by Kim Newman
“As the re-naming of your servants is also a game,” I interjected. “Le Bon, Madame L’Espanaye … in the manner of a charade. Surrounding yourself with characters of your own creation to keep the real world at bay. To feel safe.”
“But I am safe. Immensely safe, now.” As he walked to the mantel shelf his eyes gleamed in the sallow light of the candles. “For I am no longer, you see, under the glamour of my pernicious gift: my imagination. Anyone who has ever studied my stories properly knows they are all about one thing: the awful toll of madness, the horror of lost reason…. Rue Morgue says it all, for anyone with eyes to see. That even the absurdest, most abominable crime can be solved by rationalism. Well, rationalism was my driftwood in the storm. It was my salvation, Mr. Holmes — as it can be yours.”
I was startled. “Mine?”
He stared at me, dark eyes unblinking with intensity. “We human beings can be the ape — the basest instinct, dumb force of nature — or we can excel, we can elevate ourselves.” He tapped his expanse of forehead. “By civilization. By enlightenment. By perception. By the tireless efforts of eye and brain….”
He spoke with the utter conviction of a zealot, or lunatic. A chill prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I asked myself if the “awful toll of madness” had indeed been left behind him, or was I in the presence of a maniac who had committed one crime by his own admission and could easily commit another to cover his tracks?
I rose to my feet, frightened now.
“Why am I here? Why did you bring me?”
By way of reply there resounded four brisk knocks at the double-doors to an adjoining chamber — so sudden that it made my heart gallop. Poe had turned away and was adjusting his string tie in the mirror, as if he hadn’t even heard my voice, or simply chose to ignore it.
“Entrez.” He moved only to deposit the stub of his cigar into the flames.
The double doors yawned open and in silence four men emerged from the dark as if from another realm. They marched in slow formation with their backs erect, the reason for which became hideously clear — they carried a coffin on their shoulders. My chest tightened. I found I could not move, powerless but to watch as they laid it down in the firelight in the centre of the room, resting on two straight-backed chairs arranged by Madame L’Espanaye.
The pallbearers straightened. One I recognized as the morgue attendant who had lied to me, now shuffling back into the shadows whence he came. Another, the elegant Le Bon in his spotless shirt, had procured a screwdriver from somewhere and was proceeding to unscrew the lid of the casket as a continuation of the same odd, balletic ritual.
I looked at Poe. He was idly, at arm’s-length, leafing through the pages of the Life of Poe I had placed on the side-table, then shut it disinterestedly and tugged at his cuffs. It made my blood run cold to realize that, far from being alarmed by this extraordinary intrusion, he had designed it.
Each screw emerged, conveyed by Le Bon, like a bullet in the palm of his kid-gloved hand to a kidney-shaped dish. As he circled the coffin to the next, and then extracted it with the lazy precision of a priest performing Eucharist, I was filled with a growing presentiment of what I was about to behold: what I had to behold, to make sense of this, if it made any sense at all. After the lid was prised off the loyal negro blended into the darkness of the adjacent chamber, closing the doors as he did so.
I stifled a sob at the inevitable sight of the flower girl’s body inside, the bluish-purple shades of livor mortis bringing a cruel blush to her ears and nose.
“Dear God. This is obscene…”
“No,” said Poe. “Death is obscene. But death, when all else is removed, is no more than a mystery to be solved.”
“Sir—” I could hardly spit out the words, so full was I of repulsion. “You have — abandoned all that is human, and decent and … and good with your delusion…”
He remained unutterably calm as he gazed into the casket. “If you truly believed that — sir — you would have walked away long ago.”
“What makes you think I cannot walk away this second?”
“Because, sir, you cannot walk away from the mystery. That is your curse.”
“You are mad.”
Poe smiled and quoted from a familiar source: “True, nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Then his eyes hardened. “You know I am not.”
He fetched a candlestick and set it down closer to the corpse, the better to illuminate the indecent marbling of her once flawless skin.
“Though your powers of deduction are elementary, by now you will have realized the purpose of my clandestine visits to the morgue. The meticulous observation. I was of course undertaking exercises in ratiocination. The building offers me subjects in the purest possible sense. On every slab, every day, a code, a cipher to be unlocked. The application of logic telling the very tale the dead themselves cannot. What better place to perfect my craft?” He chuckled softly.
“This hobby amuses you?”
“Of course. What is there in life, my dear Holmes, if not to be amused?”
“Damn you!” I pushed him away from the coffin.
“You see? Emotion rules you completely. It surges when you should keep it at bay. To what end? If you wish to discover why she died… If you want to know the truth of what happened to her, there is only one course open to you: the cold and relentless application of rationality.”
“I loved her!” I roared, turning away.
After a few seconds he whispered behind me: “I also loved one who died.” His voice was disembodied, sepulchral and totally, alarmingly devoid of self-pity. I felt guilty at my outburst and listened in earnest to the terrible words he uttered: “Her gradual decline… From imp to skeletal invalid. Not the loss of love over days, over a glimpse, an idea, but over years. From childhood to womanhood, in a laugh. Over the lengthening of her bones and the plumping of her hips, then to watch it snuffed out by the red death running in her blood. Listening to time, whose hands creep towards midnight. Thinking, what right did I have to sob, to weep, to wish for it to happen, yes — to will the chimes and choking to come, when all suffering will cease for all but the living?”
I turned back to him, wiping away tears with the heel of my hand.
He had none.
He said: “I can think of no higher endeavour than to banish hurt and pain from people’s lives by the application of logic. I understand your grief, sir. God knows, no man stands my equal in that subject. But one must look upon death and see only that — Death. One must stop being victim to the petty frailties of our own conjecture. Instinct. Guessing. Terror. Love. Such fripperies are the sludge which gums up our nerves and dampens our intellect. And self-perpetuates, like a virulent disease. The very king of pests. Like alcohol, emotional supposition is toxic to our system, but our system rebels against being deprived of it. It must be abandoned, and dependence on it shed, lest it rule our lives completely.”
Seeing the torture of unanswered questions in my eyes, Poe picked up the candelabrum and circled the coffin, looking down at what lay inside, the tiny, jewel-image of her face glimmering on his black irises.
“I shall proceed as I always do, with general observations, moving on to the nature of the crime. Your friend was raised by devout Catholics, in the city of Nîmes, from which she absconded and became a scullery maid…”
I was choked with disbelief. “You can’t possibly…”
“I assure you, everything I say is arrived at by the painstaking application of my methods. At the morgue I procured her clothing, which had not yet been incinerated, and her petticoats were imprinted with a faded workhouse stamp of Ste-Ursule of Nîmes. The flesh on her back, sad to say, betrayed healed scars which indicated the application of a scourge used specifically by Catholic nuns. And the condition of her hands, ingrained with blacking invisible to the naked eye, presented ample proof of her time in service. But what concerns us here primarily is the manner of he
r death…”
He bent over the corpse, finger tips on the rim of the coffin, exactly as he had done in the morgue, and sniffed, taking the air into his dilating nostrils in short gasps, eyes closed as if savoring its bouquet like a connoisseur of fine wine.
“The scent of putrefaction is repulsive to most individuals, quite naturally: as human beings we have bred ourselves over millennia to abhor decay. Which is a great shame, because its study I’ve found to be invaluable. Just as a tea-taster can discern subtleties in a blend that the uneducated could not possibly discern, I have trained myself over the years to be able to assess the olfactory distinctions between stages of decay. This, when combined with other observations — visual, tactile — enables me, most often, I would say invariably, to be able to pinpoint to the day, sometimes to the hour, the time of death. These are not extraordinary talents, my dear Holmes, but ones that most people could apply, given the inclination and training. Foremost, I noticed immediately the corpse had not decomposed as swiftly as it might — always a good indication of immersion in the intense cold of water. This was confirmed by finding none of the customary bruising caused by the effect of gravity on an inert mass on land — ergo, she either drowned or was committed to the Seine very soon after dying. Since there were no pre-mortem signs of violence on the epidermis, my conclusion was therefore the former.
“The wind that night was unseasonably harsh,” he continued. “Coming as it did from a south by southwest direction. The covers of the stalls were flapping and she was the last of the stall holders to leave. She was in high spirits. Perhaps she even contemplated that she might have been in love.”
“Do not tease me,” I snapped.
“On the contrary. I am delivering the facts, however shocking or unpalatable they may be. Now, do you wish me to carry on?”
I had no alternative but to nod.
“Alone now, she feels a few dots of rain in the air and opens her parasol. A new parasol from her young admirer. In a flash it is caught by a sudden gust of wind, plucked from her hands. She grasps after it, but in vain.” This he acted out in spasmodic motions. “She chases it, but it bounces away across the Quai de la Corse, taking flight, this way, that, cart-wheeling down the boatman’s steps and landing in the mud ten, fifteen yards beyond.
“And so she ventures out — but the mud is not as firm as it looks. It acts like glue. It is up to her ankles before she knows it. Frightened, she tries to extract herself, but only sinks deeper. Almost certainly she cries out for help, but nobody hears. The river level rises. Water fills her mouth, her lungs. Soon she is submerged completely.”
“This is outrageous…” I breathed.
He ignored me. “In time, buoyancy lifts her and carries her away in the predetermined arc of the current to the jetty near the Pont Ste-Beuve. The activity of the morning boats dislodges the submerged corpse once again and it travels, aided by the wash of tourist vessels and commercial traffic, lodging temporarily against the supports of the Pont Cavaignac on her way to her final port of call, the Pont Olivier Knost, where the body is spotted by passers-by and conveyed by the authorities — requiescat in pace — to its resting place, the City Morgue.”
I shook my head, struggling hard to assimilate all he had told me. Struggling to believe that such deductions were possible. Wanting to reject them as fabulous, as fictional — as another of his fanciful tales…
My doubt all too visible in my features, he explained: “Upon minute examination, I found slivers of timber in the knots in her hair. Under the microscope these fragments showed algae matching those upon the vertical struts of the jetty near Pont Ste-Beuve. I also found fragments of paint and rusted metal in a post-mortem gash on her skull, the shade of blue matching that of the Pont Cavaignac.
“After my first examination of the body in the morgue, I sent Le Bon out on a mission with three questions. One, what was the prevailing wind that night? Two, what was the color of the paint used on the Pont Cavaignac? And three: is there a factory near the Pont Notre Dame, working through the night, producing sufficient noise to cover a drowning girl’s cries for help? There was. A printer’s shop, hard at work producing the next day’s news. Upon whose pages, alas, come the morrow, the mystery of a missing flower girl did not merit so much as a single line.”
A bitter sadness rose in my throat. I was numb with astonishment, dazzled, uncomprehending, light-headed, on the brink of alarm. The feeling was not unlike love: I wanted to be seduced, I wanted to believe, to succumb — yet everything told me to protect myself from harm, to dismiss that which drew me so compulsively to it.
Poe placed a hand on my shoulder.
“There was no murder, no murderer, no rhyme nor reason, no conspiracy, no plan, no suicide…” he said. “Just the wind, the water, the mud, the current…. Sometimes Nature itself is the most devious criminal of all.”
I turned away from him and looked into the crumbling coals of the fire. The heat from it dried and prickled my eyes but I continued to stare without blinking. A coke had fallen out below me and he lifted it back into place with long-handled tongs. He was silent for a while and I was grateful for that. I heard him refill my glass of cognac and place it on the table beside my chair. The other chair opposite creaked as Poe once again occupied it and crossed his spidery legs. I had a sense of a snowy halo in my peripheral vision. The black loops of a string tie. A weak mouth. A massive brow shadowing the eyes of a nocturnal Caesar.
“Your logic is faultless except for one thing,” I said, controlling the quaver in my voice. “The parasol. It strikes me as something of a conjecture.”
“Not at all. I might conjecture that what took her out onto the mud must have been something of meaning to her, something of sentimental value, which is why she felt compelled to retrieve it. I might conjecture that, given there has been a parasol seller on the corner of the rue de Lutece for twenty years, that is what I would have given her as a gift, had I been in love. But my business is not conjecture.” He picked a small red parrot feather from his sleeve and examined it between his fingers. “I know she was the last to leave the market simply because, upon enquiry, nobody remembered seeing her leave. I spoke to the knife sharpener and he told me the only unusual thing that day was she had a parasol — one he had never seen before — and an object altogether too bourgeois for someone of her status in society. It stuck in his mind, he said, because she walked up and down like a queen, her smile radiant. He said, in fact, he’d never seen her so happy.”
Happy. The last word had a devastating effect on me. It immediately drained me of everything but remorse. The feelings I had patently kept submerged for days welled up and overwhelmed me. I could do nothing to stop them. They broke the banks and I wept like a child.
“Now. Look at her.”
Poe took my hand and wrapped my fingers round a candlestick. It lit my way to the coffin, where the prone, lifeless husk that had once been so vibrant shimmered in its amber glow.
“Géricault, when he was painting his Raft of the Medusa, locked himself away with no company but dead bodies and even shaved his hair off to eliminate completely his need for contact with the outside world. All so that he could concentrate completely on the work at hand.”
I wondered why he was unrolling a cloth bag of surgical equipment — scalpel, forceps, scissors — but my query was soon answered.
“We are going to stay here, like Géricault, for however many hours it takes until your tears run dry. Then we will be done.” He lifted the cloth cover from a microscope on a desk. “You shall grow to know her as only God knows her. And then your wisdom will have outgrown your pain, and you will be free.” He walked over to me and placed an object in my hand.
It was a magnifying glass.
Dawn light began to outline the shutters as the screws were secured once more round the rim of the coffin lid. Poe rolled down his sleeves, buttoned his cuffs, and sent Le Bon with a message for the unscrupulous attendants from the morgue to come and remove the body.
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“We shall say no prayers for her,” he said. “She goes to the ground and becomes dirt, as we all shall.”
He opened the windows.
The air became fresh and clean. Slowly the noises of ordinary life and work permeated from the cobbled bustle of the street. A gentle bathing of the everyday was welcome after a long and suffocating night of cigar fog and candle wax. By sunlight, the apartment in the rue de la Femme-sans-Tete was no longer a prison, no more a threat, a labyrinth with some Minotaur, part god, part monster, at its centre.
“I am not, nor have I ever been, healthy.” He pinched my nostrils and drew the razor carefully down the cleft between my nose and mouth. A gobbet of soap hit the water in the bowl. “For my sins, a sedentary existence and the habitual use of alcohol and opiates is now written upon every organ in my body. At sixty-five I am heavy and weary, rheumatic and vulnerable to colds. My stomach is a harsh critic. I take quinine, digitalis and belladonna: one loses track of what produces the symptoms and what treats them. Truth is, I cannot know how many summers I shall endure…” He did not look into my eyes, focusing only on brushing more soap into my bristles. “Having no biological offspring, I have long harboured the desire to pass on what I have learnt of the science of ratiocination to someone else in this world before I take to dust. I have sought a pupil. A young adept of sorts. Foolish perhaps. Vanity, certainly…”
“That was the purpose of your test.”
“You found me, Holmes, and in so doing, I found you. Even though the clues were abundant, you were the first to show the propensity to solve such puzzles. Perhaps it is arrogance — that has always been my fatal flaw — but I do believe there may be some merit in my methods. I know the young despise the old, quite rightly and vive la revolution! — but…”
I was stricken with incredulity as I gathered the nature of his proposition.
“You would teach me?”
“There is a price, of course.” He wiped the straight razor in a cloth, both sides. “The price is your heart. Your tell tale heart…. The tale it tells is always a lie, and always leads to pain.” His sad eyes turned to mine. “Is it a cost you are prepared to pay, Sherlock?”
