Had any who knew him of recent years seen the lifeless form as it lay in the coffin before it was lowered under the earth? And most of those witnesses-Neilson Poe, Henry Herring, Dr. Snodgrass-wanted to say nothing about this funeral, as though there was something to conceal. Had they known more? That Poe, in fact, still breathed and still lived? Had he been hidden by outside agents concealing something? Or had he, Edgar Poe, perpetrated his ultimate hoax upon the world?

You see that the reasoning in my mind, produced in an admittedly highly excited state, was neither deranged nor insubstantial. I would demonstrate Poe was not yet dead, and all that had occurred would be thrown into an immediate reversal. I proceeded by foot after passing through the sewer directly to the old Westminster Presbyterian burial ground. Its place toward the center of the city, away from the larger bodies of water, had spared it and the surrounding roads the worst consequences of the flooding, though rivulets still streamed through the grassy burial yard, and certain crevices and corners contained deeper gullies of water.

I would speak to the sexton and insist upon full answers. But as I crossed through the gates, a different determination overtook me. Though it was dark, my eyes retained the exaggerated power of sight resulting from my prolonged stay in the dark cells of the prison. Indeed, with just a single burst of lightning from another storm that was gathering itself, I located precisely the spot of Edgar Poe's grave, which outrageously had remained unmarked. What was underneath?

I cleared the tree branches and other debris that covered it, and began digging with my bare hands into the grass. With each tuft of grass I removed from the center, a stream of water would appear from underneath. I tried around the periphery with no better luck. At certain places, the soil was so hardened that my fingernails cracked, staining the clumps of dirt and mud with blood.

Realizing I could make only incremental advancement in this fashion, I crossed the burial yard and, fortune on my side, located a small spade. With this instrument I began the labor of breaking up the earth in a circle outlining the grave. I drove the spade into the ground with zeal. Mounds of dirt soon surrounded me. The task was exhausting, and consumed me to such a degree that at first I did not pay attention to the sudden noise bearing down on me. I was distracted by what I saw below.

It was a common pine coffin. I reached my hand down and could touch the cold surface of the smooth wood. Clearing the soil from the top, my fingers found where the cover met the coffin but, just as I began to lift it, I was compelled to release it.

The sexton's mongrel dog was racing upon me ferociously. She pounced a few feet from me and I thought, for a moment, that she had paused because she remembered our having befriended each other. This was not the case. Or, if she remembered, she was all the more angered by my betrayal of our mutual trust. She was quite certain I was trying to steal a body from her domain (the opposite, brave canine! There is no body to steal!). She snarled and snapped her jaws among the graves, and in my state of intense excitement I thought I could see Cerberus's three jaws in that one. I tried waving her away with the shovel, but she only lowered her position and, at any moment, would launch herself onto my throat.

The sexton now emerged from within the underground tomb I had once found him in, holding up a lantern. The air was of a quality so dense and dark that I could hardly see him. He looked to be all of one color. I pictured him as the man who was found petrified to stone in that same vault.

"I am not a resurrection man!" I cried out. Although I suppose that as I was waving a shovel in the air, my hands and clothing covered in dirt and blood, with a partially revealed coffin below me, this proclamation was hardly convincing. "Look inside! Look inside!"

"Who is it? Who's there? Sailor, get 'em!"

I had no choice. I looked longingly at the wood below me, then dropped the shovel and ran. Man and dog chased at my heels.

I was not yet defeated. After leaving behind my pursuers in the cemetery, I located myself in a narrow alleyway for shelter. I spent nearly a half hour recuperating from the fatigue of my failed attempt at the burial yard before stirring myself with a renewed objective. Surely the sexton would now be guarding Poe's grave. But with wild determination, I made my way across the city, remembering along the way the address of Poe's last home in Baltimore, on Amity Street between Lexington and Saratoga, to which I had seen reference during my long researches into Poe's history.

I could ask him. Why? Friend Poe, why write the letter? Why say I am an idle young man, a pest? Had you forgotten we understood one another?

Poe had just withdrawn from his place as a cadet at West Point when, shunned by John Allan in Richmond, who refused to help rescue him from a series of debts, the twenty-two-year-old Poe came to this modest dwelling to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, her daughter, Virginia-then eight years old-as well as Poe's older brother, William Henry, and his ailing grandmother. Poe searched for a position as a teacher in one of the local schools, without success. Each of his fellow cadets at West Point had given him a dollar for the publication of his first collection of poems, and with this volume he had great plans to make his name.

Certain I had found the correct address at a narrow house between Lexington and Saratoga streets, without any consideration of a more rational scheme, I burst up the steps through the street door and, finding myself at the foot of a narrow staircase, bounded upstairs. Why? Oh, Edgar! Why write that of all things? Perhaps, if Poe had lived, he would have returned here, to his last home in Baltimore, and left some sign for me of his next destination. I hardly noticed the two women, one with white hair and one young and fair, who screamed upon seeing me enter the tiny back room where they were sitting by a fireplace. (Perhaps I was a dreadful sight, my sackcloth uniform fitted to me by the prison now tattered and dripping, and spotted with soil and blood from my failed efforts at the burial yard.) In another bedroom, a garret room at the very top of the house, a lanky man leaned out the window overlooking Amity Street and began calling, Robbery! Murder! and other exclamations. The two women now scurried through the house, and the walls reverberated with unintelligible shouts.

I shrank from the commotion and, finding that the man was in the process of gripping a crowbar, I hastened down the stairs, past the frantic younger woman, through the front hall, back to the door. I ran at such velocity that I could not stop myself until I was in the middle of the street, where under the vague glow of a faraway streetlight I could see a giant horse and carriage coming right for me, leaving me without time to move in any direction where I would not fall directly under its mass of hooves and wheels. Having no chance to save myself from this gruesome fate, I merely blocked my eyes with my arms from the sight of death.

In a miraculous motion, I was pulled bodily to the curb, out of harm of the carriage. My wrist was held tightly. My deliverer struggled to move me closer. I had shut my eyes in lifeless surrender, and now opened them warily upon this person, as though to find a phantasm haunting me from beyond instead of a human. I looked and found I was gazing on the face of Edgar A. Poe.