The Devil's Scribe by Alma Katsu Page B

save his few friends. He’d lost his parents as a young boy and had been taken in by a businessman and his family but was never adopted. He had no money and no family to fall back on; he made his living at assorted jobs, though the past few years he was able to support himself by writing poetry and stories, he admitted with a sheepish smile. Indeed, he said, he styled himself as the Devil’s Scribe, for he preferred to write tales of intense darkness—“from the devil’s lips to my ears!” he confessed—tales so unsettling that he hesitated to show them to a lady such as myself. I had no desire to read his stories, anyway; his admission cooled me toward him, for I have never trusted anyone who makes his keep by milking his fancy. Artists and the like unsettle me; I’d take a good-hearted laborer over a storyteller any day.
    I revealed nothing about myself to my accidental companion, however. In truth, he had started to grow on me, though perhaps it was because his circumstances were even more pitiable than mine. He’d recently lost his young wife—who also happened to be his cousin: not an uncommon happenstance—and he said he’d been rudderless ever since. “I’m a lonely creature,” he confessed, “and haunted by the sad circumstances of our life together. I wish I could’ve done more for her.” He seemed happy to have someone to listen to him, and in general it is preferable to tell your troubles to a stranger, as there will be fewer consequences once the last words have been uttered.
    I let him take me on a stroll through the midnight streets of Baltimore to visit some of his favorite sights. “You’re safe with me, miss. There are few to none in the city who would make mischief against me, for my reputation is widely known,” he said as he helped me into my cloak.
    “Your reputation?” I replied, amused. I couldn’t imagine how this strange man could be seen as formidable or dangerous. For I had known dangerous men in my time—indeed, my mission was to revisit the most frightening one of all—and could not see this timid, nearly deliriously soused man as being of their kind. He didn’t explain, however, but thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and looked down at his shoes as we walked, measuring his footsteps.
    By then it was quite late. We’d shared a few details of our lives with each other, enough for my new friend to ascertain that he was safe in proposing that we visit a friend of his acquaintance, not far from where we were at the moment. His friend had recently returned from a position in the East where he’d picked up “the Chinaman’s habit,” an expression that could have only one meaning at the time. Upon meeting this friend, a weedy Englishman who knew his way around pipes and opium chests, I had to think it was a friendship of convenience and little else, and indeed might be a sort of commercial establishment, one of the first of its kind in America.
    After four or five puffs on the long pipe, I felt much better. My trepidation over the task that lay ahead eased, albeit temporarily. Temporary respite was still respite.
    As our eyelids drooped, the narcotic preparing to take us to our separate dreams, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know this man’s name. I nudged him before he drifted completely into unconsciousness. “You never did tell me your name. . . . How should I call you?”
    His smile was forlorn, an orphan’s smile. “My friends call me by my surname, Poe, but I would like it if you would use my given name, Edgar.”

    I’m not exactly sure how Edgar came to join me on the train to Boston the following day. From his friend’s house, he escorted me the next morning to my hotel room and I expected he would be gone by the time I came down with my bags, but no, he had planted himself in a chair in the lobby and was reading a newspaper as though waiting on a tardy wife. I believe he was not completely in charge of his senses when he insisted on joining