by Brian Hodge
“Look closely, Mr. Poe,” Pinkerton urged, running a grimy thumbnail along the edge of the Daguerreotype. “But not too closely, as Dupin might say.”
“I… I see… certainly evidence of a single assailant,” the poet croaked. By now he was in the throes of a full blown laudanum drunk. The candle lit room spun. He wiped his feverish brow as he studied the plates.
“Excellent, Sir, I concur with ye fully. I would only add the appearance of heavy, crude leather soles suggests a male perpetrator.”
Poe pointed a trembling finger. “And the way the body is contorted, I would hazard the poor soul must have turned to flee before the attack?”
“Aye, that seems to be the case.”
“I gather now the value of such documentation,” Poe commented earnestly, nodding at the golden tinted images, still glistening with iodine and salt. He felt a strange charge of energy in his gut now, piercing the wooziness, spurred on by the burgeoning friendship with this mysterious law man, this coarse, scabrous savant. God help him, but with each passing moment, Poe grew more and more fond of this Pinkerton fellow. “Mr. Pinkerton, you are inspired! These tintypes speak volumes — especially to those who know how and where to look!”
Pinkerton was smiling. “You flatter me, Sir. But the truth is, I am only extending the theories of the French constable in your tale.”
Poe looked at him. “Was this unfortunate gentleman in the employ of the packing house?”
Pinkerton nodded and informed him that the victim — one Jasper Mullin — was indeed a regular at the plant, a clean-up man working alone in the outbuildings that evening.
“Did the man have kin?”
“No sir, unmarried… the resident of Killian’s boarding house down in the levee district.”
Poe thought about that for a moment while continuing to ponder the Daguerreotypes. “May I assume you’ve found no disgruntled creditors or holders of vendettas of any sort?”
The Scotsman shrugged. “The fella was a lonely sort, perhaps a bit of a simpleton. I cannot imagine a soul who would go to the trouble.”
Poe looked hard at the faint image of footprints. He had to concentrate to keep the plates from blurring in his compromised vision. He dabbed his moist brow with a handkerchief, wiped his mustache. “Something odd about these prints, Mr. Pinkerton. Something not quite right.”
“Pardon?” The Scotsman had suddenly become distracted. His attention had wandered to the open door across the room, the door to the innkeeper’s kitchen. “I’m sorry, Sir… I did not catch that last bit. What was that?”
“The footprints,” Poe said with the flick a nod toward the glass plates. “I cannot quite pinpoint the cause but something is amiss.”
“Amiss?” Pinkerton kept staring at that great weather-warped oaken door. “How so?”
Poe pointed at the photograph. “Well, for one, they seem to spontaneously change their composition.”
“Composition, Sir?” Pinkerton looked at the Daguerreotypes. “Come again?”
Poe ran a delicate fingernail along the glass surface above the footprints. “If you notice, the prints seem wide and flat here.” He tapped the glass. “And here.” Another tap. “But within a yard or so of the remains… they look as though they narrow. Do you see? They change shape.”
“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Pinkerton uttered, noticing the change in the prints. “Right ye are, Mr. Poe. They seem to get skinnier.” Pinkerton stared and stared, his brow beginning to furrow. “What do ye make of it?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion,” Poe admitted and let out a long sigh. He looked around the deserted tavern. The room was a cavernous, malodorous chamber the size of a dance hall, with plank floors, scattered tables, and giant worm-eaten beams running overhead. The air stank of rancid beer, sickening sweet tobacco, and the sweaty musk of highwaymen. A few congealed candles illuminated the room, casting a forlorn light that was almost tranquil. But there was something troubling about it as well. The place had completely cleared of all apparent humanity. Even the shabby little innkeeper and his portly barmaid of a daughter had vanished.
“Yer noticing it as well I see,” Pinkerton murmured, indicating the empty tavern. “We seem to have frightened off the locals.”
Poe looked back at the shape-shifting footprints. “I trust there is an explanation for these changing prints.”
“Would it have something to do with the velocity of movement? The chase would have ended there,” Pinkerton offered, pointing down at the image of Jasper Mullins’ gruesome remains imprinted in iodine-bathed copper. “I’m assuming the speed and intensity could very well distort the shape of a footprint?”
“That is certainly one possible explanation,” Poe replied, sounding a bit incredulous, pondering the Daguerreotype as best he could in his growing state of intoxication. “The brutality of the attack, the strength with which an assailant would produce such grisly affects… well, it quite obviously begs the question as to the nature of the assailant.”
“Now I’m afraid yer intellect has once again passed me by,” Pinkerton admitted.
“Look at the footprints again,” Poe urged. He pointed his delicate index finger at the narrowing prints near the mangled corpse. “If all possibilities are considered, one must consider the remotest of all.”
The Scotsman furrowed his brow for a moment, thinking about it. He fought the natural inclination of his mind to travel off the beaten path. Finally he lowered his voice as he spoke: “I can only conclude that what yer referrin’ to is what ye would call a transformation.”
Poe offered a lupine little smile. “Not exactly, Sir, although I must offer my compliments – the notion of a Loup Garou had not occurred to me until now.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Poe, the Loops-what?”
“Loup-Garou,” the poet pronounced carefully. “The elders of Bohemia created such a legend. The Loups-Garoux were ostensibly shape-shifters. Werewolves. Half beast, half men, roaming the countryside, terrorizing villagers.”
Pinkerton looked as though he were about to chortle. “Ye can’t be serious, Mr. Poe.”
“Fear not, Fair Constable,” Poe said, painfully rising to his brittle, slender five-foot-ten-inch height. He stood there on watery knees for a moment, staring at the daguerreotype. “Contrary to the opinions of my critics, I am a man of science. As I am sure you yourself can lay claim.”
The Scotsman smiled nervously, studying the thin, haunted scribe. “I’m not certain I would be so bold, but please, continue, Mr. Poe, I am intrigued beyond all words.”
“These deeds are decidedly earthly, I would venture, however unnatural they may be in their commission.”
“Go on, Mr. Poe.”
The poet reached down and lifted one of the copper-plated sheets of glass against a mug, his gaze locked onto that murky ghost of an image. His blood coursed in his neck. He felt light-headed. “Legitimate deductions…” he murmured, almost to himself.
“Say again, Sir?” Pinkerton blurted. “I did not catch that last bit.”
Poe began to back away from the daguerreotype, one feeble step at a time, keeping his eyes locked onto the image. He felt almost buoyant. “It was something Dupin used to say.”
“What was that, Sir?”
“Things which are complex or inexplicable,” Poe muttered, staring at the daguerreotype, “are often mistaken for profound. Dupin said that in ‘Rue Morgue.’”
“Are ye all right, Mr. Poe? Ye look as though yer not feeling too spritely.”
“Your killer, Sir,” Poe suddenly uttered with great urgency. He stood now at least twenty feet away from the picture, the room draped in flickering candle-shadows. At this distance, the trail of footsteps in the daguerreotype were as small as peppercorns, and all once the aspect of them that had eluded Poe – the simple, unadorned nature of these footsteps in the snow – suddenly revealed itself. Poe’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The key is not where the footsteps went.”
Across the room, the Scotsman sprang
to his feet, knocking over his chair in the process. “What is it, Mr. Poe? What do you see?”
Poe’s scalp crawled with chills. It was odd to think of that trifle literary creation as real, as an authority on anything, but that is precisely what Dupin had become to him at this strange and eerie juncture. “The key is where they came from… the glen, the wooded glen. The wilderness.”
Pinkerton slowly strode, spurs jangling, over to the poet. “All due respect, Mr. Poe, any half-wit could see they came from the woods. The posse even scoured the trees from 39th to the Widow Brown’s. What are ye sayin’ exactly?”
The poet looked at him. “They didn’t go far enough. Those footsteps do not merely come from the forest, Mr. Pinkerton. From the nimble quality of their gait, the straightness apparent only from a distance…they do more than merely come from the glen. They are one with it. They hale from it.”
Now a long moment of silence passed, so full of portents it seemed to hang like a fog in the room. At last Pinkerton mustered a soft pronouncement delivered with such gravity that Poe could feel it auger into his eardrums. “Then, Sir, we must go there at once.”
Poe cocked his head. “Go where, pray tell?”
“The wilderness, Mr. Poe. The Great Moraine to the immediate southwest of the stockyards — the direction from which the villain had come.”
Poe still did not follow.
Pinkerton enthused: “It’s the largest, darkest glen this side of the Mississippi. It’s as far as you can go into the wild. Less than a day away…and I’ve enough provisions in the buggy for at least a week.”
Another long pause here, the talk of murder and the late hour taking its toll on Edgar Poe’s sensitive constitution. Counteracting this fatigue, however, was a strange, unnamable adrenaline flowing through him now.
Finally the poet gave a reluctant shrug. “Far be it from me to argue with a man of the law.”
6.
“FACTORY OF BLOOD”
10 March
It took them the rest of that night and a good shank of the next day to get down-state to the Great Moraine along the Kankakee River. They took roads that were washed-out, and they were forced to stop more than once when the map did not correspond to the rugged prairie before them. Along the way, the buggy broke down twice — at one point requiring an improvised lubricant from a tin of lard Pinkerton kept in his chuck-trunk. Poe went through the rest of his laudanum, which put the slender fellow in a woozy state once they entered the dark thickets of the Kankakee River valley. Pinkerton kept an iron grip on the reins, his talented team of Belgian draft horses impervious to the obstacles, side-stepping massive exposed roots and dead-falls. It was slow going, and they didn’t see any signs of civilization until well after dark that second evening, but as they descended the moon lit grade of boulders and mossy logs just south of Vermilion Creek, the distant peak of an abandoned cavalry outpost came into view.
It was a map-maker’s cottage, and it looked like a small, beleaguered Inn buried in the dense woods. A single gabled rooftop poked out of the crown of a massive willow, and the surrounding foliage seemed to consume the building like ingrown hairs, their skeletal limbs and branches penetrating the shutters and logged walls. A patina of bird dung and animal spoor covered the windows. Moonlight glinted off a lonely lozenge of glass above the front door.
Pinkerton parked the team in the shadows north of the building, then rousted Poe awake. “Come, Mr. Poe. It ain’t much, but it’ll do fer the night.”
Indoors, the cottage smelled of mold and camphor, and the floorboards creaked as loudly as the bones of a decrepit old crone as the two men entered and looked around. Pinkerton lit a few kerosene lanterns, and started a fire in the musty old hearth. Before long, the map-maker’s shack was aglow with warmth and fellowship. Pinkerton made some trail coffee, and the twosome sat at the supper table, continuing their talk of mad men and mayhem into the wee hours.
Outside, the drone of crickets bathed the dense darkness of the woods.
Out beyond the deadfalls, in the silent shadows, there crouched a dark figure who thought of himself as Vengeance. He watched the distant smoke rising from the mapmaker’s chimney with interest, the blurred figures of white men silhouetted in the yellow window glass. Vengeance felt the presence of the intruders like a spider feels the vibrations of its prey. Breathing low, deep breaths, praying to some nameless Nature God, Vengeance girded himself for another kill.
In the moonlight, his great and many scars were the color of pitch, criss-crossing his face in deep furrows. Born the proud son of a tribal elder, he had once scampered through these woods as a boy with a light heart, a lover of all animals. Then the plague had come, the men with machines, plundering the land, raping the boy’s mother, killing the boy’s father, whipping the boy mercilessly, and finally burning the boy’s village near Checagau. The boy managed to escape, but the white devils had chased him into the new place they called the packing house — the factory of blood – and the boy had seen the nightmare made flesh: his beloved deer and bison being rent apart, eviscerated, quartered and skinned alive, the screaming sounds, the blood gushing in rivers.
Vengeance closed his eyes, blocking out the terrible memories.
He had not spoken human language since that terrible attack, had lived all these years among the wolves, plotting his revenge. Now he was fulfilling his destiny, his lifelong calling: to bring carnage to this nation of meat cutters, to avenge his mangled and torn brethren. Again and again he would bring the nightmare home to the white man.
He would be Vengeance.
The noises of the woods rose around him, the night sounds, the breathing bellows. He shook the memories off as a dog might shake off the rain.
It was time. Again, it was time to wreak havoc. He took a bracing gulp of night air, then lowered his center of gravity and started creeping through the darkness.
Creeping toward the mapmaker’s cabin.
7.
“AN UNINVITED GUEST”
10 March - 2:37 AM to 3:41 AM
That night, a fever dream gripped Poe — as vivid and palpable as the powder flash of a portrait camera. As he struggled to slumber on a moldy bed of straw, he dreamt he was a boy in Richmond, and it was in the wee hours, and he was wandering the woods in his nightcap and robe. He was following a ghostly woman in flowing white chiffon into the deeper shadows of the forest, and he realized, in the dream, that the woman was his birth mother, the achingly beautiful Elizabeth, an actress of modest repute, her lustrous obsidian curls flowing behind her as though she were underwater. Of course, the woman had died many years earlier, but now the sight of her, so elusive and tantalizing in the shadows of those distant trees, began to fill the boy in the dream with immense sorrow, sorrow so overwhelming it threatened to knock the young boy off his feet and crush him into the cold muddy humus. But on he went, shivering in his bare feet, through the brambles and foliage.
The ghost was leading him somewhere, somewhere troubling and hazardous. The boy hurried to catch up with her and she vanished before his eyes in a whirlwind of smoke. He grabbed at the smoke, calling out for her, but she was gone, and the feeling was almost too much to bear, the empty horrible black feeling of loss and futility and hopelessness. And that’s when another sound intruded into the dream: a deep, sepulchral growling noise — so low and sonorous it sounded like a dissonant chord oozing through the largest, longest chamber of a pipe organ. Poe spun, and all at once he came face to face with a monstrous abomination of humankind, a man-beast at least seven feet tall, covered with matted gray fur, its scabrous face open-mouthed and drooling and showing fangs —
“Mr. Poe… MR. POE!”
— and the strange incongruous voice was coming out of the beast like an echo from some distant canyon, and in the dream the boy tried to scream, but no sound came from his lungs, and he tried to flee, but his legs would not perform. The werewolf pounced at him and —
“MR. POE!”
— the poet jerked awake, s
itting up in the flickering darkness of the second floor berth, starting at the sound of Pinkerton’s whispered burr.
At first Poe was disoriented, glancing around the spartan chamber, gaping at the cold hearth in one corner, the shopworn desk and chair in another, the single shuttered window lined with silver moonlight, the bedside table and dimly glowing kerosene lamp. His head throbbed. The laudanum had worn off and he was raw and dizzy as he finally focused on the Scotsman’s bulldog visage hovering over his bed in a penumbra of candlelight. “Mr. Pinkerton?” Poe uttered in a hoarse voice. “What… time is it? I… I don’t… I….”
Pinkerton put his finger to his lips in a silencing gesture, then whispered with the utmost urgency, “We seem to have an uninvited guest.”
“I’m sorry — you said we have a what?” Poe managed to swing around into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, his stomach clenching with nausea and panic. He wore long johns. His brogans sat on the floor at his feet. He stifled a belch and ran fingers through his unruly black hair.
“I’m afraid, Sir, we have an intruder,” Pinkerton said and pointed a gnarled finger at the ceiling.
Poe looked up. His breath caught in his throat as an arrhythmic series of creaks traveled across the ceiling. Footsteps. “Dear God, is that someone on the roof?”
“Indeed it is, Mr. Poe.” Pinkerton reached over to the bedside lamp, which the poet, in his earlier stupor, had neglected to extinguish. The Scotsman removed the hurricane glass and snuffed the flame with his rough fingers. The room was plunged into darkness.
Poe acted instinctively then, dipping his stocking feet into his brogans and madly pulling on his pants and suspenders. If he was about to tangle with some dark force of nature, by God he wasn’t about to do it in his skivvies. “Is that a man, do you reckon? Are those human footsteps?”
