Fortifying myself with the simple but wholesome breakfast that Muddy had provided, I rose from the table and repaired to my study. I was painfully aware that an inordinate number of days had passed since I had last applied myself to my creative endeavors. I was already long overdue on the delivery of a promised tale of sensation for publication in a future number of the Southern Literary Messenger. And yet, to endeavor to engage in the act of literary composition seemed, at that moment, entirely futile. The all-too-vivid recollection of the horror I had witnessed on the previous eve—of the butchered old man buried beneath the floorboards of his own home—precluded the possibility of the sort of sustained imaginative effort necessary for artistic production.

It was imperative, moreover, that—until the present crisis was resolved—every modicum of my energy be devoted to its resolution. As long as the unknown perpetrator remained at large, no one in the city was safe from the maniac’s knife. There was, I confess, another and more immediately self-interested reason for my extreme sense of urgency. My latest encounter with the dark, uncanny female in the gloom of Montague’s dwelling had reinforced my conviction that—in some distinct, if still-inexplicable, way—the horrors that had descended upon our fair city were intimately connected with myself.

Closing the study door behind me, I crossed to my writing table. As I lowered myself into my seat, my gaze fell upon the yellowed newspaper review of my mother’s long-ago performance at the Front Street Theatre. No sooner did I notice this item—which lay precisely where I had left it the previous evening—than I was struck with a singular notion.

Up until that moment, I had scrutinized this article solely with an eye to identifying the various, eminent audience members whose names were mentioned within the text. The thought now occurred to me that a clue to the mystery might reside elsewhere—namely, in the particular play that was performed on that memorable evening in 1807. This, as the reader will recall, was Shakespeare’s supreme tragedy King Lear, in which my mother had won such excited acclaim in the rôle of Cordelia, the elderly monarch’s doomed, saintly daughter.