3 for Poe

We were alone that last night, in the music room, and Henri was playing by the flickering of the candlelight in the night breezes sifting through the cracks in the walls and by the flashes of heat lightning beyond the French doors to the veranda. His haunting tune set me on edge, and I felt my nerves fraying. Twice I felt there was a malevolent presence in the room, something moving in the shadows behind the rustling drapes at the French doors. But I told myself it was only the wind and the approaching storm. Only the wind and the approaching storm.

I spoke to Henri, but he, enshrouded in his piano and solitary mood, could not, would not hear me.

At last I could take it no more and told him I must retire for the night—that he needed rest as well for the move that was to come on the morrow. But he gave me no response.

I thought I was awakened by a cry in the night, but the storm had made its appearance by then, and I could not distinguish the howling of the wind from what many months of hindsight made clearer to me was an utterance more human than natural.