The Port-Wine Stain (18 page)

“Pardon me, sir,” said “M. Louis,” who had drawn up beside me and spoken before I had been made aware of him.

I looked at the man without comprehension, so enthralled was I to an alien power, one both secret and undeniable. “What is it?”

“I have seen you sitting here, by the hour, on four afternoons. . . .”

“Yes?” I asked irritably, wishing him gone about his business.

“I only meant to inquire whether or not you are in need of information,” he said, giving me a sidelong glance.

“What kind of information?” I demanded.

He must have been inured to the vexation of visitors, for he continued affably. “I have made a study of William Boyle's crimes and will gladly tell you all I know of them.”

I already knew a great deal about William Boyle. The reader will hardly credit me when I say that I had begun to receive, through the etheric currents that passed between my waxen double and myself, his thoughts and memories. (I say
“waxen,” but, in truth, it was Boyle, the man himself, who stood before me.)

The
cicerone
did not stir from my side. He grew restless. I knew then what he wished to ask me, but was too polite to say. I said it for him.

“No doubt, you have noticed the resemblance between us.”

He took off his tri-cornered hat and mopped his brow, with a sudden nervousness that betrayed his ulterior purpose in having accosted me. “I have, sir.”

“Strange, is it not?” I was enjoying his discomfiture.

“It is very strange,” he agreed, stealing another look at me.

“It is this likeness which has brought me here these three afternoons since my first encounter with it. You can, perhaps, imagine my curiosity . . . my fascination.”

He nodded in the affirmative, and I suddenly grasped an additional, more urgent, reason for my visits there: to purchase the plaster death mask from which Boyle's face had been cast in wax.*

[Poe inserted a second footnote here:
“Sub conservatione formæ specificæ salva anima.”
How is your Latin, Moran? If I remember mine, the epigram translates: “The soul is saved by the preservation of the specific form.” To continue Poe's tale.]

“I should like to speak to Madame Tussaud,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height, which, however, was not imposing. I attempted a supercilious manner and said again, “I should like to speak to her
now
.”

Without another word, he escorted me to her
atelier
, knocked once upon the door, and went his own way, with what I imagined was a feeling of relief.

“Excuse me, Madame,” I said, when she opened the door to me. “I wish a word with you.”

“What is it you want?” she asked, after having resumed her place behind an armature, on which a lump of wax was waiting to be transformed into the head of a Roman emperor.

“I want to buy the death mask of William Boyle,” I said, hoping my voice would not reveal emotions that were, at once, complex, poignant, and fearful. “I will pay anything within reason. I am not a wealthy man; I am only a scholar.”

“The masks are not for sale!” she said sharply, but in a moment, she relented. “However, in your case, Mister---------- “

I gave her a false name.

“I will give you the mask.”

“Give it to me?”
This sudden turn of events had caused the wind to spill from my sail, so to speak, and I was, momentarily, becalmed. She knew, of course, why I wanted it. She was an artist and did not need to see Boyle and me standing side by side to realize that we were twins, in all but the stain on his cheek. She must have sensed, in my request, an urgency well beyond that of a mundane business proposition. “Why would you be kind—more than kind, munificent—to a stranger?”

“It pleases me.”

And so, with my double's death mask inside my trunk, I sailed home to Philadelphia.

II

No sooner had I settled into my rooms on Ludlow Street than I went out-of-doors again, carrying the death mask inside a valise. I was acquainted with a man who worked in the county coroner's office, and I trusted that he would know someone with the requisite skills to produce a likeness of William Boyle's head in wax, clay, or plaster of Paris from his death mask. I was successful in securing the services of an expert, and, in two or three weeks' time, a
trompe I'oeil
recreation of my double's head became the centerpiece of my dining-table, where I could study it to my heart's content. I did so with the avidity of an astronomer who has discovered a new planet.

I knew something of the sciences of phrenology and physiognomy, and, with my fingers, I would read his character, its aversions and propensities, until they became second nature to me. I would spend hours gazing at Boyle's countenance, which was as familiar as my own, my mind empty of all thoughts, save his. In time, I completed the mental transference that had begun at Madame Tussaud's. I now knew William Boyle as well as I knew my own self, because, in a very real sense, I was he and he was I. (Could “M. Louis” have whispered in my ear the history of William Boyle, while I was under the influence of his effigy? No—
I say no!
My knowledge of his perversities was too intimate and comprehensive.)

It was only then that I understood the reason for our having met, as if by chance, and the purpose—ordained by fiend or devil—of our affinity: I would continue Boyle's
career, which had been curtailed by the hangman's noose. I would bring to Philadelphia the terror Boyle had let loose in London, wreaking havoc on the City of Brotherly Love. I would kill for motives he had yet to confide, if indeed he himself knew them. Whether my fate was to experience ecstasy or depravity, it didn't matter, so long as I followed Boyle's wishes.

And so, I, who had been a peaceable, even a meek man, sat at the dining-table, under the stern gaze of my master, preparing a list of victims, while the mantel clock ticked in the silence, like time's own great heart. The passing seconds fell all about me, a fine gray snow that was, in fact, only dust. As I wrote, I felt a sensation on the skin of my cheek, which, to the touch of my fingers, was hot. Having gone to the mirror, I saw that my face now bore the lurid disfigurement of a port-wine stain. I was not surprised to find it there. That night, when I lay abed waiting for Morpheus to descend, I pondered our fates—Boyle's and mine. If his blemish had been removed by the new surgery
before
he took to murdering, would his life—and mine—have been different? I had read an account in the
American Sentinel
of the repair of a hideous facial deformity, borne since birth by a young man named Nathaniel D-----------. Even now I could go to the surgeon, a Dr. Mütter, of my own city, and implore him to remove the stain from my cheek. But I did not want it gone!

[A clause follows—the beginning of a sentence which was to be the start of a paragraph, but Poe had not had an opportunity to continue before I made off with his manuscript. The tale ends here.]

No matter that he had left the manuscript unfinished, the story had shaken me. Pricked by nervous dread, I thought to throw it onto the fire as my mother wished and Savonarola, the fanatical priest, would have done had he been alive and his puritanical bonfires still raged. But they had been extinguished by tolerant men centuries ago, and I took my own dead fire as a sign that Poe's work ought not to be destroyed. Nevertheless, I would not give it back to him to finish. I felt a superstitious fear; completed, the tale might become a fatal lodestone, strengthening the magnetic affinity between my own murderous double and me. Already, I thought of him as a part of me, vile and unwelcome like a maggot in a piece of meat. I wanted to jump up and run to the hospital's incinerator and burn the tale together with gory bandages from the pit. But no, no, I mustn't!

I was on the horns of a dilemma, afraid to destroy Poe's story and just as afraid not to. The manuscript was a curse that might be visited on me if I burned it or if I did not. My mother may have been right in fearing that the smoke from the smoldering manuscript could cause the devil to appear, if not he, then a horde of glowering authors whose works had perished during the burning of the Alexandrian library. Like a voodoo curse, the manuscript might also overturn my reason unless I were to get rid of it. Either/or. The pit or the pendulum. In the end, I hid it underneath my bedroom's floorboards. I was sorry I'd taken the goddamn thing and wished I'd never met Edgar Allan Poe!

I passed the night in a hive of dreams. Next morning, I
retained mostly vague impressions from that troubled sleep. I recalled Ida as I had pictured her while I'd fumbled foolishly with the fat whore. I seemed to see Virginia Poe's sad porcelain face and remembered that I wanted very much to trace its lines and contours with my hands. I saw my mother on the stairs with a lighted candle in her mouth. In the most vivid of those jumbled scenes, I saw myself once again at the séance that Edgar and I had attended in January with Frances Osgood. We were holding one another's hands as we sat around the medium's table. I unclasped one of mine and laid it on Osgood's lap, and a bird, a pigeon, flew out from the collar of her dress. She swooned, and Edgar snickered. His mustache fell onto the table and wriggled there until Mütter impaled it with a specimen pin.

Poe's tale had put a torch to my imagination, turning its mazy, commonplace passages into Prince Prospero's lurid halls. I might have been stalked by the Red Death itself, so fine and inescapable was the net of Edgar's prose enchantment.

I knew the tale was dangerous, Moran, but I couldn't resist exhuming it from beneath the floorboards. I was drawn to it the way we are drawn to sin or to an evil that charms us. I would ponder Edgar's story, which was also mine, whenever I had an idle moment. Solitary during those weeks, I drank a good deal, as one does in hopes of forgetfulness. Sometimes the thought came into my head that I might be released from sin—strange words in this instance, but let them stand—if my house should burn down, through no fault of mine, but spontaneously, by a spark, say, jumping from Ben Franklin's machine—or from God's finger,
the one that touched Adam and raised him from the mud. If only
He
would destroy Poe's infernal manuscript, I'd be saved! A lunatic's delusion.

T
WO OR THREE DAYS AFTER
I'
D BURIED
“The Port-Wine Stain” under the floorboards, Poe confronted me.
Confronted
is too strong a word for our encounter on the college roof. There was no evident hostility. He approached me—the better word—while I was feeding and watering the birds. I had been preoccupied by his unfinished tale and did not hear him enter the coop until his shoes crunched on the gritty floor. I turned in surprise and saw him standing in a shaft of weak March sunlight, alive with dust motes and down. By impulse, I picked up the manure shovel in case I should have to fend him off.

“Good morning, Edward,” he said with disarming geniality.

I put the shovel down and faced him with more resolution than I'd previously been able to muster during our . . . trysts.

“Good morning, Edgar,” I replied in kind.

“And how are your subjects—thriving, I hope?”

He picked a downy feather from the sleeve of his black coat.

“Tolerably well,” I replied.

He kept his dark eyes fixed on mine; I held his gaze. He wiped the sole of his shoe—nervously, I thought—on the boot scraper. I took his nervousness as a triumph of my will. He must have realized his discomfiture, because he took a
step toward me and frowned. He meant to appear menacing, but his mustache twitched comically as in my dream of Sarah Whitman's séance.

“Did you steal my manuscript?” he demanded.

If there'd been a clock inside the coop, its ticking would have echoed in the silence that followed his challenge. The time between one tick and the next would have seemed an age. In that silence and during that age, I'd have pondered my answer. Should I admit my robbery or pretend innocence? But no clock ticked; the moment was brief.

“I stole it!” I blustered.

My defiance seemed to stagger him. No doubt, he'd come prepared to hear an indignant or a frightened denial. I took a step toward him; he took one back.

“Why?” he asked without anger. I realized that I'd hurt his feelings—had wounded him—betrayed his idea of the friendship we two had shared—never mind the shocks he'd given me. “Why?” he asked again in perplexity.

“You had no right to use me as you did!” I stammered in a sudden gust of anger. “Again and again, you took advantage of me . . . used me—shamefully!” Anger had grown too hot for grammatical niceties. “Having me boxed up like a . . . sending me the skull . . . and now this
story
.” I spat out the word like a rancid morsel.

“I dedicated it to you, Edward,” he said, offended.

I laughed at the presumption. He believed that I'd be honored to have an Edgar Poe tale dedicated to me and that his offenses against me would be pardoned because of it! I turned my back. I heard the hesitation, the reluctance, that would have been visible in his stance had I been facing
him. I kept my back turned toward him, and, in a moment, he left the coop.