Edgar Allan Poe lies dying in a Baltimore hospital. The fever possessing his imagination transports him to the darkest regions of his haunted universe, where he commands the inexorable cataclysm of all that he has created. C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's own detective, races against time to locate and free his creator from the Imp of the Perverse, while a slave girl Lenore struggles to withstand the forces drawing her to dissolution. Fleeing the curse of slavery, Lenore and her lover, Danton Reynolds, are guided by Dupin. Their story must win release from a fate otherwise awaiting it in this, the last narrative of Edgar Allan Poe.