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the other thief of our seats. He, it appeared by a similar look around the eyes, was the brother of the first; from his bobbing head and stare, I believed him to be slow-witted.
    You may wonder also as to my reaction. I had been enveloped in my father’s presence shortly before. Father was always a
sovereign
to all around him. You see, in the moment, it was perfectly natural to me to assume that I, too, could adjust the world as fit my sense of things. This had been the sneaking nature of the delusion.
    I may as well finish the story. The villain did not stop landing severe blows to my face and head until my father’s return to the train car. Less than a minute later, my father and a conductor had banished the men into another train of the car to be removed at the next depot.
    “Now, what did you do, my boy?” my father asked me afterward as I lay prostrate across our seats in a haze.
    “I had to, Father! You were not here!”
    “You provoked someone. You might have been killed. What would you prove then, Quentin Hobson Clark?” I looked back at the blurry image of this man lecturing me, standing above me with his usual composure, and knew the difference between us.
    Now I thought of the new warning I had received.
It is unwise to meddle…
The Phantom’s image locked up my mind beside the demon of the train from my childhood. How I burned to talk about it! My great-aunt at this time was residing with me for a few days to help oversee the housekeeping. Could I tell Great-Auntie Clark about the threat?
    “You ought to have been caught young and trained carefully,” she would say—or something along those lines. She was a great-aunt on my father’s side, and applied the sternness of my father’s business principles to promoting sober behavior more generally. Great-Auntie Clark praised Father for his “strong Saxon thoughts.” Her affection for my father seemed to accrue partially to me, and she watched over me with dutiful vigilance.
    No, I did not tell Great-Auntie Clark and soon she had departed from Glen Eliza. (Could I have told my father if he were alive?)
    I wanted to tell Hattie Blum. She had always been pleased to hear of my personal enterprises. She alone had been able to speak to me after my parents’ deaths in a tone and confidence that understood that though my parents had died, they were not corpses to me. Yet, as I had not seen her since the day we were supposed to have been engaged, I could not fathom how she would perceive my interest in this.
    In a way, the Phantom’s words attracted as much as they startled me.
It is unwise to meddle with your lowly lies.
Though he was warning me away, the cryptic words acknowledged that the perception of Poe could be
meddled
with—in other words, they could still be changed by me. In a way, that warning encouraged me.
    I felt an excitement that was only remotely familiar and only half unwanted. It was different from anything I had known in our work.
    One long afternoon at the office I sat looking at the street from my desk. Peter was nearby. He was in the middle of reprimanding our copying clerk over the quality of some affidavit when he glanced over at me. He returned to his speech, then glanced abruptly at me again. “All right, Quentin?”
    It was a habit of mine that I occasionally fell into a sort of staring spell, glaring in the air at nothing in particular. Peter was especially fascinated and appalled whenever these reveries occurred. He noisily shook the bag of ginger-nuts I’d been eating. “All right, Quentin?”
    “All right,” I assured him. “Tolerably well, Peter.” Upon seeing that I would say no more, he returned to the clerk with the precise word of reprimand where he had left off.
    I could no longer keep buttoned up. “All right, certainly! If there is anything all right about being threatened!” I cried out suddenly. “All wrong!” Peter quietly dismissed our clerk, who gratefully scurried from the room. When we were alone, every