The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(58)

Reynolds did not need to open the gunner’s next letter, sent from one of the places to which his peripatetic wanderings took him, to know that it contained painful news. The next he heard of Allan was that he had returned to Richmond. There he had discovered that Sarah, the childhood sweetheart who had never received his letters, was now a respectable widow, and he had looked her up immediately, as though needing to close the circle. Sarah had accepted his courtship, and within weeks they were engaged. It was then that Reynolds received Allan’s last letter, informing him that he planned to stop off in Baltimore on his way to Philadelphia to fetch his aunt for the wedding. Reynolds replied instantly, offering to pick Allan up when his boat docked and to stay with him until he caught his train. However, Reynolds was needlessly held up by various matters, so trivial in nature he could only remember them later with bitter rage, and by the time he reached the port, Allan was gone.





XIII

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 29, 1849, BALTIMORE awoke in the grip of an icy cold. It was Election Day, and in the doorways of the taverns, which had been turned into polling stations, the citizens had lit fires to combat the freezing temperatures. Failing to find Allan, Reynolds remembered with a start that it was the habitual practice of election gangs to drag any poor wretch they could find from tavern to tavern, inebriating him along the way, and getting him to vote several times for the same candidate. He suddenly feared that his friend might have fallen prey to one of these gangs, and so he began scouring the taverns of Baltimore asking for the gunner. And had anyone been able to observe Reynolds’s trajectory from above, they would have noticed sadly how on more than one occasion he might have chanced upon Allan if he had not at the last moment turned down one street and not another.

Thus, without bumping into Reynolds once, Allan wandered from tavern to tavern, stinking drunk, jostled by a gang of heartless rogues who had pounced on him the moment he arrived at the port. He went from tavern to tavern, arms wrapped round himself to ward off the cold penetrating the threadbare clothes they had dressed him in as a disguise, while everything around him became increasingly blurred. Finally he fell to his knees, exhausted, outside one of the taverns. Unable to drag him back to his feet, the gang left him to his fate. Gasping for breath and seized by violent fits of trembling, Allan tried to fix his gaze on the fire blazing in the tavern doorway to provide him with an anchor in that heaving world. But his head was spinning so much that the flames took on the proportions of a conflagration, and the merciless cold combined with the dancing flames to stir his memory.

Terrified, Allan felt a tiny dam burst inside his head, and the memories it was holding back flooded into his consciousness with such blinding clarity he thought he was living them anew: he could see the Annawan enveloped by the roaring blaze, the sailors in flames hurling themselves onto the ice from the top deck, the monster from the stars loping toward them, its claws dripping with blood and a trail of headless dogs in its wake. He could hear Reynolds’s voice ordering him to get up, telling him they must run if they wanted to live even a few more minutes. Allan began flailing his arms desperately, convinced he was running, oblivious to the fact that he was scraping the skin of his knees raw as they rubbed against the hard ground. The gunner ran across the snow, urged on by Reynolds, fleeing the monster that dwelled in his nightmares and was coming for him once more, a monster that had landed on Earth from Mars, or some other planet in the universe, for the universe was inhabited by creatures so horrifying that they were beyond the scope of Man’s paltry imagination, a monster that was going to tear him limb from limb because he could not run any farther, he was exhausted, and all he wanted was to lie down on the ice and let that be the end, but no, his friend kept urging him on, run, Allan, run! And so he ran, he ran round in circles, on his knees, in front of the blaze, while a white void stretched out before his fevered eyes, and he heard the creature’s roars behind him and his own voice calling out to the explorer, begging him for help over and over:

“Reynolds, Reynolds, Reynolds!”

He was still calling his friend’s name at the Washington College Hospital, where Reynolds finally found him after going to every hospital in the city.

They had installed the delirious Allan in one of the private rooms at the hospital, an imposing five-story building with arched gothic windows situated at one of the higher points of Baltimore. The hospital was renowned for being spacious, well ventilated, and run by an experienced medical team. According to the nurse who took him to Allan’s floor, through wards filled with beggars suffering from varying degrees of exposure, the gunner had not stopped calling his name since he was brought in. When they finally reached the room where his friend lay dying, Reynolds could scarcely make out his shuddering body through the crowd around his bed: gawping medical students, nurses, and other members of staff, who must have recognized the celebrated author.

“I am the man he is calling for,” Reynolds announced in a solemn voice.

The group turned as one toward the door, surprised. A young doctor came over to him.

“Thank Heaven! We didn’t know where to find you. I am Doctor Moran.” Reynolds shook his hand warily. “I was the one who attended Mr. Poe when he was brought in . . . For it is Mr. Poe, is it not? Despite his beggar’s garb.”

Reynolds gazed mournfully at the stinking clothes the doctor was pointing to, draped across a chair with a care unworthy of such rags. He could not help wondering what must have happened to his friend to have ended up dressed in those garments. Then he contemplated Allan’s skinny body, barely covered by a sheet drenched in sweat.