They were interrupted by a hysterical shout from the tower stair.
“Mr. Poe, Mr. Bierce!”
“Yes, yes, we’re coming!” Poe and Bierce descended to find a man gasping against the stone passage wall.
“HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS!” he cried, immediately, clawing at them like a man about to fall over a cliff. “In an hour they’ll land! They’re bringing books with them, old books, the witches said! What’re you doing in the tower at a time like this? Why aren’t you acting?”
Poe said, “We’re doing everything we can, Blackwood. You’re new to this. Come along, we’re going to Mr. Hawthorne’s place—”
“—to contemplate our doom, our black doom,” said Mr. Bierce.
They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim, green level, down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing.
“Don’t worry,” said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking. “All along the dead sea tonight I’ve called the Others. Your friends and mine, Blackwood, Bierce. They’re all there. The animals and the old women and the tall men with the sharp white teeth. The traps are waiting, the pits, yes, and the pendulums. The Red Death.” Here he laughed quietly.
“Yes, even the Red Death. I never thought, no, I never thought the time would come when a thing like the Red Death would actually be. But they—” he poked his finger at the sky “—asked for it, and they shall have it!”
“But are we strong enough?” wondered Blackwood. “How strong is strong? They won’t be prepared for us, at least. They haven’t the imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic bloomers and fish-bowl helmets, with their new religion. About their necks, on gold chains, scalpels. Upon their heads, a diadem of microscopes. In their holy fingers, steaming incense urns which in reality are only germicidal ovens for steaming out superstition. The names of Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne, Blackwood blasphemy to their clean lips.”
Outside the castle, they advanced through a watery space, a tarn that was not a tarn, which misted before them like the stuff of nightmares. The air filled with wing sounds and a whirring, a motion of winds and blacknesses. Voices changed, figures swayed at campfires. Mr. Poe watched the needles knitting, knitting, knitting, in the firelight, knitting pain and misery, knitting wickedness into wax marionettes, clay puppets. The cauldron smells of wild garlics and cayennes and saffron hissed up to fill the night with evil pungency.
“Get on with it!” cried Poe. “I’ll be back!”
All down the empty seashore black figures spindled and waned, grew up and blew into black smokes on the wind. Bells rang in mountain towers and licorice ravens spilled out with the bronze sounds and spun away to ashes.
MR. HAWTHORNE WAS THE MAN who bolted doors and looked out at you from shuttered windows. You knew he was home by the smoke in his chimney, or you saw his footprints in the paths on an autumn afternoon after a drenching rain. You saw his pale breath on the winter windows of his house on mornings when the panes were blind with frost. Here was his house, away from the rest on Mars, in a land he had made for himself, a land where snows fell, rains cooled the hot sands, or spring and summer lingered in an instant if Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne so much as blinked from his door.
As Mr. Poe, Mr. Bierce and Mr. Blackwood approached at a brisk pace, Mr. Hawthorne’s front door, a moment before, open to a summer night’s warmth and smell of red apples in distant trees, slammed shut. There was a skirl of raindrops, a flurry of snow as light as pollen; then all was still.
Mr. Poe gave a rap on the door.
“Who’s there?” said a voice, at last.
“It’s Mr. Poe.”
“What do you want?” much later.
“We’ve come to tell you the latest.”
“I know, I know. I saw it on the sky. The red mark.”
“Open up, we need your help. We want you to meet the rocket.”
“I don’t like to meet people,” said Hawthorne, hidden away. “I don’t belong here, anyway. I’m not like you out there, you Poe, you Bierce!”
At last the door creaked wide and Hawthorne stood revealed, his mass of blowing white hair and his full animal-like mustache, and his deep, enquiring and lonely eyes.
“You’ll be a delegate to greet the rocket men,” said Poe. “When they’re lulled and unsuspecting, we’ll take care of them.”
Mr. Hawthorne eyed the folds of the black cape which hid Poe’s hands. From it, smiling, Mr. Poe drew forth a trowel.
“The Amontillado?” Hawthorne drew back.
“For one of our visitors.” In his other hand now, Poe brought forth a cap and bells, which jingled softly and suggestively.
“And for the others?”
Poe smiled again, well pleased. “We finished digging the Pit this morning.”
“And the Pendulum?”
“Is being installed.”
“The Premature Burial?”
“That, too.”
“You are a grim man, Mr. Poe.”
“I am a frightened and an angry man. I am a god, Mr. Hawthorne, even as you are a god, even as we all are gods, and our inventions, our people, if you wish, have been not only threatened, but banished and burned, torn up and censored, ruined and done away with. The worlds we created are falling to ruin! Even gods must fight!”
“So.” Hawthorne tilted his head a little. “Yes. Perhaps that explains why we are here. How did we come here?”
“War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2067, they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing, to destroy our literary creations that way. It summoned us out of—what? Death? The Beyond? I don’t like abstract things. I don’t know.
I only know that our worlds and our creations called us and we tried to save them and the only saving thing we could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping that Earth might overweight itself with these scientists and their doubtings, but now they’re coming to clean us out of here, us and our dark thing, and all the alchemists, witches, vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at all but exodus. You must help us. You have a good speaking manner. We need you.”
“But I’m not of you, I don’t approve of you and the others,” cried Hawthorne, indignantly. “I was no fantasist, no player with witches and vampires and midnight things.”
“What of ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’?”
“Ridiculous! One story. Oh, I wrote a few others, perhaps, but what of that? My basic works had none of that nonsense!”
“Mistaken or not, they grouped you with us. They destroyed your works, too. You must hate them, Mr. Hawthorne.”
“They are stupid and rude,” reflected Mr. Hawthorne. He looked at the immense crimson symbol on the sky where the rocket burned. “Yes,” he said, finally, “I will help you.”
THEY HURRIED ALONG the midnight shore of the dry sea. By fires and smokes, Mr. Poe hesitated, to shout orders, to check the bubbling poisons and chalked pentagrams. “Good!” He ran on. “Fine!” And he ran again, past shadowed armies, the armies of Oberon and Othello, the armies of Arthur and Macbeth, waiting in full armor. And there were serpents and angry demons and fiery bronze dragons and spitting vipers and trembling witches like the barbs and nettles and thorns and all the vile flotsams and jetsams of the retreating sea of imagination, left on the melancholy shore, whining and frothing and spitting.
Bierce stopped. He sat like a child on the cold sand. He began to sob. They tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. “I just thought,” he said, “what happens to us on the day when the last copies of our books are destroyed?”
The air whirled.
“Don’t speak of it!”
“We must,” wailed Bierce. “Now, now as the rocket comes down, you, Hawthorne, Poe, Coppard, all of you, grow faint. Like wood smoke. Blowing away. Your faces thin and melt—”
“Death. Real death for all of us.”
“We exist only through Earth’s sufferance. If a final edict tonight destroyed our last few works we’d be like lights put out.”
Hawthorne brooded gently. “I wonder who I am. In what Earth mind tonight do I exist? In some African hut? Some hermit, reading my tales? Is he the lonely candle in the wind of time and science? The flickering orb sustaining me here in rebellious exile? Is it he?
Or some boy in a discarded attic, finding me, only just in time! Oh, last night I felt ill, ill, ill to the marrows of me, for there is a body of the soul as well as a body of the body, and this soul-body ached in all of its glowing parts, and last night I felt myself a candle, guttering. When suddenly I sprang up, given new light! As some child in some yellow garret on Earth once more found a worn, time-specked copy of me, sneezing with dust! And so I’m given a short respite.”
A DOOR BANGED WIDE in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others, sat down and stared into his clenched hands.
“There’s the one I’m sorry for,” whispered Blackwood. “Look at him, dying away. He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought, and clothed him in centuries
