Where Monsters Dwell Read Online Free PDF Page A

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