My downvote; however, comes from the fact I would rather see you tell your own story about a stranger through your artwork than make an adaptation of another person's writing, especially in the context of a contest. What about this visual story is yours? Without some sort of framework, we as the audience don't know. To be clear, it is totally okay to make art/writing inspired by other sources as long as it follows our licensing rules (which your piece does). I just want to you as a storyteller to be on this page too.

This framework can be a lot of different things - have fun with it! You can do something more narrative driven, like a short paragraph that tells us about a character who found Poe's writing in the Library and decided to draw this picture and is showing it to fellow Patrons. You could do something more descriptive, such as a museum style blurb of what led you to making the design choices you did in making the characters or why you chose to illustrate this specific scene. You could turn this into a short comic. Whatever works for your storytelling style, but I would need to see something like that before I upvote.

-Styg

There are some things I'd like the change about my drawing, especially the right hand side of it. Whenever I get the time, I'll try to post other sketches and even the concept art as a fun "behind the scenes".