As I have stated before, I do not own the names in this story.
At last the arrangements were made and I bid farewell to the University, the institution in which I had no desire to return to or step foot in again. My journey to Baltimore was not a particularly long one, but in my anxious state it seemed to last an eternity. I settled into my hotel room, which was only a few miles from the sculpture of my cousin that I was to visit the next day. My wait began to elapse slowly. My unoccupied fancy began to wonder off onto a more dream-like state, the fancy that overtakes most writers while they pen a story. During which, the outside world and other surroundings disappear. Existence becomes only pen, paper, and the words they create. All these things work together like the great elements of earth, water, and fire which seem to revolve around the author and mind which is creating.
For the first time in several years, I found myself writing. My soul was pouring forth onto the blank sheets of paper. The hours slipped away and of the world my lifeless body inhabited drifted away and the ideas gathered into my countenance. My heroine, the setting, and a twisted plot formed themselves as I continued to write into the late hours of the evening. I became that night a slave to the pen and its whiles. The sound of my pen scratching against the delicate sheets of paper did not cease for even an instant until my eyes could no longer focus upon the paper and the words I wrote and I was forced to succumb to heaviness of my eyelids.
I slept little that night and the next day. Anxiety and restlessness plagued the muscles of my ravaged, sleep deprived body. Little atonement was to be found for my cursed existence, save for that which could be provided by writing. When I picked up my pen again, I was immersed in a new world far away from Baltimore. It was a world that I both created and controlled. Nothing was so far out of my reach as it was in the hash reality myself writing. In this world, I was master and was appreciated for the skill I was sure that I possessed in the depths of my countenance. I was truly a writer in this new, strange place even if I was not considered thus in the grim realm of reality.
Time crept by at an excruciatingly slow interval until; at length, I bare the silence in the lonely hotel room no longer, even with the company of my work. My excursion into the streets of Baltimore was short. I venture into a small store and purchased an arrangement of differently colored roses and an aged bottle of cognac, both of which were to adorn the grace of my cousin. It appeared most unusual for spectators, I suppose, to watch me walk about the streets with nothing but these items in my hand. Yet, I felt no shame in walking through the cold streets. My every move was for the sake of my ancestry and to satisfy my aroused mind.
As the sun began to set, I stepped into the graveyard and sought the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe, my unfortunate 13th cousin of the days of yore. My eyes searched for and found the earth that marked his grave quickly. The statue rendered in his likeness could be seen throughout the grounds and made his place of his rest easy to find. I sat on the grassy ground below the statue and the large headstone that was adjacent to it, not once considering the notion that my prolonged presence could evoke angry spirits in the land of the dead. Not once did the unfriendly phantoms make themselves known to my fancy while the sun hung over my misplaced being.
Complete and utter darkness fell over the night sky, the kind of black that I felt must be experienced in oblivion throughout eternity. Only the faint shadow of a sliver moon hung above my head. The rest of the world became hidden by a black mass of clouds, determined to block my sight into the world into that surrounded my. A thick mist of also fell upon the cemetery and surrounded me and the tombstones, the last things left to mark the lives of those long since gone. Though no rain had fallen in the past days since I had been settled there, thus I began to feel a strange presence begin to pervade the air along with the fog-like mist. A chill slowly crept into the night air that ran eerily down my spine.
Though I was not subject to many of the supernatural fears felt by many, the scene laid out before me frightened me down to the core of my being. I began to shake profusely from both cold and fear, though I had no way to distinguish the reasoning behind each convulsion. It was them that I turned my attention to the friendly bottle next to me. My hand moved quickly toward the top of the container and removed the cap. I took a slow sip of the dark, amber colored liquor, allowing it to warm and sting the back of my throat and the warmth to slither down into my chest. It took only a sip to satisfy me, as I did so scarcely imbibe alcohol. I was calm after that for a while and was not so much aroused by the unsettling things happening around me.
Time passed slowly and my surroundings grew darker and more chilling. The fog grew thicker, like ghostly apparition all around me. Each seemed to center around one of the forgotten stones before me, which only added to the notions that I was not alone in the place of the dead. My eyelids seemed to notice this, as they began to sag down over my eyes. The previous evening of little rest was quickly taking its toll on my numb body. The chill seeping down my spine did nothing to rouse me and I could feel the poison of sleep creep into my mind and into my limbs.