Nevermore: A Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe Read Free Page B

landed on the windowsill, then dropped into the room with a thud.   It sat glaring at him for a moment, and then, as if satisfied in some way, began to busily and noisily preen its feathers.
    "Good evening, Grimm." Edgar said with a slight, mock bow.   "And it is good to see you too.   Perhaps I shall groom my mustache while you are busy, as a show of camaraderie?"
    The bird glanced up at him, and then continued working over its tail feathers in complete indifference.
    Edgar closed the window and took a seat at the table.   He arranged his papers carefully, gathering those he'd written the night before on top of a larger stack of blank sheets.   He always began by re-reading what he'd just finished.   It served as a quick pre-edit, and it dropped him back into the story with a fresh 'reader's' perspective of the work.
    "Perhaps," he said conversationally, "I shall write a story about a bird – a great black one who is too often inattentive.   Grave things might happen to such a creature, don't you think?"
    The crow didn't even bother to glance up at this.   Edgar chuckled, and turned to the pages before him.   He had meant to write a story of romance and intrigue, but as he read, he saw that – once again – the melancholy that served as his muse had taken over and driven dark spikes between the pages.   It was clear that one lover must die at the hand of the other, and that the mystery would depend on the circumstances.   The young man in the story was quite mad – as was so often the case – mad and absolutely brilliant.   Misunderstood.   Lonely.
    He opened the flask and took a long pull, letting the fiery warmth of it roll back over his tongue and down through the chilly expanse of his heart.   Grimm hopped to the tabletop in a flurry of wings.   He turned and glared at Edgar again, looking for all the world as if he would snatch the flask and fly off with it.   It was Edgar's turn to ignore the bird.
    "Leave it be, old friend," Edgar said.   "Now is not the time.   You are right to disapprove, but I can't help myself.   Rather, knowing the pain that it would bring, I will not help myself."
    Then, opening the small bottle of ink, he dipped the first of his quills and began to write, dropping away into the world of the story as if it might erase the real world entirely.   He told himself the protagonist's pain was not his own, so it was cathartic to pretend that the darkness in his characters’ lives was also not his own, and to drive them deeper and deeper until what he suffered in his silence seemed smaller in comparison.
    And there were the visions.   As he wrote, his mind stretched.   It was the only way he could describe it.   He reached out to the world beyond him, linked himself to the minds and dreams of others, plucked out the things that frightened them, and made them his own.   His mind blended with that of the crow as well, named Grimm for the fairy tales so well-penned by long-dead brothers.   The two had traveled together, albeit in secret, for several years.   The old bird lent him strength, sometimes wisdom, and more often than not the necessary inspiration to bring another tale to life.
    This time it was different.   Something had shifted, or changed.   He could not drop into the story he was working on properly.   He knew what was happening, knew what he thought must come next.   He even had bits and pieces of prose handy that he felt he might make use of in the course of recording that particular vision.   He could not write it.   It had all disappeared from his mind like a puff of smoke.   In its place – all he saw were trees.

Chapter Three
     
    O nce she started, Lenore worked steadily.   The work that she did was demanding.   Once she slipped back into the drawing, she had to remain there, at least until whichever trapped spirit she'd chosen to work with was absolutely freed of the object that trapped it.   She tried to think of the spirits as things, and