After a violent squall ushers in a sweltering heat wave, Annabelle stumbles upon a delirious man in the gutter. He is unable to recall his name, Edgar Allan Poe, or how he arrived in his hallucinatory state. Annabelle drags him to her lover Lucretia’s Memento Mori Shoppe, where Lucretia creates photographs of the dead—and which Annabelle haunts. With his acuteness of the senses, Poe is aware of Annabelle, although Lucretia is not. Lucretia vows to provide the mysterious stranger a safe place to peacefully pass from the earthly realm. She promises to create a proper post-mortem mourning daguerreotype in his memory, although Poe is utterly alone in the world. But first Lucretia must photograph putrefying bodies before the heat has their way with them, as Death threatens to take Poe to the bowels of hell. Ghosts of his past combine with characters and images from his literary works to torment Poe in his terror of premature burial. Can Poe make peace with his untimely demise and find solace in death? And what solace can he offer grieving Lucretia?