Nevermore: A Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe

Nevermore: A Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Nevermore: A Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe Read Online Free PDF
Author: David Niall Wilson
Tags: Horror
his hand hovered over the butt of a holstered pistol.
    Edgar knew the tales from the west.   He knew the gunfighters, the lawmen, the wild savages and the mountains of gold.   He'd met them and lived them in the words of others, in the newspapers and the stories of strange, dark men in taverns.   It was how he built the fantasy worlds that bound his own stories.   He plucked the details.   He listened, and then he thought about what he had heard.   He brought characters to life in his mind and then he let them flow back out through his fingers.
    This was subtly different, and yet, very similar.   The two men were not cowboys, but they faced off in classic, end-game stances, the angry challenger, and the calm, snake-quick killer.   That much was obvious – the larger man, in some odd way, represented the light, and the dark man had a slimy, dark aura about him.   He smiled, but it was superficial and fragile, like a porcelain mask painted carefully and placed over something hard and ugly.   The first movement, a twitch of the lip, or the raising of an eyebrow, would shatter it.
    Edgar wrote.   He built a story around it – a long road, a chase, a string of bodies stretching down roads leading west.   The road ended with a woman – a girl, really.   Her fate hung in the balance.
    Then something shifted.   He felt a surge, and knew that the dark man would win.   He would aim and drive a slug of lead through the better man's heart.   He would take the girl, and disappear into the night.   He would send the man's spirit drifting to the trees and the fog.
    It was too much.
    With a burst of will Edgar reclaimed the pen.   The story fought him, flowing on toward its conclusion, but he concentrated, gritted his teeth painfully, and dragged the quill across the paper.   He marred the ending.   He slashed across the words and recreated the image.   He feared he'd be unable to do it justice, that all the words and work would be wasted and it would be too weak to do any good.   Still, he wrote.
    He raised the quill, dipped it into the ink, drove it back at the paper and continued.   The dark man's smile splintered into a thousand points of obsidian.   His hand shot down and the barrel of his gun rose, and the other man, a hair's breadth too slow, retaliated.   Edgar’s gaze shifted ever so slightly.   A black blur passed before his eyes and, a moment later, before the eyes of the dark man as well.   Grimm, it had to be Grimm, but it could not be – not in the story – not in the image.
    The stories never leaked into the real world, or vice versa.   They were just stories.   The images – the characters – they suffered – he always made them suffer – but they were bearing the pain so that he didn’t have to.   They were projections – shades of reality.
    This was not.   This was happening, and what he wrote – how fast he wrote it, and how well, mattered.   He had no idea how he knew this, or why he believed it, but it was true.   Grimm had not dragged him out of it; instead, the old bird had joined the battle, adding his own dark speed and darker vision to the flow of ink and shadow.
    Edgar wrote the bird’s trajectory into the story.   He drove it, like a blindfold, across the dark man’s eyes.   He couldn’t stop the strike, the whipcord fast reaction or the snap of the trigger, but the bullet whizzed past its target – within inches.   It might have actually grazed the tip of the big man’s ear.   It was enough.   The second gun barked, and the dark man was driven back.   The slug caught him directly above the heart.   He spun, and as he spun, another shot caught the spinning shoulder, driving him into a pin wheeling arc toward the loamy ground.
    He spun, and he fell, and when his narrow, hooked nose struck the ground, it drove through the soft earth and planted.   He lay, at an odd angle, twitching.   Smoke curled, just for a second, from the end of the bigger man's pistol.
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