Read the title again. The Facts in the Case. He wrote it flat, like a coroner's report, and published it plain in a magazine — and people believed it. Physicians wrote in for details. Poe, who could not sell a poem for real money, accidentally published the most convincing thing in America by simply refusing to put an adjective anywhere near it.
The experiment: mesmerise a man at the exact instant of dying, and see whether the trance can hold him at the doorway. Valdemar consents. He is a scholar and he is curious and he has perhaps a day left, and the arrangement is that he will send for his mesmerist near the end.
It works.
That's the part nobody is ready for. It works. The heart stops and the lungs stop and the body cools and Valdemar goes on answering questions, in a voice that seems to come up out of somewhere far under the floor, a voice with no lips in it — and what he keeps saying, patiently, for seven months, while they take turns sitting with him, is that he is dead, and would they please let him go.
Seven months. And when at last they release the trance, the thing on the bed is gone in under a minute — nothing left but a foulness the whole room shrinks from.
He asked. They kept him. That was the mercy they thought they were doing.
