A Midnight Visitation by Clint Collins

“The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
From “The Philosophy of Composition,” by Edgar Allan Poe

On a night most dark and dreary, Poe was reading, growing weary,
a long-forgotten Gothic poem of a princess and her gnome,
when soft steps sounded on the floor and open swung the library door.

“Remember me, your ‘radiant maiden’? I’ve returned, without your raven.”

“My lost Lenore? How could this be? You exist only in my poetry.”

“Yes,” she said, “and for all time, I keep dying to your rhyme.
For me no surcease of sorrow, no sweet reprieve on the morrow.
Cursed forever with your bird, and my voice is never heard.”

“’Twas but the method of my art, to reveal the sadness of the heart.”

“Characters have lives,” she said. “Why leave so many women dead?”

“It was not some idle folly to find what is most melancholy.”

“And to acquire your fame and money, we took the sting and you the honey.
Now my sisters gather here, our sorrows time for you to hear.”

In the white shroud from her tomb, another stepped into the room.
"Know you not your Annabel Lee, whom you buried by the sea?
A fate as mine is so unjust, as immortal words shall never rust.”

Up to him crept Madeline Usher, broken from the house that crushed her.
"Why do you love a woman's death? Is she more lovely without breath?"

Ligeia and Morella came, whose bleak fates were both the same.
“We died and then you brought us back, but the days were just as black.”

Next in the room was Berenice, whose wide smile showed no teeth.
Following her came Ulalume, sent to her death all too soon.
"So many of us you entombed, for you we see a special doom.
Since we die famously on your pages, so shall your death enthrall the ages!"

And then the room was crowded full, from classic face to grinning skull,
with all the women of his pen, pointing fingers to condemn.

Suddenly there came a tapping--on his shoulder--gently rapping.
Poe awoke with twitch and shudder, heart like raven wings a-flutter.

"My dear Edgar, why do you moan? Why the low and anguished groan?"
He found sweet Virginia's hand, with the thin gold wedding band.

"'Twas a dream and nothing more. Yes, just a dream . . . and nothing more."

Clint Collins's horror fiction can be found in the Horror Writers Association anthology, Under the Fang, and other anthologies. Clint also co-edited the anthology Snowpocalypse, featuring stories of an endless winter. Clint now lives in Indiana, where ghosts patiently wait in abandoned farmhouses and mysterious rituals occur in late-summer cornfields.