After Midnight Read Online Free

unsure adolescent lover.
    After a tense wait, sure that the Toaster would break his tradition, I heard the rusted shriek of a gate being opened with careless abandon. Every muscle in my body tensed and my stomach twisted as I waited for him to come into view. Finally, I spotted him moving liquidly through the mist, which seemed to cling to him as if it were a loyal dog and he the benign master. I couldn’t see much more than his silhouette until he came to Poe’s marker and stopped. The large coat and wide brimmed hat lent him the air of a child playing dress-up.
    Holding my breath, sure that even the smallest sound would supernaturally travel to his ears, I watched as he gently laid three red roses onto the stone ledge near the ground. Standing tall once more, head bowed as if in prayer, he fumbled the cognac from his pocket. Tipping his head back, he took a long sip, and then bent to lovingly set it next to the roses.
    By now, without fully realizing it, I was laboring toward this heartwarming scene, a small part of me loathe to interrupt it. The Toaster didn’t seem to sense my approach, he only stood reverently before the grave with a downcast head and slumped shoulders, as if battling abject emotion.
    Stepping over a last headstone that had fallen and lay on the ground, I was out in the open, and within spitting distance of the Toaster. Eyes narrowed, teeth clamped tightly together, I tiptoed closer and into the spill of light.
    I don’t know to this day who it was, but one of my comrades hiding in the dark, perhaps appalled at my obvious intent, gasped loudly. At that moment, snapping to attention like a well-trained solider, the Poe Toaster spun fluidly on his heels. I instinctively fell back a step, my heart leaping, my body tense.
    The Poe Toaster’s face was darkened by the brim of his hat, but was revealed when he stumbled back, surprised. When the blasphemous light shone upon his long, ashy horse features, we locked stares. He saw the horrified recognition in my eyes, and in his I saw the strongest and oldest emotion of mankind.
    Seeming to quiver, ripple, he turned and fled into the night, leaving me behind, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, my entire being in turmoil.
    Like a drunkard, I sank limply to my knees before the grave of Edgar Allen Poe, as if I were offering him my soul, darkness stealing over my vision.
    My friends were quick to rush to my side, yelling in alarm and concern. Josh sank down behind me so that I would not fall back onto the ground; A- and G- stumbled into place on either side of me, their faces contorted in mystery and excitement.
    “C’mon, guys, give him some room,” Josh barked.
    But I was already gone.
     
    We returned to West Virginia in uneasy silence. I knew that the others wanted to question me, the tension was thick, but they refrained. I tried to rationalize what I had seen two hours back, but I simply couldn’t.
    In later days, when it didn’t disturb me to even think of the whole thing, I told myself that I had mistaken the Poe Toaster; that my own active imagination had betrayed me, and had given the face of the man an uncanny resemblance to someone else. And I laughed at my own insistence that I was able to see the grave of Poe through the Toaster. It was easier to do this than to wonder or accept, one torturing the brain, the other opening terrifying vistas of madness and possibility.
    I had seen the Poe Toaster’s thoughtful British face a million times before, and his serious demeanor had impressed itself on me as doing well in hiding his constant, sometimes tempest-tossed imagination. My brain must have projected a wavering likeness of him onto the true Poe Toaster. That has to be it. Surely, I did not confront the ghost of H.P. Lovecraft that night. I simply did not.

The Diary of Dan Cooper
     
    The following papers were released by the FBI on July 11 th 2014 after numerous requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
    TOP SECRET . Transcription of tape