The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part VI

Part I here.
Part II here.
Part III here,
Part IV here.
Part V here.

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part VI

...
“Enough. The cough is a mere nothing,” I said, improvising quickly, alluding to one of his own works with a sly smile while holding my nose firmly and tilting my head back. “It will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough.”

He laughed at that. He had a good laugh and I was genuinely enjoying his company. It seemed almost a pity to kill him.

"True —- true," he replied in kind, "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily —- but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps."

With that we made our way to the next tavern where we sat and sipped whiskey and I listened to him talk of many things -- how many drafts it took to get the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart” just so, for example, and what it was like to write “The Raven” as his wife lay dying in the next room. All the things I had ever dreamed of asking, and all the while I smiled and listened and slowly slipped him poison when his back was turned.

Half of me simply reveled in hearing him speak, vouchsafing to me tiny details unknown to any historian, and half of me, to my eternal shame and damnation, took sadistic delight in playing the cat to his unsuspecting mouse. As such, I did not want our evening together to end too soon so I made the doses small and took the risk of his discovering me, perhaps half hoping that he would.

But he was merrily intoxicated and happy to find a friend of similar temperament with whom to share his burdens, and he suspected nothing.

The chemicals I had brought were to be used in combination. They would bring about the collapse of his nervous system a few hours after the final dose was administered. Less than a lethal dosage would bring about a deep coma in the same period of time.

We were leaving another waterfront tavern, reeling arm-in-arm down a nearly empty street when he turned to me and looked around, this way and that, to see if anyone was approaching.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, winking at me. His speech was slurred, but his gaze was steady. I smiled at him and nodded and, after a long, thoughtful pause, he continued in a much more serious tone.

“Let me tell you something that I have never told another living soul,” he whispered.

At that moment, the world seemed to explode in light. A small, black thunderhead boiled up from nowhere and stood in the street between us, and my clothing was suddenly alive with whipping arcs of blue fire.

In my drunkenness, in my awe at being taken into his confidence and, I admit, in my delight at toying with my prey, I had lost track of the time, and the hour I had set for my departure had suddenly come.

The crash of sound and light utterly unnerved me. I screamed and leapt to grab hold of a streetlamp. When I regained my senses I saw Edgar, his face a mask of horrifying recognition, backing away from me, hand outstretched, pointing.

“You,” he screamed. “It’s you!”

“Edgar…” I began, and stepped towards him.

“Demon,” he shrieked, turning on his heel and tearing away into the night. “Demon!”

I almost began to run after him, but his screams were raising an alarm, and people were beginning to open their windows or step into the street. He was lost to me, and with nothing left to do, I hastened back through time.

As I jumped back through the portal, I had fleeting hopes of making one last journey –- of tracing his steps yet again and intercepting him at one, last moment, but the opportunity was lost to me. When I returned, the machine was gone as were the vials in my vest pocket, the chemicals they contained, and the aluminum control device. In this universe the laboratory was just a reference library and the great man was only a writer of fiction who came to a tragic end a long time ago.

Things are now just as you believe them to be, except here, in my head, where that other universe flickers like a thin scrim pulled over this world.

What I did I had to do, and would do again, but I would not let him end like that. No one deserves to end his days on this Earth as I know he did.

I know the poisons I gave him were not enough to kill him, but the coma that surely overtook him would have been so accurate a counterfeit of death that only the most scrupulous investigation would have found out the truth.

I know with certainty that he must have gone into the cold ground while still alive, and I believe it is no coincidence that this was his own cardinal terror.

We are attached now, he and I.

In my mind I can see him. He is in his coffin now, shredding his fingers to bony splinters and pulp trying to get out, mouth locked in a rictus as he screams pointlessly for help.

And may God have pity on his poor soul, he knows how it will end. He who wrote of “… the rigid embrace of the narrow house – the blackness of the absolute Night – the silence like a sea that overwhelms – the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm,” he above all others knows exactly how it will end.

And as the reality of that other universe ebbs away, I slowly bleed out and die. And if you believe, as I now do, in a fearsome God, a sadistic God, in a God of cruel ironies, then you must see clearly that events could never have ended in any way other than this.

THE END