Dark Eye

The answer came to him in the December of that year, not from his intensive studies, not from his work, but from a purely adventitious discovery in a small coastal California town. In a used-book store, he found an obscure Poe work, something that hadn’t been in any of the anthologies. It was titled Eureka.

He had seen references to this work in some of the biographies he had consumed, but they were all brief and dismissive. A failed effort, they called it. A hopeless mishmash. It seemed useless and irrelevant, and for that reason, and because it wasn’t in any of his books anyway, he had never bothered to read it.

When he did, it gave him the answers he had so long sought. The path.

Poe believed in dreams, not just sleeping dreams but waking ones, believed they were glimpses into another world, a better world, one to which we could all be translated. He limned a memorable, if enticingly vague, portrait of this world in his poem “Dream-Land”: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Much of Eureka was concerned with Poe’s efforts to create a new cosmology, which was rejected by contemporaries because of his lack of scientific training, and yet in retrospect, some of what Poe wrote was positively prescient. Poe solved Olbers’s paradox-why the sky is dark at night-envisioned black holes, and was the first to describe the universe as expanding, then contracting. He proposed the big bang theory, which would not be formally discovered until seventy years later, by Alexander Friedma

How had Poe known, long before the scientific observations had been made that could prove it?

The Raven told him, of course.

Poe believed that man was a mere extension of the Deity. He believed that as man shrinks into spatial nothingness he will regain his lost harmony and become absorbed into a perfect, mystical unity. He wrote: The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity [in death] ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is neither more nor less than the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.

After he read that passage, Ernie wept. He threw his hands up in the air, ecstatic, euphoric. He had wondered for so long, had needed to know. And all the while, the prophet had been trying to tell him.

These were not mere stories, mere poems. They were blueprints.

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t get this Poe stuff. I mean, I know he was great and brilliant and all, but to me, it just seems gross.”

Ernie was in his tiny TA’s office, opening his mail, trying to appear interested.

“I guess, I grew up in the suburbs, you know what I’m saying? We didn’t have guys sealing each other up in the basement or swinging big pendulums over their chests. And what was the deal with that story where the guy yanked out that woman’s teeth? I mean, this Poe guy had issues, if you ask me.”

Ernie tried to smile. She was a tiny thing, presumably eighteen, but she looked younger. She had a round face and large eyes and long, straight blond hair. He knew she had a reputation as a partyer. She wore far too much makeup. “So what, pray tell, can I do for you, Miss Swanson?”

She shifted from one side of the chair to the other, crossing her legs. “See, I know the final is supposed to be like, final, but I think I didn’t do so hot on it.”

“Why do you believe that?”

“Well… I never finished the reading. I mean, I’m sorry, but those stories were just so wrong.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Yeah, but my sorority is counting on me to keep up the academic average, and I wondered if there wasn’t some way I could… make it up.”

“I’m afraid Professor Levy doesn’t give second chances.”

“Would he have to know?”

“I could hardly offer a makeup exam without his authorization.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about another test.” She slithered off the chair and onto her knees, just before him. “I was hoping I could make it up… some other way.”

“Miss Swanson, I’m sure I don’t know…”

“Come on,” she said, rubbing her hands up and down his pant legs. “I know you pretend to be above it all with your big words and your old-fashioned suits. But I’ll bet there’s a real man in there somewhere.”

“Miss Swanson, this-this is most inappropriate.”

“Sure?” She unzipped the fly of his pants.

“Miss Swanson!”

“Come on. I’ll do you a favor, you do me one.” Her hand reached inside his pants. “And I’ll bet-” She stopped, choked. “Oh, my God! What’s wrong with you?”

Ernie hurriedly tucked himself back inside. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing! It’s gross!”

“I had an accident. When I was a child.”

She stepped away from him, her face stricken. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be cruel. I was just-startled.” She waved her hand back and forth, as if fa

“But-you said-”

“I can do a lot, but I can’t do that. I’ll just take the D.”

“Nevermore?” he whispered.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. But he heard the Raven speaking to him, loud, insistent, and he saw the girl, so like Poe’s own, and he felt his shame and embarrassment, and he was desperate to find the path, to know what it was he was supposed to do. And a moment later, the letter opener was jutting out from her left temple. She was dead in seconds.

“You have done well,”the Raven intoned. “You have begun your journey. But there is still much to be done. Much to be discovered.”

And so Ernie quit his position at the college and trolled up and down the coast of California, through Montana, then Nevada, refining his prowess and technique as he traveled, finally making his way to Las Vegas, where the final secrets were revealed to him, and the countdown to Ascension could begin at last.

30

“So what you’re basically telling us is, Edgar is Jesus Christ?” Granger wheezed.

“In his mind, yes.” I was back in the classroom again, except this time it was packed beyond capacity, not only with Granger’s increasingly sizable team, but with all the new FBI agents on the case, most of whom I hadn’t formally met. And here I was lecturing these feds, debriefing them as if I were some kind of behavioral genius. Patrick had gracefully allowed me to take the lead, thereby ensuring that I would be kept in the loop and given a decent modicum of respect. But this case was federal now. We were still allowed to play. But they owned the sandbox.

“This stuff is all fine for the college professor crowd,” Granger said, “but how is it going to help us catch the guy?”

“If you don’t understand who he is, you’ll never get him. You spent valuable man-hours last week having your men blanket all the S &M clubs and similar places Edgar would never dream of visiting.”

“One of his victims worked in an S &M club!”

“He went there because his victim of choice was there. That’s no indication that he liked it. I’ll bet he hated it and left as soon as possible.”

“Excuse me.” This came from one of the agents in the front row. “In your opinion, will he continue to abduct only girls with given names found in the works of Poe?”

“Frankly, no.” I saw their looks of disappointment-one of the few useful leads lost. But I had to give them the straight scoop. “Too restrictive, now that everyone knows. He won’t be able to find an A