A preteen reading Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, I was absolutely fascinated by Poe’s ability to contrive his endings in such an eerily easy sleight-of-hand. The tale that stood out because the dead body itself sat up and spoke was “Thou Art the Man.” Apparently someone had rigged the corpse in such a way that when ropes used to tie him flat were shredded, the body sprang up, lurching in the direction of the murderer, and the natural bodily gases caused an inserted whalebone in the corpse’s mouth to vibrate, uttering sounds, when amplified by the ventriloquist skills of the narrator, articulated, “Thou art the man.”

I imagine that same body pitching forward in a certain direction and mouthing his breathy gases through whalebone to push out consonants and vowels formulating, “This is the way.”