The scene had an indescribable effect on me; it was as if I
had been permitted a look into another world, one incredibly
vaster than our own, distinguished from our own by antip-
odally different values and life forms, and remote from
ours in time and space, and as I gazed at this far world, I
became aware—as were this intelligence being funneled
into me by some psychic means—that I looked upon a dying
race which must escape its planet or perish. Spontaneously
then, I seemed to recognize the burgeoning of a menacing
evil, and with an urgent, violent effort, I threw off the bond-
age of the chant that held me in its spell, gave vent to the
uprushing of fear I felt in a cry of protest, and rose to my
feet, while the chair on which I sat fell backward with a
crash.
Instantly the scene before my mind’s eye vanished and the
room returned to focus. Across from me sat my visitors, the
seven gentlemen in the likeness of Poe, impassive and si-
lent, for the sounds they had made, the humming and the
odd word-like tonal noises, had ceased.
I calmed down, my pulse began to slow.
“W hat you saw, Mr. Phillips, was a scene on another star,
1 6 4
™ 3י M AN WH0 CALLED HIMSELF POE
remote from here,” said Mr. Allan. “Far out in space—indeed,
in another universe. Did it convince you?”
*Tve seen enough,” I cried.
I could not tell whether my visitors were amused or scorn-
ful; they remained without expression, including their spokes-
man, who only inclined his head slightly and said, “We
will take our leave then, with your permission.”
And silently, one by one, they all filed out into Angell
Street.
I was most disagreeably shaken. I had no proof of having
seen anything on another world, but I could testify that I
had experienced an extraordinary hallucination, undoubtedly
through hypnotic influence.
But w hat had been its reason for being? I pondered that
as I set about to put the living room to rights, but I could
not adduce any profound reason for the demonstration I had
witnessed. I was unable to deny that my visitors had shown
themselves to be possessed of extraordinary faculties—but
to w hat end? And I had to admit to myself that I was as
much shaken by the appearance of no less than seven iden-
tical men as I was by the hallucinatory experience I had
just passed through. Quintuplets were possible, yes—but had
anyone ever heard of septuplets? Nor were multiple births
of identical children usual. Yet here were seven men, all of
very much the same age, identical in appearance, for whose
existence there was not a scintilla of explanation.
Nor was there any graspable meaning in the scene that I
had witnessed during the demonstration. Somehow I had
understoood that the great cubes were sentient beings for
whom the violet radiation was life-giving; I had realized that
the cone creatures served them in some fashion or other,
but nothing had been disclosed to show how. The whole
vision was meaningless; it was just such a scene as might have
been created by a highly organized imagination and tele-
pathically conveyed to a willing subject, such as myself.
That it proved the existence of extra-terrestrial life was ri
THE M A N WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
165
diculous; it proved no more than that I had been the victim
of an induced hallucination.
But, once more, I came full circle. As hallucination, it
was completely without reason for being.
Yet I could not escape an insistent disquiet that troubled
me long that night before I was able to sleep.
IV
Strangely enough, my uneasiness mounted during the
course of the following morning. Accustomed as I was to the
human curiosities, to the often incredible characters and
unusual sights to be encountered on the nocturnal walks I
took about Providence, the circumstances surrounding the
Poe־esque Mr. Allan and his brothers were so outré that
I could not get them out of mind.
Acting on impulse, I took time off from my work that
afternoon and made my way to the house on the knoll along
the Seekonk, determined to confront my nocturnal compan-
ion. But the house, when I came to it, wore an air of singular
desertion; badly worn curtains were drawn down to the sills
of the windows, in some places blinds were up; and the
whole milieu was the epitome of abandonment.
Nevertheless, I knocked at the door and waited.
There was no answer. I knocked again.
No sound fell to my ear from inside the house.
Powerfully impelled by curiosity now, I tried the door.
It opened to my touch. I hesitated still, and looked all around
me. No one was in sight, at least two of the houses in the
neighborhood were unoccupied, and if I was under surveil-
lance it was not apparent to me.
I opened the door and stepped into the house, standing
for a few moments with my back to the door to accustom my
eyes to the twilight that filled the rooms. Then I moved cau-
tiously through the small vestibule into the adjacent room,
a parlor sparely occupied by horsehair furniture at least
166
THE M AN W O CALLED HIMSELF POE
two decades old. There was no sign here of occupation by
any human being, though there was evidence that someone
had not long since walked here, making a path through
dust visible on the uncarpeted flooring. I crossed the room
and entered a small dining room, and crossed this, too, to
find myself in a kitchen, which, like the other rooms, bore
little sign of having been used, for there was no food of any
kind in evidence, and the table appeared not to have been
used for years. Yet here, too, were footprints in substantial
numbers, testifying to the habitation of the house. And the
staircase revealed steady use as well.
But it was the far side of the house that afforded the
most disturbing disclosures. This side of the building con-
sisted of but one large room, though it was instantly evident
that it had been three rooms at one time, but the connecting
walls had been removed without the finished repair of the
junctions at the outer wall. I saw this in a fleeting glance,
for what was in the center of the room caught and held
my fascinated attention. The room was bathed in violet
light, a soft glowing that emanated from what appeared to
be a long, glass-encased slab, which, with a second, unlit
similar slab, stood surrounded by machinery the like of
which I had never seen before save in dreams.
I moved cautiously into the room, alert for anyone who
might prevent my intrusion. No one and nothing moved. I
drew closer to the violet-lit glass case and saw that some-
thing lay within, though I did not at first encompass this
because I saw what it laid upon—nothing less than a life-
sized reproduction of a likeness of Edgar Allan Poe, which,
like everything else, was illuminated by the same pulsing
violet light, the source of which I could not determine, save
that it was enclosed by the glass-like substance which made
up the case. But when at last I looked upon that which
lay upon the likeness of Poe, I almost cried out in fearful
surprise, for it was, in miniature, a precise reproduction of
THE M A N WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
167
one of the rugose cones I had seen only last night in the
hallucination induced in my home on Angell Street! And
the sinuous movement of the tentacles on its head—or what
I took to be its head—was indisputable evidence that it
was alive!
I backed hastily away with only enough of a glance at
the other case to assure myself that it was bare and unoc-
cupied, though connected by many metal tubes to the illu-
mined case parallel to it; then I fled, as noiselessly as possible,
for I was convinced that the nocturnal brotherhood slept
upstairs and in my confusion at this inexplicable revelation
that placed my hallucination of the previous night into an-
other perspective, I wished to meet no one. I escaped from
the house undetected, though I thought I caught a brief
glimpse of a Poe-esque face at one of the upper windows. I
ran down the road and back along the streets that bridged
the distance from the Seekonk to the Providence River, and
ran so for many blocks before I slowed to a walk, for I was
beginning to attract attention in my wild flight.
As I walked along, I strove to bring order to my chaotic
thoughts. I could not adduce an explanation for what I had
seen, but I knew intuitively that I had stumbled upon some
menacing evil too dark and forbidding and perhaps too vast
as well for my comprehension. I hunted for meaning and
found none; mine had never been a scientifically oriented
mind, apart from chemistry and astronomy, so that I was
not equipped to understand the use of the great machines I
had seen in that house ringing that violet-lit slab where that
rugose body lay in warm, life-giving radiation—indeed, I
was not even able to assimilate the machinery itself, for
there was only a remote resemblance to anything I had ever
before seen, and that the dynamos in a powerhouse. They
had all been connected in some way to the two slabs, and
the glass cases—if the substance were glass—the one occu-
pied, the other dark and empty, for all the tubing that tied
them each to each.
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THE M A N WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
But I had seen enough to be convinced that the dark-
clad brotherhood who walked the streets of Providence by
night in the guise of Edgar Allan Poe had a purpose other
than mine in doing so; theirs was no simple curiosity about
the nocturnal characters, about fellow walkers of the night.
Perhaps darkness was their natural element, even as daylight
was that of the majority of their fellow men; but that their
motivation was sinister, I could not now doubt. Yet at the
same time I was at a loss as to what course next to follow.
I turned my steps at last toward the library, in the vague
hope of grasping at something that might lead me to some
clue by means of which I could approach an understanding
of what I had seen.
But there was nothing. Search as I might, I found no key,
no hint, though I read widely through every conceivable
reference—even to those on Poe in Providence on the
shelves, and I left the library late in the day as baffled as
when I had entered.
Perhaps it was inevitable that I would see Mr. Allan again
that night. I had no way of knowing whether my visit to
his home had been observed, despite the observer I thought
I had glimpsed in an upper window in my flight, and I
encountered him therefore in some trepidation. But this was
evidently ill-founded, for when I greeted him on Benefit
Street there was nothing in his manner or in his words to
suggest any change in his attitude, such as I might have
expected had he been aware of my intrusion. Yet I knew
full well his capacity for being without expression—humor,
disgust, even anger or irritation were alien to his features,
which never changed from that introspective mask which
was essentially that of Poe.
“I trust you have recovered from our experiment, Mr.
Phillips,” he said after exchanging the customary amenities.
“Fully,” I answered, though it was not the truth. I added
something about a sudden spell of dizziness to explain my
bringing the experiment to its precipitate end.
THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
169
“It is but one of the worlds outside you saw, Mr. Phillips,”
Mr. Allan went on. “There are many. As many as a hundred
thousand. Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor
is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms
on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre
to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life forms.”
For once, Mr. Allan was singularly communicative, and I
had little to say. Clearly, whether or not I laid what I had
seen to hallucination—even in the face of my discovery in my
companion’s house—he himself believed implicitly in what
he said. He spoke of many worlds, as if he were familiar
with them. On occasion he spoke almost with reverence of
certain forms of life, particularly those with the astonishing
adaptability of assuming the life forms of other planets in
their ceaseless quest for the conditions necessary to their
existence.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“You have seen it?”
“I have seen it, Mr. Phillips.”
I listened to him with relief. Since it was manifestly
impossible to permit any man sight of the intimate life of
outer space, what I had experienced was nothing more than
the communicated hallucination of Mr. Allan and his broth-
ers. Telepathic communication certainly, aided by a form
of hypnosis I had not previously experienced. Yet I could
not rid myself of the disquieting sense of evil that surrounded
my nocturnal companion, nor of the uneasy feeling that the
explanation which I had so eagerly accepted was unhappily
glib.
As soon as I decently could, thereafter, I made excuses
to Mr. Allan and took my leave of him. I hastened directly
to the Athenaeum in the hope of finding Rose Dexter there,
but if she had been there, she had already gone. I went
then to a public telephone in the building and telephoned her
home.
1 7 0
׳THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
Rose answered, and I confess to an instantaneous feeling
of gratification.
"Have you seen Mr. Allan tonight?״ I asked.
"Yes,״ she replied. "But
only for a few moments. I was on
my way to the library.״
"So did I.״
"He asked me to his home some evening to watch an
experiment,״ she went on.
"Don’t go,״ I said at once.
There was a long moment of silence at the other end of
the wire. Then, "Why not?״ Unfortunately, I failed to ac-
knowledge the edge of truculence in her voice.
"It would be better not to go,״ I said, with all the firmness
I could muster.
"Don’t you think, Mr. Phillips, I am the best judge of that?״
I hastened to assure her that I had no wish to dictate
her actions, but meant only to suggest that it might be
dangerous to go.
"Why?״
"I can’t tell you over the telephone,” I answered, fully
aware of how lame it sounded, and knowing even as I
said it that perhaps I could not put into words at all the
horrible suspicions which had begun to take shape in my
mind, for they were so fantastic, so outré, that no one could
be expected to believe in them.
"I’ll think it over,” she said crisply.
"I’ll try to explain when I see you,” I promised.
She bade me good night and rang off with an intransi-
gence that boded ill, and left me profoundly disturbed.
V
I come now to the final, apocalyptic events concerning
Mr. Allan and the mystery surrounding the house on the
forgotten knoll. I hesitate to set them down even now, for
TIIE M A N WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
1 J 1
I recognize that the charge against me will only be broadened
to include grave questions about my sanity. Yet I have no
other course. Indeed, the entire future of humanity, the
whole course of what we call civilization, may be affected
by what I do or do not write of this matter. For the cul-
minating events followed rapidly and naturally upon my
conversation with Rose Dexter, that unsatisfactory exchange
over the telephone.
After a restless, uneasy day at work, I concluded that I
must make a tenable explanation to Rose. On the following
evening, therefore, I went early to the library, where I was
accustomed to meeting her, and took a place where I could
watch the main entrance. There I waited for well over an
hour before it occurred to me that she might not come to the
library that night.
Once more I sought the telephone, intending to ask