Esther Stories by Peter Orner Read Free Book Online Page A

shown up that night and imagined that she’d been sent by his enemies to make a clown of him. He repeated her question in a diabolical whisper: Have I seen your kitty? This confused the old woman, because she could read lips. “Yes, that’s what I asked. Have you seen my cat? She likes to roam down here. This isn’t the first time. Naughty pussy crawls in through a window.”
    And Growling Poe said it again, except this time it wasn’t a question. “Have I seen your kitty. My dear, Muddy, I’m afraid I have. Something’s happened.”
    “To Punim?”
    “Yes, to Punim.” He jabbed a finger toward a folding chair. “Sit.” And as the old bird watched in terror, begging him to return Punim alive, Growling Poe launched into his second act, an abbreviated telling of “The Black Cat,” cutting right to the moment when the pet assassin reaches down and gouges out the eye of the feline who torments him with love.
    Although on the surface at least, Smiling Poe was a kinder man than Growling Poe—all the merchants downtown would tell you this—Smiling Poe didn’t have much better luck luring people down to the catacombs for his shows. So why, you ask, an Edgar Allan Poe Festival in our town when our idea of theater is the high school’s annual abomination of Li’l Abner ? It’s a good question, but if you have to ask, you don’t know Rita Larry-Pontewitz. Rita Larry-Pontewitz is famous for being a thrice-widowed eccentric with incurable boredom and more money than our town’s two savings-and-loans can handle. She likes to pretend that we care more about culture than we actually do. Thus, every few years or so she pours a little of her fortune into a project designed to bring us culture and tourist revenue. “Gonna put us on the map,” she shouts, as she cruises down our sidewalks in her golf cart, handing out flyers for the ballet, the opera, ancient Chinese table dancing. She’s never asked us if we wanted anybody to find us or not, but we tolerate her because she often donates money for things we do need, like a new monorail system connecting our downtown with our new mall and the reconstructed driving range and put-put center we named in her honor.
    In the beginning, we were even excited about the festival and hauled out our forgotten copies of Poe from cardboard boxes in the basement and stayed up nights rereading “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Oblong Box,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” after which we were again surprised and mildly annoyed that those killings were all an innocent monkey’s havoc. We dutifully attended the art exhibitions and the Vincent Price movies, and we happily bought tickets for the one-man shows given in the basement of our Historical Society, which the society president and chief tour guide, Hal Hodapp, renamed the catacombs. The catacombs were a dank, cramped basement filled with stacks of molding telephone books that made people sneeze so loudly and profusely during performances you sometimes couldn’t hear either Poe. But Hal Hodapp, who serves also as Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s unofficial propagandist, circulated the story that the basement of the Historical Society had been an execution chamber back when beheading was still legal in our county. (New Hampshire Puritans don’t mess around.) So the catacombs it was, no matter how much mold, and Hal, who shared Rita’s desire to put us on the map, placed signs along the I-73 corridor to attract tourists to the festival. SEE NOT ONE BUT TWO EDGAR A. POES IN CHAMBER OF LOST HEADS.
    Most people in town saw both Growling Poe’s and Smiling Poe’s show at least once. All well and good. We clapped and clapped and we clapped. That was that. Our literary interlude was over. We tromped our books back down to the basement, because they crowded our shelves. Then an odd thing. They didn’t leave. Even after the rest of the festival packed it up and moved on to Ossipee. Even after Rita herself lost