“Yet his stories contain no mystery greater than the one surrounding his untimely death. The fact that he took with him his host’s walking stick rather than his own, and that he got on the wrong train for Philadelphia but arrived in Baltimore--these suggest that he was ill or feverish. But even a protracted attack of his disabling headaches does not account for the missing five days before he was--discovered on the streets of Baltimore. Nor is there any solution to the puzzle of the name he cried out as he died--a name with no known referent in his life. There can be no doubt that the occurrences which befell Edgar Poe during the few days prior to his death will never be known to us. . . .”
--Stephen Wyralski, The Gallows Poe

His eyes open slowly to total darkness. The lids are swollen from fatigue and from a feverous illness that threatens to consume him. Behind his left eyeball is a headache he has endured for weeks.

(Where is this? It cannot be the train to Philadelphia, there is no motion, no noise, have we stopped? But there is no light, it’s like a tomb. . . .)

The terror of premature interment has haunted him throughout his life. He feels the tickle of sweat on his mustache, attempts to brush it away, but his arms are numb as though he had slept on them. Panic spins in his head, shreds his thoughts; he would kick and claw out of this blackness if only he could move his arms and legs; but, paralyzed, he is incapable of exploiting the surge of adrenaline. The itch of the sweat on his lip is driving him mad. He finds then that he can move his mouth; pushes out his lower lip, huffs and huffs at the irritant mustache, until the sweat blows away. He discovers that his back is arched and that the dullest of sensations has returned to his feet. He begins to feel again. This comforts him and he relaxes.

All he knows is that he is lying on his back on a comfortable, somehow buoyant, surface. Yet, when the lights come up moments later, a scene appears before him which suggests he is defying gravity, standing on his feet. Vertigo whirls him, the contents of his stomach push into his throat, and he looks away from the flickering scene with its clustered figures too quickly to assimilate it. With gritted teeth he represses the surging knot at his throat, though this task swells his headache till it bulges against his eye. He lowers his head, sucking cool cool breath.

He finds that his coat has been removed and his shirt replaced by a thin shirt of some kind of gauzy material. Despite its thinness, he is hot. Both hands are folded across his chest in imitation of death--

(They thought they thought I was dead, beaten? Robbed? Buried, would have been buried, would have been--calm now, be calm, you’re alive, yes yes, alive)

--clutching a stick, a walking stick. He can see only the bossed knob-a ring of silver around a black circle in the center of which has been pen-knifed the name CARTER.

(carter carter, Doctor Carter from Richmond?)

His hands are tingling now and he can feel his legs to the knees. He watches his left foot move and is comforted by it--somewhat. Blinking from sweat, he attempts to confront the bright and seemingly motionless scene again. Squints in preparation, then raises his head, then wishes he hadn’t.

The scene is grotesque, culled from a nightmare. A sickly, malignant yellow light is cast by hundreds of misshapen candles spitting hissing animal fat flames. The candles are high up on dozens of circular chandeliers hung from chains that vanish above, where there is no sign of a ceiling. Wax plops onto robed figures who seem oblivious to it, figures who have remained motionless since he began to watch. They are gathered close together, facing away from him, intent on some central object. He thinks he hears, above the candles’ sibilance, a hiss of a different kind as of something whipping through the air.

He flutters his hands until the tingling dies away, then pushes away from the surface at his back-

(How can I be standing when I know I’m lying down?)

--takes a first hesitant step, like the first step into Hell, moving slowly, delicately forward. Some enormous machine groans, shaking the floor, and he halts, poised like prey ready to run. He hears squealing, glances down and sees enormous rats weaving between the legs of the frozen figures. The rats skitter as he draws near.

He stretches on his toes to see over the shoulders of the robes, but they are too tall. He risks reaching out, shoves gently at the two in front of him. They turn away easily, allowing him to slip between them, ignoring him as they ignore the rats. There are three rows of these robed figures. The two at the back close up behind him and he is trapped among them, panicked by closing claustrophobia. Now sweat pours out all over him; he fights through the second row, kicking at the rats that scuttle over his boot. The swishing sound is much louder, and something black and enormous moves steadily in the dimness just ahead.

He glances at the face beside him. It is shadowed by the cowl, a thin face, eaten by disease. The eyes, though narrowed, burn like those of the rats below, tiny jewels blinking at him from the floor. He cries out and shoves through the last row.

The object of their rapt attention is a stone altar. He stands at the foot of it--watching. A single victim is strapped there, head back, neck muscles locked. He rocks desperately from side to side to break the belt across his waist. He wears a coarse parody of the robes around him. A shiny black crescent swings ponderously back and forth, lowering insidiously notch by notch with each pass over the victim’s body. It’s scant inches above him.

“No!” the watcher shouts, and the victim raises his head to see who has yelled, and the watcher sees himself strapped there, sees the madness of the certainty of death on his own tortured face, and howls with terror. He looks frantically about the scene, sees one robed figure to the side, working a lever. He charges at that figure, who makes no attempt to defend his position. He swats the robed man aside with his stick and pulls the lever back even as the blade splits the first few threads of the coarse gown the victim wears.

Victim and watcher gibber out of control, weeping the same sounds simultaneously.

The watcher drops to his knees, suddenly overcome by his fever. He vomits up air, then cries out, praying: “God, tell me I’m not in Hell!”--though that is precisely where he knows he is. He crawls toward his shackled double, certain that he must save that figure in order to save himself, not knowing why that should be or why he believes it, not caring, only crawling. His stomach heaves with every movement. He hears footsteps running as if down a mile of stairs, nearer, louder, like the fist pounding behind his eye. He reaches up blindly to unlace the belt but his heavy arm slides away and he falls face down onto the floor, stretched out beside his twin....

This story is available in ATTACK OF THE JAZZ GIANTS & OTHER STORIES
Golden Gryphon Press

Author's Afterword:

"This was my first sale.

"You go along writing and submitting fiction for years, and collecting rejection slip after rejection slip.  It’s terribly frustrating. You keep trying to figure out what is missing, what’s wrong, what you should be doing differently in the stories. Then one day you sell one, and you sit back and look at it and ask yourself, “What the heck did I do here that I wasn’t doing before?” To this day I still don’t know.  But some sort of threshold had been crossed, and once this one had sold, I started selling more and more of what I wrote.

"As for the story itself, I love Poe, and I loved that there was a mystery at the end of his life that had never been solved.  Now there’s a pretty fair theory about what happened to him, but I’m not going to tell you what it is although it’s probably true, because mine’s more fun."