Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster (35 page)

Eliza and I have not seen you for days and you have left us in desperate straits. I fear ending up on the streets of Margate
.

What was true and what was false? I had thought the sea air would improve how I felt, but instead my thoughts began to jumble, my head to throb gently, words from the letters mixing together, a distillation of the emotions between my grandparents just before Henry Arnold's death. I tried to clear my mind, but as I turned into New Street, I saw a flash of kingfisher blue skirts and a woman walking quickly, then a glimpse of the woman's face as she looked back at me—my grandmother, I was certain. Oddly, this did not surprise me. I followed her ghost-like presence into Cecil Square, where I saw her entering a neat brick house: number thirteen.

The rent money is missing—spent on gin from the empty bottle you left next to the box where my wages are kept. I cannot tell you how my heart sank when I found the compartment empty
.

The letter you wrote has left me in a foul humour. Interminable accusations! Do you think me so witless to spend our rent money on gin
?

As I stared at the boarding house where my grandparents had lived, the sunlight nipped at my eyes, and I experienced the most peculiar sensation, the hideous dropping off of the veil that separates everyday life and that other world we are not meant to witness. It was as if I were inside a reveler's opium dream and the past was visible before me.

* * *

Elizabeth stood before the threshold, peering through the door of their rooms, surreptitiously watching Henry. He put something in his pocket, closed the mahogany box and hid its key in her jar of hairpins on the dressing table. When Elizabeth entered the room, he pretended to check on Eliza in her cot. She placed bread, cheese and a bottle of gin on the table. Henry immediately opened the bottle and poured himself a large glass.

I have grown weary of your insistence that I sit at home like a tiresome spinster while you sing at the very theatre that deprived me of employment—you add insult to injury
.

Henry's eyes darted toward the door like a cornered animal and his anger was palpable. He poured himself another glass of gin and finished it in a long gulp, kissed Elizabeth's cheek brusquely and made his way out the door. As soon as he was gone, Elizabeth opened the mahogany box and searched through folded letters, her face tense with worry. When she closed the lid, it was as if a door closed upon my vision of the past.

* * *

I directed my gaze to the map and found “3” on Queen Street. I made my way there and discovered an apothecary shop with a large window in which two sizeable carboys were proudly displayed, one filled with a violet-colored liquid, the other with citrine. When I peered through the window I saw a dimly lit shop with large wooden counters and cabinets on the walls that held a multitude of drawers neatly labeled in Latin. Several large glass jars on a shelf housed coiled serpents with jaws agape. A small stuffed crocodile was displayed on another shelf, teeth exposed.

A man with thin gray hair and piercing light blue eyes stood at the counter serving my grandmother. She slid a piece of
paper to the pharmacist. His eyes narrowed slightly when he read it, but he turned to the apothecary jars and bottles:
Artemisia absinthium, Chininum hydrobromicum, oxymel scillae, oleum pini pumilionis, opio en polvo, calomel, syrupus sennae, papav
and
tolu
—medicines or poisons, I did not know. He located an apothecary jar labeled
Atropa belladonna
and placed it on the counter, then proceeded to mix a tincture, which he decanted into a small, cobalt blue bottle. The pharmacist's unblinking eyes captured Elizabeth's as he pushed the bottle toward her.

“Atropa belladonna
. Atropos was one of the three Fates. She held the shears that cut the thread of life. Use it carefully, madam.”

Elizabeth paid for her purchase and turned her gaze to mine. The carboys in the window glowed as if they contained a hellish brew.
Atropa belladonna
. . . And she was gone.

* * *

I found myself walking again, making my way from Queen Street back to Cecil Street and on to Hawley Square. There was no proof that my grandmother had bought the belladonna that was found on my grandfather's person, the drug that might have caused his death. And yet I felt that it was true. Had Dupin tainted my thoughts? Or had my uneasy belief come from the letters I had read? I soon arrived at the corner of Hawley Square and Addington Street, where the Theatre Royal was located, a place that brought my grandmother success and my grandfather ruination.

Who would blame a man for keeping the gin bottle to hand when forced to play the same tune again and again when the singers cannot remember the lyric?

Let us finish the play and move forward. I am certain we will secure you another position at the theatre
.

I knew that my grandmother had a coveted role in
The Waterman
and
The Beaux Stratagem
, whereas my grandfather had lost his position as a pianist. If Henry Arnold had pursued his role as the Monster, putting both their lives in jeopardy, might his wife have poisoned him as Dupin suggested?

With that ominous thought reverberating through my mind, I crossed the threshold and found myself in another world. The space was in use as a chapel rather than a theater, but it had no affinity with the air of Heaven or a place of worship. Candles illuminated the interior with fickle light and a briny scent permeated the air—old seawater, stagnant and dank, creeping along the heavy old stage curtains, settling in like poison. A mystic vapor hovered around me—the theater's hungry ghosts. They urged me to climb onto the makeshift altar that had been their stage, and look down at the theater seats, which fanned out endlessly. I could almost hear the players' voices, the music from the piano. The candlelight glowed like a swarm of fireflies, my head was whirling, the whispers grew louder.

I am a more accomplished pianist than that usurper!

My grandfather, undone by drink, made excuses for his culpability and envied the success of his wife. A shadowy movement drew me to the back of the stage, where I found old props and abandoned theater accouterments, and then a door. When I opened it, the courtyard outside blazed with light, and I stepped back in pain as a man shuffled through the door, mumbling.

An honourable gentleman acquaintance, Mr. Charles Tubbs, found Henry in the gutter quite unable to stand up, his clothes fully ruined, his mind disrupted, his speech incoherent
.

I watched with horror as Henry Arnold staggered and rubbed at his eyes. He was drenched through with perspiration, his mind thoroughly confused—his very life spirit seemed to be slipping away. Was he undone by gin or poison?

Elizabeth . . . the Monster, I am the Monster
. . .

She stood next to me, her face full of fear, as the new piano player, Mr. Charles Tubbs, ushered her husband out of the theater. Elizabeth picked up a flask of water and went into the courtyard, where Henry was stumbling aimlessly. She took the cobalt blue bottle from her pocket and tipped its contents into the water.

I wonder what all would think of the talented Mrs. Arnold if it were known that her greatest performances were on the streets rather than the theatre boards?

When she told him that the flask contained gin, he grabbed for it, and she guided it to his lips. Elizabeth promised Mr. Tubbs that she would take her husband home and refused his offers of assistance.

* * *

When I stepped from the cool darkness of the theater into the courtyard, the sun bleached the color from the sky, blurred the edge of things, and I lost sight of my grandparents. I looked at the map and saw that number “5” was the location of the bathing machines, number “6” the pier and number “7” the lighthouse. I was feeling terribly ill, my head pounding and throat parched, but I was determined to find a message within the map, for surely there was one.

Remember that when one has nothing at all, there is nothing to be lost by telling the truth. Do not vex me lest you wish to incur the Margate Monster's wrath
.

With an unsteady gait, I made my way to Marine Parade, where other perambulators seemed to shy away from me. When I reached the sands, I caught a flash of kingfisher blue and saw Elizabeth leading Henry to a blue and yellow bathing machine, and somehow it was dark and the sands were deserted
but for my grandparents. I crept toward them, but they took no notice of me. Henry's countenance was swollen and red, his tongue protruded as if trying to gather moisture from his parched lips, while his eyes glittered strangely and were black and empty as death. Elizabeth tucked the cobalt blue bottle and a letter into Henry's frock coat pocket, then climbed up to open the bathing machine door. She pulled him up inside and settled him on the floor. His eyelids were closed and his breath ragged.

Please come home. Your wife and daughter miss you deeply, despite our predicament
.

Words from the letter found on Henry's person when he was discovered in the bathing machine. Constructed to suggest innocence?

Elizabeth closed the bathing machine door and made her way back across Margate sands. Tears shimmered on her cheeks.

He passed into the arms of God before I could reach his side
.

A low moaning cry from the bathing machine, but she did not look back.

* * *

I was startled into fuller cognizance by someone shaking my arm.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked a bathing machine attendant.

“Yes, yes, quite fine. Too much sun.” And I made my way across the sands, to the pathway that led to the pier and the lighthouse. As I walked, I tried to breathe in the sea breeze, hoping it would un-jumble my thoughts and banish the specters of the past.

Had I witnessed my grandfather's true demise? Or had those letters made me conjure up that terrible scenario?

I walked the full length of the pier, looking around me for a flash of kingfisher blue, for another glimpse of the past. But I
saw nothing. When I reached the lighthouse, I stared out over the harbor to where the bathing machines stood. And still I witnessed nothing. The specters were gone.

“Look at the sea—how dark it is.”

They were with me again!

I felt a hand tug at my coat pocket. Before I could cry out, someone shoved me hard, and I was tumbling from the pier toward the dark water below and into its chill embrace.

MARGATE AND LONDON, SATURDAY, 18 JULY 1840

A lapping sound, rhythmic. Cold. Wind in my ears and the sound of gulls laughing. My cheek buried in sand, eyes burning with salt. Water rolled over me and away again. My eyes slowly opened to an expanse of stygian green beneath clouds the color of over-ripe plums. Thunder growled softly and a wild light sizzled through the purple. Water swept over me again, and I saw one hand clawing at sand and the other gripping the rim of a wheel.

“There he is.”

Rough hands pulled at me until I was sitting, but still clinging to the wheel of a bathing machine. My clothes were drenched in seawater, my skin itching with brine. I ached and was infinitely weary.

“Poe, it is Dupin. How did you get here?”

“I know not . . .” The sands seemed to shift underneath me and a blade of sunlight pierced my eye, making me howl.

“Let me help you up.”

Dupin pulled me to my feet, but the morning brightness threatened to fizzle into black, so I hunkered back down and dropped my head between my knees. “Deeply, breathe deeply,” I muttered to myself.

“Let us get you to the hotel. Are you able to walk?” Dupin put my arm over his shoulder and somehow we trudged back to the White Hart Hotel.

“A vision,” I muttered. “It was all a dream within a dream.”

* * *

We left Margate at two o'clock on a steam packet named the
Eclipse
, despite Dupin's protests that I should rest at the hotel a further day. He had found me at dawn, and I had submerged into a dreamless sleep until one o'clock, which reinvigorated me enough to get on board the vessel to London. I did not wish to tarry another day in Margate—I had eluded Death once and had no desire to grapple with him again.

“Are you feeling at all recovered, Poe?”

“Somewhat. My mind was in a terrible confusion yesterday, as if both asleep and awake.”

“Indeed. You might have drowned. What possessed you to go to those damnable bathing machines in the night?”

I shook my head. “No, that is not what happened. I saw things from the past, terrible things. Someone pushed me into the water and then all was darkness until I came back to myself on the sands, next to the bathing machine.”

“Had you been to a tippling den in my absence?”

I confess that I should not have been surprised by Dupin's question, but I was. “No spreeing—I had nothing to drink at all. My mind was terribly disturbed as if by opium, but truly it was not I who made it so. Perhaps I am becoming ill.”

Dupin held up a cobalt blue apothecary bottle. “Are you telling me that you did not drink its contents?”

“Absolutely not. It is Henry Arnold's—or more precisely, Elizabeth's. She put it in his pocket.”

Dupin stared at me. “This was found on your person. In
your
coat pocket.”

Was I going mad? The visitations or visions—I remembered everything and what I had seen made sense in the most awful way. Perhaps my overly vivid fancy had conjured it all from the letters, but surely not from an unraveling mind? I thought back to those moments on the pier.

“I felt someone tug at my coat,” I said slowly, “then he pushed me into the water. I remember falling toward the sea as if I were in a dream.”

I did not tell Dupin how a strange calm came over me when I floated up to see yellow, lavender and pink-stained clouds exploding from the sea like fireworks. When the water sluiced over me again and pulled me under, I felt no fear, did not flail but simply let myself sink, ready to give myself to the darkness around me, until I heard a voice, faintly at first,
Sissy's
voice, calling out to me, repeating my name over and over again until I kicked and clawed through the water, fought against the greedy fingers of the sea and felt my knees upon the sand. When I next opened my eyes, my arm was linked through the bathing machine wheel, and I was holding on for my very life.