Ba-bum-ba-bum-bum. The steady, hypnotic, rhythm coursed through my veins like a thousand lightning bolts. For weeks, maybe months, this staccato etude surged down my spine and throughout my limbs to the tips of my fingers. By now, of course, I had grown accustomed to this cadence of the beating heart.  Today was unlike any other. My mind was elsewhere and I had many appointments to attend. Between the Stylus and my recent engagement to my dearest Amanda, I was quite busy and strained. Pain. Tightness. Must. Breathe. Once again I had the abrupt pain in my chest. During these startling episodes, my thoughts ran to my sweet Virginia. Virginia. How soft the name sung to me. Alas, she was taken from me only two long years ago. Her hair. Her hair was long and fair. I could still smell the beautiful aroma of bright lilies. BA-BUM. Louder and louder the torturing tempo grew. The beat was strong. I felt the flush of blood pounding through my skull.

          Grief. Sorrow. Despair.

          A sudden wave of emotion engulfed me in my study. A shadow draped upon the white panes of my window as a villainous friend perched above me. He sat with a redoubtable expression, and as if He was almost suspended in midair, He moved His way across the pane and looked me straight in the eye. His Eye! His Eye! It pierced through my very soul, slicing through every memory I shared with this banshee bird. He cawed and began tapping the clear, cool glass. Ta-tap-ta-tap-tap. Suddenly, I became a fixed statue. A beat grew inside me. It grew inside the walls. It grew inside the floorboards. BA-BUM-BUM. It was Him! He was the conductor of this hellish orchestra. He was a haunting, a sign of anguish. I was ceaselessly, a cursed man. In unison, the nightmarish symphony drowned me with the sorrow of my love’s eternal slumber. The grief I felt absconded from my soul and out through my mouth. It came as a scream. It was a scream of pain, of help, of longing. I could not say if the pain below my chest was real or just a fabrication of my imagination. I swore at the filthy smut of earth. I damned Him to infinite suffrage.
          I bolted out of the door and headed straight to 4th Ward Polls. Nightfall hung on the horizon, pulling a shade over the sun. Nevertheless, I sprinted from the darkness. I ran from the thief that was the Raven. He had stolen my love, my soul, my sobriety, and my sanity.
          I faltered through the doors of the tavern. Cognac. This liquor was the sweet, sinful drink of gold and of poison. I struggled to raise the glass to my dry, cracked lips. My arm trembled as sharp pains sent through my arm and numbed my fingers. My hand cramped as I mustered just enough strength to send the burning alcohol down my throat. After several more drinks, my body began violently refusing the cognac. I stumbled out the door, and staggered into an old alley. I expelled the vile substance and collapsed on the jagged, unforgiving cobblestone.
          You suffer an abnormal heartbeat, possibly from disease or malady of the heart. A voice I had forgotten rang in my head. After forcing a memory back into my consciousness, I realized it was the voice of a physician that I had made acquaintance to in the May of 1848. I had denied his finding of Heart Disease. What was his name? What was it he had said? My heartbeat skipped a beat or was ten beats too fast. Yes, that must have been the diagnosis. What was it about alcohol? Or stress? Ripping pain tore throughout my upper body and my arms. My heart. The heart. No. Not again. Why is it here?
          Before I saw anything, I heard it. The beat, much slower now, was escalating and intensifying in volume. I could not distinguish if it was in my head or my own heart, nonetheless it played on. I felt my heart nearly beating out of my body, joining the waxing rhythm in accord. And then I heard the frigid autumn air rippling through His long, black feathers. It was His eye that I had foreseen years ago. It was the Eye that saw oblivion and was the color of the uncharted abyss. And like the color of the Raven and His Eye, my world went black.
          I woke up breathing. I floated in and out of reality. Yet, I was gone. I was gone when Virginia had died two years ago. My soul was no longer here on this earth where I was left, but in another world that I did not know. I was the empty shell of Edgar Allan Poe. And on the seventh day of the tenth month, I went with the Raven to a land far different and unaccustomed to me. And as I soared with the Raven, both heartbeats halted.  My chest suddenly fell still, and the Tell-Tale Heart ceased.