Normally, I tried to empathize with a living, breathing person, but this time, I let my mind wander into the psyche of this writer, long dead, who had penned this bizarre work. What was he trying to accomplish? And what did Edgar-our Edgar-get out of it? Why was this book so significant to him that he led us to it? It was baffling.
Until I started to see a weird sort of pattern emerging, a secret latticework woven between the sentences. And some disturbingly familiar terminology. Dream-Land. Ascension. Golden Age.
That was when I started to get it.
I was so absorbed in my reading I didn’t even notice the woman standing at the other end of my desk. She had to clear her throat, then drum her fingers.
“Thallium.”
I looked up. It was Jennifer Fuentes, the toxicologist.
I squinted. “You’re saying I need Valium? Do I seem stressed?”
“Not Valium. Thallium. A deadly poison.”
I pulled my head out of the book. “And the reason you’re saying this is…”
“I found it in Fara Spencer’s mouth, just like the O’Bannon kid predicted. I used a wide range of reagents for different hard-to-detect poisons. Thallium clicked. The spectrophotometer confirmed it. It had broken down, as any poison would over that period of time. So to double-check, I put the sample in a graphite tube and heated it to vaporize the poison. Put it under the blue light. Voilà. Thallium. Judging from what was left more than a week after her death, I’d say it was a significant dosage.”
“Enough to kill her?”
“Oh, yeah. Instantly.”
“So he took the heart out after she was dead.”
“I think so. Immediately thereafter, before the blood had a chance to coagulate.”
“But she wouldn’t have felt the pain.”
“Not if she was dead.”
Of course not. He’d captured her, sure. Probably terrorized her, just like he did me. And he’d taken the heart, because that’s what Poe wanted him to do, and that’s what he wanted to mail to me. But he couldn’t do it while she was alive. She wasn’t an offering, and outside of his twisted plan for redemption, he lacked the requisite cruelty. Or at least one of his personalities did.
And Darcy had known it all along.
“Tell me about thallium, Doc. Is it hard to get, like that voodoo zombie stuff?”
She shook her head. “Rat poison, most likely. Contains thallium sulphate. Half the people in Vegas probably have it in their garage, never suspecting how deadly it can be.”
“But Edgar would know. Edgar knows everything.”
“I feel like an idiot. I would’ve missed it altogether if it hadn’t been for that kid.”
“Don’t feel bad, Doc. You were meant to miss it.”
Jennifer walked humbly back to her office and I returned to my reading.
I’m getting close to you, Edgar, I thought. I was still missing a few key pieces of information, but it was starting to fall into place, like snowflakes on a Colorado mountaintop. And the few things I didn’t know yet, I knew where to find.
In this book.
There was a reason why Edgar was who he was, why he did what he did. And I was going to discover it. Before his damned Day of Ascension. Before it was too late.
Who are you? Where did you come from?
29
“Please, Nana, please. We’ll be careful.”
“No. You’re too young. You children should stay near the house.”
“We’re old enough. Honest.”
“Ernie, I’ve given you my answer.”
“But Nana!”
The twins had lived with their grandmother for almost a month before she relented, on a bright summer morning when the California air was so cool and the sun so warm even she must’ve found the temptation irresistible. Her small rural house backed up against a forest full of brush and hidden dangers, maple and oak and tall pines, redwoods and relicts of redwoods. Even better, not a quarter mile beyond the forest was a vast expanse of beach, a private access road to the Pacific Ocean. Nana’s family had bought this choice land not far from Salinas at the turn of the century and never let it go, even though they were poor as dirt and it came to be worth a substantial sum. But what good did it do the twins if they weren’t allowed to leave the house?
“I want you children where I can see you. No telling what kinds of mischief you might get into.” She had a cat in her arms, a huge peach-colored Maine coon that stared at Ernie with eyes that never blinked. “I know what you were up to when your parents weren’t watching and I won’t have any of it. You just stay put.”
“But there’s nothing to do in the yard!”
“And what is it you think you’re going to do in the forest? Don’t you know that place is full of ticks? Poison ivy? Do you know what poison ivy looks like? I’ll bet you don’t. You get a dose of that and you’ll be miserable for days. Snakes out there, too.”
Ernie was unconvinced.
“Did I tell you about the wild boars? My mother saw one, just before the Lord took her home. Teeth like razors. Could eat little things like you two in a single gulp.”
But Ernie did not relent. To him, the forest was an unexplored wonderland teeming with adventure. Even from a distance he could see its dark and foreboding corners, and the mystery made it all the more alluring.
“We could play lots of games in there. We could build forts and play hide-and-seek.”
“You can do all that in the yard.”
“Not good. Not like we could there.”
Nana’s eventual surrender was inevitable, given how both Ernie and Ginny pounded her with the relentlessness only eight-year-olds can muster. “But just for one hour. And I want you to carry this tin whistle. You get in any trouble, meet up with a wild boar or something, you blow on it, hard. And when you get back, I’ll be inspecting you for ticks.”
“All right, Nana. We will, Nana,” he said, throwing himself up against her and hugging her tightly.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, pushing him away.
“And what about the beach? Can we go there, too?”
“Under no circumstances are you to go near the beach. I couldn’t hear you out there even if you did blow that whistle. Now get along, before I change my mind.”
“Yes, Nana,” he said, already running.
And so the revels began. They were like pagans, Ginny and Ernie, romping through the forest, worshiping each other and secret gods known to no one but themselves. They would pretend to be astronauts on another planet searching for new life-forms and alien civilizations. They would play endless games of chase. There were no other children living anywhere near them, and they never minded in the least. They were a world unto themselves.
On some afternoons, Ernie’s favorite ones, after the running and chasing were done, they would sit together on their makeshift table, a huge stump of a tree that had been logged a generation before. Hidden amidst the maple and second-growth redwoods, they would tell each other everything. They had no secrets. Why would they? Each was an extension of the other. As far as they were concerned, they were two parts of the same person.
“Do you ever miss Mom and Dad?” Ginny asked, one such afternoon.
“I dunno.” He stretched out, sunning himself. “Kinda sorta. You?”
“Maybe. Sometimes.”
“I don’t miss Mom yelling all the time.”
“No.”
“And I don’t miss Daddy’s spankings. Which really weren’t spankings because they weren’t on my butt.”
“He never spanked me.”
“That’s ’cause he liked you. He spanked me all the time. He just liked you.”
“Yeah,” she said, drawing her arms inward as she spoke, staring at the leaves. “He sure did like me.”
“I hated it when they acted all weird and crazy and couldn’t hardly walk.”
“Me too. But that was when Daddy liked me the most.”
“And Nana’s pretty nice. Even if she is old and kinda strange.”
“Yeah.”
The breeze blew a trace of honeysuckle between them, rustling the leaves and giving them both a slight chill.
“But I still miss Mom and Daddy. Sometimes,” Ginny said quietly.
“Yeah. Me too, I guess.”
True to her word, when they returned from the forest each day, their grandmother performed full and thorough inspections.
“Those ticks are insidious. They dig down deep and they never let go. Strip!”
And she meant it. The inspection did not begin until both children were standing before her starkers. “No underwear. Nothing.” Now they really looked like wild animals, primordial wood nymphs, hair tangled and full of leaves, even bugs, dirt sweat-stained to their skin. Their grandmother checked each nook and cranny, every fold and orifice. The children didn’t much enjoy this assessment. But it did not deter them. Next day, they were back in the forest.
“Do you want to touch it?”
He had seen her looking at him while he went to the bathroom behind a tree. It was not the first time.
“No way. Gross.”
“Isn’t gross. It’s just me.”
“Well, I don’t have anything like that.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a girl.”
They sat on the stump in silence for a few moments. He knew what she was thinking. It was always like that, and not just with her. He could tell what anyone was thinking, sometimes before they knew themselves. And he knew Ginny’s mind as well as he knew his own.
“Okay,” she said, something like fifteen minutes later, out of the blue.
“Okay what?”
“Okay I want to touch it.”
He considered. “You’ll have to let me touch yours.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, whatever you got, I want to touch it.”
“Okay.”
Ernie dropped his shorts. And his Sears-bought Underoos, which drooped over his shoes.
And she touched it.
“That wasn’t so much,” she remarked, then giggled. “It’s all sticking out now.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Why’s it doing that? Just ’cause I touched it?”
“You didn’t do it right,” he said defensively. “You’re s’posed to kiss it.”
“How would you know?”
“I saw it in one of Dad’s books. You kiss it and it makes people happy.”
She obliged. Afterward, he did the same to her. It was weird and gooshy.
Later that day, when the inspection was done, their grandmother kept Ernie after she let Ginny get dressed and go up to her room.
“I saw what you did,” Nana said. “You nasty little boys with your nasty little things, you’re all alike. Well, I won’t have it. You understand me? I won’t have it.”
“Y-Y-Yes, Nana,” he managed to squeeze out.
The cat curled around his grandmother’s ankles, staring at him with large accusing eyes.
“There will be no nastiness on my property, hear me? Your father may have gone in for that sort of thing, but I most certainly will not. The Good Lord doesn’t like it. And neither do I.”
“Okay, Nana.”
“Nasty. Nasty, ugly boys. Here. Put this on.” She held out a sky-blue pinafore, one of Ginny’s.
“But-that’s a dress-”
“Put it on!” she commanded. He obeyed. She did up the buttons in the back, tied the bow, and spun him around a few times, admiring him. “There, that’s better. Not so nasty now, are we?”
“But Nana-”
“Since you’re so interested in girls, we’ll let you be one from now on.”
“Nana-”
“Go to bed now. And leave the dress on. You are not to remove it until I give you permission. Understand?”
He did as he was told, but the dress was scratchy and uncomfortable and he had a hard time sleeping. She made him wear it forever, days, weeks, including the night one of Nana’s lady friends from town came over. Nana thought the children didn’t know because the lady came after bedtime, as she had come many times before. But the dress bothered Ernie so much he couldn’t sleep, and when he heard screaming, it scared him. Scared him so much he ran into Nana’s bedroom.
“What the hell is this?” the lady said, sitting up in the bed.
Nana leaped out of her bed, wrapping a sheet around herself. “Nasty little boy! Nasty little boy!”
“Nana, I was scared-”
“Did you think you might see something? Is that what you were hoping for? That you might see something nasty?”
“No-I-I-”
“I tried to help you. I tried to make you not be such a dirty little boy. But I can see this dress wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.” Enraged, she ripped it off him, her nails like claws, then ran to a sewing kit resting on her dresser.
“Nana, please-”
“My last sewing needle,” she said, holding the silver shaft between thumb and finger. “Shame to have to use it like this. But what’s got to be done’s got to be done.”
She lowered the needle and jabbed it into his little penis.
Ernie screamed. He tried to squirm away, but the old woman’s hand held him firmly in place. Only after an eternity had passed did she yank the needle out, leaving a trickle of clear fluid in its wake.
Ernie clutched himself. He fell to the floor, curled up, hoping if he squeezed hard enough it wouldn’t hurt anymore.
“I don’t want you playing with Ginny. Not in the forest. Not anywhere.”
His eyes widened with horror. This was even worse, the most horrible punishment possible. “B-B-B-But-”
“You heard me, boy.” She held the dripping needle between her fingers. “Do I need to tell you what will happen if you disobey me?”
“N-N-N-No, ma’am.”
She would not help him or allow the lady in her bed to help him. Ernie had to crawl to his bedroom, holding himself, biting back the pain. He lay on his bed for hours, not sleeping, empty, devastated, in every kind of agony. A swelling began and he didn’t know what to do about it. He started to cry, and once he started, he found he could not stop. His whole body shook with the force of his tears. He did not cry so much for the aching, although that was great. He cried for Ginny. Because she was his life. And now his grandmother had taken his life away.