Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Kim Newman

  What game was this? A game I was compelled to play, obviously. Downing coffee at a street café, I stared at the hieroglyphs on the sheet of paper, cursing that if only I had Dupin’s deductive power to decipher them — or those of his creator. Then I remembered — of course! —in another of Poe’s tales, The Gold Bug, a code showing the whereabouts of buried treasure is broken by elucidating which character predominates, and relating it to the order of frequency of letters generally in the English language. Even so, how did I know this was in English? I was in Paris. What was the order of frequency of letters of the alphabet in French? Then the notion came to me that this was not a code similar to that in The Gold Bug: it was the exact same code as in The Gold Bug.

  I sped to an English book shop I knew in Saint-Germain, purchased their only copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination and secluded myself in a corner. “As our predominant character is 8, we will commence by assuming it as the e of the natural alphabet…” Within minutes I had translated the cryptograph. What I held now in my hands was an address. But that was not all I had discovered.

  In thumbing through the pages, I had naturally alighted upon The Murders in the Rue Morgue. And by chance my eyes had fallen upon a certain name: that of “Alphonse Le Bon”, who was arrested for the extraordinary crime— “a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity” —before the real culprit was incarcerated: a large, tawny Orangutan of the Burmese species.

  By fading light I walked to the Pont Neuf, crossing the river to the Île de la Cité, where I sensed the man in the rue de la Femme-sans-Tête confidently awaited me.

  I struck a flint to read the name-plates of the apartments. All were blank. I saw a handle which I pulled, presuming that it sounded a bell somewhere within the belly of the old building, though I heard nothing. Laughter came from a lighted window opposite and I wondered if this was a district of ill-repute. It was the kind of shriek which could be interpreted either as extreme pain or extreme pleasure and I preferred to think the latter.

  “He expected you an hour ago.” The door had been opened by Alphonse Le Bon, now wearing a tail coat and bow tie.

  I stepped inside. A matronly woman in a cloth cap stood half-way up the stairs.

  “Madame L’Espanaye will show you up.”

  Madame L’Espanaye? Then I remembered…

  “EXTRAORDINARY MURDERS. —This morning, about three o’clock, the inhabitants of the Quartier Saint-Roch were aroused from sleep by a succession of terrific shrieks issuing, apparently, from the fourth storey of a house in the rue Morgue, known to be in the sole occupancy of one Madame L’Espanaye…”

  Another character stepped from the pages of fiction… Or fact?

  I followed her, trailing my hand through the thick dust on the banister rail, dreading with every step that I was entering some kind of house of insanity, a realm where the imagined and the real were interchangeable. Where the fabrications of grotesquerie took the place of the norm. Where actors — if they were actors — took the place of the killers and the killed. I looked over the parapet of the mezzanine to see Le Bon far below, staring up at me.

  Madame L’Espanaye curtseyed and drifted backwards into ash-colored shadows. I was left alone in front of a door.

  I pushed it open to find myself in a Louis XIV room so packed with all manner of artefacts (once my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom) it had all the semblance of a fusty and abandoned museum. A museum of clocks was my first impression: pendulums from the Black Forest; cuckoo clocks from Switzerland; automated clocks from America, all blending into a whispering, clacking, clicking chorus of ticks and tocks. But there were other denizens in the shadows. Vast collections of pinned butterflies hung like oils. Not one human skeleton, but several. Stuffed birds of extravagant plumage. I reached out to touch a macaw — quickly to realize as its beak nipped my finger it was not stuffed at all. To my greater astonishment, it spoke.

  Who is it?

  “Mr. Holmes,” I replied, announcing myself to my unseen host.

  Who is it?

  “Sherlock.”

  Who is it?

  I hesitated, fumbling for words. “An Englishman. A student…”

  A laugh came from the darkness as a man poked a fire in the small grate. “There lies the way to madness, monsieur. Or enlightenment.” In spite of the glow of revivified coals, I could not yet discern his features.

  “I disturbed it,” I said. “I didn’t know it was real.”

  “Quite possibly the feeling was mutual.”

  As he held a candle to the flames and set it in a brass holder beside his high-backed leather chair, I saw illuminated the old man who had been arched over the flower girl’s corpse. Now, by contrast, settling back, crossing his thin legs, he looked professorial, almost statesmanlike, and I found it hard to envisage him as the insane criminal I had imagined, with his high forehead and weak mouth. But common sense also told me the most devious and successful criminals were those who passed for ordinary men and women. And intellect did not preclude a person from committing abominable acts; merely added strength to the possibility of them evading capture.

  “You laid a trail for me to follow. Why?”

  Dupin shrugged. “I do so admire — detection.”

  “You may not like what I have detected.”

  He took his time to light a cigar, puffed on it and used it to indicate an empty armchair facing him. I sat down and found his open case of Hoyo de Monterreys offered to me, then shortly afterwards a tray of various cut-glass decanters. I abstained. There were secrets to unveil and I would unveil them.

  “I know who you are,” I said. “But not why you are here.”

  “If you applied the science of ratiocination, Mr. Holmes, you would.”

  “The brain is a curious organ and often it needs relaxation but sometimes it needs to be spurred by fear or anxiety for the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place.”

  Dupin hazarded a thin smile. “Illuminate me.”

  “Pieces, shall we say, such as the bust of Pallas semi-hidden in the darkness over in that corner. Such as the talking bird I encountered upon entering. Such as the cipher I was given. Such as the appropriation of certain names from certain tales. The ape…”

  “Circumstantial.”

  “Perhaps. As is no doubt the way you wrote the date in the register at the morgue, which I thought barely notable at the time. The French, like we English write it for brevity, day, month, year. Alongside the name Dupin however, the date reads month, day, year, in that order — much in the manner of an American.”

  Dupin sat in silence and allowed me to continue.

  “You see, monsieur, it was not until I left the bookshop with this volume under my arm that the very obvious conclusion occurred to me.” I produced Tales of Mystery and Imagination. “For, as in The Purloined Letter, it had been in plain sight all along. Yet it was not until I thought of my good friends — the two brothers who so uncannily resemble each other that, to a stranger, they cannot be told apart — that the picture was complete.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Indeed, monsieur.”

  “And will you share with me that — conclusion?”

  I took another, smaller volume from my pocket.

  “The prefatory items in the Tales were instructive but inadequate. I returned to the bookshop and luckily found upon the shelves a copy of Thomas Holley Chivers’ Life of Poe, published by Dutton in 1852.” I looked into Dupin’s eyes but they held no expression — not even, particularly, of interest. “Edgar Poe died on the 7th October 1849, the theory being that he had been the victim of a so-called cooping gang. The congressional elections were in full swing in Baltimore and, because there was no register of voters, bully boys were being employed by candidates to round up derelicts and get them drunk enough to register false votes a number of times in succession.” I referred to my notes and underlinings in the Chivers.

  “He was found by Joseph Wal
ker, a compositor at the Baltimore Sun, lying in the street outside Cooth and Sergeant’s Tavern on East Lombard Street, which served as a polling station.

  “Dr. Snodgrass received a letter from Walker about a gentleman rather the worse for wear at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, and found the writer without his customary moustache; haggard, bloated and unkempt. His clothing, I quote: ‘a sack-coat of thin and sleazy black alpaca, ripped at intervals, faded and soiled, pants of steel-mixed pattern of cassinett, badly-fitting, if they could be said to fit at all…”

  I put particular emphasis on this last phrase, but it had no effect on the listener.

  “Poe was taken to Washington hospital,” I continued, “where he experienced exceeding tremors of the limbs, and active delirium. When questioned in reference to his family, his answers were incoherent. When asked where he lived, he could not say. Towards the end, in his stupor and torment, he called out for ‘Reynolds! Reynolds!’ — which onlookers took to refer to the navigator of the South Seas, an inspiration for The Narrative for Gordon Pym — until his poor soul was finally at rest.” I looked up. “But he is not at rest, monsieur — is he?”

  Dupin had sunk back in his seat, the wings of which served to conceal his face in shadow. He placed his fingertips together in a steeple.

  “Yes, a man was found drunk in a gutter,” I said. “But he called out ‘Reynolds’ in his delirium because that was his own name. And nobody would listen. He was identified by the Malacca cane borrowed by Poe from Dr. John Carter simply because the object had been placed in his hands by another. On the evidence of witnesses themselves this substitute was more ‘haggard’ yet more ‘bloated’ than Poe (perhaps the word ‘fatter’ would be more accurate) except Dr. Snodgrass recognized his friend’s clothes, albeit that they hardly fitted the occupant. Of course they didn’t. Because the man was not Poe. Poe was alive. Is alive.”

  Who is it? squawked the parrot.

  “And the mystery of the missing moustache is self-evident,” I said. “For one can dress a double to look like one’s self, but one cannot force him to grow facial hair he does not have. And so you shaved off your own.”

  “Bravo!” Dupin laughed and clapped his hands. We had been conversing in French but he spoke English now for the first time, with the musical lilt of a Southern gentleman. “Many have tried but none has got so far! Le Bon, the cognac! This is a cause for celebration! Chevalier Auguste Dupin has met his match!” The dapper negro emerged from the gloom and poured me an ample glassful. “I do not partake myself.”

  “The stuff can be the death of you.”

  “I fear water will be the death of me now.” Poe grinned, holding up a glass into which he had poured clear liquid from a jug. “A ‘way to watery death’ is not quite the poetic thing, is it? I quite resist banality, in death as in life.”

  “And the death of the flower girl?” I made it quite clear in my tone that I had not forgotten the purpose of my visit. “What is the poetry in that, sir?”

  He avoided my question.

  “Let me first tell you of the last weeks on this earth of Edgar Allan Poe.” Whilst he spoke the manservant Le Bon circled the room lighting candles. “It had been a year of wild dullness…. I was drumming up support for a five-dollar magazine and trying to convert my Philistine countrymen to literature — an impossible task. I came to the conclusion I could only raise money by lecturing again: with tickets at 50¢ I could clear $100 — if sober. So, with the ferocious spirit of the true dipsomaniac I took the oath of abstinence, prostrated myself at the Sons of Temperance: a solid challenge to my cravings — but, alas, unattainable…. The word ‘teetotal’ had hardly wettened my tongue before — I fell, spectacularly…. My lecture was stolen. I descended further into debt: but these are excuses. The true drinker repels the very idea of his own happiness. We deem the prospect of solace intolerable.

  “I had to leave Richmond on business, but the real reason was a desperation to escape. Escape my own shabby dreams, and, ringing like a foul tintinnabulation, the doctor’s warning after Philadelphia that one more drop of the hard stuff would see me to the bone yard. Truth was, my life had become all pose and no prose. Fancy-mongering was wearisome now. I was a performing dog wandering the miasmic stars of Eureka. So I propped up the steamer’s bar, wishing most the while a maelstrom would suck it down, and me with it.

  “As you said, the streets of Baltimore were en fête with election fever. I went unnoticed in streets teeming with drunks filthier drunk than me. I was on a spree. Maybe my last. I was determined to put and end to this life, little knowing I would start a new one.

  “Outside a tavern a man pestered me for a game of cards. He wanted to win back money he had lost, because he was sailing for Europe the next day and didn’t want to arrive penniless. The man was drunk, drunker than me — so drunk he was not even aware that, a little thinner in the girth and thicker in the cheeks, he was my double. I did not even remark upon it and I drank with him until he passed out in an alley. I thought he was dead. I felt his pulse.

  “Then, with a thundering heart, I saw an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent my life, if I had the audacity to carry it through. He, being dead, had nothing to lose, and I everything — everything to gain. I took a ticket from his inside pocket, made out in the name of ‘Reynolds’: his passage across the Atlantic. I changed clothes, taking all his identifying belongings and giving him mine, finally leaning the Malacca cane I had borrowed from Dr. Carter against his knee: the final piece of evidence that this dishevelled inebriate was Poe.

  “I took the ocean crossing, shaving off my moustache and cutting my hair lest someone identify me. No-one did. On arrival I read of my own demise, of poor Reynolds calling out his name again and again: my doppelganger, my William Wilson calling for his own identity to be restored, in life, in death — but, alas, it never was.

  “He was interred at the Presbyterian cemetery on Lafayette and Green Street. My premature burial. I read the despicable death notices penned by Griswold, twisting the facts, emphasizing my bad points and down-playing my good, but I could hardly react to any attack on my former identity without exposing my new one. As it was, I feared someone might uncover my ploy, the police or the Reynolds family, and come looking for me, so I changed my name again on arrival.”

  “To Dupin?” I said. “Your most famous character?”

  Poe shook his head. “Not at first. To begin with I stayed with my friend Charles Baudelaire, the poet. He had read many of my works before I died. For that reason, and my innate Francophilia, I gravitated to Paris. He’d translated my piece on Mesmeric Revelation in La Liberté de Penser. He saw me as a mystic and visionary and the inventor of skillfully engineered tales, and had written to tell me as much, so it was fitting I turned to him in my hour of need. He kept me under lock and key in rooms at the Hôtel Pimodon, always in penury over the years, partly because he kept me afloat too.

  “We had certain similarities. His stepfather General Aupick he despised, as I despised mine. He endured a life of money troubles, as had I. He was afflicted by bouts of pessimism, as was I. Arrogant, as was I…. But his vie libre was also a vie libertine, centred on the taverns of the Latin Quarter. He hated solitude. I welcomed it. To begin with I ventured outside rarely, if at all. I helped him with his satirical contributions to the Corsaire-Satan, and later with Les Fleurs du Mal. He in turn brought me the world, by way of the Café Tabourey or the Théâtre de l’Odéon.

  “After a while he introduced me to his Bohemian cronies as ‘Dupin’ — his little joke. The name wasn’t known in France because in the first translation of Rue Morgue the detective was re-named ‘Bernier’ for some reason unknown to either of us. And ‘duping’, you see — the pun was deliciously appealing.

  “Baudelaire’s French versions of my tales appeared in Le Pays, and Adventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym in Moniteur universel. I helped him out with some details about compass bearings and such, and acted as his lexicon of the Southern states. But his abominable life
style took its toll. As a former imbiber of substances — I had not touched a drop since my resurrection — I saw all the signs of a hopeless addict. He collapsed with a cerebral disorder on the flagstones of l’Église Saint-Loup in Namur, upset by a poem he’d read about happiness.” Poe attempted to smile. “They sent a confessor in his last hours, but by then all he was saying was Bonjour, like a child.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waved the sentiment away.

  “No more… Nevermore….” He gazed into his glass of water. “Every day is an act of will. Which is something. To have a toe at the very edge of doom and resist the urge to plummet.”

  I found myself saying out loud: “I too have dark valleys.”

  He sipped and placed the glass on the table beside his chair. “Then you and I have similarities too.”

  “But why use the name ‘Dupin’ if you didn’t want to be found?”

  “Who said I didn’t want to be found?” He rose, wrapping a woollen shawl round his shoulders. “Perhaps I was waiting for the right person to find me.” He walked to the macaw and stroked the back of its neck with a curled forefinger.

  “Whilst he was alive Baudelaire kept me reasonably secluded, but to keep me from going mad with inactivity of the mind he would bring me puzzles in the form of stories in the newspapers. Robberies. Murders. Abnormal events. Inexplicable mysteries. I would study them and, if I could, write to the newspapers with solutions. As I had done with Marie Rogêt. Always under the inevitable nom-de-plume — ‘Dupin’. From the moment I set foot on French soil, with that poor sot in my coffin, I found I had no more stomach for writing fiction. Death, madness, my trademark — I’d had enough of that. The raven had croaked itself hoarse. It is one thing to write a detective story. You know the solution and simply confound the reader. But to deduce by the powers of logic in real life…? That is true art. And I felt it stimulating to accumulate skills to that end. Pretty soon the police got to know the name and would come to me for help. It was no more than a game at first. But a game that kept me alive.”