My Clockwork Muse

by D. R. Erickson

My skin crawled and I suddenly felt keenly in danger. I hurriedly put on my shoes and grabbed my coat from the back of a chair, thrusting my arms into the sleeves. I drew my revolver from the pocket and replaced it with the box of teeth. I had made a mistake coming back here. I was a hunted man and my pockets were now so bulging with damning evidence that I knew I would surely hang were I to be found. I felt I must get back to Coppelius'—and fast.

  Even now, I sensed that I was not alone.

  I crept to the door, already slightly ajar, and edged it open, just enough to fit my head through. There, across the room, I saw a figure sitting in my rocker. It was a woman in a white dress. Her back was to me. My heart began to beat wildly. My first thought was of Virginia and I was afraid I was still in my dream. I gazed at her intently, straining my eyes. Then I blinked hard. But there was no dispelling the apparition. She was as real as I ... As real as the teeth in the foul box in my pocket ... As real as the revolver clenched in my fist.

  Stealthily, I stole through the door, as quietly as Pluto himself. I took a couple of soft steps towards the figure when I realized my mistake. My mind was still reeling from my nightmare, for this was not Virginia—how could it be? I almost laughed aloud at my foolishness—but Olimpia. I sighed in relief and felt myself smile even.

  Olimpia!

  I started to call out to her, but suddenly thought better of it. Something was not right.

  It wasn't just that she was not rocking, but she appeared to be almost not breathing as well. Who could not rock in a rocker? I wondered. Would not even one's sleeping breaths propel the delicately curved rails to motion? I knew the chair was exceedingly sensitive to the slightest touch, sometimes rocking in the breeze through the window. Even Tap perched on its back could force it into a paroxysm of swaying.

  And yet, there Olimpia sat, still as death.

  I was suddenly filled with fear. Events lost to me had transpired in the night, my trousers were ... were—

  Yes, I dared say it now! For who could deny it? My trousers were muddy and clotted with gore!

  And in my pocket was a velvet-lined box full of bloody, freshly extracted teeth.

  I was the author of this wretched story and I knew how it ended.

  I approached her from behind, not daring to speak, but stepping with a deliberately heavy tread, hoping the sound of my footsteps would rouse her from her sleep. But when she did not stir, my fear intensified. I quickly checked my pistol and found only two empty chambers—the bullet from one intended for Pluto but hitting nothing, the bullet from the other intended for nothing but hitting Pluto. I knew what it meant: my dream might not have been such a dream after all, but some jumbled madness stitched from the fabric of reality.

  How could I trust what my eyes claimed to see? For once they had told me that I had seen Virginia, known to be long dead and cold in her grave, they lost all credibility. Was I really to suppose that I had not only seen her but was attacked by her? It was beyond belief.

  Was it not more likely that this fantasy contained some grain of fact, that I had indeed encountered some woman whom my madness had only transformed into Virginia? Some woman who was not attacking me at all, but was struggling to escape from me?

  Oh, the thought threw me into despair. My impulse was to run from the room and never return. I was mad. Briggs said so. Burton, Gessler... They all thought me mad. Perhaps they were right.

  Only Olimpia had professed faith in me—and look where it had gotten her.

  I reached out my hand to touch her shoulder. I braced myself, knowing what I would find when I saw her face, a hideous death mask grinning a bloody, toothless smile.

  I grasped her shoulder and pulled. As her face came into view, her eyes snapped open and I jumped.

  She jerked awake with a start. "Oh, Eddy, it is you! You have returned."

  I stared at her, disbelieving. My eyes darted all over her face, landing finally on her red lips. Curling into a warm smile, they parted to expose two rows of perfect white teeth, lustrous as pearls.

  I let out a deep breath. "Never have I been happier to see someone."

  She gave me a bemused smile. "And I you, Eddy." Her smile vanished as her eyes searched my face. "Are you all right?"

  "I am ... I am fine," I said, running a hand through my hair. "I ... had a rough night."

  "I was worried for you, Eddy. When you didn't come home, I thought I might find you here, and I—"

  "I'm glad you did." I grasped her hands and pulled her from the chair. "Here. I need to show you something." In fact, I wanted to show her everything, the teeth, the cat. I wanted to empty my pockets and spread their contents on the desktop, to lay bare my soul. Her presence gave me courage. It was her belief in me that did it. I wanted to hide nothing from her. But when I reached into my pocket I found that I could not withdraw its secrets. It was her belief in me that did that as well. I did not want to ruin it.

  Instead, I led her into the bedroom where Pluto waited. I half-expected to find him gone. But there he lay, just as I had left him.

  Olimpia made no reaction upon seeing his body. Not expecting to find a dead cat laying on a table, she had no doubt mistaken him for a little heap of discarded clothing or a pile of soiled socks. When she realized what it was, she recoiled in disgust.

  "A dead cat!" she cried. I saw a look of uncertainty flash in her eyes as she regarded me. Now, it was her turn to think me mad.

  "But not just any dead cat. Look." I rushed to the table and showed her the tiny springs and gearwheels; and I showed her the little bloodless bullet hole from which I had pulled them.

  She squinted in bafflement. "What can it be?"

  "I thought at first that it must be some kind of mechanical device—"

  "Device? You mean a—"

  "Yes, some kind of ... apparatus ... a—"

  "A clockwork cat?"

  "An automaton, yes. But then it occurred to me. As curious as it seems... I had forgotten until just now. Last year in Philadelphia, there was this fellow, a Dr. Mutter. I had the opportunity to examine his strange collection, Dr. Mutter's Cabinet of Medical Oddities, I believe it was called."

  "Medical oddities?"

  "A fascinating—and grotesque—exhibition. Tumors and other solid concretions taken from human organs, a two-headed fetus..." I saw Olimpia blanch. Realizing that I was losing myself to the memory of the bizarre collection, I hurriedly got to the point. "One of the strangest displays was a collection of objects pulled from a man's stomach."

  "A man's stomach?" Olimpia cringed.

  "Yes, some lunatic from New Jersey, as I remember it. Nails, tacks and screws, thimbles, needles..."

  Olimpia let out a little shriek.

  "It seems the man had been swallowing them over the course of some years, according to this Dr. Mutter."

  "And you think this cat—?"

  "Yes," I said, moving closer to examine Pluto's bullet wound. I stuck my finger inside. I could feel the complicated mass of gears and brass tubing. I could tell that it was not a random jumble of swallowed objects, but a solid construction, intelligently organized for some purpose. But Olimpia brought out my rational mind. I felt calm in her presence and not prone to believe the unbelievable, however much the facts argued against me. "The bullet must have pierced the poor creature's stomach, spilling its contents into the—"

  I saw the skeptical look on Olimpia's face and I realized how foolish my words sounded. Lunacy was a human malady, I knew, and not a feline one; and cats had no use for metal objects in their stomachs—even if they could find a stash of finely crafted gears and springs.

  I rushed to the cat's eye and parted its lids with my thumbs. I peered inside the empty socket.

  "His eye is missing," Olimpia observed.

  Ignoring her remark, I looked around hopelessly. I had seen something gleaming inside the eye hole.

  "I need a tweezers or something," I said.

  "If you mean to operate on the creature, we should take it to Father," Olimpia s
uggested. "He is a craftsman as well as a physician."

  "Yes," I said, remembering the ghostly pipe organ playing itself. Mention of Coppelius brought me back to my senses. I had become too engrossed in the curious cat and had forgotten my—and now our—danger. I heard a noise from outside. Pushing Olimpia aside, I drew my revolver and pressed myself close to the wall at the edge of the window.

  "You have a gun!" Olimpia gasped.

  I drew back the curtains with the barrels of the pepperbox and peered out. "Gessler," I said. "He will be looking for me here. We must be away!"

  "My carriage is outside on the street."

  "Good," I said. I saw no one through the window. I craned my neck to see along the front edge of the house. "Go to the kitchen. There you will find some butcher's paper. In the cabinet under the basin. Bring it to me. Go!"

  Something banged against the window, hard. I gave a start and saw Pluto clawing at the glass. I could hear him howling madly. He must have spied me through the window from some hiding place in the yard. He lunged at me with a savagery shocking even by the standards of violence I had come to expect from the damned beast. He snapped his fangs with such manic force against the panes that he left blood smears on the glass as he scrambled away from the house and vanished as swiftly as he had appeared. I was glad to have had a window between us.

  Olimpia came back with a square of stiff brown paper, streaked with dark splotches of grease and blood. "My God, what was that howling?"

  "The cat," I said. I grabbed the paper and began rolling Pluto up in it. "One of them, anyway," I added. "The evil one." Then I scooped up the loose gears and springs and thrust them into my pockets.

  Now, with my coat pockets loaded down with gears and springs, an empty laudanum vial with a torn label, a sheet of hand-written L's and a box of teeth, and a clockwork cat wrapped in paper in one hand and a pistol in the other, we hurried down to Olimpia's carriage to make our way back to Coppelius' house and safety.

  Chapter 14

  On the street, Dansby was waiting for us with the carriage. "To Coppelius'!" I cried and Olimpia and I threw ourselves inside.

  "Did anyone follow you here or see you arrive?" I asked. I looked out the window and then turned to see Olimpia frowning at me. I heard Dansby's whip snap, followed by the clip-clopping of the horses' hooves. I thrust my head through the open window and yelled up at Dansby. "On the double-quick, man! We have no time to lose!"

  Dansby nodded, snapped his whip again, and the clopping increased.

  "Eddy, what is it?" Olimpia asked with furrowed brow.

  I grasped her shoulders. "Did they?"

  "Did they what? Did who what?"

  "Anyone. Did anyone follow you?"

  "No, no one. Eddy—"

  "Are you sure?"

  "Of course. I would have noticed if we had been followed. What's wrong?"

  "Besides a dead mechanical cat in my bedroom, you mean?" Wrapped in brown paper, the cat lay on the seat between us like a pork roast. I saw Olimpia look down at my hand and I realized that I was still clutching the revolver. I slipped it into my pocket. "I believe I am mad, Olimpia. That's what is wrong."

  "Oh, Eddy, don't say that!"

  "Worse, I might even be a murderer." When I realized that what I said was true, I clamped my eyes shut and began to work my throbbing temples with my fingers. "My God, what's happening to me?"

  "Eddy, not again..."

  "I awoke from a horrible nightmare—and look at me." I indicated my trousers and my general dishevelment. I knew I made a frightful appearance.

  "You were walking in your sleep again," Olimpia said hopefully. "Father has diagnosed your malady as some form of somnambulism, has he not?"

  "This was no dream, Olimpia. It was a bullet from my gun that killed the cat, for one thing. However real they seem at the time, dream-bullets do not kill, my dear. Oh, God! If only it were a dream!" I dared not tell her of Virginia, or she really would believe me mad. I knew I could not bear the look of pity or horror in her eyes if she knew the whole terrifying truth of my experience.

  Instead, I began emptying my pockets. I showed her the laudanum vial. I showed her my L's and how they resembled those on the label. I dug deep into my pocket and produced the matching half of the torn label. My hand trembled as I laid it into the jagged edge of the one that still clung to the vial. It fit as neatly as the piece of a puzzle.

  "It condemns me," I said at last.

  Olimpia collected the items I had lain on the seat of the coach and pressed them into my palm. "It does no such thing, Eddy," she declared decisively. "You said yourself that this policeman is framing you. What effort is required to duplicate your handwriting—and inexpertly at that? Who could not have then torn the label and planted the matching half in your desk drawer? In your own words, Eddy, it is the policeman!"

  "Gessler, yes. That is what I believed. But now ... I don't know..."

  "Oh, but I do know!" Olimpia asserted boldly. "Maybe not this Gessler perhaps, since your certainty on the issue wavers. But someone has taken pains to ensnare you in whatever crimes have been committed. An obvious and rather clumsy attempt, if you ask me. I have seen nothing that convicts you, Eddy. You shouldn't be so quick to convict yourself."

  "But you have not seen everything." With a rising sense of despair, I produced the little wooden box from my pocket. Olimpia reached for it, but I held it tight, and she withdrew her hands. I looked at her sheepishly. "My most recent tale," I began my confession, "involves a man who—well, to be concise—a man who becomes obsessed with the ... the teeth of his beloved." Oh, how strange the words sounded! I paused for Olimpia's reaction. Expecting revulsion or censure, I saw neither in her unblinking gaze. She was bound to be brave in the face of my weakness and I determined to forge ahead. "Beautiful, perfect white teeth they were. The man suffered from a malady similar to my own, in a way. Only his disease manifests itself as a monomania, which had become transfixed on his beloved's teeth. When Berenice dies and is laid in her grave, this man, in a delirium, disinters her and .. and ..."

  "And what, Eddy?" Olimpia urged when she saw that I struggled with the words. "And what? You can say it."

  "And extracts her teeth!" I blurted out all at once. "God help me!"

  Olimpia twittered a little nervous laugh. "Certainly, it is a horrifying tale, Eddy. But—"

  Without looking at her, I offered up the box. She took it gently from my hands and I winced when I heard the lid open. I expected next to hear her scream, to cry out to Dansby to come protect her from the madman who sat beside her, a man clearly capable of the most heinous acts. But the sound of horses' clopping was undisturbed by either.

  "I awoke with this in my bedroom," I explained in case the significance of what she held in her hands was not clear to her, "with no knowledge of how it had come to be there. And my manner of dress—"

  Her laugh cut me off.

  "It is no different than the vial, Eddy." She handed the box back to me as if it were an irrelevant trifle. "You don't remember how it came to be in your room because you had no hand in putting it there. Of course you don't remember it. Your policeman could have gotten these teeth from a dentist or some medical laboratory. Who knows? You said yourself that he had a dentist help to identify the corpse in the wall."

  The corpse in the wall. I couldn't help shuddering. "He did, yes."

  "Perhaps the same dentist who has now provided him with these teeth."

  She had almost convinced me, except for one thing. "But no one knows of this story, Olimpia. It is yet another crime—"

  "But what crime?" Olimpia interjected passionately. "There is no crime in the possession of extracted teeth!"

  I ignored her and continued in a louder voice. "Yet another crime—for what else can it be?—committed after the fashion of one of my stories. Only this time no one but me has ever seen the story." With each word, I felt a rising sense of panic. Could my waking focus on the plot of 'Berenice' have led me to re-enact it in a somnambu
listic trance, in the same way that any common event of the day becomes the fodder for dreams? In the same way that Burton's walking stick found its way from my flesh and blood hands during the day to John Allan's ethereal hands at night? This I could believe more readily than the vast coincidence of Gessler choosing out of whole cloth to torment me with a set of freshly extracted teeth. Except, again, for one thing that played upon my consciousness like a half-remembered dream. "No one but me and ... Aha!" My finger shot up with the revelation of my memory. "Gessler did read the story! He was reading it in my absence. I remember now."

  "I am not surprised in the least," Olimpia said cheerfully. "There had to have been an explanation."

  "But did he read the end?" I wondered. I tried to visualize Gessler with the manuscript pages in his hands. "Think, Poe! Think!"

  "He must have," Olimpia urged helpfully.

  I wracked my brain but could not conjure the image of Gessler reading the conclusion of the story. He might have ... Then again, he might not ...

  "But Billy Burton could have!" I cried suddenly, remembering that the story was now in his possession and had been since the previous day. Plenty of time for him to have hatched the plan and carried it out while I slept.

  Ah! Now this shed a whole new light on matters. I quickly told Olimpia of my adventure at the 'Rue Morgue' murder scene with Burton and of my masked assailant and how both mask and stick had appeared in my dream that night and how John Allan had chased me into the cemetery. But I stopped when I got to the apparition of Virginia. Even in my excited babbling, I could not get myself to admit to this phantasm. Not to Olimpia.

  "Burton is Gessler's shambling ape!" I cried. "I should have seen it."

  "His what?"

  "His Hop-Frog. Gessler is staging these scenes—and who better than Burton to help him do it? Did anything I showed him at the 'Rue Morgue' scene surprise him? Not in the least. What a show he put on! It was perverseness on display, pure and simple. It was no different than a character from one of my stories pointing out to the police how well made was his wall, while all the while it concealed the murder of his own wife. Burton was daring me to uncover his crime. Flaunting his role in it, right before my very eyes. He was not showing me how an ape might have gained entry into the house and thus committed the murders—but how he did. Right before my eyes, daring me to see."