he remained beside the bed for a few moments, still holding the gunner’s pale hand in his. Finally he laid it on Allan’s chest with the utmost care.

“I hope you are at last able to rest in peace, my friend,” he said.

He covered Allan’s face and left the room.

“He’s dead,” he murmured as he walked past Doctor Moran and his students, who were standing outside the door. “But his work will be immortal.”

As he found his way out of the hospital, Reynolds could not help wondering whether Edgar Allan Poe’s work would have been different had he not encountered the monster. No one could know, he said to himself with a shrug. On the steps of the hospital, the explorer stared at the radiant morning before him, the carriages jolting over the cobblestones, the hawkers’ cries, the people strolling up and down the pavements, all of them making up the vibrant symphony of life, and he let out a sigh. In the end, the monster from the stars had killed his friend. He had to acknowledge it had beaten them. Yet rather than filling him with hatred or fear, it merely served to strengthen his terrible feeling of loneliness. He was now the sole survivor of the
Annawan,
the only person who knew what had really happened in the Antarctic. Could he remain the sole guardian of that secret? Of course he could, he told himself, because he had no choice. Besides, what solace could it bring him now to share that secret with anyone else? And with whom could he share it? With his practical, adorable Josephine? Whom would it profit to know they were not the sole inhabitants of the universe? The coachman, the flower seller on the corner, the innkeeper unloading barrels on the far side of the street? No, none of them would be better off knowing that from the depths of the universe, intelligences greater than theirs were observing the Earth with greedy eyes, perhaps even now planning how to conquer it. As he had discovered, such information was worthless and only brought suffering to those who possessed it. Whatever had to happen would happen, he concluded with his relentless pragmatism, putting on his hat and descending the steps. He would not be the one to deprive the world of its innocent enjoyment of the astonishing beauty of a starry sky.