The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock Read Free Book Online

fear, desire, shame? I have. They have teeth, those emotions, and they gnaw and rend.”
    I was beginning to regret that Dr. Mütter had charged me with satisfying Poe’s interest, which I found increasingly alarming. By now, I’d read “Ligeia” and “William Wilson,” besides “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I understood and even enjoyed Poe’s frightening inventions. But to see one taking shape before my eyes was quite another thing. I knew that aliterary creation might scare the daylights out of me but that it could not harm me. I sensed, however, that what Poe, by his uncanny gifts, had been empowered to invoke was dangerous. All at once, I wanted to escape his influence and thought that if he were once more to catch my eye, I would be lost—an idea as far-fetched as his own crotchets. I let my eyes rest a moment on his alpaca coat, whose shoulder seam was in need of a needle and thread. Foolishly, I prayed that he would not turn around. I would be safe for as long as I did not see his face, nor he mine.
    I think that the dread I felt had been encouraged by the residue of the tales of his I had read, by the skulls and pathological exhibits surrounding me, and by the sudden obscurity into which the room was plunged. The low sun was hidden by a shoal of clouds, and the gaslights had yet to be lit. I reminded myself that the person who sat in front of me, poring over the cranial souvenir of Czeslaw Vogel, was only a poor scribbler dressed in a shabby suit of clothes. He may have been a gentleman, a graduate of a fine university, and a former West Point cadet, but, as docent of Mütter’s freak show, I earned enough money to buy a chesterfield coat, a shawl-collared vest, a fancy cravat, and leather gaiters. While not turned out so elegantly as Dr. Mütter, I was a fashion plate next to this broken-down scribe.
    â€œIf only it could talk!” cried Poe, musing on the Polish skull. “What a tale it would have to tell! It would outdo anything my mortal imagination could contrive, and I’d gladly be its amanuensis if only it would speak its mind. Think of it, Edward! It could betray the secrets of the grave. What wouldn’t I give if poor Yorick here could only workthe hinges of its jaw and speak! I’d make a Faustian bargain to gain the knowledge locked within this bone.”
    He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond reach of ordinary mortals.
    â€œTime is slowing,” he said in a leaden voice. “Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall.”
    His words were wild, and I trembled to hear them. And then he placed the skull upon the table and began to run his fingers over it, as though he meant to read Vogel’s character in the fleshless face.
    â€œEdward, I can almost see the man himself, as he used to be.”
    In spite of myself, I found myself drawing nearer. I watched Poe’s shapely fingers caress what was left of Vogel. The room grew darker, a dog barked outside in the distance, and a door in a remote corridor of the hospital closed audibly. I might have stepped into a gothic novel or one of Poe’s own literary horrors. I was deliciously frightened and enthralled.
    â€œHe was miserably poor,” said Poe, his fingertips in motion around the contours of the skull. I noticed that his eyes were shut, the lashes long and dark. A handsome man, I thought, now that I see him clearly, if a strangely fashioned one. “An intelligent man, who spoke English poorly and must, of necessity, take menial jobs that were beneath him and that he resented. A sad and lonely person, driven by demons and want to murder—a girl, perchance, who had spurned him, or a man, an overseer, who had insulted him. And so he was hanged.”
    With his slender fingers, Poe encircled the place where, in life,