Intermusings Read online

  The bottom page in the man's hand sprouted a red spot of its own. It blossomed before Edgar's eyes and grew larger as he read. Edgar swallowed and looked away, blinking three times in quick succession. When he looked back, the red spot was still there and it had grown larger.

  More spots broke out on the pages in the editor's hands. Still more popped up on the stack upon the desk. Edgar twitched inside, his stomach tying itself into a huge knot and his eye beginning to spasm. The editor’s expression continued to shift through emotions, following the words on the page, but his hands dripped with blood. His fingers smeared the pages, and a steady drip had begun at the edge of the desk, falling from where blood pooled beneath the pages.

  Edgar could barely breathe, and that drip became louder. He watched each droplet form, release from the congealed miasma on the desktop, then fall, quivering through the air to PLOP into the puddle beneath the desk.

  Then the editor scanned the final page and looked up. He grinned at Edgar. It was the big man. The man who’d been with the smaller one in the bar – and he was smiling. His smile widened impossibly and the teeth it revealed were long, sharp, and hungry.

  Edgar screamed.

  He sat up with a start. He was shaking and drenched in sweat. It was still dark, and the soft glow from the gaslights shone through the windows, illuminating galaxies of dust motes as they danced in the darkness. Then he heard the PLOP and his heart nearly stopped.

  Edgar had made tea, and though it would be hours before the city would awaken, he could no longer sleep. He had managed to stop the leak in his sink with an old rag, but the echo of that last PLOP gave him no peace. He still felt clammy from the sweat-drenched nightmare, and he sat at his desk, pen in hand, brooding.

  He was trying to pen a criticism of the latest work by Mr. Charles Dickens, whom he admired, but the words would not come to him. Not those words. The others would not leave him alone, but Edgar had to eat, and he knew he could not sell the stories. Not yet.

  "Who is he?" he muttered.

  The image of the big man, shaking his head in bafflement at the end of the bar as his friend spewed forth those amazing images in a constant stream, came to Edgar again and again. He tried to remember details. Had the man’s hands been calloused? Had he ever come into the tavern with any particular item in his hand that might give a clue to his profession, or his home? Had Edgar ever heard their names?

  Bleary eyed, he returned to the work at hand. He had a deadline, and if he missed another, he would no longer have to worry about finding the words at all, because he would be finding a job – and a home – instead. As the sun rose slowly over the city, the scratching of his quill ticked off the moments on the clock, first hesitantly, and then in a steady stream.

  It was three days later when he finally saw the man, alone at the end of the bar in The Swan. Edgar watched him carefully, trying not to be obvious. He wanted to walk over, offer his hand, and ask where the man’s friend was. Get it out in the open. Instead, he watched as the man morosely nursed a half-pint and stared at the mirrored wall behind the bar in silence.

  It was like being in the theatre and watching a play enacted with one of the main characters missing. The big man’s hat sat, just as it always had, on the bar at his side. The stool beside him was pressed tightly against the wood base of the bar, empty with the aspect of having been empty for a very, very long time. The barman brought pint after pint, but the two men exchanged no pleasantries, and none of the regulars dropped by to ask questions, or offer condolence.

  Edgar drew forth a small sheet of paper from his pocket and placed it on the bar beside his own drink, but when he took his pen in hand, there was no urge to write. The room was filled with subtle sound, low-pitched conversations and clinking glass, the clatter of carriage wheels on the street outside, and the cries of merchants as they closed their shops and carted their wares off the main thoroughfare.

  No words. There was nothing for him to borrow, nothing to steal. The empty barstool mocked him. He began to hallucinate forms and movements in the clump of felt the big man called a hat, and each winking crystal goblet signaled to him, and then ignored him when he turned to see.

  Then it started. Edgar turned his gaze to the blank sheet of paper, and was horrified to see that it had a spatter of blood near the upper right corner. Had he grabbed this from the wrong sheaf of paper? Had it soaked from his desk somehow, or been shaken free of his clothing after he left the alley?

  But no, it was fresh, wasn’t it? It was too red to be dried on the paper, and it was spreading. Edgar glanced up to see if the barman had noticed, but he had not. No one had seen – yet. No one knew.

  Edgar glanced down the bar at the big man, and as he did so, he felt something on his palm. Alarmed, he glanced down again and gasped, unable to contain the exclamation. The blood had pooled, not soaking into the paper, but leaking out of it. There was a gelatinous globe of deep, red blood quivering atop the paper. It had sprung an inner leak along one side and the trickle that ran out across the bar was what had touched Edgar’s hand.

  He glanced up again wildly. The barman had begun to walk toward him, and Edgar’s heart pounded. He found that he couldn’t breathe, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the big man at the end of the bar had spun in his seat and had fixed him with a cold stare. When the man slowly rose, Edgar could take no more. He leaped back from his stool, toppling his beer, and spun crazily, nearly veering into a table and two men playing chess on his way out.

  Shaking his head, the barman swiped his cloth across the counter and mopped up the spilled pint, cursing under his breath and vowing to charge the odd little man who’d spilled it double the next time he came in.

  Edgar crashed out into the growing twilight and lit off for home. Everywhere he looked things were tinged in red. There was no sound of pursuit, but how far behind could they be?

  He reached his rooms and slammed in through the door. The hinges complained, and the knob jiggled wildly about from the sudden fury of his entrance. He shut it just as quickly and ran to the bedside. He grasped the edge of the old mattress and pulled it upward. The pages were still neatly pressed beneath mattress and frame and Edgar let go an audible sigh of relief. Then he grabbed the stack and sorted it roughly. He pulled free those pages from which he had already written and set them aside in a rough stack. As he turned away, the mattress fell back into place with a solid thud.

  He crossed to the old fireplace by the door, the room's one ounce of charm. It was sweltering outside, but tonight, the fireplace would add its own heat to the already jungle-like summer night.

  Edgar set match to paper and sat back on his haunches, watching as the papers went up in a swift puff of smoke. Cheap paper, it had been, as rough and feeble as any he had seen. And now it curled and charred and wasted away to ashes.

  Just before the blackened edges spread inward, Edgar caught sight of a small stain on the bottom of one page. Blood. Black devoured red and the stain disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Then another arose on the blackening surface. And another. Another.

  "No," Edgar mumbled into his right fist. "No, no…"

  He rubbed the palms of his hands into his eyes until the pressure nearly made him pass out.

  He came slowly back to his senses as evening’s shadows lengthened to night. He had not, he realized, bought more oil for his lamp. There was a stationery shop around the corner he knew to keep late hours, and to carry small jars of oil. He might make it there and back if he hurried. The flash of flame in the fireplace had long since died away.

  Edgar glanced into the ashes on the hearth, but there was no sign of blood, or dampness of any kind. Only the bone-dust of words. Turning away, he slipped out into the night.

  He walked through the moonlight, his head bent low and eyes on his shoes. As luck would have it, the stationery shop was open and the gentleman with the tight mustache and careless hair admitted him long enough to purchase one small bottle of oil. He clutched it tightly t
o his chest and turned toward home, letting the light of the moon guide him.

  By the time he reached his own door once more, he felt immensely better. Surely the words would flow and his review would be complete. No more purloined stories or nonsense about bleeding paper.

  Once the lamp was refueled and the match struck, the shadows receded and all that remained of the day's madness was a tangy odor of smoke that teased at his nostrils and made him think of fat Christmas sausages. Edgar settled into his chair, took up his quill, and began to read what little he'd written already. Still, his eyes shot to the stack of stories on the back corner of his desk. They were hard to avoid and even harder to remember.

  He reached out toward the pages, meaning to just glance at the top page for just a moment, and then paused. He had the distinct and terrifying impression that there was something behind him, something just begging him to turn and see it. He resisted; he tried to force his mind back to the business at hand. The sensation was too strong, and Edgar turned.

  A red stain crept out from beneath the mattress and sheet. It gathered at the bottom of the sheet, and then traced a thin line to the bottom of the bed frame.

  Drip! One drop hit the floor, and then another, and the stain worked steadily out from some deep pool of red within, seeping through the aged material until it had spread out to cover the bottom corner of the mattress and formed a large, dark puddle on the floor.

  "No! Nonononooooo…" Edgar shut his eyes. He ground his teeth until the sound of it deafened him, and he fought the growing tide of terror for control of his mind.

  It’s not real, he thought. It’s all in your head, man – there is no blood

  He turned and faced the desk once more, reaching as calmly as he could manage for the quill. The steady drip of the blood at his back was deafening, and he wondered if the woman who could hear the sound of his quill on paper in the early hours of the morning could not hear this as well. Perhaps she was out now, calling the constable to report the dripping sound

  "Not so quick as dripping water, it weren’t, sir," she’d say, "but thick-like. Like blood, not so much a drip as a bleeding cut. I heard it through his WALLS."

  The dripping was so loud it shook the room, and Edgar dragged himself back from the terror, realizing as he did that the shaking was nothing more than his own nervous tremors. He stared at his hand and thought about the man in the bar and his large friend. He tried to picture them in his mind, only now he couldn't recall if the man had actually been there at all. Perhaps only the larger man had been there. Maybe Edgar had never seen a body in the alley at all, only papers and pages and stories. Maybe none of it had ever happened at all. Maybe there was no pile of stories on his desk, only a stack of empty pages he’d lined up in his own delirium.

  He looked back over his shoulder and whimpered. The stain had grown and the puddle beneath was making its way across the floor, spreading into a lake of blood and stretching out to reach for him with glistening red rivulets for talons.

  With a cry, Edgar brought the quill down on his free hand. There was a flash of sudden, intense pain, and he felt the kiss of ink and blood as they mixed. With a quick suck of dry air, he glanced sharply over his shoulder at the bed. The blood was gone. He laughed, and the tinny sound echoed off the walls and died slowly.

  There never had been any blood. And he had never stolen any stories. The large man at the bar had been alone, and the small man with the face of a ferret and a million stories in his head was a figment of Edgar’s own imagination. Like a mantra, he set those thoughts running over and over in his mind.

  Yes, that's it, he thought. It was my own psyche fighting to bring the stories to the surface. My own personal Cyrano.

  He looked down and blinked at the droplet of blood oozing from the wound on the back of his hand. The tip of the quill had punctured his skin, and the edges of the cut were growing dark and curling in on themselves. Edgar smiled to himself and began to hum. He couldn’t have done that to his hand. It was another product of his imagination.

  An even smaller droplet of blood clung to the pen and ran into the ink channel. As he set it to the paper, the blood soaked in and stained it, first a bright red, then pink and finally purple as it flowed away and the ink ruled once more.

  Edgar screamed and leaped from his chair, knocking it to the floor and shaking the desk so hard that the lamp nearly toppled in a mass of flames. He righted it with shaking hands before it had a chance to spill the precious oil. Then he stood in the middle of the room, face buried in his hands, shaking harder than he thought possible.

  Slowly, he peeked between the fingers of his hands at the words on the page. They were still stained that accusing red. He turned his hand over, and saw that the small oozing droplet was spreading across his wrist. Eyes wide and vacant, he turned to the bed. More than anything in his life he wanted to see clean, white sheets. He wanted to see a slight lump where the mattress rested on the sheaf of stories. Blood dripping from his fingers to stain the floor, he knew that he would not.

  The corner of the mattress was a clotted mass of blood. It was blackened at the seam, but the drip was still brilliant red, trickling across the floor and showing no sign of slowing. Soon it would trickle under the door and out into the street beyond, and someone would see it. He turned back to the desk.

  He glanced briefly at the review where it languished, unfinished and insignificant in the shadow of the pages he’d written the night before. Stolen words. The pile of paper was so pregnant with indefinable dread that he expected the corner of it to be soaked with dark ink and bleeding on to the desk.

  His hand began to throb, and Edgar walked into his small kitchen and ran cold water over it, washing away the blood and gritting his teeth against the bite of cold water on his suddenly fevered skin.

  He wrapped a linen napkin around his hand, covering the wound, and walked to the bed. As he drew near, the room grew hazy, and he stopped. The second he stood still, his sight cleared, and the steady drip resumed. Before he could lose his courage, Edgar leaned in close and gripped the sodden corner of the mattress firmly. As his fingers closed, he closed his eyes as well and gritted his teeth against the sensation.

  It never came. The mattress was as dry and hard as it had been the first day he’d laid eyes on it, and Edgar’s eyes snapped open as he stared, his heart trip-hammering in his chest. No blood. He lifted the mattress and took the sheaf of papers into his trembling hands.

  Feverishly, he thumbed through the pages, removed the top ten and replaced the rest beneath the mattress. He strode to his desk, brushed aside the unfinished review almost absently, and dropped into the chair. There was no sound of dripping blood from behind him. He did not look to see what state the corner of the mattress might be in. He read, and then reread the words, letting them sink into his mind. As he did so, he worried at them, teased them and poked them into a slightly different shape, a more proper tale. It was a tale of obsession, wine, and revenge, and it made his tongue tingle for just a taste of the vine, but he ignored it.

  Straightening his desk, his hand still throbbing with pain, Edgar pulled a blank page from the stack on his desk, and as the lamp flickered and danced, casting its laughing shadows mockingly into the corners of the room, he wrote. He concentrated on the words, and on the paper. The room faded to the background, and it wasn’t until two hours later, when he heard an angry banging on his wall, that he looked up from his work.

  The hour was very late. The oil he’d managed to purchase was low, and there were only a very few hours until he would be expected to turn in his review. He stared at the paper, pressed to the desk beneath his cramped fingers. There was page after page of writing, neat and ordered, and he barely remembered writing it. He had vague images, and there was something about Amontillado whirling through his thoughts, but…

  He straightened the pages and added them to the stack of those he’d already written. Bleary eyed, he reached for his review, and for the next hour or so, conscious of eve
ry slight scratch of his quill on the page, he worked, glancing nervously at the wall separating him from the old harpy with the bat’s ears. He finished with barely enough time for two hours rest, and without even glancing at the corner of the mattress; he fell across it into a fitful, dazed sleep.

  The Swan was crowded, and it was difficult to get a good line of sight down the bar. Edgar sat, hunched over a glass of sherry, and glared at the two empty seats across the room. There had been no sign of the large man, and Edgar’s hands, wrapped tightly around the stem and body of his glass, trembled. In his pocket he had a single sheet of the small man’s manuscript, and on the bar before him, paper and pen. He had written nothing, no captured or stolen phrases.

  He was watchful now. At the first sign of the blood, he knew he’d have to write. If he concentrated on the manuscript page in his pocket, went over the story in his head, and wrote the result, everything would be fine. Everything would be dry, free of blood, and they would not stare at him. Their voices would remain muted and distant and impersonal, and they would not accuse him.

  An image of the alley surfaced, the man’s bloody head leaking onto the pile of paper and he shuddered. He wondered, briefly, if he put the papers back where he’d found them, if the man would rematerialize slowly, blood first, to cover his words, but somehow he knew it was not that simple – and never would be again.

  Edgar sipped his Amontillado and thought of the pages, piled and waiting, on his desk. He had more work to do – a criticism and an essay – but first the blood would take its price, and there were many, many pages of the little man’s manuscript left to finish. He shuddered again, and downed his drink, signaling the barman for another.

  What he feared the most was the bottom of that pile. What would happen when he dropped the last of the manuscript into his fire and watched the blood flow and dry and crackle to dust? When all the stolen words were translated, and the stories piled in a heap on his desk, would they bleed? Would he have to start again, and again, drying it all away through the tip of his quill, or would it be set to rest?