Dark Eye

The books he’d read had given him a good idea how to do it in such a way that it would not be obvious that he had done it, at least not to the rural cops he’d met a few days before. He left the gas burners on for a long time. He tossed a match. Then he went outside and watched it burn.

There was nothing they could do to him that wasn’t going to happen already. This way, no one would ever know for certain what happened. No one but him. And Virginia.

He was the Instrument, he murmured to himself as he watched the shutters and shingles turn to ash. Now he needed to find his God.

In and out of foster homes and reform schools all his teen years, Ernie never stayed in one place for long. Soon after he left his grandmother’s house he developed a stutter that plagued him until high school. The permanent deformity to his private member made gym class a nightmare and sports an impossibility. But he continued to search for some explanation, some meaning in his life, in the tragedy that had visited him. Which was what led him, during his sophomore year of college, to journey out into the desert to attempt a vision quest.

He had never seen such a desolate environment-flat, barren, bleak. Heat rose from the pavement creating miniature mirages, smoothing the road ahead. A man named Ralph Studi acted as his spiritual guide and instructor. The first three days, he learned, would be spent in preparation. The last four days he would spend in the desert, alone. “All this training will be geared toward one central objective-your spiritual growth. At all times, the emphasis will be on grounding you in the Spirit. Not just absorbing but owning the lessons learned. Because the true work of the vision quest begins when we return to our people.”

The first day on his own, out in the wilderness, he was bored to tears. The second day, he was starving-and bored to tears.

The third day, he saw the Raven.

He had fallen asleep, or thought he had. His legs were aching from the stiff sedentary drain of remaining in the sacred circle for so long. He kept the fire burning, even though the air was hot and oppressive, even at night. He longed to stretch his legs, to partake of the tiny ration of water he had been permitted. Sweat dripped down the sides of his face. His eyelids closed and he drank in the heady smell of smoke and whatever was in that wood they gave him to burn. He thought he was asleep. But when the Raven spoke to him, he was wide awake.

He couldn’t move. Somehow, the Raven had imparted a paralysis that he couldn’t shake.

“Why have you strayed from the Path?”

Ernie didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t believe he was talking to a raven, but there it was, perched on his shoulder. It wasn’t like other birds. It was larger, its face more expressive, more human. Its eyes terrified him.

“I-I didn’t know-”

“The Path was shown to you. But you have not followed it.”

“Well… I’ve been busy with classes and-”

“There are no excuses.”

“Look, just-just tell me what to do. I’ll do it. Really I will.”

“You know what to do.”

“I don’t. But if you could give me a little hint-”

“Nevermore!”The coal-black eyes flared, angry and intense. Ernie tried to inch away, but he was still unable to move. “I have been with Virginia.”

Ernie’s hunger was supplanted by an aching in his chest, a new emptiness. “You’ve seen her?”

“I have been with Virginia. And so could you.”

“But how-”

“In my realm, all are reunited. All are one.”

“I don’t know what that-”

“You have the potential for greatness. You could be what I am.”

“I-I’ll do whatever I must. Whatever you want.”

The Raven unfolded its wings and the span was endless, a dark umbra that spread from one perimeter of his vision to the other, swallowing him. He screamed, and somehow, the act of screaming ended the visitation. He was wide awake, able to move, fully conscious that he was alone in the middle of the desert.

But he was certain he had been visited by his totem, and that the visit had meant something. What was he was being called to do?

The sweat on his brow had vanished, replaced by a fevered chill. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, trying to warm himself. Something had changed, something inside him. He didn’t know how or what exactly. But he knew he would never be the same.

It was hard to avoid the sorrowful look in the eyes of all who shook Ernie’s hand as he left the questing headquarters. Word had gotten out. They all were aware that he had been visited by the Raven, the totem of death, and they all believed that meant he would soon be dead.

But Ernie knew differently. The Raven might be the totem of death, but not his own. This visitation had a different meaning.

He returned to school, ostensibly focusing on his studies, but obsessed with the Raven’s words, trying to uncover the mysteries of his path. He graduated with honors and became a teaching assistant while pursuing his Master’s in American Literature. But although he performed his appointed tasks with excellence, his heart was no longer in them. And his soul was in another place altogether.

He had not wanted to revisit the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He remembered those stories from his childhood as dark and gruesome, obviously the product of an unstable, demented mind. But he was TA-ing an American Lit survey course, and of course he had to grade the exams, and he couldn’t do that unless he refamiliarized himself with the texts. So he sat down in his room late one evening, alone as always, with a thick volume of Poe.

He had not intended to read the entire book. A few of the major works would do, surely. He started with the poems, lovely things, sonically immaculate, if rather syrupy. But so much of it reverberated in strange and unforeseen ways.

She was a child and I was a child in that kingdom by the sea…

Such love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me…

Had Poe really written that about his lost child bride? Could anyone but Ernie himself have written that?

It was only a short while before he reread Poe’s great masterpiece, “The Raven.” Eighteen immaculately rhymed quatrains, with the Raven as the harbinger of death. Could this possibly be a coincidence?

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting… just above my chamber door…

Ernie felt as if his brain had been opened wide. As if the sun had dawned for the first time. After the poems, he pored through the stories, over and over again. It was only after he had read them many times that he began to see beyond the superficial entertainments and realize that there was something important buried within them. The similarities, the points of correspondence, were too great to be coincidental. Just as the Raven had spoken to him, so it also must have spoken to Poe. He found a tantalizing clue in one of the worst of the tales, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”: It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge-some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Yes! And another story-“The Premature Burial”: To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

That was what the Raven was trying to tell him. Death was not an ending but a translation, a passage from one borderland to another. But this wasn’t a Christian fantasy, a heaven up in the clouds such as they spoke about in Sunday school. This was something real. The Dream-Land Poe described in his poems existed, and his sweet Virginia must be there. The narrator in “Ligeia” brought back his love. Could Ernie not do the same? But what was the mystic formula that the prophet hinted at but never described? How was this magnificent end to be accomplished? How could he enter Dream-Land? How could he make Poe’s Golden Age a reality?