Where Monsters Dwell Page 3

  He didn’t answer, just left the room and closed the door behind him. In his office he quickly sat down on his desk chair. He didn’t quite know what to think. Then he straightened the creases in his pants, which were still a bit damp from his bike ride.

  Near Trondheim Fjord, 1528

  He went ashore on the island of Hitra, several days’ march from Trondheim. It suited him well, since he had been sitting in a boat long enough and yearned to use his legs again. The first part of the journey took him across the island toward a ferry landing, where he would be able to cross over to the mainland. From there he would follow the fjord toward the city. He was in no hurry to get there. In fact, he planned to make a lengthy stop on the way. He would spend the days out in the forest rather than looking for lodging. Not that he doubted that he could find an inn where a graybrother like himself would be treated well. The Lutheran heresy was mostly confined to the gentry in this country, the rich and powerful using it to justify their own avarice. But for the most part, people around here were true believers. Yet what he needed most of all was peace and quiet, free from the polite questions of a good host. When he wasn’t proceeding toward the city farther up the fjord, he wanted to spend time on his work, and nothing else.

  He wanted the vellum to be perfect. He still had not scraped it enough. First he needed to build a frame for it.

  On the first day, he settled for the night on a ridge with a view toward the dark sea he’d come from. He lit a fire to keep warm. In the leather sack he’d bought in Bergen lay the beard-cutter’s knives. In the firelight he picked up one of them and examined it closely. He imagined it in the hands of the beard-cutter. Those hands that had been so big and coarse yet could do such fine work. He did everything with his hands. Cut, made love, meted out punishment. The monk knew this man’s handiwork well. He knew how the calluses on his fingertips felt. A fatherly pat on the shoulder, a casual touch at the workbench, and the Devil’s claw around his neck. He fell asleep thinking of these things.

  The next morning the monk grabbed one of the knives and went into the forest to find four good pieces of wood for the frame. He took his time and ended up with four slim branches from an ash tree, unusually supple for the season. He joined them together, fastening the corners with a solid hemp cord that he had bought in Bergen. Then he tested the frame by pulling and tugging it. When he was satisfied, he began to lash the skin to the frame.

  4

  Trondheim, September 2010

  On the top floor of the stacks stood Vatten’s comfortable easy chair. Not an expensive item. Vatten had bought it at a flea market. It was upholstered in imitation leather, a bit too round and puffy to win any design prize, but it was extremely comfortable. In his opinion, anybody who ignored unimportant things like fashion and style trends would consider this chair a bargain.

  In genuine La-Z-Boy style it could recline, and naturally it had a footrest that popped up when he leaned back. It was the kind of chair he would have scorned five years ago, for reasons he could no longer remember. But now he loved it. Most important, of course, was the placement of the chair. These were surroundings that most recliners were never destined to encounter; it stood between warehouse shelves full of books, artwork, notebooks, and old broadsides—all the words and opinions, truths and lies that gave life to the room. When Vatten spent the night up here, he always had such peculiar dreams. It was also important that the room had a high ceiling, because Vatten suffered from an unusual form of claustrophobia. He had fantasies about being buried alive. He imagined that he would mistakenly be declared dead, and then buried before anyone noticed that he was still breathing. This fantasy of his was based on a specific incident. Once he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and his heart had nearly stopped beating. He was almost dead, but only almost. His dread about being buried alive could take on a physical manifestation. Whenever it happened, he would literally feel an unbearable pressure on his lungs, smell fresh earth, and sense the narrow coffin, the blackness of the night, the silence like a lake that was overflowing. All this while he envisioned the air and the grass up above. These fantasies were usually triggered when he found himself in narrow, tight spaces. But never when he was in the book tower.

  * * *

  Now he was sitting quite calmly, bent forward with the chair in an upright position. He had brought along a book to make some notes about Edgar Allan Poe. So far he had just one page filled with a few recent scribblings. He often jotted down interesting passages he read, or ideas that popped up if he wanted to think about them further. The notes weren’t meant to be used for anything other than to keep his mind agile. When he was done with them, he often put them in a folder, but sometimes he just threw them out. Not all ideas were worth saving.

  With the passage of time and through painstaking research it has become rather clear that Poe’s death was due to one of the following causes: meningitis, a brain tumor, syphilis, apoplexy, a deficiency of one or more enzymes, diabetes, some less common brain disease, alcoholism, an overdose of medication, opium abuse, cholera, mercury poisoning, lead poisoning, some other form of heavy metal poisoning, suicide resulting from depression, a heart disease, the fact that he was shanghaied, doped, and forced to vote for a particular party during the election of 1849, or rabies. But a definite cause of death has been impossible to determine.

  P.S. Let us hope that he did not spend much time worrying about what he would eventually die of while he was alive. (Even though portions of his literary oeuvre lead one to suspect that such thoughts may have indeed plagued him.)

  Vatten remained seated and read over his comments. He had actually intended to write more; in fact, he’d pondered writing a rather long text about the peculiar Edgar Allan Poe. With some indignation he thought about the fact that one of the greatest literary personages in the United States had died destitute, and then rested for years beneath a simple gravestone inscribed No. 80 before he finally received a suitable memorial. Today, a first edition of his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was worth half a million dollars.

  What Vatten wrote about Poe was merely supposed to be for his own use, to help his literary digestion, so to speak; nevertheless it had to be thorough. But when he looked over what he had scribbled down so far, he couldn’t come up with a single meaningful remark. Yet he decided that this note was something he ought to keep, so he folded it up and put it in his pants pocket. Then he leaned back in his chair, extended his legs, and fell asleep, his body stretched out full length.

  * * *

  Much later than usual, he went downstairs to get his bag lunch. He’d expected to find the main building deserted. The library’s closing time, 1:00 P.M. on Saturdays, had long since passed. So he was a bit surprised to find that the lights were still on in the office wing; both surprised and a little hopeful, perhaps. Was she still there?

  First he went into his office and again read through his note about Poe. Then he checked the control panel on the wall next to the desk to make sure that the alarms had been activated the way they were supposed to be after the library closed. He ran his fingers through his hair to straighten it. Although he was pushing forty, his hair was thick and luxuriant. Curly. A bit disheveled.

  The person he encountered was not the one he had anticipated or hoped to meet. Gunn Brita Dahle was still at work for some reason, standing in the middle of her office looking a bit bewildered. She was holding a bottle of wine, not the cheapest to be had at the state liquor store, but not the most expensive either. He recognized it as one of three farewell gifts she’d received at lunch the day before.

  “Hi, Jon,” she said as he entered the room. “I’m just packing up the last of my things.” Then she looked around and sighed, with a melancholy smile that was half feigned, half genuine. “It’s harder to leave than I thought. I’ve been sitting here for hours reading through old papers, emptying drawers, and looking at old photos. It’s enough to make a person downright sentimental.”

  “We’re going to miss y
ou,” Vatten said, and he meant it. He’d always felt comfortable with her somewhat strident feminism. At least she was honest. And they were the same age.

  “So how’d you like to sample this before I go?” she said. “Jens is at the cabin with the kids, and I don’t see any point in sitting at home on a Saturday night and drinking alone.”

  “I think it’ll keep,” Vatten said dryly.

  “That’s true. You don’t drink, do you?”

  “Very seldom.”

  “So you’re not a complete teetotaler then?”

  “I’m neither Christian nor of the dry persuasion, if that’s what you mean.”

  Now she laughed. He realized that they had seldom stood around just talking as they were doing now, and that she really had a nice laugh. Maybe it was the laugh that made him open up a bit.

  “But I actually have a problem with alcohol.”

  “You do?”

  “I’m hypersensitive to it. One glass is enough to get me roaring drunk.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’m not making it up. As a matter of fact, I was just reading that Edgar Allan Poe might have had the same problem,” he said, pleased that he was able to make use of what he’d read.

  “So, the master of the macabre didn’t drink as much as all the rumors say? He just got drunk fast?” she asked.

  Vatten looked at her with interest.

  “Do you know Poe well?” he asked.

  “I’ve actually been to the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond,” she replied. “I was there last spring.”

  Vatten was astonished. He vaguely recalled that Gunn Brita had taken a trip to the States, but he had no idea that she’d been to Virginia, or that she had visited the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. It struck him how little they had talked to each other about personal things. Damn, he’d been in the States last summer himself. The first vacation since that happened, and he hadn’t even asked her for a single tip for his trip.

  “Then you must know as much about Poe as I do. The main source for the claim that Poe was an alcoholic was one of his worst foes, a certain Rufus Griswold.”

  “Rufus Griswold?”

  “Yeah, I know. It sounds like a made-up name. But Rufus Griswold was real enough, unfortunately for Poe’s later reputation. He worked as an editor and literary agent in the mid-nineteenth century during the first flowering of American literature, when pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines came and went, and a poor writer often had to switch from one publisher to the next. This was the time of writing contests, feuilletons, and the penny press.

  “Griswold succeeded Poe as the editor of Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia in 1843. No one knows why, but Griswold couldn’t stand his predecessor; the main reason was presumably that Poe was a far more interesting editor than Griswold could ever be. One of the things he’s notorious for is rejecting Poe’s most famous poem, ‘The Raven,’ which was later published in the Evening Mirror.”

  Now Vatten felt his cheeks flushing. He had read about Poe with great interest, but this was the first time he’d had an opportunity to talk about the author. He noticed how much the material fascinated him, as if it somehow had something to do with him personally.

  “Griswold was even more notorious for acting as Poe’s agent after the author died. He was the first to have a collected edition of Poe’s works printed, but then he topped it all off by writing a damaging memorial as the foreword. That was where he presented the somewhat unstable author as a mad, alcoholic, and doped-up misanthrope. It was a real character assassination.”

  “Not a pleasant guy, this Mr. Griswold, I guess.”

  “Apparently not. But the sad thing about it all is that Poe’s brief, brutal biography, which posterity has shown to have been partially based on forged letters, was long considered the official portrait of the author. Not until the 1900s did people begin to get a more nuanced picture of Poe. But many of Griswold’s characterizations and assertions cling to Poe even today. One of them is the claim that he was an incurable alcoholic.”

  “And he wasn’t, was he?” While Vatten talked, Gunn Brita had taken out a little corkscrew from her purse and opened the wine bottle. Now she slipped inside her office as he continued lecturing in a somewhat louder voice so that she would be able to hear him.

  “I wouldn’t want to say one way or the other. There’s still a chance he was, but researchers are no longer certain. Poe’s brother-in-law at the time, Thomas Maine Reid, does admit that a good deal of liquor was consumed, but he also says in one place that Poe was not addicted to alcohol and seldom drank very much. Today many people believe that Poe drank only during difficult periods, and there is evidence that he could stay sober for months on end. It was in conjunction with this discussion that I came across someone who claimed that Poe was hypersensitive to alcohol.”

  “So you have something in common.” Now Gunn Brita came back from her office carrying two mugs. On one of them it said “World’s Best Mom” and on the other “Fosen Water Ski Team.” That mug had a picture of a tall, slim woman elegantly flying over the crests of the waves on a single ski. He couldn’t understand why that mug had ended up in her possession.

  “When did you discover that you were hypersensitive to alcohol?” asked Gunn Brita.

  “It was actually something that came on gradually. It wasn’t until I started at university that I developed the problem. I couldn’t drink even half a liter of beer on Friday night without getting plastered.”

  “And when was the last time you took a drink?”

  “Many years ago. It must have been…” Here Vatten stopped abruptly, but her eyes confirmed that she had understood what he had almost said.

  “How do you know that you still can’t tolerate alcohol?” she asked.

  “Well, I actually don’t know that,” he replied, casting another skeptical glance at the two mugs. “Not without trying it.”

  “It’s safe to test it here. If you get dead drunk from one mug of wine, I promise to take you home and put you to bed. It’s your day off tomorrow, anyway.”

  “OK, why not?” said Vatten, taking the mug that said “World’s Best Mom.” He held it out, knowing that he might be making a stupid mistake.

  5

  Richmond, August 2010

  The cleaning woman at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum had four different jobs. She tried to put together the wages from several lousy jobs to make one halfway decent income. She arrived at three in the morning and unlocked the door to the Stone House as usual but was startled to see that the lights in the display cases were still on. She had noticed that the curator had been oddly absentminded the past few weeks. He was often spaced-out when he arrived in the morning, as if he was brooding about some all-consuming secret. It hadn’t mattered that much to her, because she seldom had time for small talk. Nevertheless, she was a bit worried about the circumspect old man. Not all secrets should be borne alone. Now he had begun to make mistakes, like forgetting to turn off the lights. Soon he might forget to lock up, so that some early morning she might discover the door open and a homeless person or two camped out on the floor.

  As she worked her way through the Stone House and the Memorial House, she couldn’t help thinking that Efrahim Bond had begun to lose his grip. After she was finished with the first two buildings, she always took a cigarette break in the Enchanted Garden, which was modeled after Poe’s poem “To One in Paradise.” When she sat down on a stone bench near the fountain, she noticed something odd in the dim light over by the Poe monument at the far end of the garden. She got up and went closer. Edgar Allan Poe’s marble head was whiter than before, and no longer fastened to the five-foot-high pedestal of red brick. Edgar Allan Poe had acquired a body, a bloody body without skin; the sinews, muscles, and blood vessels all lay exposed. She noticed that below the flayed torso the corpse was wearing trousers, and that the boss’s card key was attached to the belt.

  She raced up to the offices in the exhibition building as if the Devil himself were at her
heels. She grabbed the phone in the boss’s office and dialed 911. Before she got an answer, she saw all the blood on the desk. Then she caught sight of the head in the wastebasket. There he lay staring up at her with bulging eyes—curator Efrahim Bond. He looked sadder than ever.

  A voice said something at the other end of the line. All she could do was scream in reply.

  Trondheim, September 2010

  Vatten opened his eyes and stared up at the familiar light fixture. He had persuaded the janitor to change the fluorescent tube a few days ago, after it started blinking and disturbing him as he was reading. The fixture was mounted directly above his easy chair, between two rows of shelving. This was in a part of the stacks where there was no natural light. For the first time he found the artificial light irritating. He closed his eyes again and felt a thundering headache, as if his pulse had been amplified fifty times and was being pumped full blast through the tiniest capillaries of his brain. Vague memories flickered between beats. He remembered that he had said, Yes, thank you, to a sizable mug of Spanish red wine. He remembered drinking it as he and Gunn Brita kept chatting about Edgar Allan Poe. Then they had moved on to talking about the library’s many rare books.

  She had an astonishing amount to say about the book the so-called Johannes Book. It was an odd collection of texts from the 1500s, written on parchment by a priest at Fosen who had been a Franciscan monk before the Reformation. Second only to the diary of Absalon Pederssøn Beyer, it was an important historical source for the period following the Reformation. But it was strange and baffling. While Beyer’s diary was systematic and scholarly and written with a larger public in mind, the Johannes Book was insular and cryptic, full of incomprehensible allusions. It had obviously been written for the priest’s eyes only, and in several places it cast doubt on whether the owner of these eyes was in full command of his faculties. But on one score the Johannes Book was in a class by itself. Johannes the priest described several people who suffered from various diseases. When it came to knowledge of anatomy, treatment of disease, and surgery, the Johannes Book surpassed most of what was available at that time. For the Nordic corner of Europe it was unique, and most scholars were of the opinion that Johannes the priest studied at a university in the southern part of the continent at one time.