Reynolds had smiled wistfully as he put away this letter from Allan. The Martian had cast an ominous shadow over their souls, and yet Reynolds could not help feeling glad that at least in Allan’s case this had fallen on astonishingly fertile ground. For his part, it merely prevented him from gazing innocently at the stars and caused him to be irrationally suspicious of anyone who looked at him with curiosity. It made Reynolds happy to imagine his friend in Baltimore, doted on by his aunt and intent upon making a name for himself as an author whilst trying to keep hardship from his door.
Two years later, when his own fears had all but faded, Allan wrote to him at last with some good news: My dear friend, I am pleased to be able to tell you that one of my stories has won a literary prize. It seems that hard work does indeed pay off, something I had begun to doubt. Although in this instance, the prize has only filled me with a feeling of joy and confidence without delivering me from poverty, in whose grip I am now firmly held, for you should know that my stepfather has passed away and left me none of his money. And so, no inheritance will save me from the eternal shipwreck that is my existence. But do not concern yourself on my behalf, my friend, for although I do not even possess a suit in which to go out to eat, life has not beaten me yet. You, better than anyone, know that I am a survivor, and in a few days from now, I shall have found refuge in the best sanctuary possible: my cousin Virginia. Yes, my dear friend, I want you to be the first to know: Virginia and I are to be married, swiftly and in secret.
Reynolds was not surprised by the blow that Allan’s stepfather had dealt from the grave, yet he would never have guessed that the gunner would decide to marry his cousin Virginia, a girl scarcely thirteen years of age. However, such an extraordinary marriage seemed to bring Allan luck, for not long afterward he moved to Richmond, where he took up a post offered him on the magazine the Southern Literary Messenger. Even so, Reynolds soon learned that it was becoming increasingly common to see his friend stumbling drunk out of the seediest taverns, and his aunt and Virginia were finally forced to move to Richmond to keep him from the demon drink. Thanks to their loving ministrations, Allan appeared to return to normal.
It was then Reynolds received a letter in which the gunner announced that in view of the growing popularity of maritime adventure stories, he had begun writing a novel inspired by their experiences in the South Pole. The novel, which was called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was serialized a few weeks later in the Southern Literary Messenger. Reynolds read each fresh installment with a heavy heart, for those pages obliged him to dredge up memories of their days in the Antarctic. And yet they no longer inspired fear in him, only a strange regret, for he realized that the exhilaration of that horror was something he would never have experienced in the comfortable mediocrity of his life as a journalist: he had conversed with a Martian, chased it, fled from it, trapped it in the ice, not to mention killing a man and saving another one’s life. Those were not things people often did. And yet he, Reynolds, had done them, however dreamlike it seemed to him now, and although when the time came he would be buried as a simple lawyer, his body would face eternity with a mysterious Martian symbol engraved on the palm of its hand.
Allan’s tale began with the voyage of a whaler, the Grampus, to the South Seas. In addition to certain rhythmic similarity between the author’s name and that of his eponymous hero, there were other autobiographical elements in the story, some of which clearly referred to their journey: part of the action took place in a hold as suffocating as the one the monster from the stars had chosen as its hiding place, and one of the characters was an Indian named Peters. However, all comparisons between the novel and their failed expedition ended there, for in the second installment, which described their journey to the Antarctic Circle, Allan had let himself be guided solely by his imagination, perhaps fearing he would lose impetus were he to recollect the truth: after several lurid, violent passages, in which the ship avoided icebergs and various crew members showed symptoms of scurvy, they managed to reach an island where they encountered a tribe that tried to take them captive. The finale to that grisly show had the crew sailing south on a milk-white ocean beneath a fine shower of ash, and just before plummeting over a gigantic waterfall, they glimpsed a mysterious, dazzlingly white figure, larger than any creature living on Earth.
Reynolds wrote to Allan at length, telling him how much he had enjoyed his novel, and tried as subtly as he could to find out the meaning of that strange, allusive ending. But, to his astonishment, the writer himself did not seem to have the slightest idea what awaited his characters on the edge of that waterfall. My novel’s abrupt ending has given rise to all manner of speculation, my dear friend, he wrote. Some critics maintain I did not know how to end it, and so I gave up at the climax, possibly owing to indolence, or because the wellspring of my impoverished imagination had dried up, or because the story itself somehow obliged me to end it there. Let them speculate, poor wretches. The truth is, even I do not know the answer, for I wrote those final pages in what can only be described as a state of intense delirium, while being assailed by terrible nightmares in which a hideous creature invariably appeared, of which I remembered nothing upon waking but the horrific impression it had caused me. But do not worry yourself on my account. I know you well enough to suppose you are afraid your friend is losing his mind. Rest assured, that is not yet the case. Although I will not deceive you of all people: in some strange way I sense I am drifting ever closer to insanity. My nightmares have invaded even my waking hours. There are times when I ask myself: Am I sick? What will become of me? And I know you are the only one who can guess at the answer.
Reynolds read Allan’s last words with a sense of foreboding, as he revisited the doubts he had had about his friend’s mental health during the journey back to America. Perhaps the gunner’s brilliant, fragile, complex mind had been unable to cope with a life built upon a conscious act of forgetting. Such a life had posed no problem for Reynolds. Perhaps he had succeeded in forgetting because the workings of his mind were far simpler than those of the gunner, Reynolds thought unashamedly. Had he not managed to forget that he had murdered Symmes? In contrast, Allan was incapable of expunging those memories voluntarily and had been forced to wall them up behind a carefully constructed barricade, even though he had been unable to stop them seeping through the masonry and spilling onto the endless white expanse of the blank sheets he placed on his desk each day. Yes, that was where Allan had exiled all the monsters he wished to banish from his life. And yet, Reynolds feared his friend was finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real life and his imaginings. Despite these disturbing conclusions, Reynolds filled his reply with clichéd words of comfort: he knew there was little else he could do to help his friend except to pray to God (in whom his belief was steadily waning) that the huge white figure awaiting Allan on the edge of the waterfall was not the specter of total madness.
Allan’s next letter was sent from Philadelphia, where the gunner had gone to try his luck after his continuous drinking had irreparably damaged his situation at work. Yet like a faithful dog poverty has followed us here, too, he wrote, and I have been forced to employ my pen in more mundane activities than I would have wished. I was even commissioned to write a textbook on conchology, and you can imagine how little pleasure that afforded me. Although happily I still have time to write tales, tales so dark and menacing that I myself am horrified by them. Yet, I know they could not be otherwise, my friend, for they are fashioned from the sinister stuff of my nightmares. Not even the Auguste Dupin stories, which I strive to make less baleful, escape from the inevitable horror that envelops them all, like a dank moss. Only my beloved Virginia is able to cast a little light into my dark soul, when each day upon my return from work she greets me with a spray of freshly picked flowers.
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 b
elief 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
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 29, 1849, BALTIMORE 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.”