Whose Floorboards

The hotel had been someone’s idea of grandeur. Two floors of brick and wrought iron in a part of Richmond that couldn’t decide whether it was being restored or abandoned. The lobby had marble floors with veins like a medical diagram, and the chandelier overhead was missing a third of its crystals, which made the light uneven — bright in some places, shadowed in others, so that walking across the room felt like passing through weather.

Poe was already there. He sat in a wingback chair near a window that looked onto an alley, his legs crossed, a glass of something dark on the table beside him that I chose not to identify. He was smaller than I expected, which is a thing people always say about him and which is always true. He had the look of a man who had been ill recently and was not yet sure he’d recovered, and his eyes moved constantly — to the window, to the door, to the chandelier, to me, and then back through the sequence, as if he were checking that the room hadn’t rearranged itself while he wasn’t looking.

Tananarive Due arrived ten minutes later, coming through the front entrance in a way that changed the air in the room. Not loudly. She simply walked in and the space reorganized itself around her. She looked at the lobby, looked at Poe, looked at me, and said, “Richmond.”

“Richmond,” Poe agreed.

“I wanted to meet in Baltimore,” I said. “Or Tallahassee.”

“Richmond is correct,” Due said, sitting down across from Poe in the other wingback. “This is where the argument lives. You can’t have this conversation in a neutral city.”

I pulled a wooden chair from a writing desk in the corner and sat between them, slightly behind, which is where I tend to end up. I had a notebook. I had a pen that was already leaking. I had the growing suspicion that I was not equipped for what was about to happen.

“The confession,” Poe said, without preamble. “You’re writing a confession.”

“I’m writing a story that takes the shape of a confession.”

“Those are the same thing.”

“They’re not,” Due said. “A confession assumes the speaker wants to be understood. A story that takes the shape of a confession might be trying to do something else entirely. It might be trying to prove something. Or hide something. Or rehearse something until it becomes true.”

Poe turned the glass in his fingers. “Every confession is an attempt to make the listener complicit. That is its function. You tell someone what you have done and the telling implicates them — now they know, now they carry it, now they are inside the act with you. The Tell-Tale Heart is not a story about guilt. It is a story about the narrator’s need to make the reader guilty too.”

“I’ve always read it differently,” Due said. She was not confrontational about it. She said it the way you’d say you preferred a different route to the same city. “The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart is performing sanity. Every sentence is a demonstration — see how calmly I can tell you this, see how precise my reasoning is, see how measured my actions were. The performance is the madness. A sane person doesn’t need to prove they’re sane.”

“That is what I said.”

“No. You said the function is to make the listener complicit. I’m saying the function is to make the listener a jury. The narrator is on trial. He’s not sharing guilt. He’s making a case. And the horror is that the case is good — his logic holds, step by step, until you realize that flawless logic in service of murder is not sanity. It’s something else. Something worse.”

I wrote that down. Something worse than madness: flawless logic aimed at a monstrous conclusion. That was where I wanted the story to begin — not with the crime but with the argument that the crime was reasonable.

“What I keep thinking about,” I said, “is what happens when you put that structure — the self-justifying confession — into a Southern Gothic context. Into a place where the floorboards aren’t hiding a heartbeat. They’re hiding something older.”

“Be specific,” Poe said.

“A coroner. A county coroner who has spent thirty years ruling on causes of death. Whose word is literally the official record — he signs the paper, that’s what happened. Heart failure. Accidental drowning. Natural causes. And the story is his confession that the rulings were correct, every one of them was medically defensible, but the pattern of who got ruled one way and who got ruled another way is — ”

“Ah,” Due said. She leaned forward. “Now I understand why I’m here.”

Poe looked at her, and then at me, and there was a flicker of something I couldn’t read. Not offense. Maybe the recognition that the ground had shifted under the conversation.

“The old man’s eye,” he said. “In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator kills because of an eye. A single physical detail that becomes an obsession. An entire murder springs from a milky blue eye. You need something like that. A detail that is too small to justify what it causes, and too large to ignore.”

“The stamp,” I said. It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and it sounded right. “The coroner has a stamp. A rubber stamp for the cause of death line on the certificate. He doesn’t have to use it — he can write the cause by hand — but the stamp is faster, and over thirty years, the physical act of stamping has become automatic. The story is about the sound the stamp makes. The way it sounds different on certain nights. The way he starts hearing it when the stamp is in his desk drawer and his hand is nowhere near it.”

“The heartbeat,” Due said.

“Yes.”

“No,” Poe said, and his voice had a new sharpness. “Not the heartbeat. The heartbeat is mine. You cannot simply relocate the heartbeat to a rubber stamp and call it Southern Gothic. The heartbeat works because it is internal — it is the narrator’s own guilt made audible, his own body betraying the composure he has built his entire confession around. If you make it a stamp, you’ve made it an object. Objects can be thrown away. Objects can be locked in drawers. The horror of the heartbeat is that you cannot lock your own heart in a drawer.”

“But a stamp you keep using,” Due said. “A stamp you pick up every morning because it’s your job. A stamp that makes you complicit not once but every time. That’s different from the heartbeat. The heartbeat is a single crime echoing. The stamp is a crime that’s still being committed. That’s not Poe’s horror. That’s American horror. Structural horror. The kind where the system works exactly as designed and the working is the atrocity.”

Poe set his glass down harder than necessary. “You are describing bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is not horror.”

“Bureaucracy is the only horror that’s ever scaled,” Due said. “Individual madness kills one old man. Bureaucratic madness kills — what was the number in Tuskegee? How many death certificates were signed in Mississippi between 1880 and 1960 that said ‘natural causes’ when everyone in the county knew the causes were not natural? Your narrator is terrifying because he is one man who did one monstrous thing and cannot stop confessing. My narrator is terrifying because he is one man who did a thousand things that were each, individually, defensible, and never had to confess at all. Because there was nothing to confess. Each ruling was medically supportable.”

The lobby was quiet. Somewhere in the hotel a door opened and closed. Poe was looking at his glass, turning it, the dark liquid catching what was left of the chandelier’s uneven light.

“The eye,” he said finally. “The old man’s vulture eye. You understand that I did not choose the eye arbitrarily. The eye is the seat of judgment. To be looked at by that eye is to be seen, to be known, to be evaluated and found — the narrator never says found what. That is the genius of the thing. He cannot name what the eye finds him to be. He only knows he cannot bear being seen by it.”

“So what sees the coroner?” I asked.

“Himself,” Due said. “Eventually. But first — the dead see him. Every body that came across his table. Not as ghosts. Not as supernatural presences. As records. Files. Cases. The dead in this story don’t haunt the way Poe’s dead haunt, with beating hearts and rapping at chamber doors. They haunt the way the dead haunt in America — as paperwork. As numbers in a county ledger. As causes of death typed in a box on a form.”

“That’s cold,” I said.

“It should be cold. The South is not always hot. Southern Gothic doesn’t have to be humid. It can be air-conditioned. It can be fluorescent-lit. It can be a county office with files in metal cabinets and a man who has a stamp and a signature and thirty years of defensible decisions behind him.”

Poe stood up and walked to the window. The alley outside was narrow, brick on both sides, and the light coming through was the color of an old photograph. He stood there for a while and I thought he might be done speaking, but he was just recalibrating.

“Hildreth,” he said, still facing the window. “Your coroner. You’ve named him.”

I had not named him. But the moment Poe said the name it was right, and I felt the unease of realizing he’d been building the character while I thought he’d been arguing against it.

“Hildreth,” Due said, testing it. “Old family. Comes from county people. His father was in government too — school board, maybe, or planning commission. The kind of family that doesn’t have money but has position. Institutional people. The furniture of local power.”

“And he’s not a villain,” I said. “That’s what I keep coming back to. He’s not falsifying anything. Every cause of death on every certificate is something a competent medical examiner could have written. Heart failure does happen. Drowning does happen. The gun did go off accidentally — maybe. The toxicology was inconclusive — genuinely inconclusive. He’s not lying. He’s choosing which truth to write down.”

“The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart is also not lying,” Poe said, turning from the window. “He killed the old man. He dismembered the body. He placed it under the floor. He tells you every detail with absolute precision. He is the most honest narrator in literature. His madness is not that he lies — his madness is that he tells the truth and expects you to find it reasonable.”

“So Hildreth tells the truth,” Due said. “Each truth. One by one. And each truth is reasonable. And the accumulation of reasonable truths over thirty years forms a pattern that no one is responsible for, because each individual decision was correct.”

“The pattern is the heartbeat,” I said.

Due looked at me sharply. “Say more.”

“He starts to see the pattern. Not because someone shows it to him — not because a journalist comes with statistics, not because there’s an investigation. He sees it himself. Alone. In his office. He pulls files for some bureaucratic reason — an audit, a records transfer — and he lays them out and the pattern is there. Not ambiguous. Not interpretable. Just there. Like a pulse. And once he’s heard it he can’t unhear it.”

“Now you have something,” Poe said. He came back from the window and sat down, and the energy in the room changed — not warmer, but denser. More concentrated. “The pattern is the heartbeat. The stamp is the murder. And the confession is: I knew. I did not know at first, but at some point I knew, and I kept stamping. When did I know? Was it the fifteenth year? The twentieth? Was it the Dawson case, when the mother looked at me across the counter and I understood that she understood that I understood? And I stamped it anyway? Natural causes?”

“But this is where we diverge,” Due said. “Because in your story” — she pointed at Poe — “the narrator confesses to the police. He breaks. He hears the heartbeat and he cannot bear it and he tears up the floorboards and says HERE. Look. I did this. The confession is a collapse. A failure of composure.” She paused. “Hildreth doesn’t collapse. Hildreth writes it down. Calmly. Methodically. The same precision he used on the death certificates. The confession IS the composure. He’s not tearing up the floorboards. He’s labeling them. Filing them. Putting them in the correct order. And the reader has to decide: is this repentance or is this the same sickness, still running?”

I felt something turn in my chest. She was right. Both of them were right, and the two rights were pulling in different directions, and the story was in the tension between them.

“Whose floorboards?” I said, and the question surprised me.

“What?”

“In The Tell-Tale Heart, the floorboards belong to the narrator. It’s his house. His crime. His floor. Whose floorboards are Hildreth’s? The county’s? The state’s? The families’ of the dead? If Hildreth tears up the floor, whose house is he destroying?”

Poe smiled for the first time. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man watching someone walk into a room he’d built.

“The South’s,” he said.

“No,” Due said. “His own. It has to be his own. Because the South is a deflection. The South did this. The system did this. History did this. Those are all true and they are all ways of not saying: I did this. Hildreth did this. One man with one stamp. The story only works if the confession is personal. If it costs him something that cannot be distributed across a region or a century. Something that is his.”

“But it ISN’T only his,” I said, and my voice was louder than I wanted. “That’s the whole problem. That’s what makes it Southern Gothic instead of just Gothic. The crime is personal AND structural. Hildreth stamped the certificates AND the system made those stamps available AND a hundred other coroners in a hundred other counties were doing the same thing. You can’t isolate the guilt to one man without letting the system off. You can’t distribute it across the system without letting the man off.”

Due said nothing for a long time. Then: “Write it as the confession of a man who knows that.”

“Knows what?”

“Knows that his guilt is both personal and structural and that neither framework is sufficient and that he is going to die in the space between them.”

Poe picked up his glass again and held it without drinking. The chandelier light caught the liquid and threw a small amber shape on the marble floor that moved when his hand moved, like something alive and tethered.

“The sound,” he said. “We have not settled the sound. What Hildreth hears. Because in my story, the sound is unmistakable — a heartbeat is a heartbeat, and once you hear it, there is no pretending it is something else. But you want ambiguity. You want defensible madness. You want the reader to be unable to determine whether the stamp is really making that sound or whether Hildreth has simply begun to hear what was always there.”

“I want the reader to understand that the distinction doesn’t matter,” Due said. “Whether the sound is real or imagined — the dead are still dead. The certificates are still filed. Whether Hildreth is haunted by ghosts or by his own pattern recognition changes nothing about the pattern. The supernatural question is a distraction from the bureaucratic one.”

“The supernatural question,” Poe said, “is never a distraction. It is always the point. What separates horror from journalism is the admission that the world contains forces that resist explanation. If your coroner is simply a man who belatedly recognizes a statistical pattern, you have written an op-ed. If your coroner hears the stamp speaking to him from a locked drawer, you have written a horror story. I know which one I prefer.”

“And I know which one is more dangerous,” Due said.

They looked at each other across the lobby, and I understood that this was not going to be resolved. The story would have to hold both: the stamp as pattern, the stamp as haunting. The confession as repentance, the confession as continued sickness. The guilt as personal, the guilt as structural.

I closed my notebook. The ink from the leaking pen had gotten on my thumb and it looked, in the chandelier’s broken light, like a small bruise. Poe noticed it before I did.

“Your hands are already dirty,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the ink.

Due stood. “Write the confession,” she said to me. “But don’t let him off. Don’t let anyone off. Not Hildreth, not the county, not the reader. Especially not the reader.”

“The reader is always the last to confess,” Poe said.

He was looking at the chandelier again, counting the missing crystals, and I realized he’d been counting them the entire time we’d been talking. I asked him what the number was. He said it didn’t matter. He said what mattered was that someone had removed them, one by one, and that the removal had been so gradual that the people who walked through this lobby every day had never noticed the light getting worse.

Due was already at the door. She didn’t turn around, but she said, loud enough to carry: “That’s the story.”

I sat in the lobby for another twenty minutes after they left. The light continued to be uneven. A man in a hotel uniform came through and nodded at me and I nodded back and we were two people who had nothing to say to each other in a room that was slowly going dark and neither of us mentioned it.